PODCAST - why dropping out of a race can be harder than finishing it
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host Johnny Ha, an ultra runner endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone a hundred K ultra. I prove them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned from breathing techniques to mindset shifts to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals, despite limitations, let's get started.
I was still running the high of winning my first a hundred K Ultra race. It was July, 2025, and I was ready to compete for another Title I for about two years. Hadn't taken time off to [00:01:00] attend to multiple overuse injuries, but I thought to myself, why not try for more? It's time to keep pushing. I'm an ultra runner.
Having pain in my body is normal. Let's go push my body even further. I ran more mileage than I ever have in a training cycle with multiple hundred mile plus weeks. But something was wrong or was my mind just playing tricks with me like it had in every other training cycle I'd ever been through. I wasn't sure, so I just shook it off and showed up to race day anyway, and I started out fast after the first lap or the first 10 miles of my 12 hour endurance run.
I was in 27th place out of 120, and I was just getting started. I typically start races really slow and speed up as I progressed through them, well after the second lap, 20 miles in, I had gained. [00:02:00] 17 places and I was on track to not only set my personal record for my a hundred K, but run 65 to 72 miles.
This would have guaranteed me having a top three, if not a top one finish, and maybe even breaking the record. For most miles ran in this 12 hour endurance race. I remember running into the start finish line, like I had so many other times in multiple races throughout my racing career and, uh, going up to my fiance and telling her.
I wanna sit down. She's like, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I feel fine. Just like my previous races, we had boltman following my ascension through the leaderboard, and this was super uncharacteristic of me. I never want to sit down during a race, but this time I did. And it wasn't because I was tired. No, it wasn't [00:03:00] because I was in pain.
No, I wouldn't feel that until the next day. It was because I needed time to assess if I wanted to continue or not, and this may have been the hardest thing I have had to do as an ultra runner. And why. Today on the show, I'm gonna share with you why dropping out of a race can be harder and more impactful on you and your life, rather than finishing it.
Here is what was going through my head when I sat down in that chair. Number one. I had trained for six months, six months. Of training, training through the winter, running 40 plus miles per week in the snow, running a hundred miles per week, week after week after week after week, dropping my weight all the way down to 151 pounds less than I have ever weighed going into a race.
I was ready to [00:04:00] win. And set the course record. Have you ever had this moment, it could even be a week or two before the race, the night before. Mile one. Mile 20. Mile 40. When you're thinking to yourself, I really don't want to continue. But I put so much time and effort into getting to this moment. That's the first thing that was going through my head.
Number two, I had the most support, the biggest fan base I ever had going into a race when I won my a hundred K race back in 2024. My fiance was there, my parents were there, my dog and a couple of my best friends were there. Besides that, a couple people knew I was doing it. But not a lot of people knew, and I was talking about it a little bit on the channel, but I had less than a hundred subscribers and I had just restarted teaching yoga at the local gym called Endorphin.
And when everyone heard I won this race, everyone wanted to follow me. For my next tray, and I was really excited. I was telling a lot of people, all [00:05:00] my yoga students who come to my class because they want to have a yoga class that serves them and their workout exercise and running routines and careers.
So I had. Dozens upon dozens of people following me virtually. And I even had about a dozen people show up to support me. I had more people that were gonna show up in the middle of the night to support me. My fiance was gonna be there all night, crewing me. There were a lot of people involved in this race, and the last thing I wanted to do was tell them that I wasn't going to.
Finish. I didn't wanna tell them that I wasn't gonna win. People were texting me saying, oh my God, you just climbed 10 places in the last hour. I had people telling me that they didn't want to go to bed because they were watching me go up on the leaderboards. This was going through my mind [00:06:00] when I sat down 20 miles into this wrist.
Number three, my fiance and I prioritize my race over other things, and since I really got sucked into achieving this goal of setting a record, I changed how I actually trained. I fell away. From what actually made me, me as an ultra runner, and by doing this I made some decisions that I do regret, and one of those is flipping my sleep schedule about a week and a half prior to my race.
Well, this completely not only messed up my life and how I. Scheduled things up between work, family, and friend obligations. It also had a huge impact on my fiance. So at 11 o'clock at night when I was sitting down conceptualizing what the next step was with all of this, I thought to myself all of that, the sacrifices that both of us were making, and it goes [00:07:00] well before the past week and a half leading up to the race weren't gonna mean anything.
This was going through my head. What sacrifices have you and your family made to set you up for a race? Think about that and how that can drive you to complete races that you need to complete, that you and your family need and want you to complete. But I also want you to think about how, if you don't break the pattern.
Of making these sacrifices by making a huge choice, like the choice I ended up making on this day, then you could be sacrificing your life and your family's life for years. Number four, I won a hundred K race nine months. Earlier. It is the last race I had run and I was ready for more. Have you had this happen where maybe you're training for your first 5K and you complete it and you're extremely pumped about it, and then you [00:08:00] go and you do another 5K, or maybe you do a 10 K and you complete it and you run that 5K faster than you had before, and then you added another 5K on top, and then you run your first marathon and you complete it, and then.
You sign up for that second marathon and you are burned out, you have no desire to continue when you're 10, 15 miles in. Well, this is what happens is we ride the highs of, oh, I won this race. I want that again. I want to do more. Instead of being okay and joyful and grateful for what we have already accomplished.
I won my a hundred K race nine months earlier. I had a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to prove again that I am one of the best ultra runners in Colorado. I wanted to prove that I'm an ultra runner, even though I have asthma. At least I thought I did. And that brings me to number five. I am not a quitter, and I know you aren't either.
That's why you're [00:09:00] here. That's why you care so much about the decisions that you make on a daily basis to set yourself up for races. And maybe you have dropped out of a race and you were judging yourself really hard for doing that. Or maybe you have a race coming up and you're just not feeling it, and you're afraid to let go of the ideal of finishing that race.
Well, even after dropping out of this race. I am not a quitter, and you aren't either. I remember the first time I had a turnaround on climbing a 14,000 foot mountain. I knew it was the right move. We were stuck in a storm. We needed to turn around and for a little bit, I was very bummed. I looked at myself as a quitter and what I had to.
Tell myself, and really where I got to in unpacking all of it is there will always be another mountain to climb as long as you quit at the right [00:10:00] time to preserve your life. And that's what I ended up doing. And while quitting in this race wasn't preserving my life. I do believe that if I had continued and finished the race, I may not have ran for a couple of years.
I do think that I would've had a really bad injury, especially because my head wasn't in it. You can fight your mind as much as you want, and a lot of times when you're running these ultra races, you need to be able to have these conversations with yourself and assess. If what your mind is telling you is fact or fiction?
Well, I knew in this case that it was fact, and that brings me to why I not only dropped out of my race in July, 2025 and why it is the best and hardest decision I have ever made. As an athlete, number one, I was no longer having fun. And yes, I enjoy the heck out [00:11:00] of ultra running and anything that pushes me beyond my limits, it really has defined me as an athlete since I was four years old, since I was told I would never play soccer, be a runner or achieve anything athletically in my life.
That is fun for me. Well, mile 21 of this race, I finally admitted to myself that I was no longer having fun. About a week before even showing up at this race, I got together with a really good friend of mine who's also an ultra runner, who also had a race scheduled the same day as me. Him and I sat down, talked about training, and he opened up to me saying that he wasn't gonna run his race.
And I asked why. And he told me, man, I'm not having fun anymore. I've tried training. Just hasn't been fun. It used to be, and maybe it will be again, but right now it's. It's not, it's not fun. So [00:12:00] instead of going and doing this race, I'm gonna go and do something that's actually fun. Well, when he opened up to me and I look up to him, my friend Brandon and his wife Kaitlyn, have been my coaches over the past couple of years, and Kaitlyn specifically ran the last lap of my a hundred K Ultra with me that I ended up winning.
So when Brandon told me this, this gave me permission to let go. Of the view of ultra running that I had up until this point, the view that you always have to push, push, push, push, even if it's not fun anymore. And I'll tell you this, if you are really getting into ultra running for the first time, you are gonna run into moments when it's not fun.
That should be followed with exuberance and joy and fun, and that's what I've found throughout my ultra running career is I could be in a really [00:13:00] dark place in training and then finish that training run and be filled with joy. Well, that was not happening this time around. I would finish a hundred mile a week and not care, literally not care.
I would finish another a hundred mile week. And not care. I would run 20 miles, three days in a row and not care. This was super weird for me 'cause in the past I would celebrate it, I'd be happy about it. But I was just tired. I was tired of putting in the miles. I was tired of not going and hiking fourteeners with my friends.
I was tired of not going to play tennis. I was tired of Tatiana and I not being able to go. Do the hikes that we wanted to do. I was just tired. I was tired of running without my dog because she can only do so many miles tired of running without Tatiana. I was tired of all these things. I was no longer having fun.
Number two, I wasn't racing how I like to race because I wasn't training how I. To train. I completely changed [00:14:00] how I trained for this race. What I mean by this is I used to do it around fun, around joy, around how I wanted to train, throwing in lifting, hit classes, just random things like going to play tennis, going to play soccer, but I was so worried about getting injured leading up to this race.
All I did was run. I did zero cross training, zero yoga, zero yoga sculpt. I only ran because I also told myself, well, if I won this race by training this way, if I double down on mileage, and I literally increased my mileage by about 40% going into this race. I was talking to my cousin's husband about this, who was a major ultra runner, and I sent him my.
Program my, my 24 week program, and he asked me, he's like, are you running a hundred miles? I'm like, no, I'm running a hundred K, like 62 to 75 miles. He's like, well, you are training as if you're running a hundred miles and you're over training for a hundred [00:15:00] mile race. He told me this about a month before my race, I had gotten sick.
I was really upset and I had a drop. Down one of my training weeks pretty significantly. And at that time he told me, he is like, you're already way ahead of it. You were training very, very hard. So there were a lot of moments leading up to this race where something just wasn't right. Training had become very one dimensional.
I was just running to get mileage. I wasn't running to have fun. I didn't listen to my body. So I had some lingering injuries that were. Compounding my plantar fasciitis and my left foot that I ran and won my a hundred K race with was bothering me even more. I had gotten it during my 50 mile race about three years ago, and it hadn't healed well.
When I was running my a hundred K race, I was strengthening other parts of my body. I was strengthening my glutes, I was strengthening my legs. I even had my upper body strength. I was stretching. I was doing yoga. Well, since I one dimensionally trained for this race, my plantar fasciitis. [00:16:00] Increased dramatically to the point where even though I only felt it a little bit on mile 20 of my race, I could tell in retrospect that my mind was trying to protect me from a major blowout.
'cause the next day I could not walk. I could not walk because of how much pain was in my heel. And that brings me to number three. I knew something was wrong and no, this wasn't a, well, maybe there's something wrong. A little twinge here, twinge there. You should just give up and use that as an excuse. No, I knew something was.
I knew that if I continued that it would not be worth it to me to win this race. I knew that I could win the race. I knew that I could set the course record for this race, but I also knew that it wasn't gonna be worth. What was festering inside, I didn't really know. I knew that something was wrong. Maybe it was my heel.
I [00:17:00] knew that this went beyond the physical pain of my heel that I felt the next day. I, number four, realized I didn't have anything to prove. I realized this when I kept visualizing and playing through me running across that finish line at 7:00 AM the next day, winning the race that I just. Didn't care. I knew that if I had done that, I would've been disappointed in myself.
I knew that finishing the race was actually losing was actually failure. I knew that making the conscious choice to drop out with the projection of winning that I had was the right move, and I ultimately dropped. Out to win. I won this race. Did I beat any other runners? No. I even went up to the race coordinator and told them I dropped out.
I didn't need to do that. This was a lap based race. You [00:18:00] run as many laps as you can in 12 hours. I could have just spent like, I ran two and that's it. I dropped out. There were only like three of us that dropped out of this race. There were plenty of people that only ran one or two laps, but only three of us actually went up.
And dropped out of the race. Well, this was extremely important to me to do because I had started letting ultra running define me. I was no longer having fun. It was the only thing I would talk about with people because my whole identity was wrapped up in it. Well, after heading home at about 1:00 AM in the morning that night, sleeping really well.
And getting up the next day, I found fun again. My fiance and I got up, went hiking. Yes, my heel was in excruciating pain, but I stressed my calves. I iced. I put Arnica on and we ultimately went and did a two mile hike for fun, and that's what I do now. It's been about seven or eight [00:19:00] months since that race, as is a recording of this video, and I am loving life.
I have so much fun and yes. I'll probably race again, but for now I know that I can do anything and that's what winning my a hundred K Ultra showed me is that I can do anything. That I put my mind to it and have fun actually doing. So I'm doing that in every other aspect of my life. Things that I enjoy, goals that I have, that I really, really want.
I'm putting my focus there and things that maybe I wanted at one point in life and don't want anymore. I'm letting those things go. So I invite you to give yourself some grace and remember that while dropping out of a race. May seem like the easy thing to do. It is the hardest thing you may ever do as an athlete.
And as a human, and that's why I have a gift for you, my friend. I have my three [00:20:00] pillars of Healthy Living Guide linked in the description. If you're watching this on YouTube in the show notes, if you're listening to this as a podcast, go grab your free copy, start integrating it into your life as long as it's fun for you.
I invite you to comment below this video with your stories of how maybe you decided. To drop out of a race, or maybe you're considering it right now. And if you wanna work with me, I have links in the description and in the show notes. If you're listening to this as a podcast, I'll see you the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection. It is about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals, [00:21:00] and if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible.
