A DNF is a calibration
THE RUB
Forty-nine runners were registered, but only thirteen finished. That’s a finish rate of 27%. 3 Days of Syllamo is a three-day stage race with a 50k on Friday, a 50 miler on Saturday, and a 20k on Sunday. The weather this year was brutal hitting 90 all three days.
At the finish line for the 50 miler, a group of us were talking to a young man who was telling us about how he DNF’d (Did Not Finish) his first attempt at a 100 miler in the fall. I replied with, “Nice!” He nervously laughed, and my friend pointed at me and said, “He means that. He thinks it’s good when someone DNFs once in awhile. That they get more out of it.”
I told him how you only really know your limits when you attempt to exceed them. If you don’t go past the edge, you don’t know where it is. I tried not to sound too preachy or fatherly, but I sincerely meant it.
THE FRAMEWORK
Tim Harford, in his book Adapt, argues that the people and systems that succeed aren’t the ones that avoid failure, they’re the ones that engineer the right dose of it. Small enough to survive. Large enough to learn from.
It’s a calibrated failure, and it shows up everywhere: in military training, in clinical trials, in the way great companies test new ideas. It’s not that failure is fine. It’s that unexposed failure is catastrophic. The surgeon who has never made a mistake in a low-stakes practice is a liability in a high-stakes situation. The pilot who has never been pushed past what he knows is dangerous the moment he is.
My flight examiner understood this. His job wasn’t to pass me. It was to find my edge. “The only way to know how much you know,“ he told me, “is to discover what you don’t know.” The exam wasn’t over when I answered correctly. It was over when I couldn’t.
A DNF is a calibration.
THE PRACTICE
Most of us are managing risks in the wrong direction. We avoid the things we might not finish – the harder project, the bigger race, the conversation we’re not ready for – because a DNF feels like a verdict. But that avoidance has a cost. You don’t get the calibration.
Try new things. Attempt challenges outside your current range. Sign up for race that makes you nervous. Pitch a client that feels out of reach. Start a project you’re not sure you can finish. Get close enough to the edge to learn something real.
Make sure your failures are survivable. The dose has to be right sized. My plantar fasciitis had me sidelined since November. My workouts have been limited to PT and strength work with almost no running. For Syllamo, I sized my dose accordingly – not the stage race, just the 20k. I was fine with the possibility of failing. Thankfully, I ran faster than expected with zero pain. The challenge was large enough to test me and small enough that a bad outcome wouldn’t have set me back further.
Debrief and learn. A DNF without reflection is just a bad day. With reflection, it’s actionable data. What could I do differently next time that would lead to a better result? The runners who said they were done after the 50k and then toed the line the next morning had done an overnight debrief. My friend who DNF’d the 50 miler and still ran the 20k on Sunday was applying what he’d just learned.
The dose, sized right, identifies your limits and provides feedback for expanding them. The young man at the finish line probably thought I was crazy old man. Maybe I am. But with enough calibrations he might learn what I did – you won’t find your edge by staying away from it.