In distance running, unlike other sports, you really can count on bringing whatever your best game is to your competition of choice

There is no exceeding fitness on race day, only falling short of it. This is actually a good thing if you absorb the implications

On February 29, Max Strus of the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association threw up a 59-foot shot with time running out and the Cavs trailing the Dallas Mavericks by one point.

Strus’ game-winning lob was only part of the incredible way the shooting guard played at the end of the fourth quarter. Strus managed to sink five three-point shots in all in the final 67 seconds of the game. While NBA players obviously have uncannily good aim, a display like this is monumental even for a regaled marksman. Strus may make the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame one day, but it’s doubtful he’ll ever do anything like this again. And if it does happen, it won’t be through an act of Strus’ will (and almost certainly won’t occur on the 29th of February).

A superstar basketball player with a stable skill set can reasonably expect his good days and bad days to naturally average out, thereby establishing his overall player profile and status—All-Star, sixth man, or journeyman and perennial benchwarmer. Proto-geezer Steph Curry still hits about 40 percent of his three-point attempts, but this essentially means balancing out sparkling 5-for-7 nights with 1-for-8 returns to temporary long-range futility.

Team sports in general are notoriously awash in prolonged or pronounced “streaks,” good and bad. If every player was at his very statistical best even a third of the time, Wilt Chamberlain might not be in the Hall of Fame itself. That’s stretching it, but hopefully the point is clear: bad days in sports are not only expected, but unpreventable by secular means. They can strike at the worst time. And the biggest reason for this is probably owed more to the presence and uncontrollable behavior of other players than to real upticks and declines in game-to-game quality of play.

Now, a player lacking in Strus’ skill can still throw in a game-winning shot from 59 feet away if he can merely throw the ball that far. A high-school baseball player of minimal renown can swing with his eyes closed and bash a game-winning home run. YouTube is rife with such great one-off moments, but these are plainly not representative of such athletes’ true skill level, or, swapped out for the equivalent in running parlance, competitive fitness. And running is markedly different at the predictive level from these fringe and dying sporting enterprises.

A seasoned runner who completes an all-out two-mile time trial in twelve minutes, feeling spent but exhilarated, faces an interesting dilemma. She now knows she can run two miles in no slower than twelve minutes, and she can make reasonable projections about her mile and 5K capabilities. But she also knows that she isn’t going to get lucky and run ten minutes flat for two miles in the coming weeks, and probably not ever. Squeezing your eyes shut and going for it in running has limited utility, especially in trail racing, where most people seem to do this anyway.

The reason I frame this as a dilemma is that even seasoned distance runners tend to unduly lose confidence in their demonstrated fitness after a couple of bad workouts or even just one decisively eye-watering stinker, especially if the blown session was a long tempo run or marathon-pace run and therefore not easily “made up” without significant disruption to the runner’s overall schedule. This can happen even when the same runner has had one or two very good races within the past four to six weeks and has had no training interruptions since.

If a typical runner looks at his or her own recent training, he or she often sees the “bad” days as standing out as strongly as the good ones. Referring to the putative 12:00 two-miler from above, say this runner has a goal 3,000-meter race coming up in a few days. Her goal time is 11:05.

Her 12:00 two-mile time trial was three weeks ago, and two weeks before that, she ran a flat road 5K in a PR of 19:20. Two weeks earlier, she did 10 times 300 meters in 85 seconds with a slow 100-meter jog.

Also mixed in over the past six weeks were scheduled workouts of 6 times 800 meters with a 200-meter jog and 10 times 200 meters with a 100-meter jog. Her times in the first session were 2:51, 2:53, 2:54, 3:00, 3:08, and untimed. Her times in the second session were all 39 or 40 seconds through six repeats before she decided for no special reason to call it a day. Maybe the usual distractions or a basic failure to attach enough significance to running in circles that day to push through.

It can be tempting to think that you’re just another Steph Curry, and that in your goal race, the version of you who either goes out far too fast or just doesn’t give a shit for some reason is as likely to appear as the runner who, if healthy and a little rested, is obviously capable of reaching her goal time. This goes back to the “dilemma,” but flips it on its head: There’s no reason to think you can’t be at your proven best, even if you can’t exceed it. If you run faster than your goal time by a significant margin, you haven’t exceeded your fitness level because you can’t; you’ve fortuitously underestimated your fitness level. You can’t benefit from lucky shots. Given that the presence of other runners can only interfere so much with how fast you choose to run, you should be completely confident in reaching your goal as long as you choose to become the architect of your own destiny on the fly, whatever “structure” that requires you to build.

Runners also like to fret over feeling cruddy on easy days, even when they know they have earned it. This kind of neuroticism tends to strike runners who haven’t raced in a few months. When you’re already just slogging to accumulate maintenance miles, with your legs moving slowly and without a workout aim to distract you, it can become tempting to lapse into ennui and attach all of the miseries of the day to the run instead of letting them bleed out by just jogging as slowly as you need to and being grateful no one is bombing your neighborhood. “Shitty” runs are an absolute privilege.

That said, they’re also annoying and psychologically erosive, especially medium-long runs that are supposed to be easy anyway but for some reason take forever. But they don’t mean a fucking thing if you’re hitting even half of your workouts in a way that reifies and legitimizes your goal. Competitive running would be far too easy to enjoy, and attract far too many bozos, if being in top shape implied feeling genuinely good even two-thirds of the time. Maybe three-fourths if you’re not a marathoner. (Running is overrun by bozos anyway, because they’re gotten around the issue of both good and bad runs and races by substituting imaginary workouts and race results on social-media sites for real ones on the ground. Who knew it ever would become that easy?)

If you looked only at your six best runs and workouts in the past six weeks, I bet you wouldn't doubt your fitness or goals, even if you think like I and most of the people who email me do and are just like, “Ahhh, please tell me something nice about this upcoming fuckin’ race even though I suck just like you do and should’ve quit like you did.” (These are the lucky shots, not representative of my interlocutors’ true recontouring fitness. Different sport.)

You could tell me, "Well, if I had five great workouts and three shit workouts in my buildup, I guess that averages out to 'probably fit and ready." But running doesn't work like that. Anyone who runs 10 miles in 70 minutes has 7:00-per-mile fitness for 10 miles, even if that run itself represented a freakish performance breakthrough. That fitness is clearly there for at least a couple of weeks after such a session no matter what as long as training is generally uninterrupted and not overzealous.

If every standard bitchy but determined human could deprive his own brain of all the bad-workout and cruddy-run data it had amassed in recent weeks—some might call this “meditating”—your brain would perceive all the goals you have as completely realistic. It's only when people start looking excessively at their Garmin data and studying their own unsure comments on Strava—a platform absolutely no one should be funding—that they begin to doubt themselves. And while not "everyone" does this, or does it consistently, it’s something to watch for, especially if you’re like me and wondering just what’s left in the world that’s truly within your power to control, at least at the level of commitment and decision-making.