In this candid monologue, endurance author and coach Matt Fitzgerald recounts his personal mid‑life performance crisis in his early 40s, when a DNF at a half‑marathon made him believe his competitive days were over. He describes how, contrary to his expectations, he later set new personal records well past age 45, reshaping his belief about age‑related limits. Fitzgerald explains the high‑stakes decision to train in Flagstaff with elite professionals, uprooting his family for a summer despite financial risk, and how that pressure ultimately sharpened his performance at the Chicago Marathon. He highlights mentorship from professional runner Sarah Crouch, who taught him to raise the performance bar whenever he succeeds more than half the time, framing failure as an inevitable by‑product of ambitious goals. Drawing on these experiences, Fitzgerald advises athletes to deliberately pursue “moonshot” objectives—goals with roughly a 10 % chance of success, exemplified by Eliud Kipchoge’s sub‑2‑hour marathon attempt—to overcome fear of failure and catalyze growth. He also teases his upcoming book, The Comeback Quotient, which expands on these themes.
Chapters
Don't make any assumptions. You know, and this is funny because I, in a way, I'm going to undercut my own advice because I did sort of assume, like, I went through this kind of midlife crisis in my early 40s when I realized that my last PR was in the past. Like, you know, It was devastating to me actually, because my PRs just weren't all that good to me. They weren't good enough, and I truly grieved it. Like, I had those— I describe it in the book. It was— I ran a half marathon. I was having a little bit— I was healthy and I was getting fit again, and I was, I don't know, 43, 42, 43. I went into this half marathon thinking, okay, maybe I've got one last shot to do something good, and I DNF'd. I mean, who DNFs a half marathon? But I did, and I'm like, it's over and I just had to face it. And then I was wrong. You know, I've set more than one PR, not only after that, but years after that. And some of the things I've experienced and done, you know, past 45 truly exploded my ideas about what's possible and what isn't. So just if you, if you think something's impossible, just know that you're, you could well be wrong. And so it's best just to assume that you can just keep getting better. And eventually you won't keep it like everyone sets their last PR at some point. But I think if you assume, oh, I can't get better after a certain age, that, that can become self-fulfilling. Lucky for me, it didn't in my case, and I don't know why it didn't. Like, I did assume I was done getting better, and yet I got better. And actually, that might relate to my second piece of advice, which is don't be afraid to fail. Like, you know, when I went to Flagstaff to train with these professionals, you know, I didn't have as much at stake as they did. You know, their very livelihood depends on their ability to stay healthy and perform. But there was a lot at stake for me too. Like, you know, it wasn't just me, but like, I don't have children, but my wife and my dog came with me. I uprooted our, our whole small family for an entire summer. You know, it was risky financially. And yes, you know, I did want to produce a book out of this. And if I just got injured and wasn't even able to start the Chicago Marathon, or if I just bombed it and there's no way I could tell a story with a happy ending, like, it would have been in a sense all for naught, at least, you know, from a business perspective. But, you know, I was willing to take that risk. And I was also, you know, I did a blog while I was there which got some traction. There were a lot of middle-aged runners out there just, they wanted me to succeed for what it might mean for them. So I was, when I ran Chicago, I was highly conscious of that, like, that weight on my shoulders. But, but I was okay with it because, you know, I actually, I wouldn't have done as well as I did without that pressure. So, you know, I, I fail a lot. Sarah Crouch, one of the, the— she wasn't a member of the team, but she's a professional runner who I befriended in Flagstaff. I was there. She kind of, I mean, she was 17 years younger than me, or at least close to 20 years younger than me, and she was like, she took me under her wing. But one of the things she told me is, you know, if you achieve your goals more than 50% of the time, you need to raise the bar. And so it's okay to fail. Like, you know, the best athletes fail a lot because they're setting a high bar, but setting a high bar is actually also what makes them the best athletes. So failure is just— failure is not even really failure. Like, But I am aware just from being a coach that there are a lot of athletes out there who are deathly afraid of failure so that they won't take risks. Yeah. Um, so, you know, the way to get over that is just, I think, to take a crazy risk. It— I've got a sort of a sequel to How Bad You Want It coming out in December called The Comeback Quotient. And one thing I advise, or I suggest, that athletes do who want to like become more— less, less risk-averse is do like, uh, Eliud Kipchoge did with his sub-2-hour marathon attempt. Like, you know, he had about maybe a 10% chance of doing that, and, and he did it, and he put it, put it out. There's no going back. So go ahead, like, it doesn't have to be a marathon, but just like as an exercise, just pick a goal that you honestly think you have about a 10% chance of achieving, and then go for it. And then you prob— there's a 90%— like, if you approach it logically, and I truly mean this mathematically, 10% chance, like, you will almost certainly fail. And you'll see it's okay, it didn't kill you, and you won't regret the experience. And you will probably also have a great performance that just happens to fall short of your moonshot goal. So that can help a lot too.
