Why Pushing Harder Isn’t Always Progress
Pushing harder isn’t always progress. Sometimes it’s avoidance. You miss the signal, force the session, and pay for it the next day with heavy legs, flat energy, or low patience.
If the next day feels heavier than it should, this could be why. Not because you “lack grit”, but because the basics don't match your workload. Kieron’s take is simple: durability comes from noticing the signs early and adjusting before your body forces a lesson.
Kieron Douglass is an Australian ultra runner, coach, and conservationist known for taking on big endurance challenges and sharing a grounded, practical approach to resilience. A mental health advocate and father, Kieron has built a reputation for doing the unglamorous work—managing load, respecting recovery, and staying consistent when conditions aren’t perfect. His endurance feats include ultra-distance events and standout challenges like completing the Gold Coast Marathon backwards.
Kieron has joined us on the podcast twice for two truly inspiring conversations. Across both conversations, he breaks down what endurance really demands. From rebuilding your mindset to navigating ultra-running when setbacks and injuries are part of the process. Listen to them here:
Running Back from the Brink of Suicide - with Kieron Douglass
Push Your Boundaries: The Physical and Mental Challenges of Ultra-Running with Kieron Douglass!
Real resilience is not suffering more. It’s making small adjustments that let you train consistently. This article breaks down what those signals look like, why fatigue, under-fuelling and poor hydration change decisions, and how to build a simple fuel, hydrate, recover routine that holds up in busy weeks.
Resilience isn’t pain tolerance
A lot of people mistake “toughness” for resilience. Toughness is pushing through. Resilience is staying aware enough to make smart calls before you’re forced to.
Training works through stress and recovery: you apply load, then you recover and adapt. But when training demands keep rising and recovery doesn’t keep up, the signs show up quickly: lower output, slower warm-ups, disrupted sleep, flatter mood, and sessions that feel harder than they should.
Nutrition and hydration sit inside that recovery loop. Getting them wrong doesn’t always stop your training. It just makes training more expensive.
When it matters most
Managing load is easy on a good week. It’s the messy weeks—poor sleep, stress, rushing—where it actually matters. The real test isn’t when you feel fresh. It’s when fatigue starts building, and you’re tempted to ignore it.
1. When fatigue builds, and you ignore it
Fatigue isn’t only soreness. It can look like:
- warm-ups that take longer than usual
- effort feeling high for normal numbers
- sleep not doing the job
- feeling cooked before you start to train
When those signals stack, pushing harder often just digs a deeper hole.
2. When you’re under-fuelled, and your decisions slip
Under-fuelling usually isn’t dramatic. It’s a string of small misses:
- hard early training session with nothing in the tank
- back-to-back meetings, then a rushed session
- skipping meals, then “making up for it” in the workout
That’s when decisions get sloppy: you chase intensity, ignore pacing, and turn a normal day into a suffer-fest.
3. When your ego turns into punishment
This one is subtle. You’re not following the plan or responding to the signals; you’re trying to prove you’re disciplined. That mindset makes it harder to adjust when you should. And that’s often when training starts costing more than it should.
Discomfort isn’t the goal
Don’t confuse extreme discomfort with progress. Suffering can mute the signal instead of fixing the cause.
Realistic expectation: Some sessions will feel hard. That’s training. The problem is when every week becomes survival mode. Consistency outperforms burnout because it’s the only approach you can stack week to week.
Make the basics the default
You don’t need a perfect routine. You need a few simple defaults you can stick to when the week gets busy.
1. Remove the “last-minute” decision
Have a simple nutrition plan around training time:
- Early training: something small and digestible you’ll actually do consistently
- Late training: don’t arrive empty and rely on adrenaline
The goal isn’t a strict meal plan; it’s avoiding the repeat pattern where under-fuelling leads to poor choices and harder sessions.
2. Hydration: treat it like a safety behaviour
Hydration works best when it starts before the workout:
- build triggers (example: first protein shake, desk, car, pre-warm-up)
- don’t leave it to “during” the session
- if you sweat heavily or train in heat, be more intentional
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about not letting dehydration be an extra source of strain on the mind and body.
3. Recovery: protect “tomorrow you”
Recovery is the stuff that makes the next session possible:
- sleep that’s actually prioritised
- food that matches training
- fluids across the day
- load management (not every day needs to be a max day)
If you are regularly feeling worse 24–48 hours later than you think you should, it's probably because you shouldn't. Take that as a signal to adjust something, not just “try harder”.
4. 30-second check
After hard sessions, ask:
- What did I ignore today?
- What do I need to set up for tomorrow?
That’s resilience in practice: awareness plus adaptation.
