When the Race Gets Real
What happens when effort exceeds what you’ve built for
You train for months and start to feel strong. Workouts go well. Recovery feels manageable. Your body gives you plenty of evidence that it’s ready.
Race day comes, and you take off from the start. The noise, the movement, the rush of bodies all around you carry you through the early miles. Everything feels solid — until it doesn’t.
First it’s a tightening you try to ignore. Then a funny ripple in the muscle. Then the unmistakable signal that the cramp is coming.
At first, you bargain with it. Adjust your stride. Shake it out. Then it locks in, and there’s no mistaking what’s happening.
You’ve crossed a threshold your body can’t maintain.
I saw this everywhere at a Spartan race this past weekend — including in myself. Runners on the climbs. Athletes mid-bucket carry. People stepping down from obstacles or trying to control tired legs on descents.
Muscles didn’t fail suddenly. They warned, tightened, and then shut things down.
And what followed was just as familiar as the cramps themselves — salt packets, pickle juice, mustard, electrolyte gummies, frantic stretching, advice shouted from the sidelines based on half-remembered myths.
Cramping exposes how many people misunderstand what the body is trying to signal when effort outpaces what it’s been prepared to handle.
Because when the race gets real, the outcome isn’t decided by willpower — it’s decided by what your body has been prepared to sustain.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
What Cramping Is Actually Telling You
When people talk about cramping during races, they’re usually describing the experience of a sudden, involuntary tightening of a muscle that won’t relax. It’s disruptive at best and incredibly painful at worst, but often forceful enough to stop movement altogether.
The muscle isn’t tired in the normal sense — it’s locked. And everything you do seems to lock it down harder.
Any runner with enough experience knows the feeling, but what matters is that we still don’t fully understand why cramps happen.
Exercise-associated muscle cramps have been studied for decades, and despite confident advice at races, there’s no single proven cause. Sometimes cramps appear alongside dehydration or electrolyte loss. Sometimes they don’t. Some athletes cramp repeatedly while others never do, suggesting genetic or neurological differences. Environment, pacing, terrain, and movement patterns all seem to matter, too.
Where research has become clearer is what cramping usually isn’t.
Large reviews and field studies — including research led by sports physician Martin Schwellnus — have shown that electrolyte levels and hydration status often look normal in athletes who cramp during races. Across multiple endurance settings, these factors fail to consistently distinguish athletes who cramp from those who don’t.
That’s led to the most supported explanatory model to date: neuromuscular fatigue under load, where prolonged or excessive demand disrupts normal motor control of the muscle.
When effort exceeds what a muscle has been trained to coordinate and control, the nervous system’s signals destabilize. The muscle tightens reflexively.
In that sense, a cramp is feedback that the demands of the task have moved beyond what your system can currently support.
When Effort Outruns Preparation
This is where races expose gaps that training doesn’t.
Training is controlled. Even hard sessions usually happen in familiar terrain with predictable conditions you’ve practiced before. You subconsciously pace yourself. Your nervous system stays inside ranges it recognizes.
Races remove those guardrails.
The rush of the crowd pushes intensity higher than planned. Pace creeps up early. Terrain changes demand unfamiliar contractions. Downhills load muscles eccentrically.
And with Spartan, obstacles, carries, and surges layer strength and coordination demands on top of running fatigue. Even well-trained athletes end up asking their bodies to do things they haven’t rehearsed under that level of stress.
Preparation for races goes beyond just fitness. It’s about coordination under load.
Muscles have to fire in the right sequence, at the right timing, while tired. When race conditions demand combinations your training hasn’t exposed — strength plus endurance, speed plus precision, fatigue plus instability — the system overloads.
That’s why cramps so often show up late, on descents, during carries, or during obstacles. The race is asking for a more complex effort than training ever did.
Races aren’t cruel. They’re honest.
They show you the difference between what you can do when things are controlled and what you can sustain when everything stacks at once.
Why Most People Misread Cramping
Most people misread cramping because the context makes outdated explanations feel intuitive.
You’re late in a race. You’ve been sweating for hours. Your legs seize. Salt packets and electrolyte advice feel logical, especially because for decades cramping was taught as a dehydration or electrolyte problem — and that belief is still reinforced everywhere, from sports drink marketing to aid-station folklore and racer “secret tricks”.
The problem is that for most race-day cramps, the body isn’t suddenly out of sodium. Blood sodium levels are often still within normal range, even in athletes who cramp badly. Sweat loss and cramping don’t line up as cleanly as people assume.
Another reason cramps get misread is the grit narrative. Endurance culture celebrates pushing through discomfort. So when a muscle starts to tighten, the instinct is to fight it, override it, or force it to relax through aggressive stretching or movement. In the middle of an active cramp, that reaction often escalates the problem.
Cramping feels like a simple problem with a simple fix. It rarely is.
In most race settings, it’s a signal arriving late, after the system has already been overloaded. Treating it like a hydration mistake or a willpower issue misses what the body is trying to communicate in the moment.
Using Races as Tests, Not Verdicts
When a cramp shows up mid-race, most common responses treat it like a one-off problem that just needs the right input. Making it stop is the goal — but it’s handled as if the body is missing a single thing, rather than dealing with an overload already in motion.
Salt packets, pickle juice, mustard, and last-minute electrolyte dumping feel productive because they give you something to do and because decades of anecdote and marketing frame cramps as depletion. In the moment, though, they rarely change what’s happening because the muscle has already been asked to do more than it can coordinate.
Even when electrolytes actually do matter over long efforts, they don’t absorb fast enough to resolve an active cramp, and blood levels are often already within normal range.
Aggressive stretching and “pushing through” are just as unreliable. Stretching an actively cramping muscle can intensify pain, prolong the spasm, or trigger repeat cramps once you reload it. Forcing effort usually escalates the shutdown instead of restoring control.
What actually helps is reducing demand so the nervous system can regain control.
That might mean slowing more than you want to. Shortening stride. Changing cadence. Or switching from running to hiking, or taking a brief pause. You’re not fixing the cramp — you’re lowering task demands enough for control to return.
Cramping is something to manage in the moment, but it’s also a signal you’ve passed your limit.
How you respond determines whether it becomes a brief interruption or a repeated shutdown — and that response is part of what races are really testing.
“Nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard Feynman
Cramping doesn’t mean you weren’t tough enough, disciplined enough, or fueled “wrong.” It means the race asked more of you than your preparation had set you up for.
Races don’t hand out verdicts on your potential. They show you where your current edges are — where coordination breaks down under load, where pacing slips under pressure, where complexity overwhelms capacity. That’s exactly what they’re supposed to do.
If you treat those moments as proof that something is wrong with you, you miss the point. If you treat them as data, they become useful. They tell you how to train next. What to rehearse. What to respect. What to build toward instead of fight through.
Progress doesn’t come from avoiding limits. It comes from meeting them honestly and adapting forward.
What did your last race reveal about what you need to build next?