There's a version of you that trains through pain because missing a session feels like failure. That skips rest days out of guilt. That logs a strong 20-miler and still fixates on the half-mile where your pace dropped. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone. And according to trail running athlete Toni McCann, you might also be running yourself into the ground for no good reason.
McCann, profiled in October 2026, has been unusually candid about her own relationship with perfectionism and why she walked away from it. Her argument is simple but worth sitting with: perfectionism doesn't make you a better athlete. Excellence does. And the two are not the same thing.
Perfectionism vs. Excellence: The Difference That Actually Matters
It's easy to treat perfectionism as a virtue in endurance sport. The logic seems sound. You want to be precise. You want to optimize. You want every run logged, every split analyzed, every nutrition window respected. That attention to detail, though, can quietly tip into something more corrosive.
Perfectionism, as sports psychologists define it, is characterized by fear of failure and an all-or-nothing evaluation of performance. Excellence-seeking, by contrast, is driven by process engagement, curiosity, and the willingness to keep showing up even when things go sideways.
Research on endurance athletes consistently finds that perfectionistic athletes report higher rates of burnout, a greater likelihood of training through injury rather than resting, and a sharper dropout rate over time. Excellence-focused athletes, on the other hand, tend to train more consistently across months and years. They're not better because they're more talented. They're better because they stay in the game longer.
McCann has described this distinction not as a philosophical shift but as a practical one. When you stop asking "was that perfect?" and start asking "what did I learn?", training becomes sustainable. That reframe sounds small. Its compounding effect over a multi-year running career is enormous.
What Perfectionism Actually Costs You on the Trail
Trail running is a sport that punishes perfectionism in particularly direct ways. Unlike road running, where conditions are relatively controlled, trails introduce variables you simply cannot manage. Weather shifts. Terrain changes under your feet. Your GPS lies to you. A river crossing adds ten minutes to your split.
Perfectionist runners struggle with these disruptions because they measure a run's success against an ideal that was never realistic to begin with. A bad day becomes a verdict on their worth as an athlete. A missed week becomes a reason to quit a race entry entirely.
Injury risk compounds this. Studies on ultramarathon and trail populations link perfectionistic traits to delayed help-seeking behavior. Runners experiencing pain continue training because stopping feels like admitting defeat. The result is that what could have been a two-week recovery becomes a three-month forced layoff.
You can see the inverse of this in athletes who've rebuilt after serious setbacks. Paul Wilson's return to a 160K ultra after a shattered leg is a case study in exactly the kind of process-driven resilience that perfectionism would have made impossible. Wilson didn't chase the pre-injury version of himself. He focused on what was achievable at each stage and built from there.
Toni McCann's Framework: Process Over Verdict
McCann's philosophy, as she's articulated it, centers on a few practical operating principles. They're not complicated. What makes them effective is consistency of application.
The first is treating bad training days as data, not verdicts. A session that fell apart tells you something. Maybe recovery wasn't adequate. Maybe stress load from work was higher than usual. Maybe the heat hit harder than expected. That information is useful. Writing the day off as a failure discards it.
The second principle is setting effort-based goals alongside outcome-based ones. Most runners set only outcome goals. They want to finish under a certain time or place in the top 20 of their age group. Those targets have value. But when race day conditions make them unachievable, outcome-only athletes have nothing left to pursue. Effort-based goals, things like staying composed on a technical descent or maintaining form when fatigued, remain achievable regardless of conditions.
The third is building in what McCann calls "deliberate imperfection." She has described intentionally accepting a training week that doesn't go to plan, without compensating or punishing herself for it. This trains the psychological tolerance for variance that long-distance running demands. A 100-mile race will not go to plan. You need to have practiced being okay with that.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
The endurance running community is, structurally, quite good at reinforcing perfectionism. Strava segments rank your performance publicly. Race results are searchable forever. Coaching programs, which can run anywhere from $150 to $500 per month in the US market, often emphasize adherence rates and consistency metrics that frame missed sessions as deficits.
Social media layers on top of this. The athletes you follow are posting their best days. Their PR announcements. Their podium finishes. You're comparing your average Tuesday to their highlight reel, and the comparison is doing damage that you might not even be tracking.
McCann's approach asks you to opt out of that comparison loop without opting out of ambition. You can still want to improve significantly, train hard, and race competitively. The shift is in how you process the inevitable bad sessions, setbacks, and off-races that come with the territory.
If you're building toward a target event, understanding how to handle the peak week of your training block is a good place to test this mindset. Peak week is deliberately stressful. How you interpret the hard days within it sets the tone for race day itself.
Practical Shifts You Can Make This Week
You don't need to overhaul your training plan to start applying this framework. These are entry-level adjustments that compound over time.
- Rewrite your training log language. Instead of "bad run" or "failed interval session," write what actually happened. "Legs felt heavy, completed 6 of 8 intervals, HR elevated. Possible under-recovery." Descriptive language keeps the data without the self-punishment.
- Add one effort-based goal to every session. Before you start, decide on one process target. Stay relaxed on the uphills. Keep cadence consistent on tired legs. Hit that goal, and the session was a success regardless of pace.
- Schedule a deliberate recovery week without guilt architecture. That means not adding compensatory miles the following week. Not framing it as "earned" rest. Just treating it as a normal part of the training structure, because it is.
- Audit your social media consumption. If the accounts you follow consistently make you feel behind or inadequate, that's information. Curation is not weakness. It's environment design.
- Notice the verdict language in your internal monologue. Phrases like "I should have" or "I can't believe I" are perfectionist signals. Replace them with "next time, I'll try" or "that tells me." It feels awkward at first. It works over time.
This Applies Beyond the Elite Level
It would be easy to read McCann's philosophy as advice that only applies to high-level athletes. Elite runners, the reasoning goes, face real competitive pressure. The rest of us are just running for fun, so what's the problem?
That framing misses the point. Recreational trail runners are, in some ways, more vulnerable to perfectionism's costs because they often have less external accountability. No coach to tell you your expectations are unreasonable. No teammate to normalize a bad training week. No professional context to distinguish "this race went badly" from "I am failing at this thing I care about."
The growth in women-only running events through 2026 has surfaced exactly this dynamic. Participants consistently cite psychological safety as a core draw. The ability to run without constant performance comparison. That's a structural response to a problem that's very widespread among recreational runners.
And if you're considering entering competitive trail events, the trail races worth targeting this October range from friendly beginner-accessible formats to serious technical races. The right entry point isn't the one that looks most impressive. It's the one that matches where you actually are, not where perfectionism insists you should be.
Excellence Is the Long Game
Toni McCann's case against perfectionism isn't a case against high standards. It's a case against the psychological framework that makes high standards brittle instead of durable.
Perfectionism says one bad race proves something damning about you. Excellence says one bad race is one data point in a career-long experiment. Perfectionism makes rest feel like failure. Excellence understands that adaptation happens during recovery, not during the session itself.
The runners who are still going strong at 40, 50, and beyond aren't the ones who never had a bad training block. They're the ones who didn't let a bad training block write the next chapter of the story. That capacity, more than any threshold workout or taper protocol, is what McCann is really talking about when she talks about chasing excellence.
You already have the ambition. The question is whether you're channeling it through a framework that builds you up over time, or one that quietly chips away at the reason you started running in the first place.