The Rule of Thirds Reframes Bad Days as Part of Hard Work
Olympic runner Alexi Pappas says bad days are not necessarily evidence that a difficult pursuit is failing. Drawing on advice from her coach before the Rio Olympics, Pappas frames serious work through a Rule of Thirds: roughly one-third good days, one-third okay days and one-third bad days. Within that pattern, she argues, bad days can indicate that the challenge is real; when they become constant, they may be a warning that the effort is unsustainable.
The Rule of Thirds turns a bad day into a diagnostic
Alexi Pappas says the best advice she ever received was a simple ratio for difficult work: when someone is chasing a dream or doing anything hard, they should expect to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and bad — in her word, “crappy” — a third of the time.
The talk visualizes the idea as a clock face divided into three colored sections labeled “Good,” “Okay,” and “Bad,” and then as a plain formula: “When you are chasing a dream or doing anything hard: 1/3 = good 1/3 = okay 1/3 = bad.”
| State | Expected share | What Pappas says it can indicate |
|---|---|---|
| Good | One third | The work is moving well, but feeling good all the time may mean the challenge is too easy. |
| Okay | One third | Neutral or uneven days are part of the expected distribution. |
| Bad | One third | Hard days can belong inside a serious pursuit, unless they become constant. |
The rule includes two warnings. If someone feels good all the time, Pappas says, the ratio may be off because they are not pushing beyond the boundaries of their current potential into “the great unknown”; they may need to “dial things up.” If someone feels bad all the time, the opposite may be true: the work may be fatiguing or unsustainable, and they may need to “dial things back.”
If you're within this ratio, then the bad days aren't bad. They just mean you're chasing a dream.
That distinction is the useful part of the framework. A bad day does not disappear, and it does not become pleasant. It becomes information within a larger pattern.
Pappas learned the rule one month before her Olympic 10,000-meter race in Rio, during a workout where she could not hit her splits. The failure quickly became existential. If she could not do it in front of five teammates, she wondered, how could she do it in front of thousands of people on the world stage? She says she cried in lane one and questioned whether she was good enough, even whether she was “worth it.” She “begged” her watch to change its mind.
Her coach, also an Olympian, told her to take the watch off. Pappas initially heard the instruction as confirmation that she might not be good enough. Instead, the coach told her: “No, Lex, it's the Rule of Thirds.”
The watch mattered because it was measuring the part of the workout she could not make cooperate. Pappas says her coach had her remove it because, in that moment, the point was not pace but effort. She returned to the track and finished the workout by giving “100 percent effort,” even though she did not feel “100 percent fast.”
The Olympic result did not erase the bad day; it changed how she read it
After that failed workout, Alexi Pappas went to the Olympics, broke a national record, and ran a personal best. She describes the result plainly: “It was awesome. The Olympics is awesome. My coach was right.”
The important lesson was not that a bad workout predicts a good race. Pappas’s point is narrower and more practical: one bad day should not be treated as the whole signal. A hard day may mean the pursuit is demanding enough to strain the person undertaking it. Too many hard days may mean the plan is unsustainable. The Rule of Thirds gave her a way to check the distribution rather than overread a single data point.
She says she now loves her bad days, not because they feel good, but because they can mean she is still inside the expected range of a serious attempt. The bad day becomes part of the process rather than proof that the pursuit is failing.
The rule also shifts the available standard. In the Olympic workout, Pappas could not force the watch to show the splits she wanted. What remained available was effort. That distinction carries through the rest of the talk: the question is not whether the work always feels successful, but whether the person can keep responding well when it does not.
Leadville tested the rule without a coach there to interpret the pain
Years after the Olympics, Pappas entered the Leadville 100-mile race in the Rocky Mountains. She calls it “the hardest race in the country,” describes it as 16 times the distance of her Olympic race, and says it includes more than 15,000 feet of elevation. Statistically, she says, only half the people who start finish. The race goes through the night.
Leadville inverted the Olympic conditions. Alexi Pappas says it was not about pace, time, or place, but about being present and continuing to move. There was no coach monitoring her thirds. During the race, she says, she felt “every feeling under the sun, and under the moon”: at times like “a brave, capable voyager,” and at other times barely able to continue.
A previous version of herself, she says, would have felt really down about the hardest moments. With the Rule of Thirds, she could see them as part of “a bigger picture of success.” Earlier in the talk, Pappas draws the boundary clearly: bad days within the ratio are expected; feeling bad all the time may mean the work is fatiguing or unsustainable and should be dialed back.
At one point in Leadville, Pappas felt as if she had “metal rods” in her legs and could no longer run. She walked the last 40 miles through the night. Her emphasis is not on having executed an ideal race; it is on not giving up. The experience taught her, she says, to let go of control, believe in the process, and be “really, really present.”
The Leadville example sharpens the practical use of the rule. It is not a promise that hard pursuits will feel orderly in real time. Pappas describes moments of capability and moments of near-collapse within the same event. The rule becomes most useful when the person cannot rely on an external authority — a coach, a split time, a clean emotional signal — to interpret the experience for them.
The same ratio became a way to coach herself outside sport
Pappas extends the Rule of Thirds beyond the track. She says it helped her write her book “Bravey,” direct three movies, and think about her own mood and emotions day to day. The structure of the rule is the same in each case: a difficult project will not provide a steady emotional signal. Feeling bad during the work does not, by itself, mean the work is wrong.
Alexi Pappas says the rule helps her “evaluate and assess” the bigger picture of a dream-chasing journey. It gives her a way to remain on her own team in moments of pain, especially when no coach is present to say that the difficulty was expected.
Her phrasing shifts the standard away from being “the best” and toward trying one’s best: “Instead of asking yourself to be the best, ask yourself to try your best.” The same distinction appears in a line shown visually during the talk: “I can't change how I feel, I can only control how I react.”
Pappas’s claim is not that emotion is irrelevant. It is that emotion is not always the final instruction. A bad feeling may be part of the expected third. A pattern of constant bad feeling may be a warning. The work is to know which one it is.