Double-knot your laces before the race. Most losses start with something small you assumed would hold.

Big efforts fail at small joints. You prepare for the hard part, the hill or the last lap, and the thing that ends it is a lace, a battery, a file you assumed had saved. Those details get skipped precisely because they seem too minor to be worth attention.

Before anything that matters, run through the boring checks out loud: shoes, charge, backup, papers. Give it sixty seconds, every time, until it stops feeling optional. Preparation is not only the training you did, it is also the two or three things that could quietly undo it.