Trying hard and still losing is not wasted. It’s stored in you somewhere the scoreboard can’t reach.

Effort does not vanish because the result went the other way. It leaves capacity behind: the fitness, the pattern recognition, the knowledge of what you can still do when it hurts. None of that gets recorded anywhere official, which makes a loss easy to write off as a waste. The gain is real and it shows up later, usually somewhere you were not expecting.

After the next hard loss, name one thing you are now able to do that you could not do before it. Keep those notes in one place across a season. When you need evidence that the work went somewhere, that list is where it is.