Development as a Marathon

Piece 2: What Experience Is For (Fulda Marathon, Germany, September 7, 2003)

Two years after I ran the Marine Corps Marathon, I was stationed in Würzburg,

Germany, working on the division staff. My friend Mike and I had become close in that

job and had deployed together to Turkey. Somewhere before we left for that deployment

we got to talking about distance running. He said he wanted to run a marathon

someday. I said I’d run one already and would love to take another shot at it. By the time

we came home from Turkey, we had a plan: pick a race, train through the year, run it

together. We chose the Fulda Marathon, in October or November of 2003.

That training is one of the better stretches of running I’ve had in my life. We had route

after route along the Main River, through the Würzburg vineyards, with views you

wouldn’t find on most American training runs. We were eventually put in charge of

finding the routes for our G3 PT once a week, which gave us another reason to be out

there scouting. For months, Mike and I ran together and trained for the same race.

The Fulda Marathon, by the way, has a story worth knowing. It started in the late 1970s

as the Blackhorse Marathon, founded by the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment when they

were stationed in Fulda guarding the Cold War front line. When the regiment rotated

home in the 1990s, the city of Fulda kept the race going. The shirt I got that year still

had a small black horse silhouette on it. A unit built something on the edge of a war, and

the community they’d been embedded with kept it running long after they left. I liked

knowing that as I lined up at the start.

Race day

We started the race together. The plan was always to run it together. There was never a

discussion of splitting up to chase individual times. That wasn’t the race we had trained

for.

And Mike and I, on paper, were not all that different. Similar fitness. Same training

plan. Same months of long runs through the vineyards. There was no obvious reason

one of us should have an easier day than the other.

Around mile eighteen, Mike started to gas. I knew the feeling. I had been there myself

two years earlier on the Marine Corps course. The legs get heavy in a specific way, the

breathing changes, and somewhere in your head a voice starts negotiating about

whether you really need to finish this thing.

So I stayed with him. We walked some. We ran some. Mostly I just kept him company

and kept him moving. I told him what I remembered about my own race, what I wished

someone had told me when I was where he was. We weren’t fast over those last eight

miles. But we kept going.

We finished a little over four hours. Crossed the line together. That was the race we had

trained for, and that was the race we ran.

What I keep coming back to

Mike told me about that race recently. He said I had exhibited “what I assume was a

bottomless well of patience” when he hit his wall at mile eighteen and we walk-ran the

rest of the way, missing our four-hour goal by nine minutes.

He’s wrong about the patience. I don’t remember feeling impatient. I wanted us to hit

that goal together, sure. But I wanted to be there for him during his first marathon more

than I wanted to meet the time. And the reason is simple: I had been there. I knew what

it felt like to crash. I had done it alone, on my first race, and I didn’t want him to.

Which is the part of this I keep coming back to. What looks from the outside like a

leader’s patience is often, from the inside, just memory. You’re not summoning a virtue.

You’re remembering vividly enough that impatience never gets a foothold in the first

place.

Most of us aren’t separated from our junior people by talent. We’re separated by

experience.

Mike and I were not built differently. We had not done different work. The only thing

that distinguished my day on that course from his was that I had already run a

marathon once. I knew what mile eighteen would feel like before mile eighteen arrived.

He didn’t. That was the whole difference.

If you’re a head coach, an athletic director, or any kind of leader with junior people on

your staff, this is almost always your situation too. The young assistant on your bench is

not less talented than you. The first-year head coach you’re mentoring is not built from

worse stuff than you are. The new player going through their first big stretch of adversity

is not failing because they lack what you have. They’re a few races behind you. That’s

usually it.

Which means experience is something we earned, not something we are.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. If experience is who I am, then the people

who don’t have it are simply lesser, and my impatience with them is justified. If

experience is something I earned, then I owe a different kind of attention to the people

who haven’t earned it yet, because I remember earning it and I remember how hard it

was.

And the right thing to do with something we earned is spend it on people who haven’t

earned it yet.

That’s what staying with Mike at mile eighteen actually was. It wasn’t kindness, exactly,

and it wasn’t a sacrifice. It was the only honest use of what I had that he didn’t. The

faster races came later. San Antonio. Boston. They came partly because of what staying

with Mike at Fulda taught me about what marathons are actually for.

All of which depends on one thing. You have to remember, vividly, what the early miles

felt like. And you have to remember them honestly.

Most of us, when we look back at our junior selves, remember the highlight reel. The big

presentation that landed. The play we made. The moment things finally clicked. We

forget that those moments sat on top of months and years of bad days, mediocre days,

and days we just barely got through. The best day we had as a young leader is not what

made us. The grind of the days that weren’t great is what made us. Those are the days

we should be remembering when we’re coaching someone through theirs.

The leader who has forgotten their rookie marathon, or worse, remembers only the parts

they liked, is the leader who is hard to work for. They confuse the experience they’ve

accumulated with the person they are. They run their own pace and wonder why their

staff can’t keep up. They think they’re leading. They’re just running alone. The ones who

remember the bad days, not just the good ones, are the ones people will run with.

Somewhere on your team right now, there’s a junior person at their own mile eighteen.

The question isn’t whether you have the patience to stay with them. The question is

whether you remember your own mile eighteen well enough to want to.

One question to sit with

Who on your team is at their mile eighteen right now? And what does it cost you to

stay with them?

Next week: San Antonio, 2008. The race that taught me what I was actually capable

of.