Development as a Marathon

Piece 3: When the Work Compounds (San Antonio Rock and Roll Marathon, November

2008)

How I got to the start line

Between Fulda in 2003 and San Antonio in 2008, my life got in the way of running. I

deployed to Iraq. I came home. I damaged the meniscus in my knee running a half-

marathon the year after I got back. The knee took its time getting diagnosed and worse,

and by September 2007, I was on a table at Fort Polk getting it surgically repaired.

The recovery from that surgery is what changed me as a runner. Not the surgery itself.

The recovery.

I had decided I wanted to run another marathon, and I picked the San Antonio Rock

and Roll Marathon, which was about fourteen months out. That gave me a real runway.

And what I needed in those fourteen months was a level of consistency I hadn’t brought

to my running before. I needed to rehab the knee correctly. I needed to lose the weight I

had gained during deployment and post-deployment life. I needed to dial in my sleep,

my food, and the daily training that would actually convert into race-day fitness.

So that’s what I did. For fourteen months, I just kept showing up. I followed the plan. I

rehabbed the knee properly. I slept. I ate well. I trained the workouts I was supposed to

train on the days I was supposed to train them. I didn’t do anything fancy. I just kept

stacking the days.

The race

San Antonio was in November of 2008. My goal coming in was 3:30. That was already a

meaningful jump from where I’d been. The Marine Corps had been somewhere over four

hours. Fulda had been just over four. Going to 3:30 meant taking off more than thirty

minutes from my previous best, which felt ambitious going in.

Race day was a different experience from Marine Corps or Fulda. I didn’t hit a wall. I

didn’t fall apart in the late miles. I didn’t walk. I ran the race I had trained for, which

was a new experience for me. The body did what the training had built it to do. There

wasn’t much drama in it.

I finished in 3:28. Two minutes under my goal.

And then, standing at the finish line, I had a thought I had not been expecting. I could

probably run a 3:15 . . . and qualify to run the Boston Marathon. Whoa. But that’s for

next time.

The realization at the finish

I want to be specific about that thought, because it’s the part of the race I keep coming

back to.

It wasn’t wishful thinking. It wasn’t a goal I had been training toward in secret. I had

not, at any point in those fourteen months, told myself I was going to run a 3:15. The

3:15 idea showed up at the finish line because the body had just demonstrated

something I hadn’t known it could do. I had felt strong through the late miles. I had

finished with something left. The 3:28 wasn’t my limit. It was simply the result that the

work had produced this time.

Which meant the next goal wasn’t something I needed to set. It was something the work

had already pointed at.

From over four hours at the Marine Corps to a 3:15 horizon at San Antonio was a thirty-

nine-minute swing. Not from one piece of inspiration. From years of disciplined work

that had accumulated quietly in the background, and one race day where the

accumulated capacity finally made itself visible.

What I keep coming back to

There’s a version of this story I could tell that would sound like a lot of leadership

writing. Set ambitious goals. Believe in what’s possible. Don’t let your current

performance limit your future ambition. That version isn’t wrong, exactly. But I think it

misses what San Antonio actually taught me.

The 3:15 horizon wasn’t produced by the 3:30 goal. The 3:15 horizon was produced by

fourteen months of consistent, disciplined work. The goal didn’t make the capacity. The

work made the capacity. The goal was just the receipt the work produced.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the most common failure mode I

see in coaches and programs is the inverse. A team has a hard year, and the leadership

response is to set a bigger goal for next year. More wins. Tougher schedule. Sharper

standards. More money. The reasoning is that ambitious goals drive ambitious results.

And the reasoning has a logic to it, until you watch what actually happens. The new goal

sits on top of the same daily work, and the same daily work produces roughly the same

daily output, and at the end of the year the new goal is either missed or hit narrowly,

and nobody is sure why.

The piece nobody adjusted was the work.

Here’s the line I keep coming back to. When you’re looking for more wins, the strategy is

never to focus on more wins. More wins are downstream of better daily work. Better

daily work is what produces capacity. Capacity is what produces wins. The flow only

runs one direction. Focusing on the wins themselves is a way of skipping the only steps

that actually produce them.

For the coach reading this: if you’re looking at your program right now and trying to

figure out how to get to a new level next season, the most important question is not what

your new ambition should be. The most important question is what daily work, if you

did it consistently for the next twelve months, would produce a program capable of

more than you currently believe is possible. The ambition will reveal itself when the

work gets done. The order matters.

Somewhere on your program right now is the equivalent of a fourteen-month rehab and

recovery. The disciplined work that, if you did it without flinching, would produce a

horizon you can’t currently see. The question isn’t what horizon you should aim for. The

question is whether you’re willing to do the work that would put a different horizon in

view.

One question to sit with

What’s the upstream work you’re not doing consistently enough? The work that would

produce the wins you keep aiming at directly?

Next week: Dallas, December 2010. The race that put me on the start line of Boston.

And the year that almost didn’t leave room for the work.

Culture wins.