Looking Up

Development as a Marathon, Piece 5: Boston Marathon, April 2015

This could sound, for a paragraph or two, like another Stop and Smell the Roses

leadership story. It isn’t, quite. Most lessons focus on enjoying the work. Mine is about

something harder: how the discipline that drives us to start can also blind us to the

significance of the start line itself.

I almost missed the Boston Marathon while I was running it. That’s what this week is

about.

How I got to the start line

Last week, I wrote about qualifying for Boston in Dallas in December of 2010. Six weeks

after that race, my ankle gave way on a routine run. The MRI showed structural damage

that had been building for years and finally cashed in. When I came home from my next

Iraq deployment, I had ankle surgery. The recovery took three years, and by the time I

could run again, the qualifying window had expired. The race I had earned was no

longer mine to run on the terms I had earned it.

A loose family connection eventually put me in touch with a veterans’ program that

offered charity bibs to runners who couldn’t qualify on time. I’ll be honest. I hesitated to

take it. I had already earned Boston once. Accepting a charity bib felt like a compromise.

But the body I had earned it with wasn’t the body I had anymore, and three years of

rehab was its own kind of qualifying. I took the bib.

I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in the fall of 2014 as part of a prep cycle, ran about

3:40, and built from there. By April 2015, I was in shape to attempt to re-qualify at

Boston. The qualifying time was still 3:15, which was the goal I carried to Hopkinton.

Race day

Race day was miserable. Cold morning, and a headwind of fifteen to twenty miles an

hour in the wrong direction the whole route. I trained for and ran the early miles the

same way I had run every previous marathon, with eyes on the pace and my goal to

re-qualify. Through twenty miles, I was able to stay on pace (even over Heartbreak Hill),

but the pace was costing me and I knew it.

Somewhere around mile twenty-three, I accepted the reality that I was not going to re-

qualify. The goal I carried from Hopkinton was no longer available.

And that’s when I looked up.

What I saw

I was running the Boston Marathon.

I want to render that recognition carefully, because it’s the hinge of the whole day. For

twenty-three miles, I had been running a race. Chasing time. Tracking pace. Tunnel-

visioned on the clock, the way every disciplined runner is tunnel-visioned on the clock,

because that’s how you deliver results. And in that tunnel vision, I had almost

completely missed where I was. I was running the race that fourteen years of marathon

training had been pointing at. The race that Marine Corps in 2001 was the rookie tuition

for. The race that Fulda in 2003 was the buddy version of. The race that San Antonio in

2008 was the unlocking of capacity for. The race that Dallas in 2010 finally qualified me

to run, before my body kept me away from it for almost five more years.

And until the clock let go of me at mile twenty-three, I had been about to run all twenty-

six miles of it the way I would have run any other Tuesday training session in D.C.

The last three miles

So I let the last three miles be something different. I was still moving. The legs were still

under me. I wasn’t going to re-qualify, but I was going to finish, and finishing the Boston

Marathon was something I had been chasing since the finish line at San Antonio seven

years earlier.

I started to notice the crowd. The signs. The faces. The streets of Brookline. The way the

noise on Beacon Street was unlike anything I had run through. And somewhere on the

route, I found Missy and the kids. She had brought all of them out in that miserable

weather to be on the side of the road. They had stood in a cold headwind for hours. I

stopped in the middle of the race and hugged every one of them.

You’ve probably seen Boylston Street on television. When you make the turn off

Hereford onto Boylston, the buildings rise up on both sides, the bleachers are full, the

sound bounces back and forth across the road, and it feels like running through a

stadium. The finish line is visible from the moment you make the turn. Most years, I

would have run that stretch with my eyes on the clock. That year, I ran it with my eyes

up.

I crossed the line at around 3:23, but that didn’t matter. The last three miles had been a

celebration of fourteen years of running. Of every mile, every workout, every long run,

every recovery, every race that had ever pointed at this one. And I had almost missed all

of it.

What I keep coming back to

The discipline that gets us to start lines is the same discipline that can keep us from

seeing the start lines we’re standing on. That’s the lesson of Boston 2015 for me. I am

not naturally inclined to look up. I am naturally inclined to chase the clock. I didn’t

remember I had run past The Alamo in San Antonio, for crying out loud. The clock is

what got me to Boston, but the clock is also what almost made Boston another data

point on a spreadsheet.

I don’t think this is just a running problem. I think it’s a common leadership problem.

Coaches with twenty years in have all spent a season or two too focused on the

championship to notice the team they had. Athletic directors have all spent stretches of

their careers chasing a metric and missing the work the metric was a proxy for. Anyone

who has ever set a goal and pursued it diligently knows the experience of arriving at the

moment the goal pointed at and discovering they were too tunnel-visioned to enjoy it.

This is not an argument against goals. Without the 3:15, I would not have been on the

road to Hopkinton in the first place. The goal is what built the body that ran the race.

The goal is what made Boston possible. I want to honor that.

But the goal is not the point either. The race is. The season is. The career is. The

relationships built along the way are. The version of the work that’s significant is rarely

the version the goal pointed at, even though the goal is what got you there. The mature

leader is the one who can hold both things at once. The discipline to chase the goal, and

the willingness to look up when the goal becomes unreachable, or even just when the

goal stops being the most important thing.

The luxury I had at mile twenty-three was that the goal was clearly gone. There was

nothing to chase. The clock had released me whether I liked it or not. Most of the time, it

doesn’t work like that. Most of the time, the goal stays viable, and the work stays urgent,

and you have to choose to look up. That’s the harder version. I know that I wouldn’t

have looked up at Boston if the clock hadn’t made the choice for me.

One question to sit with

What’s the start line you’re standing on right now? Is there a goal or moment you are

so focused on that you might be missing what matters most about this stage? What

would it look like to notice where you actually are, and look up before something forces

you to?