The Right Time Will Never Come (to Set Big Goals)

Development as a Marathon Piece 4: Dallas White Rock Marathon, December 2010

There is something you want to pursue. A goal, a project, a hard decision, a change in

your program. And there are reasons you haven’t started yet, and the reasons are real.

The year is full. The season is in progress. The conditions are not right.

I want to tell you about the year I qualified for the Boston Marathon, and why it’s the

closest thing I have to evidence that the conditions will never be right, and that the work

has to begin inside your life, or it never begins at all.

What 2010 contained

I came home from Iraq in 2009. The next year was the integration year between

deployments, which sounds tidy. It wasn’t. Our family bought our first house. I moved

from squadron XO to brigade XO, a role with more scope and longer hours. In October,

our son Adam was born. Fifth child. First son.

And in the middle of all of that, somewhere in the spring of 2010, I decided I was going

to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

I had run a 3:28 at San Antonio in November 2008 and walked away thinking I could

probably run a 3:15. But it was only after I came home from Iraq in 2009 that the next

thought arrived: a 3:15 would qualify me for Boston. And it was only somewhere in the

spring of the next year, in the middle of everything 2010 was already going to be, that I

decided to actually go after it. I had eight or nine months to deliver on the biggest

running goal I had ever set, in the worst year I could have picked to set it.

How the training fit

It fit because I made it fit and had all the right help. Not because the year had room for

it. It fit because I had decided this was the year I was going to deliver on the 3:15, and I

was going to put the training into whatever stretches of the calendar were available,

which was usually early morning before the kids and the staff were up.

None of it would have been possible without my wife agreeing to the plan and carrying

the household through a year that included a newborn, a recent move, and her

husband’s brigade XO hours. I had to step up in different ways and still pull my weight

at home; it just looked a little different. Ambitious goals in busy seasons depend on

someone else absorbing the load that the ambition creates. That bill came due in our

family in a hundred small ways that year, and she paid it.

The training itself was unremarkable. Be consistent. Stack the days. Sleep when I could.

Eat what supported the work. Run the workouts on the days they were scheduled. I had

learned from San Antonio that the work was what produced the capacity. So I did the

work.

Race day

Dallas, December 2010. Cold morning. I ran the race I had trained to run. Same as San

Antonio, the body did what the work had built it to do.

Somewhere around mile twenty-three, I did the math in my head and realized I had the

qualifying time in the bag. I was on pace. I was running well. The legs were under me.

And for the last three miles I floated. There’s no other word for it. The work was done.

The race had already been won, in a sense, in the months that had produced the body

that was now carrying me to the line. All I had to do was let the last three miles happen.

I have run many miles in my life, and I cannot remember any that felt as light as those.

I crossed the line at 3:15. Qualified for Boston.

What I keep coming back to

There were many reasons not to chase a 3:15 in 2010. They were all real. A newborn is a

real reason. A brigade XO job is a real reason. JRTC and a looming deployment are real

reasons. Buying a first house is a real reason. None of these were excuses I was making

up. They were the actual conditions of my life that year, and any reasonable person

looking at the calendar would have said: Maybe try this in 2012. Maybe try this after the

deployment. Maybe try this when things settle down.

The conditions of your life are not going to settle down. They will be replaced by

different conditions that will be just as complete as the current ones. The brigade XO

year was followed by the deployment year, which was followed by the recovery year,

which was followed by the next assignment, which was followed by the next set of

children’s milestones, which has been followed by every year since.

Which is the lie that right-time thinking depends on. The lie is that there is a future

stretch of your life where the conditions will be cleaner than they are now. There isn’t.

The version of your life that’s coming will be full of things you can’t see yet, and the goal

you’ve been deferring will still be deferred, and the reasons you’re using now to wait will

be replaced by different reasons that feel equally real.

This isn’t a willpower argument. I’m not telling you to grit your teeth harder. The

reasons to wait are real, and I’m not asking you to pretend they aren’t. I’m telling you

that waiting for them to disappear is a category error, because the conditions of a full life

are the conditions in which the work has to happen, or it never happens.

You should set the big goal anyway. Not the safe goal calibrated to the busy year. The big one. The one that scares you a little when you write it down. Because the truth is, the

year that’s coming will be full, whether you’re aiming at something significant or not.

The conditions are going to be hard either way.

For everything in our lives (personal or professional), if we don’t name it, commit to it,

and put in the work, the big things will never happen. If it’s important to you, schedule it

and prioritize it. You’ll never be closer to accomplishing something than you are right

now.

The work begins now, or it doesn’t begin. And the goal you set should be the one that

matches what you actually want, not the one that fits the year you wish you had.

One question to sit with

What’s the big goal you’ve been deferring until the conditions are right? What would it

look like to set it anyway, knowing the conditions will never be right, and to start the

work now?

Next week: Boston, April 2015. The race I qualified for in 2010 but couldn’t run for

years, and the mile that changed how I thought about goals altogether.