Life is Not a Marathon; Be a Sprinter

Life is a Marathon

We are often told “life is a marathon, not a sprint.” The sentiment behind this overused cliche is that to find success in life, we must settle in for the long haul. Success is going to take some time. Much like the long 26.2 miles of a marathon.

The thinking goes that those who sprint, will wear out too fast and not be able to sustain their pace for the long run. I certainly agree, we must have endurance in the game of life. It’s the age old ‘tortoise and hare’ fable reborn. If we can be slow and steady, versus fast and erratic, we will win the race.

There is much I like about this way of thinking. I am not here to throw it out with the bath water. In fact, I often spew words of wisdom to my students cautioning them there is no such thing as overnight success. This is a siren call for shortcuts, hacks, greed and typically leads to disaster.

We are sold a faulty bill of goods from Hollywood and the media that loves the rags to riches romantic notion of the champion that came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. This ‘story’ is certainly much more prevalent in the United States than other parts of the world.

The entrepreneur that burst onto the scene and created the next “unicorn.” Or the unknown challenger that becomes the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. You and I know the stories well, they are deeply ingrained in our psyche. Consequently, we more than likely buy into their magical elixir.

We enjoy the neurochemicals that flood our brains when we read about them. It inspires us. Ideally, these stories are the catalyst for us to take action on our own imagined journey to the top. Sadly, that inspiration often extinguishes before lunch, but that’s fodder for another blog post.

Overnight Success

The story of the overnight success captures the imagination of the world. But the reality of this journey could not be further from the truth. I have yet to see or meet, outside of winning the lottery, anyone who has become an overnight success. Success takes creation of value, a mastery of your craft, both of which take time. Be patient.

It takes hard work. It takes grit, resilience and mental toughness. It takes comfort with discomfort. It takes facing our fear. It’s a grind. Its messy. It’s about toiling in the dark, long before the spotlight ever finds you. These overnight successes we read about often leave out the backstory.

Why? Because that grind, the process, is not nearly as glamorous as the trophy. It’s dirty, and raw, and oftentimes ugly. Few are inspired by that part of the story. The retelling of the fairy tale often leaves out the failures, the rejections, the sleeping on a friends couch, the late rent checks, the nagging self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

Build Your Castle

This adversity are the building blocks of our empire; bricks in the walls of your castle. They are necessary. They are not glamorous and often lonely, but the castle could not exist without them. To do hard things, we must work hard. But also work smart.

It is not enough just to work hard. History is littered with people who have worked incredibly hard over their lifetimes, never to see the fruits of their labor. We must also be intelligent about how, and where, we expend our energy and direct our focus. Hard work and effort are not enough.

Strategic Energy Management

I was recently reintroduced to the wonderful work of Jim Loehr on the Tim Ferriss Show. Jim is widely considered the father of the mental toughness movement here in the United States. His message of character resonates with me on so many levels.

Of course, if you are one of our regular listeners to the Forging Mettle Podcast, you’ll know I have a passion for mental toughness, resilience and grit. I look to his work as a guiding beacon for my own. Dr. Loehr has worked with countless professional and Olympic athletes in his career spanning several decades. He has worked with the best and trained the best.

A book that changed my life, and one I consider a hidden gem is The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.

This is one of 17 books authored by Dr. Loehr over the years. The premise of the book is that we are often told that time is the most valuable resource we possess. Which makes perfect sense at first glance. That messaging sells a lot of time management books, to be sure.

Although, it’s difficult to argue that time, indeed, is very important. It is not the most valuable resource we have. We will run out of quality energy long before we run out of waking hours in a day. The limiting factor will always defer to energy, not time. Once we understand this, we can start to strategically manage our energy (rather than our time) to our benefit.

This brings me to the title of this reflective post, and something I touched on in our latest podcast. We, as human beings, are actually not built for steady state energy expenditure. It's time for a mindset shift.

Peak Performance

If you think of our ancestors on the Savannah tens of thousands of years ago. To live, and survive, they often needed quick bursts of energy followed by recovery. Escaping hungry predators, or even foraging for food and shelter, was typically not a sustained long term event.

It was all about ‘switching gears,’ much like I do in long distance mountain ultramarathons. We are built for a series of sprints, not a marathon. As Loehr puts it,

“We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints — fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.”

In his outstanding 2017 book, Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success, author Brad Stulberg brought the equation “Stress + Rest = Growth” to our consciousness. To my way of thinking, this concept is directly building on the work of Jim Loehr and others. There is a direct connection.

Stulberg’s equation is about sprints. If you can go back in time to your high school algebra class and imagine a Sine wave. This is what our energy expenditure should look like, rather than an idealistic flatline. Ebbing and flowing like ocean waves on the shore. The vital, often missing, component to growth is rest.

Do not fight this ebb and flow of energy. Do not allow negative self-talk about being lazy or unmotivated invade your inner citadel. Embrace this process as your natural state, because it is. It’s how we perform best.

We must take time to rest, recharge, and reload for the fight so we can be at our best when the bullets start flying and the pressure is on. You cannot be mentally tough, resilient and gritty without it. In our ‘always on’ culture, this signal gets lost in the noise far too often.

To illustrate my point, if I were to ask you to take a relatively light 3 lb. weight and do bicep curls for 8 hours, without rest, what would be your response? You would rightly say, “that is ludicrous, I could never do that! I would need to rest.” Well, my question is, why do we expect our brains to behave this way?

Your Brain as a Muscle

Think of your brain as a muscle. Realize, also, that cognitively demanding tasks use a lot of energy. In fact, our brains will actually consume 20% or our energy usage in a typical day. That's a hefty caloric budget for that 2 lb. mass between our ears. A steady state 8 hour day of deep work is not how our brains are built to operate. We cannot sustain it. If you can get 2–3 hours of deep work logged in a day, call it a win.

I encourage you to experiment with living your life as a series of sprints, versus a marathon. Without losing sight of the fact we are in it for the long haul and endurance still matters. Delayed gratification is definitely a superpower. I think you’ll like the results of sprinting, taking a rest, and then sprinting again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Use your energy wisely. I will see you at the finish line.