Most of my updates are strictly business, but today was a rougher day because I ran the longest I’d ever gone yesterday and was feeling it for the rest of the day (into Monday morning).
As many of you know, I’m training for a marathon at the end of May, and we’re almost 1 month away.
This means training is getting harder as I ramp up the distances until around 3 weeks before the race, where I taper down (so as not to risk injury).
Surprisingly, I’m learning a lot of lessons from running long distances that I find overlap with business and solopreneurship too.
To make a long story short, yesterday was a 26km run, and I especially struggled through the last 5km of it.
To put things in perspective, a half marathon is 21km, so it was like a half marathon + 1 quarter.
The interesting thing about it is that the more you push yourself physically, the more you realize that we’re probably more capable than we think we are.
Or as David Goggins puts it, when most of us “get tired and want to quit”, we probably are only at 40% of our maximum potential and can still push much, much harder.
I felt that when I finished on Sunday, because around the 20km mark my legs went dead. Heavy, rock hard and begging me to stop moving them.
I decided to ignore them and kept going until I finished the run. It wasn’t the most fun thing in the world and I was extremely sore and tired after, but I have to get these last few long runs in, and at the very least, it builds mental toughness and makes you realize you really are capable of a lot.
I’m not saying go run 26km this weekend, but don’t shy away from pushing the limits!
The other thing I’ve learned as training gets harder: just like in business, there are no shortcuts.
When I hit the street to do my runs, I know what I have to do. For the last 26km run, I knew I had to run the distance and it would take me about 2.5 hours of running.
There was no way around it.
Sure, I could’ve sped up to shave off a few minutes. But there was no getting around running from point A to point B.
Exact same is true in business – as any entrepreneurs can probably relate to.
If you’ve got your vision, mission and focus in place, you wake up each day and generally speaking, you know what you need to do.
You could look for shortcuts, or hacks, or “new tricks”, but most of us have learned the hard way that it’s the people who put in the work that are most successful. It might not always be fun, it might not always be what we’re in the mood for, but it’s what we need to do to move the needle.
And this training has really helped me realize and appreciate this, and accept the grind.
That’s what it is.
People talk about the hacks and shortcuts and 4 hour work weeks (which are possible, if you work hard upfront – it’s also a book I highly recommend and you can read my key takeaways from my blog post here), but I’ve still yet to meet (or interview) a successful solopreneur that hasn’t put in the work.
Simply put, you can’t procrastinate your way into a successful solopreneur business.
Can you relate? Either way, I challenge you to push yourself physically in one way or another, because it’s lessons like these, and also living a healthier life, that I think will make us all better in the long run.
That’s it for me, have a great day and keep grinding.
