There's something unique about doing a hard thing by yourself. No team to fall back on. No one to bail you out. Just you, your thoughts, and the work in front of you.
I've been running since I was a kid. Not because I love it. I run mainly because it teaches me things about myself that I can't learn anywhere else. When you're on mile eight of a ten-mile run, and your legs are dying, and your mind is trying to negotiate with itself to stop, that's where the real work happens. You're not building fitness at that point. You're building the ability to keep going when every part of you wants to quit.
I've completed one half-Ironman, five marathons, and a handful of half-marathons. I've also built six businesses. And the thing I keep coming back to is how similar the two feel. Not on the surface. On the surface they look completely different. But the internal experience of building a business and training for an endurance race are almost identical. Both require you to keep showing up on days when you don't want to. Both punish the sprint mentality and reward the people who pace themselves. Both have long stretches in the middle where nothing seems to be working and the original excitement has completely disappeared.
I think about pacing a lot. I once worked with a dot-com founder who was proud of his "always on" approach. He'd work seventy-five-hour weeks, sleep four hours a night, and expect the same from his team. Six months in, his creativity had tanked. Turnover was through the roof. The business was making costly mistakes because everyone was too exhausted to think clearly. He was sprinting a marathon, and it was exactly as dumb as that sounds.
The business owners I've seen create the most value over time understand something he didn't: energy management beats time management. They recognize when they're in a season that requires intensity, but they also build in real recovery. They can sustain their effort for years because they're not burning through all their fuel in the first quarter.
I learned this the hard way. The first eight years of running my own businesses, I was winging it. No real strategy. No structure. Just reacting to whatever was in front of me and hoping it would all work out. It felt like effort. It was effort. But it wasn't the right kind. Endurance athletes don't train whenever they feel like it. They follow a plan, build up step by step, and track their progress. When I finally started doing the same thing in business, everything changed.
Every significant business I've worked with has faced a stretch I call "the valley." It's the period when momentum stalls, problems multiply, and the initial excitement is long gone. This is where most people quit. Not because they're weak, but because they mistook the early excitement for the actual experience of building something. The actual experience is mostly the valley. The people who get through it are the ones who can face disappointing numbers, acknowledge them clearly, and still maintain belief in their overall direction. They don't ignore problems. They don't make excuses. But they also don't let a bad quarter define the whole journey.
One business owner I admire built a forty-million-dollar company while taking every Friday off. He used those days to think, recharge, and maintain perspective. His competitors thought he was crazy. But his clarity and consistency helped him outperform all of them over the long run. Recovery isn't a luxury. It's what allows you to make good decisions year after year instead of slowly degrading until you burn out or make a mistake you can't take back.
Solo sports teach you something else, too, something subtler. They teach you that motivation is unreliable. On any given morning, you might not feel like running. You almost certainly won't feel like running. What matters isn't whether you feel motivated. It's whether you go anyway. The ability to act without motivation is, I think, one of the most underrated skills in business. Most people wait until they feel inspired or energized or ready. The people who build things that last have figured out how to work without those feelings.
Everything awesome I've done in life has been because I've been accountable to another human. But endurance sports taught me to be accountable to myself first. There's no coach standing over you at mile eight. There's no team counting on you to show up. It's just you, deciding whether to keep going. And that decision, repeated hundreds of times, is what turns into the kind of person who can build something that lasts.
I think most people chase external wins. Endurance athletes chase internal growth. And in that pursuit, quietly, almost without noticing, they become very hard to break.