Life and Work lessons from my IRONMAN journey

A few weeks ago, after several months of intense and focused training, I took part in what many consider to be one of the most difficult single day sporting events in the world – I completed an Ironman triathlon. To earn the right to call myself an Ironman, I had to swim 3.8km in the open water, bike 180km and then run a full marathon (42km).?

This might surprise many but less than three years ago I would not have considered myself a runner, a cyclist, nor a swimmer. The journey has been very challenging to say the least – fraught with pitfalls and obstacles?but also valuable life lessons. Indeed, as Mark Allen (six-time Ironman winner) said so eloquently, endurance sports are a “test of you as a person on top of a test of you as an athlete”.?

I’ve learned a lot over the past three years of training. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how helpful it has been to apply similar principles in not only in my life beyond triathlon but also specifically in my work and career. This is my journey to becoming an Ironman along with my top lessons I’ve learned and how I’ve applied them in my work.

Lesson #1: Set a motivating goal

Rewind back to the start of 2019. My workout schedule was very ad hoc and frankly a bit aimless. It was very easy for me to skip workouts and make excuses. I knew something had to change so come the new year, I signed up for a marathon. I’ve always wanted to run a marathon at one point in my life, and decided this year was going to be the year I would do it. Excited by this new challenge, I found myself looking forward to going out for runs. I went from running zero km’s a week to running regularly. I knew if I missed too many workouts, I would not be prepared to run 42kms! This goal focused my energy, held me accountable, and inspired me to move.

I’ve applied this at work as well. Nowadays, I try to set motivating short- and long-term goals in my career that will focus and drive my decisions and actions at work. The key here is being intentional.?Having career goals help me decide and pursue opportunities for growth instead of just randomly accepting work assignments as they come along. Most folks have heard about ensuring your goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. I want to add another aspect to the list: inspiring. The best goals ignite a fire within people to achieve them. At the very least, goals should line up to a broader vision that galvanizes people to action.?

For example, early last year, I set a goal to establishing a v-team around DataOps within our organization before the end of the fiscal year . I ensured the v-team had a clear mission: to create tried and tested reusable artifacts around DataOps to accelerate customers. This also lined up with our wider organizational direction of applying Engineering Fundamentals to all our customer engagements. I was very intentional to collaborate and form relationships with people outside of my immediate team. This was during the Covid pandemic so fostering relationships was more important than ever. In the end, I was eventually successful. Without that initial goal and direction, I knew none of this would have been possible.

Lesson #2: Recovery is just as important as work – High performance = Stress and Rest

Despite being highly motivated to train for my first marathon, the reality was I had very limited running experience at the time. Back then, my idea of marathon training was running as far and hard as I can most days a week. Initially, I had this na?ve “no-pain, no gain” mindset where if I didn’t feel absolutely hammered after a run, then I was not getting worthwhile fitness gains from it. On top of this, I was not paying attention to how my body was recovering afterwards. Unsurprisingly and almost inevitably, I injured myself, sidelining me from running for four weeks and almost jeopardizing my marathon goal.

This taught me a valuable lesson: recovery is just as important as the workout itself. In fact, it is during the rest period after a strenuous run that your body adapts and gets stronger. I started to learn more about proper training methods such as the 80/20 where 80% of workouts are done at an easy effort to allow for adequate recovery to prepare for the difficult workouts which comprise the remaining 20%. I started to read books about how to optimize recovery from hard training sessions while consciously incorporating the learnings into my lifestyle with the same discipline as I did with my workouts. Overall, the key lesson here is long term high performance can only be achieved through a careful balance of stress and rest.?

As it relates to the workplace, in my line of work (Information Technology) “injuries” are less visible than a running injury but they certainly could be just as treacherous. Too much stress without appropriate recovery can manifest itself in job burnout and chronic fatigue.?

Personally, I apply this lesson by prioritizing my sleep. Having good sleep is the single most important thing you can do to ensure your mind and body recovers properly – and science backs it up. I admit getting good sleep can be difficult particularly working in global team, but with enough planning it can be done. For example, I try my best not to take work calls past 7 pm which allows me to set up a sleep routine, especially if I have early morning calls the next day. For calls that absolutely need to happen during my sleep hours, we’d often simply record them for me to watch the next day and asynchronously collaborate. Having an inclusive team that is respectful of each other’s preferred working hours is also extremely helpful.?

Lesson #3: Consistency trumps perfection

Training for a marathon or an Ironman is not about doing monster workouts then being too tired to do anything else the next few days – nor is it about pressing through this fatigue. As mentioned in lesson # 2, it’s a perfect recipe to getting injured. The key to being able to successfully complete an endurance event such as a marathon or an Ironman is training consistency. To be consistent, the training needs to be sustainable. It takes months, and more often, years of steady training to slowly and safely build the endurance required to complete an Ironman.

It's not about perfection. Truth be told, there are days where I don’t execute my intended workouts to a tee – and that’s okay. Everyone experiences bad days, and if I was too hung-up of whether I’d be able to hit a target pace or not that day, I would have missed a lot of my workouts. Yes, sometimes I “fail” a workout, but I treat it as learning opportunity. Perhaps, I didn’t recover properly from my previous workout, or I didn’t fuel properly. The reality is no one ever executes a training plan perfectly. What does matter is how consistent overall I am with my training over the long term. The slow but steady accumulation of gains over individual days of training is what allows someone like me who previously had very little experience in endurance sports to being able to conquer an Ironman.

These same principles apply to the workplace. I don’t expect perfection both in my own work or in the work of others – in fact, that expectation can be highly detrimental to getting anything done. As Winston Churchill said, “perfection is the enemy of progress”. Have you experienced getting so hung-up on a decision, such as formulating the “perfect” strategy or designing a “full-proof” architecture, that you end up wasting countless hours debating and discussing it? Analysis paralysis is a very real thing. At one point, you will just have to make a call and sometimes this will be the wrong one. Regardless, it would be a learning moment nonetheless and that is progress. The key is to be constantly iterating, learning, and steadily moving forward towards a clear shared goal.?

I sincerely believe that even the most audacious challenge, such as completing an Ironman, can be conquered when consistent progress is made towards it.

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These are just three lessons I’ve learned training and completing an Ironman, but there are many more. They say it takes almost a month to recover physically from an Ironman triathlon. Speaking from experience, mentally, I think it takes even longer! I am spending this downtime putting pen to paper to draft the rest of the many lessons I’ve learned in my triathlon journey.

Links to references and books that inspired me below in the comments.