Marathon Running Principles For Life and Job

Hi everyone, I'm Artur K., and I want to share how preparing for and running a marathon on May 26, 2024 in Calgary, has helped me adjust my personality and taught me important lessons for life, including business life.

Running a marathon isn't just about being fit; it teaches you a lot about planning, persistence, and staying positive. Here’s how I use these lessons in my life and work.

Invisible Efforts

When I train for a marathon, no one (expect one person) sees all the hard work I put in. All those months of daily training are just for a 4-5 hour performance. The same goes for life, work, and business. You have to put in enormous efforts for the final performance, or lets say the particular performance not final. This taught me to understand that many things leading to success are hidden from others' eyes. It's not imperative to announce everything you're doing to everyone. It's better if they see the result. No one will praise you for the invisible hard work, but the results will change your life.

In life and work, your everyday hard work might seem ordinary to others. But you'll reach a significant milestone and it will be a big change for you. So, learn to embrace the invisible hard work that only you truly understand.

Work Smart Not Only Hard

Running is often not just about hard work and training, but about being smart. You learn to listen to your body and avoid doing things that can harm you physically or mentally. The same principle applies to life and work. Be smart, not just hardworking.

If you're smart but inactive, that's not truly smart. If you're a hard worker but not smart, you're just a hard worker. When you are both smart and love hard work, you can put all your mental and physical resources into creating something unique and personal for you!

Planning and Energy

In my pre-marathon life, I always had difficulties with planning my resources. Running helped me learn how to do that. You can't run for 4-5 hours without stopping unless you pace yourself properly. I started to plan my training and energy intake meticulously. When I realized I had 10 weeks until the marathon, I created a 10-week plan with daily training sessions to ensure I could achieve my goal.

Planning is like engineering; you architect your project. You know exactly what and when you need to do certain things to meet deadlines and achieve great results. Planning makes you free and gives you the chance to achieve your dreams and goals.

Be Humble, Accept Help

When I tried to make a 10-week plan, I realized there were many nuances that I simply didn't know. So, I decided to ask for help from professional runners. Thanks to them, I got my "perfect" 10-week running plan, which allowed me to successfully complete my full marathon. This lesson has been incredibly useful for my job and business.

In business life, and especially on LinkedIn, everyone seems to know everything, everyone is a professional, and everyone is successful. We hear billions of words about how great we are, but not a single word about our limitations, mistakes, errors, and epic fails, which in reality, are what make us great in the end.

Balancing Effort and Recovery

Sometimes running at a slower pace is harder than running fast. This is such a great lesson! In other words: control your pace! Teach your inner self to listen to yourself. If your body wants to run fast, teach it to run slower. You'll see how difficult it is, but it helps you control your body, your mind, and your thoughts in order to get what you want to get. This is a valuable lesson for life, work, and business.

Knowing My Limits

One thing I learned from my training is understanding my limits. For a few weeks, I tried to ignore thoughts about my limitations. But eventually, when I felt overwhelmed and powerless to continue my training, I realized I had to face reality. As soon as I recognized my limitations, I understood how to manage them and even turn them into strengths to help me achieve my goal of running a marathon.

When you understand your limits, you can find countless options to deal with them. After that realization, I began to recognize my limits in my personality, life, and job. Once I acknowledged them, I became more at peace with myself and found many ways to manage my limitations.

The funny thing is, when you don't recognize your limits, you drift along without doing anything meaningful to improve your life. But once you acknowledge them, you see many ways to become a better person and a better professional.

Persistence and Adjustment

Keep training. Keep adjusting the plans to overcome challenges. Keep working. Keep moving. Sometimes it's extremely hard to keep doing the hard work, but step by step, you learn how to keep moving, even when it's uncomfortable. In personal life, work, and business, there are times when we just want to hide from the whole world, and that's okay. Sometimes we need to give ourselves that space and rest.

However, if you know how to continue moving forward, you will be more powerful and successful in all aspects of your life. You will know how to live with pain, discomfort, and hardships, and that resilience will set you apart.

Physiology, Psychology, or Physio-Psychology

When I talk to and read articles by running professionals, I often find a clear separation between matters related to mental condition and those dependent on physical condition. Generally, that's correct. However, through my training, I came to fully understand what Alfred Korzybski stated 100 years ago: the individual is complex, and there isn't a distinct separation between psychology and physiology; rather, there is physio-psychology. The idea is that your mental condition depends on your physical state and vice versa.

When you learn not to separate but to look at situations through the lens of physio-psychology, you open up new, previously unseen opportunities. You start to deal with yourself by clearly seeing the connections between your physical and mental conditions. You can use each to gain more power to continue doing what is important to you. This means that you manage all your resources effectively. You know how to use them rather than be used by them.

Flexibility and Real-Time Adjustments

My training and the marathon itself helped me understand one important thing: sometimes, there is a big difference between what you desire and what you have in reality. So, I follow this principle: if I can't run at my desired pace, I have to keep moving forward at a lower pace. But keep moving. This is the key.

You have a wish, and maybe you can't achieve it in 3 hours and 30 minutes, but if you keep moving, you will achieve it 30-60 minutes later. But you will achieve it. This principle is very important for my life and job. Continue moving! Don't give up on your wishes, even if sometimes it's extremely hard to keep going.

Fully Enjoying the Process

I’ve learned to enjoy the whole experience of running a marathon. The very beginning of the race when you are full of strength, the middle when you are already tired but realize you still have 22 km to run, and the end when you are ready to give anything just to stop and lie down. In all these phases, running teaches you to:

1. Take control of your physio-psychological conditions.
2. Recognize that power within you to find happiness, energy, and a smile!

The more I smile, the more power and inner energy I find to continue the race (remember Physio-Psychology?). The same applies to life and work. Even in tough times, when I'm positive and understand that these challenges are part of my journey, it gives me more power to cope and solve problems.

Continuous Learning

Running means continuous changes, flexibility, and endless learning. You always learn something new. Without this mindset, you cannot keep training and running a race. You have to be flexible and understand the importance of learning new things and adjusting yourself accordingly. The same applies to life and work. If you don't learn something new and just go with the flow, it means you really need to stop and seriously think about your life and make adjustments. At least, that's what I did.

Taking Control

Control your thoughts, control your actions, control your habits, control your physio-psychological condition. Control your pace. Control your smile. This is what long-distance running teaches you. Many years before my marathon, when I was in a bad mood, I would immediately listen to my favourite music - it was like an addiction for me. After the marathon, I realized that this habit was gone. Now, I can control my thoughts using my inner resources.

I know this might sound a bit new-age or religious, but it is quite the opposite. Religion and various life coaching approaches often teach you to detach from your body and yourself. In contrast, running teaches you to become more connected to your mind, your wisdom, your resources, and to trust only yourself.

Positivity and Energy

Running is all about being positive, happy, and energetic, even when you feel absolutely empty. You learn to find your inner energy and positivity. You run because you want to, because you love it, because you love the process and the atmosphere where thousands of others are running with you. It's an indescribable feeling to experience these vibes during the race. During your long run, whether it's 3, 4, 5, or 6 hours, positivity and energy are your best friends who will take you to your goal.

The same applies to life and work. Pessimism and depression are destructive, while positivity and energy heal and lead you to new perspectives.

There are so many other things I could share, but this article is already quite long. So, here are the key takeaways: be positive, energetic, and humble. Know your limits, trust yourself, believe in yourself, love yourself, and look forward to a happy future. By embracing these principles, you will truly enjoy your life!