My first half-marathon after pandemic. What did I learn?

Last week-end, in Malaga, I run my first half-marathon after 3 years of break. And I realised (again and again) that long distance running and business have so many things in common.?

When the pandemic started I was in a quite good shape for running. I already had 2 marathons and series of half-marathons and triathlons behind me, and lots of plans ahead for 2020.?

So my first reaction, when the lockdown was enforced and all the races were canceled, was: “at least now I will have time to train properly: no business trips anymore, not so many other distractions, I will be able to organise my training plan better and I will run better and faster’.?

But… there is always a “but” when you just have a wish in your mind, but not a clear expected outcome and no proper planning on how to get there.

What actually happened??

The first 2 months were quite ok, I trained 3 times a week and I increased the total distance I run within a month. But after those first 2 months my motivation started to fade-away and I gradually started to find more excuses than triggers to motivate myself: “today is too cold or too hot”, “I’m too tired” or “I’m too busy today”… Does it sound familiar to you? To make a long story short, by the end of the year I only run about 600 km (compared to about 1000 km in the previous years), and in the next 2 years I went down to just about 350 km/year. And this was the end.

So this autumn I decided to change my approach and to get back to my “good old times habits”. I decide to do it exactelly as we teach people to do things in our Strategic Thinking / Strategic Planning courses:?

• Imagine a future; and make sure it is something that will motivate you
• Set up clear and measurable objectives
• Plan how you will get there by dividing the objective / expected outcome into smaller pieces, as small as you can understand and address on a short term; this should always include clarity on “what do I have to do this week?"; and “how about tomorrow”?
• Align all the relevant stakeholders that are critical for the succes of your plan
• Work hard. Rarely succes in business is an accident; usually it takes a lot of effort and determination.?
• Don’t stop when you face a challenge; adjust your plans and just do another iteration

So did I with my running:

• I registered to Malaga half-marathon (even if in that moment I was not ready to do it; I only had 2 months to train, which is usually shorter than you need for proper training). But this was also a good motivation.?
• I planned all my upcoming running sessions very carefully and I sticked to all of them, no matter where I traveled.?
• I made sure I had the support of my family (my critical stakeholders for this challenge) for this plan.
• And as in any business, sometimes things don’t go 100% as you planned (your travel plans might change, the weather is not helping you), but you adjust on the go, keeping the same final objective in mind and re-adjusting your steps to get there.?
• And I just worked hard to make it happen. And every time I got tired I just remembered myself why am I doing it. ?

Too often we complain that we had plans (professionally or personally), but they didn’t worked out. We wanted to “lose weight, but it didn’t work..” , “we wanted to learn a new language, but we were too busy”, “we wanted to launch a new product, but the organisation did’t supported our plans…” etc.?

In fact, in most of the cases:

• we only had a “vague wish”, not a clear and measurable objective in our mind
• we certainly haven’t planned our steps to get there, or we simply did not stick to that plan (neither re-adjust it when something unexpected happened)
• we didn’t aligned all the relevant stakeholders who were critical to our succes
• and we certainly failed on motivating ourselves or/and our teams to reach those objectives

This last run was not my best run. But it was certainly a perfect reminder of how should I do things when I’m really willing to overcome my limits :)?