So 'It's a Marathon'? Maybe Try Running One

My father was a scout leader. I think he was disappointed that I didn’t join the scouts. I went to one meeting, realized that it mostly involved being told what to do and some kind of promise to the Queen. Which wasn’t for nine year old me. But putting aside anarchy and scepticism towards the monarchy, I did take one thing away from the scouts. Or maybe from Andersen Consulting training. One or the other. And that’s doing anything substantial without a plan is pretty much a recipe for failure. Or failure to plan is to plan to fail.

Which gets me to marathons. I’ve been running for a long time. I realized pretty early on that it was a simple form of exercise that required no coordination with others, involved a relatively modest initial outlay, and could be fitted around my schedule. Perfect! And so, and I’ve done this for a long time now, at some time before 6 am I’ll get up and get my run in, whether that’s in the streets of midtown Toronto, the hotel gym, wherever I happen to be. I make it work. Rain, snow, whatever. And it kind of sets me up for the day. I get a bit cranky if I don’t run, which is enough to make sure that I do it.

So this went on for a while, and then - I don’t know why - things escalated from ‘hey I could run a 10K’, and then ‘hey I could run a half-marathon’ to eventually ‘I will run a marathon’ . It has now become an annual ritual for me, which completely breaks why I started running in the first place. My low stress, easy-ozy exercise routine became “well I better do a bunch of running because the race is coming up” which now more or less consumes the summer and fall for me. I’m running marathon number nine this year.

I wish I could say that finishing a marathon is some kind of transcendent, life affirming thing. For me it’s not - it’s a bunch of work and then a bunch of pain (one year I ran the marathon, flew out for a business trip, got really really sick and then my EA had to figure out how to get me back - so sorry Amy). But it’s an accomplishment and it feels like a completion at the end of a lot of training. A time bounded effort with an outcome.

Or in other words, a project.

Which gets me back to my original point. When I first started trying to run marathons, I didn’t really have a plan. I did a few extra kilometres on the weekend, made sure that I did a long run and then kind of just ran the marathon. It went as you’d expect. Sort of okay, but kind of meh. I’d just attack the thing, which either meant that I started too fast and was a mess by the halfway point, or I paced too slowly and finished feeling like I could have done better. I was a bad combination of both undertrained and underperforming, and trying to do a pretty serious task without much of a plan or approach. That went on for at least the first couple of years.

Then I got a bit more serious about it, googled a few things and talked to some folks, and started structuring my long runs better and doing more of them. I figured out a real fuelling strategy (other than randomly pick some energy gels that I liked the colour of), and my times got better. I doubled down on what worked, learnt a bit more, and made a real effort to pace myself. And it worked. I’m not getting any younger, but my results are holding steady or improving. This year I really tried to ‘keep my head in the game’ and think about what I was doing, not drift and wonder about, like, is the Bermuda Triangle a thing ? And my time improved again.

(If the Bermuda Triangle was real it would show up in shipping insurance rates. I learnt this on the Discovery channel).

Which is to say, running a marathon is a bunch of effort. A ton of effort. I went from having no plan to having a plan. I perform better when I have a plan. I don’t think that is accidental.

Sometimes I hear people say “hey this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon”. A lot of the time they say it in a kind of hand-wavy sort of way as if to mean “this thing is really big, so we can’t be expected to scope or plan this thing out”. And I don’t really buy that. Big things become more abstract, so you end up managing them to drive out that abstraction, and that does take time. But they don’t get done by stumbling around and hoping that eventually you’ll figure it out. That’s how two year projects become four year projects. You’ve got to anchor to something, measure progress against it, and refine it. A long way away or a big lift doesn’t mean you’re excused from understanding how you’ll get there.

And to be fair, most plans suck. They are naive, overly optimistic, lack a detailed understanding of the tasks and are just generally underbaked. That's kind of to be expected. Anytime you do something novel, well, you're doing something novel and you don't expect to know it all. Or it wouldn't be novel. But that doesn't mean you shrug and go "well, I guess plans are useless" and revert to raw effort. The more sophisticated approach is to acknowledge those failings, refine and move forward. Plans are a living thing and need to be nurtured. I definitely got that from Andersen training (not the scouts or the Discovery channel).

So if it’s a marathon, I think that you ought to treat it like a marathon - with a plan and an approach. I’ve tried it the other way and it’s pretty suboptimal. Don't do that. Plans are better than no plans no matter how big the thing is.