Why "Quick Wins" are a Dirty Lie

For some health reasons I don't need to get into, I haven't done much running for the last 25 years. I've hiked and biked, including a couple of pretty big long-distance challenges, but I haven't run that much. But the health issues are in my past, so the other day I went to the track with my son to see if I could run a whole mile (1600 m). I'm pretty sure it's been 2 decades since I even tried to run that far without stopping. I wanted to get it in under 10 minutes. I ran my first lap at 2:30 exactly, and each successive lap was a little faster than the previous one until I finished with an unimpressive time of 9:18. This is called running "negative splits" and is a critical component to running good races at elite levels or even just completing a challenge without wanting to curl up into a little ball and die.

The first point is that once you learn to pace yourself for negative splits, you always have it in your head. Twenty years go by and you can still do it. I was a decent runner in high school, in the top 20% or better most of the time. As a cross country runner, I was coached to do this and our team excelled. We qualified for the state meet in our division in the state of Iowa both my junior and senior year. My coach, Mark Hostetler, continues to coach at Mid-Prairie High in Wellman, Iowa; he recently coached my brother's kids. One of my nieces, Ariana Fleming, was on State Champion girls' cross country teams for four years running. That's right, the Golden Hawks won the Iowa 2A championship every year she was there. She went on to Iowa State, but they won their 5th consecutive championship last fall. What's interesting is they always run negative splits. It's a gut-wrenching experience watching your team run like that. At the end of mile one, they appear to be in last place. At the end of mile two, they might be looking okay, but not great. However, each runner on the team is passing other runners every few seconds. And when they blast through the finish line with a first-place team score, you wonder what happened. What happened is that they redefined the "quick win" as settling into the appropriate pace. Leaving themselves gas in the tank for the end of the race. There's a much more positive vibe when everyone else is burning out and dying for oxygen, and you're passing them.

It's not that quick wins are bad, the dirty lie is that you have to kill yourself to get them. But going out sprinting is asking for burnout. One of the most miserable experiences of my life was the time Carl Christophel and I decided to run the Columbus Marathon. It was November 1997. We were used to training for 5-mile races, and we knew how to pace ourselves for them, too. But that 26.2 miler is very different! We started out for the first 11 miles or so running what felt like a comfortable training pace ... and it would have been fine if the race was only 13 miles long. But it's not. Not only were my splits not negative splits, but they went from around 7:30 or so up to 12 minutes per mile. Maybe worse. I don't remember... I don't want to remember. There was no point in going out so fast, it was stupid. We finished the Marathon in just over 3 hours and 30 minutes, which sounds fast, but we were young, 23 years old, and in good shape to compete at a shorter distance. By the end, we were getting passed by people in their 60's, maybe even 70's and 80s. It's like that scene in Office Space where the old guy with the walker is moving faster than the cars are. The last 13 miles were brutally discouraging; the last seven miles were nothing but a haze of pain. Carl could have gone ahead but he stayed with me and encouraged me to the finish line, or I might have given up. When I got done, I said, "I'll never do that again!" And I haven't. Yet.

And I still don't want to.

If you want to avoid burnout in your career or entrepreneurial journey, you do need some quick wins, but you can't sacrifice everything. Think about how you pace yourself. Take time to rest; there will always be time to do more work on that brand-new website tomorrow. Sure, you need to close that first client, but Rome was not built in a day, and neither will your business. You'll probably look like and feel like you're failing for the first third of the race. But that's okay. You can still end up a champion.