|
Glad you're here for week three. The full series runs seven weeks, each one a different marathon and what it taught me about developing leaders and the people they lead. If something in here is useful, send it to a coach or leader who would put it to work. The signup link is below.
— Ian
|
|
Friends,
Quick reminder if you're new, or new-ish, to the series. Over the past twenty-four years I've run seven marathons, and the more I look back, the more I've come to believe that training for and racing those marathons taught me more about how people and programs actually develop than just about anything else in my life. This is a seven-week series, one race at a time, on what each one had to teach. We're three weeks in. Today is San Antonio.
My third marathon was the San Antonio Rock and Roll Marathon in November 2008. I had a thought at the finish line that ended up reshaping my whole running life, and the more I sit with it, the more I think it has something to say about how coaching and leadership actually work.
Quick setup. My first two marathons had been over four hours, both with hard walls in the late miles. After my second one I deployed to Iraq, came home, tore up my knee, and had surgery in September 2007. I decided I wanted to run another marathon, and I picked one fourteen months out to give myself a real runway. That fourteen-month stretch is where the story actually happens.
I didn't do anything fancy. I rehabbed the knee correctly. I lost the weight I had gained on deployment. I dialed in my sleep and my food and my training. I just kept showing up. Day after day, week after week, for fourteen months. I stacked the days.
My goal for San Antonio was 3:30. That was already more than thirty minutes faster than my previous best, and it felt ambitious going in. I finished in 3:28. No wall. No walking. I ran the race I had trained for, and the body did what the training had built it to do.
And then, standing at the finish line, I had a thought I had not seen coming. I could probably run a 3:15. Which would qualify me for the Boston Marathon. From over four hours on my first two marathons to a 3:15 horizon was a thirty-nine-minute swing.
Here's the part I keep coming back to. The 3:15 wasn't something I had been aiming for. It wasn't a goal I had been carrying around in secret. The 3:15 idea showed up at the finish line because the body had just demonstrated something I didn't know it could do. The 3:28 was the result the work had produced. The 3:15 was the next horizon the same work was already pointing at.
Which means: the goal didn't make the capacity. The work made the capacity. The goal was just the receipt the work produced.
That distinction matters because most of us, when we want more from our programs or our teams, set a bigger goal. We don't change the daily work. We change the number we're aiming at. And then we wonder, at the end of the year, why the new number didn't come.
Here's the line I want to leave you with this week. When you're looking for more wins, the strategy is never to focus on more wins. More wins are downstream of better daily work. Capacity comes first. The horizon shows up after. The order matters, and you can't skip the part that does the work.
What's the upstream work you're not doing consistently enough? The work that would put a different horizon in view?
Talk soon,
Ian
P.S. Next week: Dallas, December 2010. The race that put me on the start line of Boston. And the year that almost didn't leave room for the work.
|
