The Marathon Mindset: Why Success Requires More Than Just a Sprint

Have you ever seen a runner fall?

The shock, the fear, the uncertainty of what happened and what is about to happen.

The impact with the ground.

Looking up and watching everyone literally run away from you.

What happened? How did you get into this position? Only a moment ago you were running, tall, fast, relaxed and then you were eating shit and watching the soles of other people’s feet go swiftly into the distance.

What do you do now?

Do you lie there and give up or do you get up and get back into the race.

You are damn right you get back up and you try to catch the person in front of you. They might be close, they might be quite far ahead, but you aim at that person and you track them down.

What you can’t do is catch them in one stride. The trip and fall happened, you might have caused it, it might have been an accident, you might never have seen it coming, but it happened.

One kick of the leg won’t fix it, but many will. Many thoughtful, specific, and effortful movements of your legs will close the gap, hopefully.

Getting Back Up

Everyone wants everything yesterday. It is as if everything is a crisis, all the time. We all know this is completely bullshit and hardly anything is a crisis, people just operate by fear.

Things, however, do happen. And your best-laid plans might have failed you and now you are face first in the proverbial dirt looking up at everyone running away from you.

What do you do now?

You get up.

We don’t live in a world where perfection exists. Everything is just a test. We have a bunch of assumptions of things we believe to be true and hope to be false and from them we make tests.

This time, your test came back with some solid information. You were very wrong. Very wrong.

The great thing about this is that you have learnt that some of your assumptions were correct and some were incorrect, so now you update your ideas and you make a new test or tests.

And you start again.

You can’t catch up the stagger in one step, it is one step at a time, making advances with every motion

The good thing with life is that the only finish line is death so you get up and you try again.