I am particularly excited about today’s episode because yesterday I completed my very first marathon. And I know that someone along the way is going to ask me the question, how did it go? And maybe, if you’ve been following the GSL, you are asking it right now as well.
I have been sitting with it since I crossed the finish line yesterday at the Garmin Marathon in Olathe, Kansas, because I want to answer it honestly here, on the Gold Standard Leadership Lab, not the polished or social media version. I want to share the real one.
Here is what I can tell you. I cleared that finish line and my 3-year goal to say I would run a full marathon before I turned 50, which is a week and a half. A total of 26.2 miles in 5 hours and 27 minutes. And I am genuinely, deeply grateful for every single step.
I want to say that again because I mean it. Grateful. Not in the packaged way, where you say the right thing because someone is watching. Grateful in the real way, where I am just sitting with my sore legs and a foggy head, replaying the whole experience, trying to let it land. Trying to understand what I actually just did.
And what I just did was finish a marathon. My first one. After three years of building toward
Three Years
This did not start on race morning. It started three years ago when I said out loud that I was going to run a marathon. That sentence alone changes something. You say it to enough people, you write it down, you make it real, and now you are accountable to something bigger than your motivation on any given Tuesday morning.
But I did not sign up for a marathon on day one. That matters.
Year one was base building. 5Ks and 10Ks. Learning what my body could do. Learning what running even felt like as a serious discipline, not just exercise. No ego about the distances. Just showing up, building something real from the ground up, and being proud of each new mile I found I could run.
Year two, I stepped up. Half marathons. More 10Ks. I finished my second half-marathon with a PR I am still proud of. The distances got harder, the training got more surgically specific, and I started to understand what my body was truly capable of when I gave it the right inputs and enough time.
Year three was the marathon. Everything from the two years before pointed here. That structure was not accidental. It was intentional sequencing. Others may do it differently, but for me, I wanted to crawl before I literally ran. Again, for me, I did not want to skip base building to get to the big goal. You earn each stage, and each stage earns the next one.
Three years of showing up. Early mornings. Long runs that stretched into hours. Speed sessions where I was locked in on pace and splits. Nutrition decisions. Gear decisions. More miles than I can easily count. All of it pointing toward one day.
And here is the thing about three years of consistency and discipline: the finish line does not create any of it. The finish line just reveals what was already there. It is the net result of what you built. Nothing more, nothing less.
Then the Hills Came
My marathon course was not flat. It was hilly, more than I had accounted for. Around mile 19, my body and I started renegotiating, something I had not planned for.
My left hip started talking. My right calf joined in. I had to make a real-time decision: push through and risk not finishing, or walk, recover, and cross that line.
I ended up speed-walking instead of running, and I want to tell you something about those miles because this is where the story gets interesting to me.
I was smiling. I truly was. Not a grimace. A smile. Even in the middle of speed-walking, when I wanted to be running, even in the middle of the course, not going exactly as I had drawn it up, I was genuinely happy to be there. My wife and daughter showed up at four different spots along that course to cheer me on with funny signs. You want to talk about what keeps your legs moving when the plan has shifted, and the hills have beaten you on points? That is it. Those moments carried me. I will remember them long after I have forgotten my split times.
I jogged when I could. I never got back to my goal pace. But I crossed it smiling. And 24 hours later, I am already thinking about signing up for the next one. That tells you something.
What This Has To Do With Leadership
Here is where I want to spend some time, because I think this experience is a clear illustration of something leaders wrestle with constantly and do not always have good language for.
You create your quarterly and fiscal-year plan. You prepare. And, hopefully, you have set goals that are specific, measurable, and meaningful. You do the work. And then you execute, and the world does not cooperate perfectly with the plan you built. Maybe you finish at 85% of your goal. Maybe 75%. Maybe the course is harder than you thought. Maybe something comes out of nowhere that you could not have accounted for.
Does that make you a failure? I want to be direct about this: no. It does not. And I say that not as a comfort, not as a way to lower the bar, but as someone who has watched leaders do real damage by treating an imperfect outcome as evidence of personal inadequacy. That is a misread. That is a category error.
Let me give you a real example that is not about running.
I started my current role at this advisory firm. On day six, yes, just six days in, the world shut down. COVID. A global pandemic that nobody planned for, nobody modeled, and nobody had in their scenario analysis. The goals I had walked in with, the relationships I was going to build, the programs I was going to launch, the timelines I had set, all of it needed to be renegotiated in real time. Not because the planning was wrong. Because the course changed.
The leaders I watched navigate that moment well were not the ones who pretended the plan was still intact. They were the ones who acknowledged the new terrain, adjusted their pace, and kept moving forward. They renegotiated terms without abandoning the mission. They walked when they had to walk. And they were already thinking about what the next goal looked like before the current one had fully resolved.
That is resilience. Not the motivational-poster version. The actual version, where you are tired and the situation is hard, and you keep going anyway because you know what you built and you trust it.
Prepare Like You Mean It
I want to give you a framework that came to me on the course, somewhere in those later miles.
Prepare like you mean it.
This is not just about putting in the hours. Preparing like you mean it means being honest about what the course actually looks like. It means doing the research, modeling the difficulty, and accounting for variance. I prepared extremely well for the marathon. What I underestimated was the grade of those hills in the back half of the race.
In leadership, preparing like you mean it means not just building the plan you want to execute, but stress-testing it. What breaks first? Where are the hills? What does mile 19 look like when everything has been going great, and then suddenly it is not?
Miles 1 through 19, I ran exactly as I trained. That does not happen by accident. That happens because the training was real, the preparation was honest, and when the moment came, I trusted what I had built. That is the payoff of serious preparation: when the pressure is on, you are not guessing. You are executing from a foundation.
In leadership terms, this is about being so grounded in your strategy, your values, and your team’s capabilities that when things get hard, you are not starting over. You are running the plan, with clear eyes, from a place of actual confidence.
And then: what will be will be. This one is harder. Because it requires you to hold your plan with real intention while also holding it loosely enough to adapt. You renegotiate terms in real time, on the course, without losing your head. You do not get down on yourself when the terrain changes. You do not treat every deviation as a failure. You adjust, you stay present, and you love the moments you are actually in, not just the ones you planned for.
I loved that race. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts, honestly, because they are the parts that taught me something my training never fully could.
Set a New Goal
Here is how this ends, and it is the part I want you to sit with. The finish line is not the destination. It is a checkpoint. It is the place where you measure what the work has built, and then you look up and ask: What is next?
When I crossed the finish line yesterday, my body had never done that before. Not once. And the first coherent thought I had after catching my breath was about the next one. Different course, maybe. Different goals, definitely. Perhaps one that is completely flat.
That is not restlessness. That is growth. That is what it looks like when you finish something hard, take stock of it honestly, give yourself real credit for what you did, and then let that become the foundation for something bigger.
In leadership, the people who grow the most are not the ones who only move when they are certain of the outcome. They are the ones who set a goal, prepare seriously, execute with everything they have, absorb what the experience teaches them, and set a new goal. They do not wait until the conditions are perfect. They do not let a 27-minute gap define a three-year journey.
They finish. They learn. They go again.
So when someone asks me how the marathon went, here is my honest answer.
It went exactly how a first marathon should go. It was harder than I expected in specific ways I now understand. It was more meaningful than I could have fully anticipated. My wife and my daughter showed up on that course, and that alone made it worth every mile. My body learned something new. I smiled through the hard parts. And I am already thinking about the next one.
The finish line is never the point. The work is the point. The finish line just proves the work was real.
Now, well, now I just set a new goal.
