Training & Business

For those of you who know me, this may come as a shock, but about 1 month ago, I decided to sign up for a half marathon.

Running has never been my forte, but I am always up for learning something new and also testing myself. Linking back to my previous post, the struggle is good for us, and I am making a conscious effort to keep struggle present, at least in relation to exercise (other areas of life can often keep the struggles present without effort)!

After having the chance last year to sell my part of a business that I co-founded, I have had more capacity to think and also reflect on the processes we went through, what was good, and what could have gone better. Now, about two weeks into my training program (which made me realize there is so much more to running than running), I started to see a lot of similarities between training for a marathon and the journey I had at the early stages of businesses.

I wanted to share a few of these key similarities as I feel they can be great references and also help those looking for a nudge to start a business or start running that they may already have the skills they need to make it possible.

The first similarity is the compounding impact of hard work and consistency. It sounds obvious and simple, yet it’s one of the hardest things to do. Some mornings it’s cold, I am tired, and I cannot think of anything worse than pushing through 10km of pain to get just a tiny incremental bit stronger, but we do it despite all of that.

Now, this is not a feeling that only happens once during training but nearly every single day there is a session planned. Now let that sink in, every day despite the adversity you remain consistent and get the work done, it is that consistency that compounds and almost without ever knowing it was possible, you run 20km.

Starting a business is similar; you are alone or with a small founding team, you have no one to cheer you on or push you forward, you have no pressure to deliver as you don’t have any clients yet, no one is forcing you to send that outreach email or get stuck into finalizing your website, but the key to success is despite all the reasons not to, you put in the work and remain consistent. It’s not one day, one email, one website iteration that will make the impact, it is working to improve day in, day out with unwavering consistency despite struggle or lack of recognition. Lo and behold, before you know it, clients come, your website looks epic, and your cold emails have an open rate that you did not even think was possible.

It may seem like success in running and business are worlds apart, but look closely and you can see the similarities.

The second is the growth that can come from conscious learning. Being blessed with an education is a privileged edge that many of us take for granted, but having the ability to understand the foundations of maths, English, and science probably adds more value to our lives than almost anything else. It is this foundation that means we can grow to who we are today, but we often devalue the impact of earlier years on who we are today simply because we don’t remember all those years ago; however, it does not mean they were not valuable or didn’t happen.

We can truly never know enough; keep that in mind and let it sink in. Knowledge is a form of a competitive advantage that many businesses disguise in the terms innovative designs, disruptive technology, and the like. All of these buzzwords and fancy value propositions tend to boil down to knowledge.

This is also true when it comes to running; I was naïve at the beginning of my running journey; I used to just run. I would get up, put my shoes on, and run for a set distance and do the same thing every time I ran, however trying to push the distance further and further over time. This, I have now learned, only benefits your ability to run in a very specific threshold, increases your chance of injury, and in general doesn’t do all that much good for your muscles.

Becoming better informed made a huge difference to my training; I now work closely with a great coach who structures various types of runs into my training place with varying distances, speeds, and intervals based on where I need to improve, and all these areas then come together to make you a better runner over a longer period of time. The results have been phenomenal.

I truly had no idea this was how it worked. So this shows just how important learning can be.

Now for this business side of this, we ran a digital marketing agency, one of the fastest-paced industries there is. Algorithms changing daily, privacy laws changing, and so much more. Navigating change is one thing, but learning was a constant for us and was one of the key factors for our success.

We put in time almost daily to exploring new systems, researching effective strategies, and making sure we were at the forefront of what was happening in space meant we were extremely valuable for our clients and it also meant we could deliver exceptional results.

Business and life, build learning into your routine; it’s not wasted time, it’s not time that could be spent selling, it’s not an escape; it is truly a critical success factor to life, building businesses, and running.

There are many comparisons that I could draw from and connect from the hours of thinking time I have had while running but the third one I am going to highlight today is how important structured rest is for your development and performance.

This time I will start with why this is so important when starting a business; that term burnout that came very commonly used over the last few years is a real thing. Starting a business is exciting and it’s something you should be passionate about; it is something that you should be consumed by, but here is the small print that is often missed by influencers and people that live by the hustle culture…within reason.

If you don’t take time to take a step back and rest, you can put your whole business at risk without even knowing.

Taking a step allows you to clear your head, broaden your perspectives, and most importantly see the bigger pictures. Tunnel vision in the early days is normal and allows you to move fast but if you don’t step back and see where your train is heading, how can you be sure you’re going in the right direction? That is the first thing, the second thing is resting.

Building a business takes time and to create the real value that you want to achieve you need 5-10 years (unless you have exceptional circumstances). Let me tell you that to keep going for that long at peak performance deserves more than a medal but to that you are going to have to build in rest. Rest is not being weak or giving up, rest is being smart and truly focusing on sustained peak performance, in business performance is not peak unless it’s sustained, always remember that.

The medal line transitions me on nicely to the running element of rest; it is a fact that you need to rest for your muscles to grow and get stronger and resting at the right times and in the right proportion can be just as (if not more) valuable than a run or a gym session. Just like when starting a business, you need rest to get to peak performance and if you don’t you will increase your chance of injuries and eventually see diminishing performance that in some extreme cases you won’t be able to recover from.

So there it is, thanks for reading through these insights, I hope they are valuable and highlight just how transferable skills can be. You can take note of the strengths you have now and with a bit of thinking apply them to where you want to be.