Marathon Running and Entrepreneurship

Some of you who follow me probably notice that I am a fanatic marathon runner. I am not fanatic in the sense that I am a good or fast runner, but rather that I take it seriously. It sounds even weirder when you know that I ran my first marathon at age 57. Since then, I have run 14 full marathons, which is more or less 2.3 races per year.

What happens in the mindset when a guy suddenly starts to run marathons at that age? We are talking about 42.195 kilometers or 26.2 miles. For sure, there are many things, but passion is one of the ingredients.

By doing sports for my whole life, the exercise part is not an obstacle, and a lot of people ask me why not just continue my healthy way of living but go to the extreme side and commit myself to such a big challenge as what a marathon race represents.

I need to add a challenge to my life! Anyone in reasonably good physical condition can run 5km, 10km, or even 21km (half marathon). But a full marathon requires more, and you need to train properly to complete it. You need an appropriate training program or plan.

Create your plan

A marathon plan you can not execute in a sprinter race speed, but it takes time, in my case, one year, before I feel ready to enter the starting blocks for the first race.

The confidence I had in myself was tremendous, lining up there for my first marathon race ever. I knew that I had trained according to my plan and was so triggered to finally get the opportunity to challenge my dream of running a race that one year back was based on a firm decision.

There it is: what you need to run a marathon race: a passion, a Challenge, a Decision, and a Plan.

Marathon Running and Entrepreneurship – Different but the Same

The four-word statement above seems to fit in pretty well with real entrepreneurs. Think about any successful entrepreneur you know, and you will definitely see a true passion behind their mission.

Indeed, a serious decision is made before the whole business project is launched, and a detailed plan is developed on how to reach the goal. And here we go! We must challenge every single hurdle during the race towards the final goal.

With an overload of enthusiasm, a result of true passion, it is more likely to be a rule than an exception that some hurdles turn into severe obstacles.

The famous “Wall” represents such a hurdle for a marathon runner. Somewhere around kilometer 30 (18.5 miles), when the body is completely empty of all energy, the immediate feeling is that here it all ends.

The “wall” is often associated with a whole range of symptoms, such as dehydration, nausea, dizziness, headache, a lack of coordination and muscle spasms, poor thinking, poor decision-making, and so on….

Challenge the wall

For me and other fighters out there, even if we are suffering from hitting the wall, it is also a trigger to manage the challenge.

After a few races, you know exactly what happens when it is time to hit the wall, and the good thing is that you can train for it and take measures to prevent and minimize all negative effects of it.

The professional runners, the best of whom normally come from countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, also have to pass through this more challenging part of the race when all glycogen is gone, and you have to rely purely on your carbohydrate storage.

However, they keep a tremendously even pace throughout the whole race. When Dennis Kipruto Kimetto from Kenya set the world record in Berlin in September 2014, with a fantastic finish time of 2:02:57, there was only a few seconds of pace difference between the slowest and fastest kilometer. How does he deal with the wall? Training, experience, and more training…..

The “Wall” in Marathon Running and Entrepreneurship

You can not find a single biography about famous entrepreneurs without talking about their failures toward their final goal.

Talking about real “hitting the wall” events, the first one popping up is when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company where he was the co-founder. How does he act when he hits the “wall”? Continuing his “race” according to plan, starting new companies and acquiring other companies to continue his mission. At that time, he had enough money to retire and live a peaceful family life for the rest of his life.

However, his agenda was different. When he returned to Apple, he reinvented the company’s image to a new level, and the rest of the success is a story we all know about.

A true entrepreneur with a burning passion is unstoppable!

The same goes for marathon runners, especially when hitting the wall. What do marathon running and entrepreneurship have in common? The first one that comes up as the most obvious is that the approach towards the “wall” in both cases never includes complaints. Complaints relate to a negative approach, and entrepreneurs and runners search for solutions.

Research even shows that exposure to as little as 30 minutes of negatively charged material actually peels away neurons in the brain’s hippocampus, an important part of your brain for problem-solving. With a true passion and a serious plan for reaching the goal, the “wall” can more easily be overcome. The same goes for real entrepreneurs as for serious marathon runners.

The freedom and privilege of practicing this wonderful sport of marathon running require a lot of coordination to materialize. One part of the coordination is the other activities in life. If freedom is an important variable for me, I found it logical to incorporate all other activities with the same “freedom tag.” In my case, The Six Figure Mentors became a perfect part of that mix.

To which quadrant do you belong?

Why are we not all entrepreneurs or marathon runners? The famous entrepreneur, investor, and writer Robert Kiyosaki explains it all in a very easy and understandable way in his book Cashflow Quadrant. You can download the book for free from Amazon. He has an interesting model where people are divided into four different categories.

The first square on the top to the left is quite obvious. As an employee, we are trading working hours for money. As self-employed people, we are still trading work for money but now on an independent basis, where the compensation will not necessarily be time-based but, for example, project-based

On the right-hand side, we will find business owners still doing a job, but the compensation is different. We have more strings on our guitar, and when the business starts to grow, we hire employees to do part of the work. Based on the mission of the business, it can sometimes take years before we get a return on the initial investment.

Passion and risk-taking go hand in hand

The keyword is to leverage all variables at our disposal to make the business profitable and sustainable. The risk involved is high; therefore, a genuine passion must be an important ingredient before even thinking about starting your own business.

Finally, everyone can be an investor as it is an activity where money is working for you. As an employee, you can set aside a certain amount of your monthly salary, invest it, and see how the money grows over time. Business owners normally include in their plan to reinvest part or, in some cases, 100% of the earnings to re-inject “fuel” into the business and its growth.

Real entrepreneurs are always found in the “Business owner” and the “Investor” squares. The risk of hitting the “wall” is highest in the “Business owner” square. To a certain extent, entrepreneurs also could be found in the “self-employment” quadrant.

There are many similarities in the characters of entrepreneurs and marathon runners, which makes this analysis interesting.

Which quadrant we belong to depends on our personality and willingness to take risks, not to mention our ability to live outside or on the edge of our comfort zone. It doesn’t mean that one personality is better than the other. We are just different.

You don’t need to be crazy!

Among us enthusiastic and passionate marathon runners, there is an expression going like this:

“You don’t need to be crazy, but it helps.”

What people outside our group view as craziness are “mandatory” activities based on our total focus on the plan. For example, during summertime, I need to start my long-run training sessions very early in the morning to avoid the heat after sunrise. Another word for this craziness could be passion.

When Bill Gates and his little team were at the peak of getting ready the first embryo for what later should be the first version of Microsoft Windows and literally worked around the clock, feeding themselves pizzas and Pepsis, was it craziness or passion?

The nuance between craziness and passion is difficult to see unless you are an entrepreneur ……or a marathon runner.

Thanks to the business with the Six Figure Mentors, you can keep freedom, and passion gets another dimension. I can go on forever being “crazy.”

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