my first marathon ended in a medical tent
I trained for my first marathon the way I had approached everything up to that point. More miles. More intensity. More discipline. If the plan called for a hard week, I made it harder.
I finished that race in a medical tent.
Not because I was undertrained. Because I had spent months conflating effort with conditioning and had arrived at the start line already depleted. Nothing about my discipline had failed. My reading of the situation had.
What changed
Five years and three races later, I ran thirty minutes faster. The training was two short runs a week and one long one.
Less volume. More intention. I recovered on purpose instead of treating recovery as the thing you do when you run out of road.
The discipline never left. What left was the assumption that more of it was the answer.
Why I tell this story to leaders
Because I constantly hear my own reasoning in the room.
Capable, credentialed people, answering exhaustion with more effort, and genuinely puzzled about why their judgment has gotten worse. They are not short on drive. Drive is usually the dimension holding up best. What is depleted is somewhere they are not looking, because the deficit does not announce itself as a deficit. It announces it needs to try harder.
That is the trap, and it is a closed loop. More effort produces more depletion, which reads as needing more effort.
The part I got wrong for years
I thought performance was one thing you either had or didn't.
It isn't. It's ten, and they move independently. You can be at Peak in Drive and Valley in Sleep Health at the same time — that combination is common enough among senior leaders to be almost a signature. The drive keeps the output arriving, which hides the deficit, which is why it goes unaddressed for years.
Reading yourself across all ten is what breaks the loop. Not because the reading fixes anything, but because you can't change a state you haven't named.
What I'd tell my thirty-year-old self at the start line
The work is not the problem. The unexamined assumption that more work is always the answer — that's the problem.
Pick the one thing that's actually depleted. Condition it. Read again in a month.
That's the whole method, and it took me a medical tent and five years to arrive at it.
Where are you now? Fifty questions, about eight minutes.
