The Single Most Important Lesson You Learn From Running Your First Marathon
I’ll never forget the night before my first marathon.
The server at the restaurant called us masochists.
Maybe he was right. Who voluntarily runs 26.2 miles?
My friend Jonathan and I did. We trained through frozen mornings and 20-mile practice runs when Netflix felt much more appealing.
"Year of Grit" became our mantra. Push through the hard stuff.
It worked. We finished the marathon.
But something unexpected happened: everything else got easier.
Client calls that used to terrify me? No sweat.
Hard conversations I'd been avoiding? Just another training run.
5am wake-ups for my side hustle? Bring it on.
It turns out there's magic in doing voluntary hard things. They make the involuntary hard things feel like warmups.
I can relate to this! I ran my first marathon in November and a few weeks later moved across continents -seemingly unrelated, but running definitely gave me a strange sense of confidence and perseverance.
Running my first Marathon in less than 10 days so I can relate to your words here. 😊