Brad Feld

Back to Blog

Marathons – 26.2 Miles is a long way to run

May 09, 2004

I ran the fourth marathon of my life today – the Ft. Collins Old Town Marathon. It wasn’t my fastest marathon (that was at Chicago last fall), but I was very happy with the results. I’ve been on a steady training regimen since the beginning of the year – which – given winter and travel has been challenging to keep up. However, my coach, Jeff Kline of RunFitUSA is both supportive and relentless – which helps.

Now running a marathon in 4:30 isn’t quite the same level of accomplishment as running a sub-4 minute mile – something that was first done 50 years ago. For a fabulous book on this quest – try The Perfect Mile : Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It – both historically detailed and extremely inspiring. However, a marathon and a mile are radically different races.

I’ve heard the cliche “this is a marathon, not a sprint” a bunch of times and decided to poke around on the web looking for it. Apparently even Meg Whitman said it at some point. E-businesses must be like marathoners – at least according to Chris Pickering. Enterprisewide supply chain technology initiatives should be like marathons – according to Ram Reddy as recently as May 1, 2004. I even ran across I guy I hadn’t thought of in about 10 years – Scott Johnson – the founder of Ntergaid who is now the co-founder of Feedster – who has an old blog where he refers to businesses as marathons.

You get the picture – it’s a cliche. But – it’s a good one. Anyone that has run a marathon knows that it’s a long way to run.

Anyone who has created a sustainable and valuable business knows it’s a long way to run.