What ultra endurance taught me about building a business

Most of my best business thinking does not happen at a desk. It happens hours into a long day on foot in the mountains, when the novelty has worn off and the only question left is whether you keep moving.

I am not a professional athlete. I just like the long stuff. But the overlap between going long and building a company is so strong that I have stopped treating ultra endurance as a hobby. It is where I pressure-test the habits my business runs on. Here is what the mountains keep teaching me.

The race is won at a boring pace 🐢

In a long event, the people who blow up almost never lacked fitness. They got excited early, ran the first section like it was a sprint, and paid for it for the rest of the day. Pacing research in ultra endurance keeps showing the same thing: effort has to be regulated, not maximised, because a self-paced long effort is a negotiation with your future self. ^[1]

Business is the same negotiation. The companies that last are not the ones that sprinted to a launch. They are the ones still shipping, still selling, still showing up three years later. Every growth phase I have seen go badly started with someone trying to compress a marathon into a quarter.

Fuel before you are empty 🍌

Every endurance athlete learns the bonk the hard way: you run out of fuel and there is no rescue from the inside. The fix is unglamorous. Eat before you feel like you need it, on a schedule, not on feelings. ^[2]

Founder energy works exactly like this. Waiting until you are exhausted to rest is the business equivalent of waiting until kilometre 60 to eat. By then you are not making decisions, you are surviving them. I plan recovery the way I plan fueling: on a schedule, before the tank is empty. It is the reason the sauna, ice and sleep rituals exist in my week at all.

The low always passes 🌊

Somewhere in every long event there is a stretch where everything feels impossible and your brain starts writing resignation letters. Ultra athletes have a saying for it: it always passes, and it always comes back. The dip is not a signal to quit. It is a scheduled part of the distance.

In business the dip shows up as a flat month, a churned customer, a launch that lands softer than the plan. It reads like evidence that something is broken. Most of the time it is just kilometre 30. The skill is recognising the difference between a dip you endure and a problem you fix, and you only learn that distinction by finishing things.

Training makes the race survivable 🏋️

Nobody gets fit during an event. The event just reveals the training that was, or was not, done. Push past the point where stress outpaces recovery for long enough and performance falls off a cliff; overtraining is a recognised failure mode with real symptoms, not just tiredness. ^[3][4] The upside is real too: higher cardiorespiratory fitness is linked to sharper executive function in working professionals, which is about as direct a business argument for training as I know. ^[5]

That maps onto business almost embarrassingly well. The compounding comes from the boring reps: the daily outreach, the weekly content, the same offer refined for years. Big moments only ever expose whether the reps were banked.

How I run both now 🧭

Same rules, both arenas. Pace the effort, fuel on a schedule, expect the dip and do not negotiate with it mid-climb, and treat recovery as part of the program rather than a reward for finishing it.

Build smart. Stay sharp. Sip the coffee. Preferably at a trailhead.