How a Rat Race Helped Me Start My Own Business

I was quickly falling apart. My legs felt as if someone had poured cement inside them. My joints exploded with every step. What was this… water dripping from my eyes? Was I… crying?? My head throbbed. I’d gone out way too fast, something every runner knows you shouldn’t do during a race. And now I was paying for it, big time. My thoughts were a jumbled mess.

I had no idea how heavily I would lean on this moment two years later when I’d be starting my own business.

I glanced at my watch to see that I’d made it 22 miles and was now running a full two minutes slower than my intended pace. Running would have been an exaggeration, though. At this point, I was barely pulling off a shuffle.

An accurate depiction of what I looked like at mile 22.

A man in a bright orange cap came up alongside me for a few steps. I must have looked like hell because instead of passing me, he slowed to my pace long enough to give me some encouraging words.

“You got this man. Just keep going.”

I barely managed a nod and a weak thumbs-up as he cruised past me. I didn’t have this. I wanted to stop.

I could have stopped. I could have called my wife and asked her to meet me where I was, somewhere around mile 22, less than five miles from the finish line. That would have been fine. I’d barely told anyone else I was even running a marathon that day. People generally knew that I was running a lot, but unlike my first marathon six months earlier, I hadn’t talked this one up much. That fact gave me some strange comfort. If I didn’t finish, who would know? Who would care? Almost no one.

But I didn’t stop. I just kept going. As I did, my mind drifted.

I thought of the many cold, long training runs I’d done to prepare for this race. No one would have cared if I’d just stayed in my warm bed on those days. Many times I was out and back home before anyone in the house woke up.

One training run, in particular, kept clearing a path through the fog in my brain. The day I “raced with the rats”. I needed to do a 20-mile run that weekend and the family schedule was jam-packed. My only shot was to wake up at 4 am, drive to a place in New York City that had a long stretch of running roads I could use, get it done so I could be back home in time to take on the rest of the day.

It was so quiet that morning. Streets that would have been packed with cars and trucks during the day were now noiseless. I could hear the street lights clicking to change from green to yellow to red as I cruised along. My legs felt strong but my stomach felt terrible. I’d begun to appreciate what a creature of habit the digestive system is. 4 am was too early to eat breakfast, so I’d brought some things to eat on the run. But my body was totally confused by the early morning exertion and breakfast on the run. I felt like I was carrying a bag of sand in my stomach. And I had three more hours to go.

As I passed city block after city block I started to see a trend. Garbage. Every restaurant and building had piled up their garbage from the previous night, but none of it had been picked up yet. The result? Rats. Lots of rats. For some reason, the rats liked to wait until I was only a few steps away from each garbage pile before they would emerge frantically, look around and sprint in front of me to a garbage pile on the other side. I was a rat hurdler. It was a literal rat race.

This ridiculous image of me hurdling and racing rats made me crack a smile and snap me back into the present moment. I’d been on autopilot, lost in my thoughts. I checked my watch to see that somehow my pace had increased during my daydream. I was only a minute slower than my goal pace, and I was actually running. I didn’t feel great, but I was now only two miles from the finish line. Did I have this?

I battled my way through the final two miles. It had started raining now, which was a cool, welcome relief. I welled up with tears when I spotted my family waving to me as I approached the finish line. I found another gear and even sprinted the last 50 feet.

50 feet from the finish line…

I picked up my finisher medal, hugged my family, and limped to a nearby tent to begin the process of putting my broken self back together.

I’d just finished my second marathon at the age of 42. My first had only been six months earlier.

Today, I do consider myself a runner, but until recently, running was never something I just did. I had a far different relationship with running when I was younger. I’d played team sports my entire life — baseball, basketball, football. For me, running was either a way to get my body from one place to another in a game or a punishment in practice for messing something up.

The me from ten years ago may not have understood why I’d just put myself through so much pain and suffering. There was no game to win. There was no opposing team to beat. What was the point?

Here’s what I think and why I now greatly appreciate both team sports and individual sports.

Team sports teach you loads of valuable skills — how to be reliable, how to rely on others, how to be a teammate, a leader, a follower. Team sports have played a large part in the kind of colleague, employee, boss, and person I am today.

But it wasn’t until that brutal marathon that I saw the valuable lessons individual sports can teach you. No one was counting on me. If I had skipped that training run with the rats, no one would have known. If I missed my time goal during the race, no one would care. (I somehow did achieve my time goal in that race, despite the full breakdown at mile 22.) If I forgot to drink enough water or bring enough food to eat on the run, I had no one to blame.

Running showed me the purest form of self-accountability. I decided to sign up for a marathon because I wanted to challenge myself. That meant I had to train to prepare my body and mind. I had to run the race because I’d decided I would.

These lessons of self-accountability have served me well as I have progressed in my career. Early in my career, like many, I was told what to do. I was accountable to my boss. If I didn’t do what I was supposed to, there were consequences. I learned new skills often because it was part of the job or because a boss said I should learn that new skill. As I became more of a leader and a creator, I often found myself working on something no one had asked for, simply because I knew it was needed. I learned new skills because I decided I needed those skills, even though no one told me to acquire them.

Now I have my own business. I am my own boss. Yes, I have clients who rely on me. But if I let a client down, I have no one to blame. I also often spend time working on things that no client will ever really know about. Prep work, learning, various organizational tasks. I make deadlines for myself. If I miss a self-imposed deadline, I may be the only one who knows.

I’m grateful that running came into my life when it did. The same kind of self-discipline I had to learn while running with the rats is what I lean on now while building my business. There’s no one to blame, no one to look to. I am that person.

I think everyone should take on some sort of individual challenge. It doesn’t have to be a marathon or starting a business. It can be big or small. The only things that matter are that it should be:

A. Something you choose to do on your own

B. Hard to do

C. Something no one will care if you don’t do it

I believe the last component matters the most. It has to be all on you. Sure, I got encouragement from friends and family, and you may as well. But whatever it is, that thing has to be all on your shoulders.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Now, go do that thing you’ve been thinking about doing!