As I crossed mile 22 my legs locked up and my body felt like it had no more left. I’d spent three months, 100s of miles on two pairs of Nike Air Max 360s to have my body fail me when I needed it most. I debated quitting, threw my Fuel Belt off into the bushes in the surbibia’s of Las Vegas. I think around mile 23 I even pissed myself, but I didn’t care. You spend countless hours and days doing what I call “setting the table” to take learnings previously and apply them forward. You run into walls like this constantly, but at the end you ask yourself “How bad do you want it”. Funny enough I pushed forward, ran across the finish line next to my dad and collected my medal.
When I was a kid I played a ton of video games. I mean tons. The day I turned 16 I got my first job at Software Etc selling the video games I loved. At 21 I beat out 700 candidates to help open one of Apple’s first retail stores, now selling my new obsession computers. I was told I had little to no chance of getting the job, but (pre LinkedIN) I networked with the right people and got my resume in front of the right people. It’s all about how bad you want it.
I’m now going through a new chapter in my journey, fundraising. In one word it’s “grueling”. At any point you can give up. You hear countless rejections. You question every slide in your pitch deck. You analyze the data and say maybe we don’t have enough momentum. You counter every response about how big the market is. In the end it all comes down to how bad you want it and how much you are willing to sacrifice. Suddenly those 26.2 miles don’t seem so bad.