Relentless Forward Progress

What the world’s hardest endurance feats reveal about leading through the long middle

In March of 2024, in the dark woods of Frozen Head State Park in Tennessee, a forty year old British veterinarian named Jasmin Paris came around a final bend toward a battered yellow gate. She was covered in dirt and scratches and could barely keep her eyes open. She touched the gate and folded in half, then crumpled to the ground, her chest heaving. The clock read 59 hours, 58 minutes, and 21 seconds. With 99 seconds to spare, she had just become the first woman ever to finish the Barkley Marathons.

If you do not know the Barkley, it is roughly a hundred miles of unmarked, mostly off-trail mountains, some sixty thousand feet of climbing, more than twice the height of Everest, run in five loops against a sixty hour cutoff with almost no sleep and no technological help. It is designed to break people, and it does. In nearly four decades, only about twenty human beings had ever finished it. Paris did not finish because she was faster or tougher in any dramatic sense. She finished because she could suffer, productively and without quitting, for two and a half days.

That capacity, the ability to keep going while everything hurts for an extraordinarily long time, is one of the most underrated skills in leadership, and almost nobody trains for it on purpose.

Endurance

Let me be precise about what endurance actually is, because it is easy to get wrong. At its core, endurance is the capacity to suffer for a very long time. Not to avoid the suffering, and not to rise above it, but to keep functioning inside it, hour after hour, long past the point where stopping would feel completely reasonable. That capacity is the whole game, in a race and in a downturn alike. I have written here about grit, about training in stress, about the rhythm of strain and recovery, and all of it feeds this. But here is the distinction that matters. The ability to suffer for a long time is not the same thing as toughness in the way we usually picture it: the clenched jaw, the heroic surge, the emptying of the tank in one glorious push. That kind of toughness wins sprints. In an ultra it gets you destroyed by mile thirty. The person who can suffer the longest is almost never the one who attacks the hardest early. It is the one who meters the effort so the suffering stays survivable, who keeps eating and moving and making sound decisions while in real pain. Endurance is suffering for a long time, but it is suffering managed, not suffering maximized.

Consider Courtney Dauwalter, the closest thing the sport has to a singular genius. In 2023 she became the first person ever to win Western States, Hardrock, and UTMB in a single summer, three of the hardest hundred mile races on earth, inside seventy days. You might assume someone like that simply hurts less than the rest of us. The opposite is true. She talks openly about her “pain cave,” the place late in a race where everything in you screams to stop, and her real gift is not avoiding it but doing calm, patient work inside it. At that UTMB win her stomach turned on her in the back half and she nearly lost her lunch in the streets of a Swiss village, and she did not answer it with a heroic surge. She shrank the task down to moving her legs one more step, over and over, and let the low patch pass. The best in the world wins by pacing and composure, not by being the toughest person on the mountain.

There is a contested but influential idea in exercise science called the central governor, proposed by the physiologist Tim Noakes: the limit you feel in a hard effort is not your muscles failing but your brain applying a protective brake to keep you safe. Whether or not the full theory holds up, every endurance athlete knows the lived version of it. You almost never reach your true physical limit. You reach the point where your mind decides you have had enough, and that point arrives a long way short of empty. Much of the skill of endurance is learning to keep working past it.

This is why the comparison to leadership holds. The hardest stretches of running a team are not sprints. They are ultras: the long downturn, the slow turnaround, the market that stays bad for six quarters straight. None is solved by a single heroic burst. They are survived, or not, by how you manage the long middle, when the adrenaline is gone and the only skill left is suffering productively while metering what you have.

Keep Taking In Fuel

No one finishes a long race on what they ate at the start. The fuel has to keep going in, mile after mile, or the machine shuts down no matter how much willpower is in the tank. Ask any experienced ultrarunner about their worst day and a striking number will tell you it was not their legs that gave out but their stomach. The moment the gut rebels and stops accepting calories, the race turns dangerous, and it has nothing to do with desire. Some of the toughest humans on earth have been ended not by the mountain but by a stomach that simply closed for business.

Leaders running a long, hard stretch make the equivalent mistake constantly. They treat the team like a tank to be drained rather than an engine to be fed. They call the all-out sprint in month two of an eighteen-month grind, burn through everyone’s reserves, and then act surprised when there is nothing left in month twelve. I have written before, in When Change Outruns Us, about how no organism thrives under permanent load, how a muscle grows only in the cycle of tearing and repair. The same is true from inside the effort. Pacing is not the absence of effort. It is the disciplined allocation of it, and it includes the unglamorous work of refueling: replenishing morale and recovery, putting energy back into the system instead of only pulling it out. The leader who looks heroic in month two by emptying the tank is usually the one wrapped in a foil blanket at the trailside by month ten.

Run to the Next Aid Station

No one runs a hundred miles, or climbs sixty thousand feet of Tennessee mountains, by thinking about a hundred miles. You get to the next aid station, and when you arrive you set out for the one after that. Ultrarunners have a phrase for this, relentless forward progress, and it is less a slogan than a survival tool. When the full distance is too big to contemplate without despair, contemplating it is itself the danger. So you shrink the world down to the next near thing. This is precisely what carried Jasmin Paris through the final hours at the Barkley, when, by her own account, the numbers said she was not going to make it. She stopped doing the math on the whole race. She just kept moving toward the next thing she could reach, and arrived at the gate with those 99 seconds to spare.

The leadership translation is direct. When the end of a downturn is not visible, your people cannot run toward “we will be fine in two years,” because no one can feel a horizon that far away. Your job is to convert an unbearable distance into a bearable next checkpoint: here is the thing we are getting to this quarter, here is the one win we are reaching for between now and then. This is not spin or false cheer. It is the deliberate management of attention, handing people a horizon close enough that they can keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The Bottom Lies

There is an old law in ultrarunning: never make the decision to drop at your low point. Never quit on a climb, never quit in the dark, never quit when your stomach has just betrayed you. The low patch is almost always temporary, and the version of you experiencing it is the version least equipped to make a permanent decision. Late in long races runners hallucinate, see things moving in the trees, and make spectacularly bad calls. Paris herself reported seeing things among the broken timber in the small hours. Studies of mountain ultramarathoners find that sleep deprivation and exhaustion produce not only hallucinations but impaired judgment the runner cannot accurately perceive in themselves. That last part is the whole trap. The depleted brain does not just make worse decisions. It is also worse at knowing it is making worse decisions, which is exactly why it feels so certain at the precise moment it is least worthy of trust.

This is not only a phenomenon of the trail. The same trap runs straight through the corner office, and I lived the corporate version of it years ago at Quigo, the contextual advertising company where I was CTO, which sold to AOL in 2007. I have described those three years as an emotional rollercoaster, and I am not exaggerating. The line I still use is this: on Monday we were on top of the world, by Wednesday we were probably going out of business, and by Friday things were fine again. Every week. If we had made an irreversible decision on one of those Wednesdays, at the emotional bottom, with the data of the moment screaming that the end was near, we would have made it on the worst possible information. The bottom always feels like the truth. It rarely is.

And this is not just the weekly whiplash of one small company. Sometimes the bottom is a genuine catastrophe, and it still lies. In the spring of 2020, Airbnb lost eighty percent of its business in eight weeks as the world stopped traveling overnight. The press started drafting the obituary, with one headline asking flatly whether this was the end of Airbnb, and CEO Brian Chesky has described feeling like the captain of a ship that had been hit by a torpedo. That was a Wednesday, and a brutal one. Airbnb did not make the irreversible decision the moment seemed to demand. They cut hard, held on, narrowed their focus, and less than a year later went public in one of the largest IPOs of the year, at a valuation north of a hundred billion dollars. Chesky’s own takeaway is the one that belongs here: the hardest thing to manage in a crisis is your own psychology. The bottom felt like the end. It was a low patch, and it passed.

So the discipline, in a race or a downturn, turns out to be the same. Decide your principles while you are fresh and clear-headed, because that is the only version of you that can be trusted to set the rules. Pre-commit to what would genuinely justify stopping, so that call is not left to your mile-80 brain. And refuse, as a standing rule, to make permanent decisions at the emotional low point. Wednesday is not where you decide. Wednesday is where you keep moving and wait for Friday.

Nobody Finishes Alone

There is one more thing the sport gets right that leaders routinely get wrong. From the outside an ultrarunner looks like the most solitary athlete alive, but behind almost every finish is a crew at the aid stations and a pacer for the night miles, people whose job is to keep one struggling human moving when that human can no longer be trusted to manage themselves. Even Paris, on a course that forbids outside help, sprinted her final stretch to the roar of everyone present willing her toward the gate. The solo image is a myth. The leaders who survive long downturns are not the ones who carry it all in heroic isolation, which is just a slower, lonelier way to blow up. They are the ones who let themselves be crewed, who say the hard thing out loud to someone they trust, who let others pace them through the stretches where their own light has gone dim. Building that crew, and leaning on it when the wheels come off, is not weakness. It is how anyone actually finishes.

So let me leave you with some questions to contemplate. What race do you think you are actually running right now, a sprint or an ultra? And have you been pacing for the right one? If the hard thing in front of you is going to last eighteen months and you have been attacking it like a ninety-day sprint, you are not being tough. You are setting up the collapse.

Pick your next aid station, the near thing your team can actually run toward. Decide now, while you are still clear, which decisions you will refuse to make at the low point. Find out who is on your crew. And the next time you hit a Wednesday, when the data of the moment is certain that it is all over, remember Jasmin Paris coming around that last bend when the math said she had already lost, remember that the bottom lies and the low patch is usually temporary, and that the whole thing can still turn in the hours after it seems most certainly finished, but only for the leader who is still moving when it does.