I ran my first marathon. I'm not writing this to tell you about the finish line. I'm writing this because somewhere around kilometer 30, I had the clearest thought I've had in months. And it had nothing to do with running.
But first, the running part.
Starting the habit
I've always been active. Boxing, gym, lifting. I like the structure of it, the routine of showing up, putting in the work, and walking out different than when you walked in. But running was never my thing. Running felt like punishment. Something you did because you had to, not because you wanted to.
I started running because I needed to think. That sounds like something people say to sound deep, but it's literally what happened. My days got so full of meetings and screens and decisions that I ran out of space to process any of it. The gym wasn't doing it anymore. Lifting is focused, intense, present. Running is the opposite. Running is time. Running is space. Your body does the work and your mind goes wherever it wants.
The first few runs were terrible. Five kilometers felt like twenty. My lungs burned. My legs were angry. But I kept going, not because I'm disciplined, but because the twenty minutes after a run were the clearest twenty minutes of my day. That's a trade I'll make every time.
The decision to go long
The marathon wasn't a bucket list thing. I didn't wake up one morning and decide to be a marathon runner. It happened gradually. Five became ten. Ten became fifteen. At some point I realized I was running half marathons on weekends and not thinking twice about it. The full marathon felt like the obvious next step.
Training for a marathon while running technology for multiple companies is its own kind of challenge. You learn to protect your time differently. Morning runs before the world wakes up. Long runs on Fridays when the office is quiet. Recovery days that teach you patience isn't optional.
There's a parallel to building systems. You can't rush the base. You can't skip the boring middle kilometers where nothing exciting happens but everything important is being built. The fitness, the endurance, the mental tolerance for discomfort. It all compounds silently until one day you realize you can do something you couldn't do six months ago.
Kilometer 30
They call it the wall. The point in a marathon where your body has burned through its glycogen stores and starts asking very serious questions about why you're still doing this. I hit it around kilometer 30.
Everything slowed down. Not just my pace, but my thoughts. The noise that usually fills my head, the projects, the deadlines, the open tickets, the half-finished conversations, all of it went quiet. What was left was simple: keep moving. One step. Then another. Then another.
And in that simplicity, something clicked. I spend most of my working life managing complexity. Integrating systems. Connecting data sources. Translating between business needs and technical reality. All of it is about adding, connecting, layering. The marathon taught me the opposite. It taught me that sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is strip everything away until only the essential remains.
One foot in front of the other. That's it. That's the whole strategy.
The finish
I finished. The time doesn't matter. What matters is that I started something I wasn't sure I could finish, spent months doing the unglamorous work of preparing for it, hit the point where everything in me wanted to stop, and kept going anyway.
That's not a running lesson. That's every project I've ever built. That's every system I've deployed. That's every time I've sat with a problem long enough to find the answer hiding behind the obvious one.
I box because I like intensity. I lift because I like structure. I run because I like clarity. Different tools for different needs. The marathon just proved that the tools work at scale.
I'll run another one. But first, rest. Even systems need downtime.