Give it everything – A Startup Selling Lesson from the Trail
You’ve got to find people that are going to support and motivate you when you might be feeling a little bit low.
In the Western States 100 that I ran ????♂️, I remember crossing the river, and frankly, I was tired but I was still feeling motivated. I knew we had a two-mile climb???? to get to the top of Green Gate.
????????♀️Jen who also ran with me was fresh – she’s a super strong runner and was ready to run 20 miles. I remember telling her, “I’m not sure, Jen. We’re a little behind schedule, but I want to see how quickly we can get up to Green Gate. And then let’s evaluate to see if we can still push for sub-24.”
And so she pushed me. ????
????I do this thing called “Eleven–Sevens”, where I run 11 breaths and I walk for seven breaths or I hike for seven breaths.
⏰We checked into Green Gate at 12:27am but my pace card had me in there at 12:05am. I thought I was more than 30 minutes behind schedule, but now I’m down to 22 minutes behind schedule.
We had 20 miles left. If only I can get a minute back per mile, which I know is a huge task, but you never know. Maybe my body can give me something that I didn’t think was there or maybe on the downhill sections with a pacer, I can move a little bit more quickly.
????????♂️ Even though there’s some climbing in the last mile or two, I can push myself to run. I went from what I thought was a 0% chance back to maybe 10% chance.
????????It gave me some hope.
As Jen & I hit Green Gate and started on the last 20 miles of the race, one of the things that she did was to make sure that I got through these aid stations quickly.
Here are some data from my aid station:
???? 2 minutes and 30 seconds ???? 3 minutes ???? 43 seconds ???? 2 minutes and 35 seconds
Not the 90 seconds I wanted to hit but I was still moving through these aid stations pretty quickly. That means I move into an aid station—get my bottles filled????, fill up with nutrition????, grabbed some food ????and move out of the aid station in under 3 minutes in all of these cases.
That’s pretty hard to do.
At this point, we just continued to #giveiteverything and kept pushing until it was mathematically impossible for us to get to where we wanted to reach.
