The Parallels Between a Marathon and Leadership Run Deeper Than You Think

After 24 years placing C-suite leaders across Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Japan, I have one conviction that has never wavered: the parallels between what it takes to run a marathon and what it takes to lead at the highest level are closer than most people ever realise.

On 30 August 2026, I will stand on the start line of the Sydney Marathon. It will be my seventh World Marathon Major, following Tokyo, Chicago, Berlin, New York, London and Boston. Seven weeks into a 17-week training program, with Tokyo’s brutal summer heat closing in, here is what the road has taught me about leading at the highest level.

1. Discipline Is Not Motivation. It Is a System

Motivation gets you to week one. Discipline gets you to the start line.

When the alarm goes off at 5am, the Tokyo sun already climbing, the humidity building, and the session ahead is a 30km long run, motivation is irrelevant. What moves you is the system you built in advance: the architecture of decisions already made, so there is nothing left to negotiate in the moment. You do not decide to run at 5am. You decided weeks ago when you committed to the plan.

I feel genuine passion when I talk about this, because it is one of the most transferable truths I know. The leaders who consistently outperform are not the most inspired. They are the most structured. Their decision-making frameworks, communication rhythms and priorities function regardless of circumstances or feeling. They do not wait to feel motivated before making hard calls. They built a system that makes the call for them.

Discipline compounds invisibly. Build the system. Trust the process. The results become impossible to ignore.

2. Belief Carries You Where Fitness Cannot

There is a moment in every marathon, and I have lived it across six World Majors, where the physiological and the psychological completely and brutally separate.

The body has done what it can. The glycogen is depleted. The legs are sending signals of protest that no amount of training ever fully silences. And at that precise moment, the only thing still moving you forward is belief. The raw, unshakeable conviction that you will finish. That the suffering is temporary. That the version of yourself waiting on the other side of this pain is worth every single step of the cost.

I find this the most profound parallel between running and leadership, and it is the one I come back to again and again.

Belief is not optimism. Optimism is passive. Belief is active and almost defiant: a commitment to a specific outcome even when the evidence is doing its best to tell you otherwise.

The most formidable leaders I have assessed share this quality without exception. They hold a vision of where their organisation is going with a certainty that can seem almost unreasonable from the outside, and that certainty becomes contagious. Teams do not just follow a strategy. They follow a conviction. They believe because their leader believes, and that changes everything about what a team is capable of enduring and achieving. When markets turn and boards get nervous, the leader’s belief becomes the organisation’s stabiliser. The team feels doubt long before it ever appears in the numbers.

There is a concept attributed to Roshi Joan Halifax, Zen teacher and author, that has stayed with me: "the leader is the weather of the company." The leader’s mood, energy and belief set the invisible conditions inside an organisation. People do not just follow a leader’s strategy. They absorb their state. A leader who walks in with doubt creates a climate of uncertainty. A leader who walks in with conviction and calm creates the conditions for their team to perform at their best. The marathon teaches you to manage your internal weather across 42.2km. Leadership demands the same thing, every single day.

Executive effectiveness begins with belief. It is the most rational investment a leader can make.

3. The Long Game Is Won in the Middle Miles

Kilometres 30 to 38 are where the race is truly decided. Not at the start, where energy is electric and anything feels possible. Not at the finish, where the crowd and the emotion carry you home. In the middle, the grinding, unglamorous stretch where enthusiasm has burned away and the end is not yet in sight, character is revealed in its rawest form.

This is the phase that never makes it to the social media post. Nobody photographs those kilometres. But I can tell you with complete certainty every finish line that has ever mattered to me was earned there. Not before. Not after. There.

I see the exact same dynamic play out in business, and it moves me every time I witness it. Strategy launches generate excitement. Results generate celebration. But sustained executive effectiveness is built in the invisible months & years between, through complexity, setbacks and moments of genuine self-doubt. Resilience is not recovering quickly. It is staying in motion when progress feels impossibly slow, when the plan is no longer clean, and when the team is looking to you for a signal that it is still worth continuing. Giving them that signal, again and again, is one of the most important things a leader will ever do.

The leaders who build lasting reputations are rarely those with the most dramatic successes. They are the ones who refused to stop in the middle miles.

4. Pacing Is a Strategic Leadership Skill

Going out too fast is the most expensive mistake in marathon running. The first five kilometres feel effortless, the temptation to bank time is irresistible. By kilometre 35, that loan is being repaid at a devastating interest rate. I have learned this the hard way on more than one occasion.

Pacing is not conservatism. It is the intelligent management of a finite and precious resource across a defined distance.

I have seen this leadership failure repeatedly. Leaders who enter new roles at full sprint, restructuring aggressively and operating at unsustainable intensity, often find themselves running on empty at precisely the moment their organisation needs steady, assured and grounded leadership most. The most durable executives I have worked with understand their energy, their attention and their political capital as strategic resources to be deployed with intention. They know when to accelerate, when to hold a steady tempo, and critically, when to recover. They think in years, not quarters. They play for the full distance.

Sustainable performance is not about doing less. It is about doing the right things at the right intensity for the full distance of the role.

5. Adaptability: When the Race Is Not the Race You Planned

I have run Majors in conditions nothing like my training. Chicago in 26-degree heat that turned every kilometre from 25 onwards into a negotiation with the pavement. Boston in a cold, relentless drizzle that never once let up, where the famous hills arrive late in the race precisely when you have nothing left to give them. The race always hands you a different plan.

But the real test of adaptability happens before race day. A 17-week program rarely unfolds as written. Illness sidelines you at a critical point. Injury forces you off the road entirely.

My New York preparation brought this home in the most confronting way possible. Persistent back pain led to an MRI and an unambiguous medical verdict: stop marathon training. Stop running marathons altogether. For most people, that is where the story ends.

I refused to accept the outcome was fixed. I shifted entirely to the bike, building cardiovascular endurance through long rides rather than long runs. I arrived at the New York start line with almost no running and zero traditional long runs in my preparation. By every conventional measure, I was undertrained.

I ran a personal best

That result did not happen because I ignored the problem. It happened because I refused to be defined by it. The commitment never wavered. Only the path did.

The runners who fall apart when disruption arrives are the ones rigidly attached to the plan they brought with them. The ones who finish strong are the ones who can rapidly recalibrate, adjusting pace, strategy, and expectation in real time, while staying absolutely committed to the outcome.

This is one of the most underrated qualities I look for when assessing senior leadership candidates. Strategic agility. The ability to hold a clear destination with one hand while adapting the route in real time with the other, without communicating panic, without surrendering to rigidity, and without destabilising the people around them.

The business environment across Asia Pacific and globally over the last decade has made this quality non-negotiable. Disruption does not announce itself. Markets shift, talent landscapes change, strategies that made sense in January look very different by June. The leaders who have navigated it well are not those with the most precise plans. They are the ones who could adapt those plans with intelligence and composure and move forward anyway.

6. You Cannot Hide from Your Data

Marathon training is built on data. Heart rate. Pace. Cadence. VO2 max. Power. Recovery scores. The numbers do not flatter you. Experienced runners learn to read them with radical honesty, even when that honesty is deeply uncomfortable.

A bad training week is not a failure. It is information. Vital, clarifying information. The only question is whether you are willing to receive it clearly and act on what it is telling you.

This quality, a genuine and unsentimental relationship with objective feedback, is one of the most reliable indicators of leadership effectiveness I have observed. The best leaders build cultures where difficult data surfaces early, where performance conversations happen before problems become crises, and where honest assessment is valued above comfortable consensus. They build cultures where the truth is never the last thing to arrive in the room.

The willingness to act on data that challenges your assumptions, about your people, your market position, your own performance as a leader, without defensiveness, is rarer than it should be at C-suite level. But in every market I have worked across, it is consistently and powerfully differentiating.

7. The People Around You Are Not Optional

Most of my kilometres are logged in solitude, just the road and whatever I can find in myself to keep going. There is something in solo training that builds a particular self-reliance that no one else can build for you.

But I have never done this without a community around me.

Over years living and training across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, I have built close friendships with people who run marathons. We do not always train together, but we share something that matters just as much. We speak the same language: early alarms, long runs, race-day nerves. We ask the right questions. We notice when someone goes quiet in the weeks before a big event. When I have had doubts, these are the people I have talked to. When I have had good sessions, these are the people who genuinely understand why that matters. That community, even at a distance, changes what you are capable of sustaining across a 17-week program. The accountability is quieter than a training partner standing at your door, but it is no less real.

This mirrors one of the most consistent and important findings across my career: the quality of the environment a leader operates in, the board, the executive team, the culture they inherit or consciously build, has an outsized and frequently underestimated effect on their ultimate performance and longevity.

The most talented leader placed in the wrong environment will, given enough time, underperform. A strong leader surrounded by an excellent team operating within a high-trust, high-accountability culture will frequently exceed every expectation set for them.

Choosing your environment with the same intentionality you would bring to any other strategic decision and having the self-awareness and courage to recognise when it is no longer the right fit, is itself one of the most consequential acts of leadership.

This is where the parallel becomes most consequential. In marathon running, nobody hands you the right conditions. You choose your training routes, your support network, your coach, your race. You set yourself up. The same is true in leadership. The most self-aware executives I have worked with understand that being set up for success is not something that happens to you. It is something you engineer with intention, through the culture you build, the people you hire, the board relationships you cultivate, and the honest assessment of whether the environment around you is one that brings out your best or quietly diminishes it.

Nobody performs at their peak in the wrong conditions. Not runners. Not leaders.

8. Recovery Is Not Weakness. It Is the Work.

This is the lesson that took me the longest to truly accept, and I suspect it is the one that resonates most painfully with the people reading this.

The adaptation that makes you a stronger runner does not happen during the hard session. It happens in the recovery that follows. Push without recovery and you do not get stronger. You break down. The body does not reward relentlessness. It rewards intelligent effort followed by deliberate rest.

I think often about how poorly this lesson translates into many leadership cultures, particularly across the high-intensity markets I have spent my career working in. The glorification of relentless output, of being permanently available, of treating the need for renewal as a professional weakness to be hidden, these are not marks of high performance. They are the warning signs of a system quietly heading toward failure.

The executives I most admire have developed an almost athletic approach to their own renewal. They protect their recovery with the same seriousness they bring to their most important strategic commitments, not because they are less driven, but because they understand that sustainable performance across a long career demands it. They model it visibly for their teams. And their organisations are measurably stronger for it.

9. Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

If marathon training has given me one lesson I apply to every dimension of life, it is this.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Not occasionally. As a default setting. Every meaningful training session ends in discomfort. That discomfort is not a side effect of good training. It is the point of it. It is precisely where the growth lives.

The leaders I have most respected share this orientation universally. They take the difficult conversation rather than the easy silence. They make the bold call rather than the safe one. They walk into the room where they are most challenged rather than the one where they are most celebrated.

Comfort is seductive. It feels like stability. But extended comfort is almost always a sign that you have stopped growing.

The most dangerous place for a leader is not a crisis. It is a plateau that feels like contentment.

Everything worth achieving is on the other side of discomfort. The road teaches you that, kilometre by kilometre. So does leadership.

On 30 August, the Training Becomes the Truth

When the gun fires in Sydney, the preparation is done. Everything built across seventeen weeks of training is already in the bank. The start line does not add to it. It simply reveals it.

The marathon does not care about intention. It does not reward the plan you had or the runner you meant to be. It tests the one you actually became, in the 5am sessions nobody saw, in the training weeks that fell apart and were rebuilt, in the moments you chose discomfort when comfort was right there, in the kilometres run on belief alone when the body had already voted to stop.

Leadership tests the same things, in the same way, with the same indifference to title or reputation. The true capability of a leader is not revealed in the strategy presentation or the annual results. It is revealed under pressure, in the middle miles, when the outcome is uncertain and the team is watching.

Nine years ago, I crossed my first Major finish line in Tokyo. I am still drawing on what that cost me and what it gave me. Sydney will test something that Tokyo, Chicago, Berlin, New York, London and Boston have been building towards without me fully knowing it.

The parallels between a marathon and leadership run deeper than most people realise. The discipline, the belief, the resilience, the adaptability, the willingness to be uncomfortable. Built on the road. Demanded in the boardroom. The only difference is that the marathon gives you a finish line. Leadership never does.

To the senior leaders and executives reading this: what has been your greatest test of leadership under pressure, and what did it reveal about you?