Life is not a sprint. I had to run one to figure that out.

What running taught me about building something that lasts.

I have never been a runner.

Every time I tried, my knees hurt so badly I could barely walk the next day. The people who run for pleasure always seemed odd to me.. I genuinely didn’t understand what they were chasing or how they kept going.

This year, in the middle of a professional hurricane, I signed up for a half marathon. August. 21 kilometres across Stavanger (Stay tuned!)

Ok, let me explain how I got there.

This has been a pivotal year. I made a decision that most people talk about and few actually follow through on: to live up to what I’ve always preached. To be coherent. To be purposeful. To stop doing work that didn’t align with what I actually believe in and start building something that does.

In practice, that meant stepping into the Norwegian market with intention for the first time. Expanding my network deliberately. Sitting at tables I hadn’t sat at before, speaking at new places, attending new events. And I’ll tell you, the Norwegian crowd is a particular one - high referral, high trust, slow to open (I’ll write a separate piece about trying to break into it, because it deserves its own story).

What I didn’t expect was the anxiety.

Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The 5am kind where you wake up with a mental list of everything that isn’t done yet and scramble to prioritise it. The kind that disguises itself as productivity while quietly consuming every reserve you have. The kind that has you refreshing your inbox eleven times in an hour...

I was trying to sprint to a finish line that doesn’t work that way.

I noticed it first in my running. When I started training, I kept trying to run faster just to get it over with, at a pace I couldn’t possibly sustain over distance. I’d burn out in the first kilometre and wonder why I couldn’t keep going. The goal was long distance. The instinct was sprint.

Then it hit me, quite literally like a lightning bolt: life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So this year, I’m going to run one!

Well, a half marathon, in the interest of full transparency.

As the training weeks went by, something shifted. The longer I ran, the more my brain quieted. My knees got stronger. The first kilometre is still where all the noise lives: the mental list, the inbox, the things I haven’t done yet. But somewhere around kilometre three, something settles. There’s just the road, the pace, and one very simple question: can I keep going?

I realised I was training physical endurance to build something else entirely.

What I’m learning (slowly, one run at a time) is that the process is not the obstacle to the result. The process is the result. The kilometres I least want to run are the ones building the capacity for the kilometres I eventually will.

Business works the same way. Every conversation that doesn’t convert, every application that takes weeks to come back, every piece of content that goes out into silence, it’s all infrastructure. It’s building something that hasn’t fully arrived yet but is being assembled, kilometre by kilometre.

I am not a patient person by nature. I’m Brazilian, I’m ambitious, and I’ve spent my entire career in environments where speed was the primary measure of everything. Learning to run slowly (literally and professionally) is the hardest thing I’ve done this year.

But here’s what I know from the work I do: organisations that scale too fast, without building the structural capacity to carry the load, break. The ones that last build deliberately, distribute properly, and don’t rely on one person to hold everything together through sheer force of will.

I’m trying to apply the same logic to myself.

August. 21 kilometres. Nice and steady.

The life marathon is much longer. I'm learning to enjoy the distance.