A marathon is a long run where you pace yourself to get to the end. Unless you’re me in Berlin this weekend, but that’s a story for another blog.

People love saying life is a marathon, not a sprint. It gets rolled out whenever someone wants to tell you to slow down, stop rushing, there’s loads of time. I think it’s one of the most well-meaning, completely misleading pieces of advice going.

The marathon metaphor has a hole in it

Here’s what people miss when they say it. In an actual marathon, the last few miles don’t feel steady at all. They feel like their own separate marathon, slower, heavier, far harder than anything that came before them, even though the pace barely changes.

Life does the exact opposite. Instead of slowing down and feeling heavier as you approach the end, it speeds up. The closer you get to the finish, the faster the miles seem to pass, not the slower.

Life does the same thing. One of the cruellest tricks of getting older is that the less time you have left, the faster the time you do have seems to move. Ask any elderly person and they’ll tell you the same thing, it goes quicker, not slower. So when people use “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” as permission to relax, take it easy, there’s plenty of time, they’ve got it backwards. There isn’t plenty of time. There’s less of it every single year, and it moves faster the less of it you have.

So stop treating “plenty of time left” as a safe assumption. It isn’t one. The years ahead of you will move faster than the years behind you, not slower, so whatever you keep putting off for “someday” deserves a harder look now.

What life actually is: sprint, rest, sprint again

If life isn’t a steady-paced marathon, what is it? I’d say it’s closer to an ultra, a long series of sprints followed by proper rest, repeated over and over, for decades.

This is really just periodisation, something I talk about a lot when it comes to training, applied to everything else. Sprint. Rest. Recover. Sprint a little longer and a little faster than last time. Rest again. That cycle, repeated enough times over enough years, is what builds real capability, physically, mentally and emotionally.

This isn’t hustle culture dressed up in different language. I don’t believe anyone can go flat out forever, and I think the people who try to are usually the ones who burn out and disappear the fastest. Rest isn’t optional in this model, it’s half of it.

Stop thinking of your year, or your life, as one long steady effort. Start identifying your actual sprint periods and your actual rest periods, and be deliberate about both. Pushing hard without a planned rest after it isn’t ambition, it’s just a crash waiting for a date.

Why plodding fails just as often as sprinting does

There are two ways people get this wrong, and they sit at opposite ends of the same mistake.

One group plods along gently forever, because they’ve bought into the idea that life is long and there’s no rush. They rarely sprint, rarely push, and wonder years later why they never got anywhere close to what they were capable of. The other group sprints constantly, never properly resting, convinced that rest is for people who aren’t serious. They usually flame out, get injured, get ill, or simply stop, because nobody can sustain maximum output indefinitely.

If you’ve read my other blogs, you’ll know I believe consistency is life’s greatest secret. You genuinely don’t need to do that much, if you do it consistently, for long enough. The same principle behind compound interest turning modest savings into real money applies directly here.

I’m not gifted, I just didn’t stop

I’m not genetically gifted. In my twenties, there were plenty of people around me who were leaner, stronger, fitter than I was. At 41, I’m something of a rarity, not because I was better than them, but because almost all of them stopped somewhere along the way.

That’s really the whole argument in one sentence. The sprint-rest cycle, repeated consistently over twenty years, beats raw talent that gets applied inconsistently, every single time.

Your sprints have to change as you age

One more thing worth saying. The length and intensity of your sprint and rest periods shouldn’t stay fixed as you get older, and it isn’t only about physiology, though that plays its part. Your priorities change, what you have time for changes, what your body and your life can absorb changes. The 41 year old version of this needs to look different to the 25 year old version, not because you’re giving up, but because you’re adapting the plan to the season of life you’re actually in.

What you can do with this: revisit your own sprint and rest pattern every year or two, don’t assume what worked at 25 still fits at 40. The principle stays the same, sprint hard, rest properly, repeat. The specifics of how hard and how long are allowed to change.

Life isn’t a marathon. It’s an ultra, built from hundreds of smaller sprints and the rest periods in between them, repeated for as many decades as you get. Get that rhythm right, and consistently, and you’ll end up somewhere most people never reach, not because you were the most talented person running, but because you were still running long after most of them had quietly stopped.