Division I soccer, two Ironman finishes, and a caveat.

Captain of the men's team at San Diego State, two Ironman finishes, and an argument that the endurance-to-entrepreneurship analogy is mostly overstated.

San Diego State

I played Division I soccer at San Diego State University, was named captain of the men’s team, and earned Academic All-Conference honours.

The captaincy was the part that mattered. It is the first role most people get where the outcome depends on people who do not report to you, are not paid by you, and are under no obligation to listen. Everything about running a company is downstream of that problem.

Two Ironman finishes

After college the competitive outlet became endurance sport. I have finished the Ironman distance twice — Ironman California and Ironman Maryland — and qualified twice for the USA Triathlon world championships.

The distance is 140.6 miles: a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike, and a full marathon, run consecutively.

The analogy is mostly overstated

Every founder who has finished a long race wants to tell you it is like building a company. Most of that comparison does not survive contact with either activity.

An Ironman has a published date, a fixed distance, and a marked course. You know exactly what the task is and exactly when it ends. Almost nothing in building a business has any of those properties. The hard part of a company is that the course is not marked and the distance is unknown.

A race tells you where the finish line is. That is the single biggest thing it does not have in common with building anything.

What does transfer

Two things, and they are narrower than the usual claim.

The first is tolerance for a long unglamorous middle. Most of the training is not interesting and produces no visible result for months. People who need frequent feedback do not finish, and they usually do not build anything either.

The second is a specific relationship with discomfort: the ability to distinguish between the pain that means stop and the pain that means keep going. That judgement is trainable and it is genuinely useful in a business, where the same two signals look identical from inside.

What does not transfer

Suffering is not a strategy. Endurance sport rewards showing up and doing the same thing repeatedly. Companies punish that. The willingness to grind through something is a strength right up until the moment the correct answer is to stop doing it, and endurance training actively trains that instinct out of you.

That is worth saying out loud, because the founder-as-athlete story is usually told as if persistence were free.

Still training

Yes, and largely because the alternative is worse. It is the part of the day that has no email in it.