Endurance

One winter I bought snowshoes for my wife and me, and for a few weeks we would head into the mountains after work with our dogs and my son riding on my back in an Osprey Poco. One or two feet of snow, plenty of ice, and no clean excuse to stay home. My morning runs that season were in crampons from January through March.

That is the kind of effort I keep returning to. Running and bikepacking are part of it, but they are not the whole thing. What pulls at me is being outside in conditions that ask something of me, and learning how much of the work happens before the hard part begins.

Endurance is one of those words that sounds more dramatic than it is. It brings to mind the hardest mile, the cold morning, the moment someone refuses to quit. Those moments are real, but they are not the substance of endurance. They are just the parts that make a good story. The real thing is quieter.

I used to think endurance was about intensity. How much you could suffer, how fast you could go, how far you could push on a single big effort. Over time I learned it is almost the opposite. Endurance is the number of times you are willing to begin.

I am drawn to hard things that take a long time to prepare for. The kind of effort where the visible event is almost the smallest part of it.

When I plan a road trip like that, I often spend more time planning than the trip itself will last. Meals. Dog food. Water. Diapers. Travel cribs and SlumberPods. Routes built around nap times, bathroom breaks, and the narrow window when everyone might still be in a good mood.

By the time you pull out of the driveway, or reach the start line, most of the work is already behind you. The training. The logistics. The thousand small choices about gear, food, weather, and rest.

Once it is underway, for once, I am not improvising. I am executing a plan I made long ago, when no one was watching, and trusting the version of me who made it. Runners have an expression for this: you never want to do anything for the first time on race day.

When the preparation is good, it disappears. What is left is my family at the ocean or on a trail, far from anything, with everything we need already taken care of. That is the quiet reward of doing the hard part early.

I felt this clearly before a bikepacking trip in Vermont one summer. The trip itself lasted two days. I prepared for it for months.

Bikepacking was new to me then, a departure from the backcountry backpacking I already knew. So I had to learn all of it. How to carry everything on the bike instead of on my back. How to pack the bags, balance the load, cook and sleep and carry a full day of water with me. I rehearsed it in pieces. I rode fully loaded for seven hours from my house to my in-laws, then camped in the backyard to simulate an entire day out, cooking every meal, in the middle of a ninety-degree heat wave.

The strange part is that some of those training days were longer and harder than the trip itself. The biggest ride happened weeks before Vermont, alone, in my own neighborhood. That is often how endurance works. The thing everyone sees is supported by work that was finished somewhere else.

Marathons taught me the same thing from the other direction. I have run two. The first was the spring I turned thirty. It was the pandemic, so there was no race. I put on my running vest, filled it with snacks, ran my usual half marathon loop, and then ran a one mile loop by my house over and over until I had covered the full distance. My wife ran the first stretch with me and came back out later to hand me crackers when I passed the house. I could do that on a whim only because the base was already there. I was in half marathon shape, with months of long weekend runs behind me. The endurance you build quietly is endurance you can spend later.

The second was the New York City Marathon, and I prepared for it the careful way. I followed a training plan to the letter for two months. I had hit the wall before, so this time I treated fueling and hydration as things to rehearse rather than improvise. I tested gels and waffles against water and electrolytes. I ran at the exact hour the race would start, on roads that felt like the course. Short of running over the Verrazzano, there was very little I did not try to copy ahead of time.

Some things you cannot rehearse. The sheer energy of the crowd was nothing I could have prepared for. But the preparation did its job. I never hit the wall, and I took about twenty minutes off my best time.

And then, of course, the race was not really over. There was still more than a mile to walk to the train to get home. There usually is.

So when I talk about endurance, I am mostly talking about the part no one sees. The long runway. The unremarkable repetition. And the runway is never poured in one push. It is laid down one ordinary day at a time.

Endurance is mostly about showing up consistently.

Not heroically. Consistently. The run you do when you do not feel like it. The work you do during a nap time or a narrow window late at night. The email you answer, the screen you improve, the problem you return to one more time. None of it feels significant in the moment. But it accumulates. I have come to trust accumulated motion far more than I trust inspiration.

Endurance is also not the same as burning yourself out.

This took me longer to understand. For a while I treated exhaustion as evidence of commitment, as if the cost was the point. It is not. Burnout is not endurance. It is the failure of endurance. It is what happens when you spend everything you have on the early miles and have nothing left for the distance that actually matters.

I spent six years at a company. When I joined, the team fit at one picnic table. By the time I left, it was a global organization. I was the go-to fixer for the hardest problems, and some days I ate all three meals at the office. I was the frog in the pot. By the time I noticed how much the temperature had changed, I was empty.

Real endurance respects pace. It respects recovery. Rest is not a reward you earn after the work. It is part of the work itself. A runner who never recovers does not get stronger. They get injured.

So I have stopped admiring the version of effort that destroys the person doing it. I want to build something meaningful, and I want to still be standing when it matters. Those are not competing goals.

Endurance has to be repeatable.

Anyone can have one good day. Anyone can summon a burst of effort for something new and exciting. The harder skill is building a practice you can run again tomorrow, long after the novelty is gone.

What makes effort repeatable is that you can return to it. Endurance is not really about never stopping. It is about learning how to come back after a missed week, a bad stretch, a distraction, or a stretch of doubt.

All of this is what it takes to run BetterKey, week after week. A company is not a single event. There is no start line and no finish, no day when it is simply done. That is exactly what makes the pacing matter. You cannot sprint something that never stops, and you cannot afford to burn yourself down for one milestone when there will always be another one waiting behind it.

For BetterKey, a lot of that endurance has gone into automation. Not the visible product work, exactly, but the scaffolding that makes the product safe to keep changing. The Makefile. The CI workflows. The scripts that let me run the same checks locally that will run on a pull request. The screenshot pipeline that boots the right simulators, drives the app through the right screens, and produces review copies without making anyone think about the machinery behind it. Nobody buys a key that almost works. And every script that runs without me is one less thing waiting to break me later.

It is a strange kind of craft: building systems whose best outcome is that they become unremarkable. But that is the point. Every reliable command, every repeatable test, every script that turns a fragile ritual into something I can run again tomorrow is another small piece of endurance.

And then, mostly, the job is to return. To show up when the progress is invisible. To hold a steady pace instead of spending everything on a good stretch. To execute the plan on the ordinary days and trust the version of me who made it.

If I keep showing up, keep recovering, and keep returning, I can usually find a way through whatever is in front of me.

Not in one dramatic push.

In the next ordinary step, and the one after that.

Each one another beginning.