It is the mind and not the legs that make the marathon winner

A short article of Christopher Clarey in the International Herald Tribune of November 4-5, 2006 (New York Marathon weekend) gives some interesting thoughts for managers. 

The marathon is a classic challenge whose concept and aura is often more compelling than its reality.  Not by accident: a remarkeble subset of managers are (hobby) marathon runners. However, as Lidia Simon says: "I think, at our level, 90 percent is from the brain; the body is really nothing".

Jeff Galloway, a former world-class distance runner turned author, once wrote he would collect "several million oxygen molecules" the night before a marathon and trap them in a small plastic sandwich bag, which he pinned to his shorts.

Deena Kastor, one of the women favorites today (winner of the 2006 London Marathon), is more inclined towards mantras in the later stages of a race. In the 2004 Athens Olympics (silver medal), she kept repeating "momentum".  In the Chicago marathon of 2005, it was "define yourself".  The words are having for her a profound meaning, different for each marathon.

Whatever the strategy, the most intruiging part of the world's favorite endurance test is not how runners' bodies allow them to complete it in nearly two hours, but how their minds enable them to manage it.

Isn't that the secret of the "sustainable manager"?

Comments

[EmmaMebratu]

In a world where methods aiming at a better personal performance focus on a balance between body and mind, marathon is indeed typically about the power of the mind over the body. And, as one journalist said, when commenting the last world championship, marathon and long distance capabilities are about a certain history of physical suffering, and therefore about what B Cyrulnik calls resilience (though this word usually applies to a more phsychological background). As if, in some exercises, only a certain level of difficulties/suffering could make one a better/more performant person. As if the Best can get out of the Worst only.

Therefore the real point for the 'sustainable manager' would be to focus on how to turn their most difficult personal background into professional skills.

[EmmaMebratu]

One more comment about the duality/compatibility of mind and body: after tremendously breaking the world and olympics record of the long jump in Mexico City Olympics in 1968, Bob Beamon never got over it, and never did it again. In this order of course: as his mind never could accept it, his body never managed to do it again. He could only once attain this "non-rational form of knowledge", most probably because he could not rationalize it. Since 1968, this particular jump has been analyzed by specialists hundreds of times, it has even become a subject for examination, and it took 23 years to re-do (and even surpass) it, once the Human collective mind could accept the figure itself (8.90 meters) as something possible. Therefore, let's dream and do it, whatever IT is !