It’s all about willpower, right?

I Dare You

I quit smoking cigarettes on a dare when I was twenty-seven.

My then wife and I were playing Risk with our friends Steve and Roberta. Steve smoked Winstons, Kirsten and I smoked Marlboros. I don’t remember that Roberta smoked. I think I started the group whine.

“We really should quit , I mean we know how bad it is for us.”  “Yeah, you’re right.” You know I tried to quit. It’s hard.”  “Yeah, hard.”

Suddenly Kirsten had enough of our pathetic moaning. She grabbed all our cigarettes, tore them up and threw them in the trash on top of the leftover Chinese food. We all looked at them in the trash. I know I contemplated fishing Marlboros out of the Moo Goo Gai Pan. I’m pretty sure others did as well.

“OK, then.” We said in unison, “We quit.”

A week later, Kirsten and Steve were smoking again. My heels were dug in.

As an aside, there are many things for which I am grateful to my former wife and the mother of my children. Daring me to quit smoking is one of them. She later quit smoking herself and I think Steve did too.

I had started smoking at thirteen and stopped from sixteen to nineteen, but by twenty-seven I smoked three red-box-packs of Marlboros a day. I was a booking agent for speakers and spent all day in an office on the phone and these were the days when you could smoke in the office and on planes. After about a week of cold turkey I decided to ween myself off cigarettes by smoking cigars. It worked for me. Cigars tasted pretty good especially those rum soaked crooks.

Problem was cigars smelled terrible to everyone else, especially women. “Ewe, get that stinky think out of here!” So that plan failed and I bought a pipe.

The pipe created the opposite effect among the gentler sex.’ Mmmm. That smells nice.” Pipe tobacco tasted terrible, even that Cherry Blend that all the women in the office were so fond of. So smoking the pipe only lasted for a month. I liked the prop aspect of the pipe, giving me time to think before responding and pointing with it, so I did chew on the pipe for a year. Truthfully there was an oral fixation component; my plastic pens still show teeth marks.

Also though I was still in the phase of my life where I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted, I gained ten pounds in the first month. That was a little worrying, but then at a company meeting there was a softball game. I hit a line drive to mid-center field but was thrown out at first because I ran so slow. I stood next to the baseline wheezing and said to myself, “this isn’t good, I’ve gotta get that crap out of my lungs.”

I started running.

In the beginning, I couldn’t run a quarter mile. Hell, I could barely run twenty yards slowly. I kept at it till I could run a mile, maybe a twelve minute mile, but a mile without stopping. I found I actually liked running.

I ran several times a week. Those were the days when people made fun of runners. I tried to convince my wife to run. She actually bought some running shoes and gave it a try until one day she said, “I hate this!” My first running partner washed out.

There was no one where I worked who wanted to run, so my running was pretty much a solo act for a long time. I went to business school in London and if I thought Americans made fun of runners, the Brits were merciless. “Is there someone chasing you?” I lived five miles off campus (by then I had two small children) and ran or rode a bike to school, showered in the dorms, went to class, changed and rode or ran home.

My running went up and down over the years. Often it was my go-to weight loss strategy when I drank and ate too much. It worked, too. The start-up phase was always tough, but never as tough as it was at twenty-seven getting ten years of smoke and tar out of my lungs.

After business school I worked for some consulting firms where there were other runners and I discovered the joys and pain of running with others – joys to have the comradery and company, pain to run with someone else who runs at a half-minute faster pace per mile than I was used to.

By the time I was in my late thirties, I ran a consistent twenty five miles per week usually with a day or two off and a long run of six or seven miles on Sunday. When I turned forty I wanted to do a lot to convince myself that middle-age wasn’t so bad. I decided to train for a marathon.

A Marathon? Are You Nuts?

Bill Rogers an elite runner from the Boston area was sponsoring a fall marathon, Boston Peace, that ran through the town where I grew up. The course ran from Carlisle where I bought ice cream, down through Concord, Lexington, Arlington, and Cambridge, all the way to Boston’s government center. I knew the course intimately and there was no “heartbreak hill” like the spring Boston Marathon had at  Mile 22, when your body is consuming itself. The Peace mile 22 was dead flat.

I trained, a lot. By the end I was running seventy miles per week. I ran 10Ks, ten milers, half marathons, over-trained a bit, recovered and finished with a pre-chip time of 3:57. (Marathoners these days have a chip in their shoe which starts when you cross the start line; when I ran there was a ten minute wait while the line of more elite runners got down to me.)

For reference, Bill Rogers ran in under 2:20. I saw him interviewed by a reporter who had run in a little over my time. He was incredulous, “You ran for four hours?!”

Why Not Another One?

The next year, I decided to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington D.C. This was an incredible experience too. The Marines lined the course, cheering you on and there were Gatorade stands every half mile on the dead flat course.

When I ran my first marathon I ran all the way. I remember thinking at thirteen miles, “Hey this is a good distance. What’s wrong with this?” But I kept running. There was a point on Memorial Drive (mile 22), when the sun had gone away the icy November wind picked up and yellow school buses were picking up bedraggled dropouts that my resolve faltered, but I kept running. When I came off the Salt and Pepper Bridge and was going up the hill toward Government Center and I realized I could make my goal and beat four hours, I sped up and someone at the sidelines, shouted, “Wow! A kick! Go! Go! Go!”

In D.C. the weather was milder. If anything there were more cheering crowds and Marines are not quiet. But unlike my first marathon where I knew the entire course  and had a vision of the finish line and was running on a base of seventy miles per week, at the Marine Corps marathon, I didn’t know the course or where I was, and  I was running on a base of thirty-five miles per week and ten to fifteen pounds heavier. My pre-chip time was 4:19. I probably walked half the course. The picture above was taken by Billie (then girlfriend, now wife) pre-race. In the after pictures I don’t look so good.

I mentally made a lot of excuses. My little start-up consulting practice had me busier. I was travelling to New York City and Detroit more and it was hard to run in the city and the GM Leadership Now training sessions included evening sessions. There was that period at the beginning when I was nursing the sprained ankle. But the real reason was I was less prepared.

Later, when the sting of my twenty two minute slower time wore off, I realized a truth, a piece of wisdom that is true in many fields:

No amount of determination, or sheer force of will, is a substitute for proper preparation.

Running a marathon, like many tasks takes physical and mental preparation. Mentally learning the course, visualizing where you will be at any point, having a strategy for times and splits. Physically you have to practice, not just logging the miles, but practice focused on improvement, sprints and hills for stamina and to stabilize and improve times.

Performance happens at a point in time, but it is determined by what has come before, preparation, mental, physical, even spiritual work to be ready. I stumbled into quitting smoking, but I quickly learned to think about the process and prepare. I really became successful when I visualized myself as a non-smoker. I finished two marathons, one better than the other because of better preparation.

About each of these accomplishments people have said to me, It’s all about determination and will power, right?”

No, it’s about preparation.

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