what long distance running taught me about startups

marathons : startups :: donating to someone's charity race : friends & family angel round

Running a startup, I take so many lessons from my long-distance running practice. Both are objectively painful, self-inflicted experiences that test your limits. Kidding! Not really – but I'm genuinely the most fulfilled I've been working on Whimsy and getting to talk to customers, the same way I feel alive after a good run.

Last year, when we got into our accelerator program, it hit me – this was just another marathon training block. The same mindset, different challenge. As someone who struggles with imposter syndrome as a female founder, realizing this parallel helped me find my footing.

After a year and a half of building Whimsy, I've realized that starting a company feels like that first double-digit run – terrifying but thrilling. I'm sharing these parallels because sometimes we already have the courage we need, just tucked away in unexpected places. Maybe for you it's not running, but whatever your "marathon" was, it probably taught you more about building something new than you realized.

The Voice in Your Head

Mile 20. Legs burning. Brain screaming to stop. That's when my mantra kicks in: "You are a runner. You are here because you love to run." That same voice shows up on tough customer calls, hours spent debugging, or on a late night in a series of long days.

I remember – “no one cares about this problem the way you do”. That’s one of my work mantras. Founders tend to put a ton of pressure on themselves, and it’s calming to remember that at the end of the day, as long as you are solving a real problem for someone, that’s what matters.

Finding Your Pace

Funny thing about competitors – they're like those intimidating runners at the track. I used to get nervous seeing them sprint past, until I realized they were making me faster chasing them for laps.

When a new startup enters the events space or a competitor releases a new feature, I tend to view it positively. It validates our market, at times helps us differentiate our product even better, and sometimes? Our competitors become our integration partners and expand our market, just like those track gods became my favorite training buddies.

Small Wins, Big Miles

Long distance running conventional wisdom: never increase weekly mileage by more than 10%.

"But I feel great!" I'd protest.

Then I'd get injured.

Keeping your mileage in check forces you to really commit to your workouts and trust in the long-term process that your training adds up. I end up prioritizing my recovery more, and increasing my resolve when I’m doing a hard tempo run.

Turns out building Whimsy follows the same rule – steady progress beats sprinting, especially when the finish line keeps moving.

Each new customer meeting, each feature shipped, each small win compounds. It’s important to remember and celebrate all of these small milestones when I feel like our goalpost continually increases – after all, that’s the best case scenario.

Keeping Calm when Things Take a Turn

Tons of runners, especially marathoners, know that sometimes, you just blow up on a run. Despite all of the work and planning that you’ve put into it! But it teaches me the same lesson I use at Whimsy: focus on what you can control.

When sales in the summer slowed down due to a busy events season, I treated it like a bad race day – adjust, adapt, keep moving. This experience taught me about the seasonality of our business in our first year.

Instead of freaking out about the customer acquisition slowdown, I asked our customer base what was top of mind for them, sparking an idea for our first revenue-generating line – event staffing services. Event staffing also ended up being a successful lead generation strategy, as 70%+ of our event staffing customers also onboarded onto our dashboard product.

The Power of No

The weekends I'd turn down drinks in favor of a Saturday morning run taught me something valuable: saying no in the moment means saying yes to something bigger. Those early marathon training days trained my friends and family well – they barely blink now when I duck out early to prep for a customer demo or work through a weekend sprint.

Here's the thing about passion projects, though: saying no doesn't feel like sacrifice. Whether it's logging miles before dawn or debugging code late into the night, when you're building something you love, the "nos" become natural. It's not about discipline anymore – it's about priorities. (Though maybe we should talk about work-life balance another time...)

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Looking back, my Garmin watch taught me more about building a company than some business books. Every tough day at Whimsy feels like another training run – brutal in the moment, but part of the journey.

You know how every marathoner swears "never again" during the race? Yet somehow they're googling their next one before the soreness fades. Building Whimsy feels exactly like that.