I’ve recently finished a two-day mountain marathon in the UK Lake District, where myself and my running partner David - the web editor here at Global Cement - carried all our cooking gear, food, sleeping bags and tent. I feel that it was a great opportunity to learn some life and business lessons.
1 Come prepared: I was fit and free of injuries. All of my gear had been used before, the nutrition was all familiar, and I had previously done similar events. We tried to reduce surprises to a minimum.
2 Know the rules: For this race, we had to select our own route in the mountains, visiting locations with different points values, and picking up as many points as possible. We had a strict seven hour time limit on the first day. However, I had not realised how tough the lateness penalties were - and they got worse the later you were. We were 25 minutes late, and all the points that we had collected in the previous seven hours were taken off us again. Ouch! We made sure to finish the second day on time.
3 Be flexible: We committed to climbing a big hill, half way through the first day. It took longer than we had planned. We didn’t then re-plan the remaining route, which was the main cause of our lateness. Dumping a bad plan as early as possible would have given us better options.
4 Avoid the sunk cost fallacy: We went up one hill, and didn’t want to go down the same way (even though, in retrospect, it would have been much faster to just retrace our steps). We should have ignored our past, and just gone ahead on the best route from where we were. A sunk cost is one that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered and the fallacy is where you persist with a course of action, when changing the plan by ignoring the past would bring a better outcome. We irrationally find it harder to stomach losses than to value gains.
5 Learn the right lesson from your mistakes: Late on the first day, we arrived at a lake in the mountains, and I guessed our onwards route ‘by eye.’ I should have used a compass bearing, but I was tired and stressed by our lateness. Unless you deep-dive into the real reason for mistakes, you are bound to repeat them. On the second day of the event, we checked our route continually with compass bearings, correcting the route as new landmarks came into view.
6 Be confident in your skills… but not too confident: My navigation throughout was pretty good, and we were generally where we thought we were (i.e. not ‘lost’). I was confident in my abilities. However, late on the first day, with the oxygen levels in my brain falling after a hard day, I felt sure that the route to the next control was ‘up the glen.’ In fact, I insisted upon it. David was unconvinced, and dug his heels in, in effect refusing to move. It took that pushback from him to make me realise that my navigational skills were not infallible. He was right - we were going in the wrong direction. Insisting upon something does not necessarily make it so!
7 Don’t be swayed by non-quality opinion: Heading ‘up the glen’ in the wrong direction, a walker who was coming ‘down the glen’ airily told me that ‘they’re all going up that way.’ Perhaps they were - but they might have been runners on different races, looking for different controls. By golly, it is hard to discount an opinion that agrees with your own preconceived ideas - in fact there’s a name for it - ‘confirmation bias.’ It’s difficult, but not impossible. Finally we ignored her advice and went in the correct direction.
8 Sometimes, just showing up can be a ‘win’: My original running partner couldn’t make the event (‘dodgy knees’), and I finally found a walking partner in David (on his proviso that he would not run one single step!). We knew that we weren’t going to be competitive, since we walked the whole thing, but we finished (not everyone did), we weren’t last, and we had a fantastic weekend in the hills with many friends. Even the weather was kind to us in England’s notoriously wet Lake District.
I’m sure that there were other life and business lessons from the weekend - and my friends will doubtless point them out to me over some beers: In life and in business, feedback is the breakfast of champions!
