Even splits, and why the discipline transfers further than the running does

Richard Joseph Spinelli holds a fairly ordinary view about marathons, which is that the whole event is decided in the first third and most people decide it wrongly. The discipline involved has an obvious application to running a company, and a less obvious point at which the comparison stops working. Both are worth setting out.

The idea, as runners have it

An even split means covering the second half of a distance in roughly the time taken for the first. It sounds unremarkable and it is surprisingly rare, because the first half feels easy and the easy feeling is persuasive.

The failure is not a failure of fitness. It is a failure of interpretation. Feeling good early is taken as a signal to go faster, when it is actually a description of a state that has not been tested yet. The cost is not paid at the time. It is paid later, at a much worse exchange rate, and by then there is nothing to be done about it.

The analogy, extended

Run that straight into a small operating company and it transfers cleanly at first.

The leasing year has an easy early stretch. September and October carry no decisions and no pressure, and the temptation is to read the absence of problems as spare capacity and commit it to something. A building, a project, a new thing.

Then February arrives, which is where the whole year is actually run, and the capacity that was committed in October is not available. The company is not short of ability. It is short because it spent the easy part at a pace the hard part could not support.

The corrective is the same as the runner’s. Treat the easy stretch as the thing that funds the hard one rather than as evidence of surplus, and hold something back on purpose while there is no apparent reason to.

Where it gets stronger than expected

The analogy holds in a second place, and this one is less obvious.

Even splitting is not primarily about restraint. It is about having decided the pace before the race, so that the decision is not being made by someone who is currently enjoying themselves or currently suffering. The runner’s advantage is not discipline in the moment. It is that the moment is not being consulted.

That transfers well. Deciding in October what February will be allowed to look like, and writing it down, removes the decision from a version of the company that will be under pressure and poorly placed to make it.

Where it breaks

And then it breaks, in a way worth being honest about rather than smoothing over.

A marathon is a known distance on a known course. The pace can be calculated because the problem is fully specified before it begins. That is the entire basis for planning a split.

An operating year is not specified in advance. The distance is not known, the course changes, and the useful information arrives during the event rather than before it. A company that sets its pace in October and refuses to revise it has not achieved discipline. It has achieved rigidity, which is a different thing that looks similar from outside and fails differently.

There is a second break. A runner is one system, and holding back is a decision about themselves. A company holding back is making a decision on behalf of people who have their own view about the pace, and who may be correct. The runner’s model has no mechanism for somebody else being right.

What survives the break

Stripped of the parts that do not transfer, one thing is left, and Richard Joseph Spinelli thinks it is the whole of the value.

Feeling good is not information about capacity. It is information about the current moment, and the current moment is the least representative part of any long effort. That is true on a course and it is true in an October, and it is the only part of the analogy that does not depend on knowing the distance in advance.

Everything else, the pacing tables, the splits, the plan held to regardless, belongs to races. Those work because somebody measured the course. Nobody has measured the year.