The Other Side of Hard: On Cancer, Competition, and Showing Up Anyway

Most people think I’m a little crazy - especially as spring signals the start of another season of swimming, cycling and running. The workouts often start early in the morning and the volume builds into the summer and fall.

I won’t get into all the details, because this post isn't about hustle culture. I have no interest in telling you to wake up earlier or grind harder. What I’m getting at is something more specific and more useful: the power of having a finish line.

The Problem With Open-Ended Work

Running a large nonprofit is, by its very nature, a job without a finish line. There is always another family in crisis, another grant to write, another policy to navigate, another staff member who needs support. The work is meaningful — deeply meaningful — but it is also relentless and, if you’re not careful, can be all-consuming. After 12 years of leading Family and Children’s Association (FCA) and 30+ years in the nonprofit sector, I can tell you that the leaders who burn out aren’t always the ones who work the hardest. They’re often the ones who never get to experience completion.

That’s what endurance sports gave me that leadership couldn’t: a finish line. A real one. A place where someone hands you a medal and tells you it’s over. For today, at least, you are done.

There is something profound about that moment — not just emotionally, but neurologically. Completing a defined challenge, one with clear parameters and measurable milestones, activates a reward system that open-ended work simply cannot replicate. And over time, I’ve found that regularly experiencing completion in my athletic life has made me more resilient, more patient, and more effective in a professional life where completion is rare.

What Cancer Changed

I was diagnosed with cancer — twice in 14 months. The first time, I told myself it was a detour. The second time, I had to sit with the possibility that it might be something more permanent. What cancer does, if you let it, is strip away every excuse you’ve ever made for not doing the thing you keep saying you’ll do someday. It has a way of making someday feel very expensive.

I kept training through treatment. Not because I’m tougher than anyone else, but because the bike and the road and the water were the places where I still felt like myself — not a patient, not a statistic, not a cautionary tale. Movement was medicine in the most literal sense, and crossing finish lines during some of the hardest stretches of my life taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way: that the body is capable of far more than the fear inside our heads will ever admit.

Cancer also gave me a relationship with uncertainty that has made me a better leader. When you’ve sat in a waiting room anticipating scan results, you develop a tolerance for not knowing that most executive training programs can’t teach. You learn to act thoughtfully in the absence of certainty. You learn that anxiety is not a reason to stop moving. And you learn, over and over again, that the finish line on the other side of the hardest thing you’ve ever faced is the sweetest one of all.

What Endurance Sports Teaches You

I’ve completed more than 100 triathlons and 15 marathons. I began competing in my mid-40’s, which means I came to this later than most and have had to earn every finish line I’ve crossed. Here’s what I’ve learned that applies directly to leadership:

Pacing is everything. In an Ironman, going out too hard in the first miles is a rookie mistake that will cost you dearly by mile 80. The same is true in organizational leadership. Sustainable high performance, in racing and in leadership, requires knowing when to push and when to keep some gas in the tank.

The plan matters less than the ability to adapt. I have never completed a race exactly as I planned it. Weather changes. Equipment fails. Your body surprises you. What separates finishers from DNFs isn’t the quality of the plan, but the ability to problem-solve in real time without panicking.

Discomfort is data, not a stop sign. When things get hard in a race — and they always get hard — your brain will offer you a thousand compelling reasons to stop. I’ve learned to treat that discomfort as information rather than instruction. That discipline has made me a far better leader in difficult moments.

Who you surround yourself with determines how far you go. I train with people who push me. I have an amazing coach who tells me the truth. I have a race community that shows up on cold mornings when staying in bed would be the easier choice. If you want to perform at a high level, you need to build a team that holds you to a standard — not one that makes excuses alongside you.

The Deeper Truth

I won’t pretend that I’ve got it all figured out. Hell, if anything, cancer has a way of reminding you that control is largely an illusion. But training for and completing endurance events — before, during, and now after treatment — has given me something no leadership book or executive seminar ever could: proof. Proof, accumulated through early mornings and long miles and more than a few dark moments in the middle of a race when I wasn’t sure I had anything left, that I can do hard things. That I can suffer and adapt and keep moving. That on the other side of the thing I was dreading is usually something I’m proud of.

Every CEO needs that kind of proof. Not necessarily from triathlon — your finish line might be a different kind of challenge entirely. But find one. Define it. Train for it. Cross it. And then notice what happens to the way you show up at work on Monday morning.