Don't Work Faster. Transition Faster.

A secret to creative output from endurance sports

There’s a secret to creative output we can learn from endurance racing.

I first discovered Spartan Racing in 2016. A Spartan Race is an obstacle course endurance event, where you run anywhere from 3 to 13 miles over rugged terrain, completing obstacles along the way.

You might run a mile, then climb over an 8’ wall, cross a set of monkey bars, carry a 100lb stone 10 yards, then run another mile to the next set of obstacles.

I like them because they require wholistic fitness. You can’t have the aerodynamic-skeleton marathon body. You need to be strong and an endurance machine.

The first race I did went, well, awful. It took me nearly four hours to complete an eight miles slog through ankle-deep mud in farmland outside Chicago. But it made me realize that I was in significantly less fit than I thought I was. I wasn’t as strong as I thought, and I didn’t have the endurance that I thought. And from that experience, a casual commitment to progressively more challenging endurance races was born.

The main metric on a Spartan race is time. How quickly can you complete the race. And when I started trying to improve my time, I made the natural assumption that I would get faster at racing by running faster.

But as I started working on my running, my friend Adil, who’d done many more of them, pointed out a flaw in my logic. My running speed was much less important than other aspects I could focus on.

A good time for a Spartan Beast, usually 13 miles long with 30 obstacles, is about 4 hours. But if you think of that as a half marathon time, you’ll realize it’s quite slow. You can complete a half marathon in four hours by walking. If you can do even a twelve minute mile you should be able to finish in two and a half hours.

So what’s slowing you down so much in a Spartan Race? How quickly you transition.

Some people will arrive at an obstacle and pause to catch their breath, wait in a longer line to start the obstacle, then take a moment to catch their breath again after the obstacle before they start running. This can easily stretch to five or more minutes, which compounded over 30 obstacles, adds another two and a half hours to your completion time.

But if you can jog up to the obstacle, take it on right away, and keep jogging after, you might cut that down to 30-60 seconds. That can take your total obstacle time down from 2.5 hours to 30 minutes.

Saving two hours by running faster is almost impossible. But saving two hours by speeding up your transition time is extremely doable.

When I did my one-month-draft challenge, I quickly realized that increasing my writing speed was a lost cause. Trying to go from 1,000 words per hour to 1,250 words per hour would be similar to going from a 9 minute mile to a 7.5. Possible, but only with significant training.

When I sped through 5,000 words in 3 to 4 hours I felt awful. The key, I realized, was to focus less on how fast I was writing, and instead optimize the transition time before and after a writing session, so that I could spend more time writing at a more moderate pace, instead of trying to spend less time writing at a frantic pace.

Most people have a pre-work ritual, whether they’ve deliberately established it or not. They sit down, open their work, and then check Twitter, email, Instagram, respond to some texts, fuss with something on their desk, realize they need water, realize they need to go to the bathroom, order more toilet paper on Amazon, respond to the new messages that have come in during that time, decide Okay Now I’m Going to Focus, get distracted again, Okay Now I’m Doing it For Real, one more distraction, THEN they start.

This can easily stretch to ten or fifteen minutes if you let it. Compounded over three or four writing sessions per day, you’ve now lost over an hour putzing about procrastinating getting started.

Worse, we often do the same thing at the end of a session before moving on to whatever else we need to do. You’re spending as much as two hours a day in these transitional phases where you’re not really doing anything intentional, and you end up wondering where the day went.

So I created a rule for myself, based on advice I read from Josh Waitzkin in The Art of Learning. When I arrived at a writing session I had to start writing immediately. No putzing.

I established a small ritual, usually bathroom, beverage, starting the walking desk, and then I’d get into it. And then when I finished a session, I’d often leave my desk entirely, even leave the office, to stop myself from getting sucked into another distraction hole.

Near instant start, and near instant stop. Make the ramps as steep as possible.

But that’s easier said than done, because part of why we putz around in the first place is because we need to recover.

We’re tired from the creative sprint we just did and need to give our brains a rest before the next one, which is why optimizing creative recovery is so essential as well.

If you can recover from your creative sprints in 10 minutes instead of 30, you’ve unlocked hours of additional high-quality creative work per day. You don’t need to spend as long stuck in the shallow work trenches.

I’ll talk about that more next time.

I didn’t have a great photo from a Spartan Race, so here’s the DC Marathon instead