I have been a distance runner for 30 years. Somewhere along the way, the road taught me everything I know about leadership.
I run early, before the house wakes up. With seven kids in a blended family, the quiet hours before dawn are the only ones I fully own. I lace up in the dark, step into the cold Iowa air, and start moving. Nobody is watching. There is no finish line crowd at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday. There is just the next mile, and then the one after that.
That is what hard problems look like too.
People ask me why I seem calm when things get difficult. The truth is less impressive than it sounds. I have just learned, mile after mile, that discomfort is temporary and quitting is permanent. Around mile 20 of a marathon, your body starts negotiating with you. It makes excellent arguments. It tells you that nobody would blame you for stopping, that you have already done enough, that this was a fine effort. Leadership sounds exactly like that voice.
Every hard chapter of my career started the same way: with a problem nobody wanted and a decision to move toward it instead of away from it.
Years ago I took the helm of a single dental practice and spent the next decade building it into a multi-location enterprise. There was no playbook. There were months when the math did not work and the only way through was to keep showing up, keep making the next right decision, keep putting one foot in front of the other.
In 2020, the State of Iowa asked me to lead strategic sourcing in the middle of a pandemic. We procured $49 million in emergency PPE while supply chains were collapsing around the world. There was no time for perfect information. You gathered what you had, you made the call, and you owned the result. Runners know this feeling. You do not get to pause the race to think about whether you are ready. You are in it.
Today I serve as Chief Growth Officer at YSS, one of Iowa's largest youth-serving nonprofits. The problems here are the hardest ones I have ever faced, because they involve kids in crisis. Youth mental health, homelessness, human trafficking. These are mile-20 problems. And it is the most hopeful work I have ever done, because every young person who walks through our doors is a life that can still change direction. These problems do not get solved by people who need comfort first. They get solved by people willing to stay in the discomfort and keep moving, because they believe what is on the other side is worth it.
What the road taught me
Here is what three decades of running has taught me about leading through all of it.
First, pace yourself. The runners who sprint the first five miles are the ones walking at mile 22. In leadership, urgency matters, but panic never helped anyone. A calm, steady presence gives your team permission to think clearly. I would rather be the leader who sets a sustainable pace than the one who burns everyone out by mile ten.
Second, run your own race. Comparison is a thief on the road and in the boardroom. Some organizations are faster, better funded, more celebrated. That is their race. Mine is defined by the people I serve and the values I carry: faith, empathy, accountability. I answer to those, not to someone else's leaderboard.
Third, the wall is where the growth is. Nobody gets stronger on the easy miles. Every breakthrough in my career came disguised as something I wanted to avoid: a failing location, an impossible deadline, a team that had lost trust. The wall is not the end of the race. It is the point where the race actually starts teaching you something.
Nobody finishes alone, and nobody has to. Runners talk about the crowds, but the truth is simpler. It is the training partner who shows up at 5 a.m. It is the volunteer handing you water at mile 18. Leadership is the same. My job is not to be the fastest person on the team. My job is to be the water station: to create the conditions where good people can keep going, and to believe in them until they believe in themselves.
My faith anchors all of this. I worship with my family at Lutheran Church of Hope, and I have learned that strength is not the absence of struggle. Strength is what struggle produces when you refuse to quit. I lead with a father's heart because that is what I am: a father of seven who has learned that love and high standards are not opposites. The people you believe in will run farther than they ever thought they could.
So here is my question for you, the one I ask myself on every dark morning before the run starts: What hard problem are you running toward?
Not the one you are managing. Not the one you are hoping solves itself. The one you know, in your gut, has your name on it. Move toward it this week. Take one step. Then another. The road will teach you the rest.