I ' ve done 131 marathons. In all that time, I ' ve never once handed someone a business card on a run. And yet running has done so much for my career.
There ' s a study that explains why. Researchers at LinkedIn, MIT, Stanford and Harvard tracked more than 20 million people over five years to figure out where job opportunities come from. The natural assumption is that close contacts matter most, the people who know us best.
Instead, it ' s the people on the edges of our lives, the acquaintances we see occasionally, whose worlds don ' t quite overlap with ours. Those loose connections turn out to be the ones that move careers. The people closest to us already know everything we know. They move in the same circles, hear about the same openings, read the same rooms. It ' s the person one step removed who brings something we ' d never have found on our own.
I didn ' t need a study to tell me that. Running built me that network years ago, one start line at a time, spread over countries, industries and time zones. I just call them running friends.
Think about who shows up to a race. Surgeons, teachers, accountants, students, and every so often a CEO who nobody recognises. Job titles don ' t survive the start line. Everyone is cold, everyone is a bit nervous, and everyone is about to spend the next few hours suffering together. I ' ve always thought that ' s the most honest place in the world. Nobody fakes their way through kilometre 35; that ' s why the friendships stick.
It ' s not just me romanticising it. Run clubs have exploded, membership jumped nearly 60 % in 2024, and it ' s not only weekend joggers anymore. Founders, investors, executives: a lot of them have given up on the networking dinner in favour of a group run. Venture capital run clubs are meeting in London parks before work now, whole communities of founders and operators who ' d rather log five kilometres together than trade small talk over warm wine. Ask anyone who runs, and they ' ll say the same thing: trust builds differently after suffering next to someone at 6am. The road shows how a person acts when things get hard, and that ' s worth more than any pitch. No handshake offers the same.
One of the biggest relationships of my career started exactly like that. I was training for a marathon overseas and got talking to another runner who happened to be a senior executive. We didn ' t talk business; we talked splits and blisters and how much the last long run had hurt. The professional side came later, and it was easy, because by then we knew each other. There was no angle to it, no favour being set up. We were just two people trying to get through the same training block, and the trust was already there by the time work ever entered the conversation.
The running connection I ' m proudest of, though, has nothing to do with work at all. Through people I ' d met on the road, I came to know a young orphan in Nigeria, and a few of us pulled together to support him. What started as a bit of help became something steadier over time, and today he doesn ' t just get by. He races. He ' s got his own start lines now. None of that came from a boardroom or a business card. It came from a group of runners who happened to care.
Some weeks the schedule borders on absurd. I remember prepping for a Commercial Review in West Africa, a 14-hour trip from Johannesburg, with Comrades, all 90 kilometres of it, sitting exactly one week away. There ' s no clever system for juggling a job like mine, a family, and a training load like that. I just protect what matters and make peace with the rest. Running taught me that, the same way it taught me that consistency beats talent nearly every time.
Nobody finishes 131 marathons on ability alone. I finished mine by showing up, again and again, on the mornings I would rather not have. Careers work the same way. So do friendships.
A lot of those early mornings, my son was next to me. We ' ve trained together, raced together, fallen apart together at the end of long ones. That ' s the real reason I keep doing this.
Not the contacts, not the medals. The mornings with him.
So, given the choice between another evening of small talk and business cards, or a cold early run with people who ' ll still be there next week, I know which one I ' d pick. The best relationships I ' ve built weren ' t handed to me across a table. They were earned somewhere around 5am, on the road.
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