Training plans and investment theses have the same shape

Two weeks out from Ironman Barcelona in 2022, I sat down with my coach and looked at the spreadsheet that had governed the previous eleven months. Eight hundred and some hours of training. Forty-three weeks without a missed session longer than a cold. One fracture in the left foot that I trained around. A family member in hospital. A bad month at work. A good month at work. A hundred small tradeoffs.

We looked at the numbers. We looked at what had compounded. We looked at what had broken. And I said, more to myself than to him: this is the same spreadsheet as an investment thesis.

I have been thinking about that for three years now. Every training cycle I've run since, and every investment I've made, has confirmed the same pattern. Training plans and investment theses have the same shape, they fail in the same ways, and the discipline required to execute one is, as far as I can tell, the same discipline required to execute the other.

The shape

Both are twelve-month bets.

Both start with a hypothesis about what is possible. Sub-10 at Ironman. An AI infrastructure company that reaches €3M ARR. The hypothesis is the cheap part. Anyone can write it down.

Both then require a weekly plan that breaks the hypothesis into very small, boring commitments. Four rides, three runs, one swim. Two customer calls, three build sprints, one finance review. The plan is not the point. The plan is a forcing function.

Both depend on the honesty of the feedback loop. You track the numbers every week. Distance, heart rate, pace, weight, sleep. Revenue, churn, lead velocity, burn. The numbers are not the truth, but they are a good substitute for the truth when your judgment is compromised by exhaustion or enthusiasm.

And both have a single non-negotiable metric that reveals whether the whole thing is working or not. In training it is aerobic efficiency: at the same pace, is your heart rate lower this month than last month. If yes, you are getting fitter. If no, something is wrong. In an investment, it is whether the company is becoming more defensible over time. If yes, the thesis is holding. If no, something has changed.

The common failure modes

Both things fail in the same four ways. I have seen every one of them both in my training log and in companies I have backed.

Doing the visible work and avoiding the boring work. The visible work in training is the hard intervals on the bike. The boring work is zone two running and mobility. The visible work in a startup is shipping features and closing deals. The boring work is instrumentation, churn analysis, and customer success. In both cases, the people who only do the visible work look great for three months and then break down. The people who do the boring work look slower at first and pass everyone else by month six.

Missing the signal that the plan is not working. Your heart rate drifts up at the same pace three weeks in a row. Customer acquisition cost creeps up two quarters running. The numbers are telling you something. Most people ignore them because the story they built around the plan is more comfortable than the story the numbers are telling them. This is how Ironman athletes end up in hospital and startups end up in a bridge round they cannot close.

Protecting the ego over protecting the outcome. An athlete who has committed publicly to a sub-10 goal will sometimes train through a stress fracture because pulling out looks worse than failing. A founder who has raised a €10M seed round will sometimes keep pushing a product nobody wants because pivoting looks like weakness. In both cases the ego cost of the correction is smaller than the ego cost of the failure that follows. Nobody acts like it.

Compounding the wrong thing. You can compound discipline in the wrong direction. An athlete who runs the same exact plan every week with no progression does not get fitter, they just get efficient at the old workload. A company that optimises the same funnel every month without questioning whether it is pointed at the right market does not grow, it just gets efficient at converting the wrong people. The hardest part is knowing when the plan is wrong versus when you need to just finish the plan you committed to.

What translates

The specific techniques that work for one work for the other. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

The weekly check-in ritual. The "what worked, what broke, what changes next week" conversation. In training it is with a coach, in a startup it is with the board or a partner, but the ritual is identical. Thirty minutes. Numbers on the table. One specific commitment for the week ahead.

The willingness to do the same thing, roughly the same way, for longer than feels reasonable. Training adaptations happen on the twelve to sixteen week scale, not the one to two week scale. Business compounding shows up in quarters, not weeks. The people who keep looking at their watch after three weeks and asking whether it is working yet are the people who quit in week four.

The non-obvious value of rest. Deload weeks are not optional. Quiet quarters for a founder are not failure. The recovery is where the adaptation happens. People trained in urgency-culture find this the hardest to internalise.

The honesty about tradeoffs. You cannot train for a sub-10 Ironman and also be the best parent, the best partner, and the best employee. You cannot build a venture-scale company and also preserve the work-life balance you had last year. Pretending otherwise is how the wheels come off in month seven.

The one thing that transfers most

The single biggest carry-over, for me, is the relationship with fatigue.

In the back half of an Ironman block, you are tired most of the time. The question is not whether you are tired, the question is whether today's session is going to happen anyway. Not at full intensity. Not at the level you would hit fresh. But it will happen. Some small forward motion that the plan said would be there, that is there, even though you could reasonably argue it does not need to be.

Running a company is the same. There are weeks where the customer meeting, the investor update, the hard conversation with a direct report, the weekly review, all of it, feel impossible. They are not impossible. They are tired. The plan said they would happen. You do them anyway.

The people who finish Ironman in the time they set out to finish are the people who did not miss those sessions. The founders whose companies compound their way to the twelve-month number are the ones who did not skip those weeks. The discipline is the same. The reward is the same.

Why I am writing this on an investor blog

Because the best founders I back look a lot more like endurance athletes than they look like any stereotype of a tech founder I grew up reading about. They are calm. They are patient. They track things. They rest when it is time to rest. They have a long horizon and a short checklist. They finish what they start.

When I meet a founder like that, I do not need to see the benchmark table. I already know the most important thing about them.