(This article was published originally on my Substack on the 7th March, 2025)
Hello, this is Eduardo and I’m an Engineering Leader and Certified Running coach. This is the first article on the Leadership Endurance newsletter, a source for leadership, endurance sports, performance and growth best practices in the confluence of these worlds.
Endurance isn’t just about physical stamina—it’s about showing up, day after day, when the excitement fades and the grind begins. In leadership, as in endurance sports, it’s easy to be strong when everything is going well. Adversity is another opportunity to build authentic and resilient leadership—when the path forward is uncertain, the setbacks keep coming, and motivation wanes.
Through tough times, when you’ve been laid off, facing career turbulence, or hit a professional wall, is when your endurance skills start showing up. It’s not just about bouncing back. It’s about staying in the race long enough to see things through. Like the best endurance athletes, the best leaders don’t rely on raw talent. They cultivate adaptability, resilience, and a long-term vision that sustains them beyond the immediate pain.
The Long Game: Leadership as an Ultra-Marathon
In the same way that ultra-marathoners stop to walk to rest or face challenging sections of the race course, successful leaders don’t avoid obstacles; they build the endurance through time to keep moving forward despite them. Having endurance in leadership is about maintaining a clear vision, staying steady amid chaos, and managing emotions under pressure.
Building endurance means developing a mindset that treats leadership as an ultra-marathon or a multi-day adventure, not a sprint. Leaders who endure don’t waste energy fighting every small challenge. Instead, they pace themselves, recover when needed, and focus on the bigger picture. If you’re navigating a career setback, this principle is key. Your leadership journey isn’t defined by one challenging period but by your ability to keep learning and moving forward.
Emotional Resilience: The Secret Weapon of Leaders Who Last
Resilience isn’t about toughing it out through sheer willpower. It’s about having the mental flexibility to handle adversity without breaking. The Survival Guide for Leaders suggests that successful leaders navigate chaos by managing their emotional states, maintaining perspective, and anchoring their identity in something more profound than their job title. This is critical when facing a career setback. You are not your job. You are your skills, values, and ability to contribute—whether inside a company or in your next chapter.
Endurance athletes learn to differentiate between discomfort and real injury. The same goes for leadership. Some setbacks are painful but temporary; others signal a need for a new strategy. The key is knowing which is which.
Leadership Under Pressure: Lessons from Extreme Conditions
In Wilderness Leadership—On the Job, outdoor expeditions are used as training for leadership: decision-making under pressure, balancing risk and knowing when to push versus when to recover. Sometimes, the workplace—or the job market—can feel like the wilderness, the mountains on an ultra-marathon, or the road ahead on a marathon. The conditions are unpredictable. But the best leaders thrive not because they control every variable but because they’ve trained to navigate uncertainty with clarity and composure.
Endurance isn’t just about physical or mental toughness but strategic resilience. Strategic resilience means embracing periods of rest as much as possible and building a support network that keeps you grounded and trusting in your ability to adapt when the terrain shifts unexpectedly.
Stay in the Race
Endurance isn’t glamorous. It’s not the fast sprint, the viral success, the overnight win. It’s the grind. The part where you keep showing up, keep refining, keep adjusting. Whether leading a team through change, rebuilding after a layoff, or striving to sustain long-term excellence, the principles remain the same: adapt, stay emotionally resilient, and trust the process. The leaders who last are the ones who endure.
In times when your path gets tough, remember, this is part of your path; trust in your experience and training and use those resilience skills you’ve built over time.
What advice could you add to this article and repost for your network?