You Can't Run a Marathon on Willpower Alone
- May 21
- 5 min read
I told a room full of business owners something ridiculous yesterday.
I told them I could probably run a marathon tomorrow.
I should give you some context. I'm a little overweight. I have osteoarthritis in my knee. I haven't run in about 15 years. I said it completely straight-faced.
The room laughed. Someone said "no you can't."
I said "you're not the boss of me. I've got grit. I've got willpower."
More laughter. Then I asked: why is that funny?
Nobody in that room thought willpower was going to get me through 42 kilometres. We all know that a body that hasn't trained can't just wake up one day and decide to run a marathon without serious consequences. Months of conditioning your cardio AND your strength. A real, tactical plan in order to achieve your goal. Progressive load over time.
That's what a marathon takes.
But we spend our whole adult lives expecting our brains to do exactly that.
Yesterday I spoke to the Cochrane Business Network. The room had small business owners, team leads, frontline workers, and parents in it. A lot of them were all 4 at once.
Partway through the session I ran what I call the Cognitive Load Game. I stacked 5 simultaneous demands on the room while they were mid-task, clapping a rhythm with their hands and feet while they had to listen for cue on when to do the rhythm and when not to. Then, without letting them stop, I asked: what is 6x9?
People who could answer that in their sleep froze.
Did they suddenly forget their times tables? Nope. Did they forget how to coordinate their body in the clapping rhythm? Of course not!
It was because there was nowhere left to put the new thing. Their cognitive capacity had hit its ceiling, and most of them had never seen it from that angle before.
In the debrief, person after person said the same thing: "I thought that was just me."
The snapping at the wrong moment (what the F$#@ is wrong with my DAMN SEATBELT?!?!?!).
The decision that felt fine at 2pm and looked like a disaster by dinner (why am I ALWAYS responsible for dinner, why can't you do it for a change?!?!?).
The 3am replay (hello insomnia my old friend).
The Tuesday morning version of yourself that you just can't seem to find again by Thursday afternoon.
The human brain has real capacity limit to what it can hang on to and what gets forgotten in order to survive.
It’s interesting that this wasn’t a topic we were taught in school. EVER. Like not one class, course or curriculum on how to regulate your emotions in high pressure situations. Not one leadership training about how complex and depleting the balance of work life, home life and personal life could be when you hit the C-Suite and how important boundaries would be.
Not one orientation for becoming a functioning adult covered how to actually maintain the cognitive system running all of it.
We learned content (anyone still remember what BEDMAS stands for?). We learned skills (I can still change a tire in under 10 mins, seriously a great skill - thanks Dad!).
The system those skills run on? We were left to figure that out alone.
There are 9 executive functioning skills governing everything we do. Starting things. Finishing them. Keeping your mouth shut in a hard meeting when you know you should. Making a clear decision at 4pm when you've already made 200 that day. Regulating your emotions when someone at home needs you and you have nothing left in the tank to give.
Even just recognizing your capacity limits BEFORE it’s too late and actually asking your partner for help (no one is a mind reader so let’s get over that noise. They’re either more intuitive naturally or it was literally emotionally beaten into them and that comes with a whole other quietly brewing, resentfully stewing tightly wound ball of problems for your therapy sessions down the road).
Every one of those skills is trainable. And almost none of us have ever deliberately trained them.
A paramedic in the room previously told me there is almost nothing built to support burnout in frontline work. Not real proactive support. Not the kind that addresses what is actually happening in the brain when you're running on adrenaline and compassion fatigue for years at a stretch. So you're telling me, we don’t care to support the mental health and well being of the people showing up that literally save our lives each and every day? Make it make sense. SMDH.
An accountant said he watches teams struggle with capacity every tax season. Not because they're bad at their jobs. Because nobody accounts for the cognitive cost of sustained high-stakes work, month after month, with no real recovery built in.
A realtor said she wanted to bring this into her brokerage before the next high-pressure market cycle hits. Because she recognized the pattern. She'd seen what that season does to people.
These weren’t people who lacked drive, quite the opposite! They’re people who had been running hard for a long time without ever having been shown how to train for the marathon race of life they were already in.
Now I’m not talking about a list of tips, nor am I talking about a wellness program that tells you to sleep more and drink water and be grateful. Ain't no one got time for that in today's modern, busy life. But seriously, sleep and hydration are legit your 2 most critical survival tools so have a cat-nap and another glass of water, coaches orders!
I’m talking about the specific, learnable skills that determine how much cognitive fuel you have, how fast you burn through it, and whether your brain can actually recover between demands. Skills that, once you can see them, you can’t unsee in your own life.
We did 3 body reset tools in that session. One of them, the physiological sigh, takes about 8 seconds and can be done sitting at your desk. Several people in the room physically exhaled in a way that told me they had not taken a real breath in hours and they felt lighter.
That’s not a wellness tip but rather your nervous system coming back online. Simple, easy and ridiculously effective!
Look, you’re already running the marathon. Most of you have been for years. The question isn’t whether it’s hard (cue the weighted blanked, Netflix binge watching and popcorn as my coping mechanisms when I feel like I’m drowning).
The question is whether you have ever actually trained for it.
Willpower got you here. As a woman who has driven though life on it can promise you this, it won’t be enough to carry you through what’s coming down the road.
Cognitive fitness training is the preparation you never got. And I'm here to tell you, it's not too late to start.
If any of this is landing for you, I would love to talk.
Jamila Godfrey is a Brain Fitness Coach and founder of Village of Play in Cochrane, Alberta. villageofplay.com
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