Hey there.
I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor, creator
of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm going to share with you a story
and philosophy, and that is how Iron Man doing
Iron Man races made me a better business person.
And the truth is, is over the last few years.
Triathlon and specifically Ironman distance
races have literally pushed me to a level.
And so many of you guys have asked me to share that journey
and my takeaways and kind of what are the new philosophy
and beliefs that I've adopted through that training process?
So that's what I would share with you.
Be sure to stay with End,
because the other question I get asked all the time is
what are my favorite business books?
I mean, tell you how to get access to the complete list
that I shared with my cousin who is just starting off in business.
And I sat down and did the work to write out
all the different books and why they were so important.
I want to give you that as a gift, but let's get into it
and so my journey
to Ironman
wasn't like I woke up one day or I put it on my vision board
and I was like, I want to do an Ironman.
It was literally a reluctant journey.
You know, for me,
I always judge people wearing spandex on road bikes.
Don't don't get mad at me. I apologize.
I'm one of those people now.
But there was just something about me
growing up as a skateboarder and a snowboarder
that any time I saw grown
men riding around in spandex, I just thought, that's weird.
I'm not that's that's not me. I don't know.
Okay, maybe they're having fun.
And so much so that I didn't even want to road
bike until I was in my thirties like I literally was.
I ran. I always ran.
I was like,
you know, I ran marathons and you know, I'd run five
K, ten K with friends. And it was kind of my thing.
If I go to New City, I'd ask, you know,
who's interested in going for a run?
It was a great way to see the city,
but I wasn't into biking and I couldn't swim.
So like none of those things, even my best friend
Nick always had it on his vision board.
Some day he just wrote Kona Ironman like you had our stand.
We were not fit.
We we never done anything long distance.
This is like such a crazy thing for even him to say.
I remember hear him saying that going like
that's nuts.
Like does he realize how much work would be required?
And I mean, I'm looking at this guy, he's
not the healthiest looking dude at the time.
And but yeah, he just kept saying like, that's my,
you know, maybe when I have more time,
maybe when,
you know,
the business gets to a certain level,
maybe when the kids are a little older like this will be a thing.
And what happened was, is we we ended up going for a run one day.
And one of my buddies, Jared, says,
you know, you should really get a road bike.
I just bought a bike. Nick's got a bike.
And I was like, oh, man.
And his neighbor Tim was selling his bike.
So I said, Well, whatever Tim wants.
Is Tim's bike good enough? He's like, Yeah.
I was like, Cool, I'll just buy Tim's bike.
And literally the first time I ever showed up, I'm
wearing like workout shorts and a t shirt helmet
on a road bike, you know, position,
and they're all like in their shorts, in whatever outfit.
And we go for a 20 k bike ride and it was actually a lot of fun.
It was just sunny outside, early morning,
cool roly poly type of hills.
And then after the bike ride, we ended up doing a5k run
and on the run, Jared says to me, Hey, if we did a thing,
it was like a 650 meter swim, right?
Not far, you know. Now it's crazy.
I say that today, incredibly far for me at the time,
I shouldn't even said that this is
this is the whole philosophy of this.
This content is,
you know, sometimes things you do just seem so small at the time.
But anyway, 650 felt like forever.
I was like, That's almost a kilometer.
I haven't even swam ten meters. How would I do that?
And and there was a race coming
up, a sprint triathlon, and we committed to it.
And I remember we went a few days later,
we went into the pool and Nick swam to the other end.
He had to stop, hold himself on the ledge.
Dan swam back. We're talking 50 meters.
I swam I think four times.
I was like, How many times do we need to swim to equivalent
to sprint triathlons?
And it was like, I don't know, 16 or something like that.
And I was like, Holy moly, we're going to drown.
This is an open water ocean swim.
It wasn't a pool swim,
but we had, I think, five weeks to figure it out.
We bought the books, we watched YouTube videos,
and that started the journey.
We did that race, then we did a second sprint,
and then it was the year later we decided to do our first half
distance Ironman Cove.
It happens,
all the races get canceled and we decided to keep doing it.
We hire a crew,
we hired a race team, we told Ironman we were doing this.
They actually were like super supportive.
They sent us a whole bag of swag and we did the race.
There was five of us.
We did our own unsupported, unofficial.
We called it Corona man race.
And then as soon as we were done,
couldn't even enjoy it for 10 seconds.
Our coaches next year we're doing a full distance.
So we did 70.3 next year we're doing one 40.6.
Just so you all know, at one 40.6 is 38, 100 meter swim, 3.8
kilometers, 180 kilometer bike ride, and then a full
marathon, 42.2 kilometer
marathon back to back.
And it was crazy, just training and training and training.
And then I, I crash on my bike.
I got hit by a car.
I cut my wheel, my heel open.
I'm actually going to slice in the video of that whole journey.
Just you guys can get a sense of what I went through
last year in that whole journey because it's going to
these are the lessons I took from that moment
and we ended up doing the race and I finished 12 hours, 12 minutes.
It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life,
and I'm doing it again this year and there's just something about it
that I want to share with all of you guys to hopefully inspire.
It doesn't matter if you're,
you know, just getting off your couch, trying
to do your first five K, you're just trying to get back to the gym
or you're rehabbing an injury or whatever it is, wherever you're at.
I want to encourage you to do something sweat a little bit
every day.
Every day that will build momentum.
But here's here's some of the big takeaways for me.
Number one is work ahead of the big moment.
So what I mean by that,
the thing that I found most fascinating with triathlon racing
and racing in general is by the time the race comes,
all of the hard work was already done.
There's nothing left to do other than race.
So a lot of people think like, okay,
I got to get ready for this moment.
And in that moment I'm going to like my
and that's going to be the thing.
But the truth is, is if you train properly
all the hard work, the heavy lifting that'll happen
before the training camps, the big weekends, literally, like
I pretty much did, equivalent in a four day
weekend, double the amount of volume for the race.
Right. Just just like but not all at the same time.
Right? Let your body recover.
Do some more volume.
You push your muscles, push your endurance, work
different parts of your energy systems.
And it's so cool to know that the
that you prep for the moment and I think in business this is
this is what I have to remind my team
this is what I remind
all my coaching clients is the work you're doing today is getting you
ready to be the person who can deal with the next set of challenges.
You don't realize it.
Whatever's going on
today, it's the sharpening, the swords, designing the process.
It's hiring the right people.
It's being fiscally responsible.
It's it's crafting your campaigns.
It's all the things you're doing today.
All of that is getting you ready to be able to take advantage
of the opportunity when it shows up.
When race day happens, all the work was done.
I've got one job today and that's to race.
It's just to focus and smile.
That is one of my favorite things my coach said to me.
He said, Smile, smile, smile.
He says, I don't have the data to prove it,
but I'm pretty sure it's going to make you faster.
And he's right at minimum.
I get everybody else smiling.
I smile at every person
I'm going by and we're going to have some fun.
Race days here don't have to stress all the heavy work was done.
It's going to be what's going to be an in business.
It's exact same thing.
So when you're going through stuff, when you're doing the work,
when you're putting in the reps in your business,
just know it's because you're getting ready
for the moment when you're going to be needed.
Number two 360 Review.
So one of the things that's unique
I think to triathlon and maybe there's, you know,
like decathlon and other stuff is the multiple disciplines.
And what I love about the multiple disciplines, it's
not even the bike swimming and running.
And you know, for me, swimming, learning to swim.
I just recently did a cross lake swim
and it was 4200 meters, the longest one I've ever done,
like across the lake that I live on.
I just kept looking at it because someday
I'm going to cross this lake and I did it.
So not only is it the disciplines, but it's also the other parts
of it.
It's the recovery, it's the hydration, it's the fueling.
And when you when when you start doing
these longer distance triathlon, you realize it's not just that one
discipline, it's everything around is the 360 review.
It's where do you have a deficit?
Because your ability to perform
is going to be directly correlated to your weakest deficit.
So if you want to have a great army in time,
but you can't swim very strong, you've got to work on your swim.
If you can't run very good, you got to work on your right.
If you have a weak bike, you had to work on your bike.
That's going to have such an impact.
Some people, it's transition time.
Some people as they don't know to hydrate properly.
You know, a lot of people see these, you know, finishes
where you have an athlete at the end of the race
and they're just wobbling and breaking down.
And some of them fall to the ground.
Some of them fall to the ground right before the finish line.
And they don't finish and then they get passed by everybody.
And people go, Oh, my gosh, that must've been so hard.
He, he, he, like, suffered so much.
But the truth is, is
it could have just been a fuel or hydration problem, meaning that
back when he started, he felt so good,
he didn't consume enough calories, he didn't drink enough water.
He didn't bring in enough electrolytes.
And what happens is the human body can't replenish those things
you burn.
You know, for me, 800 calories an hour,
my body can only consume 400.
So if I forget to fuel, if I forget to take
in the electrolytes, it's very hard for my my GI
system, my digestive system to make up for it.
And then it competes, especially when you start looking at these,
you know, ten, 12, 13, 14 hour races, you can't make it up.
And that's what happens.
Just like in business, if you neglect the code base,
if you neglect your marketing, if you neglect the culture,
if you neglect the market, the marketing system,
all these things, your sales culture, your sales training,
if you neglect these three six the area of your business,
then you're going to wake up one day and have a major fault,
a major problem in that area of the business.
And it's going to it's going to hurt.
It's going to cause you a setback.
Hopefully it doesn't take you out of the race,
but it's going to require you to stop, reassess, regroup,
fix the problem, fix the weakness
so that you can keep driving forward.
And that's what I love about triathlon, the 360 review.
Number three, mental toughness.
I think anybody that even
just considers or attempts to do anything like an Ironman
and honestly any physical endurance,
they'll quickly realize that the work is up here.
It's the real estate.
In between the years, it's the most valuable.
I've I've known friends that are incredibly talented
athletes, but the mental game gets to them.
Their ability to push themselves past what they believe
their body can do
is what stops them from performing and getting beat by other people
that have a stronger mental fortitude.
One of the quotes among many that I look to
is that we want to do hard things until hard things become easy
right?
That's why I said earlier and I kind of stopped myself
because 650 meter swim at the time felt like forever distance.
Like, that's crazy.
Now that's like
not even that's kind of a warm up when I go to the pool, right?
And it's just again, do hard things until hard things become easy.
But more importantly,
especially as it comes to business, is in business.
We want to create challenges on ourselves,
not through the business.
The business will do that automatically
because we want to become stronger. Right. Right.
There's this there's a great, you know,
philosophy that, you know, hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.
And if you want to push yourself,
you want to create something special in the world.
You want to build this empire.
Hey, you want to shine your light is is as bright as possible.
You're going to have to do hard things
because doing those hard things will make you stronger.
Steel sharpens steel, you know, no pressure, no diamonds.
And when I was doing that race, the full distance Ironman
and I'm on the marathon portion of this and it's 100 Fahrenheit
outside, okay, 30 something Celsius.
And we're literally going aid station, aid stations
putting ice on us, making sure we don't dehydrate,
make sure we don't pass out from the heat.
And it's like the last 13 kilometers.
I mean, it was crazy.
And what I had to go to where I learned
there was another gear for me
that I've used in my business since then is the big bag of lies,
the big bag of lies.
And I just kept thinking
this to myself because I knew if I had to go to that dark place
where it got that tough, the pain cape
that I needed a why that was it was going to pull me forward.
And what I did is I made a list of every person
that ever passed away in my life,
from my friend Mandy to my buddy Kevin, to my,
my Uncle Daniel, to Scott, to all these people
that I knew.
Regardless of how much pain I was in in that moment,
that their family or themselves
would trade spaces with me without a question.
And I just ran for them.
I kept lifting my feet for them.
I just kept going.
I literally would cycle through the big bag of whys.
I just go, I'm doing this for you.
I'm doing this for you, I'm doing this for you.
I'm not going to walk. I'm not going to walk.
I'm just going to keep going.
And that pulled me through.
And I've used this so many times in my business.
You know, I have a whole list of
I have a note file
that's got all these reasons why I do what I do
so that when it gets tough, when it gets challenging,
I go to that list and I remind myself the why.
Because if you're so focus and you're in the force
and you don't step back to look or you're in the trees
and you step back to look at the force,
you might forget why you started in the first place.
And then you
make it all about yourself and you get super self-centered.
You spiral down.
I want to encourage you to make it about other people.
Look externally to you, and when your business life
gets tough, go to your big bag of whys.
That's what I want to invite you to do.
And that to me will be a game changer for you.
So quick recap three big lessons on how our man made me
a better entrepreneur.
Number one is work ahead of the big moment.
When the race happens, all the heavy lifting is done.
Number two 360 review.
Look for your weak spot and fix them.
And number three, your mental toughness side of it.
Look for your big bag of whys.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I want to share with you my number one resource, my top 25
entrepreneurial books
handpicked, selected, actually originally
designed this for my cousin.
He was a young entrepreneur, 17 years old, starting in business.
He asked me What book should I read?
And I was like, one book?
There are so many.
So I literally sat there on a flight
to hours of just like collecting all my thoughts and putting down
why I think this book in this order, in this sequence
and I put in my category and is my gift to you.
So click the link below to download your copy of My Top Entrepreneur
All books and as per usual,
I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business. And I'll see you next week.