I ran the Nashville Half Marathon 20 minutes slower than my PR in Washington, DC.
And it was exactly the right call.
That’s not a sentence that comes naturally to me. I’m competitive. I train hard. I show up to races to perform. But there’s a version of that competitiveness that gets you hurt, and I’ve been around long enough to know the difference.
Here’s what actually happened.
The Setup
DC was a controlled environment. Mostly flat, wide roads, steady pacing from start to finish. The kind of course where you lock into your rhythm early and just hold it. I ran 2:18. It was clean, disciplined execution under ideal conditions.
Nashville was a different animal entirely. Rolling hills throughout. Constant elevation changes. No steady rhythm, no locking in, just constant adjustment from mile one to the finish. The kind of course that grinds your calves and quads in a way flat racing never does.
And I showed up to Nashville three weeks removed from a calf injury with a decision already made: I was not going to push.
The Decision
My chiropractor had been clear. Be smart. Don’t chase a time. Protect the longer goal.
Honestly, I probably would have landed there on my own. But having that voice in my head during the back half of the race mattered more than I expected. When you’re in the middle of a run and everything in you wants to push, having already made the decision takes the negotiation off the table.
So I ran a walk-run strategy. More than I normally would. I managed effort instead of pace. I let people pass me that I probably could have stayed with on a different day.
I finished in 2:38.
What That 20 Minutes Actually Means
Here’s what I want to be clear about. That 20-minute gap is not a performance comparison. It’s not evidence that my fitness fell apart or that three weeks off broke me.
It reflects three things. A more demanding course with constant elevation changes that DC simply doesn’t have. Reduced training volume coming off an injury. And a deliberate decision to manage effort rather than race.
My aerobic fitness was not the issue. If you put me on that DC course that same weekend, I’m running close to the same time. Nashville wasn’t a test of what I’d lost. It was a test of whether I could execute under constraint.
And that’s a different kind of discipline entirely.
The Business Parallel
I think about this a lot in the context of how companies make decisions.
The DC race is what most businesses are optimizing for. Ideal conditions, clear runway, steady execution. That’s when the plan works and the numbers hold and everything feels like it’s clicking.
Nashville is everything else. The quarter where a key person leaves. The season where cash gets tight. The growth phase where the old way of doing things stops working. Constant adjustment, no steady rhythm, effort-based decision making instead of executing a clean plan.
The mistake I see most often is companies trying to run Nashville like it’s DC. Holding to the same pace, the same spend, the same headcount plan, even when the conditions have completely changed. Pushing through because pulling back feels like losing.
But pulling back when the conditions call for it isn’t losing. It’s how you stay in the race.
A 2:38 in Nashville, healthy and intact, is worth a lot more than a 2:18 with a torn calf and six months of recovery ahead.
The Longer Game
I have a full Ironman ahead of me. That’s the goal. Nashville was one data point along the way, and a useful one at that. It told me where my body is, what it can handle right now, and what I need to build back toward.
If I had pushed and blown out that calf, the Ironman conversation is over. A three-week inconvenience becomes a six-month setback. That trade-off is never worth it, no matter how good it feels in the moment to compete.
The athletes and the business owners I respect most aren’t the ones who perform perfectly under ideal conditions. Anyone can do that. The ones I pay attention to are the ones who know how to execute under constraint. Who can show up to Nashville, read the course, adjust the strategy, and still finish.
That’s the real skill. Not the PR. Not the perfect quarter.
Knowing when to run your race and when to run a smarter one.
