“I’ve done the marathon! Looking back, I thought running 5 miles was brutal. But nothing is unachievable if you put your heart and effort into it. Don’t we all love the feeling that you finally meet your goal, no matter how unrealistic you thought at the start… I still cannot believe I did this today.”
I wrote those words on May 4th, 2024, minutes after crossing the finish line of the Chicagoland Spring Marathon. My hands were still shaking, not from exhaustion, but from disbelief.
Four years ago, I couldn’t run a mile without stopping. I was letting my career at Bayer, raising kids, and the endless daily responsibilities become convenient excuses. “Life happened,” as we like to say, and my health had slowly become a footnote in my own story. One morning, looking at my reflection, I realized I’d stopped being the author of my own transformation.
The First Steps
The decision to start running wasn’t dramatic. There was no epiphany, no life-threatening wake-up call. Just a quiet moment of recognition: I was excellent at optimizing complex AI systems, managing teams, and driving organizational change, but I’d forgotten how to manage the most fundamental system – myself.
Those first runs along the Yangzi River in elementary school came flooding back. Back then, running was simple joy. Somewhere between PhD dissertations and product launches, between FDA submissions and quarterly reviews, I’d lost that simplicity. I decided to find it again.
The first mile felt impossible. My body, after years of desk work and conference rooms, protested every step. But here’s what twenty years in machine learning teaches you: every system can be optimized if you’re patient enough to iterate. So I kept iterating. One mile became two. Two became five.
What surprised me wasn’t the weight I lost, though losing 50 pounds certainly changed things. It was how running began to rewire everything else. The 5 AM alarm that once seemed cruel became a promise I kept to myself. The rain that would have been an excuse became just weather. Each run stripped away another layer of complexity until what remained was beautifully simple: one foot in front of the other.
Mile 20 and Other Truths
Every marathoner will tell you about “the wall” at mile 20. What they don’t tell you is that it’s not really a wall; it’s a mirror. At mile 20, with six miles still to go, you meet yourself without pretense. Your legs are screaming, your mind is negotiating surrender, and every excuse you’ve ever made is lining up for roll call.
I remember that moment clearly during the Chicagoland Marathon. The morning had started cool, but by mile 20, the sun was unforgiving. Around me, other runners were fighting their own battles. Some walked. Some stopped. Some pushed through. And in that shared struggle, I recognized something profound: this is exactly what leadership feels like.
Not the leadership of titles and corner offices, but the real kind, the leadership of showing up when showing up is the hardest thing to do. The leadership of keeping promises to yourself when no one is watching. The leadership that emerges not from being first, but from refusing to stop.
The Continuous Run
The morning after the marathon, I could barely walk. Every muscle screamed in protest, every step down the stairs was a negotiation with gravity. For a full day, my body demanded the rest it had earned. But here’s what surprised me: even unable to run, I found myself planning the next one.
A year before the marathon, when Bayer announced they were sponsoring the World River Run initiative (twenty miles in four days for clean water access) I’d signed up immediately. It was that challenge that showed me I could do more than 5K runs. Those twenty miles became the bridge between “recreational runner” and “maybe I could actually do a marathon.” Sometimes the biggest transformations come from saying yes before you’re ready.
Running had become my way of processing complexity, of finding patterns in problems, of turning entropy into order, not through force, but through rhythm. Even when my legs couldn’t carry me the day after the marathon, my mind was already running.
In AI development, we talk about continuous learning, systems that keep improving even after deployment. Life, I’ve learned, works the same way. The marathon wasn’t a destination; it was a checkpoint. The real achievement wasn’t the medal or the time. It was discovering that the person who couldn’t run a mile four years ago had been carrying a marathoner all along.
Today, when young data scientists ask me about career growth or managing complexity, I tell them about running. Not because everyone needs to run a marathon, but because everyone needs to find their version of that first impossible mile. Whether it’s learning a new programming language, taking on a stretch project, or having that difficult conversation, growth lives on the other side of what feels impossible.
As I write this, I’m training for my next race. Not because I need to prove anything anymore, but because running has taught me something essential: we’re all capable of more than we imagine. Sometimes it just takes 26.2 miles to remember that.
Have you found your impossible mile yet? What would happen if instead of explaining why you can’t, you simply took the first step?
For everyone standing at the starting line of their own transformation, the hardest step is the first one. After that, it’s just one foot in front of the other.
If this resonates, see Life Lessons from Machine Learning for how AI and human learning mirror each other.