Running at the Wrong Speed

Three distinctions that help you set a pace your work — and your life — can actually carry.

There is a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t announce itself dramatically. It just accumulates — quietly, steadily — until one day it collects everything you owe.

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The first time I noticed it, I was a teenager watching my high school band director run at a pace that seemed almost superhuman.

For him, spring meant designing the fall marching show while still finishing the indoor concert season and academic year-end reports. Summer meant recruiting drill coaches, booking buses, locking in competition schedules, and getting bodies onto practice fields. Fall meant teaching the show itself — performances every Friday night, competitions on Saturdays, sectional and full rehearsals and field practices every day, and the administrative weight of it all pressing down on top of the regular teaching schedule. Then Christmas concerts. Then January.

January was always the crash. Sick, depleted, running on whatever reserve had somehow survived the autumn. I watched two different directors in two different schools follow the same pattern. The pace was impressive. It was also a trap.

Years later, teaching in England, I walked into the same trap myself. No marching band — but a full teaching load, daily extracurriculars, weekend concerts, instrumental lessons stacked end to end. I told myself it was different. It wasn’t. After three years, I crashed too.

What I learned — slowly, and not without cost — is that pace and intensity are not the same thing. You can work with great intensity for a season. But the pace you set across the whole year is either one you can sustain, or one that will eventually collect what it’s owed.

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You know the feeling. The calendar is full, the week starts with intention, and by Thursday the decisions are slower and the weight has quietly concentrated on you. You reset over the weekend and rebuild the same week again. Nothing is obviously broken — but the quality doesn’t consistently hold, and somewhere underneath you know it. That is not a capacity problem. It is a pace problem. And pace is one of the most under-examined decisions a leader makes — which means it is also one of the most available ones. Every leader can learn to set a pace that serves their work and their life by paying attention to three simple distinctions that separate performance from sustainability. Sustainable pace is not a retreat from excellence; it is where Joyful Excellence is built and sustained.

Distinctions that diagnose the pace gap

Most of us know, somewhere beneath the surface, that we are running faster than we can sustain. We feel it on Sunday evenings. We feel it in the way small tasks suddenly feel enormous. But knowing and naming are different things, and we rarely stop long enough to name it clearly.

The first distinction is this: there is a difference between the pace that earns admiration and the pace that can be carried across a full year. Impressive pace draws attention. Sustainable pace builds something. The problem is that the admiration we receive for the impressive pace makes it very hard to slow down, even when we can feel the cost accumulating.

There is also a subtler force at work. Many leaders have quietly tied their sense of worth to their output — so slowing down does not just feel inefficient. It feels like failure. When you name that honestly, the gap between sustainable pace and impressive pace stops being a performance problem. It becomes a clarity problem. And clarity is something you can actually work with.¹

Distinctions that calibrate to capacity

Once you have named the gap, the next question is practical: what does your actual capacity look like? Not your aspirational capacity. Not what you believe you should be able to carry. What can you honestly sustain across a full week, month, and year — including the slow seasons, the difficult seasons, and the seasons when life makes extra demands?

Most leaders have never done this calculation. They set their pace based on what the role requires — or what colleagues appear to be doing — rather than on what they can genuinely carry without compounding debt. But capacity is not a fixed number. It shifts with season, age, circumstance, and the competing demands of home and work and community.²

The adjustment is not dramatic. It is usually small and deliberate: protecting a genuine break, resisting the meeting that should have been an email, finishing Thursday without carrying Friday’s weight home. Calibration is not withdrawal. It is precision. And precision, as any conductor will tell you, is a form of excellence.³

Distinctions that protect momentum

Here is the counterintuitive truth about sustainable pace: it does not slow you down. It is what keeps you moving. The leader who crashes every January and spends six weeks recovering does not produce more over the course of a year than the leader who never crashes at all. The band director I watched was not an extraordinary producer of music. He was a depleted human being doing heroic recovery work every winter.

Researchers Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, who spent decades studying sustained high performance, found that what separates long-term excellence from short-term intensity is not effort — it is the deliberate management of energy.⁴ Momentum is not speed. Momentum is continuity — the uninterrupted accumulation of effort over time, built on the rhythm of expenditure and recovery rather than sustained maximum effort.⁵ And the greatest threat to continuity is not insufficient intensity. It is unsustainable pace.

Protecting momentum means treating your capacity as a resource worth stewarding, not a limit to overcome. It means building rest into the design of your year rather than collapsing into it when you have no other option. It means trusting that the pace you can sustain is not a lesser pace. It is the one that will still be producing excellent work five years from now.

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What those band directors — and I, at the time — failed to see is this: the pace you are running is not just something that happens to you. It is a decision. Which means it is yours to make differently.

That shift matters. Not because pace is a productivity problem to solve, but because the people and work entrusted to you deserve a leader who is still standing strong in year five — not one who is doing heroic recovery work every January. Treating your capacity as something worth stewarding is not self-protection. It is the kind of leadership that builds something lasting.

You were not built to impress indefinitely. You were entrusted to contribute over the long arc. So decide what you can sustain — and lead from there.

Sustainable pace is not a concession for those who fall behind. It is the condition under which Joyful Excellence takes hold and endures.

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