You Can Complete a Marathon With Sprints and Crawls

You know, I was thinking… You don’t have to run a marathon at one pace, and you don’t have to build a business at one speed either.

The hustle-culture people will tell you consistency is everything. Wake up at 5 a.m. Hit the gym. Meditate. Journal. Grind for 12 hours. Repeat. Every day. Forever. Until you either succeed or die.

That sounds exhausting. Because it is.

Some weeks you sprint. Eighty hours, fueled by caffeine and a vision. You knock out a month’s worth of work in three days and feel invincible. Those weeks are magic.

Then there are the crawl weeks. The ones where getting out of bed feels like a negotiation. Where you stare at your to-do list like it personally wronged you. Where the best you can manage is one email, one phone call, and a half-hearted attempt at a blog post before you tap out.

The myth is that the sprint weeks are when the real work happens and the crawl weeks are failures. They’re both part of the same race. The people who finish are the ones who kept moving. Sometimes sprinting, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling toward a finish line they couldn’t even see.

I’ve had crawl months. Months. And every time, I thought it meant something was broken. It didn’t. It meant I was tired. It meant I was recalibrating. It meant the next sprint was loading.

If you’re in a crawl right now, keep crawling. The finish line doesn’t care about your pace. It only cares that you showed up.

One caveat…this does not apply to Elon Musk. He has been sprinting since 1995.

Heritage Films produces personal documentary films for families across the United States and the world. We’ve been sprinting and crawling since day one. Still moving. Always will be.