Speed Running

You are rushing to the top of something you may not have the strength to stand on, skipping every optional path, every conversation, every detail that is not strictly required to reach the end. Speed running. Get to the finish, skip everything skippable.

You are doing it to your life.

It feels like efficiency, like drive, like a man with somewhere to be. But speed running your life has two costs, and they are not the small ones you think you are trading away. They are the exact things you are rushing to get.

The first is in the work. Move too fast through a task and you make errors — that part is obvious. But the deeper cost is not the mistake. It is that haste skips the reps that build the underlying strength, and you arrive at the height you were sprinting toward without the muscle required to stay there.

You can rush to a summit you have no capacity to hold. The very speed that got you up is the reason you cannot remain — you skipped the slow work that builds the strength to sustain altitude, so you reach the top already falling off it. The shortcut to the peak quietly removed the thing that lets you keep the peak.

The second cost is in people, and it is worse, because it does not grow back.

When you speed run, people become obstacles or instruments — things to get through or get something from on the way to your finish line. You stop being curious about them. You extract what you need and move. And it works, in the narrow sense: you keep your pace. But that will be a summit you stand on alone. You climbed over everyone instead of with them, and now you are at the top you wanted with no one to turn to, holding a reputation made of nothing but the attainment itself.

That kind of legacy is thin, and thin things break. A name built only on what you achieved, with no real relationships underneath it, has nothing to hold it up when the achievement wobbles. Treat people as commodities and you may reach the top — but you will get there alone, admired by no one who actually knows you, and one bad season away from discovering that a reputation with no people in it was never load-bearing.

Both failures come from the same lie: that the details you are skipping are optional. They are not the optional path. They are the path. The strength is built in the reps you want to rush. The relationships are made in the moments you want to skip. The depth of a life is not at the finish line — it is in exactly the parts speed running teaches you to discard.