Last across the line

At the halfway checkpoint of a 57 kilometre ultramarathon, I was doing arithmetic badly. There were tea and biscuits and an agonising distance still to cover.

Seven hours had elapsed. I was trying to work out whether the pace I had left in me would get me to the finish before the cutoff. Going slowly still left a possibility of finishing. I kept going.

I remember the middle of that race more clearly than the start. The start gives you people and excitement. Near the end, there's a line to reach. In between, you can spend a long time doing the work without feeling much closer to the result.

Another slow kilometre barely seems to count from inside it. You still have most of your attention on the kilometres left.

I recognise that feeling in building a company. A launch gives the work a date and an audience. Afterwards come tasks with no ceremony: decisions whose consequences won't be clear for months, work that has to be repeated, progress that doesn't look like an announcement.

Those are difficult days to judge. Working hard can look much the same as going nowhere. Persistence by itself doesn't resolve that uncertainty. A company needs evidence that the work is useful; a race at least gives you a route and a remaining distance.

What the race did make clear was the cost of an impressive pace I couldn't sustain. Every stretch had to leave enough in me for the one after it. There was no benefit in looking strong at a checkpoint I couldn't get beyond.

By the fortieth kilometre, my knee was troubling me. In the last hour, I was mostly occupied with the logistics of getting there. Family were waiting when I crossed the line.

I finished last, fourteen minutes inside the cutoff.

Fourteen minutes is a small margin over that distance. A little later and the same hours of effort would have ended outside the official finish. The result mattered. It was also a very small space in which to fit everything that had happened since the start.

I named the holding company FiftySeven because of that race.

I don't need last place to become a disguised victory over everyone else. At the tea-and-biscuits checkpoint, I didn't know whether I'd finish. I got from there to the line. That is what I want to remember when I see the number.