It’s a Sprint Not a Marathon: The Case for High Intensity Work
- Jon Schipp
- 20 hours ago
- 3 min read
Many of us have heard the phrase, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint”. It’s well meaning, but misguided. You may have even heard it from a manager, usually when you’re excited, ambitious, or pushing toward something meaningful. The intention is good. It’s meant to prevent burnout, encourage pacing, and promote thoughtful execution over making mistakes.
High intensity work often leads to greater accomplishments, deeper purpose, and ultimately greater job satisfaction.
But high intensity work does not inherently lead to burnout. Poor pacing does. Mismanaged energy does. Not making an impact does. In fact, the oppose is true. High intensity work often leads to greater accomplishments, deeper purpose, and ultimately greater job satisfaction.
High performance requires intensity in short, meaningful bursts — followed by recovery.
If you are outcome driven; if you care about shipping products, solving customer problems, and generating impact, you don’t want to stroll through your work like a marathoner. You want to move with focused urgency. Focused urgency isn’t “work more.” It’s work intensely when it matters, recover when it doesn’t, and reserve energy for moments where speed changes outcomes.
It means working with greater purpose, focus, and autonomy. If you have worked with founders, you know this is the modus operandi. This is what it takes.
Sports Analogy
Marathons are slow by design. They require endurance, not explosiveness. The average marathon takes over four hours: it's a sustained, measured, low-intensity effort.
A sprint is the opposite. The most iconic sprint event, the 100m dash, lasts about 16 seconds for the average athlete. It demands massive motor recruitment, explosive energy, and near-total effort. And because the intensity is so high, the duration must be short.
Humans cannot sprint for four hours. Work is no different. High performance requires intensity in short, meaningful bursts — followed by recovery.
A better analogy than running is training periodization which is how athletes structure the appropriate doses of stress to improve performance. Stress to the body creates a stimulus for the body to adapt, or super-compensate, if the body is able to recover from the stress.
A typical powerlifter training block is built around predictable waves:
Low-stress work — technique, volume, habit
Moderate-stress work — development, refinement, progression
High-stress work — peak performance, PR attempts, competition effort
Someone who works out 6–7 days a week at the same relative intensity is exercising, not training. Exercise maintains. Training improves. Improvement requires stress that pushes capacity, followed by recovery to adapt.
Work is the same.
A person who “grinds” 7 days a week is like someone doing light workouts daily; busy, active, burning calories, but not really progressing. Stagnant. A high-output team is one that cycles intensity intentionally.
A person who “grinds” 7 days a week is like someone doing light workouts daily; busy, active, burning calories, but not progressing.
How do I Apply this in Practice?
Here’s the part most people miss, intensity is a tool, not a mode.You don’t stay in intensity. You deploy intensity.
Working intensely in practice means structuring your effort around strategic bursts of focused execution followed by deliberate recovery and recalibration. It’s interval training for your brain and output.
First, identify when intensity matters. When should you work intensely? Here's some examples of sprint worthy work:
Deadlines with high business impact or visibility
Product launches
Competitive window, or market differentiation
Time-sensitive activities that drive alignment, or use of budget
Content creation
Product discovery & customer research
Deep problem solving
Next, make sure you have all the inputs needed to work intensely, and to allocate the time to do it. Here are a few practical examples
Plan ahead to have the information needed to work off of
Time-box work on your calendar
Remove disruptions such as notifications and unimportant meetings
Don't let calendars slow you down; pick up the phone
Allocate most valuable meetings back to back
An example of working intensely when it comes to product research is talking to as many customers, analysts, SMEs, and partners as you can in 3-4 days. Pack your calendar tight, so you're jumping from one conversation to the next. It's exhausting but you will have condensed what is normally 3-4 weeks of paced work into a few days and you will be able to synthesize that information to drive direction, alignment, and development much sooner.
Finally, plan your recovery. After 3-4 days of high-intensity work, have a low-intensity day of following up on e-mails, reading relevant articles or watching Youtube videos. Or maybe even take a vacation. In the process, be sure to measure the quality of your work and the outcomes. You are likely to see, and feel that working intensely has allowed you to create clarity, remove blockers, drive momentum and ship faster.
As you work more intensely, you will also adapt and get better and better about solving hard problems. It's a gift that will continue to propel you forward.
Comments