Three days ago I ran my first marathon in my home city of Chicago, which is a challenging experience I highly recommend others to put themselves through.

I’ve been involved in athletics my whole life and served in the Army for years, so I am no stranger to a tough workout, but I’ve never considered myself a runner and this is different kind of workout.

Running a marathon is a process and something that, although I highly recommend going through with a friend or family member, is nonetheless deeply personal.

It’s a long conversation between the two you’s that live inside of you.  The one that is knows that anything is possible and wants to accomplish more, and the other you that would love to sleep in or call it quits at mile 16 because it’s longer than most people run.

This conversation lasts 6-9 months, from the time you start training all the way through the finish line.

There is purity in this process because each runner individually decides to put themselves through it, and has ultimate ownership over the result.

I couldn’t help but see the parallel between this process and the process a real estate investor undergoes on their own journey.

Specifically 5 revelations occurred to me while jogging hundreds of miles over the last 9 months while working to transform from non-runner into marathoner.  As these lightbulbs went off I wrote them down and share them here with you.

1.  One long run, and several maintenance runs

Typical marathon training consists of one increasingly long run per week followed by several short(er) runs per week.

The thought process is that the long run is longer than anything you have experienced before and pushes you past what you are comfortable with and think you can do.

Whereas, the several weekly short runs keep you in shape, keep you loose, and getting the experience of putting in lots of miles while your body recovers from one weekly long run and prepares for the next.

If someone tried to do one long run after another everyday, continuously pushing their limits without scheduled short runs or cross training, they would soon burn themselves out and almost certainly wind up injured.

You never want to go backwards in your training, so the new normal each week on both the short runs and long runs is further than the week before.

In my mind this is exactly the same way I try to approach real estate investing.

First defining the end goal of what I want to accomplish, what the point of all this work will be.  What is my 26.2 miles the real estate world.

Then I can establish the maintenance runs (i.e. deals) that will consistently get me closer to that goal.  Doable deals that I can regularly complete without disrupting the rest of my life (much) and with each one getting me closer to the established goal.

To me, single family and small multi-family investment properties that throw off consistent cash flow are the maintenance runs of the real estate investing process.

A person can stay in shape by just consistently running maintenance runs and similarly, you can pay your bills and have a very comfortable life by doing smaller, manageable deals, but the true growth occurs when you do the long runs or a deal that pushes your comfort zone.

For me personally, the long runs of the real estate investing world are larger multi-family deals that might occur quarterly or bi-annually, but can be anything slightly beyond what a person is used to or feels totally comfortable with.

Initially the long run of real estate might be a 4 unit if you are used to single family homes, and over time might grow into 10 or 100 units with ever more sophisticated financing and partnerships.

The specifics will be different for each investor, but the point of the long run deal is growth and accelerated progress toward your goal, while still maintaining the slow and steady growth with the bread and butter manageable deal flow.

2.  You train while others BBQ

As the marathon training starts to advance, training runs start to take several hours.

Because of the commitment of time and energy, training can occupy a big portion of a runner’s day which requires tradeoffs.

I scheduled most of my long runs on Sundays, and since the race is in October, pretty much each Sunday throughout the summer was spent running.

As I ran through the neighborhoods each Sunday I could smell meat BBQing on grills and could hear the laughter from the back yard gatherings of family and friends.

In that moment, it’s very easy to question your choice to endure pain for some potential long term goal, over a full belly and more time with family and friends.

A person who decides to invest in real estate is inevitably going to be presented with the same dilemma, I know I have.

Your life would probably be just fine without spending the hours necessary to successfully achieve your real estate investing goal, so why would you trade off time with your family or spending money on something that will bring pleasure today for an investment that might not payoff for years?

These are the questions that the real estate investor will be confronted with along the journey and should be ready to answer for themselves.

You don’t have to give up these things completely, but there are trade offs.  Having a clear reason why and a defined plan to get there, makes all the difference, in my opinion, when training for a marathon or working toward investing goals.

3.  The distance keeps increasing, but the pain stays the same

The concept of the new normal can work in both a positive and negative direction.

If a person develops a bad habit like smoking or watching too much TV, they don’t typically start with a pack a day or 5 hours of television at a time.

It starts by having a cigarette with friends socially and over time a new norm is created and a habit is established.  Charles Duhigg shares more about this topic in his book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business if you are interested.

Fortunately, I have found this also works for positive habits and routines.

When I started training for the marathon, my long run was 9 miles and it was extremely challenging and wiped out all of my energy since it was about 3 times as long as what I normally ran when exercising.

Each week the weekly long run increased by a mile, topping out at 20 miles, and the several short runs per week increased as well, with 9 miles turning into a short run by the end of the training.

After experiencing the pain involved in running the first 9 mile run, I thought there is no way that I could endure a 20 mile training run or the 26.2 mile marathon, but the crazy thing is the pain never increased.

My mind and body adapted each week and the effort required to push just a little further stayed relatively constant.

This exact phenomena happens in real estate investing (and I would imagine many other areas of one’s life) as well.

When first starting to toy with the idea of becoming a real estate investor, the thought of doing a massive multimillion dollar multi-family commercial deal is totally overwhelming.

It would be like starting with a marathon.

However establishing this as an end-state goal and backward planning the short and long runs (small and big deals) it will take to deepen your knowledge base and expand your comfort zone over time creates a doable road map.

Very quickly an investor starts to surprise themselves with the knowledge they have accumulated, and the types of deals (and dollar amounts) that have become the new norm.

The deals an investor does 1 year or 5 years into the process are substantially bigger and more complex than what you started with, but the effort and challenges don’t seem to match.

This is because you adapt to handle the new norm.

This occurs without you even realizing it, purely by sticking to your plan.  Just like your ability to go from running 3 miles to 26.2 miles happens almost automatically as well by sticking to a quality training plan.

There are a lot of things in life people can fake and make look good.  Activities in which the results are difficult to measure.

I have always been drawn to other kind of activities.  To me there is something pure about partaking in something that either you do or don’t do, there is no kinda.

It doesn’t matter how much you talk about running a marathon, or plan to run a marathon, or read about it, the only thing that matters is you either run the 26.2 or you don’t.

I believe the same type of purity exists in real estate investing.  There are a lot of people talking about investing, thinking about investing, and “building their power team,” but at the end of the day, you are either doing deals and making progress toward your personal goal or you aren’t, there is no kinda.

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