Digging in the wrong place.

If this email reached you around 2 on Saturday afternoon, I'm probably close to the finish of a race in the Pyrenees, above a small town called Bagà. I hope so, anyway. It was meant to be 100 km, but bad weather made the race directors cut it to 60 km with 3,900 m of climbing. It's my second Ultra Pirineu, and 3 weeks ago I ran a 50K in Sweden as a training run for it. In May 2022 the longest run of my life was 13 km, and they gave me a wooden medal for finishing it.

I was 31 and had been running for a few weeks. I sprinted the last kilometre past a lot of people, finished 80th out of a few hundred, and couldn't quite believe it. That same spring I had already written to a stranger to tell him I was going to run the Barkley Marathons.

The stranger was Dmitry Mityaev. He has won Ultra Pirineu more than once.

Barkley is a race in the hills of Tennessee that very few people have ever finished. I'd watched a documentary about it on YouTube and decided it was mine, without ever having run seriously in my life. My message to Dmitry said: "I want to run Barkley. I'm not a runner at all. But I'm ready to give myself time. 5 years."

He became my coach, and 4 years later he still is.

The first 12 to 18 months were mostly injuries. 2025 was hard in other ways. Work was heavy, and I was ill again and again, the way you are with a 2-year-old at home. I trained less than I wanted to.

Through all of it I followed one plan from one person. I can't name many relationships in my life that have lasted 4 years, work ones included, and I didn't notice this one adding up while it did.

In 2024 I finished 4th at Satilla Trail. I've had a couple of top-20 finishes at UTMB races, Kullamannen among them. Last October I finished my first 100K here in Bagà in 16 hours 38 minutes, and 3 weeks ago I was 5th at Sörmlands, in the 50K I treated as a training run. The only race on the list I sent Dmitry was Barkley.

I'm not running Barkley in 2027. Life has changed, and it's off the plan. But a target that far away got me to take the first steps, and 4 years of steps in one direction have shaped who I am as a person, along with how far I can run. A few weeks ago my friend Sergei, who turns 40 this year, finished the Tor des Géants.

The Tor is 330 km through the Italian Alps with 24,000 m of climbing. It took him over 100 hours on foot, and I'd rather not picture that too closely. Put my 4 years next to his race and they look like nothing.

I don't put them next to his race. He has years of his own behind that finish, and I haven't seen most of them. The only fair comparison I have is the 31-year-old with the wooden medal who thought 13 km was a long way, and against him, the running has worked.

The business started the same year. It has paid back too, just not in the way I expected, and not on the running's schedule.

It began with individual clients from my own network, because as a hiring manager I kept seeing strong people with CVs that undersold them. A Telegram channel followed, then group courses, with a cohort I shut down and a couple of pivots along the way. I've worked at it at least as hard as I've worked at running.

I'm not where I want to be with it yet, and I expect to get there.

My engineering career looked more like the running. I was a curious graduate, and I had people around me who showed me what good looked like long before I could have described it myself. I wrote about one of them, Cliff, in August. With running it was Dmitry, from the first message. In both of them, someone else helped me choose where to spend the years.

In the business, I chose the spot myself, and every pivot meant choosing a new one.

Chris Do said a line in an interview that stuck with me: "I'm patient and I believe in myself." He also used a picture of digging for gold.

Patience only pays when you're digging in the right place, and you can dig well for years and never hit anything if the spot is wrong. I had the patience and the belief in the business. What I didn't have was anyone helping me choose where to dig.

I wrote in August that I don't think you can go out and find a mentor, and I still think that. What you can do is spend time where people like that turn up. This year I've found a few people whose work I watch closely and who I click with personally. None of them is the one yet.

Watching them still gives me more hope than any of the pivots did.

So, this week.

Who chose the direction you're going in right now? Think about your job, or anything else you've spent years on. If no name comes to mind, then nobody chose it, you included. You've been running on a default. So make the choice yourself now: write down why you'd stay. If the reasons hold up, stay and own it. If they don't, start planning the change this month, before another year goes by the same way.

And if someone did change your life, whether the whole world knows their name or only you and a few others do, hit reply and tell me about them. I'm genuinely curious.

Until next Saturday,
Vitalii