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In this episode, I share how my worst marathon experience from 17 years ago became one of the most impactful learning experiences for my financial journey.
I recently ran the St. George Marathon, and I’m going to tell you what I did differently this time around to improve my performance and how those lessons directly relate to wealth-building strategies.
From pacing yourself, learning from experienced mentors, to building a community for support, these insights can help you grow financially and create long-lasting prosperity.
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How did my worst marathon become one of my best marathons? What was the difference between running one 17 years ago versus today when I’m 47 years old and how does that apply to you actually making more money and wealth? Now, tune in because that’s what we’re going to talk about now. Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financial advisor. I’m going to show that’s for you. Those that work so stinking hard for your money and you’re now ready for that money start working harder for you today. You want that freedom cashflow right now, not 30 or 40 years from now if you’re lucky, but you want it today so you can live that life that you love with those that you love, and you don’t just do it to get rich because that’s awesome if you can, but it’s also about living a rich life because as you are blessed and prospered more financially, you have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you.
(01:04)
That is the whole purpose of the show today. Thank you for tuning in and allowing me to create a ripple effect through you. I appreciate all the time you guys have been tuning in and binging and thank you so much Recently, we’ve had so many of you reaching out with us on the infinite banking side or even on the consulting side, just wanting to get this passive income work for you. You guys have been coming in by many, I don’t even know the words to say it, but you guys have been coming in a lot more frequently lately than you have ever before, so thank you so much for those of you willing to take the faith and put that faith in us as well. Alright, so today I want to talk about a marathon. I just finished running. It was the St. George Marathon in southern Utah, and just so you know, marathons, although I’ve been doing that, I’ve run actually three of the majors, three of the six majors I want to run, Tokyo, London, and Berlin.
(01:46)
I saw those left, but I have ran Chicago, New York and Boston marathons and I’ve done each of those. Now I’m focusing more towards the international, but I wanted to break a fear barrier because my very first marathon was 17 years ago and I did it on a dare guys. I did not want to do a marathon at all. I was so nervous and I had a friend, my friend Jerry, shout out to you. I know he listens to some of these episodes as well. He actually reached out and he said, Hey Chris, I’m going to challenge you to run the St. George Marathon, and it was a lottery at that time, so I thought, okay, maybe I’ll do it. He’s like, listen, the chance of you getting very slim. He’s like, I’ve run it like 10 years in a row, so I’m automatically in, but for you, you may not get in.
(02:30)
I thought, okay, there’s a chance I may not get in. I won’t do it naturally, of course, I get into that marathon and so I’m running and I’m training with him and his brothers. They’ve done it before and they gave me different advice. They told me things such as, Hey, you got to make sure you pace yourself, make sure you do this, do that. They probably told me a lot more things that I just did not listen to, and if that gives you a foreshadowing of how that race went, you’re right, that race did not go as well as it should have. Now, I didn’t think so because I started running that race. This is of course 17 years ago. This is when I was 30 years old and I started running that race and of course I’m feeling pretty good about myself, and so I go out.
(03:07)
I’m feeling great. Of course, it’s kind of downhill for the first part, this is kind of similar to the Boston Marathon in some ways, a lot more hills in the St. George Marathon than Boston, but very similar in how it feels and how the course acts. So in the beginning you get this false sense of confidence. Well, of course I didn’t try to hold back. I was running what was comfortable. I ran those first six or seven miles until I hit the hills. About mile seven, you start hitting these hills and the hills go for about four miles or so, and that’s rolling hills for about another really seven or eight miles plus. You really don’t get good downhill towards the very end, kind of like the Boston Marathon. Well, so anyways, I’m running it. I run that. I get to those hills and I’m getting beat.
(03:55)
I’m like, my goodness, these hills are hard because I ran pretty tough Now also while I was running, I was just drinking water. I thought, why do they have Gatorade? I don’t need sugar water. Just give me water. So I just start drinking water along the way. So I’m stopping the stations, I’m drinking plenty of water or so I thought, and as I start to hit these hills, they are grueling and then I’m stopping at any station I can to get refuel and get more water, and pretty soon about mile 13, I hear a call from behind me saying, Hey, Chris. So I’m at the half marathon point. I did it in about one hour and 45 minutes. That’s pretty decent fast. That’s about an eight minute per mile type of pace, and so I’m feeling pretty good about myself, but then I hear voice from the back, which is my friend Jerry and his brothers all saying, man, you just took off.
(04:41)
We lost you. Well, when it’s the start line, it’s a little bit dark. I didn’t know I lost them. I actually thought they were ahead of me the whole time. They caught up and they’re like, man, you just started going. You were just going way fast. These guys were trying to go for a time faster than my own, what I was going for, and so I ran with them for a few miles. Eventually I let the brothers go. They started going. My friend hung back with me a little bit, and finally about mile 16, I said, listen, Jerry, go ahead. I can tell I’m aghast. I I’m pretty much physically exhausted at this point. Go ahead, don’t wait for me, just get whatever time you need to get. So I sent him on, of course, 16 miles, about 10 miles short of the full marathon, and of course I’m still going, and then I get to about mile 20 as we’re rolling through some hills and my quads, my quadriceps, the front part of your legs, they started cramping up.
(05:35)
So I grabbed my quads, I almost fall down the ground. Then as I grab them, my calf started cramping as well. So my quads and my calf muscles start cramping all at the same time. I’m almost laying on the ground writhing in pain. I barely limp over to the side of the road where there’s a guardrail there, and I’m telling you guys, I was already exhausted by this point wondering how am I going to do it? But when that happened, I was now wondering if I was going to have to be shuttled to the end. I remember I was stretching out my calves and just in pain, just feeling completely defeated, and then I looked down the line and I see there’s 12 other people doing the same thing. They’re all stretching out their calves, they’re all exhausted. I started laughing hysterically. I know I was the crazy guy, and I realized, I’m like, this is just like life, isn’t it?
(06:20)
Sometimes you try to do something, it doesn’t work out and you just got to keep pushing through, and so I kept moving forward. I either walked or I ran backwards. Yes, I literally did jogged backwards, staring at people as I’m running, saying, hi, how you doing? I just can’t run forward. I cramp up because all those muscles were completely done. They were out. So I had to use the other muscles like my hamstrings or just walk the rest of the way. I did finish just under five hours, so just so you know, the first half of the marathon took me an hour. 45 last half, took me more than three hours to get through. It was very tough. The heat, it gets very warm in St. George. Even when I ran this last weekend, it was even warmer. It got up into the eighties, and so it was a pretty rough race.
(07:09)
I learned some key things there that I think you could apply to yourself as well is one, I wasn’t really listening to people more experienced than me. They gave me advice and I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. But when it came to time of execution, I didn’t listen right? I didn’t listen at all. For example, don’t start out too fast. Pace yourself, and I see this in coaching all the time. So many people start out the gate just wanting to get going and that’s awesome. I encourage people to take action quickly, but sometimes they get a little bit too excited to the point where they make rash decisions. You’ll give an example. There’s one client I had that wasn’t just like he did a great job like buying a lot of properties and doing some investments that were doing well for him, and then he decided he wanted to do a little bit riskier things, things that we weren’t really suggesting and given we don’t really give recommendations anyways, but these were things where I was giving him warnings every single time.
(08:01)
He wanted to get into a Bitcoin savings account that’s paying 9% loss, a quarter million there. He wanted to go and put money into this other deal, lost money there, and so he started doing this high risk stuff. The very thing that he did that was right and correct in the beginning, he went away from, and this is the same thing I did, even in 2007, I started getting a little bit more prideful. I thought I was amazing and that I was a really good judge of what a good investments are. In fact, the truth is I just figured any investment I did would just make money and that wasn’t the case. And so I had already learned those things from my own experience. I shared that with him. He didn’t listen either. As a result, it set him back. Now, granted, he’s still got assets paying him cashflow, which is good.
(08:41)
He’s still making money, maybe even better than he would’ve had. He just maybe left in the stock market. But that being said, still because he didn’t listen to the mistakes I made, he didn’t get better either. I’ve seen that marathon. I made mistakes. I went out too fast. I just mentioned. Second thing is I didn’t drink the Gatorade. I thought, why would I need Gatorade? I didn’t know the science behind it. I didn’t know the real reason behind it. I didn’t really bother asking, but those electrolytes are everything. So when I run races now, one, not only did I pace myself this last time around where, just so you know, this last race I didn’t run in 1 45. I ran in about 1 36 at the half marathon point. Now I’m much, much faster now than I was then, but I was much more careful to save up my energy for the last half of the race, which I knew would be faster than the first half because why I started studying this is the next thing you need to do too.
(09:35)
You got to be a student of the things you teach because for example, I didn’t understand about the Gatorade part. I didn’t understand about the electrolytes, and that’s the thing that keeps me from cramping. That’s the thing that keeps your body moving and working. You could have all the water you want and all you end up is feeling bloated, but still your body’s lacking those essential nutrients that allows you to keep going. I also kept fueling throughout the race. I took the goo, which I don’t always like, but I did. I also fueled before the race, so I was eating and doing the things before to do all the right prep work, and then of course at the same time during the race, what am I also doing? I’m also saving up, like I said, I studied the course to say, alright, I’m going to strategize.
(10:12)
How am I going to run this? How much am I’m going to hold back? I know I’m going to be tempted to want to go out the gate fast, but I know I’m in it for the long game. I’m in it for the long haul, not the long haul like financial advisors say, but in for the long game to make sure I have the lasting results here that I get to that finish line. And so that’s what I did. I was trying to prep and guys, just so you know, the race of this time was still hard. It did end up being the best race I did in the last year and a half. And so remember when you’re listening to podcasts or watching these podcasts, don’t just listen to the strategy. The strategy is what people hear about, but it’s more about the way that we think is what’s so important.
(10:50)
This is why when people hire us, it’s not that the biggest thing that they get that surprises them I think, is that it’s not just finding good deals, right? Yeah. We got a whole network of people and good deals and people can use. Same thing we do with the infant banking. Infant bank is way easier to implement than the actual strategies of investing. So I’m using investing because it’s a little bit more complex like a marathon. But when you’re trying to do these strategies, a lot of times the strategy sounds good, but you got to understand the thinking behind it. So a lot of people realize that some of the best benefit they get is the perspective that we have, the way that we see things, because if you understand how someone sees something, you’ll then act and do the strategies in the right way.
(11:30)
But if you don’t understand why you’re doing it, then you won’t do it. It’s like going to the gym, right? And you think, okay, I’m going to work out the gym. Alright, I saw the short video on YouTube and I’m going to start doing this exercise. But if you don’t know the proper way to do the exercise or even how much rest and recovery should you have, what should be doing in between the workouts? What should it be fueling your body with and how do you do all these other things that apply to what you’re doing? You’re going to hurt yourself, aren’t you? And then you’re going to find out that you set yourself back or maybe won’t get the results you thought and you’re like, why did I spend all this time and effort work to get very little results? That’s exactly what people do in the financial space as well.
(12:07)
They try to learn the strategies and maybe you’re here trying to learn strategies and again, the strategies aren’t bad, understand the strategies, but you’ve got to understand the way to think how to think an investor is more important than the strategies you’re implementing because if you think properly like an investor and like a steward investor we talk about in the show all the time, if you think properly that way, it becomes so much easier to do it. For example, when I mentioned about people that kind of go and start taking high risks, they think, oh, I can get higher returns. Some people only chase the rate of return. I don’t care about the rate of return nearly as much as I care about do I get the return of my money? Do I have the ability to get that money back? Is it protected and secure or is it going to go into somewhere that even though they promised, they might promise me the moon and the stars, they might promise me 20, 30% a year, who cares if I could lose it all because it’s a high risk investment, I will take lower risk and in some cases get a lower return because I know that having that certainty is going to ensure that I have more money longer term than these other people that end up being flash in the pan.
(13:07)
Does that make sense? So you want to make sure you think like the investors, this is what I do when I read books, when I study other people, I’m trying to understand how do they think, what do they see? If I understand how they see the strategy becomes easy. That’s what you want to be doing there. And so same thing with the marathon. I was studying YouTube videos and stuff with runners and I learned about zone two running. Guys, I’ll tell you, I’ve ran a lot of marathons and this wasn’t my fast marathon. I did the St. George one this last week. It wasn’t my fastest. My fastest marathon was actually a 2 49 in California. It was a very good downhill course. The fastest flag course ever did was Chicago Marathon in 2022, I did a 3 0 7. I was exactly one hour behind the top American that finished at 2 0 7, and so I had decent times.
(13:54)
I usually hit about three hours or even sub three, which is not elite elites like sub 2 32 and a half hours or less. I can get around three hours give or take, depending on the course. Well, I’ve been working back from injuries and everything else because I was doing it wrong Again, I was working harder but not necessarily working right? You’ve heard me say that before, don’t work harder. Don’t just work smarter but work. Right? When I started to realize that my body was breaking down, I had to change the way I trained, and so I started training where I started doing more easier runs. I would run slower so I could run faster, if that makes sense. And then maybe it doesn’t and it doesn’t matter. It’s counterintuitive, however it works. So when I try to get my heart rate in that zone two area, I’m not going to talk about that.
(14:39)
That’s not the point of this. But when I started to do that in my training, at least 80% of the time where before I was running between zones three and five, 80% of the time on my training even in my body said too much. I’m out. And then the muscles were breaking down and all these things were happening. When I switched it to where I only did zones four and five, maybe once, maybe twice a week, and that was it. All the rest of the training was just easy running, but maybe going from more distance and getting more stamina, then all of a sudden things got better and actually I’m rebuilding my stamina again. That’s part of the reason why I probably didn’t get as good of a time this last weekend as I could have done had this been 2022. But my goal is I do get faster each and every year, even though it hasn’t happened last year.
(15:24)
I did slow down last year, but I’m now faster again than I was last year just because I’m building back up again. So anyways, let’s go back to the race. Go back to the story here. When I ran St. George, right, I ran this marathon again. This time I was going to be more prepared. I was still nervous. I still had those old memories of all the pain and torture I went through. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy course. All of the downhills help, it’s not a very forgiving course. It’s still very, very tough to get through due to the heat because the heat does warm up fast in those mornings and also due to the terrain, all the ups and downs, I do not do great with a lot of hills. I do great on the downhill, not so much. When there’s up and downs, it can exhaust your body.
(16:06)
So I started to prepare that way. I made sure I was well fueled. I’m not overstuffed. I didn’t try to eat too much, but I had a lot of protein leading up to that race. I drank plenty of water and fluids even starting the race. I didn’t take my first drink, I think until mile six or seven until I was getting ready to do those hills. That’s when I started taking some water and Gatorade this time. So I was taking the water, the Gatorade took the goose. I even brought a little protein shot, keto protein shot that they gave me at the race. I thought, cool, I’ll put that in my pocket. Save that for roughly about two thirds into the marathon or at least halfway in. Started chugging that too. And so I started to do that and keep myself relatively fueled. Yeah, I got hungry toward the end, but I was still feeling pretty good despite the heat, despite everything else going on.
(16:51)
And instead of running this in about five hours the first time, instead of running this in 3 0 8, almost to the exact second, I got 210th out of 4,600. So again, not like my most stellar, I mean in my age group, I got 13th place out of over, what was it, 257? Apparently I got 13th out of 257 in my age group, so I didn’t get top three. I do that in more of the smaller marathons if I do that. But either way, I was very, very happy and pleased with my time. I knew it wasn’t three oh eight’s not stellar, but still that’s a little over a seven minute per mile average, and I was able to sustain that even on the hills. I was surprised that even on the hills sometimes I was running around an eight minute pace or maybe just a little over an eight minute pace.
(17:35)
And so in fact, you can even look up online if you go search Chris Miles on the St. George Marathon results, you can even see that I actually got faster at the end of the race, a little bit more downhill. I saved it up. And so even though it was 1 36, the first half, the half was 1 32, and so I mean whatnot as fast as I wanted, I wanted to get 1 25 and get to that three hour mark or less. It didn’t happen. But I’m still very pleased because at the end of this thing, I still came out of it. I actually recovered better. I’ve actually been running for the last few days after the race where a lot of those other races before I would trash my body so much, I could barely even walk, let alone run for days later. And this is the point when you’re trying to implement on these wealth strategies, right?
(18:21)
This you got to one first and foremost is make sure that you’re listening to those that have been there and done that and still doing it today, getting that advice, getting help, that’s a big thing. Two is you got to be a student of it. You got to be a student and not just look at the strategy, which is still good. You got to know the strategies, but you got to understand the why behind the strategies. You got to understand the mindset behind the strategies, understand those things and works better. And then three, three is you run with a community, you run together. This is something that’s been very big epiphany for me, and I think even some of our clients as well. We just recently had an event for our clients. We have an annual retreat for all our VIPs, and so we did it here in Utah.
(19:05)
Had about 30 or so of us that were there. And man, the one thing that they all kept saying was, you know what? It feels so good that there’s other people like me on the same path. People think like this and understand the people that join our group aren’t just people that want to make money. In fact, it’s quite, well, it’s true. They do want to make money. There’s no doubt there. I don’t want to say it’s the opposite. No, they do want to do that, but it’s so much more. They want to live a life of purpose. They want to live a life of meaning. They want to be that ripple. They want to be the person that creates that ripple effect in others’ lives. They want to do something that’s meaningful with their lives and with the money they earn, and to hear them say to each other like, oh, it’s so good that you guys get this stuff.
(19:49)
I can’t talk to my coworkers about this. And maybe you feel the same way. Maybe you’re like, yeah, talk to my coworkers. That’s pretty tough. There might be this one coworker or this one friend or family member I feel like I talk to about this, but most people, they just don’t get it. They’re not even open or they’re just so self-consumed in their lives. They can’t even think about even beyond a 401k, they can barely think about their 401k, let alone a 401k. And so for them to say that they’re able to have that support group together, and we also have online support and we of course support them as coaches and everything else, but it made them feel so good that there was a community around that they can run together. And since that time, many of ’em have now posted more on their online forums saying, Hey, help me out here.
(20:30)
Who wants to go partner in this deal together? We’re going to look at doing this deal together. Who wants to get in? Hey, we’re talking about CPAs. Let’s talk about CPAs and things like that because we talk about taxes and whatnot. We have CPAs we refer to as well in our group. And so they were wanting to talk about that. And so now they’re starting to really reach out to each other, not just us as coaches. They get our perspective, but they get other people’s perspectives too. And I learned this in running. I started to run with a run club. In fact, some of them were actually there at this last race. It was so cool because they get you to kind of push you a little bit. They give you kind of this pacesetter. You need a pacer. Even at the last event I did, now I’m talking about switching back to our wealth event, our wealth empowerment mastermind that we had.
(21:11)
Going back to that, one of our clients brought in a new client that just barely hired us. And so they came. They were there together. They were friends. Funny enough, their wives were friends of each other. They were kind of forced together as they like to say, but it was kind of cool to see them come together and support each other. So now they’re expanding that group. And you know what I realized? I did the same thing early on because I started to teach things. I was learning to sp like people, including that friend Jerry. I started teaching them that stuff to him and some other friends. We even get together and gather together because we were local together. We would gather together and start talking about this stuff and a little bit of the dreaming side, but even about like, Hey, how does this all work?
(21:50)
How’s this different? And it made life exciting because you weren’t in it alone. And so I recommend those three things. Like I said, one, learn from others’ experience. This is why it pays to have a mentor or coach to help you bypass the painful experiences that you would have to learn on your own and could set you back years and years, even decades in your progress. Two is be a good student understanding how they see these things, not just what they do with the strategies. And then three is have a community to support you. You have all those elements together. It makes getting results so much more certain, so much more certain. And if you’ve ever done this in any other aspect of life, you know this to be true. If you’ve done this with relationships, you’ve done this with your other health aspects and things like that.
(22:36)
You’ve maybe even done this in your business and maybe you’re in a mastermind and you’re trying to work together and you might even have a mentor that helps you build and grow your business too. And you have some peers to talk to, so it’s not just looking up, but you’ve got peers and then you’re also teaching people too. That’s another bonus I’ll give you as well. That’s what helped me is I started try to teach other people that thing, even if it meant I tried bring some of my people that were like my peers to bring ’em up with me as I’m learning to do that too. Heck, even when I do this podcast, I learn every time I teach. Doing these kinds of things gives you so much better results. That’s what I just got to implore you. It not just worked in my marathon training, but I’ve seen it work with my own wealth and my money too.
(23:19)
And that’s if they could leave you with anything that advice. That’s how Marathon running can tie in with wealth building is that you’ve got to have the right people to guide you. You got to be able to have the right education, know how those people think, and then three is have the community to support you and even a community you can teach as well. That is how you guys can create financial freedom. Hey, if we could ever be a part of that, let us know. You can always reach out to us. Money ripples.com. You can also try to passive income calculator. I’ll say this. If you’re looking to become more of a consulting client, I want to know how can I get my money to work for me so I don’t have to work so hard for it? If you’ve got at least 150 or $200,000, you’re saying I could do something with this money.
(23:56)
We should be talking. That’s where you want to go. Try that passive income calculator. If you don’t yet, no problem. I would try just starting. So with infinite banking, start there with that max ROI, infinite banking strategy that we use that’s very specific to help you be able to get there faster. But either way, if there’s any way we could support you, anything we could do to help bring you up to another level to help you prosper, that’s why we have a thousand people. We want a thousand families financially independent by the year 2030. We’d love it to be you If you believe that’s you or you want it to be you, please reach out to us@moneyripples.com. Either way, guys, whatever you’re doing, be sure you don’t go alone. You can go much faster together than you can alone. Be sure you learn from those that have been there, done that, still doing it today, and then learn how they think so then you can replicate it for yourself and your own life. Go and make it a wonderful prosperous week. We’ll see you later.