Mile sixty of the Cocodona 250, a two hundred and fifty mile ultramarathon through the Arizona desert, and Rachel Entrekin took the outright lead. Not the women’s race. The whole thing. Every man and every woman in the field, behind her.
And her first reaction wasn’t triumph. It was doubt. Who was she to be leading this? Then she talked herself straight back out of it. She’d won this race twice before. She had more experience than ever. If somebody had to be out front, there was no real reason it couldn’t be her.
I’ve spent twenty years watching that exact moment play out in elite sport, over and over, in people who go on to have long, serious careers. It’s never really about talent. It’s about what they do in the split second before they’ve got the evidence to back themselves.
I had my own version of it, a long way from a desert, on a freezing balcony in Newbury. Bath Rugby’s CEO asked me if I could write match reports. I said yes, immediately, no hesitation. I had never written one in my life.
In this episode: the lunch with the PR agency owner whose lesson changed how I thought about qualifications forever, the months of unpaid, unglamorous graft that got me onto that Bath Rugby balcony in the first place, and what Rachel Entrekin’s win at Cocodona can teach you about the exact moment self belief has to outrun the evidence.
One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.
Press play. I’ll see you in there.
