A bee, a DNF, and the year that came after
The second attempt is almost always where the good work happens.
Challenge Roth, 2024. I swallowed a bee on the run. Took a breath at the wrong moment and the bee went down with it… You can imagine the rest. My first ever DNF.
There’s a version of this where I tell you I learned some big planning lesson from that bee. I’m not going to write that one. You can’t plan for swallowing a bee. Some days the day just takes you out.
The interesting part isn’t the DNF anyway - it’s the twelve months after.
The sting just happened to me. The hard part was the morning after, and the one after that, deciding whether to come back to the same race knowing it could go exactly the same way. There’s no version of training that makes you bee-proof.
Most of those twelve months were unremarkable. 5am pool decks in January. February run where I’d already talked myself out of going twice before I got out the door. The DNF didn’t haunt me in dramatic moments. It haunted me in small ones, when nobody was watching.
I’m a PM by day, and I see the same shape in the work I’m proudest of. The launches I look back on aren’t the ones that went smoothly - they’re the ones that came after something didn’t. A feature that missed. A bet that didn’t pay off. A roadmap blown up by a reorg. The second attempt is almost always where the good work happens.
Nobody asks about that part in interviews. Resumes are a string of launches - shipped X, drove Y, grew Z. What gets left out is the months between, rebuilding the thing that fell over the first time.
That’s where PMs actually become PMs, I think. The launches are the visible part, the part that goes on the resume. The recovery work is what determines whether the next launch is any good. There’s no way to shortcut it. You just have to show up.
Same in racing. The race is what people see. The year after the DNF is what made it possible.
Roth 2025: 8:49. Personal Best. I didn’t train harder than the year before. What was different was twelve months of small, unglamorous decisions to keep going.
I didn’t need a better plan. I needed to keep showing up.
