1-2-3 Inner Game
Updated: Sep 6
You've Been Doing Energy Backwards
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Twenty minutes of exercise did the same thing to a sleep-deprived brain as a ninety-minute nap.
That is not a metaphor.
Researchers at McGill kept 54 people awake for thirty hours, then split them three ways.
Group one. Twenty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise.
Group two. A ninety-minute nap.
Group three. Neither.
Then they tested everyone's memory.
Statistically, no meaningful difference between the two.
The EEG showed both brains arriving at the same place by completely different routes.
Published in PNAS last month.
Twenty minutes of movement bought what ninety minutes of unconsciousness bought.
I got back from Manila on a flight that lost three hours somewhere over the water.
Home at two in the morning.
I am usually asleep by nine thirty.
I go to see my parents as often as I can and I will keep going as often as I can, but the body does not care about your reasons.
It just files the invoice.
Four days of feeling like a slightly worse version of myself.
What fixed it was not the extra sleep I kept promising myself.
It was going out and running badly.
Running is having a moment, and the numbers are not small.
The number of people worldwide who say they run or jog went from 672 million in 2022 to nearly 785 million in 2025. More than 110 million new runners in three years. (GWI)
The 2027 London Marathon ballot drew more than 1.3 million entries. A record. (London Marathon)
Parkrun set an all-time global attendance record in April 2026: 438,526 finishers on a single Saturday morning. (Parkrun)
Running clubs on Strava multiplied three and a half times in one year, and club-organised events grew fifty percent. (Strava Year In Sport)
Everyone has a theory about why. Community. Loneliness. The algorithm. Cheap entry. Good shoes.
Here is mine.
Running is one of the last places left where the result cannot be delegated, optimised, outsourced, or spun.
You cannot hire it out. You cannot AI it. You cannot put it in a deck.
The clock does not care about your intention, your positioning, or how well you present.
That is rare now. And I think people are quietly starving for it.
I spend my weeks in rooms full of leadership teams, KPIs, quarterly priorities and strategy documents.
I love those rooms. But almost everything in them can be argued with.
The road cannot be argued with.
Five things the road taught me.
One. The body votes first
No strategy survives a bad night's sleep.
I have sat in sessions where a leadership team could not agree on a decision they had already agreed on twice.
Nothing was wrong with the strategy.
Somebody had been on a plane for fourteen hours, somebody else had a sick child at home, and the room had no capacity left to hold nuance.
Psychology is downstream of physiology far more often than we admit.
We treat energy as a personality trait. It is a resource, and it is the first one to go.
Which is why the McGill result matters beyond the lab.
The intervention that protected those brains was not rest. It was movement.
When you are depleted, the instinct is to withdraw, cancel, lie down.
Sometimes that is right. Often the thing that restores you is the thing you least want to do.
Energy before time. You can protect your calendar perfectly and still show up with nothing in the tank.
Two. Nobody can run your kilometres
No team. No leverage. No clever workaround. Just you and the road.
This is the one that lands hardest with founders, because delegation is the skill we spend years building.
Get it out of your head. Put it in someone else's hands. Buy back your time.
All correct. And there is a category of work that does not transfer.
The hard conversation with your co-founder. The decision about who is no longer right for the seat. The apology. The two hours of thinking nobody else can do for you. The relationship with your kid.
You can build a system for almost everything. You cannot build a system that runs your life on your behalf.
Three. Pain is data, not a verdict
It tells you where you are. It does not tell you where you stop.
Most people I work with confuse the two.
Revenue is down for a quarter and they conclude something about themselves.
Someone questions their intention in a meeting and they spend six weeks quietly withdrawing.
I said this to a founder recently. You are grading yourself on the scoreboard. You do not control the scoreboard.
You control the work, and you control the story you build on top of the result.
That story either funds your confidence or drains it. Deposits or withdrawals. There is no neutral entry.
The pain is real. The verdict is optional.
Four. The wall is in the head
Your legs have more left than your mind is willing to spend.
Every leader I have ever coached has a number in their head about what they can carry.
Almost none of them have tested it. They inherited it from an environment that no longer exists.
The wall is usually not capacity. It is a story about capacity, written years ago by someone with less information than you have now.
That does not mean push through everything. Some walls are real and ignoring them costs you.
It means: check whether you are stopping because you are done, or because this is the point where you have always stopped.
Five. The distance is decided before the start
You do not find the will at kilometre ten. You bring it.
This is the whole game.
The teams that hit their quarterly priorities are not the teams with better willpower in week nine.
They are the teams that decided in week one, out loud, with a date and an owner and a number.
The decision is made when you are sitting down, rested, clear, with nothing on the line.
Kilometre ten is just where you discover what you actually decided.
Clarity before intensity. Every time.
The part most people have backwards
I used to think the plan was the hard part.
The plan is the easy part. The plan is written sitting down.
Which brings me to the thing I want you to sit with this week.
Motivation isn't the fuel. It's the exhaust.
You do not get it before the run. You get it from the run.
We wait for it. We treat it as the starting condition, the thing that must arrive before we begin.
So we wait, and it does not come, and we decide something unkind about ourselves.
It was never going to come first. It is produced by the movement. It is what the engine gives off once it is running.
Which means the only question that matters is not "do I feel like it."
It is: what is the smallest version of this I can start today.
The run that put me back together after Manila was the worst run of my year.
I have run for years and I still catch myself waiting to feel ready first.
That is exactly the trap I would catch in a client in about eleven seconds.
Start the run. The rest is exhaust.
Here are some Inner Game perspectives to consider this week.
1 Question from me
What are you waiting to feel before you start, and how long have you been waiting for it?
2 Questions (and answers from me)
Q: I know I should train but by the time the day is done I have nothing left. When am I supposed to do it?
A: You are treating movement as something you spend energy on. It is where energy comes from. The McGill group did twenty minutes and got what ninety minutes of sleep got. You do not need the hour you cannot find. You need the twenty minutes you keep deciding are not worth it.
Q: How do I tell a real limit from a story about a limit?
A: A real limit gets worse when you push it and does not improve with rest, attention or support. A story gets quieter the moment you test it. Most people have never run the test, so they treat every wall as structural. Test one, in something small and low stakes, and watch what happens to the wall.
3 Insights
Motivation isn't the fuel. It's the exhaust. You do not get it before the run. You get it from the run.
We treat energy as a personality trait. It is a resource, and it is the first one to go.
Pain is data, not a verdict. It tells you where you are. It does not tell you where you stop.
Until next week:
Start before you feel ready.
Move when you want to withdraw.
Decide the distance sitting down.
— Dhiren
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