Going in Circles for a Living (And What It Actually Taught Me)

My coach Pat Wentland at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs had a way of being honest without making you feel small. He watched me skate a set of laps one afternoon where I was clearly pushing hard - sweat flying, breathing like a freight train, giving everything I had to the ice - and when I came around he just shook his head.

"You're getting faster," he said. "But you're not getting better."

I didn't understand the difference. Speed was the whole point, right? The stopwatch was the judge. If the times are dropping, the work is working.

What he was seeing that I couldn't feel from the inside was that I was brute-forcing it. More muscle, more aggression, more raw power through the turns. At a certain level, brute force hits a ceiling. The skaters beating me internationally weren't stronger - they were more efficient. Cleaner technique, smarter positioning, more strategic energy distribution. They were doing less and going faster because they'd eliminated motion that wasn't contributing to forward progress.

I was in motion. They were making progress. Same oval, completely different games.

I went in circles for a living. A 111-meter oval, thousands and thousands of laps, in skin-tight spandex, for the better part of 15 years. A grown adult hunched over at the waist, sliding around a tiny ice loop as fast as humanly possible while trying not to crash into five other people doing the exact same thing.

It sounds ridiculous, and it kind of is. But the sheer absurdity of it forced me to confront something most people never have to think about: the difference between motion and progress.

Short track is 500m, 1000m, and 1500m races on that 111-meter oval. The races last somewhere between 40 seconds and two and a half minutes. That's it. After all the years of training, all the sacrifice, all the 5am ice sessions, the actual performance window is measured in seconds. Which means the margin for wasted effort is zero. You can't recover from a bad first lap in a 500m race. There's no time.

Every stride, every position, every micro-decision about when to accelerate and when to draft behind another skater - all of it has to be intentional. If you're spending energy on anything that doesn't directly contribute to crossing that line faster, you lose.

That constraint forced a ruthless clarity I've never found naturally in any other area of life. On the ice, the question was always: is this motion contributing to the result, or is it just motion?

The honest answer, embarrassingly often, was that a lot of it was motion. Training that felt productive but didn't target my actual weaknesses. Film study that confirmed what I already knew instead of revealing what I didn't. Pat's job was to keep pointing at that gap until I could see it for myself.

Why does busyness feel so productive when it's not?

I left the ice in 2010 and pivoted into a world that looked nothing like short track on the surface - business, speaking, advising organizations. But within about six months of working with my first few corporate teams, I realized I was watching the exact same pattern Pat had pointed out to me on the ice.

People were moving fast and going nowhere.

Back-to-back meetings from 8am to 6pm. Inbox that refills faster than you can empty it. Slack notifications and "quick syncs" that somehow eat an entire afternoon. Everyone is in motion all day, and at the end of the quarter they wonder why the strategic thinking and creative work that moves companies forward barely got touched.

Motion and progress feel identical from the inside. Your brain tracks effort, not output. You can drain every ounce of energy you have and still end the day having accomplished almost nothing that matters, and you'll feel like you worked hard because you did - on the wrong things.

There were sessions where Pat would pull me off the ice 45 minutes early because I was training hard but training wrong. Every instinct said more time equals more preparation, but he understood that the wrong kind of preparation is worse than none at all - it builds bad habits and burns energy you'll need later.

That translates directly into what I see leaders struggle with. Saying no to meetings and initiatives that don't align with actual priorities. Not because those things are unimportant, but because your capacity is finite. Every hour spent on something that isn't the race you've defined is an hour stolen from something that is.

One of the things I've noticed is that most people are very good at going fast and very bad at deciding which direction to go fast in. The default is to run harder at whatever's in front of you - the next email, the next meeting, the next crisis. Rarely does someone step back and ask the equivalent of what Pat was asking me: is this motion or is this progress?

I'm not immune to this. I still catch myself in the middle of a day where I've been busy from sunrise to sunset and haven't touched the thing that matters most. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that I can usually feel it happening and course-correct before I've burned the whole day on motion.

Going in circles sounds like a waste of time. But if you know exactly why you're on that oval, if every lap has intention behind it, and if you've got someone honest enough to tell you when you're getting faster without getting better - those circles become the most efficient training ground there is.

Pat retired a while back. I still hear him every time I catch myself brute-forcing something.

I wrote about this in Zero Regrets - the cost of what competition demands and what it gives back.

I write about motion vs. progress, performance under pressure, and the messy work of getting better in my newsletter Hard Pivot. Subscribe here.

--AAO