The Impossible Triangle

Leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Games, I became obsessed w/ a math problem that didn't have a solution.

I had three goals for my final Olympic cycle: drop from roughly 157 lbs to somewhere around 145, maintain the explosive power I needed to pass skaters in the final 2-3 laps, & build an aerobic base deep enough to sustain me across multiple races over a compressed competition schedule. Three goals. All reasonable on their own. Totally at war w/ each other.

When I cut weight & my aerobic conditioning improved, my explosiveness disappeared. I felt lighter but slower through turns, like the engine had shrunk along w/ the body.

When I kept my strength & endurance up, the weight wouldn't budge. When I forced the weight down while trying to preserve power, my recovery cratered & my endurance fell apart within a week.

I remember writing target numbers on post-it notes and sticking them all over my house. The weight I needed to hit, the times I needed to skate. I was so hyper-focused on getting to a specific number on the scale that I was doing things that, looking back, weren't smart — training on top of the team's already brutal schedule. Two sessions w/ the Olympic squad, then one or two additional sessions on my own. Every day except Saturday & Sunday, which were supposed to be recovery but really weren't.

Why doesn't harder work solve the problem?

The temptation when you're facing something like this is to just work harder. That was my default for 15 yrs. Something isn't working, add more volume, more intensity, more hrs. Grind until the math starts cooperating.

But the math doesn't cooperate when the variables are fundamentally in tension. You can't will your body into doing three contradictory things at once. I got down to 2.5% body fat for those Games. My body was screaming. I was operating on a razor's edge where one bad training day could cascade into a week of setbacks bc there was no buffer left. No margin.

What I eventually had to accept — and this took me longer than it should have — was I couldn't optimize all three simultaneously. I had to choose two & let the third lag behind, at least temporarily.

Focus on weight & aerobic base through the summer. Phase power and explosiveness back in as competition season got closer. Accept there would be weeks where I felt slow, weeks where I felt weak, weeks where I felt heavy, & trust the sequencing would come together by February.

Not a fun realization for someone who's been told since he was 14 anything is possible if you just want it badly enough.

The insight I keep coming back to is that excellence isn't about doing everything at once. It's about sequencing competing priorities so they build on each other instead of canceling each other out.

In Vancouver I won 3 medals, including silver in the 1500m. Not bc I solved the impossible triangle — nobody does. But bc I learned to work w/ it instead of against it. Accepted trade-offs as a feature of the preparation, not a failure of it.

In business it's usually some version of speed, quality, & cost. You can have two but not three. Ship fast & cheap but it won't be great. Ship fast & high-quality but it won't be cheap. Build something excellent at a reasonable cost but don't expect it next quarter.

I've spoken to hundreds of organizations since retiring, and the pattern is the same everywhere. The leaders who perform best can say "here's what we're prioritizing this quarter, here's what we're accepting will be imperfect, and here's the plan to phase the third thing back in when we have capacity." That takes a kind of discipline that feels counterintuitive bc it means deliberately choosing to be worse at something for a period of time.

The leaders who struggle most are the ones who refuse to acknowledge the tension exists. They insist they can have all three, push their teams to deliver on all three simultaneously, and wonder why everything feels mediocre & everyone's burning out.

Progress almost never follows a straight line. It moves in phases. And the hard part isn't the work — it's having patience & clarity to know which phase you're in and what that phase requires, even when it means temporarily getting worse at something you care about.

I'm still learning that one, honestly.

Want the longer version of how I navigated the Vancouver cycle? Hard Pivot goes into the training details I don't cover onstage.

--AAO