Prioritize Exercise While Building Your Startup

Startups are marathons, not sprints. Figuring out how to pace yourself and your team in a healthy way has real business success consequences.

Nadir Point

When I was first beginning to build startups as a founding CEO, I struggled with achieving a healthy balance in my life. The work my co-founder and I were doing was endless, and I had a hard time deciding when enough was enough. The result was that I gained 25 pounds and routinely sacrificed exercise, time with my family, and other stress management tools.

Perhaps my nadir point was when I was raising my first institutional financing round for my first venture-backed startup. As we approached Christmas in 2007, I was in Florida, nominally celebrating the holidays with my family, but really was working around the clock. I spent almost ten days straight having meetings with my Board of Directors and driving the financing along. My body just gave out. I tried to ignore it until one of my colleagues lectured me that having trouble breathing was not something to just push through. He insisted I go immediately to urgent care. When I arrived, the doctor debated whether to hospitalize me, but ultimately diagnosed “walking pneumonia,” as well as a sinus infection and two ear infections. She sent me home with an inhaler and stern instructions to rest. Instead, I used the inhaler a lot, got into a huge fight with my mother who was upset that I was ignoring her and the rest of my family, and flew back alone to meet with the VCs.

Stress Management

The trap here is that work is never done for a startup leader, and it is common to feel pressure if you take a break. To manage my weakness in this, I must always be conscious of the trap. For example, watching a TV show tends to be done with my computer on my lap.  My husband of 30 years likes to engineer date nights of dinner out plus a movie at the theater because that is when I can manage to set aside my electronics and unplug for a few hours.

While I still struggle with a relentless work ethic, more experience has helped me learn the importance of managing my health to lead my company effectively.  Without your health, you will not have the energy to do a startup. For me, that means creating boundaries and space in my life for essential stress management tools like relationships, sleep, healthy eating, and exercise.  

It is important to promote the benefits to your team as well. No one wins when someone is down for the count. The whole theoretical startup culture of working continually makes no sense. We need our team members to be creative problem-solvers. They cannot do that if they do not take care of themselves.

Learning to manage the stress of startup life is essential. If you don’t, you can easily create a company culture that destroys your team’s health, creativity, and motivation and ultimately reduces your team’s performance and your startup’s chances of success. 

Tactics for Integrating Exercise

To manage stress, I routinely create space for daily exercise and activity. Since I am always trying to be efficient, I do tend to multitask to get work done as well.  Some of my tactics are:

• Building in daily exercise before and after work.  I enjoy starting my day with 20 to 30 minutes on the elliptical machine.  After work, I ride my horse, who I think of as 1,500 pounds of living breathing exercise equipment that is happy to see me. That ends up being two hours of exercise five days a week.  I also enjoy walks and hikes with my family and friends.
• Walk-n-talks with my colleagues or when on certain types of conference calls.  I have an excellent headset with great noise canceling that helps. My teammates appreciate the invitation to walk, so sometimes we will schedule a call or meeting when we can both take a walk and have a more exploratory discussion. Sometimes I pace in my office just to get a few more steps. And when I am with my office dog, I will take her for brief walks. These 10-minute breaks always seem to make me more rather than less productive.  I think this is the result of getting my blood moving and oxygenating my brain.
• Podcasts and audiobooks. When I am tacking and riding my horse or exercising on my elliptical machine or walking the neighborhood, I often listen to podcasts and audiobooks to keep learning even as I give my body a chance to exercise.

Active Towns Podcast on Healthy Activity

Activity and exercise are essential stress and health management tools. It is good for us mentally, physically, and emotionally. I shared more thoughts on this with my friend John Simmerman, who advocates for healthy activity on his podcast, Active Towns.  Our conversation is here.