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Endurance & Longevity

August 4, 2025

For the last ten years, I’ve filled a disproportionate amount of my free time with training for endurance-focused athletic events. In all those years, I’ve constantly tinkered with different training programs to determine what will unlock my body’s potential for high quality, sustained performance.

One particularly powerful, but counterintuitive training method is known as the 80/20 Rule, which suggests that 80% of training be conducted at low intensity and the remaining 20% at medium or high intensity. The research shows that low-intensity training promotes recovery, preserves energy, lowers stress hormones, and reduces overtraining risk, allowing for higher quality in the more demanding high-intensity workouts.

I find it fascinating that many of the best athletes in the world don’t constantly push their limit during training. They spend almost all their time steadily working far below their potential. This process is repeatable day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Endurance and longevity lead to sustained excellence.

Which is how money and investing work, too.

We’ve all seen our share of “get rich quick” stories about someone who successfully day traded a meme stock, timed the market, capitalized on a private investment opportunity, or bet big on the latest crypto fad. For every success story, there are hundreds of harrowing stories of folks who gambled and lost. We don’t hear about those.

Chasing and earning excellent returns for a few years is not nearly as powerful as passively earning average returns over the long run. It’s the steady investor who moves along each day, far below their potential, whose consistent contributions and patience will allow compounding interest to unleash extraordinary performance.

And so, despite the fact most of us will not be the next Eliud Kipchoge or Warren Buffett, we can take a page from their book and be satisfied playing our own game. The result will most likely be favorable.

- Chris McKeown

1. https://www.mediumrunning.com/medium-blog/blog-post-title-one-en72t-8h5r6
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7947281/