I Ran My First 50K Ultra Trail Race…And Still Went to the Office the Next Day (on a Sunday!)
Training for my first 50K trail race in 2018.
Then headed to the office thereafter.
It didn’t feel like a choice.
It felt like I was barely keeping up.
The morning after my first 50K trail race, I went into the office.
Not because I wanted to.
Not because I felt great.
Not because it made any logical sense.
I went because my business required more from me than I could sustainably give… and I didn’t know how to change that yet.
The Moment That Exposed the Strain
The moment that stuck with me wasn’t actually the run.
It was the car ride home the day before.
My friend and I had just finished something we had trained months for. A 50K trail race. Hours in the woods. A huge physical and mental accomplishment.
And I casually said I’d be going into the office the next day. Sunday.
She paused.
“Wait… you’re going into the office tomorrow?”
To me, it was obvious.
I had work to catch up on. I’d been working weekends for months. The workload wasn’t slowing down. If anything, it was increasing.
There wasn’t space to take a day off.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t just working hard.
I was operating at capacity… and beyond it.
What Capacity Strain Actually Looks Like
Capacity strain doesn’t show up as failure.
It shows up as success that’s getting harder to sustain.
The firm is growing. The work is there. The revenue is coming in.
But behind the scenes, everything is still running through you.
You’re reviewing more than you should be reviewing.
Making more decisions than you should be making.
Stepping in more than you should need to step in.
And the volume keeps increasing.
So you compensate.
You work weekends.
You push through exhaustion.
You tell yourself it’s temporary.
But it doesn’t resolve.
Because the issue isn’t effort.
It’s structure.
The Trap I Was In (And Didn’t See Yet)
At that stage of my firm, I thought the solution was to keep up.
Stay on top of it.
Work a little harder.
Be more efficient.
But the truth was, I was trying to hold together a business model that was outgrowing how it was being run.
And I was absorbing the gap personally.
That’s what capacity strain really is.
The business expands… but the way it operates doesn’t evolve at the same pace.
So the owner becomes the buffer.
Why That Sunday Matters
That Sunday wasn’t about one extra day of work.
It was a signal.
That I didn’t have enough capacity in the business without sacrificing my own.
That the firm was running me more than I was running it.
That something in the way it was structured needed to change… not just how hard I was working.
But at the time, I didn’t look there.
I looked at myself.
I assumed I needed to handle it better.
The Shift That Needed to Happen
Looking back, the real question wasn’t:
How do I keep up with this?
It was:
Why does my business require this much from me in the first place?
That’s a very different question.
Because it moves you out of personal responsibility… and into structural awareness.
Instead of asking how to manage the load, you start asking how to redesign the way the load is carried.
What I See Now (That I Didn’t See Then)
Most women law firm owners don’t recognize when they’ve hit this stage.
Because on the outside, everything looks like it’s working.
But internally, it feels like too much is still running through you.
Too many decisions.
Too many approvals.
Too much responsibility sitting in one place.
That’s not a personal limitation.
It’s a capacity issue inside the business.
And until that’s addressed, no amount of working harder fixes it.
I broke this down more fully in this post.
A Question Worth Asking
If you step back and look honestly at your firm right now…
Are you keeping up with it?
Or are you carrying it?
Because those are not the same thing.
And the difference between them is where everything starts to change.
If this resonates, you’ll probably find my weekly emails helpful. I write about the patterns I see inside law firms that most people don’t talk about, and how to start thinking about them differently.
