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Bill Bradley: Piling Up & Chipping Away

Bill Bradley pushing his limitsHow do you run 135 miles through Death Valley in temperatures soaring over 120 degrees?

Maybe a better question is how do you avoid running over a hundred miles through Death Valley when the road’s hot enough to catch your shoes on fire. ‘Cause if there’s any chance I ever have to do that, I will pay good money to get out of it.

The real question, of course, is why you’d do something so crazy.

If you’re my old high school pal Bill Bradley, you do it to find out if you can. Bill is fascinated–all right, obsessed–with the limitations of human endurance. And his long list of startling accomplishments reveals the secret to achieving grand and amazing goals–

Piling up and chipping away.

Piling up means that each grain of new effort adds to the total. Chipping away means the pick head strikes the same spot each time. Because a thousand shallow holes do not make a well.

By piling up the steps behind him and chipping away at the miles ahead, my friend Epic Bill Bradley repeatedly does what seems impossible, and more importantly–

He proves that it wasn’t.

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