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Around six-thirty on the morning of April 16, 2018, the lobby of Boston’s Fairmont hotel was warm, carpeted, and dry.

Then Des Linden pushed open its large brass doors, and the storm the whole city had been warned about came shrieking and howling across the threshold, with a force that almost knocked her off her feet.

One meteorologist compared the conditions to a car wash. Near-freezing rain lashed sideways on gusts pushing forty miles per hour. Des was soaked through to her skin before the doors swung shut behind her.

She turned to her agent, Josh, and raised her voice over the gale, “Oh shit, so this is the weather everyone has been talking about!”

Josh shouted back, as he fought to keep his cap from flying off his head, “Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to rain a little today!” The two of them cracked up laughing in the middle of the storm.

“Everyone” was the entire marathon world. In a few hours, Des and the strongest field in distance running were supposed to race the 122nd Boston Marathon. They would run all 26.2 miles through the worst race-day conditions in living memory.

On the bus to the starting line, the usual pre-race chatter was absent. Every runner stared out at the storm with dread.

The only exception was Des, who felt something entirely different wash over her. Hope.

A storm like this wouldn’t let the race be decided by talent, or shoe technology, or a perfect training block. It would strip the field down to those runners who could keep functioning while everything hurt. And on that measure, Linden had an unusual résumé.

She had spent the past eleven years failing to win a marathon.

In 2011, on this same course, she had led the Boston Marathon with the finish line in sight. Then, mid-final-sprint, her right calf seized. She crossed the line two seconds behind Kenya’s Caroline Kilel. It was the fastest an American woman had ever run at Boston, but when people praised her “potential” afterward, all she heard was a veiled reminder that she hadn’t actually won anything yet.

For the next seven years, she fought to close that two-second gap, only to watch it grow ever wider.

In 2012 she made the US Olympic team, then a stress-fractured femur ended her London race almost as soon as it began. In 2017 she was fourth at Boston, behind a podium swept by rivals in Nike’s new carbon-plated super-shoes, worth a rumored four percent performance boost, and made by a company that wasn’t her sponsor. Then after a long spell of inexplicably poor performance, an emergency blood test revealed she had severe hypothyroidism. For years, the gland that regulates the body’s energy had barely been working, meaning she’d been racing the best runners alive on a flat battery.

By the end of 2017 she was thirty-four, had never won a marathon, and was privately wondering whether this was all she would ever amount to.

The woman who almost won.

But her college coach, Walt Drenth, had drilled a line into her that outlasted every workout: “It doesn’t matter how you feel,” he’d say. “It’s whether you’re ready or not.”

And nobody on that bus was more ready. A storm held little fear for someone who had just spent seven years running through injury, illness, and heartbreak. And nobody knew this road better. She’d raced it five times and rehearsed it endlessly. “A 3-D version of this course lives permanently in my head,” she later wrote, “where I’ve run it countless times, incorporating the five I’ve raced before.”

For all her readiness, she wasn’t actually set on winning. After the year she’d just had, the goal was simply to make it to the finish line—proof to her sponsor, and to herself, that she still belonged in the sport.

Things did not get off to a great start. Within the first few miles, her new racing flats had become waterlogged, and she could no longer feel her own feet.

By midway, she had drifted off the back of the lead pack and was contemplating dropping out. Then she ran the logistics. Getting back to the hotel mid-marathon meant an Uber, the subway, or a rescue van—three ways of shivering across a shut-down city in soaked clothes. Running was the fastest, warmest way back. So she kept running.

That’s when the race shifted. The storm began to get the best of the lead pack, but Des was able to press through the wind to catch back up, her resilience outweighing her misery in a way nobody else could match. Her whole career, Des had exactly one method for overcoming those moments when everything screamed at her to stop. In her words, “to take another step. Right foot, left foot, repeat.” She had never taken those steps more defiantly than she did now.

Over the final miles, her preparation compounded her toughness. The young Kenyan ahead of her, Gladys Chesir, kept swinging wide through the bends, effectively running meters she didn’t have to. Des cut every corner to the shortest possible line, reeling her in through pure course knowledge. Just past Heartbreak Hill, she blew past Chesir and skipped a fluid station to force distance.

With the end in sight, she braced for what always happened. Either the sound of footsteps from behind, or her own body folding the way it had in 2011.

Then the final turn onto Boylston Street hit her with the mightiest winds of the race. The Lenox Hotel slid past on her right, the same spot where her body had betrayed her seven years earlier. This time her stride held. She listened for footsteps, for anyone coming to take it from her. All she could hear was the roar of the crowd. Then the PA system delivered the sentence she’d been chasing her whole career:

“And here comes your 2018 Boston Marathon champion, Desiree Linden.”

She was the first American woman to win Boston in thirty-three years. In 2011, she had lost this race by two seconds. In 2018, she won it by more than four minutes.

The weather had made sure that everyone suffered that day. Over two thousand runners were treated for hypothermia. What separated Des wasn’t that she felt better than anyone else—it’s that, as her old coach had taught her, readiness trumps feelings. And eleven brutal years had made her more prepared than anyone alive to compete through suffering.

Most worthwhile endeavors work like this. Chase anything hard for long enough and rejection, setbacks, disappointment, uncertainty, doubt, and pain will become close companions. But these companions are Scooby-Doo villains. They seem terrifying when they first appear and cause havoc for a while. In the moment, a fractured femur, a rival’s super-shoes, and a failing thyroid look like nothing but hindrances. But then the mask comes off, and the monster turns out to have been someone else all along. In the cartoon, it’s a disgruntled groundskeeper. In real life, it’s often a blessing.

The rejection toughens you up. The setback was a setup for something better. The disappointment shows you exactly where the problem is, which is the first step toward the solution. And navigating uncertainty and doubt is what builds the strength to seize the big opportunity when it finally arrives. Des could never have predicted the circumstances, but all the suffering she’d endured became the ultimate foundation for victory.

And here’s why understanding this trickery is paramount. If you can learn to recognize that the monster in front of you may later be unmasked as a blessing, it makes it that much easier to set your fear aside and get back to doing the only thing that ever really matters.

Taking the next step.

Right foot. Left foot. Repeat.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky’s monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest July edition, Scott explores the moats that actually matter in the AI era — including the ones only time can build — breakthroughs in cross-species communication, and how to take back your attention.

• Curious to dive deeper on the story in today’s edition? We recommend reading Choosing to Run by Des Linden.

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