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In today’s edition, Joe shares:
- The 2,500-year-old line that explains why we're calling 2027 the Year of the Sun.
- Why Sparta's holiest symbol beat their fiercest one, and what that costs you.
- Steven Pressfield on the enemy that shows up at dawn, every dawn.
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They told him the arrows would blot out the sun. He laughed.
At the Hot Gates in 480 BC, a scout ran back to the 300 with the worst number a soldier can hear. The Persian archers were so many their volleys would blacken the sky. Dienekes, the man Herodotus calls the best of everyone who fought there, didn't flinch. If the enemy hid the sun, fine. Then the battle would be fought in the shade. I've thought about that line more than almost anything else I've read. It isn't bravado. It's a guy hearing the worst possible news and finding the advantage inside it before anyone else has finished panicking. That's the whole thing. That's the entire operating system.
I'm picking the Sun for 2027 for a personal reason, and I'll just say it straight. Six years ago this business almost didn't make it. Races canceled. Venues gone. Staff gone. Nobody knew when, or if, people would ever stand shoulder to shoulder in a muddy field again. I've been in a lot of dark places on a lot of race courses, but that was different, because there was no finish line to run at. I got up every morning on the farm anyway. And every single morning, without exception, the sun came up. Didn't ask how I felt about it. Didn't check whether we'd made payroll. It just came up. Six years later we're healthier, tougher, and better than we were in 2019. And I'm convinced the reason isn't some brilliant strategy. It's that we kept getting up with it. This too shall pass. But only if
you're still standing when it does.
Here's the part most people don't know. We've spent the last few seasons with predators. Eagle. Wolf. Boar. Teeth and instinct. Beasts to unleash. But Sparta's holiest thing was never a predator. Sparta's greatest festivals, the Karneia, the Hyacinthia, the Gymnopaedia, all belonged to Apollo, the god the Greeks increasingly came to read as the sun itself. During the Karneia, the most feared army on earth suspended all military operations. In 490 BC that cost them Marathon. The Athenians fought basically alone. It was over before Sparta showed up. They held the rhythm even when the rhythm cost them a battle. So don't mistake this for the soft year. The Sun is the harder symbol. A wolf can be ferocious for an afternoon. The sun has never missed a day in four and a half billion.
That's the argument I've been making in every book I've written. Spartan Up! Spartan Fit! The Spartan Way. 10 Rules for Resilience. Not "have a heroic day." Build a will that doesn't need heroism, because it doesn't need motivation. The Greeks knew it first. Heraclitus said the sun is new each day, and also that it never oversteps its measures. Relentless renewal, inside real limits. Marcus Aurelius wrote his most famous lines about the exact moment the alarm goes off and the bed is warm and your brain starts negotiating. The beast years asked you to summon something. This year I'm asking you to sustain something.
If you want one thing to listen to this week, go find Steven Pressfield. Ep. 013, "Lessons from the Original Spartans," and the conversation we did after it
. Steve wrote Gates of Fire about the original Spartans, plus The Warrior Ethos and The War of Art. Dienekes is a main character in Gates of Fire. That's the man from the top of this email. And in The War of Art Steve names the real enemy: Resistance. The thing that shows up at dawn, every dawn, and makes a very reasonable case for tomorrow. Listen to it walking, not sitting.
Then get up tomorrow before it does, and go put a race on the 2027 calendar. The sun's going to be there either way. The only question is whether you are.
Joe
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THE SUN'S ONLY RULE
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FOUR AND A HALF BILLION YEARS.
NOT ONE MISSED SUNRISE.
NO MOTIVATION. NO CHECK-IN. NO EXCUSE.
JUST UP.
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| They Said It |
| "Then we shall fight in the shade."
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| – Dienekes, Spartan commander at Thermopylae, 480 BC
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➝The Hard Way Podcast with Joe |
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| THE HARDWAY PODCAST
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Joe McConaughy Googled "run the Pacific Crest Trail" at 22, having never raced past a mile. 53 days later he held the speed record, the final 15 spent running on a dead ankle. Joe De Sena sits down with him on what breaks between day 40 and the finish line.
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