I made thousands of dollars from running a marathon

Not directly, but the connection is unquestionable.

You’ll never see from me a screenshot of my Medium earnings! In one of my earlier stories, I promised to never post like garbage about my Medium stats, reads, followers, earnings. And I’ll keep my word.

But I do want to admit that I’ve had a good run on Medium. There goes an accidental pun!

I’ve been writing for five months exactly. My first story on Medium was on October 12th, 2021. Exactly five months ago. The story was about my sub-three-hour marathon two days prior. You can read it here and add a few bucks to my Medium earnings!

The race was awesome. I was, I am very proud of my result but, most importantly, it helped me understand the incredible power of habit, of doing something with uncompromising consistency. I don’t want to repeat too much what I wrote in that story but the point was that I hadn’t been training for some goal, like running under three hours. I hadn’t even been training for a marathon. Once I decided to sign up for a race, I knew I could do it well but in the many months preceding, I’d just been — well — running. Every day. EVERY. DAY. It got to the point — and that’s how I am today — that there is absolutely nothing that can make me compromise my habit, except for an injury. Bad weather? I run. Bad day overall? I run. Traveling for work or vacation? I run.

That race provided me with a sense of reset in my life. Not that I suddenly solved all of my life’s problems — not at all, but I started to feel that I could, albeit gradually, introduce other life-changing routines to my life.

I wrote my story on the marathon and decided that writing was next in line on the menu of things I could do consistently. Consistently is an understatement. Consistently — every day, for the rest of my life.

Since then I published 233 stories — that’s one and a half stories per day. A lot of trash for sure but I kept writing and I keep writing and it’s started to pay off, figuratively and literally.

As with my running, I had no goal in sight. Even now I have no goal in sight. I had no idea how I’d solve if ever, Medium’s algorithm that would help me become a visible writer on the platform. I just kept at it.

Yes, I do check my Medium stats a lot, but it’s not because I’m trying to get to some milestone. It’s to get a sense of my overall progress. And…