1 Hour. 3 Minutes.

I signed up for Qualcomm’s Qrun Event at Hyderabad, the 10K run, with an intention that felt almost embarrassing to admit.

Just stay in the game.

No medals in mind.

No timing obsession.

Just one rule: don’t quit early.

To make that possible, I needed constraints.

So I set a few ground rules:

• No ego running. If people passed me, let them.
• No unnecessary stops. No drinks. No distractions.
• First 5K deliberately slow. Earn the right to go faster.

The idea wasn’t to perform.

It was to protect momentum.

The first few kilometers were louder than I expected.

Legs negotiating.

Breath complaining.

Once my friends pulled ahead, my mind started doing math -

how walking “wouldn’t really count as quitting.”

Exit plans appeared. Very reasonable ones.

But I didn’t take them.

I kept the pace boring. Almost stubbornly so.

Around the 5K mark, something changed.

My body stopped arguing.

My mind stopped scanning for excuses.

It felt less like pushing

and more like settling in.

So I nudged the pace up. Just a little.

Not to prove anything,

but to see what consistency might unlock if I didn’t interrupt it.

Thirty minutes later, the finish line appeared.

That was it.

1 hour. 3 minutes.

Nothing extraordinary.

Except this:

Consistency beats intensity when the timeline is long.

Turns out, 10K was long enough.

I’m grateful for the run.

And I respect Qualcomm for setting this up -

and everyone who showed up, moved forward,

and didn’t quit early.

That’s a different kind of win.

One that compounds quietly, on a much longer timeline, outside the race.