Long distance running has some interesting similarities with startup life, IMO, that relate directly to the author&#x27;s premise. Not the same, of course, but you can still ask the same questions: What makes the entrepreneur keep going when it&#x27;s hard work, and they&#x27;re tired, nearly out of money, low on sleep, hitting the extremes of mood and ability, month after month? What motivation is there to just keep going when it&#x27;s not clear there&#x27;s an end?<p>I&#x27;m no ultra marathoner, but I&#x27;ve recently done some marathon length trail runs just for fun, it was liberating and fun to be able to cover long distances on foot without a vehicle, and I automatically started thinking about longer runs. The article seems to suggest there&#x27;s a special brand of weird, that ultra marathoners are very different. I rather think it&#x27;s human nature to see how far you can go, no matter what you&#x27;re doing, and always curious and interesting to think about and&#x2F;or experience what kind of mental states people go through when doing some activity to the exclusion of other things.