by Coach Fouse
The Concorde flew passengers across the Atlantic in under three hours at twice the speed of sound. We retired it in 2003. Today, that same trip takes seven hours.
We put twelve men on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, then cancelled the next three Apollo missions even though the hardware was already built. We haven’t been back in over fifty years.
In 1997, Andy Green broke the sound barrier on land at 763 miles per hour. More than a quarter century later, that record still stands.
Even in athletics, progress has stalled. The rate of running world records began to flatten in the 1980s, with improvement rates falling and many distance records standing for years.
In medicine, the golden age of vaccines in the 1950s-1970s gave way to slower innovation, with new drug approvals declining sharply after the mid-1990s despite research costs increasing dramatically.
It’s easy to explain this away. Running records naturally get harder to break. Medical breakthroughs require more investment. Space travel is expensive. It’s just the inevitable costs of progress, right?
But this misses the point. The problem isn’t that these frontiers became harder. It’s that we decided they weren’t worth the bother. We didn’t hit natural limits in the 1980s and 90s. We lost our appetite for risk and challenge. We reframed the dream and pursuit of the hard unknown as wasteful vanity and sold the retreat as wisdom. Rather than seeing stagnation as a crisis, we learned to justify it with calls for common sense and practicality. After all, why go to space when we have problems here?
This is the despair of a culture that’s given up on the possibility of new frontiers. Not because we can’t push them or lack the resources, but because we’ve convinced ourselves we shouldn’t. We’ve become a culture of managers rather than makers, and we’ve traded frontier-pushing for a better marketing strategy for what already exists.
Do you ever dream of doing big things, but just don’t know how to get started or how to get there?
You’re young. You have energy, you want movement, and you crave doing things that matter. Our culture encourages you to do that by “finding your voice” and “being authentic.” Frontier finding in today’s context seems to be more about self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-discovery, and self-promotion (likes, follows, fame) than learning to see and push against the barriers that are all around us. We have quietly abandoned the kind of frontier finding that led to so much of the infrastructure and abundance we enjoy today. We replace the idea of exploring and building new frontiers in the world with the idea of exploring and building our personal identities—and we don’t notice what’s been lost.
What Does This Have to Do With Running?
Frontiers aren’t gone. We just question the value of finding them.
Running isn’t solely about training your body. Running is where you practice what it means to believe in and pursue frontiers.
When you train for a goal, you’re pursuing something that didn’t exist before. A faster 5K time, the ability to run a certain distance, the capacity to endure when things aren’t perfect. This only comes from discipline. From work. From showing up day after day, week after week, even when you’re not hitting your goals, and the effort feels wasted.
Think about a track practice. Sometimes you hit your target pace. Other times you don’t. But every time you show up and push through one at a time, you learn how to keep going when it’s hard and your mind and body are telling you to stop. That’s frontier-pushing.
Every time you deal with a setback in running—a pulled muscle, a bad race, anything that disrupts your race plan—you’re learning something important. You’re learning that you’re not in control of everything, but that’s not what matters. What matters is how you respond. That’s frontier-pushing behavior.
The great explorers, the inventors, the people who actually moved humanity forward, all dealt with setbacks. But they kept showing up. They kept trying. They endured.
You’re working that same muscle here, on this team, in our training.
When you push through a hard workout, you’re not just getting stronger. You’re training yourself to believe that hard things are worth doing. You’re learning to pursue even when you can’t see the fruit of your labor.
Frontier Finding Requires Discipline
As Spire athletes, I want you to dream big. To look at the time you’ve been given and ask, “Why am I here, and what frontier can I push?
But remember, dreams without disciplined work are just dreams.
There’s a story in the Bible that has stuck with me. Jesus was hungry and walked by a fig tree. The tree had no fruit. So Jesus cursed it. The Bible doesn’t say if it was fig season or not. It almost glaringly ignores it. The point Jesus (the creator) made was, he expected fruit.
As a runner, you can’t control certain things in the season. But you are accountable for producing fruit. That means showing up, pushing through when it’s hard, getting up when things go wrong, finding a way to keep producing fruit, and remembering that PRs are not the only measure of fruit.
What Frontiers Will You Push?
At Spire, you’re not just training to run faster. You’re training to be the kind of person who believes in an abundant world where frontiers still exist and are worth pursuing.
The world needs people who know how to endure, how to fail and get back up, and how to turn dreams into something real.
So, keep training and keep showing up to become a better runner. But understand what you’re really doing. You’re learning to be a frontier-finder in a culture that’s forgotten how. You’re training mind, body, and soul to believe that frontiers still exist, that hard things are worth doing, and that discipline creates possibility.
That’s what we’re building at Spire.
