The Resilience to Redefine Victory: Solveig Løvseth at IRONMAN Kona

Recently, my wife and I found ourselves watching the dying moments of the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.

I don’t frequently venture into the sports channels unless there’s something I’m specifically interested in watching, but we’d been flicking through the options and thought, why not? There may also have been some subconscious guilt involved, considering we’d just returned from an impromptu road trip featuring road snacks, sundowners and the sort of nutritional decision-making normally associated with an unattended toddler in a petrol station.

After a week of temporarily suspending all adult responsibility, watching people demonstrate extraordinary physical discipline seemed an appropriate form of penance.

And extraordinary doesn’t begin to describe it.

A 3.8-kilometre swim, 180 kilometres on a bicycle and then an entire marathon. The fastest competitors complete the lot in under eight hours, which is a staggering amount of time to maintain that level of physical output. If I managed the swim, I’d consider the weekend a roaring success and insist on being transported home in a sedan chair while a small brass band played something triumphant.

The training and resilience required to achieve something like this are remarkable. I completely understand why people who’ve completed endurance events are so eager to share their stories, although in South Africa the number of people documenting their personal Comrades journey has reached a point where reading them all might qualify you for a finisher’s medal.

But it wasn’t the winners who had us glued to the television. It was 27-year-old Norwegian athlete Solveig Løvseth.

The race we didn’t expect to care about

Løvseth was already among the world’s elite, having won IRONMAN Lake Placid in 2025 in only her second full-distance race. She’d started the marathon in Kona in third place, more than four minutes behind the leader, but methodically worked her way through the field. With roughly ten kilometres remaining, she took the lead.

Neither my wife nor I are religious followers of professional triathlon. We knew virtually nothing about Løvseth before switching on the television, but somehow we’d become completely invested in her race, cheering her on from a sofa in Cape Town as though our Norwegian citizenship applications depended on the result.

And then, with just over a kilometre to go, she collapsed.

Her body appeared to have nothing left to give. She could barely stand, let alone walk, and the athletes behind her began passing. Every time the cameras returned to Løvseth, she was struggling back to her feet, taking a few steps and collapsing again.

It was heartbreaking to watch. She’d spent hours covering an almost incomprehensible distance, yet suddenly the final kilometre looked further away than the entire race she’d already completed. Our excitement about a potential victory quickly gave way to genuine concern. Watching her repeatedly try to stand was becoming increasingly difficult, and we just wanted to know that she was going to be okay.

After what felt like an eternity, she eventually managed to begin walking again. The lead was long gone, along with any realistic prospect of winning, but what happened over those final metres completely changed the experience of watching her race.

A different way to cross the finish line

Once Løvseth was moving again, something about her demeanour appeared to change. Rather than desperately trying to recover the time she’d lost, she began interacting with the spectators. She shook hands, acknowledged supporters and even stopped to chat with a group of Norwegians less than a hundred metres from the finish.

And she looked happy. Not simply relieved to be moving, but genuinely comfortable with how the race was ending.

We couldn’t possibly know what she was thinking or feeling, but from our couch it looked as though she’d accepted that the win was gone and decided there was still something wonderful about the experience she was having.

She eventually walked across the finish line in eighth place, greeted by the women who’d finished ahead of her.

Somewhere in those final moments, my wife and I had stopped watching to see who would win. We were completely invested in someone who wasn’t going to win, and who appeared to have discovered another way to enjoy the end of her race.

I’d spent the previous few minutes desperately hoping she’d make it. Now I was smiling as she stopped to greet another group of supporters, apparently in no particular hurry to cross the line.

The original victory condition was gone. But the experience still had something extraordinary to offer.

Even the extraordinary are still human

We hold elite athletes in incredibly high regard, and understandably so. Their dedication, physical conditioning and ability to endure discomfort allow them to achieve things that most of us can barely comprehend.

We marvel at their capacity, celebrate their determination and occasionally forget that they’re operating with the same fundamental human limitations as the rest of us. They get tired. Their resources run out. Their bodies don’t always cooperate, regardless of how much preparation has gone into the performance we’re watching. And if someone operating at the pinnacle of human endurance can reach their limit, it’s worth considering the expectations we place on ourselves and the people around us.

Take the high performers in our workplaces.

They’re dependable, capable and consistently deliver results. So we reward them in the time-honoured corporate tradition of giving them considerably more work, usually accompanied by a heartfelt expression of appreciation and absolutely no additional resources.

Eventually, they become the organisational equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Except someone has welded another seventeen attachments onto it, declared it a strategic asset and scheduled a workshop to investigate why it isn’t also making coffee.

And because they’re good at what they do, they generally keep delivering.

We look at the results and conclude that everything is fine, conveniently ignoring what those results might be costing the people producing them. If the spreadsheet is green, apparently the humans must be green too, even if half the team is being held together by caffeine and the sort of emotional stability normally associated with a shopping trolley missing three wheels.

High performance isn’t proof of unlimited capacity.

Valorie Burton explores a useful relationship between Required Energy and Available Energy, something I’ve previously written about in Capacity Fiction: Business Capacity Planning Done Honestly.

We make plans based on the resources we expect to have, then continue demanding the same outcomes when those resources change. A new priority arrives, so we add it to the list. Something goes wrong, so we throw more effort at recovering the original plan. Meanwhile, the people, energy and time available to deliver everything remain stubbornly finite.

We’ve effectively increased demand without increasing supply, then act astonished when the system starts struggling. It’s the organisational equivalent of discovering your car has half a tank of fuel remaining and deciding the obvious solution is to double the distance you intend to drive.

I’ve spent considerable time exploring how organisations measure performance without understanding the strain accumulating beneath it. Our ability to keep producing results says remarkably little about the resources we’re consuming to achieve them.

And when someone eventually reaches their limit, we can be remarkably quick to interpret it as a failure of resilience rather than recognising that they’ve been operating beyond what was sustainable.

When the Plan Changes, So Must the Expectations

In Dan Heath’s Reset, there’s a line that I really like, largely because I’ve spent an impressive amount of my adult life demonstrating precisely why it’s necessary.

“Change is not AND, it’s INSTEAD OF.”

I explored this when writing about my own relationship with exercise, recovery and the demands of building a career. My tendency has often been to add things. Another project, another ambition, another commitment, all while expecting the original collection of responsibilities to continue operating as though nothing has changed.

Unsurprisingly, the maths eventually stops working.

At work, this usually involves someone announcing that the organisation needs to become more agile, before introducing fourteen additional deliverables, three reporting structures and a weekly alignment meeting to discuss why nobody has time to do the actual work.

We’ve changed the plan without changing any of the commitments, which isn’t particularly agile. It’s more like asking a donkey to pull a heavier cart while delivering an inspirational speech about the exciting opportunities presented by the hill.

The reason I found Løvseth’s finish so compelling wasn’t that she’d somehow summoned another heroic effort to keep competing. Watching an athlete repeatedly collapse was frightening, and there are circumstances where stopping and receiving medical attention is absolutely the right decision.

It was the apparent change in how she approached the experience once the outcome she’d been pursuing was no longer available. There was no longer a race to win, but there were still people to acknowledge, a remarkable achievement to recognise and a finish line towards which she’d spent years working.

What might have been experienced entirely as disappointment appeared, at least to those of us watching, to have become an opportunity to enjoy something different… I wonder how often we deny ourselves that opportunity because we’re so busy measuring what happened against what we’d originally planned.

We hold tightly to the original objective, sometimes long after the circumstances supporting it have disappeared. We become convinced that changing course means we’re giving up, when we may simply be refusing to acknowledge that we’re no longer operating in the same conditions.

Resilience isn’t always about finding another way to achieve the original victory condition. Sometimes it means having the courage to change what victory looks like.

Three things worth trying when the plan changes

Most of us aren’t competing for world championships, although anyone who’s attended a Monday morning meeting where a project deadline has moved forward six weeks might argue otherwise.

Our circumstances are generally less dramatic, but the underlying challenge is familiar. We’ve invested time, energy and effort into achieving something, and suddenly the plan we’ve built around it no longer fits the reality we’re facing.

There are three practical ways we can respond without treating the change as a personal catastrophe.

1. Recalculate your available capacity

We tend to make plans around what we’re capable of at our best, then hold ourselves to those expectations regardless of what’s happened in the meantime.

Before demanding another heroic effort, compare what the outcome requires with the resources you actually have available. Include the time, energy, support and recovery needed to deliver it sustainably.

If a project requires another forty hours of work and the team has twenty hours available, enthusiasm isn’t going to manufacture the missing twenty. Neither will a motivational speech or a laminated poster featuring an eagle looking particularly determined.

Something needs to change, whether that’s the deadline, scope, available resources or the expected outcome.

The same applies personally. Yesterday’s capacity isn’t necessarily today’s capacity, and continuing to budget resources you no longer have is a particularly effective way to make a difficult situation worse.

2. Make an INSTEAD OF decision

When circumstances change, identify what you’re going to stop, reduce or replace rather than simply adding another demand.

For leaders, this means being deliberate about trade-offs. A new priority should prompt a conversation about which existing commitment will move, rather than an enthusiastic announcement that everything is now equally urgent.

For individuals, it means giving ourselves permission to release expectations that no longer make sense.

A simple way to start is to finish the sentence: Given what’s changed, I’m going to do _____ instead of _____.

It requires a little more courage than it might first appear. Letting go of something we’ve invested in can feel uncomfortable, particularly when our identity or sense of achievement has become tied to the original plan.

But keeping every commitment alive isn’t evidence of resilience. Sometimes it’s simply an excellent way to exhaust ourselves while achieving increasingly little.

3. Revisit the goal of the goal

We become so invested in a particular outcome that we sometimes lose sight of why we wanted it in the first place.

When a plan stops working, revisit what you were ultimately hoping to achieve. Was it the specific result, or was there something more meaningful you wanted to experience, contribute or create along the way?

A leader might discover that a project can no longer be delivered as originally designed, while the business problem it was intended to solve still has several perfectly reasonable solutions. They may even be better than the original, although admitting this can be difficult after six months of steering committees and a consultancy bill large enough to finance a small moon landing.

For individuals, it can mean recognising that the sense of achievement, connection or enjoyment we were pursuing might still be available, even when the outcome we originally imagined is not.

Our ability to influence what happens next is also worth reconsidering, something I’ve explored in Locus of Control at Work. We may no longer have control over the outcome we originally wanted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean every meaningful choice has disappeared.

This doesn’t mean pretending disappointment doesn’t matter. Losing something we’ve worked towards can hurt, and changing the plan doesn’t instantly make that disappointment disappear.

It does, however, leave room for the possibility that the experience still has something worthwhile to offer.

Redefining victory

When we switched on the television, my wife and I had no particular interest in who would win the IRONMAN World Championship. We’d spent the previous week taking a break, and watching exceptionally fit people do exceptionally difficult things seemed an entertaining way to round it off.

By the end, we’d found ourselves cheering for someone who finished eighth.

Not because eighth place was somehow more impressive than winning, or because watching someone endure physical distress was inspiring. We were moved by what appeared to happen afterwards, when an athlete who’d lost the outcome she’d been pursuing seemed to find genuine happiness in what remained of the experience.

I keep thinking about those final hundred metres. She could have been entirely consumed by the result she’d lost, and perhaps some part of her was. But what we saw was someone taking the time to greet supporters, acknowledge the people cheering her on and enjoy the closing moments of something extraordinary.

We place enormous pressure on ourselves to achieve what we originally set out to do. We make plans, commit resources and build expectations, then judge ourselves against those expectations even when the circumstances have changed beyond recognition.

Recognising our limits doesn’t diminish what we’re capable of. Changing direction doesn’t erase the effort we’ve already invested, and redefining success doesn’t automatically mean we’ve lowered our ambitions.

Løvseth didn’t win the race we watched, but she gave two complete strangers sitting on a sofa in Cape Town a story they’ll probably remember far longer than whoever crossed the finish line first.

You don’t need to win every race, and you certainly don’t need to pretend every disappointment is secretly a victory.

But when things don’t turn out the way you expected, there’s sometimes an opportunity to change the plan, gather what resources you have left and reconsider what a meaningful finish might look like.

You might not finish in first place. You might inadvertently create an entirely new story for yourself.