It's A [Boston] Marathon, Not A Sprint

Welcome to the Autistic Techie

Podcast. I'm your host, Shay Belsky, an autistic software engineer and tech lead.

We're going to dive into the world of tech careers from a neurodivergent

perspective, interviewing guests from all different corners of the industry and empowering you to be a better self-advocate.

Hello.

It's

been quite a bit, and if you're wondering where Shay has been over the last couple of months, I have

been training for the Boston Marathon.

I am super psyched this year to be running it on behalf of the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism.

They're a Boston-based organization that supports autistic people and their families to lead. meaningful, independent, inclusive lives, whatever they're

doing, whatever support they need. They do a really incredible job, and I'm psyched to be running with them this

year for the Boston Marathon.

The reason that that's relevant is because part of this training has involved me having to

really think about how I pace myself

when I run. For those who don't know, the Boston Marathon is one of the world major marathons, one of

the biggest sporting events

of the world

of any year. And this year will be the one hundred and thirtieth

Boston Marathon, where I will be running twenty-six point two miles starting from Hopkinton, Massachusetts,

to downtown Boston, Massachusetts, in Back Bay

on Boylston Street. There's a lot of lore and history surrounding the Boston Marathon,

and what really makes

a marathon an interesting experience for an autistic individual like myself is figuring out

how

I have to

pace myself, how I have to adjust

my energy, how I have to figure out what I'm putting in, what I'm expending.

It is a marathon,

and you're doing it for twenty-six point two miles. Most people in their lives will probably not ever

run a marathon, but it's a really excellent metaphor for what it feels like to be an autistic person

going through life, whether it's over the span of years, whether it's just a day.

How do you figure out how much energy

you need, what you need, what you actually have to put into your system to get through a day,

to get through your job,

and then come out on the other side and still feel like you can wake up the next day

and do the same thing? I wanna talk about what the Boston Marathon experience, the training experience, has meant

to me over the last couple of

months and why this is relevant for autistic individuals in the workplace and in their lives. I promise

you it's relevant to being autistic and neurodivergent

in the workplace. It might sound like running has nothing to do with it, but I promise you there's

a lot to take away here.

The first thing that you probably don't know about if you've never done this sort of intensive running

training before is it takes a lot of time to train. I've been training for this since about November 2025,

which was the last time I uploaded an episode for

this podcast because it's just taken up so much of my time. I'm running multiple times per week. Basically, every

Saturday or almost every Saturday since November until now, it's April 2026,

has been taken up with me running and training. I've been training with Coach Fury's Fury. It sounds like fury

and which I, I

really love that, but it is Coach Fury's marathon training program which I'm doing through the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation.

And so almost every Saturday since November 2025, I've been starting at a physical therapy clinic which is right under

the Citgo sign in Boston. If you know anything about Boston, you know the Citgo sign. It's a very iconic

part of Boston's,

uh, skyline.

In his, uh, physical therapy

clinic, the clinic

where he works, is under the Citgo sign. And so I've been starting, uh, from under the sign.

I go backwards for the marathon course,

starting from the Boston area and going backwards

along it. And then when I hit a certain distance, I turn around and I go do the marathon course

for real. One of the really important fixtures of this training regime is that it's constant, it's consistent. I'm building

routines. I'm building experience on the course itself. I'm getting a lay of the land, figuring out how is this

hill, how is this environment,

what does it feel like in this kind of a weather. It's been quite a cold winter

in the Boston area,

and I've really had to deal with

cold and rain and wind and snow and sun and any condition you can think of. So really, whatever happens

on the Boston Marathon, I'm pretty ready for the weather. If it's super hot or super cold, I'm just

ready

for it. That relates a lot to my experience as being in the workplace, just having to be ready for

anything

and just not having

to deal with it, but having to figure out what you need to get through this or just acknowledging, hey,

I can't get through this as it is, or

I can, but it's going to be very difficult or very frustrating

for me. Interviews are one of the most grueling things I have had to deal with as an autistic individual.

It is uncomfortable for

me to say the least. It feels like the highest form of masking for me, the most amount of telling

recruiters and telling interviewers kind of what they want to hear. Not that I'm being dishonest,

but really kind of

contorting and speaking in a way and speaking about myself in a way that I don't necessarily do day-to-day.

I'm just not like a, a selfish,

prideful person,

and interviews kind of feel like that to

me. Doesn't mean that that's actually true, but it's just kind of how I experience it. It kind of feels

like

I have to really be boastful

and brag about all my accomplishments and figure out what am I, what am I gonna talk

about in this interview.

What thing can I pick from my work experience, from my job to say, "Hey, I did this really cool

thing. See, this thing that I think is relevant to this job," and I could be right or I could

be

wrong. It's

this masking part of it which is really frustrating

for me

in an interview. And marathon training is both

like and unlike that process of masking.

You have to be able to tolerate a certain amount of pain, a certain amount of discomfort

before you say, okay, like something is wrong here. I need to adjust a part of my strategy.

And the good news about-doing a marathon training is it's actually a lot easier to do that.

If you are running six, seven, eight miles and your feet start to hurt,

you say, "Okay, uh, I need to strengthen

parts of the muscles there. I need to inspect my footwear. I need to figure

out my fueling."

There's a lot of science that's around that that affects you.

Fortunately, whether you're neurodivergent or not, that, that science is pretty much the same regardless of, of your, your neurodiversity.

And so if you make it to eight miles and parts of your Achilles hurt, parts

of your back hurt, talk to a physical therapist or talk to a sh- a marathon coach, and they can

say, "Oh, like if this-- you're experiencing this

sort of pain,

it means this, and you should go do this to fix it and improve it." And the good news is

that if this is like November, December, you've got a lot of time to

fix it. So that was me in like November and December.

I was doing long runs, and my lower back was hurting. And my wife, who's a physical therapist,

she said to me, "Oh, like y-you're in pain and discomfort here. You need to strengthen your lower back. You

need to do some strength training.

That way,

um, you can st- you're standing up straight and y-your back is better supported to that 'cause you're on your

feet running, you're activating all your muscles or a lot of your muscles for that

amount of time. You need to have a strong core. You need to cross-train. You can't just train your heart

health. You can't just train

your lower body. Your whole body has to be along

for the ride." And so for the last couple months, we've been doing, uh, like a LIFT class at,

at our gym, not quite every Tuesday morning, but we' try to do

it every Tuesday morning, and that's really helped. And I've actually noticed a difference because I've been doing this specific

thing for a couple months. My lower back doesn't hurt as much. It hurts a little, but that's to be

expected at mile-- at

twenty miles. I-- doesn't hurt as much when I'm doing these long runs. And that's great 'cause I'm conditioning myself,

I'm learning

about it, and I'm, I'm getting

through it. And that also relates to the neurodivergent

interview experience in

a way. The only way I was e-really able to get through these interviews in the past was to

kind of expose myself to it

a little bit, a lot

bit.

Just practice and practice and

practice and do interviews that maybe were kind of throwaway interviews, ones that I didn't really want the job,

I wanted the experience. Bear in mind also this was kind of a different day and age when it was

easier to come by interviews, so I want to acknowledge that it's harder to just throw away an interview

if you h- are struggling to h- get interviews in the first place. This is twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty

twenty when the job market was a completely different story than it is in the year twenty twenty-six. So

I'm not suggesting you throw away an interview if you don't want the job. I am suggesting that if you

can practice doing interviews with your loved ones, with people around you, with friends, with people

online. Practicing interviews was really what helped

me strengthen that muscle to help me talk about myself, and not just that, but also helped me improvise

and get a better emotional intelligence, a better corporate intelligence of what does this interviewer really wanna learn about

me? What are they trying

to discover? What's the, what's the vibe? What's the energy

around it? And then be able to adjust.

Whether you are adjusting in the middle of an interview,

adjusting your practice, adjusting

your resume, just being able to make certain tweaks to the process

and then

go

for it.

And then the next part of the training just comes

increasing

your distance, increasing the amount of time that you can run before which you have

to tap out. And that's what it's been like for me. I'll start running eight, nine miles, then it'll be

ten,

eleven,

twelve. Don't go up in that little increments. It's more been like I go up in increments

of two miles. So I'll start running, I'll go eight miles, and then I'll go ten, twelve. I've been building,

building, building, and my longest long run before this was a couple weeks ago, two to three weeks ago, and

that long run was twenty-two miles, and that was uncomfortable. That's like the longest long run that most marathon runners

will have. Some people will go a little longer than that. That's entirely up to them. That's their training plan.

Like some people want to have their training plan be

at the twenty-four-mile mark.

Is that necessary for everybody? Probably not. But for some people it is.

So what works for me might not work for somebody else, and what works for another person may

not work for me at all. I felt that a twenty-two-mile run worked for me. The week or so before,

I'd done a twenty-mile run. So for me, having a twenty and twenty-two-mile run gave me a good sense of

like, how is my body feeling at this

mile marker? And do I feel like I have enough muscle memory, enough strength to push through this and get

to twenty-six, which is only, waving

my hands,

twenty-- only four miles after

that point. And then we come to the fact that, great,

now you're actually at those twenty and twenty-two-mile markers. And at those distances, it stops purely being an athletics body

game

or

activity. It's also about the mind. How do you occupy

yourself? How do you stop yourself from

getting bored? What are you doing, saying, listening to, talking

to in that moment? What do you actually need cognitively to get

through that? Because there

are two-- there are a lot of different parts to being on the workplace as a, as a neurodivergent person.

There is the physical aspect, a lot of your senses, which

affect your mind, affect how you think, affect how you interact with the world.

That's true of the things that are outside of your control, like your background factors, environmental factors, sound,

people talking around you,

et cetera. And then there's the things that you can control, which will directly help you have a better workplace

experience, a little

bit of a better desk job, if you wanna call

it that. So to me, that might be like, I hate running in the rain. That's something that I really

just don't

like to do. I've had to do that though.

I've had to manually go out there and say, "I hate running in the rain, but I

have to be ready for it just in case a race day

is pouring rain." One of the first marathons

I ever did was pouring rain

the entire race. I had done a couple runs up to that

point just to get exposure to that and be okay with it in the worst case scenario where

it did rain. And I'm glad I did that because I was able to develop a couple different internal strategies

to say, "Okay,

if this really bad event happens, here's what you have to do, and here's how you have to manage your

senses to make the most of the situation and just keep powering through." Also, what I realized

is that running in the rain wasn't as awful as I thought it was going to be. Because when it

was raining, uh, I wasn't overheating, I wasn't chafing. The course actually got kind of quiet. A lot of people

bailed out for the race that day because people didn't wanna run in the rain. My feeling is if you're

gonna run a marathonThe weather should not

be the biggest concern.

Like you're doing a really incredibly challenging, difficult feat and you're bailing because of the

rain? Like my personal feeling is that's a weird take,

but this,

this rainy

marathon,

I was ready for it. I had

been training for that possibility, and I'm glad that I did because then I was not caught off guard for

it. And I've had experience like that in the workplace too, scenarios where I've had to defend myself in being

an autistic individual, having to defend

other people, having to justify why I needed some support system,

having to explain it to somebody, me having to explain my thought process or dig in with somebody

on some particular nuance that they were getting really hung up on. And I had been preparing for those moments.

I've done them like in little bits in my real life,

but when it came time for somebody in the

workplace to really unnecessarily dig

in and just really try to push back against me for things that are out of my direct conscious control,

I was able to have a more constructive

dialogue by it rather than feel insulted or get caught off guard because

I had been ready for that moment, ready for that conversation,

and I could handle it in a way that I felt was mature and honest, but still kind

of addressed their concerns and the problems that they were trying

to talk about. And I always remember those moments when they happened because it's easy to, it's easy

for me to get emotional about autism and neurodiversity and talk about it at length. I could wake up and

talk about this for hours if I really wanted to, but it's in that moment when you're talking with somebody

in the workplace or talking with somebody in your life

and they're asking the kind of pointed, difficult

questions, you have to be able to respond to them in a way that treats them with respect and

honesty and maturity. And if you can't

do that, then it might not go

so well for you. You might find yourself saying something that you don't actually mean. You may find yourself in

an uncomfortable situation where you have to defend yourself, or you might not get what you want out of the

situation, whether that's an accommodation, some sort of understanding, some adjustment, or something else. That's where that adjustment comes in,

that slight ability to improvise and be ready for a wide array of situations that whether they are unrealistic or

not, it's not a zero percent chance

of it happening. It could snow next

week. Is it

likely?

No. Could it snow

next week?

Yes. So I've done a lot of training runs in the snow. In the very unlikely circumstance that it

snows, I'll

be ready. If

it rains, I'll

be ready. If it's really

hot, I'll be

ready. And

the fortunate thing about the marathon is that there's really on-only so many situations,

only so many kinds of weather conditions that you have to train for, which keeps the ability to actually respond

to those a little bit more in your control. In the workplace, it's not always quite like that.

There's gonna be things that you can never prepare

for, never predict. Some things will be like writing off being, "There's no way this could ever happen," and reasonably

thi-reasonable thing to write off as a notice will never happen. I'm not worried about it. And then you wake

up and like, "Oh, this thing has happened, and now I have to

go handle it or deal with it or else." And I've had to build that muscle too in running because

sometimes I will deal with things that I, I can't predict, I can't control, and I don't really account

for it in my training because the likelihood of it happening

is so low or just such an unlikely event to happen or just not something that

I ever like functionally computed would happen, that I'd never even considered the possibility of it. There's some simple examples

like, oops, I, I grabbed the wrong pair of shoes on the way out the door, so now I'm running

not with my normal running shoes, but a different pair of shoes, and I'll have to adjust and deal with

that and run, run a little bit slower.

That's an easy thing that you could do to adjust it. But another scenario

might be, this is something that I interact about on a daily basis, is that I have a little

bit of a light sensitivity.

If I start a run without sunglasses,

I get a little uncomfortable because the light just really hits me in the eyes really

hard. So I have to adjust where I'm running. I have to try to run

in the shade. I have to adjust where I'm running. It's a much different beast when it comes to the

light sensitivity stuff. And the self-accommodation there is simple,

just wear sunglasses. Or if I had to, I could like run out to like a Target

and

just grab a cheap, inexpensive pair of sunglasses and be done with

it. Do I wanna

do

that? No.

But I'm just prepared to go out there and do the thing. I've had to deal with that in the

workplace too. There's some situations that are so like unfathomably hard to ever occur or just like so unlikely to

occur that I never really like consciously plan for it until they happen. One of those things

could be like reorgs, layoffs. Those don't happen super often.

They, they happen, but it's hard, it's a hard thing for an individual to have to like brace for and

be ready for because every reorg, every layoff, every team shuffle is,

is different. You never know what's going to happen on the other side of it. Different by nature

of the company you work at, your team, etc.

A long time ago, I was a part of a big, big, big reorg that went with some layoffs, and

I was-- my team was completely disbanded. It stopped existing.

I was moved on to a brand new team where I knew very little about the product.

I knew like a scant amount of information about the other people on the team, and I just had to

be able to manage that situation. Like either I could handle it or I couldn't, and it was difficult and

uncomfortable, but I had to handle

it. Nothing could ever really prepare you for going through a layoff and a reorg

other than being through it a couple of times

and just being like, "Okay,

what's next? What's, what's going

on here?" And I don't wish that experience on anybody.

It's

unfortunate

sometimes. There's ways to do reorgs

well. This particular

one that I went through felt kind of botched, and I'm not saying that all reorgs are like

that. I really think it depends on organization,

depends on the company. But the most that you can do for yourself in those situations is kind of strengthen

that cognitive stability and just be ready, be ready for that whenever it happens. And then we come to like

coming up on

race day right now. It's-- we're, we're nine days out as I record this. It'll be April 20th. Today's April

12th, and we'reAlmost ready to actually pull this bandaid off and do it for real. Everything that you hear about

marathon training is the fueling.

The Boston Marathon is particularly unique. All marathons are unique, but Boston is more unique. Um, a lot of marathons,

not all of them, but a lot of them are like

a closed loop. You do one loop, or you do loops around a specific course, and then you finish, and

that's it. Not every marathon is like that, though not every, not every marathon finisher is in close to the

same spot as they start. Boston starts in the town of Hopkinton,

Massachusetts,

to the west, and it ends in Boston. And for the first almost half of the co-- for first more

than half of the course, for the first, like, fifteen, sixteen miles of the course, it's, like, mostly a downhill.

Not completely a downhill. It doesn't really feel

like a downhill, but it is technically a downhill. You're descending, uh, down and down

into Boston. At around mile sixteen or so, it's this very important cognitive

shift. It's a physical shift and a cognitive

shift. Until this point in time, you've been running basically in a straight line the whole course. You've been, like,

curving along the road. There's been, like, some turns. But for the most part, you've just been kind of

following a straight line, or a straight-ish line.

Then at mile sixteen-ish,

you hit this

firehouse, and at this firehouse, you do, like, a complete ninety-degree turn to the right. It's

a very hard turn.

You are turning,

and you start

going up a hill. And these are the Newton Hills. This is a series of four separate hills with Heartbreak

Hill at the top. This is one of the most important defining factors of the Boston Marathon. This is wh-

this is where some races... this is where some people's runs die. They have used up too much energy at

this point. They don't know what to do. They've been going out hard, and now they have to go up

this hill. This is where the race really starts. This is where the marathon actually starts,

'cause up to this point in time,

every amount of energy that you've expended, that you've held back, that you've saved, that you've... Ev-every bit of fuel,

Gatorade, goo, whatever you've ingested

at this point pays off right now.

Because if you don't have energy in the tank to get up these hills, you're not making

it

up the hill.

You'll bail.

And I've been training up and down these hills for months and months and months

now, and in my job, I've been training for months and months and months and improving myself for

months and months and months, my ability to articulate, my leadership ability,

my

ability to listen to people and be more emotionally

intelligent. On my team

at work, I'm in much more of a, like, human-facing, team-focused role, as opposed to being at a startup where

I was kind of a leader, kind of an individual,

kind

of like directing people. At my current team right now, I've had to really level up and learn and build

up, build trust, build honesty with people, and build a sense that they can rely upon

me. And I've been given a lot of re-responsibility at work as a result of that. People are entrusting

me to do

some high-impact, high-value things, which is a scary but also incredible

responsibility. And now is this moment where I have to not, it's not just prove, but just to produce results

and to put it into practice and actually make it happen. And people have

a lot of not just faith in me, but they have a strong sense of conviction that I can pull

it off. And

that's what that hill is at that firehouse.

It's this moment in the course where you say, "You have to have conviction. You have to be intelligent

leading

up to it. You have to be careful." Whether you're in the workplace, whether you are being thoughtful about who

you're building relationships with, building friendships, building connections, uh, building trust, building integrity,

or

you are fueling on a marathon course. You're stopping and getting water and e-energy drink at every stop.

You're getting goo. You're intentionally holding yourself back. Whatever you're doing, you're taking breaks.

You have to be intelligent leading up to that moment because once you hit mile

sixteen, once you hit that firehouse

and turn right, you

have to lock in. You have to, you have... That's where the real,

that's where the real run begins. And then at the top of it,

there's, there's four hills. You get to the top of Heartbreak

Hill.

Then it really blows open in a good way. You start to see the rest of Boston.

You start to see the Green Line, part, which is part of the subway

system, uh, and the crowds go completely crazy. This is where a lot of people come from out

of town or come from within Boston to go to the different parts

of the course. You are close to the end of the finish line. You see the Citgo sign.

I mentioned the Citgo sign before. The Citgo sign is, like, around mile twenty-five. So once you hit the Citgo

sign, you are almost there. You are minutes away from finishing this

run. And the last part of it is one of my wife's favorite sayings, which she said

to me a lot of times, and I'll repeat it here,

"Right on Hereford, left on Boylston." That's the last kind of navigation you have to do on the

course. I mentioned before how, like, you make that big right turn at the firehouse,

and when you make that left on Boylston, it's kind of like the unwinding of that left turn. You,

you've put in the work. The job there is done. Now you get to enjoy it with

thousands and tens of thousands of people around you watching, spectating, and watching you run down Boylston Street towards the

finish line. And at work, it's different because the job's never really

over. But you

still have ways that you can produce a thing, produce a result, produce a project, an investigation, a finding. That

particular race is done. The work never stops, but you'll have built up your trust, built up your reputation

to be able to get to

a certain point.

And even when the marathon is done, the race doesn't always feel over. You're gonna be like, "Okay, what's,

what's the next race? What do

I wanna do next?" There's the immediate recovery, where you have to really recover, stay off your feet for a

little bit, fuel up.

You can really eat whatever you want to after a marathon because you've just burned thousands of calories,

and you're pretty sore. And then go

have fun. This experience for me has been

euphoric in a lot of ways. I'm excited to be doing this race, and it's gonna be in a week.

I'm really pumped for what it all means to me.

If you are interested at all in supporting the cause for the Doug Flutie

Jr. Foundation, a link in the description of the episode is going to have a link to the fundraising

page. They are a really awesome organization.

Feel free to comment, message me, DM me, whatever you want, to learn more about them.

I would appreciate any

amount that folks could give, and I am

thankful to be supporting Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation and thankful to be, have this audience

who's listening to me and talking

about it. I will see you all next time. And now that we're done with the marathon

training, there will be more of these to come. I have a couple

episodes in the pipe. Um, more guests are coming, so look forward to more episodes like this in the future.

Thanks so much.