Every summer the financial pages produce exactly one story that needs no tickers, no analysis, and no comment from the Federal Reserve. This year it is this: 8,500 people will run a full marathon through the vineyards of Bordeaux, and they will stop roughly 20 times along the way for wine.
This is the Marathon du Médoc. It is a real race. Real start, real finish, 26.2 real miles in between. The aid stations pour Bordeaux.
And not just Bordeaux. There are oysters. There is cheese. There are croissants and, somewhere in the late miles, steak. Someone looked at the marathon — an event invented to map the outer limits of human suffering — and asked a beautiful question: what if it were also brunch?
Nine minutes
Here is the number that stops you cold. The race offers 8,500 entries. This year they sold out in nine minutes. Nine. Arena concerts move slower. Playoff tickets move slower. There is, it turns out, an enormous global population of adults who read the phrase “20 wine stops” and reached for a credit card at world-class speed.
The average age of the field is over 40. This will surprise no one. It takes a few decades of adult life to figure out that a finishing time is a fake statistic and a great story is a real one.
Most runners come in costume. Nobody is chasing a personal record. The clock exists, technically, the way the speed limit exists in Montana.
The experts object
Sports scientists, asked about the Médoc, respond the way your accountant responds to your boat idea. Alcohol dehydrates you, they note, and a marathon is already a dehydration contest. Alcohol also makes it harder for the body to burn carbohydrates — the one job a marathoner’s body has. On paper, this event is a physiology exam written by a saboteur.
The race’s president, Vincent Fabre, is a winemaker, which tells you where the Médoc’s sympathies lie. His concern is not hydration. His concern is that runners taste the wines properly — swirl, sip, consider, jog. The man is defending a standard. It is simply not an athletic one.
And yet, every year, thousands of people finish. Slowly? Heroically slowly. In feather boas? Frequently. But they cross the line, and they will tell that story at dinner parties for the rest of their lives — which is more than most of us can say about our workouts.
Why this is here
Because most of the people reading this letter are optimizers. You optimized a career, then a savings rate, then a portfolio. Optimizers are wonderful clients. They also have a known failure mode: the plan quietly becomes the life.
Retirement has the same two ditches as running. In one ditch sit the pure optimizers, who will not touch principal — or dessert — without a committee meeting. In the other sit the people who treat every year like mile one. Most of the unhappiness we see in retirement comes from living in one ditch while dreaming about the other.
The Médoc is 8,500 people demonstrating the road between. Run the entire marathon — all of it, no shortcuts. Drink the wine anyway. Discipline and joy, same course, same morning.
We spend most of this letter telling you to be more careful than feels natural — about yield that looks free, about buildings with suspiciously cheap dues. Consider this the offsetting entry. Somewhere in your plan there should be a line item that makes both your dietitian and your accountant sigh — and that you would sell out in nine minutes to keep.