Three months before entrepreneur John Wang’s first marathon, he told Greg Ho, the president and COO of Spring Mountain Capital, that he was going to run a 3:20 or better. That’s 45 minutes faster than the average finishing time for an adult man, at a pace of 7:38 per mile. In other words: booking.
“I said, ‘Don’t hurt yourself, okay?’” Ho relayed to me recently, chuckling over Zoom. “So he goes out, and he’s very sullen at the end of it. He’s drinking in one of the bars I partly own in Paris, and I said, ‘John, you finished, right?’ And he said, ‘But I violated my routine. I ate something. I had to use the bathroom at mile 17.’”
Wang reported that this digestive curveball sidelined him twice during the race — and cost him a total of 15 minutes. He ended up crossing the line with a time of 3:28. But Ho later discovered that Wang had averaged a seven-minute-mile pace for the final nine miles in a last-ditch effort to meet his initial goal time. He was more than impressed.
“In the startup world,” Ho said, “I give [someone] a target, and he has to pivot for a variety of reasons. This guy killed himself to deliver on what he promised. He finished in the 99th percentile, yet he feels badly about it.”
Wang’s sub-3:20 goal wasn’t the only thing on the line when he laced up on the Champs-Elysées. He was also hoping for funding from Ho, whose specialty is alternative asset investing. In the end, Ho had seen enough; he decided to fund Wang’s idea, Queens Night Market, an open-air bazaar that has attracted millions of attendees since 2015, and launched hundreds of new businesses. These days, go figure, Wang now heads up the Food Ecosystem strategy in the Social Impact Group at Spring Mountain Capital.
“Every single day you fund those guys,” Ho said. “Because you just know, in the investing world, you’re gonna have to pivot, you gotta take the pain. I have a principle: No matter what the pain is, I’m gonna finish it. I am not thinking, we’ll see if I can do this, but if I finish…crap, whatever. I’ll stay on the path. That’s one of the things I tell people: Stay on the path and the finish line will show up.”
Ho has stayed on the literal path dozens of times, running 43 marathons himself over the last 20 years. His first came at the age of 56, against the wishes of his orthopedist. He’d been a high school sprinter, then trained in judo while studying administrative sciences at Yale. His knees had an especially shaky history, haunted by a torn meniscus and creeping osteoarthritis.
His physician told him he could run two marathons — three, tops — but then he had to stop. If he kept it up, he’d be bone on bone. At the age of 72, though, Ho runs 30 miles a week, over 1,000 miles a year and has aspirations of completing 100 marathons before the age of 100. Amazingly, recent MRIs of his legs don’t show degeneration. In an age where C-suiters are spending more attention (and dollars) than ever on personal longevity, Ho has made a simple commitment to consistent movement — and turned back the clock along the way.
“Do the Right Thing”
Ho co-founded Spring Mountain Capital with his business partner Launny Steffens in 2001 and considers his work there to be his “third career.” He was a lawyer first, specializing in tax planning, then joined McKinsey, where he rose to the level of chief financial officer over his 16-year tenure.
At SMC, Ho oversees “special situations investments,” across a variety of verticals: growth equity, total return, private capital, municipal bonds and social impact.
The last of those is of particular importance to the executive, who is at his most animated when discussing investments in life sciences and disadvantaged communities. He is president of SMC’s West Harlem Innovation Network (WHIN), which invests in businesses in greater Harlem — one of nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones (OZ) across the United States.
These are areas that went decades without investment or revitalization; but as part of the tax reform bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in 2017, following a bipartisan campaign by Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott, high-powered investors can now receive significant tax breaks in exchange for local investment.
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For its part, the WHIN, launched in 2022, has chosen a different tack: It invests in businesses, and specifically those “that seek to mitigate the disproportionate health, educational, and socioeconomic outcomes in historically underinvested communities.” Perhaps it’s a zag, industry-wise. But it’s in line with how Ho has always operated.
“One of my mentors said, ‘Do the right thing, everything else will follow,’” he shared.
The Running Bug
It was the urge to do the right thing that brought Ho to running in the first place. A couple years after he’d joined a private training group to get back into shape, the Robin Hood Foundation came knocking on his door, asking if he’d run a marathon with the organization. Robin Hood is a charity that fights poverty in New York City, and perennially fields a fundraising team at the New York City Marathon.
“If you live in New York, you want to run the marathon at some point,” Ho said. “I did it, and raised a lot of money for the Robin Hood Foundation, and some other people at work wanted to join me, so I did it again. And again and again.”
Of all the places he’s covered 26.2, he still counts New York as the toughest marathon he’s ever done. “You gotta go over those bridges…particularly the Queensboro Bridge, at miles 15 and 16. And then there’s the inversion, the cramp-up when you come off the ramp on First Avenue.”
Also complicating Ho’s efforts in New York: constant stops to greet and thank people. “I have a lot of friends and they come out to watch and wait for me,” he said. Last year, he spent 20 minutes trying to find one of his employees, a summer associate, who’d come to cheer him on. Ho remembered stopping one time during the NYC Marathon and hearing a mother tell her child, “Cheer for that guy, he’s running for the charity that’s supporting your school.”
“A lot of the runners are running for cancer, for Alzheimer’s and so forth,” he said. “Wow. Somebody’s telling you that these themes can come together, so I made this decision to get to a point that would really make me feel happy about running. It’s not about time. It’s about everything else.”
That doesn’t mean Ho is without any racing goals. He currently has two, and achieving either would be a testament to his hard-earned longevity. In the short term, he still wants to best the marathon PR he set 20 years ago, a time of 5:15. “I’m not ashamed to admit that,” he said. “It wasn’t a great time, but the goal is to see if I can beat that time when I am 76 years old. I’ve got only a few more years to do it, and that would be, in my book, pretty cool.”
In the long term, he’s determined to run 100 marathons by the age of 100. He’ll run his 44th marathon next Saturday near Bourdeaux. Does he have enough time to do it? He’s on pace, but it’s impossible to know how much the body will slow down at an advanced age. As of now, there’s only one (unconfirmed) case of a runner finishing a marathon at the age of 100 or older — that would be Fauja Singh, also known as the Turbaned Tornado. (He is currently 113.)
CEOs Who Marathon
Executives who spend millions on their health catch all the headlines these days, not least because many of them are interested in fringe longevity “solutions,” like cryonics, plasma infusions and chronic fasting. But Ho, along with a growing cohort of marathoning executives, makes a compelling case for keeping things simple.
Research suggests that runners tend to live longer than non-runners; and a specific study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology illustrated that the correlation is inclusive of varying pace groups. That’s to say, those who typically run six miles per hour or slower (a pace of about 10:00/mile) can still cash in on the same longevity benefits as their faster counterparts. Across the board, runners were found to have “30% and 45% lower adjusted risks of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, respectively, with a 3-year life expectancy benefit.”
Those are years theoretically tacked onto the end of one’s life. But a regular running routine also has the capacity to improve one’s immediate, working years.
A mountain of research has shown that compared to non-runners, runners exhibit improved attention, memory, mood and anxiety levels, in part thanks to the activity’s release of neurochemicals like endorphins and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). The latter is a protein that helps the brain develop new neurons and protect against age-related degeneration. To borrow one of today’s buzzier pop-science terms: it encourages “plasticity.”
A commitment to neuroplasticity makes it easier to keep picking up skills, regulating your emotions, solving problems, making decisions and communicating with others. All hallmarks of a good employee — and especially a good CEO. In fact, back in 2014, a pair of German researchers published a study which concluded that executives who completed marathons presided over companies worth 10% more than their counterparts on the S&P 1500.
A jefe who jogs is no guarantee of industry success, obviously. But a willingness to commit to a daunting physical goal — and actually see it through — could confer personal growth, and convey strength to the rest of the company (and industry). It isn’t just marathoning, either: In recent years, CEOs have made the leap to triathlons, windsurfing and extensive home renovation. Christine Yen, the CEO of software company Honeycomb, rides her Honda CB300F motorcycle at a racetrack in the morning before meetings.
Business leaders seem especially enchanted by a concept called misogi, a Shinto purification ritual with roots in ancient Japan, which calls for one grand physical quest each year. The concept has been popularized, in part, by former NBA sharpshooter Kyle Korver, whose first misogi was a 30-mile SUP adventure from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara with a group of friends. Another huge proponent of the initiative: entrepreneur Jesse Itzler, who even hosts dedicated misogi opportunities for his followers, like Hell on the Hill, “the world’s hilliest half marathon.”
“There Is So Much You Can Do for Yourself”
While exercise-happy executives can trend a little intense, Ho maintains a more approachable disposition. Even with over 40 marathons under his belt, he considers running “mostly unpleasant” and elected not to give it core credit for improvements in his personal wellness.
“There’s no bone on bone,” he said. “I’ve found amazing improvements in health. [But] it’s not just because of running. There’s also your diet and everything else, all of those factors. You discover there is an amazing ability for the body to heal itself.”
Instead of keeping tabs on the latest treatments or longevity clinics, Ho advocates for the boring power of consistent running and its capacity to compel healthier decisions across the board. “People are beginning to realize that they don’t want to take drugs and do this other stuff. I’m running, and actually running is helping me preserve my health. There’s a large portion of the population realizing that.”
Ho has his personal marathon goals, and he stills considers marathoning a perfect predictor of an entrepreneur’s most essential ability: “The best athletes don’t make excuses, they suck it up. The highest probability of a [successful] entrepreneur is a guy who doesn’t quit, a woman who doesn’t quit.” But these days, he spends as much time thinking about running’s potential to encourage better lifestyles, especially in the disadvantaged communities that deserve them.
“I think longer-term physical activity at a higher level than just walking is going to be very important to the longevity part of the equation,” he said. “We deserve to have longevity in a more comfortable way. We have a lot of scientific tools to keep you alive longer, but interestingly there’s no increase in the percentage of your life that you spend in good health. So you got 19 more years of life from 1960, on average, to today, but that means you have nine-and-a-half more years of not-so-good health.”
One of the realities of marathoning — in training, and of course on race day itself — is there are way too many miles to cover for a route to remain in one section or neighborhood of a city. The marathon inevitably takes a runner on a tour of places that are unfamiliar and different to where he or she calls home. Runners see more communities, communities see more runners. It’s the ultimate equalizer, and it has the power to bring people back down to earth — literally. Of all the lofty benefits CEOs could glean from marathoning, perhaps this is the most underrated.
“I think a lot of people are in it to bring along other individuals, right?” Ho said. “Then there’s a multiplier effect. You realize that there’s this amazing power of bringing people together. You can motivate them for a perfect purpose.”
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