He Gave Away His Race. What 4:43 Taught Me About Leadership

As found in Davidson Day parent Justin Palmer's Five4Friday weekly LinkedIn newsletter on Friday, April 17th, 2026. 

There is a kind of leadership that announces itself with titles and trophies. And then there is the other kind — the kind that happens quietly, on the back stretch of a 1600-meter race, when nobody asks, and nothing is owed.

This is a story about the second kind.

My son Landon is a freshman at Davidson Day School and a member of the school's track team. He had been stuck at 4:51 in the mile for a while now — not for lack of talent, but for lack of knowing how to truly give himself to a race. There's a difference between running hard and running right. Between showing up and surrendering to the effort. Landon hadn't quite found that place yet.

Then came Alex.

Alex is a senior captain for the track team— one of those runners whose times exist in a different conversation than a freshman's. He didn't have to say a word to Landon on race day. He had his own race to think about, his own times to chase, his own legacy to protect. But before the meet, Alex pulled Landon aside and asked him something simple:

"What's your goal for today?"

Landon told him: somewhere in the 4:40s.

That was all Alex needed to hear.

What followed was not accidental. Alex didn't just offer encouragement — he offered himself. He walked Landon through a proper warm-up, explained how to execute each lap, where to conserve, where to push, and where to trust the legs even when the lungs are screaming. He handed Landon a blueprint for a race Landon had never run before.

And when the gun went off, Alex said the three words that would carry Landon through four minutes and 43 seconds of his young life:

"Stay with me."

It was also no secret among the team what was at stake. Word had spread — Landon was going for his PR. The kind of collective awareness that transforms a group of individuals into something more like a community. They knew. And in knowing, they leaned in.

Alan Watts believed that life is not a journey with a destination so much as a musical experience — something meant to be felt in the present moment, not endured until the end. A mile race is exactly that. Four laps. Each one has its own world. You cannot run lap four while you are running lap one. You can only be where you are.

Alex understood this. He didn't pace Landon toward a finish line — he brought him into the present, lap by lap, stride by stride. Stay with me is not a destination. It is an invitation to exist, fully, in this moment. Then this one. Then the next.

Eight seconds faster than he had ever run. Eight seconds that didn't come from a secret workout or a sudden surge of natural talent. They came from one senior deciding that his race, on this day, was someone else's.

That is the thing about genuine leadership that we so often miss. It is not about what you build for yourself. It is about what you make possible for someone who doesn't yet believe it's possible. Alex ran a slower time than he was capable of because the better race — the more meaningful one — was the one happening just over his shoulder.

Watts also wrote about the interconnectedness of all things: that the separate self is, in some ways, an illusion — that we are expressions of a universe experiencing itself. On that track, Alex and Landon were not two separate runners with separate goals. They were one effort, one heartbeat, one story unfolding in real time.

I watched from the infield. I did not know, in those four minutes and 43 seconds, exactly what I was watching. But I felt it. The way you feel something true before you can name it.

Landon crossed the line and looked for Alex. Alex was already looking back.

There will be trophies in Landon's life. There may be faster miles, bigger meets, better days. But I believe he will carry this one differently — not because of the number on the clock, but because of what it taught him about what people are capable of giving one another.

And Alex — whatever he goes on to do beyond the track — already knows something that takes most of us a lifetime to learn: that the most powerful thing you can offer another person is not advice, not encouragement, not even belief.

It's your presence. Your pace. Your stay with me.

Justin Palmer is the father of Davidson Day graduates Jordan '24 and Sophia '25 and current freshman Landon '29. Justin is the Head of Strategic Initiatives, Transformation, and Delivery at Barings in Charlotte, N.C. Every Friday, Justin shares his "insights of things I have learned or in the process of learning" in his weekly Five4Friday newsletter on LinkedIn.