Mario Buchs Interview on How Endurance Builds Stronger Leaders and Sustainable Performance

Mario Buchs is a certified endurance coach, ultrarunner and leadership performance practitioner whose career spans service engineering, international business, major project leadership, endurance sport and human development. After leading 18 people through the completion of a $110 million Australian dollars (AUD), approximately 65 million Swiss francs (CHF), greenfield printing facility in Liverpool, UK, and later completing 22 ultramarathons, Mario has experienced performance from both sides of the equation, leading people through complex challenges and pushing himself beyond perceived limits.

Today, through Healthetica Coaching and Forward Motion Leadership, he explores the powerful parallels between endurance, leadership and human performance. In this interview, Mario shares why sustainable high performance is not simply about pushing harder, but about knowing when to persist, when to recover and how to unlock human potential without losing the human in performance.

Mario Buchs, Certified Endurance Coach, Ultrarunner & Leadership Performance Practitioner

What first drew you to explore the connection between endurance sport, leadership, and human performance?

What first drew me to the connection was the discipline of endurance sport and the realisation that the little things we do consistently are what prepare us for the moments that matter.

An ultramarathon doesn't suddenly make you resilient on race day. The resilience is built in the months and years beforehand, in the training sessions you complete when you don't feel like it, the strength work, the recovery, the nutrition, the decisions you make when nobody is watching.

Great athletes and leaders are made when no one is watching. Then, when the big moment arrives, you have something to draw upon.

I see exactly the same principle in leadership. Great leadership isn't created when a crisis happens. It is built through the everyday behaviours that establish trust, communication, accountability and confidence long before they are truly tested. My own journey through business, leading people and eventually endurance sport made me realise that performance is rarely about one big action. It is the accumulation of small, intentional actions repeated consistently over time. These are usually quite boring.

That's where the connection became really interesting to me, how we prepare determines how we perform when we're finally called upon.

After 23 ultramarathons, what have you learned about performing well when your physical and mental resources are running low?

Believe! Believe in the training. Believe in the countless hours, the early mornings, the sacrifices and all the work that happened when nobody was watching.

When you're deep into an ultramarathon and your physical and mental resources are running low, you can't suddenly create fitness, resilience or confidence. You have to draw on what you've already built. That's when all those seemingly small decisions and sessions become incredibly important. You realise that the race isn't just about what you do on the day, it's about everything you did beforehand that prepared you for that moment.

I see exactly the same thing in business and leadership. The preparation often happens quietly, studying after hours, getting up early, preparing for the difficult conversation, learning a new skill, thinking through scenarios, doing the work when nobody is asking you to do it.

When the pressure eventually arrives, you don't rise to the occasion, you fall back on your preparation.

That's where belief comes from. Not blind optimism, but the confidence that comes from knowing you've done the work. When resources are running low, that belief can be the difference between thinking “I can't do this” and thinking “I've prepared for this. Keep moving.” After all, we have built a toolbox over many years of racing, performing and training.

What did leading a $110 million AUD, approximately 65 million CHF, greenfield project teach you about people that technical expertise alone could not?

Leading is not about doing everything yourself or bossing people around all day. It is about understanding your role, staying in your lane and giving the specialists around you the space and support to do what they do best.

Yes, I knew most of the machinery and was involved in some of the commissioning myself. But I quickly realised that letting the people who built the equipment test and commission it was far more beneficial to the overall outcome than me occasionally appearing at the machines to show that I knew how they worked.

My job was to create the environment where the experts could succeed, to remove as much of the noise, uncertainty and distraction happening behind the scenes as possible so they could focus on their work.

Communication was critical, as was treating everyone as an equal and recognising that every person on that site had an important role to play. We started in April with essentially no walls, constant rain and a huge site, installing state-of-the-art technology while working towards final sign-off.

That experience taught me that technical expertise can get you a long way, but people make the project happen. Give good people clarity, trust them, communicate openly and remove the obstacles in their way, and extraordinary things become possible.

Where do you see leaders making the biggest mistake when they treat resilience as simply pushing through?

I think the biggest mistake is confusing resilience with endurance. Pushing through can be necessary, but it isn't always resilience. Sometimes resilience is recognising that something isn't working, having the courage to pause, reassess and change direction.

I've seen this in endurance sport and I've experienced it personally. There are moments in an ultra when you have to dig deep and keep moving. But there are also moments when your body is telling you something important, and ignoring that signal isn't toughness, it's poor decision-making. Leadership is much the same.

A leader who constantly asks their people to “push through” can unintentionally create a culture where exhaustion becomes a badge of honour and asking for help is seen as weakness.

True resilience is more nuanced. It is knowing when to push, when to pause, when to adapt and when to recover. The strongest leaders don't create teams that can survive anything, they create teams that can perform sustainably because people know when to step forward, when to step back and when to support each other.

Why do you believe consistency and recovery deserve a bigger place in conversations about high performance?

I believe we are far more often under-recovered than overtrained. That has become a big part of my coaching philosophy, protect your next training session rather than trying to win every workout.

It sounds simple, but it changes the way you approach training. If you constantly push beyond what you can recover from, eventually the quality of your training suffers. Consistency disappears. Consistency, in my view, is the real game changer.

Do ultrarunners ever feel completely fresh? Usually not! Part of becoming an ultrarunner is learning to perform when the legs aren't perfect and the body isn't bouncing with energy. Particularly as training progresses, we deliberately teach the body to keep moving and performing when there is some fatigue present.

This is where the magic happens. When the deeper part of the workout arrives and the athlete can still execute, stay composed and finish strong, we're seeing the result of all those consistent sessions. We've built a body and a mind that can handle the demands we've asked of it.

But recovery is what allows that adaptation to happen. Training provides the stimulus, recovery allows us to absorb it. High performance isn't about doing more every day. It's about doing the right amount, recovering from it and coming back tomorrow ready to do it again.

When an athlete or leader feels they have reached their limit, how do you help them distinguish between a barrier to work through and a signal to pull back?

The first thing I do is listen. The person is always at the centre of the decision, not the training plan, the race goal or the KPI.

In coaching, I want to understand what has changed. Is this discomfort that comes with adaptation and growth, or is it something that could indicate a deeper problem? Sometimes the answer is relatively simple, adjust the workload, change the approach, allow more recovery or work through a mental barrier. But sometimes the right decision is to stop and investigate further.

That's where our Healthetica Performance Ecosystem becomes important. We don't operate in isolation. We have a trusted network of professionals across podiatry, physiotherapy, chiropractic care, massage, strength and conditioning, medical and specialist fields. As coaches, we need to know where our expertise ends and when another professional should be brought into the conversation.

I don't see that as stepping away from coaching. I see it as responsible coaching. Our job isn't always to find a way to keep someone moving. Sometimes our job is to recognise when the smartest performance decision is to pause, ask better questions and bring the right person into the room.

What is one practice from endurance training that leaders could realistically apply to perform better under pressure?

One practice I think leaders could take directly from endurance sport is learning to stay patient and trust the process when things don't immediately go to plan.

As endurance athletes, we spend a lot of time visualising the big day. We think through the course, the difficult sections, how we might feel and how we will respond when things inevitably don't go according to plan. Then, when the race starts, we don't panic if everything doesn't click immediately. We stay calm, make adjustments and trust the preparation that got us there.

I think business leaders can benefit from exactly the same approach. When pressure arrives or results aren't immediately what we expected, there can be a tendency to make quick, sometimes harsh decisions simply because we feel we need to do something. But reacting and responding are not the same thing.

Taking a moment to pause, assess what is actually happening and draw on the preparation you've already done can completely change the outcome.

For me, endurance teaches us that not every problem requires an immediate reaction. Sometimes the best performance decision is simply to stay calm, trust the process and give the plan time to work.

What does “unlocking human performance without losing the human in performance” mean to you in practice?

For me, it means remembering that the person comes before the performance.

We have more data, technology and measurement available to us than ever before. That's fantastic, but none of it tells the complete story. Behind every metric, target or KPI is a human being with emotions, relationships, competing priorities, good days and bad days.

Whether I'm coaching an ultrarunner or working with a leader, I want to understand the person first. What motivates them? What matters to them? What are they carrying that may not be visible? What does success actually mean to them?

High performance shouldn't require us to become less human. In fact, I believe the opposite is true. Self-awareness, empathy, trust, connection and recovery aren't distractions from performance, they are part of performance.

For me, unlocking human performance means creating the conditions where people can challenge themselves, grow and perform at a high level while still having the permission to be human.

The goal isn't to get more out of people. It's to help people become more capable of getting the best out of themselves.

What is the one lesson about sustainable performance you hope people take away from your work?

If I could leave people with one lesson, it would be, stay true to yourself. Be 'you'.

Whether you're an athlete, a leader or simply trying to perform better in life, I think one of the hardest and least sustainable things we can do is try to become someone we're not. We look at other people's success and think we need to behave like them, lead like them or perform like them. But eventually, that becomes exhausting because you're constantly trying to maintain a version of yourself that isn't real.

Through Forward Motion Leadership, I talk a lot about human performance, and for me, that starts with authenticity. Be unique. Be approachable. Have a laugh. Make a fool of yourself occasionally. Those things don't make you a weaker leader or a less serious performer, they make you human.

The same applies to endurance sport. You don't need to become somebody else's athlete. You need to understand who you are, what drives you and what works for you.

Sustainable performance comes from being able to consistently show up as yourself.

You can't sustainably perform at your best while pretending to be someone else. The most powerful thing we can do, whether leading a team, running an ultramarathon or navigating life, is become more of who we actually are, not a copy of somebody else.

Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info!

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