What Watching Box Sets With Your Family Can Teach You About Patience, Relationships, and the Long Game

Day 2040. 20,400km covered. 19,675km still to go. And today's run gave me space to think about something that on the surface sounds completely unrelated to a global running mission watching TV with your family.

Bear with me, because I think there is something genuinely worth reflecting on here.

I recently finished Stranger Things. The final season. Five seasons spread across roughly six years, and I watched every single episode with my eldest son. When we started, he was young enough that some of it was probably a bit much, but we navigated it together, talked about it, laughed at it, and sat through the tension of it side by side. Now, looking back, I realise that the show itself almost became secondary. What mattered was the ritual of watching it together, the conversations it sparked, and the way I can now trace our relationship across those six years simply by thinking about where we were in life during each season.

That is not a waste of time. That is connection. And connection, I have come to understand, is one of the most valuable things you can invest in.

There is a version of TV watching that I think most people would recognise the kind where you sit down for one episode and emerge four hours later feeling vaguely hollow, your sleep already compromised, your to-do list untouched. I have been there. It is not something I am proud of, and it is genuinely something I try to manage, because that version of TV consumption does very little for anyone. It is passive, isolated, and it has a way of eating into the time and energy you meant to give to something more meaningful.

But that is not the only version.

The version I want to talk about is slower and far more deliberate. It is watching a season as it is released, waiting weeks or months for the next one, building anticipation gradually rather than consuming everything in a single sitting. It is what I did with Stranger Things, and what I did with This Is Us alongside my wife. Both experiences were different in tone but similar in what they gave me a shared point of reference, a reason to sit together, and something to talk about long after the credits rolled.

There is a concept I keep coming back to on these runs, and that is delayed gratification. It comes up in training, in business, in the 40,075km mission itself. Nothing of real substance arrives instantly. You do not run a lap of the world in a week. You do not raise £1 million for children's causes by writing one post. You do not build a meaningful relationship with your son by having one good conversation. All of it compounds, slowly, over time, if you show up consistently and resist the urge to rush the outcome.

Watching a box set across six years with someone you love is, in its own quiet way, an exercise in exactly that. You are not trying to get to the end. You are living within it, season by season, letting the story unfold at the pace it was meant to. And when you finally do reach the end, it carries genuine weight because of everything that preceded it.

I am on day 2040 of a daily running streak. I have covered 20,400km in barefoot-style footwear. I have 19,675km left before I complete a metaphorical lap of the Earth. There is no shortcut to that number. There is no way to binge my way through it. It requires me to lace up or more accurately, pull on my Vibram FiveFingers every single day, regardless of how I feel, regardless of what else is happening, and take another step forward.

The mission underpinning all of this is to raise over £1 million for children's causes, including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need. I think about that often on my runs. The children those organisations support do not have the luxury of pressing pause. The work being done on their behalf cannot wait. So I keep going, one day at a time, trusting that consistency compounds in the same way it always does.

What today's run reminded me is that not everything needs to be optimised or accelerated. Some of the most meaningful things in life relationships, missions, stories are meant to unfold slowly. The value is not just in the destination. It is in the accumulation of ordinary moments along the way.

There is a parallel, I think, between how my son and I experienced Stranger Things together and how I experience this running streak. Neither of us knew where it would go at the start. We just kept showing up, one episode at a time, one season at a time, and when we reached the end we could look back across six years and see how much had changed in the show, in him, and in the relationship between us.

I want to look back on this mission the same way. Not at some dramatic finish line moment, but at the quiet accumulation of 2040 days, 20,400 kilometres, and every conversation, observation, and reflection that came with them.

If you are watching a series with someone in your family right now, I would encourage you to resist the urge to binge it all in one weekend. Sit with it. Wait for the next season. Let it become a thread in your shared story. The delayed gratification is the point.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for following this journey. And if it means anything to you, please do share this with someone else because the more people who find it, the more we can raise for the children who need it most.

Day 2041 tomorrow.