A girl who had never cycled seriously stood on a Himalayan podium.

2020. A community cycling group in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai. A Class 10 student named Niharika Reddy joined the ride one Saturday morning. No prior fitness background. No cycling experience to speak of. The first ride was 25 kilometres, and the rest of the group was three years ahead of her on every measure.

Coaching, properly understood, is a long instrument. It does not produce visible change in a week. It produces accumulation — the slow building of capability against a curve that is invisible to everyone except the coach and the student. Twenty-five kilometres became fifty. Fifty became one hundred in a single day. The group around her watched a fifteen-year-old develop a kind of patience that does not come from being talked at.

September 2021. I relocated to Hyderabad. There had been a long-running plan inside the cycling group to ride from Kharghar to Hyderabad together — six hundred and fifty-seven kilometres in three days — and the plan dissolved when I left. It was not a story that needed to end with regret. Niharika decided differently.

February 2022. She rode it. Kharghar to Hyderabad, six hundred and fifty-seven kilometres in three days, with her father and three friends. Not a race. A personal gesture from a coached student to a coach who had moved cities. The ride was covered in the Apeejay Newsroom on the 24th of February that year. I have not been able to write about it without going quiet at the keyboard, even now.

2022. The Deccan Cliffhanger. Pune to Goa. Six hundred and fifty-seven kilometres of timed ultra-cycling, supported, against a clock the format does not forgive. Niharika and I rode together. We finished first.

2023. The Great Himalayan Ultra. Leh — Drass — Thicksey — Leh. Six hundred kilometres at altitude, in conditions that punish the unprepared inside the first two hours. We rode it together. We finished first.

Two ultra-cycling races. Two first-place finishes. A student who had never seriously cycled before being coached, on the podium of the most demanding amateur ultra in the country. The photograph at the top of this page is from the Great Himalayan Ultra. I do not show it often. I show it here because it is the truest test of the work I do.

Niharika is at university now. She still rides. She is a more disciplined athlete than I am. The coaching arc that made the Himalayan podium possible was three years long. The principles inside it are exactly the principles that make a senior leader's six-month coaching engagement work.

Why this story sits at the centre of how I coach senior leaders.

The arc that took Niharika from twenty-five kilometres to a Himalayan podium has the same shape as the arc that takes a senior leader from a stalled SBU role to a CXO seat. The shape is patience. The shape is staged progression. The shape is the willingness to do the small repetitive work that is invisible until the day the result is visible to everyone.

Senior leaders almost universally underestimate how long the curve is. They assume coaching will produce a behavioural shift inside a week or two of practice. The Niharika arc — three years of accumulation before the first podium — is the truer time scale. Six months of coaching does not feel like enough until the leader looks back and sees that the six months were the steepest part of a curve that had been flat for a decade.

The boardroom and the mountain road test the same things. Patience. Trust. The discipline of the long curve. The willingness to do the work the day before the day before the result. A coach's job — whether the student is a fifteen-year-old on a bicycle or a forty-eight-year-old SVP — is to hold that discipline steady when the student cannot yet see the result.