Most complete guide on design sprints

I'm a marathon runner worried about a goal way down the road, not running 100m after 100m after 100m until I essenrially sprint a marathon (~42km) and die somewhere in the process.

To bring this silly neverending business analogy full circle, there's a reason people run quite differently in actual sprints and marathons. If you treat a marathon like a sprint, you're going to tire out early and fall behind. It's all about steady paces, small breaks, and occasionally picking up the pace to push yourself when needed.

You can set some runners up in a marathon, then lie and setup posts every 100m and tell them they just need to sprint to the first 100m and then "we'll treat this like a real marathon." After they get to 100m you can shout, oh shoot we need to catchup, and sprint to the 200m mark. Continue this perpetually until your runner basically exhausts and dies out and just says "I quit this race."

Thats basically what most businesses do, create perpetual sprints that are completely unsustainable. Businesses have the flexibility that in their race, if the runner grows tired of their terrible coach angsting them on, they can just sub out a new fresh naive runner mid-marathon and start the full cycle all over again.

Let's stop encouraging businesses that sprinting marathons is an acceptable practice... let's run marathons like--marathons.

The Design Sprint is a useful tool for generating collaboration, shared process and fast prototyping results. As such, it is not a cure-all, just a very handy tool to use.