Most competitive effort is spent standing still, and the exhaustion is real because the running is real. In a market with capable rivals, every improvement you ship is met by a counter-improvement, so your relative position barely moves while the absolute cost of holding it climbs every quarter. The feeling that you are sprinting flat-out just to stay in place is not burnout or bad management. It is the correct read on a specific dynamic, and once you name the dynamic you stop mistaking the running for progress and start looking for the way off the track.
The name comes from evolutionary biology, and it is more precise than the pop-culture version suggests.
Van Valen's law, stated correctly
In 1973 Leigh Van Valen published "A New Evolutionary Law," built on a fact he found in the fossil record and could not explain with existing theory. When you plot the survivorship of taxonomic groups — how many lineages are still around after a given stretch of time — you get a straight line on a log scale. That linearity means the probability of a lineage going extinct in the next interval is roughly constant, independent of how long it has already survived. A group that has persisted for fifty million years is no better protected against extinction next year than a group that appeared recently. Age buys no safety.
That is strange. You would expect old, well-established lineages to be better adapted, and better-adapted things to die less. Van Valen's resolution is the Red Queen hypothesis. A species does not evolve against a fixed backdrop. Its most important environment is other species — predators, prey, parasites, competitors — and all of them are evolving too, in response to it. Every adaptive gain one species makes is registered as a loss by the others it interacts with, so it provokes a counter-adaptation. A species must keep evolving at full effort just to hold its current probability of survival. Stop improving and you don't hold steady; you fall behind a field that never stopped. Van Valen took the image from Through the Looking-Glass, where the Red Queen tells Alice, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
The load-bearing feature is that coevolution is close to zero-sum in fitness. In Van Valen's framing, the total fitness available in an interacting community is roughly conserved and merely redistributed; one lineage's improvement comes out of its neighbors' hides. Effort does not accumulate into a growing lead. It gets neutralized by the answering effort of everything you compete against. The race is real, the exertion is maximal, and the net displacement is close to zero.
Hold that structure in your head, because a large fraction of business competition has exactly this shape, and most operating dashboards are built to hide it.
The market translation, with the arithmetic
Take two rivals, A and B, splitting a market 50/50. A ships a feature that genuinely improves the product and its share climbs to 55%. For one quarter A is winning, and every internal metric confirms it. Then B ships the equivalent — matching is almost always cheaper than inventing, because B gets to copy the validated version — and share snaps back to 50/50. Nothing about the relative standing has changed. What has changed is the cost base: both firms now carry a larger R&D org, a longer feature list to maintain, and a higher baseline of what "competitive" means. They ran hard, and they are exactly where they started, poorer.
Now watch the same dynamic in customer acquisition, where the arithmetic is even less forgiving. A and B both bid on the same intent keywords. A raises its bid to win more clicks; B raises to defend; the auction clears higher for both. When the dust settles they hold roughly the same share of the same clicks at a materially higher cost per click. The escalation did not move their relative position at all. It moved money — from both of them to the ad platform that owns the auction. This is the sharpest twist of the Red Queen in markets: when rivals coevolve on a dimension they don't control, the surplus their arms race generates is captured by whoever owns the racecourse. The channel, the app store, the ad network, the distributor. In biology the redistributed fitness stays inside the ecosystem. In a bidding war it drains straight out to the landlord.
The general form: any dimension where your rivals can observe your move and match it at comparable or lower cost is a Red Queen dimension. Feature parity, discount matching, bidding on the same channels, copying each other's growth tactics, matching each other's SLAs. On every one of these, sustained effort produces motion without displacement. You are paying, continuously, for the privilege of not falling behind.
Why running feels like winning
Smart teams stay on the treadmill for years because a measurement error is baked into ordinary metrics. Almost everything on a growth dashboard is an absolute quantity that trends up while you run: features shipped, spend deployed, leads generated, headcount added, revenue in a growing market. Each of these can rise steadily while your relative position — share of your rivals' consideration set, win rate against them in competitive deals, price premium you can hold over them — sits flat or erodes. Absolute progress is visible and feels like winning. Relative position determines whether you survive, and it is precisely what a rising-line dashboard obscures.
This is the same category error I've argued underlies most talk of durable advantage: advantage is a metabolism you run, not a monument you own. A moat you must feed continuously just to keep at its current height is a Red Queen position by another name — real, worth holding, but not a wall and not a source of widening lead. The mistake is treating the energy you spend maintaining it as if it were energy building something new.
So the first discipline is to separate two kinds of spend that look identical on a P&L. Maintenance spend holds your position and will never advance it, because rivals match it by construction — your entry fee to the auction, your feature-parity budget, your defensive ad spend. Advancing spend buys relative position that rivals cannot cheaply erase. Both get filed under "investing in growth." Only the second changes where you stand. A company can grow revenue for years while every marginal dollar is maintenance, and the founders will feel busy and successful right up until a better-positioned entrant makes their entire run look like treading water.
The three exits
The strategic move is not to run harder. It is to stop competing on dimensions where coevolution guarantees your effort gets cancelled, and to restructure the game so effort accumulates. Biology and business share the same three escapes.
Change the fitness landscape. In evolution, a lineage escapes a Red Queen race by shifting onto an axis its rivals aren't optimizing — a new food source, a new habitat, a different reproductive strategy — where their accumulated adaptations don't apply and the coevolutionary pressure resets. The business analogue is to compete on a dimension your rivals are not coevolving on. If everyone in your category is racing on feature count, the exit is to win on onboarding time, or trust, or a workflow no one else treats as the product. The test is whether your improvement provokes a matching response. If it does, you are still on the track. If your rivals' entire apparatus is pointed elsewhere and can't easily pivot, your gains start to stick.
Find a niche with fewer coevolving competitors. Van Valen's constant-extinction pressure is set by the intensity of interaction. A specialist in a thin, unglamorous segment faces fewer adapting antagonists than a generalist in the center of the market, where every improvement is met by five funded rivals. This is why beachheads work: not because the niche is large, but because the coevolutionary pressure there is low enough that effort compounds instead of cancelling. You get to actually pull ahead before the field notices there was somewhere to run to.
Make your move asymmetrically expensive to match. The deepest exit is to break the symmetry that makes the race a treadmill in the first place. If matching your move costs a rival far more than it cost you — or would ruin a weaker rival to attempt — their coevolution stalls, and your gain holds. That asymmetry is exactly what a costly signal buys: the marketing and commitments that look like waste are the ones a lesser competitor structurally cannot afford to copy. A long guarantee, a structural cost advantage, a proprietary input, a reputation built over years of honored promises — each is expensive for you and prohibitive for a weaker firm, which is what stops the matching response cold. Symmetric moves get matched and cancel. Asymmetric moves are the only kind that accumulate.
The audit
Here is the version you can run this week. Take your three largest recurring spend lines and, for each, plot two curves over the last eight quarters: absolute cost, and relative position on the thing that spend is supposed to buy — win rate against your top rival, price premium you sustain, share of the segment you actually target. Not absolute revenue. Relative standing.
Where absolute cost rises and relative position is flat, you have found a Red Queen treadmill, and no amount of additional running will change the outcome, because your rivals are running too. For each one, force a choice. Either exit the dimension — stop competing there, cut the spend to genuine table stakes, and redeploy the freed energy onto an axis where your gains stick — or re-engineer the move to be asymmetric, so matching it costs a rival more than it costs you. A spend line that survives neither test is not strategy. It is a subscription to your current position, auto-renewing, and the platform that hosts the race is the only party compounding.
Stop congratulating the team for running. Measure the ground you cover, not the effort you spend — the gap between the two is the whole game.