There’s a chance – granted, it’s a slim one, but a chance nonetheless – that as you’ve been swiping your way through the articles in this month’s Newstalk  Magazine, you’ve also been working up a sweat on a treadmill, or cranking up your heart rate on a cross-trainer.

Exercise, we all know, is an integral part of a healthy lifestyle, an effective way to tackle stress, and the cornerstone to being a better you.

It’s just that it takes so much of our precious time to actually get around to it.

Clearing an hour in your day, when you’re up to your eyeballs in spreadsheets and school runs, can often give way to a quick bar of chocolate stuffed unceremoniously in your mouth as you hightail it to your next meeting. All the while avoiding even looking at the new gym gear you bought the last time you told yourself you’d make the time to exercise, and ignoring the sense of foreboding as you realise that your bank account is getting a better workout than you.

“People say to me, ‘How do you juggle your work with your training, how do you screen the 150 emails a day that you get, how do you think about the business and the challenges of where to take it, and still have time to train for a triathlon?” Mark Kellett, CEO of Magnet, one of the country’s leading telecoms firms, is used to hearing this line of questioning.

It’s a reasonable one to put to the 44-year-old father of two from Ballymun, in Dublin whose outdoor pursuits have seen him scaling Everest and coming 89th in last year’s World Triathlon Championship – swimming harder, biking better and running faster through London than most of the 8,500 competitors from 86 countries. Kellett was also due to join up with this year’s Irish squad in Edmonton, but a dodgy shoulder held him back from competing. “All I could do is swim in a circle with one arm, which wouldn’t have been very useful,” he says, laughing.

Sport always played an important part in Kellett’s life. An accountant by trade, he got his MBA in Manchester, all while playing rugby four or five times a week, and hitting the gym every other day. He describes himself as a chunky kid, but one who was immediately put forward as prop when he went to his first ever rugby training session at seven.

“I always had an interest in sport,” he says, “But particularly with the outdoors. Outdoor sports are special – going against the weather, going against the mountain and team sports, too. Competing against a far superior team, and enjoying the challenge of taking them on and taking them down. That’s the mindset I work out of.”

That passion and drive has helped Kellett to build Magnet’shis business, taking the skills he’s honed in long-distance endurance training, and transferring them to the boardroom.

“You have to be able to apply a wholly different skill set to different moments. When you train to swim, run and bike, you learn to adapt and turnaround instantly and that mindset to change carries through when you’re leaving a financial review meeting and heading off to a sales pitch. You take all the skills you’ve acquired and bring the ones you need to the forefront when you need them. That’s what the training has taught me.” This drive and energy has also helped Magnet strongly position themselves in the business market with similar qualities of innovation in cloud services such as voice, broadband and hosting, as they set out on their mission to “take Irish business to the cloud”. No small task!

It’s not just the training, but also the discipline. Finding the time to squeeze in 20 minutes on the treadmill is tricky for anyone working today, but for Kellett, he needs to find the space in his CEO schedule to cycle 30km in the morning before running the same distance home again. It takes restraint, and what he refers to as “good negligence.”

“By that I don’t mean being bad at things,” he explains, “but selectively choosing which things you won’t get done today, and recognising that they have to get done tomorrow – and no letting meetings get out of hand. You make them work as efficiently as possible. When you’re training at this level, twice or maybe even three times a day, it takes focus to create the boundaries to keep your time your own.”

In March next year, Kellett takes on an ultra distance event; you start off your day with a half marathon, followed by a 15km kayak. Then it’s 90km on a bike, working your way up and down a mountain, and then another 70km on the bike. Oh, and then you run a marathon. He’s running the Dublin City Marathon on Monday – as training.

Does he expect to hit a brick wall?

“You’re guaranteed to hit it,” he says. “At those distances, it’s far more mental – a question of determination. Of course you have to have the physical fitness, training and nutrition, but it’s much more of a mental challenge.

“If you can imagine being in north Donegal, in bitterly cold weather in March, it’s not the friendliest of climates. So it’s about getting through and enduring, and it’s the long battle. It doesn’t scare me.”

Production of this article was supported by Magnet. You can find out what Magnet can do for your business by visiting www.magnet.ie