It's all coming together for me: what I've been up to since last post
Welcome Back
First off, sorry for the lengthy hiatus.
Second of all, I’m BACK!
Third thing, what have I been up to?
I Joined a Team
I’ve been busy because I joined forces with my former client and coach Ryan Dreyer to beomce Tribal Professor to the Tribal Training family. Ryan runs the team, which focuses on endurance competitions primarily Ironman and Ironman 70.3 competitions but also ultramarathons. We are currently training for a 100 mile team trail race for the Zion Ultra in southern Utah. We have a team of 12 athletes starting together and finishing together.
One thing I love about our team is the real community and team elements. It’s not just individual training where we wear the same logo (that does happen). But we have TEAM Races throughout the year where 10+ teammates show up and compete together. We have 4 events this year with 10+ athletes all competing together. Here’s a photo of 7 of our athletes taking down Muncie 70.3 last year with Coach Ryan cheering and guiding them through the whole race.
What I’ve been doing on the team is bringing a deep awareness that these physical journey are most important to our mental nad spiritual growth outside the arena. I’ve helped Ryan bring deep wisdom and historical inspioration into creating the Team and his vision for an endurance community where we all strive not to become just the best athletes, btut the best individuals and leaders we can become.
We’ve launched a monthly podcast called ‘Tribal Cafe” which is open to the public. Ryan and I have a loose structure but we talk about emergent training issues that come up on our individual coaching calls with athletes and steer the conversation towards our self-transcendence through endurance training and competition. Here’s our last cafe discussion on some of the work we accomplished on a business summit we had together in Colorado in early January. Take a listen below.
We then let the ideas simmer in our team chat and give athletes a week to listen to the cafe discussion. Then we host a team only group discussion giving memebers space to talk about their own personal journeys using discussion prompts from the cafe. This one is closed to just team members.
How it’s working and what it means to me
I had a moment during our Tribal Symposium group call this week where all the emotion overcame me about this new position and my ‘arrival’ as a coach in this space.
We were having a deep conversation about finding our potential through sport and realizing what we need to give up if want to transcend our personal limitations. And it hit me. This is where I've been aimed all along.
Playing high level sports in my youth
Going all in on creative passion in my 20s as a musician
A decade of intense reseach into the meaning of sport as a grad student and academic which ended with me publishing my own academic book
8 years refining the message to teach uninterested students as a professor
3 years developing myself as a coach and authority in this online space learning the ropes of entrepreneurship
3 years of enduring and thriving through horrific levels of social tyranny and human rights violations during the Pandemic in Canada
It's all coming together in guiding the everyday and elite athlete into a true understanding of why they need to be competing and pushing ourselves in sports
.
The True Value of our Team
Records, trophies, race results, victories over opponents are nice but they are the surface external level of meaning to be found through sports. At their best, at their truth, sports aim us towards our greatest potential.
They clarify for us the deep virtues we want to embody and the principles we want to act by in difficult times
They destroy limiting beliefs about ourselves and let us dare to go after big goals that come with bigger responsibilities and expectations
They give us the strength and self belief to chase the best version of ourself and to willingly sacrifice and struggle towards that aim
To have a coversation with a few members of our team that strecthed almost 90 minutes where we were all engaged, learning from eachother, inspiring each other with our stories, leading each other with our own tales of struggle, and lighting our imaginations by sharing how we are breaking through to the other side, was too much for me.
Ryan asked me to comment towards the end and for once I had to pass the mic!
The emotion and gravity of what we were experiencing in the moment were too big for me to handle and I needed a moment or two to refind my composure.
These are the notes from the call last night and you can see we aren't discussing fueling strategies, technique adaptations, logistical planning, or the other objective elements you'd expect to see on a endurance training team call.
That's what sets our team and my coaching apart from everyone else in the space.
They may feign an ability to grasp the depth of what training and competing means to an individual.
But they don't understand it like me.
They don't live it like me.
I'm experimenting, being vulnerable, opening my heart to the activity, and being humbled through all the mistakes and misteps. I'm living the process so I can translate it for others to grasp and make REAL in their lives.
When I read these notes I know I'm in the right place doing the right thing at the right time with the right people.
I’m grateful and humble to bear this knowledge and proud to be able to use it to improve people's lives in real ways. There is no better classroom I could find to teach these lessons. And no better group of students who teach me more when they act on the lessons that I could ever imagine.
When you go all in on your purpose and believe that your hard work and passion will shine through I'll never believe it's not a type of magic that it all comes together.
Feeling incredibly blessed and lucky.
Which means the real work is just beginning.
Looking forward to sharing more of our team’s journey and how the athletic philosophy I’m creating is making big changes in everyday people’s lives.