ITRA and the Future of Ultrarunning with Bob Crowley | KoopCast Episode 26

Welcome trail and ultra runners to another episode of the KoopCast as always I'm your host Jason Koop and on today's podcast we have somebody with quite a prolific history in trail and ultra running going back all the way to the early 1990s Bob Crowley and Bob I'm sorry in advance for somewhat kind of outing your age I don't think you will be offended but Bob has been around the trail and ultra running scene for many many many years he's done races like the hard rock western states and then just this summer he did the notorious tour de giance over in Italy and I finally got to I finally got to meet him in person but Bob's prolific trail and ultra running career isn't the reason why he was here today he is also the new president of ITRA the International Trail Running Association and as we discuss in the podcast this is not something that a lot of North American trail runners really have any concept of and so I wanted to bring him on the podcast and give him a little bit of a floor to discuss what ITRA is all about what their mission is and how it can actually improve trail and ultra running as we know it today I also wanted to take advantage a little bit of Bob's background in venture capitalism where he works over at the Mustang group and discuss what

the future of trail running actually looks like he has his finger on the pulse of this to a great extent as you guys can all imagine I found the conversation really fun I hope that it enlightens everybody out there that is unfamiliar with what ITRA's mission is and what they kind of strive to do with trail and ultra running so kick back perk your ears up and here is my conversation all about ITRA and the future of trail running with Bob Crowley what's new over there uh yeah a lot going on to be honest um we have uh a lot of initiatives a lot of change it's only been two and a half weeks I feel like I've been at this for about six years it's all good well we got together offline I described your new role at ITRA as kind of like drinking from a fire hose but I just read in ultra running magazine it correct me if I get the stat wrong that only two out of ten people in the U.S. know what ITRA is is that correct yeah that's my stat yeah we did a survey and two out of ten had heard of it so maybe it's like maybe instead of drinking from a fire hose it's like drinking from a fire hose in the middle of the forest of which nobody knows anything about yeah exactly you know one of the the advantages of the fact that nobody in the U.S. at least knows what it is is is that we don't have to undo the brand we can start new

that's okay because the brand isn't well known and I'd rather establish it for the first time than to have 10 out of 10 think that UTMB is ITRA which is what essentially the other two that do know what it is they either think it's ATRA right or they think it's UTMB so nobody really understands in the U.S. what ITRA is that's a hundred percent um and the two that the 20 percent that do have it confused with understandably because of Michelle's close proximity um that they think they're synonymous with UTMB or they confuse it with ATRA yeah yeah um what do you know what that stat is over in Europe in terms of how many people know what ITRA is it's it's close to a hundred percent really what so okay so right particularly if you said France I'd say 90 to 100 if you said Spain same Italy close um it drops off a little bit in Eastern Europe you've got this really interesting kind of problem right where it's so prevalent in one area of the world and not prevalent in the in another area of the world why I can imagine that a lot of this has to do with the European routes but why does everybody in Europe or all at least all trail runners in Europe know about ITRA and yet hardly anybody in the U.S. does there's probably two reasons it was formed in 2012 and then officially came into existence 2013 and the

original meeting was in Comoyere um a place you and I both know and uh and then moved to Chamonix so the office is in Chamonix and if you look at the original founders the large majority of them were French French and there's a couple of non-French and so you know the organization began very um not just Europe centric but Western Europe centric um in the U.S. in particular um we have a very mature trail running history 40 years plus and it's very fragmented and what I mean by that is there's thousands of races and um those have been started years and years ago by individuals that it started with fat asses you know free races unmarked and then evolved to charities where people would do a run for fun and maybe raise some money for the landowner or for um whoever it may be a charity and and that's the way we grew up very fragmented one at a time and so 40 years later if you have an organization like Itra come along and if it's perceived that somehow Itra is trying to organize all of these uh wild mustangs that's a uh that's gonna you're gonna have a lot of resistance and and let's face it

there's no a voice that represents American trail running there's no individual there's no organization that everybody gets underneath and says yeah she's speaking for me it just it's never gonna happen because you're never gonna get thousands of mustangs rounded up and put saddles on them it's way too late for that so if Itra is perceived by North Americans and particularly Americans as some sort of governing body which it's not and it's gonna mandate rules and regulations and uh etc then Americans will resist to that because they'll say thanks but we already have that covered and some we don't really need any help it's not what we do but that's part of our opportunity here in America and then around the rest of the world is to explain what we do and I think it will be of great value to the North American market as well as the rest of the world but needless to say we have our biggest uh our greatest discerning client or customer here is is America well so here you've got the platform right now because I'm I'm in the the two out of ten Americans that actually know what Itra is and I would say a hundred percent of that two out of the ten Americans that know who Itra is has been over to Europe and has had to interface with them in some form or capacity so as you're you know as you're kind of like taking on this new role here's the big platform when you speak to

ultra runners either individually or in mass like was what's going to come out on this podcast like what's your what's your kind of pitch to them on what Itra is and who you serve and what your primary goals and and purpose is going to be as you're moving into North America we have two mandates and and it's pretty straightforward one is to teach the values the ethos of the trail running community which we believe and certainly my own experience racing around the world is the same all over so kind of one heart one trail one heart we all share the same ethos so we teach it and then we try to protect it and and what I mean by that is we've studied other sports certainly in my my day job is is an entrepreneur and now private equity we study markets and we look for trends and in trail running we went back and looked at mountain biking and triathlons and those were both very small you know communities that had deep cultures and along the way both those sports grew rapidly and the values got tossed to the side or trampled and you ask why what happened well larger organizations came in and took advantage of the growth and made a lot of money and they put in their own culture and their own infrastructure and they really didn't care as much about the ethos as they did about

making money and I'm not I'm not look I'm a money maker too so I'm not I'm not saying that's bad but that's what happened in trail running we have an opportunity to get in front of that before it's too late and think that that what makes the sport unique and why many of us come to it and then never leave is the ethos and the values and so we're here to teach those to new members coming into the community and then to protect them so work with the larger organizations to make sure that we don't lose the values as they grow we want them to grow we want them to come in we just want to be sure that they understand why those values are so important because frankly if you do it'll help your business grow better because we're very smart uh trail runners and we know the difference between somebody that's putting on um an event that really is uh indicative of what we believe and one that's just trying to you know make money we're very discerning yeah but at the same time the the mass and trail running right now is you are very well aware of and we're going to get into some of the stats and statistics later is not so big that a bigger company can't come in and just overwhelm the whole system the whole ecosystem of trail races and trail runners simply because the number that they're trying to overwhelm is so small and we're starting to see some of those bigger players starting starting to come in like

spartan who's coming into the trail uh trail and ultra scene and we're also seeing uh players like lifetime fitness kind of come in through uh through the leadville trail 100 and others and i can you know kind of hark back to the time where uh leadville sold that race series to lifetime and before i go on leadville is a race that is very near and and dear to my heart personally it was the first 100 mile ultra marathon that i did the race director king clover was the efficient of my wedding it you know it's only a couple of hours away from my house it was very influential in a lot of different aspects for for for me personally and i don't want people to think that i'm like poo-pooing on uh lifetime fitness coming in and buying it but suffice it to say i think a general consensus is is when those bigger organizations came in with is specifically with the example of leadville it was a rough transition i mean i don't think anybody would deny that i think the first few years that lifetime fitness tried to run this iconic ultra marathon in the leadville trail 100 they they they had their hiccups and those hiccups didn't act didn't need to happen i mean there were people and blueprints around and advocates in the area that were trying to steer them the right way and for but for whatever reason it started it started to go awry so is is is that a good analog to something that you are trying to like smooth out with itra is just making like you said making those values constantly and

consistently communicated like across the board when other entities come into the play it's a good beta test i think and i'm gonna i'm gonna address leadville and then come back to my running club in new england called the trail animals running club leadville is a great story because it is a case in point in the u.s where a larger organization in this case lifetime um was beginning to work with the traditional race directors that grew up in in that world that that we know very family oriented small community a lot of people would come back to that race every year it's a tradition right and somewhere the ball was dropped in understanding the delicacy of that culture and how important it was to maintain traditions and do things a certain way to keep those people coming back and um for whatever reason that happened our role at itra is to really anticipate potential um misunderstandings or maybe it's just naivety and to try to work with the organizations and with runners so you know it's grassroots to teach runners the best way to learn the ethos of trail running is to go out on a trail run with somebody that knows it that's how we all learn um so that's more obvious and we have an outreach program to get very grassroots to do that but for organizations it's a little different and there you have to um try to get their attention and and rather than them feeling like you're trying to preach to them or that you're

trying to hold them back in some way that that there's some you know secret handshake that only is for the people that come from trail running and not for the outsiders it's it's the least thing on my mind i want these people to come in and i'll come to that a little bit later as to why how how important they are to our future but part of the deal the quid pro pro here is that we teach them but if you and i'll use an analogy of a church if you want to join a community it and it's a church the best thing to do is to come in you sit in the back and you sing the hymns and you read the prayers and you listen to the preacher and then you you go and have coffee and and uh and croissants and you integrate slowly that's normal and and you get accepted and you get loved and you get brought in and and you're going to feel part of that community pretty quickly what you don't want to do is rush in through the back of the church and bust open the doors and run to the front and push the preacher off the pulpit and start preaching and there's a temptation when you've been successful in other marketplaces financially successful and grown businesses rapidly to presume that whatever worked in that place in that particular segment is going to be carbon copy available and working in in another and in this particular case trail running has some unique characteristics if you understand them and appreciate them and and take them on board you're going to have a better

business than if you just try to run them over or you even worse try to turn those behaviors to something that you want you want to bend people to your way this is not a sport where that's going to go down easy and it not just in the us that you know we've been trail runners have been around a long time there's a long history and um and one of the things that we all exhibit in our values is we're very independent and we're very self-sufficient and we're very stubborn and those things work great if you get that and they can really work against you if you don't understand that now in the trail animals it's a 19 mid mid sort of late 80s early 90s we started the trail animals and it's just a local club in boston it serves new england and it started with 10 20 people a long story short there's almost 7 000 members today in trail animals 12 races 4 000 runners a year it's actually a pretty good sized club as trail running clubs go but when when we started to grow rapidly the the founders all sat around and said let's make sure that we don't allow the growth to overrun the values and it's the same ethos that you know we have around the world and we really made a concerted effort to say while we're teaching people how to run and how to train and how to eat and how to race let's teach them the values

simultaneously let's make the same priority and you know here we are many many years later almost 25 years later and i can i can put my hand on my heart and attest that the trail animals running club is no different today than it is back when we had it in the in the late 80s and 90s the only difference is we have a huge number of members but i think to a person the members understand that the values are to the front and they teach each other it's you know it's self-fulfilling right so if you if you do that properly the members teach the other members and you don't have to in my church analogy you don't have to be you know in the church in the pew every sunday you can just learn it all out and out in the trails themselves and so that that model is another beta test for us to say can itra do this on a global basis i think they can i think we can and so what does that so you're you're kind of charged with one of the things that you're charged with is bringing itra into the north american audience from a really practical like ground level perspective from the viewpoint of a trail runner that's going to one of your trail races or to another trail race that they have there locally what does that actually look like what like what will they notice or if they do they notice anything at all in terms of how itra starts to become involved in all of these different numerous and kind of fractured races well i think it's a great

question today there are approximately 70 national representatives which are people that have been elected to to itra to represent their region or their territory and and they're charged with being the local representative um to go to the races and clubs and help teach people about itra but also remind them about the uh the values okay does that work um it depends it depends upon the the country and the national representative i believe itra has failed in giving our national representatives a clear um mission and we failed in giving them the proper tools to go out and do what we we want them to do and we're in the midst of correcting that but but i think in the past it's been it's been touch and go some some national representatives are enormously effective others you know not so much and there needs to be continuity and consistency there we also need to spend more time reaching out to the national and regional associations like atra here in the us and you know they're they're a very very necessary partner and we're partners with them but we don't really do anything more than say that we need to actually be doing something with them in conjunction with them and there there's hundreds of atras around the world that that are in various countries

who know where the trail runners are they have their own memberships they're the same members we have and it it seems incredulous to me that we don't embrace them and work with them and figure out how together right we can teach and reinforce these values so that's another area that we have to improve and we will another one frankly is the brands so brands are um interested in trail running because it's growing at a click of about 10 or so a year and it has been for the last 10 or 15 years it's the only part of running in the world that's growing consistently rest of running is flat to down trail running is growing and so that always attracts the attention of a good brand because there's an opportunity to sell their their goods and services um but again we want to make sure the brands understand our ethos and that when they out they have outreach to our athletes and to our runners that it's all done as part of the community and so they can be an asset for us to reach out to the to the runners when we can also help them understand what are the kinds of products and services you want to bring to the market that will resonate right with this kind of trail runner with this ethos so that's that's another area where we probably haven't worked in as close in conjunction with the brands but we will and the last of course is the organize the race organizers as we started this discussion and um

not to go back over that but it's obvious that we need to work with um the thousands of races that exist all over the world and the hundreds um if not thousands of race directors so that um they can put on safe fair um you know um enjoyable fun events um fill their rosters you know you know as many runners as they see fit and and that at the end of the day you know the athletes finish and say that was a great race and this was a great event but you know it's the community that i'm really turned on by it's when i get to the finish line and everybody's like sitting around and waiting for me or cheering me on i'm a nobody and yet i feel like somebody and i'm on the track with a lot of somebodies a lot of like world-class athletes that are either out there with me or they're sitting there at the finish line and they're giving me a high five and they're telling me what a great job i did that's pretty unique in this world of sports and we don't want to lose that under any circumstances because you know it draws us in and it keeps us in so you have this like multi-level approach where you're reaching out to like the more natural the more national organized or the more uh nationally kind of recognized organizations like atra you're reaching out to the brands who have presence both here in the us

domestically and then also abroad and then you're also reaching out to the individual races and i've got this matrix now going in my head where the last group the races all the wild mustangs if you mustangs is that the analogy you used earlier okay all the wild mustangs that are out there that that's the one that that poses the greatest challenge but also the greatest opportunity because they're they are the first touch the first last and primary touch point with the actual athletes that are participating in the sport yes the brands have the influence and yes atra has a certain influence but at the end of the day runners go to a race and they have an experience at that race that either tells them hey i want to continue to be a part of it i'm going to continue coming back to this church church or you know what this church isn't really for me i really didn't like you know where i was sitting in the pew and i didn't like the pastor's message and things like that is that the way that you're viewing it as well that this latter part like the races i wouldn't say it's the linchpin but it's definitely the most intriguing of those levels of communication and and outreach right i yes it it serves organizers serve a couple of purposes and as a coach and having listened to many of your podcasts obviously our athletes runners are motivated by having a goal and in in trail running it's being able to train for an event and then compete in that event and hopefully accomplish whatever goal that

you've set so one thing that these organizers do is set up goals and and give people you know mile post out there somewhere to shoot for the other thing they do in the church analogy is bring the communities together every once in a while and um essentially celebrate and in that celebration you really get a sense for what the bigger community is like and it's it's pretty joyous and you either really walk away from that feeling that sense of way beyond what you expected which was i hoped for a result i got my result or i didn't but wow i i wasn't expecting this whole other feeling of like i want to do that again and i want to be part of this there's something going on here that maybe i didn't experience in another sport and i'm not exactly sure what it is yet but i want some more of that and so the those two things happen at races and if they're well run you know the feedback to the race director is usually dual great event well organized the markings the infrastructure the volunteers the medical support terrific that's all on the quantitative side but a lot of the best race directors also here and you know the people out there the people out there the amount of support i felt um the the amount of love and joy that was there

the the runners that i met from everywhere yeah that was actually even better so that's the part that um is critical to this community because if if we didn't have the races we would have trail running we all most of us spend a lot of time alone um um listening listening listening to nature or listening to podcasts or or books or whatever and maybe you're running mate but it's a pretty solitary sport and so it's only at these times that that the communities get together and gather do you really get the full sense that you're part of something bigger and that's a pretty critical part of building communities right if you think about society if you didn't have places to gather every once in a while it's not nearly as tribal right as um as whether it's around a fire or it's in a church or it's a bigger environment that's a pretty fundamental thing to society well and we have a blueprint for that going on right now i mean the races are gone right this tribal communal very experiential happening that are that are races where everybody gets together they have a common experience we give everybody hugs afterwards high fives you know and there's a big accomplishment at the end of the day celebrated with a beer and a belt buckle or whatever like those are not going to happen for for the near future and to time time stamp this a little bit we're recording this on april 29th

so it's right in the middle of the covid 19 pandemic and my one of my fears that i want to get your that i want to get your take on one of my fears is that if the rate if the lack of races is prolonged to a certain extent i agree with you that we're going to continue to trail run we're going to continue to meet our mates and our training partners when we can out on the trails we're going to continue to run out on the trails and if anything the uptick in the outdoor activity that we've seen i take it as a good thing as much as people like to complain about this being more crowded that being more crowded there's more people out on this summit or whatever i think overall that's that this is going to be a net a net positive but my fear is if that if that lynch if that lynchpin of the community which are the races if we go for a long enough period of time without having that communal and tribal gathering aspect during those races i i'm not going to say that the community is going to going to deteriorate but i do feel for the health of it in terms of how many people are participating how many people get enjoyment out of and things like that i was wondering if you had any kind of comments on that aspect because we're starting to we're really we're actually having a you know like a test tube scenario of that playing out right now i certainly have a viewpoint um and it's pretty encouraging for me um when i first was introduced to trail running back in the

late 80s um out in california first then back in boston with the trail animals it was very small so we're we're talking about very small groups um that would meet up and we just go trail run we weren't really racing that much it was just you know enjoying each other's company and i was quite happy it was very satisfying it was very um fulfilling and so um when we raced and it wasn't that often um it was fun to get together and and essentially what happened back then was you almost knew everyone so it really was like going going to some local community um um activity but it it wasn't that i had to do it it was just nice it was a nice to have now i think as we've grown as a sport the competing part and racing has grown in stature and so to your point yeah if we took it away now if we never could race again if we had to just go back to being in small groups and just running on the trails and enjoying nature and enjoying each other's company would it completely um disseminate uh would it would it annihilate trail running no no it would decrease the the membership for sure but i i don't think that's going to happen number one and two um i believe that we're showing the resilience that trail runners possess in this

current covid situation with a lot of innovative alternatives from coaches from the athletes from the organizers and saying look we're going to continue to run we're going to find a way to run and we're going to find a way to reach out to each other even if it's electronically we're still going to do it and when this is over and when we are allowed to come back out and play with each other again it's going to be that much more fun i really believe that and i believe every trail runner in their soul believes that and i think we will have that day will come it'll come in fits and starts for sure it's not going to be a light switch on as our governor here in california says it'll be a dimmer but as we come back we will gain courage and we'll gain enthusiasm and um the landscape will have changed so the runners won't have changed that we'll only be joined by a considerable amount of new faces that are coming from the likes of spartan and obstacle course racing and likely coming from triathlons and iron man and likely coming from families that have been out enjoying nature maybe for the first time because they've been shut in and they needed the fresh air and so they go out and they have walks and they hike and realize hey you know this is actually something we want to do post covid so there's a lot of

sources of new trail runners coming so i'm really encouraged by the growth potential what is discouraging and and really tough to swallow is seeing so many of our colleagues suffering that are race directors and many of them it is their livelihood and um and it's there there are no clear answers to the problems that they're encountering and and there's not a particularly good timeline um so what happens is some of them may decide that it's not the right thing to continue to try to do and and may um go to something else in their life and that will create a supply and demand inequity where we have a lot of runners coming in that's the demand and maybe not as many races available and that will create a temporary vacuum and that's where the likes of the the bigger operators will look at that and see there's growth and now there's actually a playing field here that we can fill the void and let's step into that and i think you'll see that that's a natural evolution of a business that has gone through somewhat of a setback and now um will come back roaring and that's why having a clear understanding as those operators come into our sport that that they understand our ethos and understand that it is important to just not trample to run to the front of the church and start preaching but to really try to

understand why we do this and to to mirror that in the events that you you put on for us so that you know you begin to adopt our values and we begin to appreciate the way you put on a professional uh event and we can live and cohabitate quite nicely together and not ruin the community in the process and by the way i believe as a business person if you understand that you'll make a lot more money than if if you misunderstand it and you have an attempt to sort of ready you know fire aim and kind of have your gun handed to you it so is that your buy-in right now with the iron mans and with the um with the spartans that are starting to get into the sport it's like hey listen it's good for your business too like not only are you going to fit into the church fit into the community better but make no doubt about it they're coming into trail running to turn a profit i mean their business they have to expand their business and i completely agree with you that there that there's going to be this vacuum on the other side of this pandemic where race directors are just going to fold up their tent and go home because they don't because they don't want to do it either because they took a huge loss and let's be honest like you can you can provide some perspective on this as well through your organization in many cases being a race director is a really thankless job it's not very well paying the margins are very low if not not if non-existent or you're taking a bath on it or you're doing it for

charity and things like that and yes the community is good about thanking their race directors and things like that but it's a tough it's a tough gig very few people get into it to be a gazillionaire and there's going to be a lot of people that look at the adversity that they are now facing with not being able to bring in revenue to to put their races on and go you know what i i get my time is better spent elsewhere and then therefore the kind of the vacuum is created so what are we back to my original point with all that what are the like the buy-ins that you are using to communicate to some of the organizations that are coming in in order to help them like understand the community right so it's pretty straightforward if the reason that you're paying attention to trail running is is to grow your business then you're measured on how well you grow the business ultimately it's profits and it's revenue but at the end of the day if you spend a lot of money to go after a market and it and it fails that's you get an f if you wisely spend your time and your money and it really grows well and you see it on the top and bottom line then you get an a and this is a sport that has fairly deep roots in terms of what it believes and why people do things and yes there is um an enormous amount of growth that has come in the last

10 15 years that would be from um predominantly millennials um with an increasing number of women and so the demographics of the sport have shifted from the days when we did put on free races for charity and it was a smaller community that that group is aging out i'm part of that group and not aging out but we're you know we're in the minority now in terms of the number of people in the sport so if i'm you know a global event sports event operator i'm looking at the demographics and i'm looking at what kinds of things do those runners want and what they want are experiences they want really good experiences and they understand the difference between quality and just you know having something that's thrown at them they also understand the need and the desire to want to um have an organization giving back helping the greater good that's a very important part of the demographic and so we have an opportunity to do all of those things if you just take a breath and understand why people are here you can put together events that reflect all of that and more and that's a good thing for them because they're going to grow their business faster and they're going to be more sustained and it doesn't interfere in any way with our mission at idra in fact all we do is help them we're not here to tell people what the

rules are we're not here to tell people how to make money that's up up to the community to decide that for themselves um our our real goal is to make sure that they understand and and you know 10 years from now if we look back the measuring stick for idra will be is are the values as prominent then 10 years from now as they are now and that's what we've always measured trail animals by is is 25 years later can we really put our hand on our heart and say that people understand the values and they're as important to them now as they were when we were 30 people and i honestly believe that's the case so that's why i have so much hope that regardless of the you can't stop the growth we could we could sort of build circle our wagons and decide that nobody's in and uh that's it we've had enough um but we're not going to do that and and you can't you can't stop it so you have to understand the growth you have to embrace it and then you have to try to figure out ways in which you can coexist and that's it's it's really not not more complicated than that yeah i appreciate those goals and i really appreciate like from what a business perspective we would call values based kpis right your key performance indicators for itra are values oriented not necessarily okay we're going to grow from 600 000 to a million to 1.2 million participants and

you know it's x amount of revenue and things like that i think i think that that part of it having that alignment is is is incredibly critical absolutely now you know we have to we have staff and we have mostly volunteers almost all volunteers but we have staff and we have some expenditures um as a non-profit so we make that by having members both organizers and runners and in that case there is um a presumed exchange where if we ask someone for a euro or a dollar they will get something in return for that um and our other mission is to be a reference be the reference for our sport for our community and what that means is is it would be nice if runners from around the world had one place to go to answer you have find answers to the questions they have about our community and that could be gear it could be medicine it could be research it could be training nutrition races all of the above um right now it's pretty fragmented again if you if you want to ask those questions you might google it so you do search natural search or you you may go to social media but it's scattered and there's an enormous amount of great things going on but there's no really central place and one of the things that we'll try to leverage

in the future is technology and and that's a good that's a good timing because that's my background i come from technology and so i've always viewed technology as the foundation of anything that's to be built because you can scale things you can rapidly be addressing the needs of the market and you can be very agile really three important aspects and itra is a little behind the curve on technology is we have a lot of good technology but we could have better and i think with a little few turns of the screwdriver and a couple of swings of the hammer we can have um what i i believe is going to be potentially one of the the most innovative sports organization platforms in the world and that's coming soon and what that will allow us to do is then come back to the topic of a reference and we we really want to be um the combo kayak so kayak never does the transaction if you're looking for for tickets for uh airplane tickets you search and you get you find the best deals and then kayaks is okay this is the one you want and they'll send you off to delta airlines right and that's where you finish the transaction so they they have a purpose there which is to be um uh in the middle of an exchange so that's one model and the other is wikipedia now wikipedia is so powerful because it's it's content comes from millions of

people and and particularly people that really know what they're talking about well we have literally millions of trail runners and we have thousands of suppliers of information and our goal will be to be the exchange so that if you have a question about uh and it'll be geo ontology meaning be able to get your question down to where you are so if you're looking for a trail or a running mate or a running store or a coach or information about an injury you have or a particular race on and on and on we will build the exchange we'll call it the e-trick exchange which would allow you to ask the question and then we're going to use really good search and good metadata to then get it down to a few places that have the answer if it's looking for a coach ideally cts will be one of those answers and then you click through and say here here here are three or four resources that really fit your search go to visit their sites connect with them and they will take care of answering the questions that you have now that's a very valuable resource and in the future when we build that we believe that's a fair quid quo pro again for a membership for example having runner insurance where if you travel overseas and you race and

particularly if you're racing in um it actually by the definition of most insurance policies that come with travel they exclude any any sort of sport or danger right anything that's considered extreme they're excluded so um you have to get a rider that specifically addresses extreme sports we offer insurance huge discounts to our our runners if you just become a member we have a performance index so we rank 1.8 million runners around the globe from 1 to 1.8 million and they're ranked based upon their performance and which kind of race they race in which we have a rating system which is also done across thousands of races and that's a that's a way for brands to figure out what athletes they might want to make ambassadors or put on their team it's used by race directors to decide who they might want to provide an invite to or maybe um give a um um a free pass and invite the athlete to come race it's used by um researchers magazines people that write about the sport to kind of decide who's the best in the world and and it's used by the athletes themselves for their own measurement of where do i fit where do i rank am i moving up am i moving down who am i going after on this list you know in my future so it's a pretty

valuable tool those are all the kinds of things that that are behind the membership if you you know want to have um access to them and it's pretty straightforward stuff so in summary we we have the values mandate that we talked about we also have the mandate to be the reference and we we've got some work to do for sure but at the end of the day if i come back to north america and particularly america and and we can go one-on-one with an american trail runner and say this is what itra does for you on the values and ethos side and this is what we do for you on a service side these are things that you i we really think you're going to be interested in and for that we would like your membership if we can do that over and over again and it's a genuine even value proposition then we can grow our membership by tenfold and if we do that we'll have more than enough um income to do the things that we want to do both on the ethos side and building a better and better reference resource so again it's self-fulfills and you're right we're not trying to make millions and millions and millions of euros or dollars we're not trying to build you know some gigantic organization and by the way we are not a rules body we don't set the rules we don't determine for people you know um how to do it and we don't tell people what to do that's not our job um and so it's a pretty efficient organization to be honest with

you um it's and it's very distributed not that complicated yeah but the references piece of it is quite intriguing because i can tell you just as a just from my experience being out in the space and being a coach i get questions all the time on which race should i do what coach should i find you know what's the good you know what's a good product for this you know what advice can i go over here for that and the reason i've always i've always appreciated being able to answer that question because i can drive them into coaching right that's what that's what i do for a living but my first thought is is somehow the massive search engines have failed that individual because i'm not their first line something else is their first line they're going to google whatever they're going to whatever they're looking for before that and sometimes the the sheer volume of information is overwhelming and if some way this is this is why this is intriguing if some way itra is curating that and presenting it to the athletes and the runners that are out there in a logical fashion that kind of acts as like a pre-filter that part of it is that is actually quite quite attractive because of this extremely fractured nature that we have within trail running where the information on all the different races and everything is just everywhere that's right and and that really is what we're going to do so it's not that hard um you need to have the right technology stack or what we call platform and

it needs to be extensible and modern and scalable it needs to be multilingual so you know when you try to go into um new countries that are double byte language like cantonese arabic um today you know there's a problem when we get race results and they're in double byte language they're not anglicized or latin and we have to then convert all of that and and there's a lot of manual innovations well if you have an open system um you can then ask the people that make those converters for a living and attach them to our um if you will our campus of technology and immediately just make the ask and then we get it back they do it for us and so we can then allow the more difficult regions and the more complicated problems to be solved locally that's technology now let's go back to content we don't want to amass the content all we want to do is act as an exchange so there are really good sites today that provide medical advice to trail runners they're out there all over the world i agree they're hard to find they're hard to find but but they're there and they're really really good when you find them so rather than asking the question i always use the uh you know at trail animals we have a seven almost seven thousand members in our facebook page or group

and when someone asks a question let's say it's about an achilles heel and they say i just got diagnosed with level three achilles heel what do i do and you know our community is very very um gracious with providing answers and and that that athlete will get 60 responses from our club members and and some of those answers might actually be coming from a pt or a doctor and some of them may be coming from someone that's had a grade three achilles heel problem before and what they did and some of it might be um you know things they learned in the woods and wives tale you get all of that and that athlete now has to process 60 different answers right and determine well which one of these actually is the right answer it's tough there is no yelp right and so um what we'd like to do is take that same scenario and have them come to itra and put in i'm in boston i have a grade three achilles heel problem and i'm seeking an answer i'm seeking advice and then i'm probably seeking therapy right and we want to be able to use our engine to put you right at the doorstep of probably three or four solutions that are going to be in your backyard with the right answers and hopefully you know in that case it might be a pt right it shouldn't be that hard and and that information exists around the world it's just

we've got to be able to pull it together now how do you get that content in there well if we have a federated technology we're going to have people in the boston area that will want to volunteer and say let me have that little piece of the world because i know it and i'm motivated think wikipedia now and i'll keep it up i'll make sure that the links and the curation is done really really well because like that's my little part of the world that's my contribution to giving back if we multiply that times thousands of people around the world that really know what they're doing in their respective regions all we do is provide them the platform but it's a federation of people actually contributing it's the same philosophy that we do on the ethos and the values we're just applying it now to information but it's exactly the same model right and so that's that's a to-do um coop it's not something we do today well it's but it's not that far in our future and and it is something that um i think we're all really excited about aditra and we hope that the community will find you know it a really useful service well i i think you're kind of underplaying the enormity of the task a little bit and i i've got a you know huge grin on my face right now if that's not coming through the audio um why don't you describe to the listeners like what is the organization actually look like like how many people are there where where are you all located and i think that'll give a sense of of why i'm

grinning so much because it's it seems to me for me knowing your organization that you have a lot of great folks a lot of which i've had interaction with but compared to the magnitude of what you have just described over the last 40 minutes or so that's a tall ask for the staff that you have so who do you have where are they just in just in general terms and am i thinking about this outlandishly that it almost seems too big for its britches there's 1.9 million runners if you start with what do we serve and we serve the runners they're at the forefront everything we do there's 1.9 million people that's performance index have been indexed there's about 200 000 runners that are you know registered members of each right now and there's about 3 500 race organizers so it's pretty good size and 32 000 races so it's pretty good size organization today um the organization has traditionally been based in chamonix because uh michelle paletti my predecessor has been the founder co-founder and president of the organization since its inception in 2013 so he was there seven years and it made sense to have it there in chamonix it actually cohabitated offices for a number of years with UTMB um so there's a small group of people a handful of half a dozen people in chamonix in the chamonix region

that are now staying at home of course and working um as full-time staff we call them our professional team um with with michelle's departure um and in my election we have shifted the the way that itra is structured simply because we're trying to prepare for what we call chapter two or itra 2.0 right the first chapter were the first seven years and it grew rapidly and and michelle and his team just can't say enough good things about what what has been created here but now the sport's accelerating even more as we talked about earlier the texture of who's going to be providing organizations and races is going to change and so we have to prepare for that and we also need to get back to the basics of making sure that we are um teaching and protecting the values and being this reference that that is in our charter and the the big two big differences will be technology will be at the core of everything we do going forward and that you know am i biased of course i am i mean i i don't know how to do anything even play guitar without technology so it's just in my dna and two we we really are going to be in a distributed world where it is more like wikipedia where we have a lot of people holding up their

hands saying i want to be part of this movement of itra how can i help like i really want to help and up to now it's been hard to figure out how to onboard people tomorrow it's not going to be hard at all it really is going to be pretty straightforward and we will take that help and some and so rather than a few people trying to do remarkable things we want a whole lot of people doing small remarkable things that add up to something big and if it all comes back to a really well-built technology platform then we can do it now who do we use for that how do we do that well we'll be using third parties for sure yeah we're not a software company so we'll use um trusted partners to help build a very modern infrastructure and then that will allow us to bring on other third parties into our world i use the analogy a lot with our team as a college campus imagine having the the piece of land and and all of the the campus architected with all the different buildings you know the the classrooms and the dormitories and the university center and the library and the medical center but but you only start to build you know one dormitory and one classroom all right and and you have the map and the buildings all match and we built the first two and then as time goes on you build the commissary you build the university center and some of those buildings like the medical center might be built by a third party because their specialty at building medical centers right and so but it all still

matches it all fits on the plot map and it all um is tied together that's exactly what our vision for the future of the technology is is we're not going to do this alone we're going to have a lot of help both in the content and creating the exchange but also in the technology that we use to translate the technology that we use to reach deep into markets that are more complicated like china right a tremendous market opportunity for us but not without its unique characteristics that need to be done inside out not outside in um and there's many other markets that we we hoped to help grow trail running in that that have similar unique aspects to them um and so on and you know even even in this covid period now our thinking is turning towards what can we be doing in the next 30 days to help our runners and to help our organizations prepare to come out and then what can we be doing during that coming out period which is definitely going to be months again it's going to be the dimmer coming on slowly what can we do to keep them informed what are the tools and ways in which we can help the community come back to life and we have time to put the infrastructure in place we have time to you know think about what are the most valuable services and then when things are running hopefully um the

new normal well then we you know we'll hit our stride and it's no different than training you know if the aspirations to train for a hundred you know we gotta we gotta put the training in now and and we all get that because that's every single person that i'm involved with at each is a trail runner every single person that holds their hand up out in the field is a trail runner and we don't have to talk about the ethos we don't have to talk about tenacity and grit and knowing how to come back and come back because it's what we do and so the beautiful thing is is you can go right to what do you got what do you need to do right and we can cut through all the normal translations and just say here's a thing we need done and we can rely on those people to do it and that's the power of you know serving the trail running community is this is a pretty um talented group of individuals both in their physical skills but also their mental toughness their tenacity their ability to take on responsibility and do things i mean you don't very few of your athletes i'm sure just get up one morning and decide to go run a 50 probably against your good counsel some do but most of them have to plan they have to train they have to put a lot of time into ultimately achieving their goals so we're riddled in a good way with all that talent and our our role is to try to figure out how to marshal it for the good of ourselves right this isn't like for some

profit making entity we're doing all these things to make our own community better and people really get turned on by that yeah and just like a trail ultra runner uses crew to help like or they leverage their crew to help improve their performance at a race pacers people at aid stations and things like that it seems like you guys are leveraging people outside of itra to get your mission accomplished and some of that leverage comes from the community itself i mean if the community is providing a lot of the content and the answers that then get put into this curation funnel that you guys are that you are building it takes the it kind of almost serves as dual purpose because it takes the burden off of your limited staff but also still maintains that ethos of being a community uh a community centric service where the answers and the information is actually coming coming from within the community exactly outside of the community well let's let's use the example that we both experienced in the yosta valley in italy last oh no here we go we had to bring it up we had to bring it up look it's it is it is 900 plus or minus runners how many how many tens of thousands of people are there in in the form of people are there in in the form of crew in the form of volunteers in the form of all of the people from all of the towns and all of the infrastructure to put on that event

that essentially are probably 10x so it's 9 000 maybe more that aren't doing the race but somehow some way they're putting in ungodly amounts of hours happily gleefully as we saw joyfully and you know that's an extension of one trail runner times 10 times whatever that is the attraction of this community is why are race directors surrounded by all these volunteers right and the answer is is because they have the same feeling that's being thrown off by the community as we do as actual runners and that that that right there is the ethos and that right there is what makes it special and coming all the way back to why is itra here it's to make sure we don't lose that because if we do then race directors have to start paying people to do all that stuff and athletes have to start paying people to be crew and pacers and it all starts to feel very corporate and nowhere in there is room for you know the ethos so yeah we we under any circumstances can't let that happen yeah i've always thought about it in terms of the impact that uh that happens as a person doing a race always goes far beyond that person locomoting for 50 miles or 100 miles or in your nice case

in tour de giande however long that course ended up being i thought it was like 230 miles by the end always always measured in days right yeah exactly exactly multiple multiple days but that impact no matter how you measure it whether you take the really cliche economic impact which a lot of race directors like to do or you just take the social impact or emotional impact or inspirational impact it always goes far beyond one person actually locomoting those miles or one person traveling to an area and spending money on a hotel and at the restaurants and things like that there's this there's this multiplier effect that always happens whenever you have these community races that i 100 agree with you the tour de giande it has that on steroids just because of how involved everybody does have to be to pull that race off all the communities and all the towns and all the volunteers and the people that are shuttling the yellow the yellow bags and the medical staff and the the support people that come from all over the world to support their friends and family i mean it just becomes this huge you know this huge ecosystem of people that it takes to to pull that race off we have the privilege i have the privilege of being down the street from western states trail and so needless to say very involved and very committed to that event as well one of the things we established a few years ago was when the international athletes come to western states we offer them pacers and crew and we offer them a roof

over their head by auburn ultra running families that will provide them a bed and a hot meal some logistics show them the trail all to really make them feel at home and and reduce their stress level it's hard enough coming all that way and training for the race of their life the response to that has been interesting the athletes love it because it does reduce their stress um and they meet these wonderful people and families and so it's a really nice community and way to show off the american trail running ethos and spirit but what we didn't expect was that the families are equally grateful because they've met these remarkable people and they remain friends over the years needless to say are invited to the homes of the athletes so if they're from bolivia or portugal or from hong kong they're invited to come and stay with them and show them their trails and show them their beautiful country and countryside and that connection is um it's a little almost inexplicable how deep it is so that kind of exchange for instance if you come back to our heatra exchange imagine being able to connect runners that way around the world yeah so if you want to go to hong kong and you want to find the trails and find someone to run with and maybe even stay you know in a post-covid world we got to figure this out but maybe even stay right at someone's home wouldn't that be cool yeah and wouldn't that sort of reinforce who we are and i think

that's all within our reach the staying under someone's roof in a post-covid world well that one we got to figure out but but the rest of it um you know uh is all at our fingertips with a little bit of ingenuity a little bit of effort and boy doesn't that sound like somebody training for a hundred miler a hundred percent um okay we're gonna pivot away from each other just a little bit for this like final section that i want to talk to you about but before but before we do how would people learn more like how do people become start to become engaged with each other because we started out this podcast with this north american audience and this podcast mainly has a north american audience is they're not gonna they're not they're probably gonna not even gonna not even gonna know what the letters in the acronym are that's another survey you could take right there so how do how do how does our nor how does our uninformed north american audience learn a little bit more about itra itra.run that's where it starts all right we'll just leave it there at the website anything else you want to say before we get your membership okay all right let's pivot a little bit because i'd be remiss if i didn't take advantage of like two really unique aspects that you can bring to the listeners the first one is is you as you mentioned in the podcast you've been trail and ultra running for a long time almost since some of the like some of the major origins of of the sport particularly in the us and

so you've seen a lot of change but also you've been a very you've been very successful on the business side and been able to predict markets and in particular endurance markets where they're going to ebb and where they're going to flow every year ultra running magazine comes out with their statistics on how many people are participating and what that participation looks like male versus female 50k versus 100k and 100 mile and that's something that i know that you've had a keen interest on a number of different levels as well and so i'll open the floor up to you if we look forward five to ten years from now what are the big what are the big things that trail and ultra runners are going to see that are different compared to what they are now okay uh starting with the runners the participation rate so trail running's been growing approximately 10 a year for almost 15 years so it's that's incredible by the way that like that right there is mind-blowing for that long the number of events has also been rapidly growing and in fact um our research shows that there was an imbalance of too many races so too much supply and uh over over the demand and you know that's not uncommon in growing markets it's a shiny object and so it attracts a lot of interested parties because everyone figures hey it's the

gold rush you know he's got a nugget that guy's got a nugget i know what he does he's not any better than i am i can get a nugget too and we had a lot of nugget seekers and some of them are really really good and some of them aren't so good and what the covet is done is it's gonna as a warm up buffett says when the tide goes out right you see who has their bathing suits on i love it and we got a lot of naked people and um that's gonna hurt yeah that's gonna hurt and it's gonna create the vacuum that we talked about our our research shows that that post covid that there's no reason just like the economy was raging along and you know the reason we have a an economic problem on our hands isn't because there was something wrong with the economy well same goes for the growth of trail running the trail running will resume at 10 but we actually think it'll be higher than that and why well there's three or four sources and i mentioned all of them earlier in the podcast one will be the the millions of people that have discovered the great outdoors and post covid will go well i was doing it because we kind of had to just for peace of mind and we couldn't really go that far from our home and so we went outside and got some fresh air but you know we really enjoyed it and i wonder if i did this like as a habit now what kinds of things could i do could i hike find hiking clubs nature clubs orienteering trail running

etc and trail running will be on the list and it will benefit from people seeking part of the community joining groups locally to say hey you know i'd kind of like to learn how to do this and where do i go and again if we had the appropriate exchange it would be very easy to get an answer to that question so we think there's millions of people around the world that are in a category of going to start paying attention to trail running we think that china we know china is growing pretty rapidly very grassroots these are people that share precisely the same values as everybody else we know that spartan has put their foot into the sport and they will leave it there and they are bringing with them um uh nearly a million uh obstacle course race athletes and iron man as we know now is buying back uh to the bringing back to the us uh iron man and with that um they're going they they have uh tar wire and they have uh ultra trail australia already in their portfolio and uh i believe because trail running is growing they will pay attention to trail running and i think we'll see them as is a a citizen as part of this UTMB is now UTMB international and they're growing across the globe um we haven't seen uh active yet we haven't seen lifetime we haven't seen three or four other international sports event organizers but

they're out there and it would not surprise me if you see some of them come in and and some startups by the way some some executives that come off of some of these other events and say hey this is a great play here to to to fill this vacuum and to build something specifically for trail running so that will all um kind of even up the supply and demand with a little bit more consolidation on the supply in other words fewer players bigger players plenty of room for the mom and pops and for the one and twos that's i'm not saying they're going away i'm just saying there will be some consolidation and that all breeds um one thing growth and it breeds um serious players serious brands and a lot of trail runners you know getting out there and we're going to be reaching out into parts of um the world that want to emerge that don't have organized trail running they don't have a club they don't have an association and part of what we're doing is reaching out to those communities and saying well let us help you build the infrastructure kind of here's here's the 101 on how to organize a club here's how you organize an association here's who you want to belong to here's where you get the rules right here's how you can begin to build your first event that's part of what we do as well so all for all of those reasons i think the future is very very bright for for trail running there is going to be um some not so pleasant outcomes

from covet and um that's it it's just inevitable that's what happens in any marketplace but but the long the mid view and the long view um from from a business standpoint and investment standpoint is it's actually quite attractive yeah i think your your point that the players that are in the industry not just the race organizers i actually look at this from a coaching perspective as well because coaching market it's a cottage industry but there's competition in it but from uh coaching perspective and you can even look at the other brands nutrition companies apparel companies footwear companies and things like that there is going to be this overall proposition that the ones that don't have the bathing suits on when the tide when the tide rolls out they're just not going to be in as good of a position and they might in fact actually go away once all of this is uh said and done which leaves the opportunity for the better build the stronger the ones that have you know better leadership that have good customer base loyal customer base and things like that to take a little bit more pieces of the market share and in that case this you know this um this picture that you painted earlier of all these wild stallions kind of running around they're just become they're they're bigger and different animals i guess to to extend that analogy a bit and i'm i i i agree with you that the mid long term picture is rosy but i'm i'm still not this is just my opinion i'm still not quite convinced that a huge consolidation of all of that let's just say

that in theory there's four big players in the race space right i'm still not convinced that that would be a good thing or a bad thing and i think i think that proposition when a lot of ultra runners are looking at that going oh my gosh these 10 races that i'm used to the mom and pops running now some other larger organization is running they can't visualize it so it's just kind of scary to them right if if just to bring clarity or specific numbers to your point today we have the numbers i'd say over 90 percent are one or two races for an organizer it's very fragmented yep so there's very few like UTMB or um um jameel right that that have you know more than even five five five five is a lot i'm suggesting in in in round two here that it's still going to be up in the probably 80 80 percent oh interesting okay so you're going to have some some um fallout but it's not like it's going to go 70 percent consolidated to the big players it's it's too mature a market and it's too fragmented for that to happen so there's room for bigger players to come in but but you're you're you're not going to see this this enormous turnover like you might have seen um in triathlons where iron man can

you know there's four players really in triathlons and and then there's everybody else and i'm not saying that though that the iron man franchise and the others like vine vine vineland vineman and others they were built early enough that they they caught all the growth and that's exactly what tough mudder or spartan or rugged maniac have done in ocr they caught it early and they were able to capture most of the incoming the stallions the mustangs they're they're long gone they're they're way way way way long gone and it's only in the the new and emerging markets that you might stand a chance to dominate so you you could maybe do that in china you could maybe do that in parts of africa where they're really emerging and you might have one or two players that get most of the events that's possible but on a global basis now if if if the big players get more than 20 of the market share i'd be very very very surprised surprised yeah the the other thing confounding that though is the scaling is much more difficult because you have especially north america because you have all these permit caps that are you know 200 runners big being able to scale a large organization up in terms of numbers of participants when you have to replicate that race model that race business model sometimes multiple times across a weekend it's just it's just enormously more difficult as opposed to an iron man model or a

tough mudder model or an ocr model where you can bring thousands of tens of thousands of people into one singular race and grow that race just or grow the participants just from that one single race here you've just got the proposition where it's like 100 here 100 there 200 there 300 there 100 there and it's just like to to do it as an organization is just really logistically difficult it's it's it's inefficient you're you're absolutely right the fact that we're we're trail runners not road runners right and that we are 90 plus percent running on property that's local state federal government owned makes it so that there's caps that there's limitations that there's impact environmental impact issues and and then we're sharing these trails with all the other people that that indeed make it very inefficient now someone like spartan if you look at their model that they were creating venues where they they had control over the venue and and they could replicate it over and over it made for a very efficient model you could do trail running that way you could you know kind of run around a dirt parking lot and and do that um and there's a place for that for sure but that's traditionally not what we do um most of the races are a little more scenic than that and thus you can't control the limits and you're right so so even even if somebody wanted to take a dominant position they would find it

exceedingly inefficient and therefore that is not very attractive business model yeah well we'll see what happens i think i think it's super interesting uh you know in an effort of full disclosure i reached out to the spartan people uh back in february to bring them on the podcast and they're they stood me up they agreed to do an interview and then didn't show up for it so we'll we'll see if that tune changes after covet this is all before the pandemic came around but i still would love to bring them on they have an open invitation to come on and and tell us what they're trying to do in the trail and ultra running space i'm completely open to that and i i'm i'm intrigued by their ideas and their business model and what they can potentially bring to the space i don't well i certainly i'd be happy to help connect you there you go yeah um i i think that they i know they would like to come on um so let me help you do that yeah i i like i said i i don't know exactly why the whole thing fell through but i was a little disappointed that it that it was and i would love to have them back on i have nothing against them i'd love to hear from them um all right bob we're gonna let you go man i really appreciate your time i know that you got a ton of stuff stacked up for for today other than the acronym itra is there anything else you want to leave listeners with you know i just get out there and let's have some fun i love it i love it bob all right man well we'll see you on the trail soon enough i hope i make my way out to the western states course and we can share some

trail miles at some point might be several months from now but i'll be looking forward to it nonetheless yeah well we look forward you got a roof over your head with us here and a beer and a pizza in your belly and somebody to run the trails with you oh man that sounds so good all right i'll take you up on it for sure thanks again for the opportunity all right folks thanks for listening to bob and i today about all things itra and a little bit of prognostication on the future of trail and ultra running and you know i think that after this covet 19 pandemic works its way through the world we are going to see a much different landscape in the trail and ultra running space maybe spartan is a part of that maybe iron man is a part of that maybe some of the races get consolidated who knows we're just going to have to see at the very tail end of it um uh as a little bit of follow-up i did uh get in touch or back in touch with the good folks over at spartan and invited them back on the podcast hopefully we can get that out to you folks sooner rather than later i think that is going to be another interesting conversation appreciate bob for his time here in the podcast i appreciate you guys listening to the podcast as well and big special shout out to the new editor and post-production specialist michael carson if you guys have not noticed the last couple of podcasts we have taken the quality of it up a notch and that is due

due entirely to mr carson's hard work and really putting up with me on the front end of it to really get these podcasts uh to sparkle a little bit more i hope you guys enjoyed it all if uh you do have some time go ahead on over to itunes and give this podcast a rating or a review helps the podcast out a lot appreciate the heck out of everybody listening we will see you out on the trails at some point and until then stay healthy stay safe and keep training your butts off we're gonna eventually get back to the races but until then keep running people you