Meghan Hicks and Bryon Powell of iRunFar, the Hub of Ultrarunning | Koopcast Episode 39

what's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast a podcast where we explore all areas of ultra running including training racing nutrition physiology psychology as well as have a little bit of fun banter along the way and this episode of the podcast is definitely full of the fun banter i have on today none other than megan hicks and brian powell of i run far you guys will recognize them for the incredible race coverage that they do in any normal year but as we all know this is not a normal year and so i brought them on the podcast today to really discuss that what is going on in trail and ultra running right now what have they learned throughout the course of this pandemic what are the good things that are gonna come as a product of all of us going through this pandemic and when are we going to get to see each other again when are we going to be able to get to go out to the races give everybody a hug see people race see people compete and start up that aspect of ultra running which we all miss so dearly brian and megan have really done a fantastic job over the course of the last several years building a community within trail and ultra

running their website i run far i don't need to tell you all that it is a hub of the community where everybody goes to for all different types of information information on the races information on how to train for them and information on just how the community is doing with some of the profiles that they do for everyday ultra runners i really like this conversation we had a lot of fun with it as you guys can tell it got a little silly at times with some of brian's uh with some of brian's metaphors that he started to throw out on various things and i hope this episode really brings a smile to your face and helps you realize that there's a light at the end of the tunnel of covid19 we're all going to get to see each other again and we're all going to get to go out to the races again so here we go let's get right into it brian powell megan hicks i run far we're on if you want to be on all right we're on then yeah well i feel like i feel like industries like ours are just like in a complete lurch right now like it's hard to predict the future of i mean our industry is going to be incredibly different until there's a vaccine for covid and you know races of large kinds like large the types of travel and mobility that we used to have um yeah even just like city group runs and you know groups getting together more than a few people to train or whatever

the entire life of our community is different i would say that it's a compromise on everybody's part and probably one that people wouldn't otherwise make i mean it's race directors don't want to be putting on race for the most part don't want to be putting on virtual events they want to be holding their real races in person and that fosters community and and you know on the participant side that that's what one of the main benefits of participating in a organ in the sport in an organized way is getting together and and whether you're meeting up with friends that you've known for a decade or two or just running into new people being able to talk to them about the sport that you're so excited to now be joining um i think as soon as people are able to safely get back to the physical races there'll be a couple outliers like there's some people that are love to and very good at putting on spectacles of various sorts they get people excited in a virtual sense um i think though a couple of those will continue but you're not going to have you know if there's a vaccine early next year there's not going to be the UTMB and then the virtual UTMB run alongside or i hope not like i i just don't think that truly like i mean i think this part of this sport is we're doing the best we can right now on all sides and yeah i think we'll for the most part switch away from the the virtual model i think i

think you're oh go ahead make it oh no you go i was good i was just gonna put in a cheeky comment i think you guys don't want to have the virtual UTMB coincide with the real UTMB because it puts another thing on your plate to cover fortunately we're not covering virtual races so yet yet go ahead that would be a compromise i feel like there have been a couple cool things that have come out of this virtual scenario that like may you know continue on like um what james varner abram dickerson have done with the trail running film festival turning it virtual instead of you know trying to travel from city to city and have gatherings in the traditional sense like how cool is it i mean the technology is there to bring people together virtually let them see things with you know like movie theater style the comfort of your own home like that's cool that's super cool i could see that moving forward where maybe they have a mixed model like maybe they do a three-week tour with x set of films and then have the you know because it'd be preferable to get in a movie theater and watch it with your friends and catch up but then to to have a a final showing it's you know a global gathering essentially i've had almost all of my athletes do one of the virtual races or the virtual challenges or whatever just one of them and it's kind of like initially it was like built out of

necessity and i use that word deliberately because they would tell me i i need i need use that word i need to do something and you know you can debate if you really need it or not of course you don't but you get the point but then after that that initial exposure to the virtual event some of them have said i love this i love doing it i love the online community that you know i can engage with it you know for whatever reason they just identify with how the how the event was orchestrated and then other ones have kind of said man this isn't you know this isn't really for me and i think we'll start to see that we'll kind of start to see that play out because we are looking you know we're recording this at the end of at the end of june right now we're still going to see this play out in some former some former capacity through the end of the year so they're going to be this isn't like a one month like test case this is going to be like a 12 month test case where these where the races the physical part of the races are in some sort of flux yeah i definitely think that there was a you know when the pandemic started and we were all locked down and we were just like searching for ways to connect with each other like everybody was like yes i shall do virtual give me an outlet anything that see somebody besides who's behind the you know four walls of my house um but yeah like it i think as brian said and as like this time is proving like you know we are

a community of people we like to see each other's faces we like to be each other be with each other and virtual events are not a complete replacement and i just don't i mean there is an upside to it i mean if the virtual model virtual event model could grow and there be some successes and some motivations in there and some continuation of it into the future i mean if you can create that excitement for the for that group a of your your coaching clients their coop uh that's that can reduce environmental footprint because like one of the i mean aside from the travel i do specifically for work the vast majority of my travel and it's not much is to go race now if i could find that same excitement um once or twice a year and divert that from traveling to some destination uh there's benefit to that uh and good that can be done that direction i think a lot of i think a lot of people are thinking about it that way too like oh wow i don't need to do 12 races a year i don't need to travel specifically and create that footprint to 12 different places many of which are you know across the atlanta or across the pacific every single year i can have the same or similar experience or get the same value out of something that where i can connect with people from everywhere from something that i can kind of create in my backyard did you guys when you guys did operation inspiration which by the way from an observation standpoint i thought it was an overwhelming success i mean all like a lot of my

athletes engaged with it they all had a great time just seeing like the social media hits was fantastic you guys raised a shit ton of money like it just stuff that like made my eyeballs pop out what what what what did you guys learn like learn from that because i kind of feel like you were like all right let's just see if this works and and then like oh and behold it does and it did and like i mean i think i got a couple lessons out of it one is if you give a community the opportunity to do good a lot of them are going to choose to do good and actively do so um i also think it showed me that individuals or a small group of people can spark positivity in the world like it was definitely one of the goals was to a give individuals the opportunity to to get out of their house and get get active when maybe they haven't been but also to share that positively on the internet and in the time then was i mean i guess still a lot of negativity and controversy and arguing on social media and then just for a day to have people's feeds filled with uh just beautiful images of where they're running or decorated bibs or them out hiking with their family it was like a really cool uh experience i want to add to that that um what i run far and operation inspiration all the participants did was like just one sort of prong of what the global trail and ultra running community did during april there were several different

virtual events sort of happening you know weekend after weekend after weekend that were all fundraising for covid related stuff and i added it up in less than a month trail and ultra running raised over half a million dollars for covid related relief research etc and short period of time you know sort of like you said punting these events out there just you know with not a lot of planning trying to just do good and do something and boom like we did a lot it was really it was really awesome yeah that's a huge impact i mean not only in absolute terms half a million bucks it's never anything to sneeze at but also in terms of like how big the community is yeah absolutely amazing did you guys have a when you guys were sitting there like in silverton this whole thing's like coming down and like you said there's like a lot of negativity on social media like you know people are bashing this bashing that we're never going to be able to get outside woe is me western states is canceled and all this kind of stuff did like did you ever have the sense of like how big of an impact that would actually have i don't think so not in the original ideation phase like maybe we could have imagined that scale of participants but i don't think that amount of positivity or positive impact i don't think that really was in our all was on our radar yeah i mean everything that everything we're doing right now we're like creating it from like you said like zero i haven't done it before and that was that was a

cool thing like as you were talking about like the total of for all the races that raise money over that the vast majority of that i think correct me if i'm wrong was not from race organizations and that's not the people who are race organizations it's just like you and me creating for and for one example something completely from scratch and the yo corro en casa group over in spain creating something completely from scratch and and the trail sisters event and like all these were just like people inventing the wheel each time and alone to do good and like that was just amazing well speaking of wheels you guys are like the hub of the ultra running community like there's there there are other publications and other like media outlets and even even people on social media out there that have engaging you know that have engaging personalities and try to you know engage their audience and things like that but the two of you combined with the contributors that you work with you guys have done such an amazing job of taking this widely different and widespread very small scale events and people in community a community that exists across the entire world and really really small pockets and you've been able over the course of the last several years to kind of like bring them together with your content and on and on your website and operation inspiration was just an extension of that

and i'm kind of wondering like what so you mentioned the things that it did for covid great awesome you know you raise all this money it's great for the community absolutely but is it also as impactful to i run far in terms of you guys's ability to be a hub in the community um i guess what i would say about that is that um our race coverage has typically been like the thing that you know for years it's been the thing that happens once a month that it in some way brings the community together um you know we go to a location other runners go to a location we bring that experience to whoever wants to pay attention to it around the world so with the lack of that um one of the you know the reasons that we've put together these two virtual events that we've done is to try to create some sort of global organic level global connective experience we can't do it with our race coverage and race storytelling so in the absence of that what's a way to you know bring somebody from eastern europe in connection with somebody in you know western north america what's a way to have them get excited about on a unifying concept or event and essentially i haven't even looked it up probably in five four or five days but i know when we had about half as many entrants as we do right now there were 55 different countries represented among the

entrance which is more than we had in all of operation inspiration with 1700 i mean in like yeah just countries of all sorts you know the ones you'd expect but then the uh bahrain and brunei and you know we're sticking on the bees and then there's like you see that and then it's fun seeing pockets sprout up of so yeah you have this these all these folks coming in from around the world but then you have other little hubs like there's been a surprising number of people signing up from the philippines way more in mexico a group in tech like a big cluster in texas and it's just kind of fun to see how how atomic uh you know it can be but also how nucleated it can be like there's there's little hubs that that that that form nice metaphors yeah i was gonna say the same thing that's bringing in chemistry and warfare all at the same time yeah i totally lost my train of thought of where i was gonna go to next because of that um sorry to stop this conversation in the tracks no it's good it's all good man it's all good but i mean needless to say like you guys you guys feel like it was a win kind of like all the way around at the same time do you still want to get back to like your bread and butter we need to go to the races and watch people compete and engage with the community in that way megan hicks yeah i mean

i miss humans so much i mean i i'm like a categorical introvert i check all the boxes for that personality type but man like i really miss the physical company of running with people and going to races and seeing people and just getting to watch people you know have triumph and tragedy and like kind of the you know the metaphor of life play out in a day or two in a race and getting to share that with other people yeah like that's um that's a really amazing part of our sport how humid it is like you know some sports are so just disconnected from the human experience but our sport and you and our humanness are so intertwined and yeah i miss that i mean i don't miss sitting on airplanes i don't miss sitting in airports i don't miss like lack of sleep but i miss being being with people and telling stories for sure what about you i will say definitely off the bat and uh sort of continuing it's nice to have had a small pause from travel because i've been doing that in particular for for a decade now so it's nice to have three months at home or three months of not international travel so that was that was a pleasant break but i could definitely i'm excited to travel again and to see those events um and i guess i i definitely didn't have to travel as much the last three months but and i expected to

catch up on life and take care of the backlog of work and do some home projects um let me tell you that didn't happen putting on two virtual events from scratch along with still running the magazine side of iron far as we consider it like yeah uh no rest for the weary um definitely you do have some lettuce and spinach and kale going in the backyard that is true you have a corona garden seriously you guys started a corona garden well it's because i had one before i moved out west and then i've been traveling every summer for the last decade so it was nice to finally attempt to grow things in silberton we're gonna stress the attempt because yeah yeah i woke up on the first day of summer last friday and all the beans i'd planted and some of the potatoes were scorched frozen bummer i i can i can totally empathize with that because my workload has doubled has it oh yeah like i mentioned this on um dylan's podcast a couple of weeks ago um that although i have like i have empathy for the people that are furloughed and laid off and everything that's going on there i i like personally have a hard time identifying it with because i'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off like trying to like manage all of these different like things that have kind of like come into its place and i don't really know how to put how to quite put a finger on that so you and i brian we're in the same we're in the

same boat there where i have not been able to catch up on things i think that metaphor of chicken with its head cut off is like so apropos because you know i feel like i'm running around as hard as i can frantically working and but it's without i mean that's not not the motivation but it's it's not like i'm working twice as hard and it's like i'm working overtime and getting paid for overtime at a job like it's scrambling you know as hard as we can and like just to try to get by because there's there's so much fallout in the broader outdoor industry and and you know people who do support us there's some that you know have jobs cut you understand like they gotta they gotta cut support or whatever they have to do like right on um but it's it's it's working twice as hard for half as much but it's a hard situation let's talk about that a little bit and let me kind of preface this from the get-go that if you guys want to be on or off the record about any of this just just say just just just mention it you know i i i tend to not pull a lot of punches on this podcast and i know you guys try to try it try to walk a very neutral line at at at some points but i want to i do want to bring up this subject of the the publishing and the digital magazine space and brian you mentioned that there's a there's an arm of iron far that is essentially digital magazine and that space right now is getting annihilated like you just look at what's happening in in in the

publishing world even in book publishing it's just everything is just getting completely decimated and there's been these like really kind of novel attempts for some of the publishing outlets to like monetize their content and basically they're moving to what what small scale publishers have done for a number of years now which is this like donor patreon uh type of model and and most notably outside magazine which is a big influencer in the space i don't think that we can i don't think that we can overstate that they've moved to a partially moved is a wrong word it's not like they made a wholesale you know move over to this but they have opened up an revenue avenue of we want to solicit reader donations we want you to like donate to our content almost like npr that's what i thought of when i originally saw this uh when i originally saw this strategy i'm like this is what npr has done for for years but for a paid for subscription-based model to like move over to that it this is my opinion not byron and megan's if i run far it kind of it kind of like reeks of desperation because they haven't made an attempt to engage the community to facilitate this hey come and help us out because we're going to help you out and then they all of a sudden switched over to it out of necessity that's why i say it it it it kind of reeks of desperation but you guys are in the industry

you guys are in that space what have you seen play out and you can either use like your experience from iron far specifically or like anything else that you've seen kind of play out in the in that magazine space well i think i can speak to the desperation i think that's a really good choice of word because it yeah it is and it is not just in the outdoor industry which i'm using as the broad term and include clues outside and iron far um there's marketing whatever the industry is marketing is the quickest thing that can be cut uh you don't want to cut your production if you're a if you're a major outdoor producer like if you're producing shoes or apparel like you need to keep your your designers on staff you need to keep your your hub on staff but you can cut that marketing budget with an email right or an email it's like and you can do it instantly so that's and having spoken to people about past recessions or economic troubles like it's always the first always the first one to go 100 and uh just kind of how it played out and me observing it in my world um kind of deals are developed like partnerships are developed throughout time but there's a lot of they get worked on the end of one year and into the first couple months of the next and um we had had a bunch of hours booked up kind of on a normal rate that they would normally be on there were some still in development in march and as soon as march came around anything that was in development got like a hard pause like uh and and then like that that sort of stood in that space of pause for most of march and i can't remember

exactly when but i don't know if it was the end of march beginning of april the clawback started it wasn't just we're not developing deals it's we're canceling like set contracts yeah um to the point of i mean i don't i would guess 40 to 50 percent of what we had on the books got pulled back uh and and that's with nothing else being developed going forward so it was uh and i'm sure that's not you know i know the people in those marketing departments it wasn't just like i run far i'm guessing that's pretty indicative of um of most of the industry most of the publishing industry media whatever you want to create that umbrella um i mean you see it you hear that in the television space the television ads like um so i think and especially in the the physical print media has been in a rough spot for ever yeah i mean not that i want to take on extra work but that's definitely the reason i run far is not entered in a publishing game is like no that's a that's just a tough road to hoe right now and uh i can't imagine being a being an outside or being a trail runner or an ultra running like or those equivalent magazines in durance or vista trail in europe whatever it is like it's been a tough area and it just got a whole lot tougher so i'm gonna plug if you wherever you are in the world if you have a trail runner or an ultra running uh if you're not a subscriber right

now go go subscribe if you want a magazine to stick around subscribe yesterday yeah like 100 i would i would add to that that it's it's hard to speak for the other um you know magazines or online media or whatever to sort of know their internal struggle but i mean i run far is traveling through this crisis courtesy of a you know the government loan and our patreon support um our patreon support has i mean we've had a dip because there are people who've lost their jobs and stuff like that but um largely the patreon family has remained strong and supportive and yeah i mean that money is turning around going straight into the pockets of all of our writers and stuff every month and so um we are we feel so lucky that um we have a supportive community who does want to you know see us through this and give us their money each month and i mean i i guess you can't fault another publishing entity for trying that model because um you know it works for some um yeah you gotta do what you gotta do but it hadn't really happened in in media that includes print publications until very recently that's right yeah and i think it can it can maybe work in a in a better sense for a niche outlet say like trail running trail runner magazine but how do you do that with a diffuse

audience like an outside i mean yeah they do some long form really in-depth stuff they truly do have some um maybe a little sensationalist for my side of things for my for my like sometimes but they do have some substantive journalism there or writing or whatever it is but they also have a lot of here's our gear reviews but there's a hundred dollar outlets somebody could check out the the latest you know rooftop box or uh ski boot but here's the difference and it's something that that that megan just said you said you have a very supportive community and i would i would actually change that to you guys helped create that supportive community and that's the difference that that's the difference of where you can lean on that patron style audience in this time versus having to create it because you've created this that you've you've created in this and cultivated this very supportive audience that is going to stick by you for the most part i think that's a true statement just from what you guys just said it's going to stick by you for the most part through kind of thick and thin to whatever means that they kind of whatever means they can i think that's the that's the real difference that we're starting to see play out is that the the information outlets the media outlets that have gone to some length to cultivate their audience are good they're just more resilient during this downturn because their people will stick by them and i think there's kind of a reciprocal nature there like yeah um as you

know and i guess it is the creation of community in both directions because i mean as as the covid crisis was going on you know getting worse and like media our brand partnerships are starting to get cut that already existed i'm thinking we hadn't got a ppp loan yet i'm thinking that you know patreon is going to get cut in half and i basically put out a note to our patrons like this is not the time that we're not making a plea we're not you know saying woe is me or we're desperate but if we if there comes a time when it is like if it comes to here's here's the the end or not yeah like we will we promise to let you know and like you know we're not going to say that until it you know it is time and hopefully it never you know it isn't that time but we make that promise back to you like we will let you know when this is the time to help if you're going to help you're gonna you're gonna have here's my bold hashtag not so bold prediction if you ever get to that place you're gonna have people like come to you in droves and be like i got your back and i hope that never happens and that's but that's the kind of implicit of that is like that we wouldn't do that until that moment yeah yeah we also wouldn't abandon the people who've who've been behind us and with us this whole journey yeah i heard you mention that on one of your on one of your uh patreon broadcasts and i really appreciated the approach that you took because you could have from the onset at the very beginning of this staring

down you know staring staring in the face of 50 percent patron cut all of your you know advertisers kind of running and canceling their contracts and things like that you could have said everybody who's giving us money now give us more money you could have very easily like like made that plea and i i bet you would have been successful to that end even then but instead instead and this is what i think is really cool i feel like i'm just patting you guys on the back this whole time i'm in a giving loving mood today but instead no no no no but but instead instead you kind of stuck to your ethos which is to to like go out and do something for the community with operation inspiration and to the moon and that always you know those are what those are those things that like you can't ever like you give them to the bean counter and they're like i can't find that rl for this like you spend x amount of money and blah blah blah what do you kind of get back like it's it's like esoteric and it doesn't happen for so far down the line that you can't really track but it's going to work out in your favor it's funny i hadn't even thought about this is like this week we have our semi-annual pledge drive every year and it's by far the bigger one like the western states week leading up to hard rock we always have the last couple years we've had a here you know here you can pick up buy our stuff here you can get a sign for patreon because there's more people that are more people are most engaged let's say during this week um or what's one of the weeks that they're most engaged and it literally has not crossed my mind until oh yeah we didn't even do that okay we're just we're doing it like doing as much

as we can uh yeah to try to do some good and create some positivity and and continue doing like the magazine side of things we're always saying that though like when we're trying to like plan out things we're like what's the what's the actual like value of this and it's like who knows it's all tangible value you know i mean trust me as somebody who you know used to drive a lot of the operations of a small company you can only get so granular and powerful with the answer to that question and if you're trying to search for those answers too much you're kind of wasting your time you got to do things that like stick to your ethos so and that's pretty much been the way we've done it for the last decade so i'm gonna stick to it all right megan i'm gonna give you hard questions now since you feel like i've been like throwing like throwing you softballs i want to talk about your production calendar a little bit like going forward uh so normally you have like this combination of informative and also like personal and inspirational types of articles that focus on like people and community and things like that i can only speak to the performance side of it because that's what part of what i do as well right write a lot of content produce content on the performance side of it it has been a like i've been on the freaking struggle bus you know the like 80 mile of 100 mile struggle bus for like the last three months because like the things actually aren't relevant right you're talking about like tapering something relevant let's see yeah are you saying you're

we're both puking our way around a turquoise lake right now yeah exactly we're definitely puking our way around turquoise lake from the content perspective right now probably what the metaphors today is is pulling out some what else good ones um it's both entertaining and horrifying at the same time but what so where i was going with that is is like what do you think your your normal content mix is going to look like for the we're really realistically looking at kind of towards the end of the year before any sort of like like routine races and performance things kind of come around what does that look like for you guys yeah i mean as you probably know our um monday race results news article got the boot as soon as the pandemic happened because there's no races and i mean when we can when justin and us converted to doing a weekly catching up with column to like check in with top runners or runners we haven't interviewed in a few years stuff like that we kind of thought oh maybe this will be like a two month long thing and here we are like four months four months into it almost four months at least of editorial planned and it's i mean we're essentially looking for that to continue for the rest of the year um but i would say that has probably been the only change essentially i mean we haven't you know we basically have stuck with all our columns as they were um whether it's

educational editorial instructional like they're all they're all still in the works i mean we don't have the additional content of races but changing justin mocks this week and running to catching up with is the only change that's happened so far and i anticipate the only one that's going to be yeah made at least for the next couple months i mean the the content of the articles tends to follow different themes as the year progresses like you know people start writing about western states and then they start writing about how they blew up at their race and the lessons that they learned and um you know there's oh it's the holidays and how to stay motivated through the holidays and so there are these sort of uh repeating themes and um so far this year we've had some really divergent themes like oh we're gonna talk about this novel virus for a couple months fairly regularly actually the one of the great changes of uh i have to say for this year's uh uh editorial content and this was not planned because she says there's themes and it's none of that is planned none of that is like top down spoken it's it's what people want to write about like we don't very rarely pre-screen what topics will be but there's fewer western states articles this year we try not to to top down steer our writers too much so then a lot of them do write about western

states and then we have 15 editors are informational articles and it's like all right can we just tell next year like write a few less have you have you noticed any changes in like the consumption patterns though like the people that are going and visiting your website or like certain articles like being really hot or certain articles like flopping has that been any different i don't look and that'd be my purview seriously yep we don't we don't write to clicks so i don't even look that's badass i love that i think there's less engagement on social media i think people are using you know during the time of covid and now the social justice issues conversations that we're having people are engaging with social media more on those issues than they are their you know their beloved niche sport and stuff but i think people are still clicking and going and reading in a fairly normal behavior i think i had to like give a potential brand partners some like just vague or you know broad numbers the other day and looked at like last month versus as a total like traffic wise versus like say in october or november of last year and they were similar i just don't know what the breakdown is because we don't very intentionally don't look at i love the fact that i love the fact though that you don't look because i i honestly i don't either like for the content that i that i put out every once in a while the our editor jim rutberg who's also the co-author on my book he'll send me

something like oh this did really well or this did really poorly or something like that and kind of give me like the edges of the bell curve just as like information or whatever but for the life of me if i were to be able to predict that i would lose every single time like just literally just this morning he said the article that you wrote last week went off the charts and when i turned it into him i said this is i'm i'm not happy with this like put it out there but this sucks and maybe i was just in a bad mood or whatever and come you know turn around like three days later he's like this is awesome you know i had great click-through rates and blah blah blah i'm like all right whatever just keep not telling me this yeah i guess i mean that and that's very intentional is because we don't want to i mean not looking at any media in particular but the broad scope of media these days there's so much clickbait and yeah listicle and i mean and we would double traffic in three months if we did that now i don't know what that would mean in the long term because a we probably hate ourselves and quit um but also we'd probably lose our the following that we have cultivated over the time but like we don't want to write articles to to aim toward the readers we're gonna write the articles that i mean to get more readers i should say like we're gonna write the articles that or publish the articles we think should be published and written and i feel very strongly that you know you can make money off of writing clickbait and lists and whatever the viral topic of the moment is but you are you're sort of

isolating yourself you know you're you know you're marginalizing the people you're writing about or you're using you know somebody or some performance or some moment in time for your benefit and yeah i mean i don't i don't really think that the long run is is thought about you're also chasing the next level of salaciousness maybe that's a little maybe that's a little bit too too intense but you guys get what i'm saying like if you're writing the clickbaity articles like there's always somebody else out there that's going to write something more clickbaity and so you got to keep like upping your game in order to in order to and you see that now where it's just like oh my god where did this come from and the other if you ever go to a media bias checker i forget the name of the website but like something if you search for that like you just see these tails going off and not in trail running but just like the more and more like the more salacious articles and it was really cool to have one trail and ultra runner i really respect uh sort of pull me aside at a race i think like a year or two ago and say you know thank you for not being yellow journalism yeah and like that is that reaffirm what we had done and like just reaffirm what we should continue to do i'm thinking i'm starting to come to the come to the opinion that people are starting to value that more because they can kind of see through it because it's become so watered down i remember like really on in my coaching

career i i wrote a lot as a contribute as a contributing author to the stereotypical like mass media publications you know the runner's worlds and the outsides and kind of the real broad base things and there was one incident in particular that like complete that completely like turned me off to that whole to that whole industry i wrote some nutrition article where i gave a recipe and in the in the recipe were almonds and when the article came out and you guys see where i'm going here when the article came out i had this recipe here and this blah blah blah blah you know you know three tablespoons of almonds go ahead blah blah on the opposing page was a full page ad for california almonds and i was like wait a minute you guys paid me yeah you guys paid me my little fraction for my article great i'm very thankful for that but you spun it off into an ad that you generated like 20 times the revenue from and i don't see a dime from that and there's an implicit there's an implicit endorsement from one to the other that the readers see because they're on opposing pages you did not agree to no you irritated the shit out of me we very specifically one of the benefits of not having like a we have a editorial calendar in the sense of this columnist is this day of this month and this columnist is the other day of the month but we don't have planned out six weeks in advance what they're writing about which means we can't do that it's called cross selling right

it drives me freaking bonkers in the industry and we don't we and like people who you know i know lots of people in the industry and we talk about like how to how you make things work and they're always pushing the cross sell and like we we don't we never like oh we've got this article on this city coming up we need to yeah you know go to their their travel board and you know get an ad they post against it like no like that's just so yeah how many articles how many articles were published about chocolate milk three years ago yeah they had they had some powerful lobbying and uh a lot of uh a lot of a lot of money behind their uh advertising going around um let's pivot back to travel and races ping pong ping pong back and forth back and forth do you guys have anything on your like race coverage calendar for the rest of the year for race coverage no no travel um not to say it won't it couldn't happen um it's definitely not happening the next couple months um still um and i guess we would watch the situation to see if it improves we're not going to go just cover a race to go cover a race if it's unsafe or imprudent to do so not not just unsafe for us but just the wrong the could doesn't mean the should yeah well that's what i want to kind of to get at i'm going to date i'm going to date the recording of this podcast a little bit but that's totally fine you know we're recording on june june 25th

so as of today pandemic oh my gosh like i've got two weeks i'm two hours i've got to get out of the prediction business because i keep doing pretty horribly at it um but it looks like as of 3 p.m mountain time on june 25th that bad water is going to happen i don't know if you guys have been following that but like almost half their field has dropped out um there was a freaking like earthquake that caused a huge landslide and the whitney portals like the race director chris cospin is still like nope we're holding this thing like we're gonna try to figure it out so races like that are gonna happen looks like speed goat might happen races like the bear looks like in september might happen you guys are still taking this like comprehensive evaluation of should we go and is it still relevant for us to go not just kind of like jumping at the next race opportunity to get out there and get more coverage i'd say yes on all counts yeah like it is a for us like it it's a very calculated decision in terms of i mean it's a bad for business decision quote unquote but we're not going to go just chase korean baseball to put something on you know but like that's happening in sports illustrator right no korean yeah it's upgraded to japanese baseball but no like you're not going to just you know there's going to be a race and you know people are going to want to follow it and they are going to follow it but like we're not we kind of have a standard of level of in depth of competition that we cover a race we're not going

to go just cover a race that doesn't hit that just because people want to follow a race and more importantly like you know i i don't even know that races should be held right now i mean to be honest and that's a that's an unpopular or races that aren't regional yeah i mean i don't know if maybe there are maybe there are races that you can put all the aid station controls and in good faith try to do that you know just limiting contacts having wave starts but you're still having bad waters i think it's only gonna be 60 people but for the most part you're having a couple hundred people travel from all over a state all over a couple states all over a couple countries to one location and there's all that travel to get there there's you know you know you might have 10 person waves but all those friends are going to get together after the race and have pizza and a beer or coffee or whatever and like should we be encouraging that at this point it's not like it's not like a family going up to the mountains and camping for a weekend and running on their own it's it's a it's quite literally a communal event a hundred percent so since i'm out of the prediction business that's not gonna that's not gonna stop me from making you guys get into the prediction business what's what's the like what do you guys think is the first big race that you guys will go back to like if you could look in your fuzzy ass crystal ball right now like what does it tell you i mean i would honestly guess it's not till next year like a trans grand canaria kind of timeline um that was the last one we were at

i know yeah uh i mean in fear like i wish things would progress in a positive direction such that maybe maybe jfk got super competitive this year and that would be awesome i would love to go cover jfk like for a multitude of reasons but i we did i mean and there could be stuff earlier than that i mean there's the golden trails world championships they've now moved to like october and the azores of portugal i mean there's there is stuff later in the calendar um but i just i don't think i'm having a not a good feeling it's just being so uncertain that i would not say yes to anything or not be positive that i'd be going to anything before say next year do you think that do you think the competitiveness of the really big races is going to look any different next year i think there's i think so i think there'll be a concentration more so than even this year i think people are going to be not not desperate but eager to win on the big or perform on the biggest stages so i could kind of see a a concentration of the of people going to i'm going to find a way to go run western states or find a way to go run UTMB or whatever i mean whatever the next north face endurance challenge championship is yeah so i mean that for a while i was hoping that might happen this fall because yeah enough race has been canceled a couple were postponed but enough have just been

canceled that you have all this pent-up demand from the racers to race and you could have a really i mean you might have some burnout but i think you'd have a lot of people showing up on just a couple start lines which would be really great because there has been a a dilution of competitive depth um just because there's so many great events around the world and events eager to bring people and people are eager to experience the world so you just have a lot of a lot of b-level races and i don't say that disparagingly but just there's so many good races out there yeah i've i've said that for a few years now that the sport would be well served to try to like concentrate the competitiveness around around a fewer high quality races because it's it's good for the exposure of the sport it's not good for the exposure of the sport when you have people winning high profile races by hours yeah those are awesome performances you don't take anything away from the athletes but you still want a competitive exciting race where people are you know plowing down from roby point you know neck and neck and they get on the track within three seconds of each other and they're like sprinting to the finish like those types of things like time and time again create like cool storylines it gets more people in sport it's fun for everybody it's fun for us to like watch it and the athletes like it as well like the athletes who get to compete in that like head-to-head consistent fashion i think they really kind of relish that versus just running around the middle by themselves or whatever it might be

three of them that's you know three strong women or three strong men that start that next level race and then one has an injury or drops out and then there's two and you know as you said one wins by a couple hours and then you know what is that yeah it's not it's not a bad performance but it's not as exciting from a from a viewer standpoint or uh what do you think think in terms of what's gonna or what the next race is gonna be each other at a race again oh man well i can see you guys on my video conference right now um i'm in the same camp i'm in the same camp as you brian where i think that trans grand canaria is going to be the first one that brings people together um and but it is going to be and i think that this is a good thing it is going to be touch and go because the differences in the restrictions from country to country not only with people coming in but people getting out of the country is just gonna it's just gonna force a concentration of elite athletes and everyday athletes alike on kind of on on certain races and i think from the competitive side of things i honestly think that that's that's good like when you can get deeper higher quality fields it's more exciting as i mentioned earlier and if the conduit to that just happens to be this weird weirdness i don't know how else to describe it it's weirdness that we're gonna go that we're gonna go through through the early part and maybe even a lot of part of next year you know so so be it but yeah if i had

to put down a bet down in vegas it'd be trans grand canaria which is really surprising we both hit on the same race there's a lot of races out there i mean it could be it could be that that is competitive but it's not quite right to just travel from the u.s to share the event yet so maybe it would be you know i mean how do you justify i mean you're a coach but how do you you know if that's just on things opening up can you go over there well so here's the timing of this right i mean you realize this because we both saw each other on the island like i left like it was either like the last day of february or the first day in march and it's it's extremely difficult to think back that far because it seems like three years not three months has transpired since then but i i would like i remember sitting down with my wife liz and going like maybe i shouldn't go to this race i'm certainly not mission critical i like going out there that's probably the biggest reason that i do go to these things i just like it yeah it's you know beneficial for my athletes and things like that and yeah there's b2b stuff that happens when i go out there but it is certainly discretionary so anyway i remember going through just a little small inkling of that before i left i traveled i spent two days on the eastern seaboard doing some business stuff and recording a couple podcasts and i hopped over to the island and from the time i landed into the the time i landed on the island to the time that i left things escalated you know in like hockey stick style fashion where spain was like one of the epicenters of the outbreak and so for a while i'm like do i even do i even

travel out of here do i like quarantine myself on this island which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world um still be there yeah so i still would be there i haven't had to import liz i have an athlete that's been in costa rica since like november because he's like i'm not leaving anyway but anyway so i remember i remember going through that you have to go back through or i had to go back through madrid and going do i even really want to do this and then the day after i got back was the day that all of the airports got shut down and you saw these huge lines trying to come in the international terminals i'm like i didn't experience any of that like i missed that by 24 hours or something and to your point megan like i had a huge amount of traveler's remorse from that like i i shouldn't have done that i you know brought you know risk into the situation i could have been a silent care carrier liz you know my wife's going back to high school and you know now she's going to spread it through colorado springs like i had this really big like maybe a couple week period where i was like dang i made a i made a i made a big mistake but like the learning lesson in that is like people are going to go through that they're going to learn from their friends and this experience that i'm now verbally telling you guys but also through the experiences of like other people and what they've done in the past what they've personally done in the past and that is definitely going to make me more gun shy about going out to trans grand canary especially since i am i am certainly discretionary in that in that situation we even after we kind of committed to going to the race remember the week

before i traveled like even like a day or two before like do i go we were thinking of pulling the plug yeah it was weird i mean in things once it was almost like when we were in the air things escalated like from the time we left to the time we touched down i was like what the heck just happened there was an upper forehand that i carried like a and wore on the plane like an n95 mask that i we'd use to like air seal and insulate an attic the previous fall so like all dirty i'm like on the plane it's what i got i took i took alcohol wipes out of my foot care kit and i traveled like the little small like one inch by one inch alcohol wipes that you use innovation oh my god i use like four or five of them like every time i like sat down i had this little pile of like single serve alcohol wipes that i had to throw away she's gone to like a barbecue joint and got it exactly yeah so i was being somewhat responsible but it was pretty hilarious because we were trying to like hack the whole hack the whole thing together but then once again coming back was the bigger thing and i actually now that i remember this correctly i got stuck in madrid overnight unexpectedly because of mechanical so i was there yeah i mean it was just exactly yeah exactly like exactly and so this whole thing is escalating and watching it on the news like oh my gosh like this could turn from bad to worse really quickly i remember like we were talking like you know about whether i go in at all or not i mean and i mean through the organization like they helped put up a couple journalists but i was like supposed to be in a shared room with two other people and like last minute i decided like i don't

know where these i mean i don't know who i'm rooming with i don't know where they're coming from i mean these are tight this is three adults in a two adult person type room like i'm gonna pull out a lot of cash from my pocket and like just not re you know get possibly get sick and you know silverton is a pretty remote town and there's a in a lot of elderly people and like it's a close-knit town too so you're just even if you're careful there's contact in the street so it's like i am going to do whatever i can to to be preventive and and then sort of self-isolated for three weeks afterward but so we've learned a lot of lessons from that little bit of traveling right beforehand what do you don't push the envelope that's the lesson okay what what else do you guys want like the trail running community to come out the other side with after this pandemic is over i keep i keep saying this like it's a light switch it's going to happen but it's not but you guys have seen no well on or off yeah no um but you guys have seen you guys have definitely seen some some real positivity as an outcome of the covid19 pandemic you guys have helped create that but you've also seen the community kind of engage in that what do you hope is everlasting from this whole experience i hope i would love to see it become normalized that people don't race as much as they do for multiple

reasons but the largest reason being for um athlete health longevity like yeah it's having having a career being a healthy person outside of your running um i guess when the pandemic started and we locked down that was my first thought was like oh this is the period of time where our community discovers we can just race once every six months and like you know tear it up have these incredible performances that we can't reach because we race every month and a half or two months or whatever um yeah and so i don't know if that's yet happening because i see people like pushing themselves pretty hard in some of these big long virtual events um so i don't know how many people are just sort of buckled down training not doing you know ridiculous things and trying to like you know be in really good shape for something this fall but like to me that'd be super cool to see all these people who just trained consistently turn up at some race at the end of the year the beginning of next year like really fit and be like oh this is what we can do with this sport if we rest a little more i put this out on twitter the other day so is 2021 or 2022 is that going to be the year of the pr seriously i hope yeah i think that'd be cool because what all of us are

theoretically into four months of you know not no races so what a good potential consistent training block we probably have at least four of those months to go um i would say that kind of you were as cooper while back you were saying how there's a break between your athletes and people liking the virtual races and people who don't i think megan's talking about a group of people who are are in these times finding motivation to train and continue with it and i think there's a large group of people who are being uh having difficulty with that and i'm hoping that i'm one of them like i'm running every day but and as much as i want to have some fun summer adventures like i'm not not finding myself training in a real sense and i hope for people like myself and a lot of others like this is not a unique situation right now um that they're able to do two things one is learn how to deal with the other stressors in their life and and how to either modify their habits to change those stresses or to be able to fit better fit their running with those stresses and also to just dive down and have a better grasp of what their motivations are for running and because those evolve over time like what my motivations to run were 25 years ago are not the motivations i have to run today or or what they were 10 years ago so like find to find out what those motivations are and i think having a vacuum

where like those aren't obvious like if i had a hard rock on the calendar and i'm training for it like it's easy just to put the head down and train for it but now in a vacuum what what do i get out of it and what do i want out of it and to come to that realization you have to be more deliberate with why you're doing in the first place right not just a belt buckle yeah all right i got one more thing for you one more thing for megan actually specifically brian you can step aside um yeah totally selfish totally selfish i'm gonna do nolan's in a couple weeks what critical piece of advice can you give me which direction are you going i'm gonna go north to south because i just know the lines better in that direction i know you went south to north right bring a bunch of food on princeton that's it that's all you got for me bring a lot of food come on um k's cheeseburger yeah can i come bring you a k's cheeseburger 100 yeah you can absolutely do that i love that place i went by there the other day by the way they're still rocking k's cheeseburger for those of you who are listening is this classic 50s uh burger place my dad actually used to go there when he was in high school my dad grew up in pablo yeah and i sent him a picture of it he said it hasn't changed every time i go there um but yeah it's this classic like 50s style uh walk-up counter burger joint in uh

bunavista colorado to make sure i pronounce that correctly otherwise people yeah people get mad at me and they're they're like one of their little like tchotchkes or fun things that they do with uh with their with their guests is they give them all names of celebrities that typically were famous like in the 50s and 60s maybe the 70s yeah exactly frank sinatra yeah frank sinatra yeah which is fun so bring a cheeseburger on princeton come on you got to give me something better than that start i mean you can't start nolan slow slower i mean slowly enough slowly enough all right it's impossible to start it slowly enough all right um i mean you've done tour de giant and long ass things so like this will be easy embrace the hallucinations like become one with whatever your mind creates there you go i like that be one with the hallucination i'll try to i'm gonna throw one in there as the observer and i i should have observed and given it to megan uh one attempt to go and that would be weather window yeah and don't be afraid to bail that first you know the two peaks in if you're on if you're on elbert and it's just not a great day and not a great day go back out two days later because yeah seeing megan get like thrown around an 80 mile or seeing the winds like howling on the tops of shavano and like uh maybe she should have done this tomorrow that's when i've been scouting it that's

exactly what's been happening to me is the winds have been so bad this year i've just gotten freaking pummeled so advice well heated i saw your um gps or your strava wandering around on the nolan's line and i wondered if you were about to give it a go yeah yeah i'm gonna go back out this weekend again so like i said i'm giving it a go i'm talking to blake blakewood on monday i'm gonna ask him for for some advice as well because i need it i need all that i can get uh up the boulders down the scree yep it's like quintessential blakewood advice yep yep that's exactly what i'm planning on doing all right folks um anything else that you guys want to plug from iron far that's coming up nope um not for mine yeah i mean who knows when you'll get to actually hear this and who knows where we'll be in the pandemic and um yeah i mean we have a couple like brainstorms for what fall projects we might undertake but um hopefully we'll be recovering from our latest endeavor when this podcast which is funny i just have to share the the a little anecdote from after the first from after operation inspiration virtual race it was definitely the scenario if you would ask the person finishing their first hundred miler will you ever do this again like the next day somebody's like when's your next one i'm like never ever and now you're like yeah let's do it again and even at the time i was like ask me in another three or four days could change but it's sparing this off forever i need the puffiness of

my feet to go down before i can get through it oh the ultra running metaphors we love it all right we're gonna let you guys go thank you guys for coming on the podcast today thank you guys more importantly for what you do for the community if you guys can't tell from the for the well i mean i i have a trust me i'm i'm very realistic about the impact that i can have with athletes you guys have an impact across the entire community and you've done a fantastic job with it i've been big fans of yours for a long time brian you probably don't know this back when your blog days when you're when i run far was a blog i can remember my marketing manager actually coming up to me saying you've got to read this guy's blog it's actually kind of good so yeah so all the way back to those days and uh it's been it's it honestly has been um it's just been really fun seeing you guys take that website where it has gone and along the same time uh growing the community with it so thank you guys for what you do thanks coop onward thank you uh hopefully we uh see you at an event soon or a trail or soon yeah good luck at nolens yeah soon enough thanks you guys good luck and there you have it folks that was really fun you got a little silly at times thanks a lot to brian and megan for coming on the podcast today i really appreciate their time but more importantly i appreciate who they are and what they do in the ultra running community it is just

an invaluable service that they provide to all of us if you have not gotten the chance to do so head on over to patreon and become a supporter of iron far you can do it at any level you want but it makes a big difference to them and it makes a big difference to the community and also the information the quality of the information that i run far can put out which is absolutely top notch thanks to all the listeners out there i appreciate each and every one of you if you are so inclined head on over to apple podcasts and give this podcast a rating or a review i would appreciate that a whole heck of a lot i also appreciate the feedback that i get on social media it's always fun to see my instagram and my twitter feed filled up with what people think about this particular podcast i appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you we will see all of you out on the trails video