Ironman’s Expansion Into Ultrarunning With Dave Beeche | Koopcast Episode 49

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast i have david beach who is the senior vice president and managing director for the iron man group in the oceana region which means he is responsible for all of iron man's events across australia new zealand and that area of the world which include ultra trail australia and the terrawera ultra marathons which iron man recently purchased i wanted to bring dave on the show today to discuss what iron man's plans were for expansion they are making a big splash in the trail and ultra running community and i wanted to find out straight from the horse's mouth what that means for ultra runners of all different types across the entire planet dave has an impeccable finger on the pulse of the endurance community having been an athlete and also a budding ultra runner as well and we go through some of that history with his own personal ultra running and how iron man initially started to get into the ultra running space i had a lot of fun with this conversation i hope you do too let's get right into it here's my conversation with dave beach from iron man i think to kind of like start out with since i've got predominantly a north american audience why don't

you just describe like what you do with iron man and then what you've been doing with ultra trail australia and with terrawera since iron man has has acquired them yeah sure um so i look after the australia and new zealand region makes up about 10 percent of our global business um and so we while the name the iron man group might indicate we're predominantly a triathlon company we're actually not um so we're a really diverse uh event company now we um deliver athlete experiences to over a million customers now every year we operate in 56 countries um more than 250 events um so truly global uh presence and our region um is lucky enough and that it's um treated as a bit of a petri dish uh for the globe we've got the most diverse portfolio across triathlon cycling mountain biking running and trail running um and so i've been in this role about five years um i ran an event company in a partnership with another entity and we got bought uh by iron man and uh sort of expected to be sent down the road when you uh when you get bought but um they offered me the role to run the region so i lived in australia for about three years and now back home in new zealand and so yeah trail running we um i've always loved running trail and i've done a few races over the course of a um a long um sort of career as an endurance hack i guess you'd call myself and um i uh was looking for a new challenge and someone

suggested i run uh ultra trail australia um and uh yes i've sort of been in 2017 uh i did the event and uh absolutely loved it and um not only the um endurance experience itself in the race but the community that was around it is really what struck me as um something slightly different from the rest of our portfolio and so um yeah following that started a conversation with the owners and um and then yeah ended up buying the buying the race six months later um and uh and then that's really been the start of our um our strategy i guess in the ultra trails place and then went on to buy tatawera ultra and um we've got another race here in new zealand and yeah it's a it's a pretty um pretty exciting and and cool space to be uh operating yeah it's it's awesome i'm kind of giving a little bit of a chuckle because it's such a cliche way to fall into a business it's like you go and you experience you're like hey i want to i want to i want to i want some of this action and in your case and in your case that was like convincing the brass at iron man to go and buy this race and perhaps even at that point like launch a strategy more of a broader strategy into the space of trail and ultra running yeah look and i and i'm a little bit tongue-in-cheek because i mean the two are inextricably linked for me like i've i've been in the business now for 10 15 years and so when i'm i can't differentiate you know my my personal endurance um habits from what i do as a job right so whenever i'm doing races and taking part in

whatever it be be it mountain bike stage races or trail running i can't take that lens off for what my job is which is what i love doing you know i'm in this space because um we all are anyone working in events you have to do it because you love it um and so yeah so look i'm going into having a look at ultra trail australia i was i was well aware that you know ultra trail uh running was experiencing a massive boom and it was a potential area uh of interest for us um as a as a global company um but it did surprise me um the quality of the experience and you know it was yeah it was quite transformative for me actually it was it was awesome so it sort of that was the icing on the cake behind some i guess some early thinking that had already been there yeah and i think that's when the trail and ultra running community looks at acquisitions like this and as you're aware i've had some people from spartan on the podcast as well when they look at larger companies kind of like foray into trail and ultra running and i'm actually not sure if the sentiment plays true internet like as much internationally as it does domestically but it does domestically where they think hey i'm already having this great high quality experience why does spartan iron man the wanda group whoever else whatever other big organization why do they have to like come in and you know like like change this race and from your from your perspective it sounds like you changed very little because the experience was so high for you to start out with yeah it's a really valid question and and like i get that all the time and

you know the the big fear is that you know the iron mans and others of the world are a big gorilla in the room and they're going to come in and buy the event and cut the costs put the prices up and change the experience and try and corporatize it and nothing could be further from the truth we don't we don't buy successful events because um we want to stuff them up we we you know our uh approach when we buy an event is um take a very softly softly look and learn approach and you know typically we try and keep the vendors on for a few years so we can learn the ropes and and just understand the true intricacies and understand the culture around a race um and then you know we we try and identify areas where we can add value to it and that's not always apparent straight up front um it takes some time you need to understand you know where um where you might be able to um put your thumbprint on it and improve your food experience it's always about making things better you know we don't try and make things worse for people and i know that there's a fear that with scale things change but i think that's inevitable in some respects anyway is with a sport that's growing as quickly as ultra trail running is there are going to be more races races that are there are going to grow inevitably um and i think with players like us coming into this space you know we can put our thumbprints on it around you know and typically quite often it's around the edges like what i've seen in my experience in the space is that typically um the smaller you know owner operator type event does an exceptional job between the start line and the finish line um and it's the stuff around the edges that we can often add some value to you know like i was child australia you know we had we've got a merchandise

team here and we added a merch program around the event which um which went really well people loved it you know that they wanted to buy a high quality range of running gear um that was branded with the event um and you know we got great feedback on that so um you know we have a marketing team that it's got access to um you know a database of millions of athletes around the world and you know we can cross promote things and help grow the event so there's a whole range of stuff but again it's it's baby steps so it's look and learn um understand the culture and you know and then gradually change stuff well you started to answer my next question is is what's different and i guess when is it different for the end user so you can put yourself in a position of somebody who's got who has been to ultra trail australia or terra where i've athletes gone to that have gone to both of those for year after year after year and there's an ownership change like what are they going to notice when they go there um so they hopefully they still see the previous owner around because that's always the intention and uh you know we've got tim and paul here at terra where ultra and and tom and alina and ultra australia and and they'll stay on for a few years um because inevitably these um these events um become inextricably connected with the owner and they're part of the dna and you don't want to lose that um and then outside that in in year one you might not see a lot of change um and then gradually you might see a merch program uh appear you might see um some new sponsors come on board you might see

the experience um around the the event venue evolve so you know i'll give you a great example so i ran the um ccc last year at uh UTMB yeah and early i was there early in the week and i was watching people cross the finish line of the tds which is the one of the earlier uh races in the week and um as you'd be aware and and most people are that the finish line of the trail running races um you know friends and family typically run down the finish line with the athlete and i had my um you know my ironman hat on i was looking at it going geez it looks a bit messy you know the people really need to you know share that finish line experience with um you know their friends and family um you know because an ironman it's different you know you for us it's the athlete's moment so i um i was thinking maybe that's something we could evolve in time but i give that some thought and then um i just when i ran the ccc i had a very long tough day and um i only got through that race because my wife who was there supporting me um at the 60k mark when i was ready to pull the plug and i was i mean i'd been throwing up all day i was an absolute mess she said she sat me down and i said i'm done and she said no no just give yourself half an hour before you pull your race bib off just have a rest lie down you know she wasn't forcing me back out there but then you know i had a rest and then got some food and finally um you know an hour and a half later i stumbled out the door and finished and the only reason i finished that race is because she was part of that and then so coming into the finish line at god knows what time in the morning there's no one there at four in the morning and uh so um

i grabbed her and said come down the finish sheet with me and that was a really cool part of the experience because i wouldn't have finished that event without her support and so that changed you know this is why i'm sort of talking about looking and learning and understanding the culture before you come in with your changes so that was really cool um but then the experience post crossing the finish line i felt could could do you know in time with something there's no finisher medal at UTMB races um that once you cross that line you sort of just spat out into an open you know courtyard type area so um you know i mean i think does a good job of that experience when you cross the finish line that moment with the volunteer with the medal with the towel through the recovery handed back to your family type thing i think that's a really key part of finishing your ironman experience and now maybe some learnings from that we could transition into ultra trial running over time i think that that perspective is is a really good one to have to actually go and put your money where your mouth is or put your body where your mouth is i guess that'd be the better analogy like put your puke right where your mouth is in your case right go out and experience the races and you you dove in with you know literally with both feet going into ccc at the UTMB races because that's one of the you know that's obviously the mecca but to to do that offers the ultimate perspective because you can have all of your other previous experience from other sports but like knowing the culture of the sport that you're coming into or a culture of a new sport i think is so kind of incredibly valuable um let's pivot to north

america a little bit because i'm gonna i'm gonna be a homer i'm gonna be a you know go usa team usa and i want to peel the curtain back a little bit on what you think or what you know might be your ironman strategy for north american events that exist or that you're going to kind of put on the ground can you give us a perspective of that landscape yeah so i i look after obviously i run the the oceana events and look after our global strategy um and um one thing i would say is that the the restriction of the way the u.s market is structured with the pretty um tight capacity constraints on events with forestry service park service um capacity restrictions make it a very fragmented market um you know and you've got western states with 396 or whatever it is athletes and i think the the biggest 100 mile race might have about 700 athletes so you know for a company like ours which is focused on athletes a races and delivering exceptional experiences at your your peak event for the year in the scale environment um that's what we're good at so that's what we focus on you know how you translate that into a market which is really fragmented and small as a nut we are yet to crack um and haven't yet formulated where we're going to focus and so aside from the scale uh issue you've then got

the the you know the ownership side of things as well and i mean clearly you know a race like western states which has you know been owned by a committee and effectively by the community for you know um since the dawn of ultra trail running is um you know it's not on the table for discussion it's just not something you you know that's that committee is ever going to be entertained you know um handing over to a corporate so you've got to be realistic around where your aspirations are and um and what that might look like but um you know we ultra trail australia has 8 000 athletes which i think makes it the second largest trail running festival in the world after UTMB um and tarawera uh in new zealand has uh this year or coming up next february they'll have about three three and a half thousand so those are the types of scale events that you know we want to focus on um and quite how we transition that into the u.s as yeah as i say as a work in progress it's always scaling in the u.s is always problematic for races because as you mentioned you can't scale within the race itself you have to scale with more and more footprints and with more and more footprints become more like just you have to double triple quadruple your infrastructure and but i don't know i in terms of i don't so to be honest i don't know if i can kind of like take that at face value because i still see i still see iron man because i know andrew and i know how you guys work right andrew's your ceo i know i know how you guys view growth and opportunity and it's not simply a numbers game for iron man in a lot of cases that's a big part of it

totally agree but there's also like capstone type events that help that help that help build the brand and the one that i'll always put out there is like leadville right leadville has the exact same story as western states it's been a race since the dawn of time it's one of the marquee events there's absolutely no reason for the previous management to like turn it over to another organization yet it changed hands when lifetime fitness brought it in and lifetime fitness brought it in for a completely different reason we're not going to get into that on this podcast but for a completely different reason than it was originally started your you iron man is not lifetime but there's a parallel there where i could see iron man looking at marquee types of events just to just to have that beacon right just to have that beacon of light for people to look to yeah look i yeah i think you're right i'm not gonna not gonna deny that you know if an iconic event you know popped up and it was you know there was an opportunity um then sure we'd absolutely take a look at it but you still got to build the model behind it and it's you know as a global company we still are formulating how this all sort of stitches together um and at the end of the day um whether you've got aspirations around building uh a series or a brand similar to like we have with uh the iron man product um you still each and every individual race has still got to stand on its own two feet as a great experience and a great product um and you know kona's obviously you know does that at the top end of that and we've you know we're doing that in the mountain bike space so you know we

bought the cape epic a few years ago um with a stage race there and you know that that's an obviously an iconic event and we're now looking at how we leverage that to um grow our footprint in mountain biking so um so like i'm not um i'm not saying that we don't have aspirations in the u.s um because we do um but quite how those are formulated yet is still a work in progress yeah and in an effort of full disclosure for the listeners and listeners will know i'm all about full disclosure here um uh cts has a had a b2b business to business relationship uh with cape epic before iron man took it over and after iron man took it over and i helped kind of broker then and brokers sounds like way too over complicated i helped i helped manage the deal before then kind of like during the transition so i have a little bit of like inside knowledge on it and some of my connection with you has to do with that has to do with that uh relationship but okay let's get back to ultra austral australia because it is i mean it is a marquee event worldwide you mentioned 8 000 8 000 athletes yeah which i didn't know that i didn't think it was that big i knew it was big i didn't think it was that big what's the geographic distribution of those athletes yeah so um there's about for that one 25 it's now 20 international um and then there's about another 30 interstate so coming from outside new south wales from within australia uh and then the rest are from um intrastate so from new south wales so quite an eclectic

group and is that is that any different than uh tara werea uh tara werea has got a high proportion of international athletes so it's 40 international um and you know new zealand's a small country um and people treat it as a bit of a bucket list destination um so you know a lot of our events here and that sort of bigger um international brand scale rely a lot on on international travelers coming into um there's a reason to come to the country you know part of our sort of um strategy is around thinking about ourselves as a as a type of tourism company so while we're still you know authentic experience driven you know event company a lot of our stuff particularly on this end of the world relies on um people using events as an excuse to go and see a new destination 100 adventure tourism right i mean that's a huge industry right now um you mentioned that uh tara werea is a bucket list event for people and that's certainly been the case with a lot of my everyday athletes and also a lot of my elite athletes i've always been really impressed on the quality of the elite fields that you're able to bring in and let me put an asterisk by that and that's not to say that it always has the best elite field those are incredibly difficult to pull off but i'm impressed because of the location and the timing because it's hard to get those athletes out there what what is you guys's philosophy on how important or unimportant putting together those elite fields are yeah look it's it was it's fundamental particularly during the early stages of race development and you know we obviously can't

take credit for this but um the previous owners of tata werea tim and paul did a great job and i don't know you know paul charteris but he was sort of one of the original founders of trail running down this end of the world and you know he was part of the founding membership of the ultra trail world tour and um he's run western states and um it's pretty um plugged into the ultra trail community and so it's through those uh relationships that he formed with um both other event organizers and elite athletes that he's managed to persuade people to get on a plane for a you know 12 or 14 hour flight and then another drive and uh at a time of year when you know you guys are in deep depths of winter so um he's done a fantastic job of that which we you know we're keeping him on in that sort of ambassador role to make sure we don't lose those relationships and we you know transition them over time um to our business is that going to be something that you envision continues for both of those races that like heritage of bringing elite athletes into it absolutely and it's it's critical for success of any any event like i mean i think you get the balance right some people can get too carried away with just being solely focused on the elite athlete component and think that that's going to be the answer to growth but actually you know our philosophy is twofold yes you need to do that but actually you need to get the grassroots athlete experience right from start to finish and that's you know mapping out everything from the first touch point you have with them through your marketing or comms you know right through the pre-build-up process through to what happens on site at event and then what happens after etc so you know that's all mapped out according to a brand strategy that we develop

for each event um and so each touch point that we have with those athletes through that journey um reflects what we're trying to achieve uh with with the brand yeah and i always think you've gotten good exposure with the elite athletes that have gone there because it's i think on the calendar it's an advantageous time to put a high quality race out there because there's a little bit of a gap but also people like going to that area of the world and they like showing it off on their instagram feeds and things like that which kind of feeds into you guys's mo of being a destination race right yeah and teller where it's not a um i mean it's sure it's a miler and a hundred k but it's not um known as a it's not a mountainous miler right so for an elite athlete who might be in their off season um yes it's still a um a decent hit out but it's not gonna be a UTMB equivalent or something like that i love that athletes in their off season they can run a hundred k okay all right we talked a little bit about the potential or lack thereof of iron man kind of coming into north america and i really i really appreciate the the transparency on there but i realize that iron man is a bigger global brand what does it look like this is going to be a this you could take the rest of the podcast for the answer to this question what does that look like internationally like where do you guys want to have trail running footprints across the entire globe yeah good good question so um just backing up a little bit to the state of the sport globally i guess given it's really um phenomenal growth you'd have to say um that structurally it's still very

fragmented so there's lots of different series you know there's ultra trial world series there's a golden trail running series um there's you know what the spartan guys are doing there's there's lots of stuff happening and lots of people um trying to find their their space i guess so that's at the it's a top level um and then i guess to answer your question more directly um we want to or we think the part of the value we can bring to this category is the fact that we have a global operating footprint so you know the 54 countries that we operate in give us a unique perspective on um or ability to deliver races just about anywhere in the world and so as we build our ip in this space and develop best practice both you know operations marketing you know sponsorship all the rest of it then um we'll be looking for opportunities that um we can um add value to those um races that we you know think might fit that that approach so again it's still a work in progress for us you know there's no um finalized master plan here for what iron man wants to do um at this stage we own two two biggest races sound you know the ass end of the world you might say so um so while we are looking and learning and about the space building our ip um and developing our relationships with other events and understanding who's who in the zoo and um what races um you know might be a potential fit for our um our growth aspirations then you know we'll continue to do just that look and learn and look for opportunities

okay i get this i get the sense by like reading between the lines of that answer a little bit is that you've got these feelers out you have a strategy you have these feelers out covid probably threw a completely monkey complete monkey wrench into any of those deals wherever they were but you're putting those feelers out and you're gradually starting to like chip away at this strategy that you've come that you guys have come up with corporately and i don't expect you to like you know take me into like the contract line by line item that would be a really boring podcast but but to get a little bit more detail on it like it does that mean you're going out and trying to acquire races that exist or build races that don't exist or a combination of both of those a combination of both okay so go ahead yeah and so it is um a process of still still looking and learning um and i'd say that the philosophy is we want to do more in this space we just is um the the global structure plays out and there's you know different players coming and going and and things happen then you know we'll look for opportunities as they arise well and as you pointed out right trail running's still on this like hockey stick growth right now it but you and iron man i believe you are smart enough to realize that that's not always going to be the case and you have to build things for 10 or 20 years from now not from what not for one or two years 100 yeah and look if um

we may we may take a view that there's some um areas that we want to do organic growth or you know new um greenfield development of races so um you know one of our european um i'm a european counterpart um we've launched a multi-sport type festival in andorra and that's going to have a uh an ultra run as part of that over the course of three or four weeks and you know there'll be a mountain bike race and and ironman 70.3 uh and then a trail run and you know spread over a month you know we we think there might be some opportunity there to um you know great destination again so there's a whole lot of ingredients that obviously go to um making great events and you know destination one of them um as well as a great course and um you know all the rest of it so were you pretty close to like getting any of those deals done before covid did it really throw a monkey wrench in the system oh look yeah i mean covid's no doubt slowed a whole lot of stuff down and you know i think i've lost count of how many races we've canceled globally globally now you know i think it's it's up over 200 um you know in our our region i think we're up at 12 now we've canceled you know just last week we canceled another ironman uh we canceled uh run in melbourne week before that we canceled uh city to surf the world's largest fun run 85 000 people in in sydney over a 14k uh city to bondi uh distance so in the noosa triathlon you know world's largest standard distance olympic triathlon fell that week as well uh and austral australia so we we lost over 100 000 athletes uh in one week

two weeks ago the scale of that is so huge yeah so it's fair to say that that's where the focus of the business has been in the last you know since the covid crisis but look i think there's light at the end of the tunnel now and we managed to get a ironman 70.3 away in um australia last weekend um we got away i think three or four races in europe the weekend before we've got another one coming up another two races globally i think this weekend we'll get up and then next weekend after that we've got ironman cairns which should uh get up so i think you know hopefully we're moving to a a mindset where we're learning to live with this virus and putting in place safety measures around events that mean they can still proceed in spite of various levels of outbreaks or um you know covid health restrictions um i i promised before we got on the air that we weren't going to talk too much about covid but since we're on this since we're on this subject i actually am going to bring a little bit of a bridge that is a little bit more pertinent to iron man's growth in the sport and this piggybacks off of a podcast that i did with uh the president of itra bob crowley uh several weeks ago and he knows the space really well and i share this opinion with him where he he was describing the post covid landscape as one where they're just going to be a lot of smaller trail and ultra running organizations and races that just go out of business they just can't weather the storm they're just not built for it you know they're going to get bored with it they don't want to deal with whatever the tale of covid is and they're just out and then you combine that with trail and ultra running still growing

it's still got hockey stick growth still exponential growth those two things combined uh make for a void that is going to be filled and one of the ways that that void is going to be filled is with larger organizations like you with spartan coming in starting races and and buying races is that something that's kind of like in your calculus to kind of like weather this a little bit and then see what the landscape looks like on the other side yeah a little bit although i wouldn't entirely look i fully agree that there will be some operators that can't weather the storm but the thing about um events is that there's such low barriers to entry that anyone who can come up with a an idea a concept can off the shelf they can get a registration system they can build a website in a day they can apply for a permit from the forestry service and the and you know the local council and they're pretty much in business so i i suspect that some of the void will be filled by whether it's the same people or new people um coming back after perhaps a period of hibernation and saying um you know what um we can we're gonna give this another go because what one thing we are sure about is that there will be increased demand in a post-covid well not post-covid because it's or a learning to live with covid world yeah um there will be a lot of demand and you know we're seeing that already with races that we are managing to get away that um athletes want to race again and so um and i think that's going to be really really strong in 21 well you probably share this opinion i've been like beating the drum on this recently with a

bunch of my colleagues trail running is perfectly set up to be the first mass participation sport that is at full capacity during like during the tail end of this pandemic however long it lasts four years or five years or whatever that is i mean it's perfectly set up you can spread out it's got a really cool culture people from the huge mass participation events like all the ones that you're mentioning that you just had to cancel they want to go to smaller venues stay a little bit closer to home and trail running and ultra running has that right concoction of events to where they can hopefully bring more people into the sport that are looking for an outlet absolutely so you know you may see more smaller races pop up yeah yeah that's a good point okay um yeah well i i so i pre i appreciate that perspective i want to i'm gonna press you and i'm gonna peel the curtain back a little bit more and once again i press on this a lot you know and you could tell me after the fact that you want to delete any of this stuff that we've recorded i'm more than happy to do it but i want to like i'm trying what i'm trying to do is personally for myself but i also think the listeners are curious like two or three years from now like if you were just to be able to immediately fast forward and get your way get dave's way or iron man's way like what what does what does the footprint look like in terms of iron man's trail running footprint yeah like that's a really hard one to ask i'm not trying to dodge the question here the reality is um you know what let me put it this way we've created a successful global brand with

the iron man product um we're we're looking at we own the rock and roll series and you know that's a brand that you know um we're trying to add some value to and evolve over time and so i think this this concept of us having um uh a role in something global um it without again our operational footprint and our scale and size is of interest now what that looks like whether we do it on our own whether we're partnering with people um i'm not sure but um what i do know is i think i think we've got something to add in this space um i think we can you know help the sport i know that you know so many listeners might laugh at that and go you know you guys are the big bad corporate you know i love my local race and i think the way i view it is as the sport grows there's going to be a role for lots of different types of events and players in this space and there will always be a space for the local you know smaller um you know ultra trail running event and if if that's your cup of tea and that's where you want to stay and you know um you may pay a lower entry fee i don't know whatever the difference is that spins your wheels it might be just with the people from your local community that you like running with then that's great those races will continue and there's a role for those um what what i'm saying is i guess there's also a role for um something perhaps of a slightly different scale that stitches stuff together globally you know and there's been a couple of plays at that already with ultra world tour and you know UTMB is obviously the the biggest at the

moment um in terms of scale and and i guess profile where you could argue the toss whether it's western states or or UTMB but two quite different kilos of fish and they they illustrate i guess the fragmented nature of the sport and and the different um philosophies that go into it but you know i've been to UTMB twice now and um i think it's great i mean for me as a runner that that's doing a race of that those sort of durations and distance with a a large number of people in the big show you know it works for me personally i think it's great that start line experience you know at UTMB is one of the world's best start line experiences of any sport it's phenomenal um and uh so yeah but and then but as i say there's also a role for you know the smaller races so um yeah i'm not sure that answers your question no no no i i get it you're not trying to dodge it i know that you can't like totally totally predict the future and trust me i mean i've been in those types of strategy sessions and asked ourselves what's our three-year strategy those are really hard answers to kind of you guys are still a business with real capital constraints and real people constraints and as covet is illustrating real environmental constraints that are kind of like placed on you so i i get it that you that there's not unlimited amounts of everything that you can just kind of do what you want but i will i will echo your concern as like not concern but your comment as a member of the community that i i feel it's good for the sport to have the diversity of small races races that are run by

you know mom and pop one person two person they'll always be run that way races that are kind of organized into like regional clusters of five six seven eight nine ten and then bigger global organizations like you and spartan and whoever else kind of comes along because that diversity is good you can pick wherever you want to go if you don't like this experience you can go over that experience and that's good for the for kind of for the economy of the sport as a whole that's good for the athletes at the end of the day it's good kind of up and down the chain all the manufacturers and things like that to have that diversity it doesn't have to be one way or the other i guess is what i'm saying no i 100 agree and i guess what we try to do at that that sort of top scale end is we we try to take the best bits of what um a sort of more localized event has and that's you know putting a face on the event you know um and personalizing it and um you know because what what you find is like in the in the like the hundred staff we have in our region they are just as passionate about events as the mar and pa operator you know you don't come into this industry and work in an iron man or spartan whoever and you see it i love what you're doing because it's hard it's bloody hard work it's just as hard work you know i've done the small you know operator thing in the event space i know what it's like and i work just as hard today and i'm just as passionate today in my role as i was uh back then and you do it because you love it um and yeah you might have you know you might have to apologize because we're a business and actually you know we are a for-profit entity but i think that drives a certain level of um sharpness and efficiency around making sure you know the athlete experience

but yeah my team don't that we love it when we get our athlete satisfaction survey results back that's our measure of whether we've nailed a race not how much money we've made and so that the team get out of bed every day and give it a hundred percent to create the best athlete experience we can and and that's what motivates and drives us and i think that that at the scale end will translate into um you know a good thing for ultra trial running in the long term i'm familiar with those athlete satisfaction surveys because i've had several athletes that have taken them and i've taken them myself let's set this up a little bit how long has iron man been doing that within the iron man distance or the iron man like the iron man races ballpark ballpark i'd say i'm guessing but it's well pretty my time uh it'll be 10 15 years if not longer a long time is kind of what i'm getting at and typical customer satisfaction survey tell us about this tell us about that what can we improve all this other stuff yeah is that something that you implemented with with ultra uh ultra trail australia and with terrawera yeah absolutely and what is is so you've seen both kind of sets of feedback or types of feedback from the trap from the triathlons that have been more established within your organization and the trail races that you took over that you kind of implemented a uh a po a consumer satisfaction survey or customer satisfaction survey what's the difference between the two or is there a difference between the two um yeah it's a tricky one to answer there's a difference but i guess

um yeah like i would say i mean ultra trail australia last year in the 2019 edition was the second highest uh score on overall satisfaction globally of any event in the portfolio wow and i mean our team here absolutely live and breathe these these stats so we i mean i don't want to start skirting about oceana but you know last year we won best overall i'm in i think it was best 70.3 best marathon and best ultra trail um event and best mountain bike event i think it was so you know we live and breathe these and and again it comes back to that customer experience so um trying to um deliver those to the the best way we can is what we're about and what we love doing and um yeah so whether there's a difference between ultra trail running and i mean depends on the circumstances around the event and you know what's happening in the cycle of its growth and development but um yeah well as you know the customers are always right and they will always tell you they'll tell you when they get it wrong for certain they'll also tell you when you get it right and so i always think that those customer satisfaction surveys are usually an over inflated view of what you've got wrong and under inflated view of what you've got right and you've got to sift through that can can i we we've done this within our organization too and i'm this is completely satiating my own curiosity there's probably very little value to the audience out there but my podcast will do whatever i want to do what's your

what's your hero metrics or metrics off of those surveys like the one or two questions that you really focus in on um the key one is rate your overall satisfaction okay and what we do is say we scale of one to five so um five is outstanding four is yeah i loved it yeah three is average you know whatever so we total up the four and the number of people who take the four and five boxes um and and then that we sum that out of a hundred percent and that's how we say that's our sort of benchmark rating that we use so um last year ultra trail australia 98 percent of people ticked box four or five that's good for overall satisfaction and that's the one thing that rises to the top just what your overall satisfaction is huh yeah there's a whole lot of stuff that sits under that with courses and aid stations and you know all the rest of it but that's that's the metric we use the cliche this is peeling back curtain on cts a little bit of my we we use the cliche and i think very valid would you recommend this to a friend because it's we're it's more of our camp product that we do this on which is not dissimilar to your race product but we look at it as is it good enough for somebody to say hey you guys need to go to this yep a little bit different than race but yeah no that's good there's another good uh good rating system as well so um and like you say you when you get it wrong you they definitely don't what so pretty quickly that the um the this image of the um soulful uh trail

runner who's in touch you know with the community themselves and nature and is is very uh generous of spirit which is generally describes most people um can disappear pretty quickly if you get something wrong in the race well and people have choice right i mean we we we present a lot of times you know we think about areas that are growing which trail running is we think about it as something where you put anything up and the demand will and it will immediately be satiated but that might initially be true or not probably initially true but that's not true long term because people are going to have choice people can kind of go anywhere and if you're not putting up a high quality product people will just go find something else that's it and it comes out priorities you just got to come back to the basis you know the priority one is a safe race right so you you just make sure you know and learning um safety around a um ultra trail event is different than you know an ironman event for example or a road marathon that we might operate so that's been you know a place we've treated very carefully and that's always number one um and then you know you go through the priorities after that and make sure you know course marking you know aid station food you know you get all you gotta you can never take your eye off the basics with this and you know start focusing on you know too much sponsorship or merch or or whatever it might be and you know you lose your way pretty quickly so you know what's clear from our athlete you know back to the survey results is that you you can peel away all the other stuff but you have to get the basics right and deliver that to the best possible standard you can and then you build around that

that's a really intuitive approach i i can really appreciate that um i want to go a little bit back to your strategy and i think i'm going to set you up for a lot of people that are going to ask for this job so you you mentioned that the way that the way that iron man found ultra trail australia and terrawera was just you go in there and it's an awesome event let's let's figure out how to be a part of this i had a great experience there is that a way that you're going to use to scout other areas in the world and i imagine if you say yes you're going to get 100 resumes after this after this podcast airs uh let me put it this way it's certainly part of the equation and you know i think you just can't beat the first-hand experience and you know i'm i'm lucky enough in my current role that i do um owen we have a team that um affords me the opportunity that i don't have to be on the tools as much as i used to and that i can turn up to a lot of our own races and do them and experience them and you know provide feedback and put that athlete hat on and um like last year i did about eight of our events in our portfolio just different races and you know things looking good the night before the weather's good the team are in good shape oh you know if i can jump in you know i will and um i think that's uh you know as we translate that to scouting i guess for different opportunities in the future um then you know absolutely getting a first-hand runner's experience around what a what a race is like is um is important but yeah just part of the equation i guess but what you're what you're saying is is you're filling that role internally because everybody wants to fill it

everybody wants to go and scout the races themselves versus you putting out a job rec saying we're looking for this person because you would get a lot of people apply for that job that would be a great job i'm giving you i'm giving you business ideas i told you this is going to be mutually beneficial for both for both you and i there's there's my contribution i gave you a way to solve the scaling problem is to hire for somebody that sole job is to go around and do the races from a first person athletic perspective and report back to you but i mean i think in some respects though it's it's becomes for the races that have been around for a while um self-determining because the races that succeed and grow have to deliver a good athlete experience so you know by definition if a race has got the brand has been successful and it is growing there's only so many new customers you can fill in a pipe um if you're churning out you know ones that are unhappy at the other end before a race you know gets a bad rep and and people don't know you know they stop coming so um you can sort of pick it um just from you know the growth story around an event as well okay well if you want to we'll put your email address in the show notes people can email you for the for the role i'm gonna push for this um i want to i want to kind of leave uh the this i want to kind of like leave this podcast on kind of a discussion around elite athletes because this is something that's really near and dear to my heart and it's also something that i think iron man has done impeccably well and i don't say and they haven't done it impeccably well just because they were the first and they've been around for the

longest like that's been an intentional cultivated part of the iron man brand to bring in all these fantastic athletes from different disciplines and from olympic list uh olympic distance triathlon to compete in kona the kind of the premier stage year after year and it's an it's an awesome elite athletic event and i think personally this is me getting on a soapbox about elite athletics i think that that level of competition when it's concentrated in that fashion that's the thing that i want to focus on when it's concentrated in that fashion all on the same stage the same people every year year in year year in and year out competing for the exact same title it brings the best out of everybody that catapults and has catapulted iron man into the into the stratosphere that it's in right now or it's a big it's a big part of it trail and ultra running despite ourselves we have not been able to figure that out as you mentioned it's really fractured and one of the ways it's really fractured that i don't think we spend enough time talking about is on the elite athlete competition so you've seen it on an iron man let's wave dave's magic wand give me a lot of power in this podcast by the way let's wave dave's magic wand let's say listen we were going to do this in trail and ultra running we want one big stage where everybody comes everybody competes and it's going to catapult the sport learning from the lessons of iron man what does that look like yeah look i wouldn't say it's necessarily given that the iron man model um is the only model that would work um for ultra trail

running i mean i think it's it's a model that has worked well for iron man look i 100 agree no doubt i mean kona is the great showpiece of the sport and has been responsible for phenomenal growth one sidebar comment though is that for 80 of athletes lining up on the start line of the 40 plus regular iron mans around the world no intention of trying to qualify for kona yes they might have heard about it through kona they're inspired by it um but you know they're there for their own personal journey and reason that there is a key difference here i think um in ultra trail running is that i'd say there's a higher proportion of people doing ultra trail running for their own personal reasons and journeys rather than competing if you like they're competing with themselves rather than their their neighbor are you trying to say the iron man community is overly competitive with each other is that what you're trying to say come on come on you don't have to be a diplomat here look no genuinely not for the i think it's a proportional thing right it's a mixed bag right but i would say there's a higher proportion of people doing iron man triathlons who you know the first have you if you've done have you done an iron man i have not done an iron man no okay the first question you do if you say you don't know i mean the first question is you know what was your time or marathon what was your time right if you say you've done ultra trail australia no one really cares about your time yep or you know it's it's about did you finish what was your journey like you know what were the people like along the way it's it's quite a different culture oh yeah i think that'll change a bit as it and the cultures always evolve over time but um sorry we've gone in a rabbit

hole here but back to your question um around what the right model is you know maybe it's um a tennis type model and there's a grand slam of of four you know um sort of world events that that stitched together or you know there's different ways you can do it what i would say though is that i think the demands on athletes of regularly running elite athletes um you know 100k or 100 mile or whatever the you know the ultimate distance ends up being at that world level um you can't ask too much of people to run too often and i think that's you know part of the challenge of the fractured nature of the sport at the moment is that you know elite athletes have this challenge of you know do i go and race here for um a bit of you know limited prize money but i've got an endorsement here what's the coverage of this race like do i do you know this because it's on the ultra show will tour and i'm gonna get some points and that adds up towards the end of the year that's you know it's it's all over the place to be honest so i think um yeah how this evolves is yet to be seen um but there's no one single answer i would say yeah and so there's going to be plenty of people that disagree with me and that's fine we can agree to disagree there's no you know love lost or anything like that but i personally think the sport of trail ultra running is better served at least at the elite level to have some more maybe not an ultimate point of concentration but at least some more concentration where you get the like a bigger concentration of the best athletes competing on the biggest stages because of what you just mentioned they get so strung out

throughout the year that it's hard to put together like a really marquee or you know beacon type of performance that everybody kind of gets attracted to and that and that's sinisterly because i'm in it for the health of the sport right i make my living coaching athletes in the sport i think that's good for the health of the sport when you have those things because the competition is just it's just good for everybody i don't understand agree so maybe iron man can help with that that's my that's my calling to you because you want you have the well first off i mean i mean you know you're kind of you're we're kind of joking because this is like self-serving for you as well but i do think that with iron man's kind of pedigree in creating elite elite sport you have a blueprint not the blueprint or the exact blueprint but at least a blueprint to say okay here's how it could like potentially be shaped and it doesn't have to look exactly like this you know thing that we've built with kona but there's at least something there to draw from and right now as you now have the experience of even going to UTMB there's really not a lot to draw from you know yeah and when you do get that sort of concentration um of all the best athletes it makes for spectacular viewing and and yeah it's it's awesome um you know and you'd have to argue that happens sort of two maybe three times a year at the moment you know UTMB western states and you know leadville hard rock you know maybe there's a bit there's a few others around but um yeah i would say even then though like the number of people that can cross over

between those two races one they're obviously like way different races but the competitive landscape kind of almost makes them mutually exclusive but that that's always been that's always been a just like a desire of mine to see more and more of and nobody's going to be able to like flick a light switch and have like the magic answer it's just it's a gradual movement towards the a concentration of elite level competition is the way that i would put it yeah i agree i think it'd be great for the sport not you know not just for the elite athletes and the profile and you know um the ability for people to earn a decent living off it or whatever it might be i think it's you know it's good for the overall growth of the sport and inspiring you know more people off the couch and um you know into trail running well that's so that's my subtle nudge for you to help with that completely selfish all right there you go awesome um all right i appreciate your time coming on the podcast today before before we let you go just on a personal note since you're now like getting into this ultra marathon world what's next for you like what ultra are you they're gonna like sinisterly scout out to like bring on board to the iron man brand or which one do you actually genuinely want to do once covid's all done with genuinely want to do i was entered in the tds this year which i'm pretty disappointed about that's so hard that race is so hard yeah so um but uh given we're still pretty much locked down away uh in little old new zealand there's a um quite a well-known race here called the kepler uh which is a 60k run in the southern alps which i did many years ago um and uh yes i'm i'm managed to

get online and in the allotted time and uh get an entry and so um yeah i'll be i'll be doing that in december and then uh yeah we'll see when these international borders open up and see what the future holds but um well if you're at tds i will be there and i'll i'll help you crew out look me up we'll have to connect then i love that race i like tds because it you can watch and help athletes out at that race and still be a part of the UTMB ccc deal it's hard to do UTMB and ccc at the same time it's like i crossed one year i crossed like the borders like 19 or 21 times or something like that just driving my car like an idiot around the around the house um uh but but but tds the way that's set up kind of early in the race it's great you can do it and once you're done you can watch everything else and it's cool yeah and we have an ultra trail world tour meeting around the event um you know the last couple of years so it's uh it works well i've got to be up there anyway so um most of the people on the uh on the tour um have a go at some sort of race around uh UTMB so yeah it's good awesome great event well thanks again for your time um before we leave where can uh athletes kind of learn a little bit more about terrawera and ultra trail australia or any of the other races that you're involved with yeah just just google ultra trail australia tell where ultra marathon um down here and uh yeah once those borders get open we would welcome your lovely north american audience to come down here and uh experience a bit of um yeah down under hospitality and um and see our beautiful

countries it's cool every i've never been down there but every single athlete that i've sent to either one of those races raves about it they are the people that score fives or put down fives on your athlete satisfaction surveys they put 10 if they could put 10 well the thing is that people think they're coming for the race and the course and the achievement of their goal but what they always walk away from and i'll take this philosophy across all our events is the people and you know i think australians and new zealanders do a pretty good job at welcoming people and you know um they walk away with the friendships and the connections and that kind of thing so um we put a lot of work into making facilitating those uh those opportunities for people so they um walk away with um some yeah some new friends awesome i hope people get to experience it dave thanks for your time again thanks jason great to meet you oh that was fun thanks a lot dave for coming on the podcast we had a lot of laughs with this one i will absolutely touch base with you the next time we get to see each other at an ultra run hopefully it's tds maybe i'll make my way down to terrawera or ultra trail australia i would encourage all the listeners out there to check those two events out they are absolutely amazing to the best ones in the world thanks again dave for coming on the podcast thank you to all the listeners appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you we will see you out on the trails thanks