Competitive Secrets and Personal Costs
Navigating openness, structure, and investments in running
Life is full of tradeoffs. A couple that have been on my mind lately are openness vs secrecy, structure vs freedom, and costs vs payouts. My coach, Jack, published this article about my training for Transgrancanaria, detailing the weekly workout plan that I followed and explaining why we made specific training decisions. Meanwhile, I’ve been sitting on a draft of an article written over a month ago that I was thinking about publishing here, going into why I’ve been liking keeping things mostly quiet about my training and not posting everything I’m doing to Strava. I hadn’t published it yet because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to really commit to that mentality. Jack wanting to publish his article sort of forced me to reevaluate how much I actually cared, and my realization was: I only mildly care.
Openness vs Secrecy
First off, I do think there can be some competitive advantages to not sharing everything you’re doing as an athlete. I can get into this a bit more, but with that aside, it’s also my personal life and I like having some things that are just for me. I’m not required to share anything, it’s just sort of the normal culture in our sport for most people to be pretty public about training. I’m mostly talking about Strava here, but the recent uptick in ultrarunning YouTube activity has pushed the openness to new extremes. However, many of the top people whose training I’d most be curious to see are Strava-dark and pretty private on social media, so no one really knows what they’re doing.
I’ll admit, I love when other runners put it all out there. Some athletes post every run, every lift, every heat training session, sharing their entire process in full transparency. And I think that’s great for the sport. It pushes boundaries, helps others learn, and makes high-level training more accessible to the broader running community. I follow along, find it interesting, and I respect the openness.
Since getting a coach and focusing more on specific workouts, I’ve stopped wanting to fully share everything. I post some things on various platforms—race recaps, life updates, many of my training runs—but maybe 30-60% stays private on Strava. It’s not about hiding, it’s about choosing what to share, and my reasoning mostly comes down to mental freedom. If my competition and the public doesn’t know what I’ve been doing, they might not know what I’m capable of. I like coming into races as an unknown—often I feel like an underdog who punches above his weight class, which is a fun, lower-pressure position to be in that has worked well for me. As I’ve had more success in the sport, the pressure to continue performing at a high level increases, both internally and externally. If I don’t post, there’s less expectation or perceived judgement and the run exists just for me, which can keep running more enjoyable.
Structure vs Freedom
For so many years, the entire point of running to me was to move freely in the mountains. Getting outside melts away everyday stress, allows me to explore beautiful places, and share those experiences together with friends in my community. One of my longest-lasting internal conflicts is about if the purity of that freedom can exist while also trying to take the competitive side of the sport seriously, pursuing financial goals within running, and finding my personal performance limits through structured training. Structured doesn’t mean it can never be fun, and sometimes the prescribed run is basically just “3 hours do whatever you want”. But more often than not it means I’m passing on the long slogs up technical peaks through thigh-deep snow that used to bring me so much joy. Which is why I’m officially announcing my retirement from competitive running.
Just kidding. I have actually been surprised to find a different kind of purity in the structured training and racing side of things as well. It feels really good to see week-over-week progress, and then translate that into a course record or satisfying performance on race day. Some things that I used to hate, like track sessions and treadmills, aren’t quite so bad anymore. I feel like a hypocrite after publicly shaming treadmills on Finn’s podcast, but the past few weeks I’ve been doing some incline trainer workouts. Aside from the benefits when outdoor conditions are tough, I’ve sometimes been able to push myself harder on a treadmill than if I’d been outside, because on a treadmill if I want to slow down I’d have to admit defeat by hitting a button, while outside I don’t always notice that I’m slowing down as I get tired. I also see the treadmill as a tool that could make training with a newborn much simpler, so if you see some influencer Instagram content about that in the next month or two it means I’ve sold out and gotten one sent to me for my house. I guess that’s a good segue to the last tradeoff I wanted to touch on today.
Cost vs Payout
There’s a lot that goes unshared about financials as a trail runner. Even once you’re on a paid contract, there’s a lot within the industry that you don’t know, to the point where it can be challenging to have any idea what you’re worth to brands. It seems like I’ve been hearing a lot about athletes working with agents recently, who can be valuable as they tend to have a clearer picture of the current market and can advocate for you to brands. But agents come at a cost, so you have to decide if the potential upside of having them advising and negotiating for you outweighs the percentage cut or thousands of dollars of fixed fees you might be paying them.
Coaches also come at a cost. From monthly payments to agreements that rely on the marketability of an athlete to bring in more coaching business, you’re often giving up money or privacy in exchange for expert training advice. If you’re successful at races, you get bonuses and better contracts and it’s worth it. Or even if you’re not getting paid, it could be worth it if it helps you get the best out of yourself. But that’s not always the case, and there’s some risk involved in these investments. I could go on and on through all the different potential costs a runner could incur: PT, masseuse, travel for training camps, certified safe-for-sport supplements, high-quality foods, etc. Even additional sponsors bring on more obligations that take time and effort. You get the picture. Each could be seen as an investment, but your running becomes a business and not all investments are worthwhile.
In Conclusion?
Back to what got me started thinking about all this, check out Jack’s article if you want a more transparent view into some of my training. If you don’t really care, don’t check it out, it will be extremely boring. While I was initially conflicted about it being shared, I think it’s mostly in my head and doesn’t really matter that much. It does a good job of highlighting the (maybe somewhat unique) coaching dynamic that Jack and I have, as well as all the hard work that I put in over the past few months. I’m proud of that, and happy that I get the privilege of living the trail running dream and sharing the journey.