The track
Hurdles, and the habit of leading.
Twelve years in the event, and captain of every track team from middle school through college. Third in the 55 meter hurdles at the 2010 NCAA Division III Indoor Championships, seven individual conference titles, and three Wabash records that are still standing sixteen years later: 7.48 indoors over 55, 14.24 outdoors over 110, and 22 feet 5 inches in the indoor long jump.
Hurdling rewards a specific kind of discipline: the same movement, repeated exactly, under fatigue, with a hard object in the way if you get it wrong. It is not a coincidence that the rest of my working life looks like process design.
American Ninja Warrior
A complete 180.
After twelve years as a track athlete I competed on the NBC series American Ninja Warrior twice, in seasons 13 and 14, reaching the Los Angeles semi-finals the second time. Everything track taught me about repeatable technique had to be rebuilt for a sport that never runs the same course twice.
Before one of my runs the producers had me perform my Ninja Warrior Rap on camera, which is either the most on-brand thing that has ever happened to me or proof that the two halves were never separate to begin with.
I post training clips as I go, because the useful part of this is not the highlight reel - it is what the training actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.
Coaching
Passing on the good, the bad and the ugly.
Three years volunteering as a hurdles coach after college, with a USATF coaching certification.
Hurdles is an event where proper coaching is often underserved - plenty of athletes are handed the event and left to work it out from watching. Having spent twelve years learning it the hard way, I thought the honest version of that knowledge was worth passing on: what worked, what did not, and what nobody tells you.
Every team captain role I held taught me the same thing coaching did - the performance is individual, the standard is collective.
Elsewhere
The rest of the work.
Athletics is not something I sell - it is the discipline underneath everything I do. Here is where that shows up.