I turned 30 a few weeks ago on December 27th, 2018. Two weeks before, I decided to do something pro-active to celebrate. I decided to run 30 miles.
It was an aggressive goal given that the longest I’ve ever run was a half-marathon (just 13.1 miles). I was going to do more than double with less than two weeks to train.
But...was it truly insane? I’ve interviewed world record-breaking athletes, Olympians, former Navy SEALS, and ultra marathon champions on this program. I’ve seen numerous examples of people achieving the impossible. The arbitrary milestone of 30 years of not dying seemed like a good excuse to see how far I could push myself.
I’m proud to say I did it, and I believe all our listeners can accomplish their own version of my 30-mile challenge. This time around, our co-host Dr. Brianna Stubbs sits in the interviewer chair, diving into my two-week “training”, what was going through my mind as the miles passed by, and what I’ve learned from the experience.
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Transcription
Brianna |
Hey Geoff, how are you doing today? |
Geoff |
Good, happy New Year. This is our first podcast we're taping in 2019, so it's good to kick this off. |
Brianna |
I've been away in England, and you've been away down with your family in LA. So what we're sitting down here to talk about today is a challenge that you took on over the Christmas break, why don't you give the listeners a little bit of background, and tell them what you did on your holidays. |
Geoff |
On December 27th, I turned 30. And I've been pretty busy up until mid-December, just with company and end-of-year closing of books, all of that, and didn't really have time to figure out what I wanted to celebrate with. And thinking about what I wanted to do, I had the realization that a lot of us always just consume to celebrate, what I mean by that is you consume by buying things, or consume by having a nice meal. Which are all great, not to demean any of that stuff, I love luxury items and eating good meals. I wouldn't say no to any of that. But I wanted to be more proactive for this milestone of turning 30, so could I make this something more practical, could I do something that would make me feel proud of doing something? As opposed to just receiving the great work of other people? Like a show or a food or a meal or an item. So I thought, "30 years, might as well run 30 miles." This was probably December 14th, it was gonna be less than two-weeks out. I was like, "Okay, 30 miles, I'm gonna just think about it and try to do it." |
Brianna |
That's not a small undertaking, so can you maybe rewind a little bit further, had you ever run that far before? What was the furthest you'd run before you decided that you were gonna run 30 miles? |
Geoff |
The furthest I'd run before was a half-marathon. |
Brianna |
So 13 miles. |
Geoff |
13 miles. And I think this goes back to really being inspired by people like you, people like our colleague Michael Brandt, who are in sub-3-hour marathon, you've been doing Ironmans and Endurance Athlete. And also, a lot of our customers and the people that we work with on a daily basis, these are people like Victoria Bussi, who are breaking world records for cycling, all the Tour de France teams, all the folks in the military community who are as regular Army or Special Operations' folks, just doing crazily impressive endurance feats. And at one blush, you can be like, "Okay, those people are just more special than me." But I think maybe I was arrogant or confident, but you also just realize these are also people. I think from a resume, you might sound like an alien with a PhD, with a couple world championships, all these crazy credentials, being the youngest person in the world to cross the English Channel. Who is this? Are you a real person? But I think you just realize that not just you, but everyone is an actual just person, they've done incredible things in their past, or have incredible things on their resume, but everyone's still a person. And I think that gave me motivation or interest to really just push myself in a physical level, that I really didn't ever really truly do. |
Brianna |
You'd run a half-marathon, were you training regularly? What was your regime, how fit, what were you doing? |
Geoff |
I probably started doing more thoughtful runs probably at the beginning of 2018, so about a year. So to just give you a sense of my athletic interests, I grew up as a suburban American kid playing Little League, soccer, basketball, as an elementary school student. Thankful to my parents for putting me in all those positions and leagues, it gave me exposure to a bunch of sports. And then, as I went into middle school, thinking about what I wanted to focus on, I started playing tennis. But it was never a serious endeavor, going back to a lot of my conversations with people that ended up being professional athletes, or folks accomplishing world records. I think the motivations were interesting, so for me, on my mom's side, they were all teachers, my dad's side of the family were all business people, entrepreneurs. Athletics was a side activity to get into college, it was never like, "Be the best tennis player," or just be super good and win tournaments. It was like, "Be really good at school, at academics, and then do extracurriculars to get into a good college." But I guess it still put me in a very early age that being fit was helpful, my mom's still a workout freak, and works-out a lot. So I always had this notion of, "Let's go to the gym and do some exercise." But I was never really serious about training. So I think, again, getting inspired by other customers and the folks that we work with on a daily basis, maybe I should just push myself a little bit and have some goals. So seeing you guys go from a rower to someone competing at the World Stage on Ironman was pretty awesome, seeing my co-founder and CEO going from a high school soccer player to running a sub-3-hour marathon, it was like, "I feel like almost an imposter here if I'm sitting around getting fat." |
Brianna |
It puts it within your grasp, that you could go out. You see, like you said, normal people going out and doing these challenges and feats, and pushing themselves, and you felt like you could do that too. |
Geoff |
I'm not gonna be a great competitive runner, that's not my goal, but I think, can you have a challenge and a goal for yourself, and push your own limits? And I think that's been the reward from that. So to answer your question directly, really just started to put in some miles and run regularly at the beginning of last year, 2018. I think just to give a sense of my general exercise routine, it was always, go to the gym pretty regularly, four, five-plus times a week. But just do one mile on the treadmill and go lift some weights, that's the intensity of the workout. Almost more as a way to decompress, rather than actually training. |
Brianna |
How did you find it when you started running? I know around the office, we would chat on times you used to run with music, and how did running change from the first time that you started running, and how do approach it now? |
Geoff |
Good question. I think hearing that I regular run five seven-milers, and can do a 30-miler now, would have been pretty foreign to me just over a year ago. The first few times, was just, "Can you not look at your phone for 30 minutes?" That was probably the hardest challenge, which might seem silly, but I think that's actually real. If you think about the average consumption of information that the modern person has, if you look at screen-time apps, people are checking their phones hundreds of times a day. Every time there's a down-pocket, it's like boom, you've got your Instagram out or you've got your Facebook Feed out, you're just looking at information. |
Brianna |
You were running along, and you were not able to focus on the running, or you were worrying about what might be going on in your phone, thinking about it? |
Geoff |
I think just as an entrepreneur, your email's constantly on, and people are pulling you all the time for information. You're trained to just be like, "All right, I've got some free pocket time." |
Brianna |
How did you get over that? |
Geoff |
By realizing that you suck at running, I'm pretty screwed up. I won't take that, but wow, am I that addicted to information that I can't just focus on a task for 45 minutes, an hour? So that was on the mental side, and then I think just on the physical side, just my feet weren't ready to take that regular pounding. Again, I think for ... And then now, I think after this year of training and talking to folks that are athletes, that are in the military community, I think a lot of people are just soft now. People are worried about hurting their knees, you're not even running, you're running two miles and you're worried about hurting your knees. Are you serious? But I think it is, if you're going from zero-to-30, you're probably gonna hurt yourself. I just didn't have the right shoes, hurt my feet a little bit, had some false starts where I wanted to heal up, and didn't know what pain was expected pain of being sore after running, and what pain was probably injuring yourself. So a spotty, I would say three months. You actually instigated this, I think you challenged me to run a half-marathon. |
Brianna |
I instigated the half-marathon, I didn't instigate the 30-miles. |
Geoff |
You instigated the half-marathon, what was that? It was Spring 2018? |
Brianna |
Yeah. I think we were at a company dinner, and to be honest, for me, the half-marathon, even if you're going slowly, it's not gonna take you more than two-and-a-half hours. It's not a crazy amount of time to be on your feet and out walking, so I think that most people, if they approached it right, could complete 13 miles. I know people that don't run, that go on 13-mile hikes. So if you just put some athletic kit on, then change it into something a little bit more vigorous than the walk, then I think most people could complete that distance. I think we were talking about it, and I think the next day you went out and did it. |
Geoff |
I think it was on a Friday, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna do it on a Saturday or Sunday." I remember it was at a Thai restaurant, and we were having lunch with the company. Because at that point I'd gotten over the bridge around, "Okay, I know I can run for 45, 60 minutes," so I could run five, six miles. That was a reasonable distance for me, so I had some confidence that I could do more than a couple miles on the treadmill. So that's me, after a couple months of just going out and just running along the Embarcadero. I had my loop going from the San Francisco Freight Building, down to AT&T Park, loop around, and then go all the way up to Pier 39, then go back to the Freight Building. That was my come around, six miles, I can do it in 45, 50 minutes. I think you challenged me, and I was like, "All right, I'm gonna do it." I think I had a couple Ketone Ester bottles, just got some bananas, and had a lot of caffeine, and just busted it out. I think that gave me, again, some confidence that these numbers, these distances, as you said, aren't crazy physical feats, I think they're just more mental challenges at this point, in this society. |
Brianna |
I would say though, that 30 miles, that's four miles longer than a marathon. |
Geoff |
30 was a little crazy. |
Brianna |
Saying to someone, "I'm going on a half-marathon tomorrow," it's a very different challenge to saying, "In a couple weeks, go and run 30 miles." Because I think, a bit of background for the listeners, I did my first marathon at the start of December, and it's a long way to run. I did train for 12 weeks, and did some 22-mile runs in training, I know what it's like. But by the time you're running for that long, it's not even, your body just gets battered from being on your feet, and putting impact through it for that long. So it starts to be less like something that people can just wake up and do, especially with a limited background. How did you approach that, do you think your expectation married up to the reality of how tough it would be? |
Geoff |
To give you some context, I think at this point, just fast-forwarding to December from Spring, for my first unofficial half-marathon, dialed back on the running, because I didn't necessarily have a goal. But I was listening to David Goggins' new audio book, Can't Hurt Me, about his athletic challenges as a way to callous his mind. My personal thinking was getting around this notion around, I think a lot of people today are too much passively consuming, and I think the people that we have in our community want to not just be passive consumers, we want to be active participants and create things of value. I think these two things in my mind, and just having a milestone of turning 30, it was like, I want to put myself into a challenge, put it on my Instagram to be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna do it." And just was publicly accountable. |
Brianna |
That accountability. |
Geoff |
And I just started to put in miles on the treadmill, because I knew at that point I had 13 days to try to get up to 30 miles. Again, I'd run, but I wasn't training for anything. I remember just being on the treadmill, ran for an hour, did six-some miles on the treadmill. I'm like, "Okay, I can still run a decent amount." And I just wanted to put in miles with low impact, so just a lot of treadmill running, just to get my aerobic ability up, without hurting my joints too much. |
Brianna |
Because the treadmill has a bit of give in it, so it's less impact on your knees and your ankles. If you're trying to create a quick ramp, like you were, that's definitely the safest way to do it. Compared with going out and running on tarmac. |
Geoff |
Exactly, so I would just do a lot of six-to-nine-milers, I remember two days before Christmas, doing a nine-miler. I was going down to my parents' home in Pasadena, and just trying to find a track to run at in the Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade. I just saw the marching bands practicing, I was just running loops around them for an hour, an hour-and-a-half. |
Brianna |
What were the reactions to this challenge, once you had laid it out there? What did your friends say, what did your family say? |
Geoff |
My parents were like, "Why are you trying to torture yourself on your birthday?" |
Brianna |
Because it took quite a bit of time on your birthday, it was pretty much your whole birthday day gone. |
Geoff |
Yeah. I feel like I eat pretty well, I have nice things, I find ways to relax, it didn't seem that interesting to me at that point. It was like, "I want to do something to challenge me that I can actually remember." If you have a 15th nice meal, I don't know, is a 16th nice meal gonna be really great? Or the 17th time you go to a spa? Or, I don't know, whatever, the third time you go to Disneyland, or watch a movie. Again, I enjoy all those things, but I think I just wanted to anchor something, to set a tempo for the new decade of 30 and kick off the new year in a right mindset. But I think I'm fortunate to have crazy friends like you, to just be like, "You got it." Okay, I'm gonna do it. |
Brianna |
You had your family being a bit bemused, those of us here at H.V.M.N. being like, "Woo, go Geoff," getting excited. I was back in England, and I was following. Because of the time difference, it was getting in towards the middle of the night, so I was following your updates through until I went to bed. I'd gone out for a nice meal, and every so often we're checking your updates under the table, so it was quite fun to follow you. You got bemused family, supportive friends, and you're coming into the night before and the morning-of, what did you do to prepare directly before the event? |
Geoff |
One of the biggest challenges, was just finding a 30-mile route. I don't spend much time in the LA area, so I didn't know what's a reasonable 30-mile route that wasn't gonna just be like running around a track for 80 loops or something, or 90 loops. Something super boring. I guess it'd be 120 loops. I decided to make a weekend retreat out of it, chose to go to Ojai, which is a little bit of elevation, there's some hiking and trails there. I underestimated how hard it was to run up trails, but the longest trail I could find in Ojai was a 15-mile loop up one of the peaks. Which had a 4500-feet elevation, and ... |
Brianna |
So it's not like you were just gonna go and run 30 miles on the road, flat. |
Geoff |
I think it would have been really lame to just run on a track. |
Brianna |
You don't have to run along a track, but for example, in LA you could have run along the front, past Santa Monica. |
Geoff |
But that's long, I guess you could really run up a beach for 30-miles, but I also know beach running's hard. |
Brianna |
Not on the beach, there's a path. What I'm saying here is it's a lot harder to run 30 miles with elevation on a trail, than it is to ... |
Geoff |
I realized that. |
Brianna |
When did you realize that? |
Geoff |
Once you're just doing crosshatches up a mountian-side, you're just like, "God damn, this is gonna be a long day." And then running down was also rough on the knees, too. |
Brianna |
It's almost as hard to run down, as it is to run up. |
Geoff |
Just in terms of prep, I think I knew that if I was doing trail runs, I would need to make sure I stayed hydrated, because it's a long day out. So I got a nice little hydration vest, got some nice advice from you for fueling, in terms of making sure I was eating enough calories. Because if you're out doing 30 miles, I think the rule of thumb is that for anything less than a half-marathon, you can push it without fueling, but anything beyond, you'll need calories. So I got all that dialed in, I think I was just like, "Okay, let's wake up, have a little bit of breakfast, let's do it." |
Brianna |
Set off up this trail by yourself. |
Geoff |
Christine, my girlfriend, was supporting a lot. It was a nice day, that ended up being a long day of a lot of running. She's a much better endurance runner than me, so she was almost carrying me towards the end. |
Brianna |
But she didn't run the whole thing with you, she just picked you up, or did she? |
Geoff |
She ended up just following the whole time, which was crazy and awesome. |
Brianna |
It's a good bonding day for you guys then. So, you set off up the trail, and you realized that the trail's quite hard work. How do you start rationalizing this to yourself? You were saying early on that you were bored when you were running, have you got past that? How is your mental game? |
Geoff |
I think it's all just baby-steps, if you can push through the first 30 minutes of your body not wanting to move ... I'm curious of your experience, probably the first 30 minutes of running you're just like, "Ah," you're just getting the gunk out of your system and getting your brain in the right mindset. And then you just tell your brain, "We're gonna be doing this for a while." And then it's like, "I'm gonna do it." So I think at that point, I can put myself in a trance state, "We're gonna just do this." So the mental part wasn't an issue. There was just a lot of climbing on gravely rock and not wanting to slip, way more tiring. So the pace was quite slow, at certain parts you've got to power-hike some of the steep parts of that trail. That 15-mile trail, I think would have been a nice day out for a hike by itself. And then I think Christine at that point, she thought we were just gonna call it. Because it was a nice 15-mile hike, she's like, "All right, we're probably just gonna call it in." I'm like, "No, we've got 15 miles to go." And then I was looking at the Google Maps, trying to find some loop that is more on flat ground. |
Brianna |
So you headed off the trail, come back into town ... |
Geoff |
Just running loops around the town of Ojai. |
Brianna |
And there was a point where you were running around a baseball field, how was that? |
Geoff |
Basically, 15 miles hiked, it was like, "This is taking a lot longer than I want to, we've got to change up the terrain, so you can run flat. So we can make up a little bit of time, go a little bit faster." And then we started making loops around the town of Ojai, and I think around mile-23, 24, was the peak of mental toughness. Because there's the marathon distance of 26.2, and you're still a couple miles out, and there's still seven miles to go to finish 30, and it was starting to get dark. Where it's like, "Okay, should I just run a marathon, should I just quit, should I just lie to myself that I did it?" Those things started creeping up, and I think this was quite a few hours in. |
Brianna |
How did you feel? How did your body feel, were you tired, were you hungry? Were you sore, how was the whole experience at that point? |
Geoff |
Calves, feet, everything has got quite a bit of pounding by then, and then running downhill shreds up your quads. So the legs were in pain, and I think your mind's like, "Man, are we gonna stop? Are we gonna do this? This is getting cold, it's getting dark soon." |
Brianna |
Getting dark, that really sucks. |
Geoff |
You're just talking with yourself for a lot of hours, I think that's one thing I appreciate about endurance activities. You're actually in your own mind for quite a long time, and I don't think people really do that anymore. |
Brianna |
Especially, like you were saying very early, without having that stimulus of technology and interaction. |
Geoff |
You're distracting yourself with new information, so just being five, six hours in your own head was a long time of you talking to yourself. Like, "Why am I doing this, is this fun anymore?" Doing some updates on Instagram, that was fun, just to take off some of the monotony. |
Brianna |
Did you put on a brave face for the Instagram updates? |
Geoff |
I think in the beginning more, but I think towards the end I was just like, "Dude, this sucks." Because it's just hard, your body's sore, your body's tired, your brain's bored, tired. Again, at mile-23, 24, you have this false milestone of, "Maybe I should just do a marathon, and just call it a day." And you still have seven miles to go, which is pretty long. |
Brianna |
As long as one of your normal training runs, at least. |
Geoff |
Yeah. Damn, after a seven-miler, eight-miler, I think for most people that's a nice session, and that's when you're fresh. It started getting dark, and I was like, "I don't want to actually kill myself running around town with not a lot of lighting." And I wanted to get my feet into a little bit more of a soft terrain, because I was running on concrete and sidewalks at the time. So I was just trying to find some park, and just constrain it to some nice field, some nice soft field I could just run loops around. I just ran around the city to find their baseball diamond, I was like, "All right, this will work." And I ended up running 30 loops around, a lot of loops around this baseball diamond, just to crank out another four miles off that baseball diamond. And then, when it was 26, 27 miles left, it had just a resurgence of energy, where I remember an initial day where I decided to do a 30-miler, I was BS-ing, saying, "Look, I could do a 5K in my sleep, a 30-mile, I can definitely do it." Just pumping myself up. And then I was at that point, I had 5K left. Three miles, I was like, "I better stick to my word there, I can definitely crank out three miles in my sleep, so I guess I've got to do it." I think mind over matter, where you're just like, "Let's do it, move the feet." |
Brianna |
How did it feel to finish? What went through your mind? |
Geoff |
It wasn't a crazy athletic achievement that broke any records, but I think it was good to remind yourself, and I think this ties into just a larger story here. It was good to say and state a goal, and actually accomplish it. I think that's something that would push your internal limits, and that gives me confidence, and I think a reminder of what each of us can do. And I think a lot of us stop having these positive feedback loops in life at some point, because I think when you go through school, there's a lot of short-term feedback loops. When you're in competition, there's feedback loops. You're winning a competition, you're getting an A on a test, you're getting a good score, you're getting feedback from a project or your teacher. At a certain point, as you go into the workforce, or doing your career, that feedback loop stops. You're just exploring by yourself. |
Brianna |
It is uncomfortable as well to put yourself on the line, to set a goal, and then you're there and you're at 23 miles, and you're like, "I could just ..." |
Geoff |
I think people want goals, I think when you don't have goals, you're actually stagnant. I think that's why a lot of people are searching for meaning, or I feel like there's almost a malaise with a lot of people out there. |
Brianna |
But people are afraid to set goals that they might fail at. |
Geoff |
But that's the only goals that are worth achieving, because if you know you can do it, then you don't as a human being, don't actually put weight on it. So I think for me, I think that one accomplishment just reminded me of the value of setting high goals, and achieving it. And then have an expectation that you can pick a goal, and do it. |
Brianna |
I agree. |
Geoff |
I think that was the highlight for me, this is twice as long as I've ever run before, but I'm gonna do it. And I have confidence that I can do it now, and can I take that confidence that every other activity, and put high bars for everything else I do. I think that you might say that an athletic goal has no relation to a business goal or an intellectual goal, but I think that's overly simplified. I think at some shared root you just need a discipline and a resilience to failure, to get any goal done. That made me think about my past, I wish that I had focused a little bit more goal-oriented, in terms of athletic endeavors in my childhood. Where I think, just where I ended up going down my path, again focused from just my upbringing of having my mom's side of the family being teachers, my dad's side of the family being entrepreneurs. They're very focused on academics, scoring really good scores on SATs, I had the highest SAT score as an 8th grader across the nation. I had 1590 out of 1600. So getting all these academic awards, winning science fairs, which I think reminded me of again, seeing those early positive feedback loops, and I'm sure in your life, as you became more of a serious rower and started getting feedback loops, you got more and more confident. And I think at a certain point, you stop getting these short feedback loops, or your feedback loops are super long. In business, a project is a quarter, or you're doing an academic research project, your feedback loops are six months, 12 months. I think if you don't have that tight feedback loop, you lose momentum, or you become listless. So I think this athletic 30-miler, just reminded me of the value of having these goals, and training your brain to expect that you can surmount and accomplish things on a regular basis. It's rewiring my motivations, and my thought processes a little bit. |
Brianna |
I think there's something that's very powerful about setting a goal, putting yourself out there, achieving it. You learn things through that process that map into all areas of whatever you're doing. You spoke really nicely about that, and I think that's something we can all take away from this as an example. No matter where you're starting from, you've got to be holding yourself accountable, pushing your limits, and delivering on things. But it's all from your own personal baseline, as you said earlier on as well, it's not like everyone's gonna go out and run a two-hour marathon, break the world record. For me personally, I'm not going to be a professional triathlete, or look at where you're at, you set something that's a little bit challenging. And then through the process of training and then of executing, on the day, that pressure to deliver and step up. There's always a point where, I think in Rome we used to talk about having the hand in the fire, that painful point where you've got to decide whether you're gonna stick with it, or whether you're gonna pull back. So creating those opportunities for yourself to grow as a person, and develop that resiliency and discipline, sport is a great way of doing that, that then maps into everything else that we're doing. |
Geoff |
I think hand in fire is a great analogy, I think we are in a society where we don't really have opportunities to do that. I think most jobs or opportunities don't put that kind of pressure to test yourself at that level, but I think that's so important for you to have your hand in a fire and see that success in yourself. To know that you can handle it, and you want more of it. |
Brianna |
And ultimately, with sport, you've got a little bit more control over the outcome. With your career and business, if you're part of a big company, sometimes it's harder to see whether what you're doing has an impact. We're very lucky here, because we're such a small team and you can really see the impact that you're having. But it can be difficult to get that in your professional life, so you might put in 100 hours of effort, and then not see a return because another member of your team or the stock market's changed, or it just didn't work out for you. As where with a sport, time and effort in is generally within reason rewarded by improvements, and as long as you're setting progressive and realistic goals, you can start to make headway towards them. Which is a little bit more up in the air with business, I think. |
Geoff |
I think that's exactly what I was thinking about, coming into this conversation. Because, how do we make this more generalize-able? Because I think again, this one random 30-mile run is interesting for me personally, but how do we take lessons from it? And I think the broader theme here is that we know that positive feedback loops are very valuable for building up confidence and competency, but in a business setting, or in something that has a lot of variables, you can not control the variables there. Your success is not just dependent on your effort, there's a macro-environment of the stock market, your other team members dropping the ball, and the feedback loops might be longer. So you don't get that confidence and that repetition there. But again, with something like an individual sport, you can get that short feedback loop, get results, get confidence, and get that flywheel going. The way I think about it now, there're different flywheels that you can kick off in your life, but make sure you have enough short-term ones so you can keep building confidence of setting goals, executing, surpassing those goals, and improving. Because if you're just waiting for two-year long cycles, you're gonna lose momentum, lose steam. There's no way to track that progress, our minds are not designed to have a two-year, 24-month planning cycle to see success. You need to have that short term success, that serotonin, dopamine that gets you motivated to keep pushing yourself. |
Brianna |
That's a good point to start wrapping up. So Geoff, when's your next ultra-marathon, what's the next challenge? Are you converted? |
Geoff |
I think I want to do a timed marathon, a formal marathon. |
Brianna |
This year? This is on record remember. |
Geoff |
Yeah, I think I want to target somewhere between 3:30 to 4:00, again, I'm not gonna move super quick. |
Brianna |
What's your half-marathon time? |
Geoff |
Just under 2:00, like 1:59, so I want to improve my half-marathon time, and do a reasonable marathon. I think one thing that's been inspiring to me, was looking at some of the physical fitness standards for some Ranger units, or some military units that are just posted publicly. I think it's a good reasonable standard, the Rangers are an elite unit in the American military, how can I get top ranking for all those events? So I think on a lot of physical pull-ups, sit-ups, those are pretty reasonable, but I think it's a 13-minute for two miles, which is quite speedy. Those are things I want to work towards, a 35-minute five-miler, are a couple running standards there. |
Brianna |
You've got a few things- |
Geoff |
I've got a few things I want to go towards, I want to be quicker on these medium-distance runs, and then have a couple good long-distance runs in there as well. |
Brianna |
If the listeners want to keep up with your training and your progress, how can they follow you? |
Geoff |
All the H.V.M.N. channels, you can keep track of me, but also Brianna, other folks on the team. But if you want to follow personal story, I have a personal handle at Twitter, just GeoffreyWoo, G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y-W-O-O on Twitter and Instagram. |
Brianna |
You're on Strava as well, aren't you? |
Geoff |
I'm on Strava as well, I've got to log more stuff on Strava, I'm doing a lot more indoor treadmill stuff. |
Brianna |
Strava is good for accountability, so perhaps someone else will want to run a marathon with you, and you can pick one, and people can train with you towards a marathon later in the year. |
Geoff |
It's always fun to get like-minded people with goals together. If you have goals for 2019, hit me up on any of those channels, we'll support each other and make 2019 the best year ever. |
Brianna |
We really appreciate when listeners get in touch, and the community that we're building online, it's great to hear, as Geoff just said, what other people's goals are and what we can do to support one another to achieve those. Because, as you said, it's super powerful making and achieving goals. I think that's a really great point to end the conversation, thanks for letting me on this side of the mic, thanks for making time to chat. And really big congratulations, because to be honest, when you said you were gonna do it, I thought you could do it, but I did think you were also a little bit crazy and you didn't know what you were getting yourself in for. Because a marathon is a long way, and 30 miles is four miles or so longer than a marathon. |
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