Eight days into Wahoo, a calendar invite landed for the 2023 Running Product Experience Team.
My reply was immediate.
“Achievement unlocked. I have waited my whole life to be invited to a meeting Running Product Experience Team :)”
The grammar was not great. The excitement was accurate.
I had spent years keeping work and endurance sports jammed together. Now the overlap was part of the actual job. The day before, I had forwarded a Monday-night plyometrics workout from North Brooklyn Runners to a Wahoo colleague. It was a plain group email showing how serious runners were handling race preparation in the real world. No deck. No market study. Here is what people are doing on Monday night.
The rest of onboarding was more basic. I was trying to find the product forecasts, understand the sales channels, and learn how all the hardware fit beside the subscription business. I did not know where the right spreadsheet lived yet. I needed to learn fast.
Meanwhile, Apply had a marketplace integration stuck at account setup.
I had entered the Shopify address incorrectly, possibly with one trailing slash, and the confirmation email would not arrive. That kicked off more than a week of support messages, repeated checks, and a few different guesses about which account had been created. Eventually the access worked and we could finish the setup.
Then a Leadville 100 planning thread arrived.
Amanda and I were part of the crew plan. I was also penciled in for roughly twelve miles of pacing late in the race, when staying awake would be as important as running. The email contained aid stations, cutoff times, vehicle rules, pacer handoffs, and a lot of arithmetic about a day that would almost certainly ignore the arithmetic.
I replied at 10:22 that night: “ultras are ez - DTR/C whatever.”
Nobody knew what DTR/C meant. Fair question.
“Down to run / crew whatever.”
That was week two. Wahoo meetings, an Apply support ticket, two bikes against the wall in the new apartment, and a plan that might put me on a trail in Colorado in the middle of the night.