A New Mountain to Climb

00:00.00
Steve
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast. My name is Steve House and I’m here today with coach Alyssa Clark, welcome Alyssa.

00:10.68
Alyssa
Thanks for having me, I’m stoked to be here just a little bit about me, I’m a really long distance ultrarunner and I’m one of the new coaches at Uphill Athlete as well as helping with this podcast and a bunch of other awesome projects that we have coming up. So Steve we are here to talk about a lot of fun things. But first of all I know you want to say something about Scott.

00:37.82
Steve
Yeah that’s right I wanted to start off today because this is the first podcast in a long time and first podcast without Scott as part of Uphill Athlete and I wanted to just send a big shout out of thanks and gratitude for all that Scott contributed to my life over the last almost twenty years that we’ve worked together and all of the great projects we’ve done and last but certainly not least this incredible project that is uphill athlete.

01:10.32
Alyssa
Yeah, well I think all of us in the mountain community and beyond can say that we’re incredibly thankful for that partnership and all that it has brought to us. I mean it truly is an icon of Mountain sports and you really have changed the way that we move in the mountains. So thank you both from all of us who are big fans. So I guess we’d want to start with what are some of the changes that you’ve seen in Uphill Athlete. But also maybe some of the things that have stayed the same.

01:44.87
Steve
Yeah, well, what fundamentally stays the same is what we do and why we do it. You know we are here to educate and inspire mountain athletes and we’re going to continue to do that. We’re going to continue to educate ourselves. Inclusive of coaching our training groups, our training plans and of course all the free content on the website or the content in the books that to me is all education and the inspirational piece is one where we’re supporting each other by telling stories and sharing stories. Especially the stories of those kind of gritty raw real-life moments for me, the stories are not the ones you know. The conquest or the win or whatever. It’s not that kind of a dialogue. It’s more of the stories of like hey it was really windy and snowy and cold today and I went and did my training and I screamed at the wind and I you know had my hood zipped all the way up and I got my workout in anyway. Um. And yeah, all of that is uphill athlete because it’s education. It’s a celebration. It’s a community. You know it all comes down to you know sharing this incredible joy and awe that we all feel when we’re moving in the mountains.

03:20.20
Alyssa
For sure and I can attest to the fact that I have definitely screamed at the wind in the past while training because wind’s not my favorite but we’re working on that. I think those stories are super important. I think at the end of the day in many ways it is storytelling that we’re trying to accomplish. It’s education and storytelling. I think without those, what do you have?

03:48.26
Steve
They overlap too, right? The education, the best stories educate and inspire.

03:58.64
Alyssa
Absolutely as a former English teacher. It’s really making my heart proud to hear that and also too. It’s like that’s what inspires us. It’s the stories of what we’ve heard in the past that are the reason why we get back out into those mountains.

04:12.89
Steve
Yeah I think we started basically on this singular idea of taking conventional endurance training methodologies and practices and translating them for unconventional athletes. And I hope you take that as a compliment to all of you listening. But by that I mean you know of course we started with alpinism but you know running two hundred and forty miles through the Utah desert like you recently did or or whatever those are also pretty unconventional I would call if you can even call them a sport. It’s not a sport as much as a quest for me. That’s you know what we’ve always done and that’s what we’ll always continue to do. From that core piece springs all kinds of stories and education and inspiration and mountains are awesome and awesomeness inspires us to do great things. We get to see ourselves do great things and we get to see others do great things. I mean you were telling me about you know the other was it last weekend when you were crewing for a friend at an ultra and Will was there who is one of the other coaches was crewing for one of his athletes. Will was pacing a friend of his and then Will pulled his hamstring after what like seventeen miles and then your husband Cody stepped in. And pace this guy he didn’t even know for how many miles.

01:05.90
Alyssa
Yeah, so like 14 and yeah and now they’re best buds. So it’s just so funny.

01:09.12
Steve
Wow. So.

01:14.79
Steve
And that’s that’s what these stories are about. These are about human connections and stepping in to help a complete stranger you know will witness them pull dig deep to do something to help them. To dig deep to do something you get a friendship out of it. I mean it’s just amazing and like that’s what mountain sports are about. I feel like a lot of especially team competitive sports just sort of misses at least in my experience.

01:49.27
Alyssa
Yeah I totally agree I think that I say that ultra running is about the community because it’s not us versus us. It’s us versus the challenge of the event or the challenge of the course and I mean similarly to Mountain Sports it’s like that. Not necessarily versus the mountain but versus the challenge of what we’ve set forth and it’s our job to help each other get to our potential because I think it’s not about standing on top of the mountain. It’s about seeing if you can even come close to touching what you believe you’re capable of doing and I say that all the time when I’m asked about my own running. It’s like what are you trying to do? I’m like I have so many people believing in me and supporting me to try to even come close to seeing what my potential is. That’s what I want to do. It’s not to win races. It’s not any of that. Not conquering mountains. It’s about how close I can get to what I believe I’m capable of.

02:56.23
Steve
No I want to unpack that for a second because you know I want to give that a little perspective because let’s think back to less than one hundred and fifty years ago and Whymper climbed the Matterhorn for the first time it was eighteen sixty five and back. Then you know climbing was at the end of the romantic period. people were realizing that there weren’t actually evil spirits and dragons living on the tops of these mountains and they thought well maybe we can climb up there and see what there is and it was. Sort of competition to try to get there to these summits the first time. They were incredible adventurers. There were all kinds of close calls and loss of life along the way and that was kind of the era that was born. From which mountain sports was born and then that in my mind continued until world war 1 and 2. In the postwar era mountaineering and mountain sports became this way of reestablishing national identity. You know if you were Italian and you were on the losing side of world war two you know climbing K2 was an incredible thing. An incredible event for your national identity. It gave you pride again. Gave you something to be proud of and you know if.

04:27.60
Steve
That I think continued until like the 80’s when I would say we entered what I call the Messner era where you know it was no longer about nationalism. It was actually about individualism and it was about firsts and it was about and that led us into where we’ve kind of come in these last few years. It’s about speed records, fkts, new routes and things like that and I feel like we’re actually closing that chapter for me, especially in the broadest sense of mountain sports where we’re entering the chapter that you just described where uphill athlete as a community and the people who are uphill athletes and identify with what we do, they are out there trying to find out what they’re capable of and and writing their own stories. And those stories may be written on the same mountains as you know Whymper climbed in 65 but they’re still their stories and they’re relevant mostly to them and probably nobody’s going to write a book about those events you know one hundred and fifty years from now. But it doesn’t matter. We’re past that we’re in a different or different era. It’s the era of finding out what we’re individually capable of and how we can show up for ourselves every day.

05:58.14
Alyssa
Definitely I also think, kind of touching on the point of the fkts and speed records is that those are set with teams. There might be 1 person running up the mountain but it’s generally a whole team that got them to the start and it’s a whole team that’s supporting them that probably recced with them or like looked at the course together that gave beta like it’s almost like it’s accepted that if you’re going for a record you talk to the person who had the record before.
And it’s a sign of respect but also a means of gathering data and information of how to get there and a lot of these records are supported, and I mean that’s just an enormous community investment that goes into that. So I think that also is just a testament to how we reach our potential by doing it together.

06:56.40
Steve
Yeah, absolutely and it’s so cool. It’s also like people support what they help create concepts right? Like you know you’re going and you’re gathering the intel if you will from the prior fkt holder and they’re probably telling you like oh yeah, what I would have done different is this and that this is probably the 20 minutes that is the difference between the 2 times and the end you know and it may just be as as simple as that. So I absolutely agree that’s where we’re at and you know and I think that’s one of the cool things about. I go out in the mountains, you know at this stage in my life too. You know the people that I see every day on the trails. Ski trails and mountain trails around here where I live. It’s you know a lot of the same people all the time and it’s you know we kind of know each other. You know we don’t. I may not know their names, I may not know their addresses. But I recognize them and I see them out and we’re sort of not at each other and we all know we’re kind of like in the same sort of brotherhood or sisterhood.

08:05.67
Alyssa
Ah, definitely and I think that actually does fit in really well to what you see Uphill Athlete as this amazing foundation that we’ve built like you know we have hundreds of years of people who have climbed mountains that we can then go back and learn from. And here you have this foundation of Uphill Athlete. That’s been built in this beautiful and intentional way. What do you see are the things that now you look at and go we can take this and we can do better and kind of what’s that story behind it.

08:39.80
Steve
Yeah, great question. Well there’s so many things that are exciting for me right now like one is you know we’re going to continue to work on the website. We’re continuing to write the website is not finished in terms of content.There’s some big pieces of content coming you know around rock climbing, around training for tactical athletes, around diet, nutrition, Sports Psychology, Mental Health there’s a lot of big topics left for us to work on and each of those topics deserves its own deep dive. You know I don’t know what you want to call a landing page or cornerstone page on the website. You know these like our strength training landing pages where you know those are 8, 10, 14000 word articles. They take a while. They are almost mini booklets in themselves and then you know there’s a lot of space in between for lots of interesting subjects that people are interested in that are admittedly narrow but still very interesting. So I think that there’s a ton of writing work to do. That’s one area. The podcast which we’re going to continue and you know we’re going to talk about and I want you to talk about specifically more in a little bit. Um I think that there’s also some really great things to do with video continuing to build on Chamonix Mountain Fit or filming some more of that. We’re also working on producing more strength training related video content in the follow the trainer format. I want to talk some more about that. But yeah, there’s a lot of great things coming. Great stuff.

10:40.66
Alyssa
Definitely so I guess to go back a little bit, how did this kind of new and I hate to say new because again we’re sticking to who we are. We do have the same values. We still have the same training where we are the same company in many ways but we are different. How did that difference come up and what happened in the past? It’s been talked about a fair amount in other podcasts and kind of I want to hear from you of what you saw as kind of that split and then this new kind of old direction I guess.

11:29.28
Steve
Yeah, yeah, absolutely well I think that you know Scott and I just reached a point in our you know vision for uphill athlete and where it just no longer made sense to continue in a partnership. You know my vision which is the only one I can speak to is a pretty big vision. You know, um I think that sometimes I tell people this is the great thing about turning 50 at least I hope you get this before you turn 50 but ah, you know I’m not in any way you know holding myself back anymore for people. I had to keep myself pretty small for a long time and within the context of Uphill athlete. And I’m not a small guy. I mean I’m not very big, I’m only five ten, but I mean that’s small in the sense of I’m ambitious and I use the analogy if people want to talk to me about um you know I use the analogy of my climbing career. I was not a well-known climber because of my climbing being the hardest moves. I think that the only thing that built my climbing career was that I had big ideas.

13:00.99
Steve
And I had visions and other people couldn’t see and I was willing to work for 10,15, 20 years really hard to realize those visions and that’s the kind of personality that’s the kind of person I am and I’ve been holding myself back in that way for the last few years because it was too overwhelming for some of the people that I worked with. You know this was when it became clear that Scott and I weren’t going to be able to continue working together. I also laid this out to the coaches. And I said hey like this is what I want to do with Uphill athlete I don’t intend to go anywhere. I have a three year old and a six year old. This is the second half of my life. I’m young, I’m relatively young, I’ve got a big vision for what an uphill athlete, not as a company but as a community, can do for mountain sports. I really think I’ve said this many times. I really think we’ve just scratched the surface. For example, like you know 2000 climbers go to Everest this spring to climb Mount Everest. Last year we trained 10 so you know what it’s like you know point zero zero five you know 10000 people ran the utmb. We coached one. You know that’s one one hundredth of a percent or something like that we’re barely barely scratching the surface and one of the things that I said to that I’ve been saying to to Scott for a while and that I laid out really clearly over the summer to the coaches was exactly how big my vision is. And I really do think that we can play a major role in shaping how people engage with mountain sports and how they prepare themselves physically of course, but also how they prepare themselves mentally. I think that’s an area we haven’t done enough work on. And all of the things that contribute. For example, you know one of the areas that we’re growing into more is working with physical therapists to do online consultations and screenings before an athlete starts coaching or starts on the training plan so that you can make sure they are not getting injured or if you’re coming back from an injury, how do you know that you’re ready to start training. How do we build that in? How do we build a meal plan that is custom tailored to your training over a multi-month period? These are the kinds of things that we can do that I have ambitions to do and work on. To be honest I think there are people that are attracted to these big ideas and want to contribute and help and dig in and love getting busy and working with purpose. There are people that you know want to work fifteen or twenty hours a week and go climbing a lot and that’s all sort of completely fine. I needed a bunch of people on my team that were really motivated to dig in and work and produce education content, tell stories, develop ideas and build them out. You know that’s a big ask and I think that those were some of the kind of big ideas that I’ve been holding back for a number of years and I just frankly wasn’t willing to hold back anymore.

17:03.38
Alyssa
Well, thanks for sharing and personally I’m super glad that you are going with it because I think we’re very similar. We’re big idea, big energy people and maybe sometimes much to our spouses’ chagrin.

17:25.79
Steve
Ah, maybe we should get our spouses together. They could have a support group.

Alyssa
Oh man. Yes, that’s a really good idea. They’d probably appreciate that. But I think first of all, I really appreciate you sharing that I think you can hear the emotion in your voice of how important this is to you. I can understand that too where it’s like you’re so passionate about helping people and helping make these changes that it feels like it’s bursting out of you. I’ve seen this passion and drive just from the first conversation that we had and so I fully believe that we can do this. I know it comes again to education and just celebration piece where I think when you’re an athlete who’s had a fair amount of success I mean I say fair for me, an enormous amount of success for you, is that you know what that feels like and you want to share that. You’ve said that over and over like through all the podcasts that I’ve heard and just this story that you tell about the beginning of Uphill athlete. I think that you know here is honestly just the beginning like it.

Steve
Yeah, yeah.

18:37.30
Alyssa
I tentatively titled this episode a new mountain to climb and I think that we’re standing there ready just to climb. But we’re not starting from the bottom but starting from a new elevation and like we’ve discovered a new mountain that we can go after.

18:57.10
Steve
Yeah, and I think that you know to me that’s what really good leadership is if you put it into an analogy. It’s like climbing a mountain and getting the whole team to the top. And everybody’s on the top and they’re celebrating in their site and then like after a couple of minutes of celebration the leader says. Okay, and now we’re going to climb that one you know and what do you guys do? Think how we should go about it? Where’s the route like who’s going to pack the food? Who’s going to take care of the gear? Who’s going to do the route finding? Then you break it down and attack the next piece, attack the next client and attack the next project and you know I think that this is how we succeed together and not just as a team of coaches and all the support staff we have as an athlete but also as a team as a community.

19:53.91
Alyssa
Yeah, and from the group of coaches and the people that you brought together I can already see that every single one of those people would be like yeah and let’s do the mountain after that too.

20:05.45
Steve
Yeah, pretty much. It’s I got to say at least I mean you’ve been. You’re absolutely part of this. It’s been such an incredible experience to have put my intention out into the Universe. I don’t want to sound too metaphysical here, but it was shocking how people just came in like it was a magnet or something. Like you know out of the woodwork and out of the community. And it’s been absolutely incredible and the quality of the coaches that we have now working and that we’re developing some new coaches as well. It’s kind of mind-boggling. I honestly think you know we just have the best coaching team ever at this point and I don’t know what happened I couldn’t explain it. It’s just like where did you come from? I mean I know you’ve been in our community for years but all of the sudden is just like wow. You know you’re doing such amazing things with the podcasts and and you know everybody’s been contributing and and it’s been one of the things I think that happened that was really clear for me because I had a minute to really think about how I wanted to proceed with uphill athlete.

21:42.23
Steve
Once it was clear that I got to make all the decisions at least at the outset as to how to refocus as a company. One of the things it was really clear is I wanted to build a world-class team of coaches of course. But I wanted every coach to have their own unique superpower and this is absolutely manifested. I don’t know how but like you know everybody everybody has some. You know whether it’s you with your education, your podcasting background or you know we have Alexa who has a master’s in exercise physiology and a masters in Sports Psychology, she’s working on her doctorate in sports psychology. She’s been a race director. I don’t know how many ultras she’s run, but I mean not only is she an experienced coach for a bunch of years, but she also has this whole other gift around and an interest and passion around sports psychology. It’s like wow here’s a person that we can bring in. Bring her in as a coach and she’s incredibly valuable and good as a coach but she also has this whole other skill set that is going to be beneficial to us as a team of coaches internally because we know if we have an athlete that’s struggling. For example, getting back to training after an injury and we suspect that you know there’s maybe ah like a mental component. We know we have somebody to call on. Everyone that has come in has that incredible unique superpower and it’s really cool.

23:22.18
Alyssa
Yeah, and I can attest to that. Just, spoiler alert, I’m the one running the coach’s email. So if you email the coach. It’s most likely me responding.

23:32.33
Steve
coach@uphillathlete.com, yeah that is Alyssa right now.

23:38.69
Alyssa
Ah, so yeah, if you want to say hi, feel free to shoot an email to that. But I can say that there have been some really thoughtful and interesting emails that are either out of my expertise and I’m willing to fully admit that because I think that’s another part of what Steve has kind of built is that we are not all experts at everything. We have our strengths but we also need each other. Our strength is relying on the team for parts that we feel less of an expert on and I try to always be very transparent that I want to ask for help. And I have so much yet to learn. So what’s been amazing is I’ll get an email. I’ll be like wow I really want to help this person as best that I can, but I might not be the best equipped so I’ll shoot it into our group text and I’ll have like 10 incredibly thoughtful, amazing responses right away. People already offering to help or like to get on the phone with them, and so I’ve just seen this wealth of knowledge and also, I think this is another piece I’d love for you to touch on Steve, because you talk about this a lot is that coaches have to be empathetic, in many ways vulnerable, and so I think that that’s something I see too. It’s something I have always tried to practice as well as being an empathetic person because I don’t really think you can be a good coach if you don’t have empathy.

25:10.77
Alyssa
Yeah, and I’d love to hear your take on that too. Steve.

25:14.20
Steve
Yeah, absolutely and that’s one of the things that I feel very convinced about both personally and professionally is this idea of leading with vulnerability and as I think you can attest to Alyssa, like I will frequently start any kind of conversation with a coach whether it’s individually or in a group by telling exactly how I’m showing up. Maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m not having a good day. Maybe I’m having a good day, but I will still then proceed to give my best. I’m going to be vulnerable with where I’m coming from and who I’m showing up as that day. I think that’s so key because that’s how we have to relate to our athletes because our athletes whether they’re being coached or working from a training plan. They’re giving it their all. They’re getting out the door as much as they can and if you know if they miss 2 workouts within a week and they get some scolding from their coach like I mean maybe that was okay in 1980. But, I don’t think that’s okay, frankly anymore and I frankly, just don’t think it’s productive. I think that’s not what people need, like okay you missed two days of training this week this is what that means and here’s how we’re going to move forward based on that and how can I help you only miss one workout next week.

26:49.30
Steve
You work from a place of connection and empathy and understanding to try to get the athlete into a better place and that’s where coaching can really change people’s lives.

00:00.00
Alyssa
So going off of the coach themselves being empathetic and vulnerable, I think the act of asking for coaching is one of the most vulnerable states a client or an athlete can put themselves in because you are admitting that you need someone else’s help and asking for help which can be a very hard thing to do. Also I mean if you think about the things that matter most to us if you ask someone like what’s your goal for this 100k oftentimes people won’t tell you they might not even tell you that they’re running 100k because they’re scared of being vulnerable and failing. So we are truly helping people reach that goal that is the scariest and puts them at their most vulnerable self. That is something that as a teacher I used to say to my students, the greatest gift that you can give people is your vulnerability. Mountain sports are a place of vulnerability because you’re chasing after a goal that you don’t even know you can do and that’s really scary and also really amazing. So I think as a coaching staff it’s our job and it’s our duty in a way to hold that vulnerability very carefully. I think again as I’ve said we have a coaching staff that I think can hold that vulnerability very carefully. I know that you want to say a few more things about who they are and you know what you see the coaches as.

01:58.53
Steve
I love that. I think we’re going to get to talk about it more I hope. I love what you said about asking for coaching as being vulnerable or admitting that you’re going to try to run a 100k.
I mean this goes to exactly some of the things that we want to do with uphill athlete. We want to make it more accessible. What makes the mountains more accessible than fitness? And that’s not just physical fitness either. Honestly, it’s mental health too and you know all these things are of course intertwined and related. But I think that’s a great observation. I love the words you have shared about that. I was thinking as I was putting this new team of coaches together with some of the bedrock coaches that stayed with uphill athlete that I wanted everyone to be a great coach. But, I also wanted to have some unique power and this goes back to a lesson I learned. I worked for Patagonia for a bunch of years, 22 years and we used to be involved in all kinds of product development. It was really fun work and over those 22 years I was working with and for a lot of different people.

03:42.71
Steve
We were in charge of different pieces of the company at different times whether that was outerwear or backpacks or like luggage or whatever it was. One of the best lessons I think from that experience that I had was the backpacks. I remember when we first introduced the ascensionist backpacks as they’re called, it took us I want to say it was 5 years. It was a really long time and over those 5 years people within the company touching that project would change because people would either move to another job or some would take a new job or whatever. When we first came out with them I thought that you know all things aside, I think that they were really super successful and really excellent packs. There’s for sure things I would change in hindsight but given what we had and what we knew then we came out with three really great climbing mountain backpacks at three really great prices. Those are really great simple designs that lived up to our ethos and all that.

05:10.95
Steve
So that continued and we launched a successful line of technical packs. What happened was people need to understand those of you that get frustrated when a product goes away, they need to understand the lifecycle of most products. You know the first year the product comes out, it’s of course really successful. The second year it’s a little less successful. The third year it sells 10% of what it did the first year and that’s just sort of that a consumer product lifecycle for the most part. There are for sure classics which I’ll talk about and some other stories probably. Because there’s been lots of lessons from my time there but one of the lessons from this was we had to redesign the backpacks roughly every three years. One of the times you know I remember is working with Josh Warden and Kelly Cordis. The previous backpacks we just felt were an abomination and we just didn’t like them. There were all kinds of things wrong with them but we did a meeting offsite and somehow Josh and I convinced the powers to be to let us have full control.

06:22.78
Steve
Let’s just say that it was a complete disaster. I mean they did allow us full control and they did make those backpacks and they did sell them, but they were horrible and you know at the time we thought they were the best. But then, it didn’t dawn on me how bad they were until the next year when I went to a product meeting and I watched one of my fellow ambassadors who didn’t know that the backstory just do a full walkthrough of why that backpack was complete crap.

06:55.47
Alyssa
Um, yeah.

06:58.21
Steve
It was junk and he was right. He was and I remember just sort of sitting there listening and having it dawn on me as just like he’s totally right. He’s right about that. He’s right about every single thing, and I think the problem with the backpack wasn’t the problem of the backpack. But, there were only two people working on it. What was so great about the first backpack is we had like probably 20 people working on it and everybody contributed a little thing and everybody had a different viewpoint. There was still enough of a leadership structure to when it was necessary to make the decisions on which ideas had enough merit to kind of trump the other ideas and come to some decisions. Because ultimately some decisions have to be made even when you’re making something as simple as a backpack which is just cloth and straps and that for me was a very important learning experience. So as we relate this to uphill athlete you know I want a team of coaches that all have slightly different perspectives and slightly different experiences because that’s how we’re going to build the best product because everybody can bring something. If you have a completely flat structure where you can add like the 10 Josh Wharton and Steve Houses, but if it’s a flat structure. You’re still going to produce a horrible backpack. You need 10 people or 20 people do help with that.

08:31.54
Steve
We all have different skills and you need a little bit of a leadership structure so that somebody at the end of the day can say no this is what we’re going to do and that’s how it works I’m afraid. My experience and I think that as I was building the coaching team and looking for those people you can start to understand how much of you I was kind of interviewing in the sense when we started talking a number of months ago because it’s not just coaching skill. It’s like can I work with this person? Does this person have ideas? Does this person have the confidence to project their ideas? Does this person have the self-awareness to be able to admit that they might not know something? All of these things are really important when you’re building a team. You can’t just build a team of people who all think they know everything because nothing is going to happen. You also can’t just have a team of one because that’s too much of an echo chamber and that doesn’t work either. So the coaching team that we’re putting together I think is incredible for all of these reasons. I just can’t get over how excited I am about all of the talent and passion and perspectives and creativity and humility and knowledge that we have in our little room of coaches at uphill athlete. Not just coaches but you know also the broader team of people. Like our product manager that works on helping us improve the products. Our advertising team helps us figure out how to tell the world about what we do and all these other, Yogesh who’s helping us with our writing and telling our stories more clearly and I mean such great energy. Such great people.

10:35.93
Alyssa
Absolutely and I can attest to the fact that I have an ascensionist from 2014 and it’s still my favorite backpack and it goes everywhere with me, so something went right with that. A lot of things went right with that but clearly that process worked quite well.

10:53.68
Steve
The only thing I would change would be the fabric, but I can say the fabric was mostly a price decision because the price,those packs read the twenty five liter retail for like $59 just like half of what any other product pack that size retailed for at that time. So.

11:12.65
Steve
It was a good enough fabric at an incredible price. It was pretty you know and then if you got into better fabrics, it would easily double or triple the price. I think it was a good decision for launching the line. It was really good.

11:25.62
Alyssa
I Totally agree and the fun thing is that I now have fun patches on it just a few and that gives it even more character. It’s like a race bib if you have a little bit of wear and tear on it, it means that you did something with it. You can’t always have it pristine.

Steve
Yeah, I’m very proud of it. I have this one pack that’s actually a demo or a prototype from that era and it was made out of Non-woven Dyneema which is a really durable all white fabric and it’s a little bit of an offsize too. It’s like thirty eight liters maybe forty liters so it’s a little bigger than normal. I was supposed to test one of the things I did and sent it in and there wasn’t enough wear on it. The people in Ventura were complaining that it hadn’t been abused enough. So I actually drug it behind my car on the entire approach into the black canyon from the end of the pavement to the north rim and it’s got all these little holes and tears. But I still use that pack. I still use it. And I actually wish I had never drugged it behind my car because that thing literally would have lasted my entire life had I not done that. But anyway that’s ah, that’s a bit of a decision but a great pack. How do we get talking about packs? We’re supposed to be talking about the future.

12:44.14
Alyssa
I truly wish that there had been a video of you because I could just see some climber being like no stop!

13:05.40
Steve
Yeah, well first I tried flipping it to my belay loop and just climbing with it hanging between my legs so it would swing around and drag as much on the rock as much as possible. Not only was that really not that fun to climb with but it didn’t really work that it didn’t make any holes.

13:24.70
Alyssa
Well, that’s great. So is there anything else that you’d like to touch on before we kind of get to our last question which we’ve already been talking about.

13:25.19
Steve
Not right away.

13:40.87
Alyssa
Let’s go with the podcast but anything more you want to add on.

13:45.93
Steve
We have so many great things to talk about and projects to share. There are so many pots on the stove right now. If people haven’t heard from us in a while and haven’t heard from me in a while. It’s not because I haven’t been doing anything just because I’ve been too busy to do anything but do things. I’m so excited to share all that you have coming out these next months and years.

14:11.31
Alyssa
Definitely, if we want to get to what, if you could narrow it down the three things that you are most excited about at uphill, what would they be?

14:12.76
Steve
I think you want to talk about the podcast.

14:24.85
Steve
Oh boy, you know the most, well I mean you probably know this but it’s the coaching team. You know the coaching team is the kitchen where all the good goodies are baked. You know the croissants.

14:38.55
Alyssa
That.

14:41.56
Steve
Like the bread, the tortilla. All the good stuff comes around and I think the team that’s kind of coalescing around this is really amazing and I’m excited about it.

14:59.41
Steve
You know, kind of filling in what I see are some missing pieces in the website content and I’m excited about expanding our storytelling into more visual storytelling. I mean there are certainly people that are readers but there’s a lot of people out there who learn from visual and audio.

15:18.73
Steve
The podcast listener crowd for example, but there’s also a lot of people that want to watch some story and you know there’s a ton of potential for us in the world of visual storytelling and that’s something I’m anxious to get started on for next year.

15:36.89
Alyssa
Definitely, I think that’s awesome. I will say that one of the things I’m most excited for and this kind of brings us to what is the future of the podcast because I know that’s a question that you’ve been getting a lot Steve. Questions of when’s the podcast coming back and we’re here. We’re back. We are really excited because we’re going to be bringing quite a bit of focus within the podcast. So we’re going to be focusing on a specific season with a specific topic that we’ll be tackling within that season and asking guests and kind of bringing on industry experts as well as your stories onto this podcast focusing on this. One specific topic I don’t know if we want to spoiler alert what it is Steve.

16:35.42
Steve
Ah, not yet, let’s let them stew a little bit and we still need to get our guest list squared away and whatnot. So let’s wait on announcing that but I know that you’re super excited about that and taking on the role of podcast producer and she’s just brought so much great energy and ideas and structure and we have an audio engineer now. We’re remastering all the old podcasts. So the audio is better and something that a lot of people have been asking for for a long time so we’re able to do that now. And yeah, every podcast is going to become better in every way.

17:14.00
Alyssa
Definitely And ah, kind of our season podcast is a bit of a longer term project but we will be putting out content at a more rapid process. So If you’re wondering if you’re going to have to wait for uphill, you’re not. Because we are going to be touching on specifics within areas that uphill is growing and continuing to build education so we’ll have an educational component also introducing some of our coaches to talk about these specific topics but just to give you an idea of what’s coming up, we have our female Uphill Athlete training groups and also just building on what’s happened there. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for tactical so we’ll be talking and doing a tactical episode. We are adding quite a few training plans and also just expanding upon that. Translating them into different languages and getting those getting it more compatible with those fitness Tracker devices. We also have a new director of coaching that will be coming up. We will be talking about our media space, the nutrition restructuring because nutrition I know is such a huge part of what we do. We can’t do it without it and then our sports psychology and mental health piece. So those are the kinds of things we have coming up. We will have education woven into all of those as we always do so please look forward to that. And I ask for all of you please rate review and subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. That really helps us to grow. It helps us to bring on great guests. And it helps us to bring more content to you to help you climb your mountains.

19:09.48
Steve
Thank you for listening to the Uphill Athlete Podcast don’t forget that you can access more resources or talk to a coach by visiting uphillathlete.com check out our Instagram @uphill_athlete or write to us or write to Alyssa at coach@uphillathlete.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much for listening.