Welcome to my website! And if you don’t like it or if you think making a website is antiquated, don’t blame me. My wife made me do it. She says writing makes me happy and that I should do it as much as possible. As usual, she’s right in that it does make me happy. And I like long-form writing much more than short posts and captions on social media. In fact, I find social media for the most part, abhorrent, but I use it for work purposes.

Speaking of work, after 11 years as the founder and director of the HOKA NAZ Elite professional running team in Flagstaff, Ariz. I have switched gears and am now the CEO of The Marathon Project—a race that I co-founded and put on for the first time during the Pandemic in December of 2020. It was meant to be a one-off deal, but in the fall of 2024 we got the gang back together and re-launched TMP as an annual event with races for amateurs and pros that will take place every December in Chandler, Ariz.

I shouldn’t “yada yada yada” leaving NAZ Elite though. It was my life for 11 wonderful years, beginning in January of 2014. My wife and I founded the team with an original roster of nine athletes and myself as the coach, hoping to create a brand that would eventually be valuable enough to sponsors that we could make a true business out of it. In that first year we funded the team ourselves and our athletes came through big time by running really fast, winning races all over the country—including two national titles, and even qualifying for the World Half Marathon Championships. We were then fortunate enough to sign a title sponsorship with HOKA in February of 2015 which allowed us to take the team to a whole new level.

In 2016, HOKA NAZ Elite athletes produced two sixth-places at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials and two fourth-place finishes at the U.S. Track and Field Trials (along with a seventh)…coming painfully close to making the Olympic team. Not to fear though because we only got better from there and in 2020 we crushed it at the Marathon Trials, putting five athletes in the top 20 led by Aliphine Tuliamuk who won the women’s race in dramatic fashion. I resigned from coaching duties in 2022 to focus on the business side of things (which ended up not being near as fun). But the team has certainly continued to excel. All told, from January of 2014 through December of 2024 our athletes won 143 races—including 21 national titles, produced 15 World Marathon Major Top 10s, earned six international medals and competed at the 2020 and 2024 Olympic Games.

As much of a whirlwind as those 11 years with NAZ were, what I did from 2006 - 2012 was even crazier. In August of ‘06 my friend Matt Helbig and I opened Big River Running Company, a run-specialty store in our hometown of Saint Louis, Mo. We started with a shoestring budget (pun intended) but made it work by putting in stupid hours, saying yes to everything, and just generally trying to outdo ourselves each day/month/year. The list of cool things we did included but was most certainly not limited to: Monday night group runs, Tuesday night speed workouts, the Saint Louis Blazers youth running team, the Big River Racing Team, Big River Training Team, and an annual Holiday Lights Run that got so big we had to break it up over the course of several weeks. We also founded and directed a whole slew of races including the Forest Park Cross Country Festival, The Festival of Miles charity track meet, the Castlewood Cup and The Skippo (trail races), the Truffle Shuffle 4-Mile, and the Macklind Mile. By the time I sold my half of the business (due to total burnout) we had three locations, a thriving race timing/management business, and were considered one of the top stores in the country.

During my time at the stores, and with the team, I’ve taken on all sorts of side projects including directing the 2012 and 2013 USATF Cross Country Championships in Saint Louis, coaching at the youth and high school level in Flagstaff, and writing four books. I suppose it would be fair to say that I’m at my best when I’m busy and thus my goal with this website is to try and stay that way by producing all sorts of fun, and perhaps somewhat random, content to fill the time when I’m not working on my day job.

I guess I’ll wrap up this About section with a quick trip back to how I got started with this whole running thing. I was first introduced to it in middle school and liked it right away—mostly because it was finally something I was better at than my friends. Then I fell head over heels in love with it in high school where I flourished under the tutelage of my coach, Jim Linhares. I went on to run in college at Truman State University where we had a pretty decent team and a damn fun bunch of guys. After that, I was somehow lucky enough to run for the Hansons Brooks Distance Project in Michigan for two years—where I learned that I wasn’t good enough to be a pro runner, but that I loved the running industry. It was the knowledge I gained working in the Hansons Running Shops, and running for the team, that I eventually used to start Big River Running Company and later…NAZ Elite.

Onward…