I’m walking past windows of stores I can’t afford to enter, looking at clothes I’ll never wear, studying display techniques without realizing I was studying them and that I would later lean on replicating them. The shops are closed but the lights are on, and from the street you can see everything: the precise fold of a pocket square, the way a cashmere coat drapes on invisible shoulders, the architecture of luxury.

I’m twenty-one, broke, living in a basement room with particle board furniture and a single cup from the Conran shop that cost more than I should have spent. Eating ramen. Bleaching my hair silver because that’s what fashion school kids do. Wearing a turtleneck like Augustine, my illustration instructor, as if the costume might make me real.

I remember thinking in metaphor in a very art school way: This is what real wood looks like.

The window displays. The rich wood fixtures. The brass. The nickel. The deep, certain grain of money and history and permanence.

And then thinking rather dejectedly: I am not this.

I feared I was a lot more like my shabby room, particle board wearing a thin plastic veneer. Twenty-five years later, I have days where I’m still not sure I was wrong.

That basement room near Regent’s Park. God, it was a shithole. Rough Berber carpet on concrete. Laminate wood furniture, not even real wood. Little side table, bed, single mattress, desk, wardrobe. One window into a light well, so I was literally just looking at concrete. I spent as little time as possible in there.

I did not have a radio. I did not have a television. Pre-smartphones, so no escape hatch to the world. Just me, alone, in this room with art materials, some worn out clothes, cold. Knowing there were students on upper floors living in much nicer rooms. Shared bathroom down the hall, though nobody lived in the damn basement so the shared bathroom was basically my bathroom. That was the one nice thing.

I would heat water in my kettle and make ramen noodles and eat them with crackers pretty much every day. Once a week I would go to a little Moroccan place on Marylebone High Street where they got to know me. They probably thought I was some rich American kid using his parents’ credit card. I wasn’t. I think over time they began to understand that I couldn’t really afford what I was doing there. That I was out of my depth.

So I wandered. I walked until my legs and feet went numb, either from the cold or the distance. I would go to fabric shops, embroidery shops, the odds and ends places with buttons and embellishments. I would wander through Selfridges or Liberties just to be out of the cold and walk somewhere warm with other people around. As humans, I think we’re conditioned to want that. I’m introverted, I like time to myself, but I like to be by myself together, if that makes sense. I want to be around people. I want to know that humanity is an actual thing.

And late at night, I would walk Bond Street. New Bond Street. Savile Row. The shops closed but the windows lit. Those windows were portals. I would stare and move on and just think and imagine what it would be like to wear those clothes. To be in those settings. That luxury. That warmth.

What struck me most was the depth.

Where I was actually living, my actual existence, it was very thin. Very surface. I hate to say it, but it was very veneer. It didn’t have the depth of real mahogany or real walnut. It was just veneer. And I felt thin and cheap.

So when I looked at these things, I imagined what it must be like to be thick and full and real. There’s a smell and weight and presence to real wood. Veneer? No. To have that depth and certainty, that weighty presence. I longed for that. I longed for that from my world of thin veneer.

Maybe it was some kind of metaphor I didn’t understand at the time. Was my life, this thing from Milan and now to London, was I afraid it was just a veneer? That I wasn’t real wood? Maybe I’ve always feared that I’m just a piece of particle board with plastic, or in a best case, very thin wood on top. Beautiful to all the people who didn’t know any better back home because they were from a farm or in the government or teaching school. They didn’t know.

But maybe I would be sussed out by the people who really, really knew. That I wasn’t rich mahogany or deep walnut or even hard and tested oak. That I was thin, plasticky, shitty veneer on eroding particle board.

Augustine brought light to that world. Kind of convinced me that maybe I wasn’t veneer.

He was a wispy character, tall, thin. He had this nasally posh British voice. I mean to just say it, I found the guy enchanting. He clearly knew his stuff and he exuded fashionista, whatever that actually means, but if you met him you would immediately know. He exuded that knowing cynicism. This guy had clearly been in the back rooms of Vogue. He had sat in the front row of runway shows. And so I took his words, his anecdotes, and owned some of them. Probably stole some of them and repeated them later.

What I remember thinking about Augustine is what part was he written for? Because he seemed so perfectly himself. There was a depth to his caricature that let you know this was not a man pretending. He was this thing that he was being. And I thought it was so cool.

Later in life, now, as I write, I often think, am I explaining to you? Or am I allowing you to feel it for yourself. The former is performative, the latter, well, it’s the better thing, that was this person.

I even bought a turtleneck. Felt right at the time. Put on a costume. Maybe I would be less veneer.

But here’s what I wonder now: Are we all just veneers? Are we all just particle board with plastic on top, ready to be peeled off and reskinned?

I want to be real wood. I think that’s my struggle. How do you know what species of wood you are? How do you sand it? How do you polish it? How do you oil it? How do you make it good?

Or am I meant to be petrified driftwood, hardened and weathered by a bunch of shit?

Augustine, he was real wood. I think. Or maybe he just had a better veneer than the rest of us.

Fast forward. Different city, different decade, same feeling.

I’m looking at my own reflection in a different kind of window now. Not Bond Street luxury but my laptop screen. LinkedIn profile. Oxford MBA. Founder. Former COO, Global Director. The professional veneer is better now, more expensive, more convincing.

But underneath?

I still wonder if I’m real wood.

It’s a specific kind of imposter syndrome. Not the performative kind people mention casually at conferences, the false humility that actually signals confidence. The real kind. The gnawing kind. The kind that asks: What if everything I’ve built is just increasingly sophisticated veneer on the same shitty particle board?

The veneer industry exists because real wood is expensive, and most people can’t tell the difference. A well-applied surface looks like solid wood. It functions like solid wood. It even ages like solid wood, if it’s real wood veneer, nicely matched, if you’re careful.

The only time you know for certain is when something heavy hits a corner and it cracks. When the edge chips. When something cuts deep enough to expose what’s underneath.

I’ve had those moments. We all have.

The question isn’t whether you’re veneer or solid wood. The question is whether the distinction matters as much as we think it does.

Maybe what’s underneath is just... more layers. All the way down.

But here’s the thing about particle board:

It’s compressed. It’s been through pressure. Heat. Force. It’s made of fragments that couldn’t hold together on their own, bonded under conditions that would splinter solid wood.

Solid wood has never been tested like that. It just grew that way.

I grew up in the true middle class, the kind that barely exists anymore. Government worker father, schoolteacher mother, ranch house, four bedrooms, nothing of poverty but nothing of estates and colonial manors either. I was not born into certainty. I was born into the in-between, and I’ve spent my whole life on the razor’s edge of it, oscillating between proximity to ruin and proximity to something that looks like success. I don’t know if the pressure that made me, the compression of all those fragments, produced something that can actually bear weight. But I’m still here.

Here’s what I’ve learned about veneer:

It’s not dishonesty. It’s adaptation. It’s what happens when you’re twenty-one and broke and standing outside windows you can’t enter, and you realize that if you want to get inside, you have to look like you belong there first.

And what happens when you’re forty-seven with an Oxford MBA on the wall and the particle board is still showing through? When the veneer is more sophisticated but you catch yourself, still, looking into windows you’re not sure you belong behind?

You realize you’re still on that razor’s edge. You’re still that kid on Bond Street.

The costume becomes the character. The performance becomes the person. The veneer grows into the wood.

Or it doesn’t.

And you spend the rest of your life wondering which one you are, or if the one you thought was better the whole time, actually is…

Φ

I’ve spent most of my life being told to minimize myself and “pick a lane.” Not necessarily literally all the time, but yes, sometimes, literally. I never really have.
And I’ll be honest about how that’s gone:

It has not led to fabulous riches.
Or unmitigated success.
Or even a clean, steady upward trajectory.

It has, at various points, honestly, made me poor and occasionally miserable. But in the larger accounting, the one measured in decades rather than quarters, the one that really matters when you start to consider the one “life” you get in this particular game we are all playing together, it’s made me happy in ways that staying in one lane never could have. Even if that means I’m not envied by all for my riches and fame. Ha!

The choices I’ve faced, made, and both loved and hated:

Art or commerce.
Creativity or operations.
Builder or storyteller.
Endurance athlete and explorer or business guy.
Design or management.
Strategist and thinker or executor.

The world works a bit like a highway. Late at night, when it’s empty, you can drift around. Fast, slow, left, right. The margins feel wide. During rush hour however, when things are busy and moving fast toward defined goals, people really want you to stay in your lane. It’s not just a suggestion. If you don’t, you will eventually hit someone. Or, more likely, you’ll make the effort, they’ll flip you off and you’ll inch back over “where you belong.”

Those lanes aren’t arbitrary. They’re anthropomorphic. A horse needs roughly two and a half to three feet of width. A person walking beside or passing needs another two to three feet. Add a little clearance so packs or loads don’t scrape walls and you end up at six to eight feet. Exactly the width of many historic lanes.

We built roads that way. Then we built carts and cars to fit those roads. Add a little more buffer and you get the width of modern highway lanes.

Careers aren’t all that different.

It’s simply more comfortable for systems when one person occupies one lane while many people work together. So we’ve built entire structures to funnel people into lanes and encourage them to choose early and stay put. Even if the conveyance options are difference, even if the end goals are significantly farther than ever before… same lanes, same rules. The highway just works better when you stay in your lane.

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way.

Most of our lives get constructed as a series of “or” choices. If you’re reasonably capable and motivated, that approach can put you in a perfectly respectable lane. But as I’ve gotten older, and especially in a dawning age that increasingly rewards synthesis, I’ve come to believe something else.

& is actually the point.

Not “and” as in chaos.
“And” as in refusing to amputate parts of yourself just because they don’t fit neatly into a prescribed lane that may or may not match the world anymore.

Most of the best work I’ve done has come from changing lanes. Back and forth. Sometimes politely. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes riding the dashed line and gobbling it up like Pac-Man, which I’m sure looked irresponsible from certain mirrors.

The point isn’t “be everything.”
The point is “know the thing you’re actually being.” (Cliff’s note: It’s your authentic self).

For me, that thing has always been some version of creating a sense of place and a simple, navigable path through complexity, wherever it is.

Sometimes that’s a physical environment.
Sometimes it’s a business.
Sometimes it’s a painting.
Sometimes it’s a long run into the mountains.
Sometimes it’s writing.
Sometimes it’s just an idea, like this one.

If you’ve been told to narrow yourself down, I’ll offer a different question:

What are you being asked to cut off that might actually be part of your advantage?

As we head into the new year, my hope is that you experiment with offering yourself a little more fully to your work rather than buying into the illusion that staying in traffic is the same thing as progress.

Stillness is the space between effort and awareness.

Stillness is where work becomes strength, where fatigue turns into growth.
The body can move while the mind stays still.
The mind can wander while the body rests.

Sometimes motion is the only way to quiet thought.
Other times, stillness is the only way to not just listen, but to hear.

Sometimes doing nothing is the something you should be doing.

Time is a function of motion, the earth’s orbit, the distance we travel, the pace we keep.
Take away movement, and time dissolves.
What’s left is presence.

In that space, the usual metrics vanish, distance, progress, identity, speed.
You stop counting.
You start paying attention.

Stillness isn’t retreat; it’s recalibration.
It’s the body integrating, the mind syncing with breath, the pulse settling back into rhythm.
Not a pause. A reset.

Stillness is the moment motion exhales.

You can find it mid-stride, when breath and cadence fall into perfect rhythm.
You can find it after, when the body rests and the mind finally drifts clear.

Stillness isn’t passive. It’s active awareness, deliberate quiet.
It gives motion definition.
It’s what turns movement into meaning.

Stillness isn’t escape.
It’s the ground between doing and being.

Φ

There’s a rhythm to impact.
Each step lands as both force and feedback, the earth receiving and returning what you give it.
Every runner knows the moment: not the first step or the last, but the one that happens when the mind drifts just far enough for the body to take over.
Some people call it “the zone.” I think it’s simpler than that.
It’s when gravity becomes partner, not opponent.

That’s Ground.

It’s where abstract meets actual, where momentum plus resistance equals forward progress.
In Light, rhythm belonged to the sun, rise and fall, day and night, cosmic, vast.
Here, rhythm belongs to the body, repetition, friction, response, intimate, personal.
Similar patterns, this one just closer to the dirt.
In running, Ground is feedback. It hurts, it humbles, but it’s always the teller of truth.

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Ground never lies.

My first ultra was an eye-opener. The planned waypoints for rest and refuel weren’t the mini-salvations I had imagined. They were each their own small death, both corporeal: blisters, loss of skin, and psychological: a little piece of soul, the ache of leaving warmth, companionship, relative comfort, forcing motion until momentum could be regained.
The first mile after getting back on the trail felt like fire, actual searing pain.
Then, somewhere in that second mile, each time, my body accepted the contract.
Pain became signal, signal became rhythm. That’s when I started hearing what the trail was actually saying.

Ground is never the same twice.
It receives your weight and gives it back differently each time, soft under pine, sharp on scree, slick in mud, unyielding on stone.
Each surface speaks its own dialect, and you learn to listen through your feet.
Stride changes. Cadence adjusts. Effort redistributes.
You’re not fighting terrain, you’re negotiating with it.
You give, it answers, you adapt. That’s the conversation.

Ground speaks in a recursive loop.

Somewhere past the halfway point, I realized Ground was teaching the same lesson over and over: you can’t control conditions, only response.
If you fight feedback, you break.
If you listen, you move.
The rhythm becomes a loop, impact, feedback, adjustment, response, again and again.
A living circuit.
You start to feel the trail not as obstacle, but as pulse.

By the final miles, feedback softens, not because it hurts less, but because you’ve learned the dialect.
You know what every rock means, what every ache implies.
The mind stops arguing, the body starts translating.
This is why I call running my meditation.
At some point, all of your mind’s nonsense gives way, and you don’t think about running, you are running.

Ground gives back exactly what you offer.

Endurance is not toughness. It’s the resilience to quiet the mental demons so your body can understand, interpret, and respond to what the ground is giving you.
You can try, but you’ll never conquer the ground. You just have to meet it halfway.
If you consistently give it the energy you have, it will reliably give you the feedback you need to move forward.

Here’s to learning the language of terrain, of body, of feedback.
Here’s to the Ground, the quiet, honest teacher that turns pain into progress and motion into meaning.

Φ

If Zero was silence, Light is emergence.
It’s the first sign that effort has meaning. The first signal that direction exists.
After hours of darkness… running, building, enduring, light is the moment you realize you’re still moving forward.

Every long run, every startup, every reinvention has that threshold: the point where you’ve burned through energy, comfort, and maybe faith. You keep going anyway. Then, without announcement, light arrives.

“The shift from Zero to One always happens in the dark.”

On the trail, it’s the instant you can finally turn off your headlamp, when the world becomes visible again.
You see the shape of the terrain instead of just reacting to it.
The cold breaks, color returns, and warmth crawls across your shoulders.

You don’t accelerate. You just belong again.

In startups, it’s the same.
The early stage is night running, blind, repetitive, surviving on motion and instinct. You don’t actually see outcomes, only challenges to overcome and obstacles to avoid.
Then one day, an investor gets it, a customer signs, a product works.
It’s not full sunlight yet, just that faint grey line on the horizon that tells you momentum is real.

Light doesn’t erase difficulty; it reframes it.
Pain becomes distance. Fatigue becomes data. Doubt becomes design.
It’s not easier, it’s illuminated.

That’s why I chase first light.
It’s the most honest version of reward… earned, not gifted.
No one sees it but you.

“First light doesn’t reward effort. It reveals it.”

In business, this is the hardest translation: the shift from Zero to One.
It’s not scaling that’s difficult; it’s ignition.
Most people think the dark is failure, when it’s actually gestation.

At Apprentos, I’ve learned that nothingness is where you build nerve, conviction, and pattern recognition.
Before revenue, before users, before applause, there’s only belief repeated daily, like a runner’s cadence in pitch black.

Zero is potential.
Light is proof.

You can’t force light. You can only earn the right to meet it.
Consistency creates dawn.

In endurance and in enterprise, that’s the law:
you push through the void long enough, the world eventually reveals itself.

The paradox is that once light comes, you realize the dark was never empty, it was formative.

“We mistake darkness for absence. It’s actually apprenticeship.”

Light doesn’t arrive as triumph; it arrives as orientation.
You see what’s been built, the miles, the lines of code, the days without applause, and realize that progress was happening the entire time. You did that, darkness your gauntlet, inner voice your mentor.
That realization is warmth.

Every founder, every athlete, every creator lives for that moment: when the invisible becomes visible, when motion becomes meaning.
It’s the same sunrise whether you’re in a canyon or a company.
Light is acknowledgment that you’ve made it far enough to see the path you’ve already carved.

“The reward for enduring the dark is not rest. It’s perspective.”

Tomorrow, there’ll be more darkness… there always is.
But you’ll remember this feeling, the warmth that follows perseverance, and know that it wasn’t luck or grace. It was rhythm.
It was Zero finding form.

Light is not arrival. It’s confirmation you’re on your way.

Here’s to every dawn earned, in body or in business.
To turning off the headlamp because you made it.
To stepping from Zero into Light.

Φ

If you pay close attention (which admittedly I only do very rarely), before any endeavor of real significance there’s a silence so complete it almost hums.
It’s the instant between inhale and exhale + movement, before code runs, pen touches page, or a stride begins.
It is pure potential. It exists in time, yet nothing occupies it.

That instant is Zero.

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For most of human history, zero was feared.
The Greeks distrusted the void, refusing to name it.
Medieval theologians called it heresy.
Only when mathematicians dared to quantify nothingness did modern science, and with it every algorithm we now run, become possible.

A few years back, as I wandered through Oxford’s stone corridors (shout out to Saïd Business School and St. Hugh’s College), where those same medieval debates once took place, where the idea of “nothing” was literally dangerous, it occurred to me that centuries later, in that same place, I was learning how to build and rebuild from absence: markets, brands, teams, even myself.
The physical architecture hadn’t changed much.
But, importantly for this essay and for my endeavors at large, the mental architecture had, providing permission to question what happens before the number one had.

“Sometimes the void is the first teacher.”

As Charles Seife wrote in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,

“Zero is both nothing and everything. It isn’t the absence of value but the capacity for it. Without it, there is no calculus, no physics, no digital world.”

Every equation, every byte of data, begins by acknowledging the void.

In my own life (on my better days, anyway) I’ve come to see Zero not as an erasure but as a foundation.
Each reset after feeling burned out, after a move, after a pivot in business or a change in relationship, isn’t a collapse but a return to ground truth.

Zero is the state before bias, before inertia.
It’s the point where curiosity is still pure, uncolored by outcome.
It’s where everything can begin because it is not “nothing,” yet not quite a “thing.”

“Starting again is a skill, not a failure.”

When I strip away title, ego, or any descriptive facility, what I think remains is rhythm: wake, move, learn, build, grow, break, recover.
The pattern is simple, but the discipline to protect that simplicity is not.

Zero is what remains when you remove noise, financial, metabolic, emotional, or anything that is not literal rhythm.
What’s left isn’t smaller.
It’s pure potential energy waiting to be shaped by intent.

There’s an elegance to beginning from (not quite) nothing.
Architects know it. Every structure starts from the empty plot.
Endurance athletes feel it. Every early morning’s first mile begins with still legs and a steady exhale.
Entrepreneurs live it. Every idea, before it accrues the weight of iteration and complexity, exists as one fragile, feather-light variable: belief.

Zero demands faith in form before form exists.

“You don’t have to see it to build it.”

It’s where I try to return each morning, before screens, before metrics, before caffeine, to re-enter the day clean, leaving the calculus of yesterday behind.

It’s also forgiveness.
To begin again is not weakness but design.
Nature loops through zeros endlessly: seasons, breath, orbit, life, death.

Seife argued that zero changed everything because it let us imagine infinity.
That’s the paradox I love.
The smallest conceptual thing, the one we equate with literal nothing, opens a horizon so large our human brain can’t even fathom it.

Starting from zero doesn’t mean starting over, or starting from nothing.
It means starting from a position of harnessed potential.

Here’s to starting each day, each endeavor, each quest… from zero.

Φ

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People who know me well, will tell you I’m not great at sitting still.

I’ve always got something going on, some project or another. I’ve always been a seeker.

Of what, you may ask? I’ll tell you when I figure it out.

I often joke about that old U2 song; it’s truth for me, and maybe that’s why it’s always been close to my heart. But we all know, behind every joke is at least half a truth.

As I get a bit longer in the tooth, I think I’m realizing the old adage is right: the journey is the destination. Maybe that’s what I’m in love with, not some far-off Shangri-La, but the search for it, and all the people and places that come along the way.

So I thought, why not make it a bit more official?

The SideQuest isn’t about starting something new for the sake of it. It’s about giving structure to something I already do and already need.

Some heady concoction of travel, exertion, and exploration.

Endurance training, the long runs, the climbs, the hours outside, it’s the one space where I can actually hear myself think. It clears my head in a way nothing else does. It’s my meditation.

I’m not the best, the fastest, or even really competing (except maybe with myself).

Rather, in my own way, I’m finding peace.

If I’m going to keep doing it anyway, I may as well turn it into something meaningful, share it, and maybe make it useful for other people, maybe inspire you to find your own SideQuest.

Or at minimum, entertain you if you’ve made it this far.

What is The SideQuest?

It’s not a race.
It’s not a midlife crisis.
It’s not really a hobby either.

It’s a framework for doing hard, interesting things on purpose.
A series of ongoing quests, physical, creative, and mental, that live alongside the main story of life and work.

The next one happens to be a bit of an adventure in Europe: a 309 km (about 192 miles) traverse of the Swiss Alps in the summer of 2026. More to come on that soon.

I’m thinking I’ll try to do it in four-ish days.

Why? Like most of the interesting things in life, it spun out of something more ordinary.

I recently launched a business with my co-founder, Chid Liberty, called Apprentos (https://www.apprentos.com). We’re working hard to revolutionize the registered apprenticeship landscape in the U.S.

As fate would have it, the gold standard for apprenticeship systems happens to be Switzerland.

The more time I spent there, studying and learning how their system works, the more I fell in love with the landscape.

It felt fitting to map a journey across it, to understand it in a deeper way.
And so it begins.

But there will be others.

This isn’t a single quest; it’s a lifelong project, to lean into the unknown, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and to explore where curiosity, endurance, and (hopefully) enlightenment intersect with purpose.

Why The SideQuest Exists

On another SideQuest, while at Oxford reading for my Executive MBA, Professor Kurt April talked about the difference between importance and significance.

Importance is about recognition.
Significance is about meaning.

That idea stuck with me.

Most of my career, and to date, many of my aspirations have lived on the side of importance, the measurable kind of success.

But there’s another kind that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets.
Or, if I’m being honest, in places like this.
Or in Instagram reels, or anything of the sort.

It’s the kind that comes from effort, exhaustion, surrender, and discovery.

The SideQuest is my way of exploring that second half, significance… through motion.

Pixels, Light, and the Space Between

I grew up in a time when video games started as very rudimentary pixel art.
They evolved quickly, but they were still very clearly pixel animations, not remotely life-like.

I remember our first Texas Instruments computer and Space Invaders, and then, just a few short years later, being completely mesmerized by Nintendo and Zelda, how real it felt.

Well, real enough that it stopped being just a “complete the objective” game, taking out the pixels raining down on your spacecraft, and became something that felt close enough to life that it sparked imagination.

What I loved wasn’t necessarily how real the games looked.
It was still obviously a video game.
It was the gap between what you saw and what you imagined.

The worlds were believable but unfinished.
Your mind had to fill in the rest.

In a similar way, I fell in love with black-and-white photography, particularly the work of Ansel Adams and how he used light and exposure to pull the grandeur out of real landscapes.

Those images didn’t create fantasy.
They revealed truth.

Somewhere between those two things, the roughly framed and imagined, and the evocatively captured and elevated, is the space I enter when I run through different places.

The real world around me and the imagined world in my head blur together.
A run through a foggy forest feels like a portal could reveal itself at any moment.
A deer on the trail feels like a messenger.

It stops being training and starts feeling like a Quest.

That’s what I want to share here, that intersection of endurance and imagination, of exhaustion and insight, of the real and the mythic.
The science and the story.

Because in the middle of all that, if you’re open to it, I think you, like me, might find meaning.

What You’ll Find Here (and on Instagram @thesidequest.io)

Dispatches: Reflections and stories from training, preparation, travel, and ultimately the Quest itself, particularly focusing on the mental side of all this, the physical prep, the numbers, and the ideas that surface when you spend enough hours alone in motion.

What You’ll Find on my Website (coming soon!)

Labs: Not like bloodwork, but studies and experiments with my biometric data, gear, training and nutrition protocols; what I’m learning about physiology and performance along the way.

Films: Short visual pieces and behind-the-scenes work from upcoming Quests and footage from the actual Quests pieced together into hopefully inspirational and compelling stories.

Partners: Brands and people who align with and support this mission, and believe endurance can be art.

What It’s Really About

It’s not just about training endlessly and running across mountains.
It’s about exploring the world and yourself at the same time.
It’s about curiosity, discipline, and what happens when you do something hard just because you can.
It’s about moving from importance to significance, again, and again… and again.

Thanks for being here.
Subscribe, share, or just follow along.
I’ll post training logs, thoughts, photos, and eventually updates as the Alps 309 Quest gets closer.
But the real story is ongoing.
Every one of us has a SideQuest.
This is mine.