The summer before my senior year of high school, my football coach told me I should give up my starting QB job to run cross country. My paint-crew boss spent the whole summer showing me stats that suggested I might be the fastest miler in the country stupid enough to spend my fall playing football and not running distance races. My boss was both the track coach and the cross country coach. And my uncle.

I cared a lot about track, and it was clear that running cross country would greatly improve my race times. Our football team was horrible. We had one single win the previous season. Why I’d continue to play that sport, when I was almost guaranteed a state championship in cross country, made sense to nobody.

15 years later, I asked my wife to bring a 4’ wide inner tube to an Ironman triathlon so I could carry it during the running portion of my race. The Colorado sun beat down on the triathletes traversing a cloudless, shadeless course with temps in the mid 90s. And I ran through the pack looking like I was late to a pool party.

I find myself having to explain my decisions often.

My most ambitious training goal yet, running a sub 2:30 marathon and powerlifting more than 1000 lbs in the same day (no equipment, 1 rep max each of bench press + squat + deadlift), deserves an explanation.

Sports can be a powerful source of meaning… Then we grow up.

In the book Man’s Search For Meaning, psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argues that humanity’s primary drive is not pleasure or power, but the pursuit of meaning. He offers one pathway to finding this meaning that perfectly mirrors my experience with sports.

Meaning comes from shared suffering with teammates that serves a purpose towards accomplishing a greater goal.

My high school football team overcame years of agonizing losses to become district champs my senior year. (I did decide to keep my QB job after all.) My college cross country team endured 14 mile runs together early Saturday mornings (on very little sleep and with a healthy bout of nausea) to get faster every week.

Up until my last race at the NCAA National Championships my senior year, my life found meaning through physical pursuits. Then, suddenly, that was gone.

To be clear, I find meaning in things outside of sports. My relationships with my family and friends are paramount. I also find meaning in academic pursuits, music, and my career. But nothing in my life quite fits that “shared suffering” formula for meaning like organized sports.

I continue to play local volleyball, basketball, and softball leagues, but they aren’t the same. Adults don’t practice. My team isn’t sharing suffering towards a common goal. We just hope we don’t blow out our knees when we try to beat out a throw to first.

Leaving the NCAA was the worst breakup of my life. My relationship with running became tainted, and I turned bitter towards the sport. But then, like a good Lifetime Christmas Movie, I fell back in love with an old friend from home.

I spent my 20s searching for meaning.

While I was no longer on speaking terms with running, I started lifting with the goal of getting bigger. I just wanted to transition from crazy-skinny-runner to normal-sized-dude. I lifted for strength and power in high school and for speed and injury prevention in college, so I was familiar with the weight room. I thought I knew what I was doing, but looking back now – I didn’t.

Either way, I was enjoying the ride. I finally had a goal for physical movement again. Weight lifting is intoxicating if you track your progress over time. Unlike running, where my improvements came on timescales of years, I could see improvements lifting from week to week.

Then, a close friend and former teammate of mine asked me to run the Berlin Marathon with him. 5 years since I got dumped by Track, I was starting to recover from the loss. I figured I had to try a marathon at some point in my life, and Oktoberfest sounded like a good time. So I agreed.

I started running again, and it rekindled an old flame. But, I couldn’t find meaning in it like I used to. One rainy day in Boston, I ran a 2:31 marathon on fairly minimal training. On the flight back, I couldn’t shake the feeling that ultimately nobody really cared. I was never going to make the Olympics.

Runners in my position tend to set their sights on qualifying for the Olympic Trials. In fact, I have teammates that have competed in several of these. I think that’s an exciting goal, but in order to run a 2:16 marathon (the 2028 standard), I’d have to give up a lot of strength.

Now aware of the longevity benefits of maximizing total body strength, I don’t want to sacrifice those health benefits for an arbitrary running goal. I want to gain strength, not lose it.

I also don’t want to lose the flexibility that my current training offers me. Going all in on a 2:16 marathon means sacrificing Friday night hangs with my wife when I have critical workouts the next morning. In the grand scheme of things, I just don’t think the destination of an Olympic Trials race is worth the journey I have to take to get there.

If I’m not willing to specialize in running to the extent needed to push my limits of speed anymore, there is another way to approach the sport: I could see how far I can run.

My 30th Birthday Crisis

Approaching 30, I followed in the footsteps of other insecure males approaching an age milestone and did something drastic. I decided to do a full distance Ironman with as little training as possible, and I insisted that it be my first triathlon ever. No practice runs. Not all my decisions have good explanations.

Honestly, that race was amazing. I pushed myself in a way I never thought possible. It was a very stupid goal; I’ve been in Ironman races where people die. Still, I became an Ironman. And then my training lost meaning again.

I don’t want to pursue races longer than an Ironman. So, if I am going to keep racing, it needs to be for speed, not distance. This once again put my aerobic training at odds with my weightlifting. I needed a lifting goal that is different from just getting big, and a racing goal that compliments it.

The 1150 Club - Bringing meaning to the training required for health and longevity.

Then, I met my neighbor, and everything changed. The dude could powerlift over 1500 lbs. He introduced me to the sport of powerlifting, and I was mesmerized by the goal of joining the 1000lb club. Building peak total body strength perfectly aligns with my health goals for lifting, and the 1000lb target brings meaning to the time I spend in the weight room.

But this was only half of the puzzle. I needed to find an event that rewarded both running fast and lifting heavy. I looked into some typical “Hybrid Athlete” sports like CrossFit and Hyrox, but those technically aren’t optimizing the same things. Those are more endurance-lifting events than powerlifting. Instead of being rewarded for deadlifting 500 lbs, athletes are rewarded for how fast they can toss a medicine ball into the air 50 times or do 20 pull ups. That starts to feel an awful lot like “exercise” to me.

One day, it just clicked. I don’t need a new sport; I can simply combine the two that I love. I want to answer, “how fast can I run while also being in the 1000 lb club?” I believe a sub 2:30 marathon is an optimally challenging pursuit, if I do it with the muscle mass required to powerlift that much weight. Pursuing both tasks at once brings a novelty to my training that sparks excitement, and it ensures I’m optimizing for longevity.

1000 lbs + 150 minutes = 1150.

So, the 1150 Club got its name.

I learned a lot of Hybrid Training lessons the hard way.

I started powerlifting aggressively, doing deadlifts for the first time in my life. I already knew a lot about running, but I needed to level-up my powerlifting knowledge. I found a ton of information online about weight lifting, but I found out the hard way that each source was only giving me part of the story. There was a lot of nuance consistently being left out.

After 30 years of being virtually unbreakable, at times running over 120 miles in a week, I’ve spent the last 2 years bouncing from injury to injury. Each one taught me a valuable lesson, and I finally feel like I’ve cracked the code to hybrid training. I’ve identified the parallels between running and lifting that allow for coherent programming based on very simple principles.

Time + consistently training at a manageable effort + occasionally training at a high intensity = sustainable progress.

I want to share these lessons with you. For free. To build a community. So I’m not doing this alone.

I still miss that feeling of “shared suffering.” So, I’m starting a team.

A lack of meaning in people’s lives, especially in their physical training, has become a global epidemic. Since COVID, people feel more isolated than ever. Meanwhile, America’s life expectancy trends have not been pretty. Sports have taught us the way to fix this.

Join The Scholar Athlete community, and let’s make the meaning that comes from team training something that doesn’t end with our youth.

You don’t have to run a sub 2:30 marathon to be an Athlete.

“If you have a body, you are an athlete.” - Bill Bowerman, legendary track coach and co-founder of Nike.

I developed the Hybrid Athlete Ratio to track progress in between my 1150 milestones. I needed a metric that I could watch progress over time instead of waiting for one single goal to accomplish. Ultimately, the HAR is what I’m structuring my training around. Hitting the 1150 goal will just be a byproduct of this.

Anybody can use the Hybrid Athlete Ratio as a metric to optimize their training around. Whether you're an elite runner, world-class lifter, or completely new to both, you can determine your HAR now and structure your training towards improving it.

Or you could set an 1150 Club goal that uses the benchmarks of a sub 3:00 marathon and powerlifting over 600 pounds. Whatever your goals, they will drive you towards a healthier, happier life.

Let’s pursue them together.

Sharing the journey

I’m going to be sharing my training updates with this community. I’ll walk through my programming, why I’m doing what I’m doing, and any setbacks I encounter along the way. I’m not a professional athlete: I drink too much, and I eat junk. I’ve got to figure out how to juggle work, training, and enjoying my life – all on a budget. I’ll share it all.

I will publish free training programs and share science-based articles to answer questions we encounter along the way. All of my material will be science guided but driven by common sense. We’ll debunk the latest social media fads and pay attention to what elite athletes do.

Eventually, I’d love to gather your training updates and reshare them with the community. We might not be able to train together every day, but we can share the journey.

If you want to increase your connectedness to others, learn more about health and fitness, and get the occasional boost of motivation, I invite you to subscribe to The Scholar Athlete Newsletter.

Thanks for joining me this far. There’s a lot more to come.