No 27 — Jeffrey S.

Our Selves, As Humans

Read time: 18 minutes.
Interviewed November 23, 2020. Published March 23, 2021

My name is Jeffrey S. I live in Santa Barbara, California. I've been here for about 10 years now, and have been fortunate enough to spend my whole life in California, just along the coast with these beautiful ocean and mountain views. Because of that, I have a deep appreciation for the outdoors. I think it's fair to say that my life revolves around being outside, whether it's running or biking or going to the beach with my dogs or coaching—I coach high school cross country. I love the outdoor lifestyle and I definitely like the sunshine, too. The cold gets to me pretty quickly. I like to be outside as much as possible.

What does home mean to you?

I think home means comfort. Wherever you're comfortable in your surroundings, with people, with the environment, places, the experiences where you feel like you can be yourself. You're not trying to be anyone else or do anything that you don't want to do, you're just being—that's home. Home is wherever you feel like you can be your true, innate self.

What does community mean to you?

Community is definitely connected to home. In a way, when you have a home, you create a community as well. Community would be the people that make up your home, but not physically inside your house. It's whatever circles you tend to spend your time with, and even beyond the people you know, it's the friends of friends, even friends. I know that's not happening a lot these days with what's going on, but community includes all the strangers that you haven't even met yet. Connecting with new people, that's an element of community, too.

You can learn a lot from your community. Even when I've been somewhere for a long time and I think I have my community all set and figured out, there's always new elements coming into play. I think we can consider community a sort of basepoint, but if you pay attention to it, you'll see it's always evolving and growing and that's probably the beauty of it—no community is stagnant.

What are you most afraid of right now?

Something I've tried to work on in recent years is not having a lot of fear. I mean, there's definitely a lot of risk and uncertainty, and I think there's value in having that in life because those places are good opportunities to grow, find out who you really are, and challenge yourself. But what am I afraid of? I don't really like snakes too much. I guess I'm afraid of snakes. But I generally don’t  have many fears. I'd say I try to have a lot of positive, hopeful energy versus fearful, negative energy. Especially right now.

[What was it that made you decide to work on eliminating your fears?]

I think I just realized that fear is something that you kind of manifest yourself. You have a lot more control over it than you think you might have—it's a lot in your head. I learned a lot of this from running and training. If you approach something that seems insurmountable or scary, instead of focusing on the impossibility of it, try and remember this challenge is there for a good reason.

There's a lot of positivity and there's a ton to be wrung out of it. If you take the doubt out of fear, it's not scary anymore. You'll have a better chance of finding success.

In running, and especially in longer races, you'll find yourself deep in the woods on trails, or on mountains, in areas that you have no control over at all. If you let that get to you, then you're going to crumble, you're going to slow down and you're going to have all these other problems. But if you're able to marginalize it and break it down into very digestible pieces, then there's nothing to be afraid of.

What's the happiest moment of your life?

It actually happened pretty recently. I'm a professional trail runner, and part of my living and how I spend my days is training for races every year. I'm used to getting together with one large, impactful part of my community, traveling places, pinning on a number and competing with my peers. And that hasn't really happened this year. As a solution for runners, there's been this uptick in time trials, or speed records—officially they're being referred to as fastest known times, or FKTs. There's all these speed records all over the place, the fastest people have travelled up to Mount Everest, across the Grand Canyon, Mount Wonderland in Washington, you name it, trails all around the world. You can pretty much do that stuff socially distanced and away from other people, and it's not technically a real race, but they've become very popular this year for athletes that have been spinning their wheels and missing their typical race calendars.

So I definitely fall into that category. I'd never done an FKT before, and there's a local one that's down in LA that traverses the Santa Monica Mountains all the way from the Pacific Palisades above Malibu and Calabasas and ends at Point Mugu, in Ventura. It's called the Backbone Trail and it's about 70 miles long. And it's just beautiful. I mean, you're running across that entire mountain range. So back to your question, happiest moment of my life. I did the Backbone FKT a couple of weeks ago, and it was the furthest that I've ever run in my life. It was the most prepared and happy and confident I'd ever been for a big athletic undertaking. It was by far and away, the greatest athletic achievement in my life so far. And it was just such a joyous day.

I didn't have any fear that day. I didn't have any nerves. The whole week leading up to it, I was really, really excited. I just wanted to run.

I just wanted to run far. I did have a small group of friends there, and it was just an amazing experience, especially with everything that's happened this year.

I just let myself go through the whole process—researched and reconnaissance the entire trail and then developed a plan with logistics and precise splits and all these elements, and then applied it and nailed it; setting the FKT by almost 30 minutes under the previous time, which was  faster than I expected I'd do. That was a really happy day. It was only a little over two weeks ago and I still feel like I'm digesting it. I'm feeling some of the buzz and I've been doing a couple interviews here and there and working on a story for a magazine. It was definitely the happiest athletic moment of my life. And I think, you know, when I take a step back in a year or two, it'll be a super pivotal, baseline shift for me as an athlete.

[That's incredible. What was your time?]

11 hours and 10 minutes.

[Wow. That's absolutely amazing. Congratulations! Your mile is vastly different from mine.]

You can always get faster. The best way to get faster is just run one mile a day. Take your time, build up slowly. It is definitely more mental than physical. I mean, I put in the work beforehand, right? You do all the hard stuff in the training, and then you go out there on race day or FKT day and you celebrate. If you look at it that way, you really are just out there celebrating all the hard work you put into it in the weeks and months leading up to it. That's why people call them "projects". It's this FKT project, this beautiful thing where you understand the terrain, you know what's coming next, you know how you're feeling, you're in total sync with the hydration, nutrition, and  pacing. There are all these things, oh, and the elements! A couple of weekends ago we had that rain and wind and hail—the weather threw us a bunch of curveballs, but luckily the day of it was perfect and I just felt so steadfast.

You know, a couple of weeks before was the really big training week and I did a little over a hundred miles in our mountains here, out our back door, and I knew that if I could get through that final training block that I would be ready. It would just be a matter of showing up on the start line and running. It can be as complicated and scary and fearful as you want it to be, or it can be this thing that is just an amazing life experience. 70 miles is a long way, but it's not that long if you break it down. One foot after another, mile after mile, I know the course, I know my abilities, I know my plan, and now I just have to go out and execute it. I guess that's just the way my mind works.

What’s the saddest moment of your life?

Last year, my grandmother passed away and that was really tough. She was the glue that held our family together in a way, you know, our rock. I feel so fortunate to have known her for 30 plus years. It was hard to lose her, everything about her, her personality, her love and passion for her grandchildren and her children. She loved hearing about what we had going on in our lives, and I looked forward to our monthly visits and weekly phone calls, all these things that you take for granted. It's been a year and a half, but it still feels pretty fresh and pretty recent. I think anytime you lose someone you love, that grieving can take a little while.

Who's the most influential person in your life?

That's an easy one—My friend David, who I actually met when I moved to Santa Barbara. I think he was more or less one of the first people that I met when I moved here. Naturally, I met him outside, biking up on Gibraltar Road. He was ahead of me, I was chasing him, and then he got a flat tire and I stopped and helped him fix his flat. We've been best friends ever since. He actually grew up in Santa Barbara, left, and then came back. I've always admired his very entrepreneurial spirit. He's done a lot of different things in life and he always does it with so much attention and care and detail. He's the kind of person that if you asked him to do something, anything, be it grocery shopping or creating a product and bringing it to market, he's going to blow you out of the water and put in a thousand percent more work than he needs to do.

He's super inspiring to me, especially being self-employed and someone who, in my early twenties, honestly struggled with knowing what I wanted to do in life. His spirit and his drive have been super influential in me. Having been new here, in a way, I guess I was looking to meet him, and I'm lucky to have found him pretty early on. A lot of people actually think we look like brothers, and I don't have any siblings and he doesn't have any siblings either, so he really does feel like a brother to me.

Have you ever experienced prejudice? And if you have, how so?

Yes. You know, I read this question and I've been wrestling with it for a couple of days now. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before. It's a tough one. I think indirectly, maybe I have, which I don't know if that answers your question appropriately or not. I'm Jewish, and I can't say that I've ever really felt singled out or anything like that, but I have had the experience of going to the Holocaust Museum in Israel and a few other Holocaust memorial sites in the States. Being there, it's hard to explain. It's hard to put words to it. Especially the one in Israel, walking through and seeing all the details and the history and knowing these were my ancestors. It didn't happen that long ago. That kind of stuff is still going on all over the world, to so many different groups of people. It makes me sad.

That would probably be the only time I've really felt any kind of prejudice, and it's not direct. Maybe it's not even prejudice, but more of a feeling. The positive side of me believes there's a beauty in the sadness. When it's memorialized, it's a way for people to learn and share and connect. And when you go to a place like a Holocaust museum, you see so many different types of people, everyone is from all over the world, from different background and different religions, all under one roof. In a way, it connects people in a mutual understanding of, "Hey, this happened in our collective human history."

We're in an ever-evolving society, and sadly we're still struggling with a lot of those prejudices in 2020. We are all a part of these memorialized memories, and hopefully we can learn from them, grow and have these hard conversations, and figure out ways that we can prevent this from happening in the future.

Have you ever thought about privilege? How?

Yes. Especially as a Caucasian male who admittedly has spent his entire life in California, I admittedly feel very fortunate. I've never taken it lightly and I've always approached every relationship or interaction with anybody, regardless of their socioeconomic status or background, as an opportunity to learn and grow and to not force or push any of my ideals, knowing that I never have been hungry before, I've never struggled to pay rent, there are things that I haven't had to worry about. Having that privilege, I aim to use my experience to understand and connect with people that might not have the same kind of background as I have, and hopefully help to uplift them.

What was one pivotal moment in your life, and how did it influence you?

Definitely one pivotal moment in my life was I moved to Santa Barbara in 2011. Back then, I suppose you could say I lived in the real world. I had a normal job, I'd put on fancy clothes, and I was living in the city. I was in San Francisco working a finance job before I moved here. I think my decision in moving here was relatively random, because I came through on a bike ride, actually. I had quit that finance job and just biked down the coast, looking for adventure, looking to meet people, looking to have some good life experiences. I made it to Santa Barbara, which on a bike is pretty far, and I just instantly knew this was the place I'd been looking for.

This was what I'd been missing, without even knowing I was missing it, until I found it. My intuition told me this was the place, this was where I want to be.

I guess I have the random bike ride down the coast to thank for that. So that was a pretty pivotal moment. Now I've lived here longer than I've ever lived anywhere else in my life.

I got here in around five days on a bike. I was carrying everything I needed with me. It was also pivotal because I feel like I got away from sports and athletics in college. I was looking for a different experience than what I had growing up. I played tons of sports in my youth and it was a big part of my life, but I think going to college I was looking to separate my high school self from my identity as an independent adult. I rejected athletic pursuits, even though I knew it was in my DNA. After getting my finance job and doing that stuff for a couple of years, I found myself a little lost, and I didn't know it at the time, but I think I found myself looking for an athletic pursuit to really invest myself in. That bike ride was the start of my endurance racing career, so to speak.

Here we are, ten years later. Running wasn't even my main sport growing up—I was always fast, but I was never a runner. Now, part of how I make a living is that an international brand, Salomon, compensates me to represent them. So clearly, that trip was super pivotal in a lot of ways for my life. I could have never guessed that this is where I would be a decade later.

Where are you from and how has being from your home shaped who you are today?

I'm from a small town, just north of San Francisco, called Mill Valley. It sits at the base of Mount Tamalpais, Mt. Tam for short. When you look at her from the East Bay, Oakland area, she looks like a sleeping lady, a woman lying on her back, it's really beautiful. My mom grew up in Mill Valley and my grandfather built a house there. When you live at the base of a giant mountain with trails all over it, it's just in your blood to be outside and be on that mountain. I didn't run a lot when I was growing up, but I biked a lot and was frequently skateboarding and exploring outside.

What's one thing that always reminds you of home?

The Bay Area fog. I think there's a social media account called Karl the Fog or something like that, and really, that hits it on the head. If you grow up in the Bay area, especially the North Bay or San Francisco side, it's foggy all the time. The fog seems like its own being, it takes on a personality of its own. It's always creeping in with these weird fingers over the bridge or the mountain. Now, I live on the Mesa in Santa Barbara, and anytime we have fog, it hits me in a weird way. It reminds me of home.

What's something that you've accomplished that you're proud of?

I think back a lot to going out on a limb and going on that bike ride and ending up in Santa Barbara. When I got here, I was still being pulled into the real world. I gave a couple more typical jobs a try, and the last job I had was the most perfect, real-world job you could ever have. You know, you could wear shorts and a t-shirt and sandals to work. It was very relaxed, very beachy, a short bike ride down this most beautiful bike path in the world, right next to the Pacific Ocean. But I was still sitting in an office and had to be somewhere for a certain number of hours every day. I know that works for a lot of people, but for me it never made sense, it just took me a while to realize that. It's easy to deny that kind of truth from yourself.

I got to that last job and realized, if there was ever a real job that could work for me, this one had to be it. And I knew within a couple months, it was not it. I still stuck it out. What I'm proud of is that I took that moment, and in the last six to seven years, I've slowly figured out a way to have a career that still allows me to have a really flexible schedule and be outside when I want to be outside and say yes to projects that I want to work on and no to projects that I don't want to work on.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm proud of going out on a really scary and unstable limb—you know, it was around the time when people were having trouble getting hired for jobs out of college. I basically went against all logical recommendations and quit what didn't work for me and kept searching for what did. I'm still continuing to follow this feeling. It's a circuitous path that just sometimes you find yourself wondering, am I doing the right thing? You're just barely scraping by, it's hard, but then you start to see that kind of dedication pay off. It's not necessarily financially, but I find myself super satisfied with what I'm doing every day. I don't work a day in my life because I love everything that I do, every single day.

My proudest moment was following my intuition and realizing that I couldn't do what I was "supposed" to be doing.

That's one thing I really love about Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara has always supported me in that way—the people that come here love it. They fall in love with the ocean and the mountains and the outdoors. I feel like we're all very like-minded and resourceful, and figure out a way to make our passions work. You do a handful of things that are all connected in a certain way, and they're all a little different and they feed your soul and slowly turn into this bigger and more pronounced thing. They give you the courage to do what you want to do and be who you are.

[That's incredibly inspirational. I think we've all arrived at a crossroad at least once in our lives, and the fear of making a wrong decision is very relatable. I don't think I've known another professional trail runner before you. I'd imagine that career isn't very common, and I love that you made that for yourself. Do you have any advice you'd want to share to someone who's on the fence in pursuing their passions?]

I mean, you take small steps, right? I didn't jump from working a real job to trail running. There were a lot of steps in between. I was much more of a mountain biker before I was a trail runner, but I got into competing and races just by working events. I found myself doing the complete opposite of being inside an office. I was going to events all over the country and interacting with people with similar passions, and some of them were races, some of them were trade shows. I could talk way too long about it, but then that led into journalism. And then I pivoted into the PR side of things, and got into coaching. It's been this crazy, crazy path, but I guess what I'm saying is I didn't quit my job and suddenly land into my career. I didn't even think that I was going to be a trail runner. The best advice I can give is to just follow your intuition, it won’t lead you astray.

What's something about yourself that you don't like talking about?

This is interesting, because you asked me about my saddest moment and I said it was losing my grandma and how she helped keep the family together. My grandma did a good job of bringing a lot of different people together and making them feel like a family. With my immediate family, I've always felt like, maybe, I was supposed to be in a different family. It's hard to explain, and this might not come across right. Two elements to this is first, I'm an only child, and second, my parents got divorced when I was a very young age. I was an only child with divorced parents that didn't like each other, but both still wanted to be in my life. I split my time between them a lot. It's something I definitely don't share with people very often. I think I've been a bit intrepid about sharing that with important people in my life, because I worry that information would be a turnoff of sorts, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. I find myself thinking, who wants to marry or get involved with someone who doesn't really have an amazing relationship with their parents and a tight knit family connection? Especially now without my grandma, who was the glue that made my family stick together and be okay. I think what it comes down to is I don't have a lot of close family.

What's one thing that you wish you could share about your culture with the world?

I think I would define that as my running family, specifically trail and ultra running, because there's definitely a big culture behind that. People define themselves as either more of a road, marathon runner or as a trail, ultra runner. What I would share with people about the ultra world and the ultra community is that it's full of so many different types of people. There's people of all different skill levels. People who can't do a mile in January, and then they're running 50 miles in June. It runs the gamut and it's just full of so many incredible people with incredible stories and backgrounds. You could have never run before in your life, and there's people that just walk and hike ultras. Honestly, a lot of the terrain forces everybody to hike at some point, whether you're the fastest runner ultra runner in the world or the slowest—it's a very leveling thing.

If you have any interest at all in the outdoors and trails and getting out there and testing yourself and getting lost and climbing crazy mountains and crossing rivers and seeing bears and wildlife, and also be surrounded and supported by a bunch of people that you don't even know yet, though they're about to become your best friends, you should come check out the trail and ultra world, because it's the most welcoming community I've ever been a part of. And I feel so fortunate to be able to make it a huge part of my life.

What would people be surprised to know about you outside of everything that we've talked about?

I actually have a bunch of tattoos. I think that surprises some people.

How do you feel sharing this stuff?

It felt good! It helps that you're a natural conversationalist, these are good questions, and I can tell that you're actually very interested in my answers, so yeah. It felt really good!

Last question. Can you please reintroduce yourself?

My name is Jeffrey, and I'm a dog lover, coach, and trail runner. I try to be a better human being each day, but don’t always succeed. That’s alright, because there’s always tomorrow.