I’m only cynical when I’m burnt out.
Repetitive predictability burns me out.
That’s complicated because predictability is mission critical to what I’m building. A podcast has to come out. The newsletter has to arrive. The business needs systems. Borderlands becoming something durable requires doing many of the same things over and over again.
And that predictability is also the Achilles heel of my joy in it.
Maybe that’s why I really want to join in with the homies hating on UTMB. Or at least not celebrating it.
There’s a vocabulary for it already. Corporate. Commercial. Too big. Too polished. Too much money. Too many brands. It would be easy for me to arrive in Chamonix already knowing what I thought.
But I have a hard time thinking about institutions that way.
I tend to see the person or people behind them.
I think some of that comes from the time I’ve spent contemplating forgiveness. Institutions can absolutely hurt people. But the genesis of the hurting action is still something done by individuals. And I’ve found there is greater relief in forgiving those individuals than there is in forgiving, say, Walmart.
It works the other way too.
When I think fondly of an institution, I find myself looking for the person pulling the levers. Who made the decision I liked? Who cared about this detail? Who protected this weird little thing when efficiency probably suggested killing it?
Take Andy Parkin.
Andy is the artist who makes the winners’ trophies for UTMB. Matt Trappe introduced a small crowd to him at his studio outside Chamonix.
By almost any modern business logic, the arrangement is absurd. It is inefficient. It is expensive. Andy is a moody artist who seems perfectly comfortable placing his creativity, his wellbeing and his self-expression above the needs of UTMB or any client, really.
And someone at UTMB keeps protecting his seat at the table.
That disrupted something I believed about the organization. I had assumed UTMB was doing what successful institutions eventually do… Optimizing. Growing. Professionalizing. Finding efficiencies. Replacing the weird, expensive, human things with things that scale.
Andy does not scale.
But UTMB is also something entirely different to Andy. It’s the race that started just up the road from him in the early 2000s as a labor of love by people he considers friends.
I’m looking at a global sports property.
Andy is looking at something his friends started.
Andy is a cautionary tale.
We think we know UTMB.
We do not.
Or at least I didn’t.
And this is where I started wondering whether my problem with UTMB was actually a problem with UTMB at all.
Maybe it’s “by UTMB.”
UTMB is the race. The people. The weird traditions. Andy making trophies inefficiently in the mountains. Twenty years of accumulated relationships and decisions and compromises.
“By UTMB” is the machine.
It’s the thing kicking and screaming in the sandbox, trying to put its name on everything. It’s the expansion strategy. The replication. The part that asks whether this thing that happened organically in one particular place can be manufactured somewhere else.
At the same time, UTMB isn’t taking races by force and slapping “by UTMB” on them. Race directors are signing contracts voluntarily. Willingly.
And I see those race directors being rewarded for their work.
I don’t expect someone to spend years building a race and then turn down a buyout so I can stand on a stump and proclaim their virtue.
It’s a beautiful thing to build something that someone else deems valuable enough to buy.
Which makes “by UTMB” harder for me too.
I’m building a machine too.
Borderlands needs systems. It needs a podcast that comes out when I say it will. It needs a newsletter that arrives. It needs things that work without requiring me to reinvent them every week.
I want it to last.
Which means some amount of the thing I’m suspicious of in UTMB is the exact thing I’m trying to build.
The question probably isn’t how to avoid the machine. I don’t think you can build anything durable without one.
The question is what the machine is allowed to kill.
Andy doesn’t scale. He isn’t efficient. He makes the whole thing harder than it needs to be. And someone keeps saving him a seat at the table.
May it always be so.
I came into this curious about your UTMB opinion—and left thinking about Andy instead. I didn't know about him—"someone keeps saving him a seat at the table" is the line I can't shake.
I followed the whole UTMB week religiously this year, and getting to spectate a sport I love at that scale was pure joy. Your question about what the machine is allowed to kill lands hard for me. I spend my days in an industry where the machine quietly kills the unmeasurable, human (fun) stuff because it doesn't scale, so watching someone protect the Andys feels like the whole point.
And that finish chute got me: just like Ironman—corporate, absurdly expensive, and it's a feeling nothing can replicate, soaking in every second through the crowds and noise. There's room for both, I think. I hope! The global spectacle and the hometown 50K.
Finally got around to reading (and listening to) this properly and in peace. Really liked it and totally feel you, Josh. The distinction between UTMB and “by UTMB” is super useful. And having been at Matt's Andy Parkin event myself, that tension between the machinery around UTMB and the people, history and culture underneath it felt especially tangible. I'm glad we got to see this other side.