Running Coach Dusty Robinson: Coaching, Community, and Choosing the Redding Lifestyle | All Redding

Redding is a beautiful place. We have national parks in three different directions, two world-class lakes. This is a sportsman's paradise, but it's also full of wonderful people. We have business leaders, community leaders, faith-based leaders, all of them working towards a singular goal, and that's to make this a great place to live. I wanted to showcase these people, give their perception of the place that they call home. This is All Redding.

Dusty Robinson, welcome to the All Redding podcast. Happy to have you here today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, well, let me start with a little introduction. So, Dusty Robinson, you're the Director of Sales, Marketing, and Sales Enablement at a large insurance brokerage here in Shasta County, but your life's passion is coaching, and specifically coaching runners. You've been a competitive runner for 40 years and a coach for 30 by my rough arithmetic. By way of education, you hold a master's degree from Humboldt State University in exercise physiology. You're the coach of the UPrep High School cross-country team and operate a bespoke professional running coaching service called On The Run Endurance. You're a married father of three and a hometown boy who grew up in the North State, graduated one of our local high schools, and even spent time in my haunt of Palisadro. Importantly, and we'll get to discuss this a lot more today in our conversation, you left the small town of Redding for the city, but you made a conscious choice to return to Redding to build life here because of all this area has to offer. Do I have that about right?

Wow, that was a fast summary of a lot of years, but dead-on accurate.

Well, good news is we got some time to explore a lot of those years, and I'm pleased to report that was not written by AI, it was written by GJT. It probably took longer and there's probably more misspellings, but who knows. Hey, before we get started, every guest here on the All Redding podcast, and because Redding does have warm months, gets an All Redding Tumbler, and this one works real well. I got one as a guest on the podcast when I was first here, I don't know, a year ago or something like that, and it actually keeps ice cold for like a day. Love it, works really good. Definitely need that here in the summer. Yeah, for sure. So tell me about your growing up in Redding and your running background. Summarize kind of that first part of your life and falling in love with running.

Yeah, so I think categorizing that into two things, like the growing up in Redding part, I find myself now so grateful for growing up here, just the type of childhood I had in those younger years. I was, you know, early on more of like that traditional multi-sport athlete in like elementary school, right? Played everything. Also grew up horseback and on motorcycles and that sort of thing, so there's just a really good outdoor sort of lifestyle that I really enjoyed. And then, like many people, I'm guessing most people that get into running, they sometimes get dragged into it by a friend, and so I went to Columbia Elementary School back when it had less than 300 students, kindergarten through eighth grade. And gosh, that was a long time ago, but there used to be a race in town. I think it was called the Rotary Stampede or something like that. It was in conjunction with the rodeo and it followed the parade route downtown. And I think it was a two-mile, if I remember right, and they had this weird division where you tied yourself together with ropes with three other teammates. And our school had a team, and of course the four fastest people got to be on the team, and I was not one of the fastest. But they needed a fourth, and there was like three of us that were all like, well, who should our fourth be? So we ran a time trial on Columbia's old dirt track, and somehow I won that time trial and ended up being the fourth person on that team. And that literally was the start of the next 40 years of running for me. So that was roughly in eighth grade. Ended up running that event. I was very small as a freshman. My middle son loves to tell me that he's bigger than me at eighth grade. I was 4'11 and 89 pounds, and wanted to play football, and was told by my coach at Nova essentially not to even try out, because I was so small.

You were gonna get killed.

I was gonna get killed. And so I wasn't gonna do a sport, and that same friend that I tried to get onto that team with said, you should try cross-country in high school. And so I started running at Nova, and I haven't stopped since.

Okay. So I got emotionally roped into running because, you know, my wife loves running. It's a huge passion for her. And she invited me along. But you actually got roped into running. Like physically roped.

With an actual rope. Yeah, right.

How very North State. So then you end up at Nova, you're running cross-country, and what's next in your running career?

Well, you know, that high school time frame when Nova existed was really interesting. You know, I actually really loved the Nova concept and hated it at the same time. The things that I loved about the Nova concept was when we all went off to our respective high schools, everybody you competed against the previous year was a teammate. And so the rivalries were really, really strong, but they were extremely respectful because those were like your best friends. So I left Nova, went to Central Valley, was supposed to be an Enterprise kid. Everybody in my family went to Enterprise. My mom, my dad, aunts, uncles, everybody. My grandpa was very not happy that I chose to go to CV, but all my friends were going there. And so I made that choice, and it was a really great choice for me because, you know, the cross-country friends that I made at CV, they are still friends of mine today. Lifelong friends. I mean, just last week one of our friends who now lives in Montana was in town, and the phone rings, and you know, like everybody just stays in touch. And that was a great smaller sort of environment, and had an absolutely great experience there. After CV, of course, 17 years old, didn't know what I wanted to do, so I enrolled at Shasta College. At the time was thinking I needed a break from running for whatever reason that might be, but arguably the most influential person in my life came along at that moment in time, and that was Jim Middleton. And Jim was the cross-country and distance coach at Shasta College, and he was the master recruiter. He would talk to anybody about joining the team. And for junior colleges at the time, if you had a full team, five, seven runners, you were doing good. We had 40. And that was a credit to Jim just being connected and such a good human to people. And he said, hey, I want you to come out and run cross-country, just fall in love with running again, that's enough. And that was enough for me to say, well, maybe I'm not done. And I would say that's when I actually really found myself as a runner. In high school, I kind of applied myself, but Jim's belief in me and helping me just accept whatever my own journey was, that next two years is when I improved a ton, and I became a lot more confident. That community college experience academically, athletically, all of that really was a catalyst to going off to Chico and then to Humboldt. And I think without that community college experience, I wouldn't have been as confident. And a lot of that was the running that happened and the growth that I experienced at Shasta College.

So coaching, parenting, mentorship, leadership, and work, you know, there's a lot of crossovers if you put those things in a Venn diagram, and something you just said about Jim Middleton was that he had this belief in you. How did he show that to you, or how did he call out in you a desire to give your best effort? You know, you described taking it more seriously in college at Shasta College versus in high school. What was his methodology as you look back, or what was his tactic that we might apply, not just in sport, but outside of sport?

Such a great question. I actually think about that, and I think about him a lot. Him and I still have lunch regularly, and it's one of the questions I actually ask him because I don't know that I can put my finger on it. You know, I can't say he did any certain thing. He had a giant heart for people, he connected well with people, you were so much more than a runner. The thing that stands out in my memory the most is he was always unafraid to prompt you to think and challenge yourself. And so the most prime example I can give you of that is, I changed my degree seven times in junior college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was sitting in his office one day and he was like, have you ever considered being a coach? And he would just do stuff like that all the time. Like he knew you well enough as a person and saw stuff in you that you didn't see in yourself, and he would just prompt thought or questions and probably stay out of the way. And I mean, I think back to that meeting in that office and that one short question, and it's literally like I ran off to Chico State and got a degree in physical education and pursued a master's degree in exercise physiology because that's what you had to have to coach at the collegiate level, which at the time was kind of the dream. And so just knowing people that well and being that connected to someone that you can ask the right questions and get them thinking to make their own decisions. I think about how hard I worked in my running in college versus high school. And sure, there's some maturity level there probably of just me growing up a little bit, but it was probably him asking some similar question and more me making the decisions on my own that I was gonna pursue a higher level of running.

Yeah. In my profession, you know, we ask leading questions and then one of the rules when you're asking leading questions, you never ask a question you don't know the answer to. But he was brave enough to ask that open-ended question but had insight into his audience it sounds like. Yeah, one of the wisest guys I know, a mentor in my life, a fellow named Ken, he asks the best questions. So, you know, I'll be ranting about whatever it is, this problem, this issue, and then he'll ask a simple question and it's corrective, encouraging, all at the same time. Sounds like Jim Middleton might add some of that.

Yeah, I mean, I think he probably, such a humble man and I don't know how comfortable he would even be hearing me say he's probably the most influential person in my life. But I know that I've gone out of my way to make sure he knows that. I've said those exact words to so many people and I think in my coaching, I may never be able to put down on paper what it was that made him a great coach and then try to emulate that. But even just from an inspiring level of care for people and probably optimism, you know, I would never go into his entire story but he went through a lot. And his level of optimism with himself and his wife was inspiring. And I've been meaning for a couple of years to actually bring him in and have him talk with the U-Prep team. And this is a great reminder that I need to make that actually happen.

Yeah, I wonder how many of us share a story like that about a coach, somebody coming alongside of us in those years. Like there's really not a lot worse than high school. You know, you stepped in at under five foot and under a hundred pounds and then there's a high school senior walking around with a beard at 200 pounds and 6'2". You know, that's a tough environment. So having those great coaches come alongside is super important.

For sure. And I think coaching is such a gift, right? I mean, I try to treat coaching with such honor or respect, whatever word you want to kind of put into that. Because there's a closeness that an athlete and a coach have that I think that relationship is actually really rare, more rare than we probably give it credit for, right? And this is not taking anything away from teachers. I think they're heaven-sent. But a lot of times a teacher will see a student for 50 minutes and it's like, think about any other relationship where a teenager has two hours with someone five days a week. Like, they probably don't have two hours five days a week with their parents, right? And so, you know, I personally take that responsibility as a coach seriously. It's a really important role and I try my best with coaches that are surrounding me to encourage them to recognize that it's not about the X's and O's of the sport. It's about what they're learning through sport, the relationships they're creating through sport, all of those types of things. It's a bigger responsibility than I think sometimes we give it credit for.

Yeah, that's something that I like — you're thinking outside of just the X's and O's. I was talking with a pastor and he spent time in a part of the world where you couldn't be out with your faith, it was a risk to life. And in a different context, he said, you know, in America sports is God. And I think, you know, a lot of times when we're running our kids around, it does feel like it's ruling our life. But then I like the way you're approaching coaching, that sports is a place where you learn relationships, you learn overcoming difficulty, you learn so much more than just how to run faster, how to jump higher, how to put the ball in the hoop or pass the goal line or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, it really is, and I mean, I think it's what has drawn me back to it. I commonly say that coaching is my passion. I catch myself all the time saying like, that's really why I was put here. And I think it's because there's just so much inside of it. I look back, especially in cross-country and track, very unique sports that sometimes are overlooked, you know, up against football, basketball, some of the traditional sports. But if you really think about cross-country and track, they put boys and girls together on a team. And you might toe the line separately, but throughout the season you're training and traveling and doing those types of things together, and you don't have that in football, you don't have that in basketball, right? And so, you know, I think back to when I took over U-PREP, it was first year after COVID, we had four returning athletes, and we're like, oh my gosh, we got to rebuild this thing. And through a lot of hard work we got 18 kids that season, so that was great. And so I just remember we'd have like team dinners, and the prime example of just how kids grow up in sport and the influence, right? And I remember you put food out with a bunch of teenage distance boys, that food's gonna be gone fast. And I remember like pulling all the boys aside like, sorry, girls eat first. You know, this is gonna be how we behave. And it was so cool to witness the boys over time. Now I see senior boys with freshman boys that come in, and the food gets put out, and a young boy will start moving, a senior boy will pull them back and be like, no, no, no, our girls team eats first. And it's just — I mean, it seems like such a small thing, but they're spending 10 hours a week or more in this environment, and what can that environment do to grow their character, grow their politeness, grow their commitment to our community. So we do a lot of volunteering hours with like Sweat Running Club at the races, running aid stations, and things like that, so that they're learning how to give back. So I become maybe borderline emotional, but definitely super passionate about like, there's so much more than the fact that we put one foot in front of the other and run.

Right. Yeah, I don't want to diminish what you said — it doesn't seem like that big a deal, but to me it actually does seem like that big a deal, because the vast majority of runners are probably not gonna run in college, and if they ever do run in college, the chances of any of them running at a professional or an Olympic level is pretty slim. You know, I've coached youth sports, what now, 14 years, and I've never had a pro athlete come out of any of that. That could be due to the coaching, I acknowledge it's likely due to the coaching, not their natural athletic ability, but they're all gonna go on and be husbands, wives, members of their community, have to interact with different people from different backgrounds, and learning that, managing it well, giving to the community, which we all take from even if we don't realize we're taking from — they're learning that through sport.

Yeah. Well, and more reason to not be so obsessed with the sport aspect of it, right? Like, especially through running, I mean, you know, there's perseverance, there's patience, there's one of the things that I think has been so lost in our society — delayed gratification, right? I mean, we just live in this instant world, and you know from training, there's nothing instant overnight about becoming faster as a runner, and so I look at running under those levels, and I just think, like, these kids are better off four years later to have, if nothing else, learned that to make progress I have to be patient, I have to be disciplined, I have to enjoy that process and learn to let go of the fact that I'm not going to be faster tomorrow, I might not be faster next month, I'm gonna be faster maybe by the end of the season.

Right, I learned that lesson under your coaching the hard way. Noreen and I were training for our first marathon together, she's done multiple marathons, this was my first and so far only — and perhaps only ever — marathon, and I was telling her this time that I was gonna make, and she's like, sure you are, and I was so confident, and about mile 20 she came by me, and I'd been quite a long distance in front of her, miles probably, in front of her, and I was running sideways on legs that didn't function anymore, and I still had a 10k to go. So yeah, it's delayed gratification, and I learned that lesson the hard way. So, okay, so let's pick up the story then — you get inspired to pursue coaching, you head off for education, and then ultimately it's now Cal Poly Humboldt now, right? It was HSU back then. Yeah, well it's like our local Simpson grads, they graduated Simpson University now, but it was Simpson College back in the day. So okay, so you went to HSU, and then somehow you ended up in the city. Life took you to the city, and then family happened. Talk to me about what life was like in the city.

Yeah, for sure. Sacramento happened, you know, because you graduate and you kind of had a plan. My plan was to coach college somewhere. When I graduated, there were almost no coaching positions available on the West Coast, so it was kind of like, do you want to move to the Midwest? And then my wife, she was in pursuit of corporate wellness, being like a corporate wellness director, and it was about the time that all the dot-coms were starting to say that we're not gonna spend money on that anymore, and so both of us were like, what are we gonna do? My dad lived in Sacramento at the time. A bigger city seemed like it probably had more opportunity, and my dad was willing to let us move in with him while we got on our feet, and that is literally what took us to Sacramento. There wasn't anything super specific. And then, you know, like life does happen, roughly 18 years went by in Sacramento, doing life down there. You know, we were super involved in the running community down there. Running was at the center of everything for us, family-wise still. So we worked at Fleet Feet in Sacramento, starting out, and then you know, both of us just ended up taking on significant roles in that company. I started the event management division within that, and so we put on some of the biggest half marathons and things like that down there.

Isn't one of those coming up right now? The Shamrockin' Half Marathon?

The Shamrockin' Half Marathon was my brainchild, yeah. I had this idea of a springtime half marathon with bands on the course and a big party afterwards at Rayleigh Field, which is now not called Rayleigh Field. Sutter Health Field or something like that. And so yeah, we very quickly expanded that into an annual kind of resume of events. I think we had about 15 events. Started a training programs division as well, and so at the height, we were coaching about 3,000 athletes a year. And the coolest part is our kids were kind of growing up in that environment. My oldest ran his first ever race when he was 18 months old.

On his own two feet?

On his own two feet. It was a race in Sacramento called the Zoo Zoom, and it benefited the Sacramento Zoo and finished at the back gate of the zoo. So you finish the race, and then you get to go into the zoo with your race entry fee. And they had kids races, and they had a 200 meter kids race. So he ran the 200 when he was 18 months old. I think Bodie ran when he was roughly 20, 21 months old. And Travis did it as well when he was around the same age. So they all started very, very young. So yeah, over the years, life became more about the kids and their sports. And I would say my kids kind of followed both Stacey's and my footsteps. Stacey was a multi-sport athlete herself, and so they did all the different sports. And then at one point in time, and this is kind of the beginning of the end of the city life — Caleb was on a youth running team, and it wasn't that far away. We lived in West Sacramento, and it was at Ansel Hoffman Park. Not really that far away. But at practice time, it would take Stacey an hour to get to practice, and then she would hang out until he was done. And even when traffic had died down, it was about 40 minutes home.

And just for perspective, like, no traffic, nobody's on the roads, it's 3 a.m. How long is that drive from where you were living to the park that you just described?

If it was 3 a.m., oh yeah, 14 minutes, 16 minutes.

Okay, so she's giving up an hour and 15 minutes of her life just sitting in traffic for a 14 minute drive each way.

Right, each practice. And we had three practices a week. Saturdays were a little less bad than the weekdays. So yeah, we kind of always assumed, oh, you know, we're spending six hours a week commuting to a practice. And so we decided we were gonna start our own club in West Sacramento. So we started a racing team called the Delta Hawks in West Sacramento. And that was awesome, just to grow something from scratch and really serve a different community. First season we had 45 kids participate and they were essentially all from West Sac. There was nobody really commuting in. So it really felt like we provided something that was missing. It wasn't like we detracted from the club that we were a part of. We literally brought more runners into the sport of running, which was cool. And in that roughly two-year journey is when we really started recognizing that we were just chasing our tail a lot with time. And Stacey made this comment that she was tired of having to plan what we wanted to do every day. And at first when she said it, I don't think I understood what she meant, but then I started thinking about what really makes us happy. And it was like, really it comes down to being outdoors. Being outdoors and being active. We can talk about running all day, but as long as I'm outside, especially Stacey, if as long as she's outside and we're active, we're happy as a clam. And so you start thinking about that in a city life. For us, like great hiking trails or mountain biking trails were really located like in Auburn. And so you go, okay, well Auburn's no traffic, Auburn's 35 minutes. But rarely is there no traffic. And so oftentimes that was going to be an hour and a half, hour and 45 minute situation of driving. And so to Stacey's comment about planning, you would have to be like, when are we gonna go to Auburn in order to hike? How does that fit in getting back? Because if you ever went on a Sunday in the evening and you were coming back, you were hitting all the traffic coming back from Tahoe. And so there was always this planning. There was planning around — we finally splurged and bought a used boat after we had been there for 18 years. Stacey absolutely loves being on the water. Like it's her absolute happy place. We've got Folsom Lake right here. Well, try to go to Folsom Lake from West Sacramento on a weeknight. Like it's essentially impossible. So we would go on the weekends. Well, on the weekends there's the population of the greater Sacramento area, probably over a million now. And so Saturdays you'd get out there and the lake was packed. So it was just like, ah. So once I started making sense of Stacey's comment, it really started to become a discussion of, you know, is Sacramento where we really want to be? And I always feel somewhat obligated to say this when I talk about Sacramento because we absolutely loved our time there. And I actually think it's an amazing small, big city. You know, it's got all the big city stuff that you want to do and that sort of thing, but you go out to dinner and you'll bump into people. It's a great big city. And we had a really great experience there. But when we really thought about how we were spending our time and started to reflect on what we wanted, I remember saying to her, I was like, wow, what about Redding? And a lot of people feel like, because I was born and raised here, that I came home, you know, there's always that kind of assumption. But it was so much more conscious than just going home. It was really, truly recognizing, hey, we have two lakes that are within 20 minutes of almost any house in Redding. And not only do we have two lakes, but those two lakes get warm early and stay warm late. So you can participate in those lakes for long periods of time.

Yeah.

You got May to September pretty easily. So that was a factor. And then we learned — I grew up mountain biking and back when I was mountain biking in high school, there were only two spots you could ride. It was Clickabow trail out in Jones Valley and some trails in Whiskeytown. Well, Redding Trail Alliance over the last decade has expanded trails to two or three hundred miles of trails. And so I started to learn through friends that were here about the trail system. I was like, oh my goodness, like we have trails literally from my garage door. And so it took all of like a week and we were like, this is a very conscious decision that that's the kind of lifestyle we want.

Contrast that. So you're in traffic an hour and a half or something to Auburn, how long does it take you to get to that single track from your front door?

The closest trail access is probably a little less than 500 yards.

Okay. So a slow walk and you're there in five minutes.

Yeah. It's pretty spectacular and I already take it for granted. We've been back six years and I already don't go use it as much as I should. And it's something I'm very conscious of and try to at times give myself a kick in the rear to get back to being really intentional about what we have access to. And the other perspective that's my favorite is summer nights on the boat because I can come home from work and the moment he was 16, I taught my oldest like, hey, you can hook up the boat and have it ready and all that kind of stuff. So I literally would come home from work and everything would be ready and I would change into lake clothes and we could be on the water by five thirty and have five thirty to eight thirty out on Whiskeytown because it's so close living on the west side. And then we'd still be home by nine and get the kids to bed by nine o'clock. And I'm just like, that's so amazingly impossible in any other environment than what we have here in Redding.

That's one of the goals of the All Redding podcast is to bring awareness to people of just how special this place is. And you know, I've lived here a long time and left for education purposes, but came back and you do find yourself taking it for granted. What are some things you share with others about being intentional, living in this area, being aware of the lakes, the mountains, the trail systems? What are some things that you share with folks to try and get them to put the remote down, put the book down, whatever it happens to be and go outside and see what this place has to offer.

Yeah. You know, I think being intentional in general in life, when you have conversations with people a lot of times they'll give you a lot of advice, but then some of the advice never includes how. Right. And Stacey and I've gotten away with this. So I have to be very transparent that we're not doing this right now. But when we drove north to move to Redding, we wrote a list of everything we now have access to. And for the first couple of years, we were really intentional about like, Lassen National Park is 56 minutes from our house. And like, we need to be there and we need to go to Burney Falls and we need to go up to Whiskeytown Falls and we need to be out on the lake and to the trails and the Trinities. And I mean, it just goes on and on how much outdoor is within say 90 minutes of us. And so the how for us was initially very physical, like checking things off a list. Some other things that we've done — the house that we ended up buying, in the kitchen they had chalkboard painted on one of the cupboards. And I think they probably had like grocery lists or something on it. Well, for us, it's all the things we want to do. And we keep like a tick sheet of it. So we have Shasta Lake, Whiskeytown, lake standup paddleboard, all the different activities. And every time we go do one, we kind of put a tick sheet on there and over the years you start to establish kind of some goals, right? And so we aim to get on the two lakes at a minimum 15 times in the summer. And we've had years we haven't hit it, but I think just having ways of keeping it top of mind to go out and interact with what we have access to is a really key piece. I also think there are those of us that more naturally come to pushing ourselves to stay engaged with the outdoors and activity and movement. And I think carrying some responsibility to pay that forward or encourage others. I know in my workspace, I'm pretty intentional on Mondays when I walk in — what did you do outside over the weekend? And sometimes the answer from coworkers is nothing. But in my belief system, I'm like, if I ask that 52 weeks out of the year, somebody is going to move and get outside more than they would if I didn't ask that question.

Yeah. One of the things that we were chatting about before was how easy it is to get outside. It doesn't have to be this extreme thing, right? It doesn't have to be your first 10 mile trail run. Like you mentioned sunset at East Beach or Lema Ranch. You know, you have some perspective, having lived in the city, that getting to Clover Creek, getting to Lema Ranch, getting to watching the sunset at Whiskeytown's East Beach is like a 15 minute adventure. And it requires a car and a little bit of walking and that's it.

Yeah. And I truly believe when we do that, we immediately remind ourselves of the appreciation for the area. So it snowed a week ago, right? And it's 70 today. So I was dropping one of the boys off at school at U-Prep. And then I'm coming back down, heading west on Eureka Way and all these hills are just shining with snow and the snow is really low on the foothills and that sort of thing. And as I'm driving home, hands-free of course, I call Stacey and like, hey, get ready. Let's go look at the snow. And we didn't even get out and go hiking or do anything. But it was an 18 minute timeframe of like picking her up at the house, jumping in the car, driving up to the visitor center, getting out of the car and standing there for three minutes. And just reminding ourselves — I don't know that we went to remind ourselves, right. It's just that it's so beautiful. And in taking in everything earth has is something that I'm hugely passionate about. I'm so thankful that we've been able to spend a lot of family time on the road to national parks and things like that, because our country and this earth is just absolutely stunning. And we have that like right out our doorstep. We just have to make a choice to go engage with it. And that choice doesn't need to be a 10 mile run or a big mountain bike or climb Mount Shasta. Like, have you just gone out to Whiskeytown and walked the Oak Bottom trail? Or even our Sacramento River trail? That loop is stunning. And if you go at the right time of day, sunrise or sunset, it's absolutely gorgeous.

Cause sometimes I'll run after work. I mean, it's the best place to be. It's a little cooler down there by the water. It's gorgeous.

Yeah. So, you know, celebrating our accessibility and getting out there and reminding yourselves. And you and I've talked about this too, right? Like there's aspects of Redding that everybody likes to dwell on. And I find myself doing that same thing. I'll dwell on things. And all it takes is like, I went for a ride to top of the world — one of my easy access sort of rides right from my house. And I'm instantly reminded about what's great about here. Because every place on the earth has good and bad. My grandma used to always tell me the grass is greener thing. And you'll chase that grass is greener all over the world and not recognize what you have access to in your backyard.

Yeah. I'll get on my rants about this social issue or that political issue. And then I'll look out my door and I see Mount Lassen from that side of our house. And I live on the east side of town. So you're 56 minutes, I'm like 40 minutes from the entrance there, just up Highway 44. And you know, there was a writeup in some outdoor magazine or something I was looking at probably a year ago and it said the undiscovered mini Yellowstone, and that's Lassen. And we don't use it enough. So I love your idea of, okay, we're going to make a grocery list, but instead of having whatever milk and eggs on the grocery list, we're going to have some trail in Lassen park or just a sunset at East Beach, any of these simple things like that. And if you have kids, they make it easy to have fun because you have water and a rock, then you have a stone skipping contest. You have water and a dog, there's a stick that's going to need to be retrieved from that water. You don't need a lot. It's not expensive, but you couldn't buy it.

Right.

Okay. So then you guys make this conscientious decision to come back to Redding. It wasn't just a spot because this was where you had grown up. How did the transition go for the kids coming back here? You know, we talked a little bit about your oldest who was about 11 or so at the time you guys came back here — how to go from having been a city kid his whole life to being a more rural community kid.

Yeah. Well, you know, the first part of that journey that was so interesting is we moved into our house February 15th. And so about three weeks later, COVID shut the whole world down.

Oh, so you're February 15th, 2020.

Yeah. And so, you know, I think the biggest effect right away that we recognized — and this sounds bad, but it'll come out as a positive — was schools shutting down and all that kind of stuff. And you think about that for three kids that have grown up in Sacramento and like, they had connections, but connections like through me, right? Like, you know, they knew the kids of my friends and that sort of thing, but I wouldn't say they were their deepest friends, right? They left their deepest friends kind of behind, especially our oldest at 11. And I think that timeframe where they weren't in class all day, I look back and as much as that sucked, wow, we were outside a lot because we could be. I was seeing things on the news and getting text messages from friends in Sacramento — like the river trail was off limits. You weren't allowed to recreate. And so I look back and I'm like, we were supposed to move because that meant those boys spent the next five months really learning what it meant to have access to nature and outside and just go out and do whatever they wanted to do. And I remember they would have virtual class or whatever it was, and then you would have time and we'd be like, let's go. And I spent many hours with a laptop on our boat on Shasta Lake during that time. And so COVID for us was this starting point for our kids to fall in love with being outside a lot. And so like our oldest fell in love with fishing. And he found this thing that was so him, right. Something that was really deliberate and thought process oriented and patient and quiet. And like, that's so who he is. And he absolutely fell in love with that. And then our middle son fell absolutely in love with mountain biking and ends up like a total shredder on the bike. I can outclimb him just because of strength, but downhill he's gone.

Well, he hasn't learned yet that he might break. But even if he learns it at his age, learning it at his age means the doctor says six to eight weeks, but in four weeks he's pulling the cast off himself because he's fine. And he actually is fine. That's a superhuman healing power of that age group. I can hurt myself sleeping now.

Yeah. And I almost texted you this morning. He, in the PE mile, not pushing himself, he went 5:54 this morning, not pushing himself.

I nearly died two seconds faster than that. And it was only your big son who pulled me along. Okay. So the transition back here was confirmed, so to speak — the world shuts down, COVID happens and you guys have landed here about two weeks before that all happens. Has Stacey, I assume a better person than me — did she ever say I told you so, or has she always been very mellow and pleasant about moving back?

No, she's never really said that. I think she would agree that there probably was some hesitancy because of some of the stuff we always hear, right? She's a Bay area girl, so I think sometimes it's a little smaller and slower than she would prefer. The summers are hot and oh my gosh, that first summer we had the Zogg fire, which was not the biggest fire in the world, but we were eight weeks of smoke in our backyard. We were literally — I was shopping for houses out of state. And in that moment, I think I was the one, if anything, that was like, this was the wrong move. Because if we moved here for nature and then now I can't be out in it, like this is not the place for me to be. So if anything, reservation or anything came from me. And no, she never said like, I told you so. I think I asked her for a lot of years — it's been six years now, but for probably the first three years, I would ask her constantly, like, you know, are you happy here? Was this the right move for us? And I like that you used the word confirmed. Like there was a lot of stuff for us that was confirmed. The COVID piece was something that was confirmed. Seeing our kids growing up in a different way. And I actually love the fact that they've experienced both. Caleb has definitely made comments where he's like, I don't want to be in small town USA, but I don't want to be in a big city. And that just tells me that he has some perspective, and I don't know, had we stayed in Sacramento, that he maybe would have had as much value for something slower and simpler. Not saying it's better. It's just that perspective of — sometimes I mean, I was in Sacramento earlier this week for work and there's a little part of me that goes, ah, kind of missed the rat race a little bit. But then you come back home and you see the mountains and it takes 12 minutes to get across town. That's pretty great too.

Yeah. For me, I don't mind being bold enough to say it's better. It is better. It's better because life is finite. We, a long life is still finite. Whatever it is, you've got a certain number of days and minutes that you get to have on this earth. And it's better to not spend them in a car. It is not as meaningful of life. It is not as full of life to sit in a car and commute. I have a dear friend, he's an attorney in LA and on the days that he's in the office, if he's seeing family, friends after work, he's spending three hours round trip to have a meal. He'll spend more time in the car by a factor of 200% than he'll actually spend breaking bread with his people. Yeah, that's not better. And I'm not suggesting there's not benefits. Does he have a thousand great restaurants to choose from? Sure. He does, but learn to cook, man. You can make something just as good at home with a YouTube video. I mean, it's just better. I don't mind visiting them. I like visiting them. There's fun stuff to go do, see a sporting event, amusement park, access a big airport, whatever you need. But it's great to leave. I love when the big cities are in my rear view and I'm moving away. Okay. So then if you're capital-P passionate about coaching, let's talk about some of your coaching. Why are you passionate about coaching? It sounds like — here's what I'm thinking as I listen to you — you're passionate about coaching because of the human element of it.

A hundred percent. I once had on my LinkedIn bio that I'm passionate about helping other people improve. And so coaching is an element of that, running is an element of that. And I think I do tend to speak myself or others kind of speak into me, the running coach element of it. But even in my workplace, you know, a year or so ago, I took on a project that was really about developing people. Because it just — I don't know where it started. I genuinely don't know where it started with me, but I feel so strongly that we're supposed to be here for one another, to help other people. And so coaching is kind of this outlet towards that. When I see you and Noreen run faster, the times are cool and that's what we report. But the joy you get out of self-improvement — if that self-improvement was mountain biking or walking or learning or any of that kind of stuff — if I can play a piece in that, that tends to be what brings me the most happiness. So when Jim asked me that question, have you ever considered coaching? Of course, I thought of that question through the lens of coaching runners. What I didn't realize is how much it actually just meant helping people.

Yeah. We live in this time where we can be quick to forget that it's never been like this before. We've never been more distant from one another, more locked in on a device, a screen, a phone, a computer, whatever. They're a needful tool, but they also create distance with actual community, actual human interaction, actual interaction with the nature around us. You know, you go back not very far — so not very far that there are pictures of it — where life required you to interact with the earth to survive and to thrive. And then to do that alone was virtually impossible. So you needed a community. I think that's still true for the human condition, but we can be distracted from that truth. People need people.

A hundred percent. Yeah. I think we need to be outside. We need to be active and we need connection.

Right, right. I agree. Okay. So then let's dial down on some of this coaching stuff. So you coach youth athletes in high school and you coach adult athletes through On The Run Endurance. Talk to me about the difference between coaching kids and adults.

They're both so fun. You know, I spent so many years coaching adults. And so moving back here and getting the opportunity to coach at UPrep was actually kind of this full circle. I started coaching at Central Valley High School like the moment I graduated and then drifted. And then to come back to coaching kids again. I coached the Delta Hawks in Sacramento, that was kind of the start of getting back into the kids thing. I just love how open — well, not all kids are open, but maybe they don't intend to be open, but they can't cover things up as well. Right. Like as adults, we tend to mask a lot of what's going on in our life, a lot of our stress. But kids show it. Like, you know if a kid's having a bad day or not. And there's such an ability to connect with them and care for them. Seeing a kid come out of seven or eight periods of academics, and maybe they had a really hard chemistry test and they're stressing about it, they just show it so much right on their body language that you can kind of be for them and say, hey, rough day. And they're like, yeah. And they just open up so much. So when I compare the two, you know, adults don't let you in quite as much as maybe kids do, but then coaching the kids has made me so much better with the adults because it's almost like I can see through the adults even better because of the opportunity I get daily with the kids.

So do you find yourself able to ask better questions of the adults because you're with the kids, to draw out what's going on with them? Which direction does it flow — do kids teach you and then you're better with adults, or both?

Oh, I think kids teach me and then I'm better with adults. A hundred percent. Like even at the training level, you hear me all the time at practice talking about the kids at the adult practice, right? Because we're trying things here, we're implementing things there. But especially with the engagement piece, just really like how to ask questions. Cause you know, if you ask a kid, how's your day? Good. That's all you're getting. So you do have to up your skills on engaging with kids. And even though they might wear it on their sleeve a little and you can see it, getting them to open up and talk to you takes a different skill. So then learning that skill and having to — especially because again, you're spending 10 hours a week with them — that skill starts to become a little more refined and then you can go over to coaching adults and definitely use those skills.

Okay. So one of the things that you chatted to me about when we were talking about coaching and coaching philosophy that really changed out of just coaching to life — you mentioned that you want to inspire people to be a forever learner. Maybe you could talk to us about how that looks in coaching. You talk about continual program changes, and so maybe you could say more about what that looks like both in and outside of the sport world.

Yeah. I think you know, like in business, life, whatever, you have to have morals, core values, foundational elements to who you are, what your belief systems are and those types of things. But kind of how you deploy training to any athlete probably has to be a little bit different for each athlete. If you are a forever learner, you're trying new things — athletes like it or not, athletes are kind of guinea pigs all the time. And you're trying different things because ultimately you're trying to find your best way to help someone improve. And so one of the things that's been really — some might say it drives them a little nuts — I will change things quite a bit. I'll see something that I'm not totally happy with and I'll go investigate it. And I find myself to be really good at networking in the sense that I am just fearless to pick up the phone and call the most famous coach on earth and say, can I get 10 minutes? And because of that, I've been able to continue to learn, make changes to our program. And the program continues to get better and better. And my hope in that — and I come out and I tell the kids this — look at a four year period and look at how we were doing things four years ago and look at how we're doing things now. Look at the fact that we're better because of it. And hopefully what you see when you look at your coach is someone who is constantly in pursuit of being a little bit better every day. And that's never stopped learning, never stopped growing. And if they take that skill with them — and it has nothing to do with running — that will serve them really, really well. Just keep getting a little better every day.

Right now that's completely true. That translates to how you interact with your family, how you do professionally, what you do in your community, your friend groups, all of that. So have you been at UPrep long enough now that you've coached someone all the way through freshmen to senior year?

Yeah. So Caleb would have been the first cycle of that. And so this year was my fifth season. Got all new freshmen this year. And we're definitely graduating off, right. Which has its own lessons in it. You know, you take leaders that have been with you for four years and they graduate. And if you're not backfilling on what your culture is and your systems and that sort of thing, you know, it can kind of ebb and flow quite a bit. But yeah, I love actually right where we're at now. The early times were fun, but it was very — it's like starting a business. You're just grinding and trying to build something that someone would be willing to buy into. Now it's like it's built and it's just how do you keep it improving as you lose people and gain new people.

Right, right. Yeah. I don't know that I personally like it cause I compare my run times to your UPrep runners and they just keep getting faster and I just keep getting older. It's tough. So talking — you use that phrase ebb and flow — the popularity of running, let's talk about running specifically as we come toward the end of our time together. Running seems to ebb and flow in popularity, right? Like it was so iconic to run in, you know, whatever that timeframe was, late seventies maybe into the early eighties. I can picture the Nike shoes that were the running shoes at the time. So iconic that the movie Forrest Gump of course has that scene where he jogs across America and the jogging craze. Where's running at now? Is it ebbing? Is it flowing? What's going on with running?

Yeah, I think it's either flowing or headed in that direction. You know, the interesting thing with running is during darker times, you know, recession or anything like that, running will boom because at the end of the day you need a pair of shoes, right? And you can step out your door. What we're seeing right now in running, I think is the start of something that's really flowing a lot. There's some things that people are really enjoying as a lifestyle about running. And so when you think about running, most people think about road runners, right? They do those races, they do a marathon, all the stuff you kind of hear about. Maybe then you mentally cross over into track and field because we see it in the Olympics. But there's all these other facets of running. So trail running is exploding. Just people wanting to be out in nature. And most people — what I've seen is they'll go on a journey with running. You know, you get the beginner runner, like the couch to 5k person. And they'll do that and they'll grow. And maybe one day they grow into doing a half marathon. If they really get into it, they do a marathon. Maybe they do a few. A lot of marathoners will get on this cycle of doing marathons for a while. And then they tend to stall out and they're like, kind of tired of doing marathons, but going back to a 5k now feels like it's not much. And they'll find themselves attracted to trail running. And trail running is just like such a happy place, really great community of people. It's gorgeous. It's a really good experience. All the pressure of like, what's my pace and all that stuff kind of starts to dissolve away. And it really becomes a lot about enjoyment and community. So trail running is really exploding. And then the youth part of it, which I think is newer — a few years back, 15 years back maybe, there were like no 20-somethings running. You would go to the races and look at race results, and that 20 to 29 year old age group, the times were very, very slow, which was indicative of just not a lot of people doing it. Now you're seeing that change. And I think it's because of kind of the youth and high school scenes — the youth club scene has really exploded. And then what's happening in the high school scene is absolutely phenomenal. The times people are running. A year ago, the UPrep boys team got sixth at the state championship. When you look at their results, if you look back at the previous 20 years, they probably would have been on the podium at the state championship at least eight or nine times. They probably would have won a state title two or three times, and they were sixth. And that was considered the best team we had ever had come through UPrep. So everybody's just getting faster. They call it trackflation. And the times are absolutely absurd. I mean, we had a high school girl in Utah a year ago, senior, ran 4:22 or 4:23 for the 1600.

Oh, that is — that's almost a mile for non-running people. It's like 1,607 or something.

1,609 is a mile. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, the times that are being run are just absurd, which again, it's indicative of participation, enjoyment, excitement around the sport, which means we are moving in the direction of flowing now. I think our coaches across the nation have the biggest responsibility ever right now, because I do truly believe the world is a better place with more runners in it. Our job is to not mess this flow up and become so obsessed with the outcomes and the results and the times that these kids see their value as whatever their most recent time was. And that's where I go back to the coaching piece of like, this is not just about how many miles you put in and what times you run. It's about what you're learning and what you carry into life from it. And if we do that, running is a huge exploration opportunity. You're traveling, you can get out of the car, throw on a pair of shoes and explore somewhere. So I hope that all of our coaches across the country, as exciting as the times are, are balancing that with just helping kids fall in love with running so that we have more runners in the world.

Yeah. It sounds like all those coaches need a dose of what Jim Middleton gave to you when he invited you to come out and run for Shasta College, which is just fall in love with running again. You know, personally, I like running. I don't love running. My wife loves running, but I love running with her. I love the idea of overcoming difficulty. It's inherently difficult. And that brings me to kind of the last thing that I wanted to make sure we chatted about today, which is this idea that running is for everybody. So you do private coaching as well, and your coaching company is called On The Run Endurance, right? So somebody who might be listening to this heard something like couch to 5k — maybe that's slightly less frightful than you and I talking about half marathons and marathons and these amazing times that these kids are putting up. Talk about coaching the running that is for everybody.

Yeah. It's a sweet spot and I find myself bouncing around, right. I love working with someone who's high performance and that sort of stuff. And then I'll bounce back and I'm like, I love the joy of introducing someone to the sport. And we talk to the kids about it a lot because have a high school kid try to go convince another high school kid that joining the cross country team sounds like a good idea. Like, why would I run? Most people kind of have that — running was used as punishment when we were kids. Like we have all this bad stuff associated with running. A bear's chasing me — that's when I run. Yeah, you'll hear that. You'll hear like, I only run if I'm chasing a ball, those types of things. Inherently running is actually like a very joyful thing. So go to a playground, like a little kids playground. You'll see a kid doing one of two things — they're sitting still in some fashion, maybe they're on a swing or going down a slide, or they're sprinting. Both are very joyful — either relaxing and joyful play or joyfully active. Like they're not suffering through running. So we inherently enjoy the act of running and the act of moving and the act of being outside. And we have a perception that it's supposed to be hard or it's physically daunting. I think we also collectively as a running community have a responsibility to continue to make running the most welcoming community in the world. The other reason people don't start running is they feel intimidated. I feel like I'm not like the rest of them. Maybe they're carrying a little bit extra weight. Maybe they're slower than that person. And the thing that I absolutely love about running is this — pick the distance, mile, 5k, marathon, whatever you want to do. If we go out there and our times are astronomically different, my son runs a 5k in say 16 minutes and you run it in 21 minutes and I run it in 23 minutes — very different times. But at the finish line, we are all exactly the same. We pushed ourselves. We went through the same kind of pain, suffering. If we both go out there and we put in the same effort, our races were exactly the same. And that commonality — if you walk a 5k and that's really hard for you, or you run a 5k really, really fast and that's hard for you, it was still hard for you. You still went through all the same emotions, challenges, that sort of thing. And I think that's what bonds a running community together. The reason that I said I think the world's a better place with more runners in it is two things. One thing that's really interesting about running is it's one of the most giving communities in the world. So when you think about most of the runs that you sign up to do, there's a nonprofit beneficiary. Probably all of them. And if you total all that, 15 years ago that was the biggest donation pool in the world. And then the other thing that I always love sharing — a friend of mine from Sacramento, her husband was way high up in the army ranks, and she kind of never knew where she was going to be from one month to the next. And I remember one day going, that's got to be hard. Like, how have you handled that? And she was like, you know what? Everywhere in the world I went, I would look up a running club and I instantly had family. And so we have a responsibility to make sure our sport stays that sort of welcoming, that sort of giving, because they go back to the three things I mentioned earlier — I think we're supposed to be outside, I think we're supposed to be active, and I think we're supposed to be connected.

So that — I don't like using it as a slogan. This is not a slogan. It's a way of life. But you know, as you connect it with OTR, On The Run, and your coaching and me having been one of the people who has experienced that coaching — there is great connection. There is great community connected with you taking a friendship out of the running experience. But you have this idea. Let's go with this idea: live what you love. What does that mean to live what you love?

Well, first of all, I have to give credit where credit's due. Most of the great ideas and great things in our family have come from my wife, Stacey. And even the words On The Run was one of her ideas. It's a play on words in the sense that, yeah, we run a lot, it's a part of our life, but we love being that family that's on the run and on the go all the time. You know, people complain all the time about being so busy chasing kids here and there and all kinds of stuff. We try to stay very connected with the fact that that's an amazing opportunity. That is a short period of time in our life — those 18 years with our boys are going to go by fast. And we're going to wish we could be chasing them to a game or a soccer park or getting them to a dance or doing something like that. So on the run — it was Stacey's idea and this framework of a dual meaning. Live what you love was also something that she came up with. Have her on the podcast next then. I know, she's the brains behind it all. And I don't really remember the first time she said it, but she said it and then it became something we wrote down. It became something that I started signing off my emails. And I think for me, that was like a level of encouraging people to think: are you living your life doing things that you love doing? And I guess you could sum that up as, are you being intentional? And so that's what live what you love means. And it really — it's kind of a message to everyone around us, but in our house it's a deep message to our kids that you can spend your life in a lot of different ways. And us having that statement in our household of live what you love — I'm hoping that our kids take with them that if they ever find themselves in pursuit of something that is not in alignment with that, they should be checking themselves a little bit and say, is this how I should be? Is this the direction of my life? And you and I both know there's going to be times in your life you got to grind. And we don't shy away from that with our kids or anyone that I'm influencing. There's going to be times you got to buckle down and get through some hard stuff. And it might not all be stuff you love doing. But in the big picture of your time spent, which is so short, make sure you're spending that time doing stuff you love doing with people that you love.

There's not a better way to conclude our time together. If people want to connect with you for coaching, where can they do that?

A website is ontherunendurance.com. Email address is just dusty — D-U-S-T-Y — at ontherunendurance.com.

Hey, live what you love. Thanks for being on the All Redding podcast.

Thank you for having me.