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syndicaterunning
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the log · issue no. 019 · september 2026
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the human on the other end
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the
team runrun
coaching platform has almost 400 coaches to pick from, and the
interesting thing is what it refuses to be at that scale. instead
of an authoritarian assembly line of the team runrun “method” it
is a franchise built on many different personalities and training
philosophies.
coaches set their own prices, keep their own methods, write their
own communication terms, and take home nearly all of the money.
trr runs the business underneath and sends them runners. nine
years in, more than 10,000 runners through the platform, not a
dollar of outside capital.
matt urbanski started it in 2017 with julie urbanski and dave
scheibel, after quitting his job money management, hiking long
trails, enrolling in nursing school, getting licensed, and then
never working a shift. he had about fifteen runners on his roster
by the time he graduated nursing school. he took the runners.
the early version of the marketplace had tiered packages and
capped call limits, which is a reasonable way to sell a product
but a poor way to sell relationships. what replaced it is a single
rule, and that swap explains the company better than any mission
statement could.
what surprised us most was the vetting process to sign up hundreds
of coaches. trr has onboarded professional runners with forty
thousand followers who could not keep a client, and a 4:30
marathoner from columbus, ohio who built a roster of thirty. so
the screening process isn't for racing or influence
credentials. it's for something harder to measure, and once a
month twenty-five coaches get on a call together to sharpen it on
each other's hardest cases.
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once a month, twenty-five coaches working through each
other's hardest cases.
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one of us was coached by matt for three years, which is the
disclosure and also the reason we wanted this story. but here is
what never came up in any of it. last october matt covered 159
miles in a day at the 24 hour world championships in albi, france,
finishing 19th in the world and first among americans. we found
that out afterward, on our own.
and that tracks. the entire thing is built so the attention points
at the runner, which starts with the founder keeping his own out
of the way. race times and perfectly structured coaching templates
turned out to be a weak signal for whether someone can actually
coach, and the roster got built accordingly. if you're
wondering what it's like to work with a team runrun coach,
that's the tell to look for. they'd rather talk about
your race than theirs.
we also asked matt about ai, because everyone is asking about ai
coaching. matt's answer was not the one you would expect from
a guy whose whole business is human coaches and endurance
performance.
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battle cry
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season one is in the books. 105 runners, 25 clubs, one august.
20,956 miles and 936,969 feet of climbing between you.
miles was never in question. meshingomesia track club closed at
2,579 as a club, with cameron dean balser putting up 896.5 of them
on his own. phil dodyk went 503 and tj dailey went 454 behind him.
three of the top five individual mileage boards in the entire
competition came out of marion, indiana.
vert was the opposite. wet bandits took it at 201,703 feet with
wetter bandits at 192,726, which is 8,977 feet between two clubs
from the same city after a full month of climbing. it was not
settled until the last days. the part worth sitting with is that
wet bandits ran 943.9 miles to wetter bandits' 1,532.9. they
won on vert while running 589 fewer miles, which tells you exactly
what kind of month it was in seattle. mike groenewegen led
everyone at 127,444 feet across 396 miles, roughly one out of
every seven feet climbed by anyone all season. between the two
bandits clubs, 42 percent of all the vert in the competition.
worth saying plainly: one of us runs with wet bandits. the boards
are pulled straight from strava and we don't touch them, but
you should hear that from us rather than find it out.
if you ran for a winning club, watch your inbox tomorrow. we need
a mailing address from you and then prizes go out.
we're sitting september out of formal competition. botrc is
not going anywhere. season one was the question of whether anyone
would actually show up for this, and 105 of you answered it.
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common interests
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for anyone thinking about signing up for a race after toughing it
out through battle of the run clubs, here is a great site to help
if one of the now eight world marathon majors is interesting to
you.
marathonballot.com
has built an easy to use set of applications that can help you
plan and navigate the ballot entry system, as the competition to
register is just as intense as botrc.
the site has some good tools for education on the series and the
specifics of each race. with berlin and chicago on the near
horizon to serve up some more inspiration, it might be time to
start thinking about your 2027 racing plans now.
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that's season one. if you know someone who spent august
quietly stacking vert, forward this to them. if you'd rather
see something else in here, hit reply and tell us.
midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.
come run with us.
graham + mark
syndicate running
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