What I'm Actually Building

An answer to the question I keep fumbling.

At TrailCon this June, someone asked me what I do.

I have been asked this a few hundred times and I still do not have a good answer. What comes out is a list. I host a podcast. Well, two podcasts. I also run a network of about thirty-five shows. I write a newsletter. I do some consulting, mostly market research and sponsorship strategy. I invest a little. I co-founded a peer group for founders.

I watched his face while I said it. There is a specific expression people make when they are deciding whether you are very good at many things or not finishing any of them. He was polite about it.

The problem is not that the list is wrong. The list is accurate. The problem is that a list is not an answer, and I have been giving people a list for two years because I had not done the work of figuring out what the list adds up to.

So I did the work. Here it is.

Think about how much money moves through this sport. Shoes. Races. Gels. Watches. Coaching. Apparel. Recovery. Nutrition. Billions of dollars, hundreds of companies, thousands of people who wake up every day and go build something in running.

Now think about what those people have.

Athletes have everything. Agents, coaches, physios, sponsors (well…), a dozen outlets covering their results, a whole apparatus that exists to support the person crossing the line.

The people building the companies have almost nothing. There is no trade publication that operators actually read. There is no one research firm that studies this category. There is no banker who understands why a shoe brand and a nutrition brand are not the same business.

In most industries this stuff exists. It is boring and unglamorous and it is the reason those industries function. Endurance sport never built any of it, because for most of its history it was not big enough to need it. Now it is.

That gap is what I have been building into, one piece at a time, mostly without noticing.

I started the podcast in 2019 to ask people why they run. That was the whole idea. No strategy, no business model, no plan beyond wanting to have the conversation.

Nearly five hundred episodes later, I have talked to Olympians, first-time marathoners, founders, coaches, and a lot of people who are simply obsessed with the process of getting better. Somewhere in there, without meaning to, I built a map of this industry. Who is building what. Who is honest. Which brands understand their customer and which ones are guessing. Where the money comes from and where it goes.

Then, at the end of May 2025, I left a ten-year career at InsideTracker and bet on myself full time.

Everything I have built since is a different way of using that map.

For The Long Run is the company, and it is also the show. It is about the heart of endurance, the why underneath the miles.

Long Run Labs is what happened when one podcast turned out not to be enough. It is a show about the business of the outdoor industry. It is also a network, 35+ endurance and outdoor podcasts reaching roughly a million downloads a month, where I handle sponsorship and strategy so independent creators can spend their time making the show instead of selling it.

Two shows. One is the heart. The other is the engine.

That is the media layer. It is the most visible thing I do and it is maybe a third of the work.

Research. This month I ran twenty-two hundred prompts across five AI models to find out how endurance brands actually get discovered and recommended, because nobody had done it and every brand I talked to was guessing. I design seeding programs. I’ve co-organized in-person market research programs for a billion dollar brand. I build campaign measurement for brands who want to know whether a sponsorship worked, not whether it converted in thirty days. This is the research firm that does not exist, and speed and reach are my differentiators.

Capital. I write angel checks into early-stage endurance, outdoor, and health companies. More often, I make introductions between founders and the handful of investors who actually understand this category. There are more good founders in this sport than there is smart money, and the mismatch is expensive.

The room. I co-founded The Huddle with Jason Fitzgerald and Ross Yellin, because the “how do I work ON my business, not IN my business?” is real and most founders in this industry are solving it alone. And I co-launched Trail House, a documentary project following post-collegiate trail runners in their quest to become sponsored athletes, because someone should be telling those stories while they are happening rather than after.

Here is the sentence I could not produce at TrailCon.

I am building the connective tissue between the people building endurance companies and the media, research, and capital they cannot get anywhere else.

Not a media company. Not a fund. Not an agency. The connective tissue.

Every piece feeds the others. The podcast gives me the relationships. The relationships make the research honest. The research makes the consulting worth paying for. The consulting shows me which companies are actually working, which tells me where to put money. The money and the advice deepen the relationships. It is a loop, and it only works because it is a loop.

This part matters more than the rest, because a person with seven projects owes you an account of the boundary.

I'm not building a media company that chases scale. I could double the network by taking every show that asked. I do not, because the value here is trust, and trust does not survive a growth target.

I'm not building a fund. I invest my own money, in small amounts, in companies I understand. If that ever changes I will tell you. And I am already working as an advisor for a couple of funds.

I'm not building an agency. I take a small number of consulting engagements a year, in categories I know, for people I want to work with. I turn down more than I accept, and I am aware that saying so is exactly what someone would say either way.

I'm not trying to be a media personality. The show is a means. It always was.

In a year, I want the research arm to be the thing this industry cites when it argues about anything. I want a brand deciding on sponsorship strategy to check what we published before they check anything else.

In five years, I want an operator in this sport to have what an operator in any grown-up industry has. Somewhere to read. Somewhere to look things up. Someone to call. I do not think one person builds all of that. I do think somebody has to start.

If you are building something in endurance, outdoor, or health, I want to hear about it. If you are a brand trying to figure out whether any of this marketing works, that is the question I find most interesting in the world right now. If you are an investor looking at this category and wondering who to trust, I probably know.

And if you have been listening for years and you had no idea any of this existed behind the show, thank you for listening. That was sort of the point.

You can reach me at [email protected]. More about all of it here.

Jon