Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track Podcast. I'm your host, Finn Melanson, and this is a two-part episode from Conversations recorded at the 2024 running event in Austin, Texas, this past November. First, I'm joined by friend Tim Tullofson, who provides a behind-the-scenes look, if you will, of his own event, The Mammoth Trail Fest, which takes place annually in September.

Then Lauren Osborne, co-founder of the Exchange Running Collective in Nashville, Tennessee,

joins the show to offer perspective on the cutting edge workings of brick and mortar community-oriented running stores.

Before we get started, though, thank you to Keene for making our trip to

TRE possible. Stay tuned in 2025 as we have a really cool content series with them

debuting in the second half of the year. With that, though, let's get into it. This is our last

but absolutely not least interview at the 2024 running event here in Austin.

We are at our booth just adjacent to Keene's little makeshift headquarters here,

joined by a friend and sometimes collaborator on the single track podcast, Tim Tullifson.

Tim, how are you doing 46-ish hours into this industry trade show Bonanza dude is way easier than race directing so right now

i'm feeling spry does that give you a certain body armor and mental armor like when you're

three like what what does it feel like to be an accomplished race director in the sense that you've had

like three under your belt now confidence comes from competency and i think I am going into the subsequent years a little more confident

just knowing that the our bare minimum metrics of like safety and like satisfaction of our runners,

all these things are being met. I continue to draw from that. So I'm getting less and less

insecure and nervous going into each one. Thinking a bit about race directing for a second, and

this is a point of view that I do want to tie back to the conversation. If I think of a theme

at this year's running event, it is the tech sheet versus the point of view. Like you think about

people that will stop by the booths. Historically, the primary conversation is like, let's talk

about the features of the shoe. Let's talk about the pack. Let's talk about what materials went into

the apparel. But then you have brands like satisfy that come in and added to that primary

conversation is like, we are punk rockers,

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