Tad and his dad
“I know of no greater life purpose than to perish in attempting the great & impossible.”
Friedrich Nietzche
Meet Tad & His Dad…
Some fathers and sons bond over video games. Some bond over football. Tad and Bryan bond over shared suffering.
It started a few years ago with Spartan races, those delightfully punishing obstacle courses designed by people who apparently look at normal running and think, “This is not dangerous enough!”
For Tad, obstacle course racing became more than a weekend hobby. He won the national championship for his age group two years in a row, qualifying for the U.S. National OCR Team. This summer, he will compete with the team in Ireland. When he is not racing, working out in the gym, admiring his muscles in the mirror, or attempting ill-advised fancy flips on A-frame obstacles, one of which resulted in a broken nose, Tad is focused on high school. He is currently ranked first in his class and aims to attend MIT in the fall of 2027.
Bryan, on the other hand, has not yet been a podium finisher, except in competitions of charm and congeniality. What he lacks in athletic accolades, however, he makes up for in charisma and an alarming desire to do hard things. (He assures me that being married to me is NOT one of those hard things.) He gets up at 4 a.m. six days a week to workout. He has completed countless Spartan trifectas (three races in a single weekend), run the Utah Beast while unknowingly battling COVID, and picked up a tick in Ohio that later tested positive for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Rather than taking mishaps as signs to find a new hobby, Bryan, the eternal optimist, works with his BFF, “Coach Claude” (AI) to design even more dangerous escapades, like ultramarathons, because what could be more fun than running ’til the soles of your feet bleed and your toenails fall off?
At the heart of their shared suffering is misogi–a Japanese idea that once a year you should do something so difficult that there is a fifty-percent chance of failure. All of Tad and His Dad’s mini-misogis are leading them toward one ginormous misogi: Cocodona 250 in May 2027: two hundred and fifty miles on foot across Arizona. That’s what he’s talking about in this video taken at mile 99 of the High Hope 200K.
This is the place where I, mother of Tad, wife of BT, and crew chief of both, chronicle their journey as I see it. (Despite the fact that Tad argues that I am an unreliable narrator, a storyteller with a skewed sense of reality, I maintain that I’m the only rational one in the group.) Here you will find race recaps, training updates, finish-line photos, trail stories, and the kind of memories that usually end with, “Well, THAT was the hardest thing I’ve EVER done.”