Tim from Final Surge met with Colin and Danny to discuss Final Surge - a platform for coaches and athletes to track their training. Tim shared his background, and how he came to create Final Surge, and the three of them compared Final Surge to its main competitor, Training Peaks.
Participants
Tim is from Jefferson City, Missouri. He’s a co-founder of Final Surge, an online training platform. He studied Management Information Systems at University, which is mainly business with a little bit of programming and computer science. Tim is based in Raleigh
Key points
Tim’s athletic career
- Tim ran 5k and 10k events in college [03:22]
- Tim’s strategy for getting enough volume in his training while managing his Achilles injuries was to do a lot of his running in single workouts, rather than splitting it into two runs. This meant he would do a 20 mile run almost every day, and a long run of 28-30 miles on the weekend. [05:02]
- Tim gauged his easy run pace by doing his runs on a loop of single track and gravel trails in Umstead State Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, and estimating he was going roughly 7 minute per mile pace [05:59]
- Tim’s focus in triathlon was Ironman distance events [11:30]
- Tim’s first Ironman was in Louisville in 2008, which he found to be a great intro to the Ironman distance because it was a super flat course and had a current in the swim [12:54]
- Tim was motivated to transition from running to triathlon by his friends, who had gotten into cycling. They decided to meet up and do a triathlon together, and Tim’s first race was a sprint triathlon in Raleigh. [14:11]
- Tim competes in one race a year, the coach’s mile at the Sir Walter Raleigh Miler, and a half marathon on Thanksgiving [21:00]
- Tim can still run a half marathon in under 1 hour 18 minutes, and a mile in 4 minutes 43 seconds [21:43]
- Tim found that training for triathlons caused him to miss out on spending time with his kids when they were growing up, and it also made him tired. This was a big reason why he decided to stop training for triathlons. [22:42]
FinalSurge’s competitive advantage
- Tim from Final Surge believes that other platforms that were built around the same time as Final Surge were built by people who didn’t really understand the athlete and coach ecosystem, because they hired programmers to build the platform. In contrast, Tim built Final Surge himself, so he had a better understanding of what the platform should look like. [28:39]
- Final Surge has over half a million users worldwide and 10+ employees [29:32]
- Final Surge aims to keep its interface simple and only show users the data they need, rather than overwhelming them with metrics. [30:37]
- Tim and Daniel R. agree that being honest with prospective customers and telling them to go to a competitor if you can’t meet their needs is a good sales strategy, as it builds credibility and trust. [32:46]
- Tim’s goal with Final Surge is to build a platform that has everything a coach needs, so they don’t have to use three or four different platforms [41:30]
- Final Surge allows users to keep their account free of charge, meaning they can access their data at any time, unlike Training Peaks which charges users to access their data [44:12]
Final Surge’s business model
- Final Surge makes its revenue from coaches, who pay a fixed monthly fee to coach up to 100 athletes. The fee is $39 a month, and $15 per block of 50 athletes after that. [50:51]
- Tim built Final Surge to be cost effective for runners, who often don’t have a lot of disposable income. [52:05]
FinalSurge’s userbase
- Final Surge’s userbase is 75% runners, 15-20% triathletes and 5% cyclists [34:45]
Problems with Training Peaks
- Colin Cook had a frustrating experience using Training Peaks, where he would ask for feature requests and they would go into a black hole. He feels that Training Peaks, as the 500 pound gorilla in the space, doesn’t care about its customers. [35:17]
- Danny and Colin Cook have both experienced negative effects from chasing CTL (Chronic Training Load), such as injury. They agree that it’s a meaningless number from an algorithm [38:04]
Expensive equipment in triathlon
- Tim found that in the sport of triathlon, there was so much technology in the sport that was based on what you could afford. If you didn’t have a $10,000-$15,000 bike, $2,000-$3,000 wheels and a $500 wetsuit, you were at a significant disadvantage [53:42]
- Tim prefers running to triathlon because in running, everyone has pretty much the same pair of shoes, so the results are determined by who is the fittest. In triathlon, you can buy an advantage with an expensive bike [54:11]
- Tim and Danny agree that triathlon is a sport where having a higher disposable income gives you a significant advantage, because you can afford better equipment such as bikes and wheels [55:04]
- Tim knows a college coach who tests his athletes using different brands of super shoes on a treadmill, taking lactate readings. One of his athletes found a specific shoe that dropped a minute off her 5k time compared to other brands. [56:36]
Running shoes
- Tim is a big fan of running shoes with new foam technology, such as the Nike Invincible Threes, which have a large block of Pebax foam. They have saved him from injury and improved his recovery since he started wearing them in his late 30s. [58:16]
- Tim raced as an elite marathoner in a pair of Adidas flats, the lightest shoes he could find, which weighed five or six ounces. It felt like running barefoot on concrete [59:30]
- Tim thinks that the benefit of modern running shoes comes from the foam, not the carbon plate. People make the mistake of wearing carbon plated shoes for every run, which can lead to injury. Tim recommends only wearing them for one threshold workout and one other run a week, and saving them for racing. [60:21]
Tim’s treadmill
- Tim loves the Wahoo treadmill because it has a solid build quality, with a beefy motor that means it doesn’t shake around and adjusts to the user’s running speed within 2-3 seconds, compared to 9-10 seconds on his old treadmill [61:26]
- Tim thinks the Wahoo treadmill is great because it has a solid build and a massive motor, meaning it doesn’t shake around and the speed increases quickly when you change the speed, making it ideal for doing interval workouts [62:33]
- Colin Cook thinks that the Final Surge treadmill could be a game changer for indoor running, similar to what smart trainers did for indoor cycling. [63:52]
Tim’s health
- Tim had heart surgery to correct a condition called AVNRT, where the electric pulse of his heartbeat exits the flap in his heart where it’s supposed to exit, and goes somewhere it shouldn’t. The condition only affects 0.5% of people. [64:58]