¶ Meet TJ Daly and His Running Journey
So you're thinking about running , but not sure how to take the first step . My name is Brian Patterson and I'm here to help . Welcome to Brian's Rompod . Hey there , fellow runners and fitness enthusiasts .
Welcome back to another episode of brian's rampart , and I'm your host , brian patterson , and today we've got an inspiring guest who's sure to ignite your passion for running . Joining us is tj daly , the founder of the mtc club , and I will find out what the m means soon .
Tj's journey from rekindling his love for running in 2012 to establishing a thriving running community is nothing short of remarkable . We'll dive into his personal transformation , the inception and growth of the MTC Club , and we'll explore some of the club's notable achievements , including the victory in the Great American 5000 virtual race .
So lace up your running shoes and let's hit the ground running with this captivating conversation . Welcome , tj .
Thank you so much . It's nice to be here . Thank you for all my fans out there .
I couldn't get enough of you first time , great . Right now take two . So as I sue with most of my guests is I just like to find out a bit about your relationship with running growing up through high school .
So so this is an interesting story because I was not somebody who gravitated towards running Initially . I wasn't somebody that was very good at running .
I went to a very small private school and in elementary school , a family who has some runners I'll talk about later but had a son who was in my grade and they established a cross country team all school , so it was one of the few sports we played . That was about fifth grade and I was exposed to it .
I , you know , I had a class of 12 , so you would think I would be in the top five on a cross-country team . But even with that small yeah , you know , I kind of I was kind of on that cusp um , but I think something cool that is kind of retold later in my story was that that became my friend group .
So I wasn't necessarily going to practices or going to meets excited about executing the event at that time , but I got to hang out with my friends and so that was a real catalyst for me when it came to high school . I of course got better over those years , but was still not near the upper echelon at all .
However , at the end of my eighth grade year , my middle school closed and so I had to go from a class of 12 to a class of 400 .
Oh right .
Right and I ran cross country that freshman year kind of as a way to help me with that transition from that small school to a larger public school . So it served me really well there .
But because I didn't have that passion at the time because I didn't see the progress that I wanted to see , that was kind of where my relationship with running ended was after my freshman at least for me in time , after my freshman year of high school , again struggling to kind of even make the JV team at that point .
I know when the equivalent over here in high school . I know it was something I quite enjoyed because it was something I was , I know , academically school was kind of quite a struggle for me , reasons being , you know , I was on medication and whatever , but I seemed to excel at cross-country running and basketball .
I think maybe the basketball because of my height at the time , but was there something at the time that you kind of just gravitated to because you quite enjoyed it ?
You know I enjoyed the community of it and I do remember around eighth grade yeah feeling that freedom you feel after a good run .
I remember going to a neighborhood next door to mine and running around the neighborhood in my 10 to 12 miles , which was considerable , you know , because races back then were were a mile or were 2k yeah um , and so we never really ran more than a couple of k or a couple of miles on a regular basis .
And so to go out there and run 12 and I remember looking back and feeling so accomplished that I could just keep going felt really empowering , and I was very similar to you in the fact that who was a major struggle and I was also on medication for all kinds of things yeah um , so so it .
It definitely the community side of it , but I did feel some a boost in self-confidence , you know , towards the end of middle school and early high school yeah , able to do things I thought I could yeah , I mean you , from what you were just saying there about you know you sort of having to , you could run and run , and run did bring to mind a film about
steve profane , profane , profane sort of thing , and he's , he sort of had a
¶ Early Running Experiences and Challenges
uh , a natural um , uh , a natural ability to running at a run an early stage , and he could just keep going , keep going and keep going .
Yeah , but he's a big , he's a big uh presence in this household I'll talk a little bit okay , all right , we've watched . We've watched every steve prefontaine movie , all the clips on youtube and , of course , being over here in the us , he's kind of a deity here . So yeah we go to the prefontaine classic every single summer .
We'll be going again , yeah , in this july , so it's a big yeah , yeah , as an aside , I mean it's an incredible story and it's a shame that he didn't reach his potential . You know , like the 72 Olympics and yeah . So it's quite a tragic story , but if anyone out there wants an inspiring story to see the film , then please do go and see it .
So yeah , and also , it's the start of Nike , that's true , that's how nice it's .
Starting like , yeah it is . It's great to see that kind of bubble up with the , the waffle , iron and power man and it's , it's such a such an interesting individual yeah , I agree yeah now .
So talking about high school , so did you , you know , did you go on to college or did you sort of take your running on to college or not ?
I didn't . I had a really big break from running . From probably my freshman year in high school , I shifted over into football . So I played football for a few years and then started to introduce running back into my life , probably five or so years after that .
So I took some breaks there , really , you know , and that was just your standard fitness running right , running a couple times a week to maintain cardiovascular health , more of a health play . And then in 2007 , that was my first marathon and the approach to that was more of a do hard things approach let's accomplish something we didn't think we could accomplish .
I had shifted and started working a lot in the bodybuilding space , so I was doing a lot of weightlifting , spending a lot of time in the gym , but accomplished going through that phase of my life and see the next natural progression with endurance .
So 2007 was the first marathon and that was the seattle marathon , out in seattle , washington , and then took another break until 2020 and that's when things got rude did you have to train much for the marathon at the time , or ? I thought it was . So .
You know we're talking 2007 , so the internet was there , but yeah you know it was basically runner's world and hal higdon would put together these programs and you'd go to runner's world and you had your entry level , your intermediate , your advanced programs .
Although I have to beginner , I took the , the intermediate program , which I think was 30 to 40 miles a week . I still have some of that data because I was using like tracking methods when they were in their infancy back then . But yeah , I didn't run as much as I thought I would , but I didn't . You know , I didn't get .
My farthest run prior to that marathon was 11 miles , so I didn't quite get where I needed to be . Do you ever think ?
I know we're kind of like jumping about , but do you ever think that , with the advances in technology and data capture we have now , do you ever think if only you had it , then were you kind of glad you didn't ?
have it then , it's like a double-edged sword right .
It is yeah we've dove as a club , we've just jumped into the data and I think it does get a little bit overwhelming at times and maybe pull some of the joy and the fun out of it , like thinking back to those times where you know you didn't have the gps data or you didn't have strava to prepare yourself to other people , or there weren't all of these
different approaches to training that have you jumping all over the place and , and you know , at times it's fun and it's engaging and it keeps you interested because your approach to training is always shifting . But at the same time it can also make things overwhelming and I've kind of faced the situation in that regard recently . So I definitely miss the freedom .
Yeah , I love . The one thing that I refuse to do is run with the phone . I still obviously have , you know , my , my , my watch on my hand . But , yeah , that's my time to kind of disconnect and uh , yeah , I'm with you .
I do miss some of those days where I don't I don't need to know my stride rate or my ground contact time you know all of the other things .
Yeah , it's kind of , uh , paralysis by analysis sort of thing . I always think that because I remember the days when I mean I was running to early , um , early 2000s or to , to mark out the run that I was going to do . I would go out my bike one day and then just mark it out and I think , right , that's three miles .
If I do twice that , then it's six miles . So it was pretty basic .
We would just drive the car and use the odometer on the car .
Exactly exactly .
Mark it out . And then I knew , running from this house to this end of this cul-de-sac and back was a mile and you just look .
Yeah , yeah , we're out and back yeah . Yeah , like you said , I mean , you know nowadays maybe we bought the fun out of doing that . They'll never know , you'll never know . So what's the story about now ? First of all , let me get . How do you pronounce the M word ?
This is hard .
Okay .
In most of the people . Unless you grew up where we grew up , they're probably only
¶ The Technology of Running Then vs Now
five or six years old , right ? So it's Mishingo Misha .
So Mishingo Misha M , shingo misha , that is so as shingo misha , mishingo misha . Yes , ah , great , okay , um , because I was trying to say it all day at work and uh , and I was trying to look it up on wikipedia now does it have kind of , uh , native indian connotations ? Yeah , it does , yeah , it does . What's okay ? What's the story ?
here's what's kind of ironic about that how this ? Also , we grew up in indiana in the united states , in a county called grant county and there was a famous indian chief , miami indian chief from that area and his chief , chinga bishop . There was a local kind of country club that a lot of us grew up either around or going to .
So it was kind of this because there are four or five different towns in this county , we didn't have a center point . So this kind of country club where , again , we lived by , worked at and this is the collective original group kind of was our .
You know , the thing that tied us together and and what was interesting about it was that years later this is , you know , we were there in the early 90s , late 80s , right , and the club started in 2015 , 2016 yeah , um , fast forward to 2021 we started a race in one of the races we produce in a park .
The park is named Katiwi Park and that is a Miami Indian work . So when we developed this , we had no clue . You know , 20 years after we had been there and 10 years after the formation of the club , or six or seven years after the formation of the club , we were in another environment or situation where that miami indian heritage is popping up again .
So it was kind of cool , um , and that's how we got the name of the race all right , okay , so , um , so your mission is basically to support sort of runners of of all backgrounds , so how did you kind of start up the community itself ?
so it was really built around family , um , whether that's our core family or our extended family . Yeah , so I began , you know , running again in 2012 . Premise , or the reason I began running again a phone call from my brother yeah we'll dive into that a little bit later . Uh , he got me back into running .
Subsequently , the following year , my other brother was like well , I want to join and I want to run with you guys . And then another , another person that we had grown up with in very close proximity . He was on a weight loss journey and he wanted to , you know , find a community to help him there .
He was interested in at different paces and different types of races that he were . And then we had another friend move back from across the country who looking again for faster road races , so it kind of snowballed it was .
It was interesting how people from such a small town and we're talking about a town of 30 or 40 000 , so not large by any measure were just all at the right time in their life and all at the right place in their life , all of it within 20 , 30 , 40 minutes of each other , to lay a foundation .
And then , as , as it continued to grow , we had somebody that you know . Here's this oh , I want to . I'm a , I'm a new runner or I'm an experienced runner . I want to . I'm a , I'm a new runner or I'm an experienced runner , I want to do fast road racing Well , this person here is doing that , training Right .
Or I want to pursue ultras Well , this person here is doing that and it's grown significantly um through that method . And then , just happenstance , running into people , I think you spoke with Christy P , who is like the epicenter of our running community right , like the epicenter of our running community .
Oh right , oh , I see she helped us expand tremendously , so it's very much an organic , very much so . Yeah , and I think I kind of get the impression with a lot of these communities .
I know I interviewed someone over here who started a running community and basically you know it's all been kind of word and mouth within the local uh , when I live in twickenham , which is not far from uh , which is on the suburbs of london , sort of thing , but it's just you know , it's all word of mouth , and then going to meets and that kind of thing , and
then I don't know , do you have a like a t-shirt which kind of helps advertise the club or something ?
Yeah , we have all kinds of things this hat .
Oh , yeah , yeah , yeah yeah , yeah .
So we have people in these . You know , for us that's exactly what it was .
And the other thing , too is , you know , continually reinforcing that we're here to support because we're our own club and I think a lot of times other clubs kind of push , push that away , you know , like we have other local running clubs that are surround us yeah and if you present yourself as too competitive or too to whatever , whatever how you know , you want
to maintain a perception of we're here to support you , and so we also try to um partner with other running clubs , even though we're our own thing , to create awesome experiences .
Right , okay , so do you think you've kind of carved out like a little niche for yourself or you don't want to sort of bottle yourself into a kind of a ?
I think we have . No , I think we've done that because we produce races . That's a big thing for us , and so we are engaging in conversation with other running clubs that are supporting those races . But we'll reach out and highlight some of the strengths of these other running clubs .
Hey , could you come bring your energy to an aid station at one of our races , because you know you have a lot of people in your club participating and you guys bring great energy , so we'd love to have you do that .
And here's what we can do from a partnership perspective to enhance your club's experience at our race , as well as maybe provide some other support for endeavors that your potential club has outside .
So we have that unique aspect and then we have some other things that we do , um , specifically some of the relays and some of the work elite and the things that we can help other people from different clubs participate in . They may not have enough people within their club that want to do that thing , so kind of mix and mash and put do you do ?
let's say , you know weekly meetups , or do you ? Or do you ? Is it very much a club which is very much more spread out than that , more of an online kind of presence ?
it's definitely the latter . Yeah , one thing about our club that I've noticed and this is just my perception or of the whole thing is that we have a lot of individuals that are in that stage of life if we've both been through where it's just it's almost impossible . You know , you have our core is probably as young as 30 yeah into into
¶ The MTC Club: Origins and Growth
early 50s . We have some people older than that but like professional , yes , a whole nine yards , so meetups , uh , on the weekend mornings there are , or there are search committee or whatever that looks yes , yes , that's right and we have . We have runners in seven states .
So okay you know we do a lot more virtually and then we'll get together physically a couple times a year , especially again relays um or other other , you know , just races across the country . But we're definitely more virtual all right , um .
So this isn't something you do full time , is it ? No , or is it ?
no , it's , it's growing , it's growing pretty significantly . We had one of our races sell out seven months in advance this year , which was awesome oh my gosh and our second race is close to selling out here and it's in a couple of months , and then the club has grown from six people to over well over 100 . So we're we're getting there .
But , yeah , we want to just again kind of follow that organic path and not really push anything too hard and really ensure that we're creating the right experience , that people feel like they're offering them something for where they're at within their journey and where they're at with it .
Do you , do you offer , like not only just um you know , sort of the races and putting on races ? I can't ? Do you offer sort of advice on training advice or physio , that kind of thing ? So what , what sort of um services do you offer on that side of ?
yeah , so we have all of them . Uh . So from a coaching perspective , we do have two coaches . We have christy christy's's , kind of our broader road running coach . She will tackle the majority of people that we have wanting to participate , whatever they want to participate . She's extremely experienced with marathons and ultras .
And we have Corey Nuro , who is kind of our more intense he's more Norwegian method really high mileage , pretty aggressive and pretty condensed workout sessions within a week , um , so if somebody's very serious when it comes to road running , they will engage with him . We've also put together plans with other people that have field specialties .
So like there was a track club here in the United States called 10 man and 10 man elite and it was indeed a track club and we've worked with their strength to develop a strength plan . And then we have a couple of local physiotherapists guys that we will send or recommend to our runners . That are local anyways as it relates to getting through injury .
That are local anyways as it relates to getting through injury , what's an injury versus what's a naked pain , and how you can work biomechanically through a lot of things that may be ailing now going .
Going back to you . You you said that you're you're overcoming , or you kind of got back into running in 2012 . Overcoming a 70 pound weight gain mean . Looking at you now on the screen , I can't imagine what 70 pounds would be like on you . So in our metrics it's five stone . But were you quite muscular then ? Or was it just you were just out of condition ?
It was a little bit of both . Yeah , I've always struggled with yeah going I had a really high metabolism and then going into high school just ate as poorly as I could .
Yeah , I went from 145 pounds , same height that I am now , to 225 by the high school and that was fully out of shape oh my gosh , all right , yeah , so 140 is 10 stone
¶ Building a Running Community Across States
over here in the uk , and then yeah , so another 70 , yeah , so yeah , you're looking at 15 , 15 stones . I've never like , yeah , and you're what ?
six , six foot , about six feet , yeah , about six feet , yeah um , and then from that point I got , like I said earlier , I kind of got into the bodybuilding side of things yeah I got my weight back down to 160 pounds and then started to build muscle and lose fat , so I got up to as high as 260 .
So there was more muscle there than there was in high school , but it was still , and then it kind of fell out of that like let's call it 2005-ish , and then , you know , got back down to a reasonable weight and then from 2006 on it just kind of slowly tipped back up I call it from 180 to 230 , 240 , about where I was when I got that phone call from my
brother .
From there was it kind of a gradual . You gradually went down to a , a particular good running weight I did in six months oh , right , okay but it was very regimented .
It was , you know , chicken broccoli , all right yeah , and it was that meal four times and it was like I mean it was definitely not sustainable yeah , exactly , I mean I .
I mean I've known over the years that diet is 80 percent of the , the success rate . No doubt about it yeah , so no doubt about it okay , good so , and and did you notice that there was this ? Um much more ? You had more energy , increased performance in terms of your times .
Oh , it was unbelievable . It was . I mean , I couldn't tie my shoes without losing my breath when I was two . Oh my God , it'd be really big . And then just watching the progression , I think that was what was interesting . The second time around in 2012 was that I started to see the progression .
I started to find issues that I hadn't explored in the past and it maybe played to some of my strengths earlier on and then it kind of grew from there . So , getting in shape like that , I noticed a major difference climbing stairs , just doing everything . Really it was super impactful , you know health .
So , um , then you kind of obviously embarked on doing marathons . Tj Daly's running journey was unlike any other . He started as a kid who barely made his cross country team out of just 12 students . Running was just a way to socialize back then , not a passion . When his small private school closed , he had to go to a public high school with 400 kids .
Running became his way to cope with the big change . After high school , tj tried football bodybuilding , but then came back to running . He ran his first marathon in 2007 . He remembered those simpler days of running , using a car odometer to mark his route and just enjoying the experience , not worrying about all the fancy data points that technology gives us now .
They made him think about how we're so focused on metrics and fitness these days . The real Kent change came in 2012 , when his brother called him up . Tj had gained 70 pounds . He decided to get into shape by eating healthy and running .
In just six months , he went from barely being able to tie his shoes without getting winded to discover he had a lot of athletic potential , and that personal transformation became the basis of something bigger the MTC Running Club . The name MTC
¶ Weight Loss Journey and Transformation
comes from TJ's hometown in Grant County , indiana , and it has cultural significance that connects to Indian heritage . The club started as a small group of family members and grew to over 100 runners across seven states . Mtc put on races that sold out in months in advance , offered special coaching and worked with other running groups instead of competing with them .
They also had a virtual first approach that worked on their busy members , mostly professionals in their 30s and 50s . Tj talked about running changed him not just physically , but also it helped him build a strong community , whether you're looking for motivation or a fitness journey or advice on how to make meaningful connections with others who share your passion .
This conversation was full of real wisdom that TJ earned throughout all those miles and hard work . Now , this was just part one of my chat with TJ . Part two is coming out next week and here is a taster for next week where we talk about one of his heroes , roger Bannister . So see you next week for part two .
Yeah , because it's such a monumental moment in sports I mean people thinking that you couldn't physiologically do that exactly , die before they and for him to do it and then do it the way he did it . So I , I um have my daughter , who's 11 and I'm a runner as really cool achievements herself .
Um , watch that and just you know she doesn't quite realize it yet , but but what he did and like the , the track that he ran it on and the shoes that they ran it in , and his training during lunch while he's trying to become you know a doctor and just the way it all came together . Yeah , yeah .