Balancing Executive Leadership, Spartan Racing, and Personal Growth with Gwendolyn "Wendy" Bounds

Her most recent book , not Too Late , which we're going to talk about Not Too Late the Power of Pushing Limits at Any Age , is an inspiring account about balance , midlife transformation into a competitive athlete and what science shows about the benefits of embracing new challenges at any stage .

Raised in North Carolina , bounce now lives in New York's Hudson River Valley , and you can subscribe to her sub stack and I'm going to add that link into the show notes for our listeners . Wendy , welcome to the show . Before we get started , I ask this of every guest what's your favorite music genres and can you share a memorable concert with us ?

So music genres like this is a pretty , pretty challenging one to narrow it down to just a favorite one , but I am I may be the only tech person who will say this , but I am a country music fan , a pretty big one , and my playlist .

I actually have a playlist that I listened to a lot while I was writing the book , so it ranges from Eric Church and people like Travis Tritt and Kenny Chesney and others , but it also then goes right into Beyonce , bb King , katy Perry , faith Hill , the jackson five . So make of that what you will , it's country , but with a pretty big twist .

Any reactions before we move on to concert memorable concert experiences .

And I was a kid was Jimmy Buffett who just died this past year , and he my parents took me . I think I was like seven years old and it was just this raucous concert .

I might've been in the seventies or very early eighties I'm trying to do the math on it when I was seven , but apparently a lot of people were smoking , you know marijuana in the audience , and I kept saying like daddy , what's that smell ? Mommy , what's that smell ? And they were like just play with the beach ball , somebody's bouncing around .

That certainly remained , and people were wearing I don't know if you've ever been to a Jimmy Buffett concert , but people would wear shark heads on their , like these fake shark rubber things on their heads for his song . Fins and beach balls get thrown all around in the audience , and it's quite a scene before and after and during the concert .

But the most memorable concert was certainly that Sticks with me . Haven't beat it yet .

I started out , I started right out of college working for the Wall Street Journal as an intern , which then segued into a full-time job there as a journalist , and this when I first started .

This was in the days where text was king and the print newspaper was still sort of that was the main medium , and I cut my teeth really in my very early 20s with some of the best journalists in the world , learning from them . I did not have a financial background .

I'm terrible at math , but I got a pretty good education working there in my 20s , learning from some of the again best folks in the trade , and I got to basically witness the digital revolution , when it happened , from the offices of the Wall Street Journal , which was one of the first big players in the digital space to charge for its content on the web , and

it turned out to be a very smart decision on their part and I was able to , through my time there , both move over and work on the video team and spend a lot of time also working just on the dot-com side itself , and so I got a pretty fulsome look at that main transition that we had and how information was delivered .

After that I went over to Consumer Reports , which is one of the oldest product rating organizations in the country magazine , website , podcasts and I ran all of their media there for about eight years , and you know then obviously by that point , social media was part of the big transition , and just as I was leaving , we were starting to talk to this company called

OpenAI about this new technology generative AI and we were starting to experiment with it .

And I ended up leaving Consumer Reports to go to a tech company called Smart News , where I work now , which is based in Tokyo , which is an information news aggregator with a presence both in Japan and also here in the United States both in Japan and also here in the United States and we have just hired a bunch of big , interesting tech people over from Google

and other places and are really doubling down what we're doing in the US , and obviously the AI revolution has transformed everything about the information business , and so I'm deep in it in that there and in the meantime , just I'll drop this and I'll stop talking . I've written a couple of books .

The first book I wrote after the terrorist attacks in September 11th of 2001, . I ended up I lived next door to the World Trade Center towers and my apartment building was damaged from the attacks , and both are also our offices at the Wall Street Journal .

I ended up moving upstate to the Hudson River Valley in New York and stumbled upon this Irish pub where the community was struggling to save it , and I ended up working there behind the counter some and took a leave of absence from my job at the Journal and wrote a book about this pub and the community's attempt to keep it alive .

And then my second book , which we'll get into , so I won't do it now is Not Too Late , and I'm assuming we'll go there at some point . So that's , that's it in a nutshell .

I know Michael Easter gave me an opportunity to , I think , guest write on his sub stack and launch it and I was sharing that around and other folks in my network . My mom bought the book . I had an opportunity to listen to it on audio as I was driving from New York to California last month .

So I kind of wanted to start and give you an opportunity to talk about what inspired you to write the book .

I met Shannon in a desert at a conference called Don't Die . So there you have it . That is where the deepest of friendships get formed is , at a conference called Don't Die , in the Las Vegas desert . So more on that maybe at another

point . In terms of what inspired so not too late is it traces my evolution from a , you know , I grew up a scrawny kid , last picked for sports teams and evolved into , like many people I know , and this may ring true to you a busy executive tied to my screens doing a lot of sitting , but someone who was not a competitive athlete .

And at age 45 , I had a wake up call at a dinner party , which you talk about later if you like . But it really triggered me to get up the next morning and start . I googled what are some of the hardest things you can do , and one thing that popped up was obstacle course racing and Spartan racing , which is a brand of obstacle course racing .

And for people who don't know it , this is a brand of obstacle course racing and , for people who don't know it , this is a type of endurance sport that's pretty demanding . You have to have high respiratory fitness because you're running through cross country terrain , mountains and farmland and you know difficult , muddy , rocky conditions .

But you're also scaling obstacles . You're climbing a 17 foot rope , you are carrying a 40 pound sandbag up and down mountains , you are going over walls six foot walls , eight foot walls so I thought this is the last thing I'll ever do .

And then just I started , you know , getting these workouts of the day from Spartan and kind of put my foot into it and little by little I got up to my first race and now , eight years later , I have written about my evolution from that point to this year .

I was ranked number one in the country in the national series for my age group in Spartan racing and 50 plus races through it , and have competed in two world championships . So the book is about that evolution but , more deeply , is about how all of us can answer these profound questions that hit us when we hit the age of midlife , of .

Is this really all I am ? Is this all I can be ? Is this ? My time is running shorter on this earth ? I am in this cycle of the same things every day . You know that wake up , same routine , same friends , same family , same restaurants . And how do we break that ?

How do we add something more and different to our life , especially something we thought was maybe impossible for us to ever be ? So that is the essence of it , and the inspiration to write it just came from the fact that people would ask me how have you done this , like , how have you balanced a big career with taking on something new and ambitious ?

You were not an athlete , and how did you do it ? How did you manage your time ? How did you get out of inertia ? How did you explain this to your friends and family ? And every time I would get finished telling them they'd say you should write a book about that . So , finally , I talked to my agent , my book agent and that's what I did .

But I feel and I'd like to hear how you feel , shannon that you know when you start these competitions , everything else fades away right , like whatever it is that you're worrying about in that moment , whether it's some meeting you had at work or an argument you had with somebody , or if you're worrying about something on the health front .

The thing is it's like , for that time period that you're on the course , you're focused on nothing else but just one foot in front of the other , and so for me it's kind of been almost like a more aggressive form of meditation in that right . I don't know if you've experienced the same thing .

I think , being in technology , you just tend to multitask and I really think that's where burnout starts to come from . I'm really glad that you're both sharing this for our listeners .

But I think that is being able to engage in something where you can break yourself out of that frame of my mind is going here , here , here , here , and carrying so many things and being able to focus on just a singular thing , which , in this case , was the physical sense of just moving forward and getting through to the finish line in strength training , like

what you're talking about , melissa . It's can you .

Can you just drop your phone right for what , however long you were doing that strength training session , and concentrate on nothing else but getting your form right , getting your breathing right and anybody who's going to dive into something that matters to them , that they truly want to learn , get better at , maybe even attempt to master .

This kind of singular focus is really important for anybody and super important for people who have tech brains like we do .

You are in a room by yourself trying to put together 90,000 words , in my case , and figure out what themes and what the narrative arc should be , what should be in the book , More importantly , what should not be in the book , and piecing this all together so that one day you hope somebody will read it and remember something and you'll talk to them about it .

Right , and and , but you don't know . And it's a , it's a lot of , it is just a lot of commitment for the unknown . So that just overcoming that hurdle I think is true for anybody who is writing a book .

It was easier this time , my second time around the but the most challenging part was adding that to the balance of things that I was doing in a day , because I did not take a leave of absence from work . I had just started , I got the book contract and then I got this new job at Smart News and I wanted to do both things . I had this opportunity .

They just happened to collide at one time and I had to figure out how to balance doing both of those while also training and then traveling to compete and then , yeah , also being a good spouse and taking care of my family and thinking about my parents and my dog and the chores that we all have to do and the laundry right .

So I think really my time management and my discipline about what things are actually the essential things in my life and what things are non-essential and could be parked , that reconciling that , Shannon , was the most challenging part , but when I when , that's how I was able to get it done . Yeah .

So I mean the way that you just kind of laid out your heart , you know , in terms of what you were going through , the doubts , all of that stuff and coming to the other side of it , I thought that was one of the most inspiring parts of the book .

One of the things about experiences like this and if you're going to write about them is the truth is it's not like the movies in many ways , where you don't just wake up one day and it's like everything's great and the Rocky music comes on and you just charged a Victor . Right , that's not how it happens .

I mean , life is complicated and you lose people , you lose pets , thing , people get sick , you get sick , um , and you lose a job .

Like all these things can happen that can throw you off the course of the best intentions of the thing that you really want to be spending time on , and how you find your way back to that thing and in my case , this thing was obstacle course racing and then also how that thing can lift you up and bring you , make you feel like the future is still filled

with new possibility , at a time when , again , like things in midlife can be challenging , right , and you've got this overload , and that can be true even when you're in your 20s and 30s .

So , in a sense , if you can stick with it and find a way to keep at it , I think it can be the thing that actually pulls you out of some of the darkest moments , and that was the truth for me and that's , you know , some of what you're referring to . That was the truth for me and that's some of what you're referring to .

That are some dark moments in the book , but I think that journey is the true journey that anyone would face .

But one point there's a scene in the book where I'm actually visiting them and I'm driving along by some farmland and I have to pull over my car because , guess what ? I needed to answer a text from work and so I'd pulled over and I was on the side of this road , this country road .

I happened to look up and I saw a farmer on his tractor and he was just going down the rows of the crops and was waiting for the text to come back in .

I was probably like agitated and I just kept staring at him and then I realized like he's not looking at his phone , like he's just going up and down those rows of crops and if he doesn't do that , his crop dies .

And that focus and that notion of like if you don't do these things , your crop dies made me go home and write in this notebook I had , like you know , don't , let , don't let your crop die . And it made me think what is my crop , what is the thing that is I need to take care of every day , and everything else can be sort of secondary to that .

And that's what I did . You know it was my family , our health , my job , and then obstacle course racing , like I put that in my crop . And then things like social engagements . I stepped down from some boards that I was on . I didn't really like go see a concert , like there were a lot of things I cut out .

I cut out scrolling , aimless scrolling on social media . Those things were dispensable . But my crop and the indispensable things , right , those were what got my attention every single day . It's very clarifying , melissa , as you're alluding to , like you know , you're talking about your wife and your pet and people .

Everybody will know what their crop is if they truly , truly think about it .

But he really , in this short essay , just drives home the point that it's not a cliche statement and when you truly grasp that life is short , you will relentlessly prune bullshit from your life . I think is a direct quote and I've read that multiple times over the last few months and shared that because it's so true .

And when you think about it , like yeah , we got roughly 80 years and 4,000 weeks and when you think about how short amount of time that is and if you're you know , if you're in midlife , you're getting close to where you got more sand in the hourglass that's gone through than still at the top and , um , you know , you can talk about it a lot , but and you

won't feel it ever Like I think it's impossible to think about it every single minute of every single day , but if you can think about it more than you are now , like you're saying , it's a forcing mechanism , shannon , and I totally agree , wendy as you became an elite athlete .

I'm among some of the best of my age , which is something I never thought would ever be possible , like me being able to fly myself to Mars right now or win a Grammy and if you heard me sing anything you would say , yes , she's going to get to Mars before she ever wins a Grammy . So

there's that . But my body changed early on . Again , I was this skinny , scrawny kid and there wasn't much muscle mass to me . But the first thing I remember we're getting these little calluses .

I would touch under conference room tables when we were knee deep in about 85 page PowerPoint presentations and I thought my head was going to explode and then I'd kind of feel these little baby calluses emerging under the conference room table . It was like this little secret .

I had right that I had this life where I was and I wasn't even serious yet , but I was getting up an hour earlier or 45 minutes earlier and going out in my backyard to train and I didn't know what I was doing . I was doing things in the frosty grass while my neighbors would drive by and gawk at me .

But the physical transformation that started to occur , like when I would have muscle tone and somebody would say , oh , you must be a runner , and because I'd be at a doctor and be looking at my calves and I'd be like who are you talking to , right ?

So just the transformation of my thinking that anybody would look at me and think that I look like somebody who was either athletic or strong , that was an awakening .

That was just something I'd never had any people say to me ever other thing I think this is far more psychological is that we all have attributes , right , and attributes are very different than skills . Skills are something you acquire and can learn .

Just as I learned to scale a wall , I learned to scale a rope , to climb a rope , but attributes are kind of always running in the background .

There's a great book called Attributes , by former Navy SEAL called , named Rich Dibney , and these attributes are things like determination or humor , grit , things of those natures , of that nature and I found that my superpower in racing was really the grit factor .

I never come out fast , I never come out hot , I'm a slow , I'm a slow start , but I can suffer for a long time and I I'm able sort of to pick it up through the end , and that is , I think , grit was something I had in the workplace and it was very interesting to see how attributes from one part of my life could translate into something completely new ,

where and help me right , even if they seemed like such different environments being in a corporate world versus being in a muddy race course . But I think that that is something everybody listening to this can pick up on if they're trying to learn something new , whether it's something physical or chess or whatever the activity might be .

Your attributes , your attributes are there , running in the background . You have them , you know what they are in other disciplines . How do you make them work for you in something new , especially learning something new and hard ? How do those attributes give you your edges and your equalizers to help you advance ?

And I have found that to be a really profound part of this journey to understand that translation of those parts of me .

I just have to tell you how much I appreciated the time you took to give me just a really great , lengthy response , because I talked to you about struggling with injury . I haven't been able to do a Spartan now for about a year and it just meant so much .

And when you closed that last email with we will do a Spartan together , that just was the inspiration for me to really say forget this , especially the things that you hit on in the book about . People will just get injured and then just say this is what you do at midlife , and then they drift away .

And I felt like I was headed in that direction until I read the book . But what advice would you ?

And the truth of the matter is I can see something in you where I know that you're going to come back from that , and I meant it when I said we're going to run one together and even if we had to walk it together , we would do it , right , it wouldn't matter , we'll get there .

And I see that in you and I appreciate your wanting to come back from it , because I think so many people just kind of do give up and they say it's too late .

And that is the core of what I want people to know is I'm not saying it's never too late , right , I'm not living in a fantasy world , but often it's not too late , and that's what I was trying to say to you . So , thank you and back to you .

a lot . So what would you give and advice that you would offer up to others who aren't physically fit today but want to take on a similar challenge ?

I mean , it took me almost two years before I got to my first race , but just because of life events and I wanted to feel ready for it . But I think it's , how do you start to incorporate movement more into your daily life ? And that can be anything as small and I mean when I say small I mean small from the 10 minute .

You know little bites and chunks of time that emerge in your days where you're like well , I have 10 minutes before this next meeting , I guess I'll just check my email or I'll scroll on Instagram or I'll go wander down the hall . If anybody even goes to an office anymore and talk to somebody . Can you use those 10 minutes in more productive ways ?

I wrote about this in my newsletter , my Substack newsletter , not too late recently , how to use these time slices , and I actually give some very specific examples exercises , breathing , things that people can do that are going to just turn them and their brain a little bit more toward thinking about health , like .

The first thing is a mentality shift of how you're going to add little bits during the day to your little bits of wellness into your day , and that's going to just starting to think like that is going to be a big first step .

The next thing I would say is you know if you need , if you're alone in trying to do this and it's not working for you , how can you find community ? How can you find somebody who will go out and take a jog with you ?

Or can you find a community online that you can join that will inspire you and hold you accountable , because accountability is really important when you're setting goals on being fit , and I think and I'm not going to give a prescription about you know what actual things to do , because this could differ for everybody , but I'm trying to give some broad strokes ,

things that I think will change people mentally so that being physically fit becomes a part of their just their daily life . People are afraid and you get more afraid of this as you get older . They're afraid to look foolish .

They're afraid they're gonna like well , who's somebody's gonna laugh at me and the way I run , or picking up this tennis racket and the way I hit the ball , or , you know , I was really like , I know I looked really dumb when I started training in gyms with people who are half my age .

But once you get over that , that feeling of like I shouldn't look foolish , or that feeling of I need to have my hand on the master control switch , it's so powerful and that's how you begin to get better .

So I would say to anybody who's worried about that , just like park , that the you know the stoic philosopher , epictetus , you know , talks about this and says you know , if you want to improve , you know you need to be okay looking a little bit foolish , be content to look a little bit foolish , and that's a mantra I would say to everybody .

So those are a few things and , again , we could talk for hours about this and it's what I'm trying to dive into in my newsletter more , but I think those are some places to start . Shannon , those are perfect , thank you .

I am , I do eat some red meat , but I focus mostly again on fish , things that swim or things that fly , those are my proteins , and again really on that Mediterranean nuts , olive oil , leafy greens , vegetables , things of that nature , and that works for me . I'm quite conscious about the amount of protein I eat and I am trying to get , you know , close .

I can't get quite close to a gram per body of , per pound , but I I'm trying . There's , there's a lot of science out there about protein and how important it is for maintaining muscle mass and , you know , managing hunger and energy , and so I'm very careful about the amount of protein I get .

And I've become far more conscious about the amount of alcohol that I consume . I've reduced it a lot . I mean not all journalists , but many journalists by nature are often , you know they're , they often drink or they go to bars . And I still do drink some , but I drink a lot less than I did and I've been quite conscious about that .

And I take supplements to the degree that they are supplementing things that I have talked to my doctors about . That I know I need more of like vitamin D . I'm not out in the sun a lot , unless I'm racing , because I had a diagnosis of melanoma , which is a very aggressive form of skin cancer , five or six years ago , and so I'm very careful about that .

So I take D and some fish oil and a handful of other things , but those are things I have run by my doctors so I'm not experimenting a lot with new things that come out in the market . I try to keep it pretty simple . Does that answer your question .

And so I just take that input and I think , well , all right , if it's not helping me . It's just I'm trying to put things in my body at this age that are going to improve my health span . Right , I don't want to just live a lot longer and not be as healthy as I possibly can because I'm not going to improve my health span .

Right , I don't want to just live a lot longer and not be as healthy as I possibly can because I'm not going to enjoy it . So that's just a factor , and it also impacts how I train and how I think and how I feel in the morning and how I sleep , which I know we'll get into wearables in a minute and I can track this with some of my wearables .

I can see very easily the impact that alcohol has on my sleep when I do consume it . So it's just something . I think about it and I'm not preaching and saying everybody should stop drinking , but I just say I'm drinking less and it's working for me .

I think that if there was anything I could say about the single most transformative thing in my life in the last several years was complete removal of alcohol . I just feel so much better . I miss it . I love my glasses of red wine , but it had a profound impact on me .

I got COVID in the very early days and my aura ring for two days prior to my like feeling bad and really bad and getting diagnosed with the test , my aura ring , like my numbers , were just terrible . Right , my body temperature was up , my HRV was way down , my heart rate was elevated . It knew I was getting sick . So that was a real kind of interesting .

So I listen to it now . If I see things are off in it , I pay attention . But I also think it's a great governor because , as Shannon was saying , you know , if you eat something like late in the night , that's not good for you , or you consume an extra glass of wine , you're going to see it in your numbers in the morning . You know , do I think it's ?

Do I live by it ? As you know my Bible , like if I , if my ring says I've had a rough night and I still have a workout to do in the morning and I feel , okay , I do my workout , it's not like I'm like oh , I'm going to not listen to my body and how I feel , but I do think it's a very helpful tool to just make me accountable to myself .

And Shannon I don't know if you feel the same way or , melissa , if you wear one too- yeah , I wear one too , and I would agree with you on the COVID thing .

I didn't have a good night's rest , but I'm still going to do strength training tonight , so I'm glad you said that . I think somewhere along the lines I was supposed to hear that message .

I just became passionate about chasing an incredible night's sleep , hacking the environment every possible way to get as much deep sleep as I possibly could , and I found that the ring really helped me stay in line .

I was eating what I thought was a great diet and exercising all the time . I was like , well , how is this happening ?

I decided to wear one to get some information and it was very enlightening to me and things that I thought were super healthy were actually triggering these surges of my glucose in my body , and things like a healthy fruit smoothie which , when you puree fruit that has , the sugar concentration goes up , and that caused it for me at least , because it's very personal

for individuals , but that was causing elevations . And I loved sushi with white rice , but it turned out white rice was a big culprit and so by wearing it I was able to really bring my numbers down .

There's a number they track called A1C , and I was able to just see what different foods do and then also what different forms of exercise do to it , because you can exercise in a kind of low zone two cardio way and it'll actually . You know your glucose will come down .

But if you're , when I run these races and my heart rate's really elevated and I'm going at a fast clip , then the numbers are jacking up . So you just kind of learn again how you have to balance everything .

I think that's been a very interesting tool for me as someone that we wouldn't have necessarily had that years ago , to be able to watch that part of our health .

And I also found I don't know if you see this , but like , if you just go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes , the same exact meal will impact you differently , and then you can see that right there in the app .

, for sure .

So Shannon and I were talking about it and , lo and behold , you know he was , he had read it , his mom had read it , and I'm just so grateful that you were able to find time to come on and talk with us . I mean , this has been extraordinary .

Once Shannon and I bonded out there in the desert , I'd have done anything for him , and now that I've met you , I feel I feel the same for you , so happy to come back at any time and I'm appreciative to your doctor for recommending it and just for the two of you , for asking questions that are important for all of us to think about , and especially those of

us in the tech community .