Talking with IM Lake Placid Champion Trevor Foley

Michael Jordan gave us a bit of spoken word in one of his iconic Nike commercials with,

"It's not about the shoes. It's about knowing where you're going. Not forgetting where you started. It's about having the courage to fail. Not breaking when you're broken. Taking everything you've been given and making something better. It's about work before glory. And what's inside of you. It's doing what they say you can't. It's not about the shoes. It's about what you do in them. It's about being who you were born to be."

I interviewed Trevor Foley nd his partner, Sophie, recently and when you watch and listen to the interview below, you'll see that it's not about the saddle. It's about where this young triathlete has come from, the hard work he has and is putting in, and how he is aligning his actions with his virtues in a striving for excellence. And, if you'd like, you can find our ongoing Forum thread on Trevor here.

Trevor Foley reached out to us at the end of 2023 asking to try a saddle and we began working on his bike fit by video while he was in Tucson with me in Boulder. Pretty early on I learned that Trevor is from Brooksville, Florida. My mother was born in Brooksville and her father was an orange farmer there, and my great grandmother whom I spent quite a bit of time with growing up lived to 102 years old there. This is an area of Florida with miles upon miles of crushed limestone roads canopied by moss draped live oak trees. This is Florida's hill country, and while people laugh at that seeming oxymoron, Trevor understood and immediately sent me a screenshot of a Strava ride he'd recently done in Brooksville with 6,529ft of climbing over 117 miles:

Trevor came to Boulder to train for the summer and within a couple of weeks, his fiance, Sophie, and he were pretty sure they plan to make Boulder their permanent home. For this interview, we headed out from their place and up the Boulder Creek trail and into the solitude of Four Mile Canyon for a steep and scenic little climb that shows off the draw of Boulder.

While interviewing Trevor and Sophie, what jumped out to me was not only Trevor's daring certainty in his vision of being a pro athlete – that included him choosing to be homeschooled his senior year of high school to focus solely on running and leaving college early to pursue a pro triathlon career – but the steadfast support and commitment of his mother, father, sister and Sophie.

That takes a bit of bravery to shun the safety of conformity. It's been suggested that the internal self talk we have going on in our heads is social by nature and can nudge us towards conformity over our conflicting desire to be exceptional and distinct. That internal voice considers how others might view us and how our actions might be judged, providing some guard rails to help us course correct so that we stay in the good grace of others. Taken to an extreme, it's been observed that people who venture off into solitude for years on end with no human contact lose that internal self talk because there is no social gaze and no need to buy trust so that others will feel safe cooperating with us. To orient one's high school and college academics solely around sport ignores pressures to stick to the norms and safety of the herd.

Pro athletes in all sports can have a bit of a sharp edge to their personalities at times, and I wonder how much of that is related to the internal tension that a burn the ships and take the island mindset creates within oneself when shoving off social expectations and going all in on what could be considered an intentional and examined life.

Pro athletes create an ideal for us mortals to strive towards in terms of athletic achievement. But what they also create is an alternative path towards a life well lived – a life largely void of checking off boxes that society deems worthy and labels successful. The author/poet, James Rebanks, tells his story of going to Oxford but then choosing to walk away from a socially celebrated life trajectory and returning to his family profession of shepherding. At the end of his book, he laid in a field with his sheep and dogs and said aloud, "This is my life. I want no other."

I think that is our unspoken goal for ourselves and those we love – to be able to say aloud, "this is my life. I want no other." To sincerely state such a belief could very well require going into the wilderness so that we can examine our life with the self talk and its internalized social expectations on mute.

Trevor and Sophie, burn the ships, take the island.

Photo Credit: Nate Castner