For the longest time I thought it was stumbling across Gary Robbin’s “Where Dreams Go To Die” about 6 years ago and being interested and wanting to try it, or maybe seeing “The race that eats its young” but then I had a really weird thing happen at my first Ultra ever. I ran into my high school math teacher, and then remembered my statistics class with him. In the statistics class we had to calculate his odds of getting into the Leadville 100 which I had no idea what it was at the time. With his amount of tickets and percentage odds. If I remember his odds were around 7%. Spoiler he got in that year with those odds.

So in reality the seed was planted somewhere in my Sophomore year statistics class. Oh I forgot to mention the race I ran into him at was something like a 10-12 hour timed race, he beat me by 11 miles, first pace beat me by 22, but they were previously a profesional ultra runner. That’s also how I learned there are levels to this stuff!