A detour.
Oversharing is also part of my identity.
Today’s post: On becoming an athlete in my 30s (and why it changed how I think about brand identity)
Today marks one year since my first ever (adult) race.
I don’t say that to mark time. I say it because something shifted in that year that I’ve been trying to articulate ever since I started taking sports seriously, and I think I’ve finally got the words for it.
It wasn’t that I discovered running. It wasn’t that I found a new hobby, or that I got fitter, or that I learned I was more capable than I thought. All of that happened. But none of it is the point.
The point is that I built an identity. And once you have one (a real one, not a curated one) everything changes.
Here’s the arc: May 2025, I crossed my first trail race finish line at Xterra Gozo. Immediately started crying in my coaches arms, because up until that point, I didn’t think I could do it.
A week later I signed up to my next race. Double the distance, double the elevation and in the Spanish mountains. I didn’t think I could do it, as soon as I crossed the finish line and realised I PB’d on a twisted ankle, I cried my eyes out again on the phone with my dad and booked my next race immediately.
By December, I’d completed four races.
I had a plan for 2026: my first ultra. I was all in. Flights booked, race booked, training plan set.
Then injury hit in January.
And in the space of trying to stay active without running, I discovered cycling (thanks to my Dad and Sister). Then swimming (thanks to Neil). And like the all-or-nothing person I am, it wasn’t long before the obvious thought arrived: well, if I’m doing all three...
So yes. Possibly a millennial crisis. Possibly just who I am. But I am now, apparently, on the road to triathlon.
But none of that is the interesting part either.
The interesting part is what happened to how I see myself.
I am someone who wakes up at 5am most days. Not because I have to. Because that’s who I am now.
I am someone who reorganises her entire social calendar around a training block. Who turns down plans without guilt.
Who, when injury cancelled my ultra, didn’t spiral, just recalibrated and found the next hard thing.
I am competitive. All or nothing. Built for endurance.
The hard things are part of it. Actually, the hard things are it. Showing up to a session when your body wants to quit before you’ve started is hard. Being consistent when life is full is hard. Fuelling properly, even eating more, is hard.
I didn’t decide to be those things. The sport revealed them, and then repeated them back to me so many times that they became undeniable. That’s not motivation. That’s identity formation.
And identity, once built, is the most powerful force I know.
I’ve never been someone who talks herself up. If you know me even a little, you’ll know this. So the fact that I can write (with no hesitation) I have the potential to be an athlete, and mean it completely, tells you something about how different this is.
Sport is the one arena where I don’t question my abilities. Where the self-doubt that shows up elsewhere doesn’t get a seat. Where I feel fully in sync, fully present, fully myself … even when I’m hyperventilating up a 14% gradient and my legs have stopped listening entirely.
That’s not a sport. That’s a home.
And when you find something that feels like that - when you find a space that reflects back exactly who you are - you don’t just participate in it. You belong to it. You organise your life around it. You talk about it constantly, evangelise it to anyone who’ll listen, and feel genuinely puzzled when other people don’t get it.
Sound familiar?
That’s what cult-like brands do.
Not cult in the negative sense. Cult in the truest sense: a community built around shared identity. A brand so clear about who it is (and by extension, who you are when you’re part of it) that the relationship stops being transactional and starts being tribal.
People don’t become loyal to brands because the strategy is good. They become loyal because the brand makes them feel like themselves. Because belonging to it says something true about who they are. Because it gives them a flag to fly.
This is what I spend my days building for founders.
Not logos. Not content plans. Not positioning documents … though all of those things are part of it. Brand ecosystems. The full architecture of how a founder’s identity becomes a world that other people want to live inside. The infrastructure that turns an audience into a community, and a community into something that runs on belonging rather than persuasion.
I work almost exclusively with founder-led businesses because founders are the brand. Their story, their conviction, their specific way of seeing the world - that’s the asset. My job is to build the ecosystem around it: coherent, layered, unmistakable. Something people don’t just follow but identify with.
The founders I work with aren’t selling products or services. They’re offering identity. A way of being in the world. And the ones who build that most deliberately, who are most precise and most fearless about who they are, are the ones who build the most loyal, most energised audiences.
I know this because I’ve built it. I know it because I’ve lived it.
In my (almost) mid-30s, I’m building two things at once
An athletic identity — triathlon on the horizon, and a version of the athlete dream I’m getting closer to every year. A full-time sponsored athlete might be a stretch, I know that. But closing the gap? Abso-frikkin-lutely. Training most mornings. Preparing for my first triathlon in September and who knows what else after that.
And a consulting business built on the belief that the most powerful thing a founder can do is stop performing a brand and start building one that’s genuinely, specifically, irreducibly theirs.
I’m sharing more of myself here because brands are like people … and I am the brand too. Not because I think my training splits are fascinating to anyone (they are fascinating to me, which is enough). But the fullest version of what I build (for others and for myself) starts with being honest about who I am
An all-or-nothing person. A builder of worlds. Someone who wakes up before sunrise, and finds that to be her favourite part of her day (besides cuddling my dogs… shhh don’t tell them.) I wonder why anyone would do it any other way.
That’s the identity. Everything else is the ecosystem around it.
If you’re a founder building something where you are the brand and you’re ready to be more deliberate about it, this is exactly the work I do. Find me on LinkedIn or reply here.