In the summer of 2020 before I went to college I did a ton of running and trail running. My future was blurry though. A lot of people would ask what I'm doing and I would just say I planned on being a marketing manager for a sports company. In reality, I had no desire to work for someone else and I knew I would do something on my own that I was passionate about and loved. Around that time I was doing my Sunday long runs on trails with Team Dirt & Vert over at Erwin Park in McKinney Texas, just Northeast of Dallas. I remember one Sunday I was talking with one of the guys and they asked me that same question. "What do you plan on doing after college?" I've always had in the back of my head an idea to do something with coaching, race directing, just anything that has to do with running but I had never actually spoke it out loud before. So I told the guy, "I want to be either a running coach, race director or just something like that." I didn't really think much of it after. Going into college during my first semester I just figured when I graduate I would start my coaching business and maybe put on a race. That was my plan. All of those plans changed very quickly.

After a week or two of college, I was sitting in Micro Economics class and something hit me. This thought of working a desk job in corporate America just wasn't appealing to me and made me feel sick. For some reason, I started writing in my journal names of running companies. I figured I would just use those names as ideas for after college. After that microeconomics class ended I rode back to my dorm. As I get to the door of my dorm and put my key in... it all hit me. Races, coaching, apparel, content, and everything running all in one company based in Texas. I opened the door quickly and grabbed my journal and started pouring every thought that I had onto paper. I knew that was it, all these years of starting little businesses since I was a kid and this was the one. "This is the company," I told myself.

Texas Outlaw Running Company was born, but it was just some words on a paper at that point. I had really big ideas, some more radical than others, but it was going to be a lot of work. I immediately started up my talk show, made my website, started race plans, and got clients for my coaching side of it. Within a week of pouring all my time into the company, I finished every aspect and it was all a rolling production from there. 

In December of 2020 I put on my first race in my hometown called the Cooke County Patriot 5k. The event sold out within the matter of weeks with a total of 50 runners. It was a 5k road race on one of my most favorite routes in town. Putting on the race itself was challenging. I learned a lot from that first race. Going into 2021 I had a plan to put on five races, majority of them being trail and ultra marathon races.

My first trail and ultra race of 2021 was the Chupacabra 50k over at Copper Breaks State Park in early May. It was a 32 mile (50 kilometers) and 10 mile (17 kilometers) trail race through some breathtaking terrain and canyons. The cool thing about Copper Breaks is that its an International Dark Sky Park so the sky is filled with stars at night. My friend from college, Asher Hamlin, was there for the whole thing to help out. I made him co-race director. He had done a lot of trail races, he's a leader at heart and he loved running just as much as I did if not more. He was the perfect guy for the job. So there we were, a few college guys traveling out into the desert, course marking, setting up and camping out every night right under the Milky Way. Our photographers, Josh and Cole from ReRoute Meida, came out the night before the race. We clicked really well with them, they were about the same age as us. By the time race day came everything was set in place. All those months of hard work and planning were coming together. The race couldn't have gone any better. Almost everyone finished, we had a few drop out and the conditions were hot and extremely windy. Regardless of weather, almost everyone said they were coming back as soon as they crossed the finish line. It was Texas Outlaw Running Company's first race in the ultra and trail running world and I couldn't be more happy with how it went.