Sole Sisters - Int w/ Hettas

Speaker: You're listening to Soul Sisters, brought to you by Running Scared Media. I'm Justine and I'm Kylee. And we also have here a special guest. It's Lindsey Housman, founder and CEO of Hedda's in innovative running shoe company serving women runners. Hello. Lovely to be here. Thank you guys so much. Yes. We're so excited to be able to talk with you. This is a running podcast. Do you want to share your running fitness history for yourself personally and for your brand? Absolutely. I would say I've been a lifelong recreational athlete since I was like three or four with gymnastics. And it just went from there, moved to my sports have been sports. So volleyball, badminton, tennis. But when I was in my twenties, I did a lot of travel. And when you're traveling for three months at a time or two months at a time, and you want to keep your fitness up, running was the best way for me to do that. So I would say that was my entry into running, where I would go on these trips, pack a pair of running shoes, and it was a great way to see wherever I was visiting. I loved running through cities. Then I took a break from running and then had twins. And again, when you have twins, you can't really follow a schedule of going to a hit class or going to a tennis game. And the easiest thing to do for fitness is to run. So I did another ten years of basically running as my main cardio fitness activity. And then since then I've had some feet injuries, which have led me to start headers, and I haven't been running as much. I've been walking a lot and back to playing Tennis, but my forefoot precludes me from doing too much with impact, so it's been challenging. I always thought gymnastics is definitely the gateway sport when you're a child. Something about being able to flip and balance on the high beam makes you want to dive into everything else that solidifies you as an athlete. Yeah, it's a great way to put it. It is a great gateway for girls, and it gets you used to using your body and moving in different ways, and then just wanting to do that. Even if that doesn't end up being your main sport, like it didn't end up being my main sport. But moving my body is something that I do every day, at minimum with a walk, but I would say at a higher activity level, at least five days a week. Today, after this podcast, I'm going to go play a tennis match. It helps me break up my day. It helps me think clearly. And then I come back and I'm more energized for the afternoon. And then I might do some cardio tonight before my kids get home. I like what you said too, about what got you into running was kind of the versatility of it. Oh, yeah. I love sports like tennis or I've done tennis, pickleball, volleyball, those kinds of sports you were talking about. And they're so fun. But you do have to kind of go to a certain place at a certain time and have certain people there in order to play. But when you're running, it's just you in the shoes. It is a really fun way to explore a new place, like you said. I loved it when I think back to my three months where I was doing Europe, and at that time some of the Middle East, which was in the late nineties, which kind of gives you a hint of my age. Um, I look back on that trip and some of my best memories are running through Paris, running on the beach in Tel Aviv, running in the countryside in Spain, running up the hills in Greece, running with such an integral part of that trip. We were in Israel. We had to run at ten o'clock at night because it was so hot out, and we would go running like between nine thirty and ten thirty at night. It was awesome, I loved it. It helps you feel productive when you're on vacation and like lazy and eating all the foods and everything. Like it kind of helps you still feel normal one hundred percent. I'm going on vacation for a week to a family cottage. Running is easy. You just bring your shoes and you're good to go. But what drew me to starting when I did Heather's, why we chose run to start and was one of the versatility. And if you are an athlete, no matter what sport you're competing in, you're doing cardio in some way, shape or form, and you're most likely incorporating running into your routine. But the second thing is the running community is just so incredible. And I really felt like it was a way to participate in a group where we could have engaged conversations, we could get a lot of product feedback, we could have more easier engagement with our customer than, say, if we launched with a tennis shoe or a different type of sport shoe. It was just a way for us to really learn and iterate and make sure we're making product. That is what our customer wants to be buying. I know it's kind of funny. Running is such a solo sport, but then there's so many communities just built around running together, run clubs, store runs, demo runs. You take up running to do while you can't meet up with your friends to do tennis or something, but then you do it enough. You kind of end up finding a community and making friends that are just running friends. You mentioned that you kind of had some foot injuries. Is that what drove you to start cheetahs and make shoes that were designed for women's feet versus typical running shoes designed for men's? Yeah. Originally my husband and I had thought about starting a company, later arrived. Twin daughters. Now they're thirteen. We thought about starting a company focused on women in sport when they had graduated high school. Sort of as our what do we do now type thing. And, and the reason we wanted to focus on women's sport is both of us really fundamentally believe in the power of sport in all our lives, girls and women, that participation rates for girls in particular being so low, they're missing out on all these critical skills if they drop sport too early. So that was already sort of ruminating in my mind when I started having feet injuries. And when my four foot injury started, I developed metatarsalgia and I was like, what is going on? I couldn't even go for a twenty minute walk without limping. We had a colleague through a mutual job. He'd been in the athletic sport industry for four years, four daughters, two granddaughters, very active wife. And my cousin kept saying to me, we'll just have Doug make you a pair of shoes. And I was like, why is Doug just going to make shoes for me? And I had a conversation with him and he said quite bluntly, while you've been wearing shoes made for men, and it just sort of stopped me in my tracks. And I was like, wait a minute, that makes no sense. My body is so different than my husband's body. It's changed, you know, through puberty, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause, the hormonal changes, body shape changes. How has this not been brought in to shoe design? And then I just started thinking about it on a practical level. Like I would never work out my husband's workout clothes. I wouldn't ski on his skis. I wouldn't play with his tennis racket. Like I just require a different piece of equipment and different apparel to be comfortable doing. My sports and feet are so important, like your foot health is so important to longevity in sport and your ability to balance and stay active as you age. That really sort of lit a fire underneath me to look into what would we do differently if we created shoes designed specifically for women's anatomy, if we incorporated their hormonal changes, if we understood their biomechanics and their gait, You know, what materials would we choose? How would we test them more? I started talking to people and we were having conversations around this idea. It really became apparent that there was a need in this space, and that came from, I don't know if you guys are on the internet as much as I am, but there's this breaking story, and it was revealed that crash testing in cars was designed for men's bodies, that a woman's body. And that's why they find women pass away more often in car accidents than men, because it's not built for our safety in mind. And so I feel like there's this big shift in equity making the spaces safe for women, too. And it's crazy that it's taken this long to think about it, but you don't even realize that things aren't designed for us until you have that moment. It's like, oh yeah, I guess that's the case as often that we're getting safer cars, better shoes. There's an amazing book out there. It's called Invisible Woman. It's by Caroline Criado Perez and the crash test dummy story is one of the chapters in her book, and it's just all about unconscious design bias. You don't even realize you're doing it. You're unconscious bias. Whether it's a group of men making a decision, they might not even realize that it's not going to work for the whole population. And so this Invisible Woman book is just fantastic. In looking at all the different ways there have been designs that women have not been included in. And then what happens when you broaden it and you do include women in that design? It's a fantastic read. We're big readers, so we're adding it to the TBR for sure. I love reading, it's awesome. You asked also where the ideas come from, and there's an amazing book. It's a photography essay book by a woman named Kate T Parker. It's called strong is the New Pretty. It's about girls telling their stories like quotes and beautiful photography from six year old to eighteen year olds around strength and resilience in sport and why it's so important to them. And we bought that book for my twin daughters when they were six or seven. I wanted that to be the theme. Sport is important, strength is important, and the book is just so beautiful. And when you look at the inspiration points behind where the company came from and that sort of emotional connection I had with that book, it's something that we think about when we're looking at how does branding and speaking to our community, whether it's online or in person, carrying that messaging of, we can be pretty and we can be beautiful and we can be strong and confident and we can light gear and we can be competitive and all those things can exist at once. I was gonna say, Kylie, I guess I'll speak for you, but she's my niece. So Kylie has a thirteen month old. Aw, yeah. Yeah, that's a good book to get relations. Thank you. She's sleeping right now, and. Yeah, definitely doing sport, running activities like that. It kind of has a new meaning when you have a child. Like I'm hoping she sees her mother being active. Her dad is starting to get back into running himself or like if he has free time going out for just a bike ride or something. Just so simple like that. And I just hope it's like setting her the examples that I want her to be active and love me. I'm kind of afraid of nature, so I want her to not be afraid of like bugs and things. I want her to be outdoorsy and brave. So I'm hoping we're setting those examples, but it takes on a new meaning when you do have kids. It's so true. And I don't know if you know this, but the most important factors in keeping girls in sport is girls seeing their mother be active. Oh, so you are absolutely setting the right stage and the right message. I think about that with my girls. They're thirteen now. They are very competitive dancers. Not my sport of choice. It terrifies me, but we support them wholeheartedly. It is a whole different world that I never anticipated being a part of, and I've had to learn so much. Keeping them multi-sport was also really important. We're a skiing family and we kept skiing alive, and they're very accomplished skiers. And tennis isn't their favorite thing, but their friends are playing tennis. They see me go out to play tennis. They want to come and play tennis with my husband and I and with their friends. And so just setting that example, and I know lots of kids that go for runs with their parents or they do races, whether it's a walk or run race or a triathlon, there are so many opportunities now to include your kids in your activities, and it makes such a difference. Oh, Violet's already done her first race at like six months old. Kylie had pushed her in a stroller. It's amazing. Yes, they gave her a medal even though she just was asleep. Oh, yes. Oh, I love that. That is so fantastic. I love the different dimensions of sports you kind of talk about with your daughters, how there's some sports they take more competitively and other sports that it's just for fun. And I think that's important for you to have to be able to branch out. Not every sport has to be taken to the ultimate level, just doing things for enjoyment as well as some sports. You do take a little more seriously when you're talking about multi-sport athlete. It's the balance of competition and fun. Yes, one hundred percent. I think having that balance, you learn about the social aspect. And so my kids really, you know, skiing, they'll go ski, they can ski pretty much anything, but they'll ski with anyone on any run because they appreciate the social aspect of it, and they just want to be with their friends on a chairlift in tennis, it really is just about my friends signed up for that camp or my friends doing that. Are we all going to bike down together? But I will say the competitive aspect, having mastery around one sport has given them a lot of confidence, which I don't think I had at their age. I can do hard things. I've trained really hard. I have a thirteen year old that's pretty amazing that they know that their body is capable of doing things and mentally they're capable of doing hard things. And so they'll put themselves into situations like, okay, I only play tennis twice a year, but I'm going to enter the tournament. I would never have done that. And I don't need to win the tournament. They want to be part of it. That is really cool. It's cool to see your perspective. If you're a family that is active together, you build that confidence together. It's pretty special. And you know, I think we're in the teenage years, right? So I'm there are lots of emotions, but they still want to ski with us. And I'm taking that as a win. I've heard all these stories about what happened in the teenage years. And if my kids don't want to come up for Ski Day with me, I am happy. I was twelve years old when I decided to stop skiing with my parents. You had a really mean sister who tricked you into doing black diamonds. So I think it was that along with not liking skiing that stopped you. I have karma. Yeah, you have trauma. So Hedda's is named after your two daughters. How did that come to be? Was that like a nickname you had for your twin girls beforehand? My background is pretty pragmatic. It's in finance and technology, and naming a company is like one of the things that I even naming shoes right now. It's not my wheelhouse. And so when we were trying to figure out how to name the company, we were like putting the girls initials down and playing around with them. Their names are Hadley, Elizabeth and Taya and which spelled H e t a. And to be completely honest, it was during Covid and Hepa filters were a huge topic of conversation. I'm like, well, we can't name the company header because it sounds like a Hepa filter. And then we were like, well, what if we did like Hadley, Elizabeth West Ann, and we add a T and it still didn't look quite right. And so then I just added like, there was nothing scientific about it. We knew we didn't want to use a word that had a definition, so we wanted it to be something made up in our minds. It had a bit of a Greek sound to it. Yes, that's how it got named. It's giving Greek goddess of running. Yes. Maybe we will create a new Greek goddess. We'll add one to mythology. Yeah, yeah, we could put a Greek goddess. The Persephone shoes after. We're based in Vancouver, Canada. And so the shoe names have come from places in Vancouver that either are near and dear to us from a running perspective, or have been an iconic part of the Vancouver run scene. That's actually really cool. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the Vancouver running scene? Yes. I didn't realize sort of how rich and vibrant that it is. Vancouver has a really amazing run community across all levels, from Olympian level down to everyday runners. It's a city that does not get a lot of snow, of course, except when we did a run study to test the shoes. We had three weeks of snow and we planned for one snow day, but it's typically a year round. You're running on pavement or in trails without snow, and so people are outside running for most of the year. And I think that's why running is also so big here. We were fortunate to meet through our research partner, Doctor Chris Napier from Simon Fraser University. Rachel Cliff, who was the Canadian record holder in the marathon and half marathon in twenty eighteen and had two Olympic heartbreak stories. She's now part of our team, and Rachel has been integral in helping establish the run community across Canada. But then when we did our run study, which Rachel wrote the plan for and coached, that's really where we met a lot of people who have introduced us to run clubs and to the the Vancouver run scene. We did a six week run study in twenty twenty two. Sort of the last big test before we launched the shoe. And we had sixty five women aged twenty to seventy, running three to four times a week, training on a half marathon training schedule and filling out very detailed surveys for us. Those women out of the sixty five, sixty one of them completed the study. So we had a very high completion rate from then on. We've stayed in touch, I would say, pretty closely with at least five of them. Three of them work closely with us right now. So it's been pretty incredible that that one run study then opened up doors to all these different run connections in the Vancouver community, all different levels of runners. It's just been warm and welcoming across the city. Do you have a favorite Ruter Trail for yourself? When I was running postpartum for ten years in Vancouver, I love running by the water. I just love being by the water. So Vancouver has an amazing seawall. I forget how many kilometers long if you ran the whole thing. It is in total and my house is pretty close to not a midpoint, but a point where I could go in either direction for up to eight kilometres if I wanted to. And so that was my running route. I just loved that I could go at different points and see different parts of the city because the seawall was so long. So if I was at my parents house, I could get to the seawall a different way and run by a completely different part of the city than what I could access from my house. When I went back to work, seawall was down six blocks from where our office was, and I would access a different part of the seawall. It was just always my main point in Vancouver was to go there. We spent a lot of time in Whistler, and if I was in Whistler, it would be along sort of the Valley Trail or along trails in. Lost Lake has a great gravel loop around it, a bit more nature focused. Going back to that running trial you did. I think it's really special that a handful of those women love the product so much that they kind of are still with you guys. Yeah. One of the women is our wholesale and community and athlete manager. I met her through the run study. Another one works for us both in organizing community events as a photographer, creating content. And then three of the women are on our community team and go out and host events for us. So it's just fantastic. That's the best testimonial I feel like you can get. How did you find the women for the running trial? Rachel, because of her connections, was able to reach out to several organizations, run groups that then posted it on their boards, and it went viral in Vancouver really quickly. One of the women who I met at a local run store. She ended up writing her first research paper, and she was one of the people that helped coach in the run study. I remember she came over one day. We just posted it less than forty eight hours, and she was like, Lindsay, the run study has made it into my secret WhatsApp run chat. She's like, how? How did it get here? She's like, I didn't post it. And I'm like, I don't know. And so through a few posters at stores and reaching out to a few different women, it just spread quickly. Now, Nike does do run studies in Vancouver out of UBC, which is where a woman approached me about running one for headers at the time, was able to reach out to a lot of people that had been in Nike run studies and Nike run studies were typically mixed gender and not female specific, and they also had an age cutoff at sixty. So I think we had six or seven women approach us that were like, hey, we're over sixty. We used to do the Nike run. Studies were not eligible. Can we do yours? And one of the things that you have to do to participate in a study, like the one we ran, is fill out the fitness form. And I was like, hey, if they pass the health and fitness, I don't care how old they are. Like there shouldn't be an age cutoff. It's more about these are the metrics that we have. You need to be running three or four times a week. I think your pace had to be below an eight minute kilometer. Like it was pretty wide. Really no other restrictions other than you pass the health test, you're committed to this training program and you fit into a pretty broad range of cases. We run with a running club called MRC. When I go to running club, I can spend the entire time talking about running. There's so much to consider and think about. I can see where people who are into running then do the running trial and get really analytical with their observations and things like that. It's a good crossover of people. People who run a lot tend to also overanalyze and think a lot. Yeah. The information we got back was amazing. The fact that sixty one people stayed in it through the end and the people that we lost were mainly because there was other commitment issues, or someone ended up getting sick. You had to participate in eighty percent of the dates to continue it. But since then, we've done other run groups with Simon Fraser for other research, and we always get amazing turnout, and then people often will participate in the next study. We were also doing in-lab testing and it wasn't close. The In-lab testing was in another suburb of Vancouver, and so many of the women that did the run study then signed up going into the run lab and doing it a totally different study that we were running. And a lot of them came back and then did a study with us this past winter in January, and they were like, do you remember me? I was at the original run study and this is really cool. This makes me want to move to Vancouver. Oh my God, the shoe sounds extremely well researched. Talk us through how starting this business works, because it sounds like you had to do a lot of work on the back end before you could start getting the product out there. We did do a lot of research. I remember having a meeting at Fleet Feet in twenty twenty four in September, and having a number of people in the Fleet Feet team just be like, you don't see startups do as much work as you guys did to research and develop your product. And they were impressed with the work we did, which which made me happy because it was a long time. We formed our research partnership with the SFU Run Lab and Doctor Chris Napier at the end of twenty twenty one, and started two research projects with him the next year, which were really baseline, because there is not a lot of research out there on women in performance sports, period. The stat is less than six percent of the research studies between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one on sports science focused exclusively on women. We had to do baseline. We did a literature review. What had been published, and we did focus groups to decide what could we pull out of the research and apply to shoe design, and where were the gaps that we needed to develop new research studies that would help set our research plan for the next decade? At the same time that we were doing that, our shoe partner, Doug Sheridan, had already been working on a female specific shoe through his consulting company since the eighties that had never made it to production, so we weren't starting from scratch. He has always been passionate about building women's specific footwear, started fit testing. We're basically Doug would send samples of shoes to my house. It's Covid, so I would have runners come over and meet me in my yard. We would have them try on the shoes. We would take videos, send notes back to Doug. He would adjust the fit, we'd do another round of fit test. So all of those fit tests, no one is running in them. This is purely about how does the upper fit the foot. We're happening at the same time that we were developing initial drawings and designs for the shoe, and then we were starting to get information from Simon Fraser from the research. So there are lots of things happening concurrently that we're feeding into the shoe building process. By the time we started our run study in the fall of twenty twenty two, we had enough information from Simon Fraser and had done testing with them in lab on machines to understand different profiles of foam and plates. We were able to write really detailed survey questions based on what we had been learning. That then led to the final adjustments of the shoe. Even when we launched the shoe. We still did a lot of testing. We seeded twelve run clubs across Canada and the U.S., ten pairs of shoes each. In exchange for the completion of four surveys. We kept pulling on themes that were coming up and will continue to do that as we bring new shoes into market and have the ability to keep interacting with the customer post development as well as during the development process. We're going to be running a shoe demo here for MRC soon. I think it's such a great way to introduce your product to local communities, make the customer feel like they're part of the mission, that their feedback matters. Get a fan base for your product right off the bat. That really did stem from the run study. We have these duffel bags of heavy shoes. There's two in the US, there's three in Canada that we ship around. If they're in a city where we do have community members. We'll send a community member to host the demo. But getting shoes on feet, having people experience the product has been so important. A long tail way to build brand awareness, but it really has been critical. And you see it in our online sales in the cities where we have spent the most time on the ground in person, which are West Coast, Canada, Vancouver, Victoria, sort of sea to sky corridor, and then San Francisco and all of the areas around San Francisco. Those are where the majority of our sales are coming from. We've started having more shoes on the East Coast in the Connecticut Run demos in New York, run demos to Winnipeg. We've had a lot of run demos in southern Ontario. You start to see those communities light up as well. It's really been a critical part to our brand awareness strategy. Soul sisters runs out of Reno, Nevada. You know what else runs in our area? DJ trivia. Both Kylie and I love playing at different bar locations throughout the Sierra Nevadas, from Minden to Carson City, Reno Sparks, Cold Springs, and everything in between. There's a game that's running distance near you. Wait, what? Justine, I'm not running. And if you're in the Northern Nevada area like us, DJ trivia just added weekend games. So now trivia runs can happen every day. I'm not liking where this is going. Guess I'll just have to check out DJ trivia dot com and find the game closest to me. DJ trivia is across the US, so you can check online and find a game near you too. And unless you're Kylie, there's no running required. What would I have done differently? We did raise capital a small amount of capital early in twenty twenty two. I had this illusion that it would be easier than it is to raise money. I would have changed the way I use that capital, and I would have made it last longer. I would have done that differently. And I think that would have alleviated a lot of stress in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. That's something I feel like you can only learn with hindsight. Exactly. I think I also would have leaned more into DTC. We really tried. Initially, we wanted to sell through independent specialty stores because that's where we thought our customer was, and we wanted to be able to build community with the stores. So we spent most of twenty twenty four working to get into specialty run stores. And it was really challenging and frankly, not that successful. And then we pivoted to just a few select partners who are really aligned with our brand and interviewing the stores as much as they were interviewing us. We've pivoted more to a direct to consumer model through our website. I'd love to be in more specialty retail stores eventually. I just don't think the brand is at a place where it fits with a lot of specialty retail stores that want it to be easier to pull off the shelf, to give to a consumer. We still require a lot of education, and the shoe feels very different and it looks very different. And it's hard to sell different in those stores. So I think as we expand our lineup and have other offerings, we'll look forward to re-entering that channel. But I think, you know, earlier on I would have spent less time pushing a rock up a hill. I wish I would have seen it sooner that this was not the channel for us at this point in time and put more effort into direct to consumer. I like what you said too, about interviewing the people that you want to collaborate with just as much as they interview you. That's such a good point. If you're going to be working with independent stores, you want to make sure that they're as excited about a woman's running shoe as much as you are. Because otherwise, how are they going to communicate that to customers? One hundred percent. Do you have a running scared story that you would like to share with us? I don't know that. I mean, I have a lot of skiing, scared stories. I definitely the running had the way I had it structured into my life, it was always a place of reprieve. I think when I was doing all that running in Europe, I didn't ever think I'd be able to run a 10-K. And I remember coming back from that trip where I ran for three months with my girlfriend, and I was with friends at a training off site training for work, and they wanted to go for a 10-K. And I was like, there's no way I can do that. And I didn't realize that I had essentially trained for one by what I had been doing just to explore cities and stay active. And I remember going for this ten K run with my future coworkers and be like, oh wow, I just ran ten K and it was like nothing. And I had been nervous about doing that. Also chasing my few friends through Paris. It was one of the first runs, maybe the third or fourth run of the trip, and I remember just lagging behind them before cell phones thinking, what do I do if I lose here in Paris? I can't keep up. But they didn't lose me. I'm still here. I actually had a similar run scared moment to you. Kylie and I were actually Canadian. We would go visit our cousins in the summertime. During high school, I had visited my cousin who was older than me, and she was already getting into half marathons, and she convinced me to come out and run with her and her friend. And she's like, it'll be fun. And back in high school, oh yeah, I probably had a cell phone, but there was no international plans. So I essentially didn't have a cell phone in Canada. I went on a run with her and her friend. I had not ever really ran before. I lost them very quickly. They were also teenage girls and probably in their own world, running together super fast, and I just lagged behind a little too much. I got lost and thought I could, like, find my way home instead of waiting there for them. I also, like, threw up my breakfast during that run before I lost them. I thought I knew the way back to my aunt's house and I really couldn't figure it out. I ended up asking somebody who was just driving in the neighborhood, hey, how do I get out of this neighborhood? They told me how to get to the closest shopping center. I also didn't have anybody's phone number memorized. I think I went into like a 7-Eleven, and I asked the employee there if I could use his phone, but specifically his Facebook account so I can add and message my cousin. Oh my gosh, thank God for Facebook. I know, so it was a little bit like the phones rescued me, but I didn't have my own phone back then, and I just waited at 7-Eleven for a couple hours until they saw the message from a stranger and got me. And then after that, my aunt was like, you need to carry this piece of paper with our address and phone numbers on at all times. That's literally what I'm thinking of. That gives me like, chill. What if that had happened to me in Paris? I was like, right, you also can't speak the language. Yeah, yeah. Very resourceful. Justine. I was desperate, I was like, I need help. I'm gonna ask everyone to use their Facebook accounts until I could get a message across. To this day, I only have Kylie's phone number memorized. When my husband proposed to me, I went to go get the ring resized and it was under his name. And so they're like, oh, what's the phone number for the account? And so I grabbed my phone out to look up his phone number. And this person's like, you're about to marry this man. You don't even know his phone number. I'm like, huh? I felt so shame. So I memorized it. After that, I'm like, now I do know his phone number. Okay. I still don't know my husband's. I know my husband's, but I don't know my kids. Isn't that awful? I know you mentioned that you had a skiing scared story, and I'm very curious, especially since we outed Kylie's ski trauma earlier. Could we hear yours? I grew up skiing in Ontario, where there are not mountains, and then moved out to British Columbia to go to university and discovered that I thought I knew how to ski. I actually only knew how to ski on groomed runs, just sort of put myself in a place where I need to learn how to do big mountain skiing. Like I want to be able to ski all over this mountain. So my girlfriend, boyfriend, and his good friend were like two of the craziest skiers I knew. My girlfriend and I decided one season that we were going to put ourselves in situations that were really going to make us uncomfortable, but we were going to get to be really good skiers. And so his friend would go ski by themselves in the morning, and my friend Anne and I would go ski by ourselves in the morning, and then we would meet up with Phil and Mike and let them take us wherever they wanted to take us on the mountain. So for a season, I spent the afternoons terrified because they were putting us in such weird runs and I was having to traverse around bulls, like just do things that were crazy and just trust that they knew our ability and they weren't going to put us in a situation where they were going to push us, but they weren't going to hurt us. It was terrifying. Um, but we did it. I did it all season and I would literally feel like I might throw up a little bit before we, you know, we'd meet up with them and I'd be like, oh God, where are they going to take us today? It was so fun. Made me realize that I could ski these things that I thought weren't for me, that they were just for other skiers on the mountain, and that I wasn't strong enough or capable enough to do it, but I actually could. Having people there that are cheerleaders, they were so supportive and they were pushing us. Having someone come and be like, no, you can do this. You can actually do this. I believe in you. Having someone believe in you and believe in your capability, that takes you a long way. We talk a lot about why we run on running scared media, but never answer our listeners real question how do I become a better runner? The truth is, the better you feel in your own skin, the better you run. Chia peak helps you achieve your best running self with innovative products, using high quality materials and the coolest designs. Kia peak is ahead of every season with fleece skirts, ice bandanas, ear wraps, visors, hats and more. Made by runner for runners, Kia Peak will make you feel so good. You'll be running ultras just to show your fit off for longer. Save twenty percent off on all your Kia Peak needs when using the discount code. Running scared at checkout Kia peak dot com. K e a p e a k dot com. I'm really focused on strength training right now. I trained my knee Skiing on New Year's Day, and it's recovered. When I was recovering from it, the physio I was working with had me do all these plyometrics power tests. Functionally, I was really fit, but my power level was actually really low, which surprised me because I've always been quite strong and consider myself to have a decent amount of power, and that might have also contributed to why I sprained my knee. I don't know what the four tests were, but on most of them I was below the thirtieth percentile. So I want to get myself to the fiftieth percentile in these plyometric power tests by May and then be above the fiftieth going into the summer. And then I always have tennis goals, since it's one of my sports that I would say I learned as a kid, and I'm relearning as an adult, just goals around improving my consistency and competing in some recreational tournaments and getting back on the tennis ladder. I tend not to be a mentally strong tennis player, so I can get a lot of self-doubt, and I want to be able to overcome my own mental barriers so I can improve my match winning ratio. That sounds like really excellent goals to have. This is a little off topic, but it's my favorite author. She wrote a book about tennis, but have you ever read Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Oh, yes. Yes. Taylor. Jenkins. Reid. I love her, too. That's a great book. When you talked about the mental game, I was just thinking about Carrie. The mental game is real. I mean, it comes in all sports. You realize how much your mindset really does matter. That shows up the most for me. So working on sort of mindset shifting, which I think will benefit in all aspects of my life. So when I started Heather's, I think what really surprised me is I thought about all the sports I had done in my life, which were a lot in every sport I had done except running. I had had a coach. What it made me think about with running and what I learned through doing the run study is I always just thought of running as putting on shoes and going out my door, whether it was in Vancouver or abroad somewhere. I hadn't thought about training workouts in Vo two max workouts and progression runs and fartleks and track sessions and hill runs. And so as Rachel was teaching me about all these different types of runs to build into your training program and why you would do them, it just blew my mind that I never thought about having a running coach, when of course I would have a ski coach. Of course I would take tennis lessons. Why had I never, even for one session had someone come and help me with running? Hopefully one day when my forefoot can handle both doing tennis and running, you know, I'd love to try track sessions. I love that burst. I don't like long runs, I love sprinting, and I think what Rachel raised my awareness of is that running doesn't have to be what I was doing, which was putting on my shoes and running. I can do the things that I love about tennis, which is the sprinting and the running and bursts. And we can do that in running too. And someone can help me with my form. The same way someone helps me with my tennis form to make it more fun. And that was a big aha moment for me. It's interesting to learn that about you, that you're more of a speed runner. I'm working on a theory on the types of people who are speed versus the types of people who are long and slow. We'll make a podcast episode about that in the future once I have all my data. Can you share like a hypothesis that you're working about? It's very like limited, still long and slow. People are type B and speedy people are type A, but I want to get into it more like I want to get the zodiac signs in there. Do you think that fits though? What's your sign? I'm a Virgo, so I like being organized. Virgo is a type A for sure. Yeah. That's interesting. I'm happy to participate if you need to do some surveying around it. Ooh, hone Your theory. Okay, okay. There's one person that comes to mind who's, like, speed queen in our local community, Catherine. And she's so organized, she's always on top of things. And then, like, speaking with you, just about everything you've done with Hedda's, I'm like, okay, these two, they fit in the same category. I need to do more research. I'm gonna have to interview her now and put together a theory. No, I love this. I have a weather theory, so I understand weather. I think that weather where you grow up and the weather where you grow up influences your personality. Oh, okay. So let's hear it. My theory is if you grow up in a place with more turbulent weather, like I grew up in Toronto, there were extremes, there were snowstorms, there was. The weather is not pretty like it's ugly in the summer, you get brief months of like nice weather and then it's humid and hot. People that are from Toronto or from the East coast in general, to be very much more on the table, very direct, and they have a bit more cutting, sort of sarcastic sense of humor. It's a bit more this is who I am. I'm going to put it all out there. And then I moved to the West Coast. And the weather here is much more consistent and bringing blossoms are beautiful in the summer, weather is beautiful and yes, there's rain in the winter, but it's still very green. And I found that people tended to want things to always look a little bit more consistent and nicer, and not be as on the table and out there with everything that might be going on. Also, shy away from conflict. Test my weather theory every now and then to see. It's not always true. Of course, very much generalizations, but it's been interesting interacting with people from different coasts and understanding sort of where they grew up and the nice litmus test against their personality. I think there's something to that, because we have the same kind of idea in the States, with New Yorkers being a different way than LA people, even though they're both big cities. I kind of see what you mean about the weather. California surfer chill dude versus people in New York are known to be direct and sometimes rude. Right? And it's probably that like survival mode with the weather and the people and traffic already type of vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lindsay, do you have any last words or things you'd like to promote? Yeah. So we wanted to make trying heads as risk free as possible. So you can find us online at dot com. We offer free returns, free exchanges, and a ninety day free trial. We really want you to be able to try the shoes. And if they work for you, that's amazing. And if there's not, there's no risk to it. Just send them back to us. Any use shoe goes into donations or into our test fleet. There's no waste associated with it. Please follow us on socials. We're at where W e a r underscore us on Instagram and TikTok. We recently launched a loyalty program on our website. It's called The Inside Track. We have two different tiers of membership and we're going to be doing amazing partnerships. Our first partner is Samsara Cycle out of Vancouver that just launched their run line. So we're doing a giveaway with them for core members as well as partner discount codes. Lots of ways to engage with us. We want to build our community and be really engaged with people both digitally and in person. Yay! Well, thank you so much for coming on to Soul Sisters and we hope that. Well, sorry I'm really bad at outros, as Kylie knows, and I can't do it. It's so much pressure. You'll take over. Okay, Lindsay, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us. I feel like we learned so much about not only your business, but you personally. I'm honestly excited to try the headers out. And once again, thank you. Now I'm bad at outros. Oh, see, we both are. You guys are both great. And I had so much fun. And I appreciate your podcast and having me on it and just the raw and honest conversation. So thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. Well, your tennis match. Yes. Good luck. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye.