Good morning, Motivators.
Bit of a different video here today because we need to talk about a bit
of a new direction that you're about to see with the channel over the last,
I would say actually three years, almost a lot of you might have noticed
that a I haven't raced in coming up on three years this September, and B,
the channel has kind of been a little aimless.
I've been a little aimless.
But now, for the first time in three years, we have something new.
We have a new direction,
we have a new thing coming up and a new bunch of content and something that I
think is important to leave behind and provide to the endurance world
that I'm really excited about, that I want to share with you here
and where we're going with this and why I think it might be worth sticking around,
or if it just isn't for you, maybe why you should move on.
So we're going to just kind of bare
my soul a little bit here with you about where we're going.
My name is Terri Gazelle.
In my twenty s, I was overweight.
Unfulfilled, and couldn't even run to the. End of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports, lost £65,
won age groups, race world championships, broke records, and trained and.
Learned from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too can use endurance sports to.
Change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system.
A system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Motive,
offers that system and I want to share some of the tips from it today.
So when I started putting out YouTube
videos seven and a half years ago, it was just for a hobby.
It was just to have a creative outlet where I could do something other than
being an investment advisor, which I really wasn't happy doing.
And it grew more than I ever expected.
And around about 75 100 videos in, my wife Kim said, hey,
you've been doing some beginner videos lately that's really helping.
The messages that you're getting on social
media and in the comments of those videos is working really well.
And all of a sudden I started getting so much fulfillment out of this and realizing
that, hey, there's an entire group of people out there that feel ignored
because so much of the content in the world is built for athletes
that are already pretty fast and it's about how to make them faster,
not just the basic entrylevel, how do you start becoming an endurance athlete?
And then about a year and a half or two
years into doing YouTube videos, I started doing a daily vlog.
And the daily vlog was about my day, but it was also, what am I learning,
and then what can people learn alongside with me?
And I was racing so there were all kinds of new races and, like,
storylines and build ups to races, and that's what grew the channel.
I think we started doing daily Vlogs
at something like Video 175, and I did that for two and a half years.
And that's when we grew from, I think,
30 subscribers all the way up to 900 subscribers or so by the very final daily
Vlog that I did two and a half years later.
And that was super exciting.
It was really fun.
But over the course of that,
the entire intention was helping more people get into endurance sports,
helping inspire more people, give more people tools that were going
to help them to be able to change their life.
Because I felt that changing my life was
the best thing that ever happened in my life.
It gave me the confidence to leave my job
as an investment advisor to start this business, to take on athletic challenges
like marathon, swims and ironman and half ironman that I never thought possible.
I never thought I'd be able to go under 10 hours in an Ironman.
I did it in my first I never thought I'd
be able to go under 5 hours and a half Ironman.
I went all the way down to 428 and qualified for world championships.
Super exciting.
And I wanted other people to be able
to feel that excitement and that fulfillment.
And the intention was always, how do I help people get that motivation,
that self confidence, and that belief that they can change their life, too?
So then the pandemic happened,
and I had this bit of an existential crisis of like, what do I do?
I was known as Triathlon Taren.
There are no Triathlons to do.
I'm not racing.
Other people aren't racing, so what am I going to tell them to do?
So the content, it felt a little pointless.
It felt disingenuous for me to be like,
all right, hey, let's go out there and stay motivated
throughout this pandemic because races are going to come back.
And I was feeling really unmotivated.
I was feeling like I wasn't being honest with you at the time.
That was super emotionally painful to feel
like I needed to be the motivator, but not be motivated myself.
And throughout the course of the pandemic, I gained that motivation again.
But because there wasn't races for me to do, where I got that motivation was I
always looked at what is a challenge that intimidates you, that scares you,
that you're not quite certain if you can do.
The challenge that really inspired me and scared me was to build a brand,
to build motive and build something that was bigger than me,
bigger and more important than just my story in Triathlon.
Even in the last 18 months since we launched Motive,
I've been very uncertain about how do I transition from the guy who raced
and provided motivation in the form of racing and lessons that I gained
throughout my racing to how do we continue to create content and motivate people when
I'm not racing without it, just feeling like I'm talking at people.
So I've had a couple of years of thinking like, okay, we've got this big megaphone,
this big following in endurance sports and how do we actually make that something
that is beneficial to the endurance sports world?
And finally now I think we actually have a vision about where we go with this.
So what I've realized over the past year,
two years in particular, as the awareness about cultural
differences and representation and the reality is that people other than
very privileged white people face day to day.
And what I believe is that everyone deserves the right to change their lives
and live a more fulfilling life through endurance sports.
How the internet works is just naturally, people tend to gravitate towards
and follow those people who look like themselves.
And who is most present in endurance sports?
30 to 50 year old privileged white people.
And the vast majority of people who are on magazines and covers and in podcasts
and on the face of this YouTube channel are very privileged white people.
And unless you are fast, sexy or rich, you tend not to get a whole lot of play.
But that's not the reality.
Every single person out there wants
to live a better and more fulfilled life and is aspiring for more things.
But what they need is role models that they can look at and say, hey,
that person there looks, sounds, acts like me, has a similar background.
And if they are doing it, I bet I could do it too.
But I can't be the motivating person
to everyone out there because I don't look like everyone out there.
I can't be a representative for moms, for people of color,
for people with low income, people that are three or £400 heavier
athletes, athletes with physical disabilities.
But that doesn't mean that we can't use
what we've built here to affect the endurance world and help inspire
and open up the endurance world to those people.
So the thing that I'm announcing here is something called the motive movers.
And this is similar to an ambassador program where we are going to partner
with well known people out there in the endurance world.
So as opposed to a traditional ambassador
program where we say, hey, here's a bunch of gear and now promote our
brand, instead what we're doing is we are intentionally partnering with people
who you could look at and say, you know what, I bet you several years ago
they doubted that they would be able to do this.
And we're intentionally trying to find a very broad spectrum of people,
heavier athletes, moms, people with different backgrounds,
different demographics, from different countries,
from different socioeconomic statuses, different types of people.
And we are going to create content with them.
A lot of the content that we do here will be less about strictly me or strictly
my thoughts to teach you, and more about what are all of the stories
out there from all the different people out there that you wouldn't necessarily
think would have gotten to endurance sports.
But they are in endurance sports.
They're changing their lives
with endurance sports and they're having a great time doing it.
And the content is going to be with and around them.
We're going to change the content
and start making it easier for all different types of people to find their
people where they can look at them and go, you know what?
If they can do it, I can do it.
Let's show the actual demographics, the actual people that are making up
the majority of the field to inspire so many more people out there.
And I suppose I just wanted to open up and say, if you felt that maybe I've been
less passionate about endurance sports, I would agree with you in a sense.
Floundering yeah, like, I wasn't sure what
this whole thing, this relationship that we had between me
and the lens that represents all of you out there would actually turn into after
the pandemic and after my focus has shifted so much towards helping other
people get to races as opposed to me getting to races.
But that's not at all to say that I'm not passionate about endurance sports.
What I am not passionate about is I'm not passionate about just mindlessly going
and suffering because I think that's exclusionary to people.
When we start doing nothing but portraying
online that we're training 1012, 15 hours, it's nothing but hard work.
It's so hard. And every one of us is guilty of this
because that's what we want to show is like the hard work that we've done so
that we get recognized for it and it helps motivate us to continue on.
But I think the people outside of endurance sports who might consider
getting into the sport, it becomes intimidating because they go,
wow, that is going to be so many hours, that's so hard to do.
I definitely can't fit it in.
I think that we need to make it more
acceptable for people to think, hey, if I can train four to 5 hours a week,
maybe I'm not going to be a world champion athlete at the start,
but I might be able to go and do that half marathon that I never thought I could do.
But we need to, I think, as a community,
be better at showing that this is accessible for all different
types of people, that it isn't just about huge training hours and PDS.
It's about being a better version of yourself.
And that better version of yourself might be just going from the couch to doing
a five k or running for a kilometer continuously.
And that better version of yourself also
might be going from local podiums to trying to be on international ironman
level podiums or qualifying for a world Championship.
And there is nothing wrong with either end
of the spectrum or anything in between as long as you are trying to be a better
version of yourself in a balanced and healthy way.
That's what we want.
And we are launching, I think the very next piece of content
that you're going to see is with first motive mover.
We're launching with, I think, six to seven motive movers.
Ashley Hencamp, who is a mom of four, she is a teacher, very busy lady.
Jonathan Perez,
who was over £300 and still doing triathlons and endurance sports.
Milo James from Underestimated, who is a person of color and just a very
positive vibe out there in the running community.
Gillian Roberts,
who is recovering from cancer, has a couple of times before and has
always focused on what can she do, not what can't she do.
Kevin and Lauren from our triathlon journey, who still to this day doubt
that they would be able to do some of the things that they're doing,
but they still take them on and take them on and challenge themselves with a smile
regardless of what time they actually do the race in.
And there's Joanne Courtney,
who is kind of a bit of an interesting thing out there because she is a world
class athlete, tremendously fit athlete, but when I started talking to her about
doing triathlon, she seriously doubted that she'd be able to do it.
So taking those lessons of somebody like
Joanne, who on the surface should be confident, but showing the vulnerabilities
that, hey, it's okay to doubt yourself and you can get through
these processes, this is who we're launching with as the motive movers.
You can go check them out.
Links to all their profiles are in the description below.
But I don't want to just limit it at telling you what we're doing.
I want to involve you here.
So what I want to ask from you is who inspires you out there?
Who is somebody that you can look at and say, I bet you several years ago
they doubted that they would be able to do this, but they're doing it maybe not
necessarily fast or slow, but just somebody who you would go,
you know what, they're just a regular person that is out there spreading
a fantastic vibe and this is the type of person that we don't always hear from.
I want you to comment below with who you
think that we should try to involve in the motive movers.
Who do you think we should try to feature more?
You can DM me on Instagram.
You can comment in this video below and we'll reach out to them and start
featuring more of these stories to start giving a bigger voice
to the underrepresented people in endurance sports.
We want to help other people live this fantastic, fulfilling, exciting, fit,
healthy life that we all know as endurance athletes.
And we need to help grow that pie as
opposed to just focusing on the existing people in it.
So that's what's up. If that doesn't sound at all interesting
to you, and you came here for me racing years ago and you're expecting me to get
back into racing, it's probably not going to happen for a while because I'm focused
on our brand and helping other people get to races.
That's the exciting part, I think.
Just going and doing more races just it's more of the same.
It's more of a 30 to 50 year old white male going out there trying to be fast.
And the best thing that we can do for our sport and for our community is show all
the different faces and backgrounds of our sport.
I hope you stick around, but if you don't, I completely respect that,
because things have changed A lot in the last seven and a half years.
People evolved, I've evolved,
and I hope that where we're going with this is evolving to something Much
bigger than just me telling the tale of me racing more, and it starts telling
the tale of all the great Things that average people are doing exceptionally.
Thank you for watching Motivators.
If You're Looking For A Training Plan
that incorporates These methods that is as good as a one on one Coach but as
inexpensive as doing it Yourself, check out Our Motive Training App
that covers Triathlons running races, do athlons swim runs and cycling events.
The link in the Description below where
you can check out your Customized Training plan for Free.
Also, if you Rather listen to these Tips,
we also publish these videos in Podcast format on the Terrain's Motive Method.
Podcast, so you can check that out. And if you don't want to do.
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hit us up With A virtual high Five by smashing the like button below.
Later, Motivators.