In 2013, shortly after I got back from a combat zone tour in Afghanistan, I was brought in to the trial team for a big FTC civil prosecution defense. The case was very technical, and dealt with human factors, general user interface, and presentation of websites and their inherent information. FTC contended that our clients’ websites were deceptive, and a host of experts was brought in on both sides to argue the point.

I'd always been the guy who loved to drill down on issues, so I was a natural fit to be the attorney preparing the economist, the marketing expert, and the technology experts (both on the forensic and the general user interface side).

And so began my career in cyber. Sometimes it's the smallest events, combined with preparation and interest, that can set your career on a different trajectory. Long story short, my experience with the case soon was noticed by the newly created cyber operations element in my local National Guard, and I was asked whether I would like to give legal briefings at the next Operation Cyber Shield in 2015. I was told that I would be given a deck of slides and needed to present on cyber security issues. It turned out that they gave me no resources at all, and that I had to create guidance and slides with my own sources in 24 hours. The rest, as they say, is history, with my now having become a fellow of information privacy, a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security p-Professional), and a Certified Privacy Law Specialist.

The takeaway: Those of you who are involved with cyber should get used to the experience of cold terror, rapidly sown. 

The same is true of my ultrarunning career. I once served on a volunteer search and rescue team with two miscreants who shall remain unnamed that would scamper up the mountain with small fanny packs (that’s what we called them back then). They told me of this race that traversed the Wasatch mountains over the course of 100 miles. I immediately resolved that I would do this thing. Three years later, after torturing through training my 27-year-old body that had really never run before, I found myself on a ridge line between Big Cottonwood Canyon and Mill Creek Canyon in the middle of the night, wind howling, wondering what in the world I’d gotten myself into. I have a dear colleague who is a very successful attorney in Salt Lake City who ran the 1994 Wasatch 100 with me. Like the roads mentioned in the Robert Frost poem, we took very different paths. He realized that running 100 miles is utter foolishness and never did it again, having completed an item on his bucket list. I found running such distances to be a calm and peaceful salve to my OCD and somewhat spectrum self, and decided to embark on a new life hobby That was 59 x 100s and 11 x 200s ago.

I suppose running ultras was a natural byproduct of my early training as a musician, which taught me that just about anything can be achieved if you spend between two and three hours a day utterly dedicating yourself to its accomplishment. Along the way, I have learned many of the skills collateral to being a successful ultra runner, including navigation, mastery of technology used for said navigation, footwear, meteorology, proper clothing, and other such sundries. Of course, when I joined the Army in 2007, shortly after my father, a career Army officer, untimely died, I found that many of the same skills translated into soldier skills. I soon found how idiosyncratic my lifestyle was when even the most hardened soldiers with whom I served would shake their heads dismissively when I would mention ultramarathons and say, in the most polite (but more profane) manner, "That's messed up, sir."

I'm okay with that.