TRACKRAT wasn't planned. It was built from inertia. When I first moved to Austin a mutual friend introduced me to Ankith who then introduced me to David. These guys, like me, were in tech and loved hard workouts. Now I don’t mean your typical push-pull-legs split, but the type of workout that makes you question why you agreed to it.
We started meeting every Sunday to run sprints, typically 8 200s. Every week, the group grew as we pulled in other people on the track and they brought their friends and we decided we needed a name for this near-religious experience we put ourselves through every Sunday.
As the weeks passed and our relationships within the club grew, our ambition for what TRACKRAT is grew. We doubled the number of free workouts we run weekly, partnered with Alexis Ohanian’s ATHLOS to do an activation at Texas Relays, volunteered as a club at Cap10K, and started competing as a club.
However, we collectively noticed the meets we went to were competitive but were long, far from the city, or light on the sprint events we cared about. In Q4 of 2025 we decided to solve that.
As we got into planning in the new year we knew we wanted our track meet to give back to the local community. The tension was running a quick 2-hour event, offering a nominal athlete fee so no one is priced out, and still covering costs.
We intended to work with partners to bridge the gap. That didn’t happen, but they did help with in-kind donations, so we agreed to backstop our costs rather than put on an event that didn’t have the quality we wanted.
The other piece we had to solve for was finding athletes who would actually want to compete. Not many people want to sprint, even fewer want to compete at a track meet, and we wanted athletes from other clubs, not just our own.
Luckily Muse had just launched, and I was able to use it to build out our lead list of over 200 athletes sourced from adult track clubs, former college sprinters, sprint coaches, masters athletes, and a few creators who train seriously, and then identified followers of followers of the TRACKRAT account and other sprint clubs.
I then turned the list into an HTML CRM and reached out to over 200 people manually. (Thanks, Muse rate limits.)
After months of preparation, the meet happened this Sunday. We got to the track at 7am to start setup and by 12pm we had finished cleaning up. TRACKRAT members, clubs from Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, friends, family, and neighbors showed up. Over 200 people attended. The cost to throw the event was about $4K. Ticket sales brought in $2K. We’ll run it again in 2027.