Gabe Peterson: 0:05

They did this really human superpower that we're born to run. I say this a lot and people are very skeptical. I wasn't a collegiate runner. I ran recreationally, mostly to stay kind of fit, and I don't think I'm a particularly talented runner. Just lots of hard work and setting small goals. So he starts off doing this 50K called Anilope Island. 50k which is Anilope Island is an island in the middle of Salt Lake. It's pretty amazing. It has bison, it looks like this prehistoric pile. It's like a 50K lap. And again I finished I thought that'll be it. I'll never need to do an ultra again. I thought that was fun. Maybe I could do a 50-miler. So the next year do a 50-miler and then 100-miles sounded pretty insane to me. But eventually you're like well, I'll do it once. Tell you what. It's kind of a drill, I'll just do it once.

Gabe Peterson: 0:55

So I ended up doing this race in Utah called the Bear 100, which goes through kind of the Wasatch Mount. It's just amazing, beautiful race, although it's one that most people consider one of the hardest hundreds in the world. This is my first 100. Usually people start off with a very easy 100. I didn't know that, so I just started with one of the hardest hundreds out there Next. That was fun, so I'll do the Wasatch 100 the next year. And I heard of these 200-mile races, which is how fast forward 2019 and me starting doing these runs for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I was like all right, moab, I love Moab. I lived in Utah. That was my favorite place.

Joe Miller: 1:37

And.

Gabe Peterson: 1:37

I said this will be like running through paradise, but I'm only going to do it once, and this week. Along the way, I read about this race Badwater, which is 135 miles. That starts at Badwater Basin in Death Valley in July, so the hottest place on the earth at the hottest time of the year, and you finish at Whitney Portal. I remember reading about that, people like Scott Jerk doing it and I thought no way, those guys are super, super human. And then, next thing, you know I did that. Yeah, you're in Italy running through the Alps. It was progression over many, many years. I would always have a smaller goal and a lot of times I thought that was the goal and then I realized maybe it's like the idea of using that mount top analogy A lot of times, the mountains frustrating it's ball summits.

Gabe Peterson: 2:23

You're like I'm at the summit. I'm like, oh no, this isn't the summit, it's actually over there. And then you get there and oh, this is another fall summit. So it looks like those smaller goals were ball summits and I don't know, Baby tortoise was the actual summit. It's hard to imagine doing anything more challenging than that.

Joe Miller: 2:47

Dave Peterson, welcome to Titans of Transition.

Gabe Peterson: 2:50

Yeah, thanks for having me, Joe. This is going to be a good move.

Joe Miller: 2:54

Yeah, this is one of the things I do on this side. You and I are in the same CIO Chief Information Officers network. I do recall recently you mentioning on this side that you had done some extreme sport events and we'll get to that. But I just want to ask you a little bit about your background. So you were in the Navy, isn't that right?

Gabe Peterson: 3:25

Yeah, so straight out of high school I enlisted in the US Navy. So I grew up in a small town in Northern California and it was very intriguing by the Navy Recreation Post and joined the Navy to see the world. So I thought it was a good way for me to get some good life experience. Also came from a pretty modest background, so my parents were like if you want to go to college, good luck.

Joe Miller: 3:48

Yeah, I do.

Gabe Peterson: 3:50

So the GI Bill was also really compelling. So they lived up to the Recreation Post or by the time I'd been in the Navy a year, I had circumnavigated the globe. Wow, I was in the tail end of the Persian Gulf War. It was actually kind of funny. When I came back I was in E2, which is like the second lowest ranked in the military, but I had like three rows of ribbons, and at the time people who had been in the Navy 20 years didn't have three rows of ribbons.

Gabe Peterson: 4:18

So, he's like old crusty chief who'd been in it 20 years, and he's like sailor. How did you get three rows of ribbons?

Joe Miller: 4:26

They sent me the bread and dough, and you had such a safe job too. Right, tell us about what you were doing on that.

Gabe Peterson: 4:34

Yeah, I was in the F-18 Hornet Squadron F-18's, the jet the Blue Angels fly. So I worked on the flight deck it was what's called a crew chief or plane captain when I basically had one plane that I was responsible for the maintenance on, and so I actually had my name on the side of the airplane.

Gabe Peterson: 4:53

It was much lower than where the pilots was. I was following it. The nose gear is on the door that opened up. It said you know Airman Peterson from Ferndale, california, there you go. Very cool. Not many places you know an 18-year-old can be responsible for a $25 million jet, making life and death decisions.

Joe Miller: 5:12

Oh man, so I had to bring back so many memories of visions of Top God Tom Cruise movie yeah, that was it. Did you oversee the group of guys that went out there did the little dancing action on the flight deck?

Gabe Peterson: 5:27

I don't remember A lot of dancing, but definitely like the hand signals. It's so loud you can't communicate verbally, you can't hear it all, so you communicate with hand signals. And when I was in Top Band it actually come out and there weren't a lot of movies on the boat. But you know there's a 5,000 person ship the boat so they go to the cruise for six months and they bring like 20 movies so they play the same movies over and over. You get through where you can memorize the movies and Top Gun was one of them.

Gabe Peterson: 5:58

But we know it lacked because the hand signals are totally out of context and wrong in the movie. Oh are they? They're correct signaled but they're given the wrong time.

Joe Miller: 6:09

Well, some producer probably thought they looked cool it looked cool.

Gabe Peterson: 6:12

It's a great shot we're going. You never do with that.

Joe Miller: 6:17

Well, we'll swing back to that probably a little bit later, but I want to jump right in and kind of in the back of everyone's minds as you're listening. I know there's question how does a guy that rose to being in the C-suite of VP of Information Technology have that as part of their life? It's kind of you envision that, a sort of buttoned up, professional, corporate guy. And then, like I said, we were having this meeting, actually over Zoom. We were having this meeting and I mentioned that this book I was reading by Dave Goggins and you went, oh yeah, I've raised with him and which is this crazy exceal out of control, extreme accomplishments, physically type guys. And yeah, I raised with him.

Gabe Peterson: 7:08

I actually finished a race that he did not finish.

Joe Miller: 7:12

Oh, was it one of the ones where he was like running on broken legs and stuff.

Gabe Peterson: 7:16

I don't think I broke in legs, he just kind of had other issues.

Joe Miller: 7:22

Altitude issues, I think what he said Gotcha, so I went to the same altitude Didn't have those issues. Yeah, so let's talk about your last one, which is like it's like the mother of all events. It's Tour de Ligeants, Is that how you say?

Gabe Peterson: 7:35

it Tour de Jants.

Joe Miller: 7:36

Tour de Jants.

Gabe Peterson: 7:38

Italian for the Tour of Giants. So it's a approximately 220 mile loop through the Italian Alps. It starts in Cormeier, which is just if you've been to Mont Blanc. There's the Mont Blanc Tunnel as soon as you pop out of the Mont Blanc Tunnel. On the Italian side, that's Cormeier. It's just a very scenic Looks like, yeah, you're in a postcard. When you get there it almost doesn't seem real, right in the middle of the Alps. A lot of people consider it the toughest mountain race in the world because it has about 86,000 feet of vertical gain and loss, or about three Everests. If you went up Everest from sea level, it came down three times.

Joe Miller: 8:23

And how many miles long or kilometers long is it?

Gabe Peterson: 8:26

It's. They built us 330 kilometers, but I actually got 227 miles, so it's a little longer than advertised, wow.

Joe Miller: 8:36

And five days, is that what it took you?

Gabe Peterson: 8:39

to complete. It took you five days. So the race started on Sunday and I finished Friday night. So it was 135 hours and in those 135 hours I slept about a total of seven hours.

Joe Miller: 8:53

I watched that blog video that you put on your channel. I got to know you a little bit. I mean, I know you professionally, but I got to know you a little bit more because of your self-talk through the whole process. I'm just curious when you watched it back, did you notice anything in what you said as you narrated that that surprised you, or was it pretty much the way you remember? Or yeah, just kind of curious, because sometimes when you're in the middle of going through something you have one thought in mind, but then when you look back at it you go, oh, I guess I was. I'm just going to say I was in better shape than I thought I was, or I was struggling more than I thought I was.

Gabe Peterson: 9:32

It was probably the opposite. I probably generally thought I was in better shape than I was. Like, did you see on the video? You know, I think at one point he would talk about it feeling strong, but I looked like. I just like, like I just crawled out of a grave and I'm like I feel really good. Well, I don't look good for that video.

Joe Miller: 9:53

Well, what I noticed was you were like coaching yourself because you would say all right, wow, okay, well, that was interesting, okay, so now the next one. Yeah, we can do this. I mean, you were kind of keeping yourself encouraged and I'm just that's just sort of I'm going to park that. Thought we can swing back to that, but that might be the mode you operate in in a lot of different spheres of your life.

Gabe Peterson: 10:19

Yeah, then there's definitely a lot of transferable lessons to life, the work world, I think. And in the movie I tried to, you know a lot of people film like the Epic Mountains, which is there, you see it, I tried to kind of narrate my internal monologue, so you're hearing generally what I'm thinking. You know the more like PG-13, what I'm thinking.

Joe Miller: 10:45

Did you cut some things out in post, did you?

Gabe Peterson: 10:49

There were things that were like oh, that's yeah, that's no. I could put that in there, which is great. That's the real few months of the 18 year old sailor.

Joe Miller: 11:01

So this was pretty much the most extreme thing you've done at this to this point.

Gabe Peterson: 11:05

Yeah, I would definitely say this was the most extreme thing I've done. And I would say you know that's saying a lot, because I've done some pretty extreme things. Yeah, a lot of times I look back and I'm surprised Like, oh, I did that, because if went back 10 plus years I would have a hard time believing me. From 10 years ago that's doing, has done this stuff. What started that? Because it wasn't something that started very early in life.

Joe Miller: 11:34

I do want to point out pretty early on that, in addition to just doing this passion of yours, you also have a personal mission involved in this too. You're raising funds for a charity, and why don't you tell us about that?

Gabe Peterson: 11:47

Yeah, I have to tell. So. 2019, my oldest daughter, sky, was diagnosed with type one diabetes, which you know she's very young and it's just nothing a kid should have to go through, because usually the way they're diagnosed is she ended up in the pediatric ICU and it's a medical mystery. You know why? She's basically passed out and throwing up. It did take the doctor's log to diagnose that she had type one diabetes.

Gabe Peterson: 12:16

The upside is, as you get into it, the technology has really improved the quality of life. But when you're in the hospital, they want you to know all the low tech stuff, because what if the technology doesn't work? So they're giving you like the vial and a syringe this is going to be the rest of our life like measuring doses, and then as we leave the hospital they go oh, there's a pen where you just dial the dose and give it to her, and then at six months, once you guys are approved, you're confident that you can get an insulin pump where you would punch in the numbers and it'll automatically do the dosage. But I read the first few weeks were tough, where before every meal she'd have to get a shot, and so it's very complex. We have to calculate, like, the number of carbs which actually turned out the endurance sports thing.

Gabe Peterson: 13:00

You know, I knew how to like count carbs because that's really important you have to fuel. So I guess one of my superpowers I can look at a plate of food and go that's about 40 carbs and I'll usually be within like 10% accurate. Wow, my wife was like Google it and how much is this? And I'm like, oh, that's about 40 carbs. And she's like wow, it was 43. You're really close. The first few months they come up and show me a plate of food like how many carbs is this? Yeah, and then you have to do the injection, which my daughter really, you know, is usually a lot of crying. So her strategy was she would just not eat.

Joe Miller: 13:36

And she didn't do the injection. Good idea.

Gabe Peterson: 13:38

Yeah, and then she goes forward. Now it's she's got an insulin pod. It uses technology where it's taking her, basically blood sugar reading and adapting. I mean, technology is amazing. That's why you know part of why I'm in this career. But at the same time, in 2019, I was doing the Moab 240. This is a race where I beat Goggins. Yes, as you would think I took his soul.

Joe Miller: 14:05

Let's see if we can hook him into this video to comment against this Go viral. I know you got into it with Dan Crenshaw there for a while too, so that was kind of interesting.

Gabe Peterson: 14:15

Yeah, I was definitely. I'd read his book and I was aware. When he was showed up at the registration I was like that's Goggins, that's cool. I was in the Navy. People in the Navy are called squids. I was catching up to him and so my plan was, when I caught up to him, I was going to say hey, it's two squids, let's have a push-up contest, see who wins.

Joe Miller: 14:33

I didn't expect that to win, but I thought that'd be funny.

Gabe Peterson: 14:36

But he ended up dropping out due to some medical issues. But anyway, I thought maybe people would donate to a fundraiser, I don't know. So I set a pretty modest goal. I think it's 240 miles. So I said, yeah, $2,400. If I can hit that, that'd be really amazing. And again, the power of technology. I just put this out on social media. Hey, I'm going to go do this run for my daughter. It'd be great if you donated. And I think in a day we blew through $2,400. I can't remember how much we ended up raising for Moab, but it was like $4,000 or $5,000. Since then, every year I pick one race that I dedicate as a fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So their mission is a world without type 1 diabetes, with me doing this crazy, stupid epic stuff, and help in some way. I'm happy to do that and I found that the more insane the event, the more people are willing to contribute.

Gabe Peterson: 15:41

And it helped me out there because I know I can't quit. All those people contributed. I can't quit for them, I can't quit for my daughter. So those are usually races where I really need that extra boost of mental resolve that I'm not going to quit, because a lot of these races are 40% or 50% of the people don't finish. Like Tour de Chauds, about 50% of the people who started did not finish, and these are the best ultra runners from the entire world. No one shows up lightly to do Tour de Chauds. Everyone there, like when I talked to them, they had a very, very serious resume. So just failure is a very real possibility, which makes things exciting.

Joe Miller: 16:28

You see, in a lot of these events you know it's going to thin out, but it was really interesting watching your video because in the very beginning there was so crowded going through those narrow streets that you really couldn't run or just maybe walk you sometimes had to stop.

Joe Miller: 16:45

And then, probably about halfway in, you noticed that reading less than that you were separating on the skinny trails and then, I think probably two thirds in or three quarters in, it was like, hey, I actually could find a place to sleep tonight. I didn't have to sleep on the floor or the ground.

Gabe Peterson: 17:04

It was really unusual to say. Ultra running is a sport that has a lot of popularity in Europe and you see in the movie like people were lined in the streets, ringing bells, yeah, shouting the others, which one of the things at times it shows is die, which means go, which like on day three or four where someone's shouting, hey, you got to go, wait a minute. And then something realized like oh, he's an American that debate and they would know it would be like don't say that to him.

Joe Miller: 17:34

Oh gosh, that's hilarious Wow.

Gabe Peterson: 17:37

But yeah, so you don't have ultras like that. Where it starts with you know that was there was two waves in each wave was about 500 runners like the biggest ultras in the US are 500 runners and that's a cap of tortoise nods and you don't get that kind of crowd mojo at an ultra. It's more like if you're doing Boston marathon or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so that was really cool.

Joe Miller: 18:02

So one of the things that I want to bring out is this incremental improvement concept. But before we tie that into this extreme events that you've been doing, let's pivot back. You were talking about the technical aspects of helping your daughter manage your diabetes and doing the manual injections, and I make insulin pump and the feedback with the monitoring. You have a scientific background, which I found out also. I come, I have a degree in chemistry and a minor in physics. You do as well. So let's pivot to your initial career. This is supposed to be about transitions this podcast and talk a little bit about your transitions and how they came up. You graduated from Berkeley with that degree, is that right?

Gabe Peterson: 18:47

Yeah, no, that's right. So got out of the Navy, which is in some ways a hard decision. So I actually enjoyed the Navy in a lot of ways as an adventure and I could have seen myself being a career Navy guy. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened, but life's turned out pretty good for me. So I used the GI Bill.

Gabe Peterson: 19:07

I started up in a small college in Northern California where I grew up and then I transferred into Berkeley and so a couple of transitions there just go from the military back to school and I had this very exciting, dangerous job and then all of a sudden life's kind of boring again. You're studying. I was responsible. I ended up responsible for a team on the flight deck and as responsible for myself, it's kind of like for me it was almost for a while better word, relaxing and enjoyable, like going to college. I'm just responsible for myself. Everyone else there is super stressed, especially when I got to Berkeley. It's a very competitive environment. You know you do the orientation and they're like how many of you are the slewditorian or valedictorian in your high school and like half the people raise their hands and like why isn't high school? I didn't even know I was gonna go college.

Gabe Peterson: 19:59

Wow, if you talk to a lot of the students there and they're like they'd been groomed from the time they were 12, that they were gonna go to Berkeley. And I'm like huh, I decided I was gonna go to college on my 21st birthday when we just pulled out of Hong Kong and I said, you know, if I don't take my shot now, that might not come again. So I'm gonna get out of the Navy and use the GI Bill. It's a just GI Bill and a lot of hustle. I was able to put myself through Berkeley.

Joe Miller: 20:25

So just real quick interrupting you. I'm sorry, but when you said something there, how did you come to the point where you felt like you had to make that decision? At that point in time, you were getting close to the end of your initial commitment. Is that what it was?

Gabe Peterson: 20:38

Yeah, it was kind of either reenlist for another four years and I had orders. I wanted to be an air traffic controller, which can be a lucrative civilian career too. It's hard to get into that school and I had orders to go to air traffic controller school. So on the one hand I had a very sure thing like this sets me up for a nice life. But for me I felt like I could do more. I could take my shot because I worked with the pilots and I knew them pretty well.

Gabe Peterson: 21:11

You see, I'm off the boat, have a beer and thought what's the difference between me turning the wrench on the airplane? It's hard to imagine now, but I used to have mechanics hands. You know we have the grease and the crevices of your hands. What's the difference between me with the greasy hands and this pilot? And it's like, well, that guy got a philosophy degree from Ohio State, so he gets to fall into the airplane and I try to get that. I go. I'm at least as smart as these guys. I need to take my shot. So I figured, worst case, I could always reenlist back in the Navy. But I would kick myself if I didn't take my shot. So it was kind of a big leap to just like I'm gonna give up this sure thing. That would give me a pretty good life. Then go back to college and who knows what happens there.

Joe Miller: 21:58

Okay, so your life changed. You're on the Berkeley campus, which is kind of an elite. I'll just say I don't know if it was the same timeframe, but I did have a CIO IT leadership post in Berkeley, so I visited that campus a number of times for meetings and my nephew went there as well, so I'm pretty familiar with it and that's a big shift, you know, culturally.

Gabe Peterson: 22:22

Yeah, from the Navy to Berkeley.

Joe Miller: 22:24

Yes, yes. So I imagine you just put your head down and just focused and grounded out for the remaining two years or whatever.

Gabe Peterson: 22:34

however many years, yeah for the junior and senior year. Yeah, I mean, I always try to make time also to enjoy the experience as an older student. By the time I was there, I was in my mid-20s and, like I said, I had an appreciation for it that, hey, life's not really like this where you're just responsible for yourself, where your job is to enrich yourself and take tests. A lot of the students were very stressed about it. I'm like no one's gonna die.

Joe Miller: 23:02

I had a job where I could actually die if I made the wrong decision.

Gabe Peterson: 23:07

So yeah, I definitely worked hard. The usual pattern was all the problem sets for physics and chemistry were due on Fridays, so I would stay up all night Thursday get those done and hand them in, like let's do it in noon, so like 11.58, I'm there. But then I was like, oh well, you know the weekend I have some time to go enjoy.

Gabe Peterson: 23:27

The Bay Area. So I wanna go, I wanna go. Just huge value in Berkeley is all the people you meet there. I consider myself kind of an extrovert, so I just meeting people, learning their stories and having a really unusual background there. They grew up kind of poor in the small town in Northern California that I've been in the Navy. That was the usual story.

Joe Miller: 23:47

Unique, definitely unique.

Gabe Peterson: 23:49

They were not many older students. It was usually like the age of the grad students. Usually people thought I was a grad student.

Joe Miller: 23:58

Ah, so the next transition came when you had to get a real job right.

Gabe Peterson: 24:03

Yeah, when I graduated I did some research. I did an internship at the Stanford Lateral Accelerator, which again was another kind of pinch yourself moment, when I had my old 1960 Volkswagen bug that I bought saving up from a cruise in the Navy and I drive onto the Stanford campus and it was like something I'd never imagined for myself. It was just like going on the Berkeley campus Like I can't believe this is my life. But the thing I realized was research was not my passion. I enjoyed I definitely enjoyed science, but the actual research turns out all the interesting chemistry seems to happen at like three in the morning in some sort of concrete bunker by yourself, and I like working.

Joe Miller: 24:47

By yourself, yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 24:49

I didn't get energized by doing it and it was kind of the tail end of the dot com era, you know late 90s. So I thought I could maybe move into technology. But I still want to stay involved in science because, yeah, it's important for me. So I did a plight of job at a software company, make scientific software for the pharmaceutical industry, which can put me on this whole path of life sciences, informatics and IT.

Joe Miller: 25:15

Were you a developer.

Gabe Peterson: 25:16

Kind of worked in professional services. I guess the way I got the job was. They were trying to make a chemistry based product and found they couldn't teach the programmers chemistry, and so they wanted to see if they could teach, you know, chemists programming and sure not any super useful programming languages like Fortran, but they had treatment transmission though, as I basically walked in and they're like hey, our product uses Oracle database. And I'm like what's an Oracle database? I've never heard of it.

Gabe Peterson: 25:43

It's fine. Here's the book. Read the book and then start programming next week. Ok, so a great experience for learning.

Gabe Peterson: 25:55

Yeah, they're like OK, we have an engagement where this customer wants a chemistry data warehouse and you're flying out there on Monday OK, I guess I'd better read that book. So you have the playbook and then you have to present yourself as the expert and you're in a lurch and you're making a lot of mistakes. So that's one lesson I've picked up for my life is being willing to fail. Like I mentioned, a lot of these races is a very high probability of actually failing, but I think that makes it more exciting.

Joe Miller: 26:27

Not everyone is like that. There's a lot of people in this world who have fabulous contributions to whatever endeavor they're in, but I wouldn't call them risk takers. I would say that certainly they can move into other areas I'll say, grow into other areas but jumping into something that they don't have structure and they don't have a base competency in it is something they aren't willing to do. And I think, thematically, here I'm starting to see a thread that this is one attribute you have in your wiring and your natural or gifting or wiring that has played out in multiple different areas of your career and your life. Is that, like you said earlier on, when you're making the decision to go to Berkeley, it was like, well, I figured I would take my shot at it. Or, as we'll probably learn later on, how you got into your endurance sports is you just went for it. And so the length of that stretch for that kind of a transition, people have different tolerance levels for that.

Gabe Peterson: 27:36

Yeah, I don't know if that's intrinsic or that's maybe something that having that early experience in the Navy where you learn how to take risks and maybe even learn how to even enjoy taking risks you used to take your risks, or maybe you're born with it, I'm not sure, but it's definitely there and I think for the most part, it's led to a lot of interesting what I call misadventures, you know my. Youtube channel called Gabe's Misadventures.

Joe Miller: 28:03

Misadventures yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 28:05

They're not always adventure and sometimes they're misadventures. So often they're misadventures, but just be willing to accept. This isn't going to go the way. The movie's playing out on my head.

Joe Miller: 28:15

Right. So then you were at that company and then you went forward. The next transition came. When, or how? How did you actually get into IT management?

Gabe Peterson: 28:26

It was kind of a long and indirect road, Like I've said, my life's kind of series of happy accidents. So I was more on the software development, informatics side. I worked in early discovery, pharmaceutical discovery at Pfizer the one now would be called data science and kind of progress, so that I worked. I ended up working in every phase of pharmaceutical R&D over a series of years. It sounds really short, I need to say it Worked in discovery at Pfizer, preclinical at Amgen, and then started the clinical informatics team at City of Pope, which is one of the top cancer research hospitals in the world, and so each of those is a big transition.

Gabe Peterson: 29:08

People generally would specialize in one of those areas and make that their whole career. For me it was kind of like what's the new challenge After that? I was kind of like well, I've worked in every phase of R&D, what's next? And so I like to joke that I went to the dark side of IT. I figured, yeah, I'd learn a lot and everyone was kind of jobless, you could do it anywhere, whereas our industry is largely based in a handful of locations. You're committed to living in one of those. Luckily for me. Now one of those locations is San Diego, which is San Diego, does not suck.

Gabe Peterson: 29:44

Is that a T-shirt? Sure, yeah, I'd make that the marketing slogan.

Gabe Peterson: 29:47

Oh you've probably heard that a lot on the on my movie. Some of my friends joke that it should be a drinking game. Every time I say something like this view does not suck and you have to drink. So I ended up heading up information systems at a medical device company that was actually based in Utah and it was a spin off from a much larger company. So it was kind of a new area doing something that most companies would take 18 months to do a spin off like that and I think we had about half that time so had to build up the entire IS team, implement all the systems. The new company would need everything from an ERP with SAP to HR system, workday customer relationship management, sales horse. These are things I'd never done before. I do kind of what they did, but it was kind of like.

Joe Miller: 30:41

I'm sure there's not a theme here. I'm still seeing there being sort of a theme.

Gabe Peterson: 30:44

Yeah. Okay, it's something I haven't done. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I'm generally trying to learn. I'm trying to learn from them and not repeat them. So that was a good learning experience, just working a lot of different areas of the business. The company was heavily based in GMP or good manufacturing practices and I'd never done that. So I learned all about the plant and just doing things like Gembo walks and was able to break kind of the flavor that I learned of Agile by the capital A yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 31:14

Introduce Agile to the organization, and so, by the time I left, a lot of the manufacturing teams were having daily standups when they had a scrum board.

Joe Miller: 31:21

People are not in the industry. That's a big shift, because typically in these highly regulated fields, things move slowly when it comes to development. You're in what they call the old waterfall method.

Gabe Peterson: 31:37

I was kind of early adopter way back in the early 2000s as a software developer and there were some of the early flavors of Agile like extreme programming that eventually scrum kind of took over and for me that's something I brought to every company. So I said, well, this works in the software world. We're making hardware, medical device products. There's no reason it shouldn't work. You've got a lot of resistance that well. I understand why they work for you software guys, but that's not going to work for hardware. But it's all about people. It's not really about what the product you're delivering.

Gabe Peterson: 32:11

It's about how humans work together in teams to be highly productive. And so I said, okay, well, let's try the experiment. You have a product development team, I have a scrum master. He'll take you through one sprint, one two week sprint, and we'll see what happens. And I got one of the VP's of R&D to agree to that. I think probably expected it to fail. And two weeks later he said that team got more done in two weeks than they would usually get done in two months and they were sold.

Joe Miller: 32:41

That's why I sell people.

Gabe Peterson: 32:45

It's how I ended up doing a lot more beyond the classic IT role, whereas really helping a lot with the business transformation, and end up leading business projects that really had almost nothing to do with technology, because I was thinking you guys want a tool problem or a tool solution, but you have a process problem.

Gabe Peterson: 33:07

Let's fix that and then we'll give you the technology you need. There's a lot of just using Agilent and digging into it. What's the problem? How do we solve it? In bite-sized chunks. So one of the analogies I use between mountain running and the work world is we're going to the mountaintop, so the classic waterfall approach would be I can tell you we will be at the mountaintop at 842 AM on this date and it will look exactly like the.

Joe Miller: 33:40

It never happens?

Gabe Peterson: 33:41

It never happens. I have a Gantt chart that shows you on this exact moment, we will land on the mountaintop.

Joe Miller: 33:47

And it doesn't matter how many tiny tick marks you have on your Gantt chart, it doesn't make it any more accurate.

Gabe Peterson: 33:54

None of the Gantt charts are ever reality. So it's like, hey, we know we're going to get to the mountaintop, but the first step is we got to get to the base of the mountain and then we find the trail. And then we know there's a trail there. We don't know much about the trail, but then the next milestone is we're going to get to the stream that's up the mountain and while we learn, this trail is really different than we expected. It's a lot steeper, so we need to adapt our approach. That same approach, I think, is really what kind of the agile philosophy of small, bite-sized chunks, big goals. But if I focused on the finish of Tour de Gence, I don't think I would make it. So I'd just be mentally overwhelming to know I've got five more days of being out there in the mountains running. It was always like what's the next thing?

Joe Miller: 34:38

When I coach leaders, I often pick up on a problem.

Joe Miller: 34:44

When people get stuck just because of that one comment you made, it becomes overwhelming because they're so focused on the long range of the outcome that they want. It's good to have a vision, it's good to have a directional, a vector I'm talking physics now towards where you want to go. But the problem is your vision is just not that great. When you start things out and if you overanalyze and think about the destination, it becomes extremely discouraging along the way and you find out that the journey, the way you plotted it out, is not at all like the journey that you have to take and it's a lot like climbing a mountain or going up a mountain where, if you're way back on the valley floor, you can see the ultimate destination that's your long range outcome planned the peak.

Joe Miller: 35:34

But when you get up close, you go up to base camp and you go up to the first shoulder, you can't even see the peak. There's like three or four other lower peaks in the way, other shoulders that you have to go across, and your vantage point from the floor of the valley doesn't appreciate the journey along the way. It's a mindset thing that I think is illustrated in your journey, both on the corporate side and also in the athletic achievements you've made. This comes up a lot and it's very helpful for people to reframe things, to say, yeah, I still have that long range goal for today. And this came out of your video because you kept saying, today, this is my goal.

Joe Miller: 36:17

Or even like if I could just make it down this hill in the dark without falling off the cliff and dropping my poles, then I'll be good. And we'll go and then we'll see.

Gabe Peterson: 36:29

Yeah, focus on the next milestone. That ultra mindset is very transferable because in the ultra there's definitely times where you want to focus on what is that goal? Like your motivation is low, right, like, why am I doing this? I think about, like, my daughter, the mola, like why am I doing this to myself? And I ask myself that a lot in tortoise odds, I think why am I doing this to myself? And then you focus on the why, the big picture, but mostly it was like I just need to focus on I'm getting to the next town where there is an age station and I'll get to have a bowl of pasta or something. I'm not thinking any farther than that because if I think like, oh God, 200 more miles to go, that is just overwhelming. I would just you can't eat that elephant all one bite.

Joe Miller: 37:16

Right, and I think of people when they think about their careers. Sometimes they can be the same way. They're like oh, I have this long, I have this goal that I want to get to a certain level, but for the past six months I haven't moved an inch. Well, that's six months, all right, let's keep going. When did you start your? I'm just wondering how long these two aspects of your life are running concurrently. When did you start running and what was your first race? How long was it?

Gabe Peterson: 37:49

Really, this all started when I was turning 40, about 10 years ago. I turned 50 this month.

Joe Miller: 37:57

But you've only been doing this for 10 years.

Gabe Peterson: 37:59

Yeah, I mean, I would say I was very active after the Navy, always ran, but recreationally. I had done a couple of marathons, but not at all competitively. You know always just the goal I'm going to finish, you know, and it'd be like a four and a half hour marathon which, congratulate, everybody does that. That's not a competitive me.

Gabe Peterson: 38:19

Sorry I've kept you going. Yeah, I'd always been pretty active, backpacked and things like that. I think it was kind of why I was turning 40. I really had this epiphany like hey, I need to take my shot.

Joe Miller: 38:30

Oh, there's that phrase again, yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 38:33

Yeah and yeah, it's only going to get harder. I'm 40. It's only going to get harder, and it was kind of the series of small goals.

Gabe Peterson: 38:39

When I turned 40, I said, hey, I'll do a half hour marathon. For people don't know it's a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride and then a half marathon, which to me at that time sounded just insane. I had run pretty steadily, but recreationally, not, you know, not particularly fast. I thought I could swim because I was in the Navy, but it turns out I could just not die in the water for a very long time. I could freestyle swim very fast. I basically had to be an adult onset swimmer and learn how to actually properly freestyle swim. I would say I'm still not great there.

Gabe Peterson: 39:22

And then I hadn't ridden a bike in 20 years, so I went to the local bike shop, bought a bike and started learning everything that you need to do about know about cycling, and so so I did it. There's this race called Super Frog, which actually here at San Diego as I live in the Pasadena area at the time and I think I liked it because it was connected to the Navy it was actually a race that was started by the Navy, seals Frogmen, held on the BUDS course where they go through, based on the SEAL boot camp, and they have pictures of fallen SEALs. So it was very like all right, this connects to my past, but I was my mental, I was like this is one and done, I'll do this, I'll hang the bike up on the garage wall and I'll have bragging rights for the rest of my life. So I got to the finish line I was like, wow, that was, that was really fun, I should do an Iron man and, sure enough, next year did Iron man Arizona. It just kind of kept progressing from there.

Gabe Peterson: 40:22

And then the Ultra started when the medical device company was based in Salt Lake City, utah. So around 2014, moved up to Utah Again. I had no connection to Utah, no family no religious connection.

Gabe Peterson: 40:34

I'd been there a few times and I thought, you know, as I discovered, jen, it was before social media. Now, now people know Utah is amazing. We got in before, before everyone do that. I remember posting pictures of Utah and there, yeah, I'm up in the mountains. They're like where is that? Are you in Colorado? I'm like, no, I'm not, I'm in Utah. And they're like, oh, utah doesn't have mountains, it's just a flat desert. No, no, I had about the bathing of mountains in the world. So that was when I got into Ultras, live right at the base of a mountain, and I actually read Born to Run, which, yeah, I love that book. The whole thesis is this is humans, this is our superpower. We're literally born to run.

Gabe Peterson: 41:14

Humans can routinely outrun horses and races, and so the idea is that this is we're much more heat adapted than any other species on the planet. People always think of the Minolus shoe thing that came out of Born to Run, which is also one of the teams that I don't buy into that part.

Joe Miller: 41:29

Well, I mean, you can talk about feeling the next goal, but I wonder if it's not the next goal, but it's the fact that you're pushing yourself. You know that you're feeling like I'm going to take the shot or I'm going to go for it. There's this disquieting you for just sort of sitting and being comfortable where you are. Now I don't mean that a negative way, it's mostly positive.

Gabe Peterson: 41:56

They're talking to you like why can't I be like most people and just be comfortable?

Joe Miller: 42:02

Right, right. So let's try to glean some lessons here. Wow, I mean, there's so much. What are some things that are positive? Lessons for growth and for moving forward in one's life that you can glean from both of these. Then use a few other options situations.

Gabe Peterson: 42:20

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap. I'd say that when we talked about setting goals, because a lot of these are long term goals. When people come to me and they're like, hey, I want to do a 200 mile race, and okay, where are you at? Well, I ran a half marathon. Okay, you're looking at like a three year goal, but I want to do it, like in six months. All right, you might be able to drag yourself through a 200 mile race in six months, but it's, it's not going to be fun.

Joe Miller: 42:48

You'll be in the hospital, yeah, afterwards.

Gabe Peterson: 42:51

Yeah, your chances of success are going to be low. Your chance of injury can be high, like this is something you need to build to over years. So work is you know. As the same way with your setting goals. Some of them are very nebulous, like we want to go to this mountain top and maybe it's shrouded in clouds. We can't even see it. We know it's there, but we don't know what it looks like. Definitely I'd also say that kind of agile mindset of doing things in small bite size chunks, and one of the things I like about agile is it's an empirical control framework or it's using the science of approach. I have an idea, I try it and I find out really fast whether it succeeded or failed. So a lot of times in training, Isn't it, by its very nature, inboxed?

Gabe Peterson: 43:40

Yeah, so you're doing it in a short span of time. I'm an agile. It's usually a one to four week spreads, so it's kind of that same idea with training. Is you do this, what's called period of that periodizer training where it could be a goal in this block? My goal is to get faster and I'll objectively be able to measure whether I'm faster, because I'll go out and run like a 5k time trial and I either ran a faster 5k or I didn't, whether that training approach either worked or didn't. And so I did a lot of self experimentation on what kind of worked and a lot of what didn't.

Joe Miller: 44:15

So that framework then you apply when working with your team. I'm sure that there is maybe from the business you get a sort of, I'll say, somewhat nebulous goal sometimes or what would appear to be unrealistic at times, but do you apply the same sort of thinking and mental model to mapping out the course on your professional side? Yeah, definitely.

Gabe Peterson: 44:42

There's a lot of parallels, I mean, some are. I'd say that where it's really different a lot of times is running is more individual. Sure, you're part of a community, but it's really about. It's really about yeah, wait yourself.

Joe Miller: 44:53

You have control of everything, yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 44:56

Which is sometimes the worst, because you we're not honest with ourselves a lot. So the classic is you'll get someone who has this running goal and you're like, okay, it's really easy to see if you're gonna have a chance of I want to do, say, a sub three hour marathon. Okay, go run a half marathon and if you can do it in this time you know like an hour and 20 minutes or something like that you can probably run a sub three and you go what's your fastest half marathon? Well, I've done a two hour half marathon, Okay it's a long way.

Gabe Peterson: 45:28

Yeah, you got work to do. So sometimes it's harder to do it by yourself because and I think this is why coaching is an important in athletics is you have someone who's giving you that feedback, like, okay, I hear your goal, you want to get to three hour marathon. You're at more like a four hour marathon. Now here's what we have to do to get you there. That's probably like a two or three year goal of really focusing on running a marathon that fast Using the marathon analogy, because you know people kind of understand marathons like people run them or is that teamwork? Is it work is a team and it's more? I think they're a lot more variables and it's a team that you don't necessarily. It's a hybrid team. Some people report are part of my team. They're my direct reports, so I have some ability to directly influence what they do. But most of the products we roll out are not for the technology team.

Gabe Peterson: 46:18

They're for the business unit like scientists doing research in the lab. So when they come to you with those unrealistic goals, I want to read a 200 mile race and but my most recent thing is you know I've read a half marathon and you go okay. Well, here's what you have, the work we have to put in. Oh, I don't want to. I'm too busy to put in that kind of work, but I still want that goal. So I put in some early tests to see are they really committed? I want to do this project. I'm like okay, here's what it's going to take from your team. We need a product donor, someone from your team who can really drive the vision for this product. Oh, I don't have anyone that can do that, who is not busy. Okay, that's fine.

Gabe Peterson: 46:54

I don't understand it, but we can't do that product. You're not committed to this project. You won't give me a product. Yeah, here's what I'll need. I will need a product owner. We'll need people to be a part of this team developing this product, but they're too busy. I totally understand it, but we won't be successful. And, yeah, I want to invest in projects where we're going to be successful for a company.

Joe Miller: 47:18

It seems so obvious, but I would say, based on my experience, that's probably one of the easiest places that technology leaders can trip up, because they want to say yes to something, they want to be helpful and in the end of the day they're not going to be helpful because there are realities to what it takes to get certain things accomplished, and so that's really great advice. The other thing I wanted to pivot to unless you want to spend a little more time on that is just the importance of mindset and how that it may be. It's a little bit more of a general lessons learned and advice for those who are on the journey, but the importance of mindset in both venues, both areas.

Gabe Peterson: 48:06

Yeah, I think there's some overlap, definitely. Yeah, I think the ultra mindset I was talking about knowing when to focus on your big goal like hey, you're losing motivation, why are you doing this? But if you're like I just need to get up the side of this mountain or I need to learn this new programming language, focusing on the why can be overwhelming to focus on the task. So in ultra, there's a lot of understand when to focus on the why versus when to focus on the task.

Gabe Peterson: 48:38

So it's 2am and you have it slept in three days. That's a really bad time to focus on the why You're going to go to a dark place. Just focus on the task. My job is to get to the next mountain pass and then from there.

Joe Miller: 48:52

So maybe there's times to opine and then there's times to grind, yeah there's a lot of grinding.

Gabe Peterson: 48:58

That's in the video. I've actually referred to that a bunch of times because that was yes, I remember. Ian up branded the John Muir trail during COVID because all the races were canceled, so it's a 211 mile trail that's Northern California right.

Gabe Peterson: 49:15

Yeah, in the Sierra Mountains. So we did it northbound, starting from Mount Whitney, tosimete Valley, and we ended up actually sitting in the fastest known time on the route that we took, although we didn't know it at the time. So I joked that I have the fastest known old dude time. Here come his ultra runner, very kind of cocky, like, oh, this will be easy. It ended up being probably one of the hardest things I've done, maybe just a little below with tortoise jobs, but anyway, you get in through hiking as a tradition, you get a trail name. You don't go by your regular name or civilian world, and so my trail name was Grinder because my friend, he was really fast. He would shoot up to the pass and then he'd take breaks, whereas I would just keep going. I'd get to the pass and I didn't even break, I'd just keep going, and so I'm going to just grinding it out.

Joe Miller: 50:05

Or he's like well.

Gabe Peterson: 50:06

I can grab it sprinting to the next.

Joe Miller: 50:08

It feels like a time to talk about the tortoise and the hare, maybe, yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 50:14

And then definitely there's a lot of just grinding out, which I talked about a lot in that video, Like it was just time to grind it out. So I think the times in life where you just have to do things that are fun and they're going to help you get to this goal and I think but I think overall enjoying the adventure and making sure it's fun in the work context I generally want my teams to work should be fun. Most days when we show up we should be having fun. I know there's some companies that take that as a really bad sign that you're not serious and I don't want to work for those companies anymore.

Joe Miller: 50:49

If you don't look like you've been going through the torture chamber with misery on your face, then you must not be committed. Is that the idea?

Gabe Peterson: 50:56

Yeah, I think I both have worked. Both worked for that kind of company.

Joe Miller: 51:00

Yeah.

Gabe Peterson: 51:01

Or where you run into someone and they tell you like how busy they are and how hard everything is Me Okay, that's just like the company's culture is. They're once telling each other how difficult things are, versus more like a hey, we're here to discover new drugs. That's a really cool thing that we get to do. We get to discover new medicines that help patients, sometimes with untreated diseases. That's amazing. So it's really cool to get to be part of that in some small way.

Joe Miller: 51:32

Well, that's part of mindset too, and is that is understanding the overall context, and this gets back to the vision part taking time to appreciate where you are and that you are in a spot that you feel good about. The other thing I want to chat about real briefly is to ask you the question have you ever been in a situation where you were tasked to do something and just wasn't really your natural strength to do?

Gabe Peterson: 51:57

Yeah, I think that's one of those, you know, where I was asked to do something and I'm like okay, I've never done anything like that before. When I was at the medical device company, there were a lot of folks who'd been there a long time and so they're very invested in the way things were. I was new, so the CEO asked me like hey, we have this problem shipping our products on time. Can you look into it? I'm like I don't know anything about me. He's like it's okay, you seem to have a good like critical thinking skill set. Just go see what you identify. I said, okay, I'll play Agile, we'll do a sprints, get a team cross-factual team together, identify what the problems are and then start attacking the problems and then flash forward a few months. We've implemented a whole sales and operations planning process, or SNOP. It started off I couldn't even spell SNOP, but just had to learn along the way and really take advantage of that team that collectively were much smarter than any of us are individually.

Joe Miller: 53:02

Yeah, yeah, so that's great. Are there any closing ideas you have in terms of lessons learned that would be helpful for folks tuning in. This is the question I ask in all my podcasts is if you were to turn the clock back and be able to speak to yourself when you were 25 years old or whatever, what advice, what sage advice, would you give yourself?

Gabe Peterson: 53:25

Well, that's a tough question. I'm very grateful for the life I've had growing up. I wouldn't have thought I'd be talking about any of this stuff. I think I enjoyed the journey. I'm 25-year-olds. A lot of them just aren't appreciated. I was in a unique experience where I was at Berkeley and I can appreciate how amazing this was. I had so many peers who this was like a grind for them. It was so horrible. We're here at one of the best universities in the world and this is going to open up so many doors for your future. Just enjoy that journey. Like I said, have fun.

Gabe Peterson: 54:01

And also one of the things I've learned is hubris is rarely rewarded in sports and also in life, I think, wherever I've ever had major setbacks definitely in sports, whereas where I got cocky like, oh yeah, I've done this race, so I don't really need to prepare for this other race, I can just show up and go beast mode the few DNFs I've had, that is almost always how that story played out and it was always like all right, I need to stay humble, it doesn't matter, this race doesn't care that I did these other races. I need to respect that. This is a really hard race. So same thing in life, I think trying to stay humble and keeping that learning mindset. I mean, you know this, we both have the same career in technology. Most of our career is actually not about technology. It's about getting people to change.

Gabe Peterson: 54:57

And I think it's because at some point we lose that growth mindset and we start saying things like this is the way we've always done it. That reason we should keep doing it in the future.

Joe Miller: 55:11

Yeah, well, that's great advice when you danced around. A little model that we talk about a lot in this field people, process, technology and it's interesting Most of the time we get recruited into jobs help an organization based upon technology, understanding and knowledge and experience, maybe some process, but over time we've both chatted about this that kind of the one of the biggest levers is how you influence people. That's leadership.

Gabe Peterson: 55:39

And how you get open this.

Joe Miller: 55:41

Examples of you bringing in Agile was just one of several examples that came out in this episode, but really that is huge. Yes, you have to have your technology chops on. You have to have understanding. But understanding how to serve the organization, serve the other leaders that you're peers with or you report to, and how to motivate and coach your team is kind of what really makes or breaks long-term success, I think. So that's a great reminder. But hey, it's been so much fun talking to you. Any final closing thoughts.

Gabe Peterson: 56:19

No, I really enjoyed this conversation, joe. It's interesting, I usually talk about one or the other, so it's kind of a wall of blend of professional and athletics.

Joe Miller: 56:27

Hopefully they'll come through okay with the episode. You're on LinkedIn. People can find you there. We'll put in the notes of the game, once we're exposed, how you can be reached, but definitely we will point to that episode. I don't know, it might be an hour or longer or something like that.

Gabe Peterson: 56:42

About 15, 55 minutes.

Joe Miller: 56:44

It is really cool. I mean, it's just amazing. And again, it's an amazing accomplishment. So kudos to you for that. But also just listening to your inner dialogue, I think, is really powerful, because there's a lot there to unpack. So anyway, thanks again, gabe, for being on Titans of Transition.

Gabe Peterson: 57:03

Yeah, and a great discussing my adventures and myth adventures.

Joe Miller: 57:09

Misadventures. I love it All. Right man, Take care.

Gabe Peterson: 57:11

All right, you too, bye.

Joe Miller: 57:15

Hey, thanks for joining me today on Titans of Transition. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please check the show notes for additional information.