About Tobias Mews

I've had a few lives.

The first was the army. I led men on operational tours in Iraq and Cyprus, which taught me two things: that I was capable of considerably more than I'd assumed, and that leaving was the second best decision I ever made.

The second life was sport and journalism. Ultra-marathons, Ironmans, the Norseman, wife carrying (yes, really). Columns for The Telegraph. Two books. Somewhere along the way I realised the sport and the writing weren't separate things. They fed each other. Take one away and the other went quiet.

For a long time that was enough. I drove across Argentina chasing the Dakar Rally in a Mini Countryman. I visited all 15 UK national parks in 15 days. I ran the Marathon du Médoc on my wedding day, with our guests alongside us. Type 1 fun, mostly. Some of it firmly Type 2.

Then I stopped competing at the level I had been. Stopped writing about it. Started wondering what came next.

Which is where this third life starts.

I'd spent years interviewing athletes, and what I kept noticing was that the interesting question wasn't how they performed. It was what they built when the performance was over. Companies, brands, funds, platforms. Second acts with actual structure to them. The identity question I'd navigated twice over, now playing out across an entire economy.

I'm a marketing strategist by day, an EMBA student at Quantic, and the founder of The Athlete Founder: a fortnightly newsletter decoding the business models and strategic decisions behind athlete-led ventures.

It turns out the sport, the writing, and the business thinking were always going to end up in the same place. It just took a while to see it.

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To learn more about me and my work, look at the following links: