Ido Dassa

Ido Dassa, a twenty-eight-year-old Israeli ultrarunner turned startup founder based in Vienna, joins Evan and Danny for a conversation that covers a lot of ground: growing up overweight and checked out of school, discovering sport at seventeen, becoming a professional athlete and national record holder, and now building Race Pace, an AI-powered trail running co-pilot. What makes Ido's story compelling is not the race results but the way he thinks, like a person who keeps saying yes to things that terrify him, from signing up for an Ironman four months after learning to swim to competing in the backyard ultra world championship satellite race in October. He talks about how sport gave him a toolkit for everything else in life, how getting comfortable with failure in training made him willing to try things he would have never attempted before, and why he deliberately seeks out situations where he has no idea how the day is going to go. The episode closes with a pitch for Race Pace and a reminder that the backyard ultra world championship satellite races are happening in October with live tracking available online.