Teaching Runners How to Do What They Love, Pain Free!

Shelli Varela: Caroline Bjorkquist, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing podcast. Buddy, I’m super stoked you’re here.

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Thanks so much.

 

Shelli Varela: Would you mind sharing with our incredible audience who you are, what you do, and who you serve?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Well, I’m Caroline Bjorkquist. I am a business partner with my running coach, friend, and partner, Valerie Hunt. She is a running coach and I’m basically her integrator, and we help new and injured and even experienced runners learn to run pain-free.

 

Shelli Varela: I, as a former runner, would love to know how to run pain-free. Run yet pain-free, whole other story. I love your story because you make so many things possible in that many of us are the upfront person, the creative, the person that has the idea, the information, and the knowledge and you do also but for many of the people who are upfront who have a certain type of personality or a certain type of brain, like left brain, right brain, doing both the teaching part and the part that is the bit they love, the art, if you will, is a far different experience than doing the back end stuff, which is like how do you actually make this engine go? And I love hearing about how you have managed to make this possible by working with a business partner. So, could you start us off with like how did you get to be in the membership site business? What was your story before that?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: So, I was living in Phoenix. I’m now in Dallas. But in Phoenix, I was in sales and programming. I’m in a very corporate environment. I was a corporate person and I had an opportunity to move to Dallas to start teaching. I had never done this before. So, at that time, I was also turning 40 so it was like this big midlife I’m turning 40. I wanted to run a marathon. I wanted to be able to do this exercise when I was traveling and all that wonderful stuff that happens when you’re in the corporate world. And so, I put on my bucket list to run a marathon. And like most runners, you start getting addicted to what I call the bling. So, I started running half marathons and then I started running full marathons and I ran one marathon, and then I ran a second marathon because I moved to Dallas and it was an opportunity to run a second marathon. So, the first one was the Chicago Marathon when I turned 40. It happened to be on my birthday so I ran it on my birthday. Then I ran a second one because the first one, I was told by a coach you can’t run just one marathon because then you never have a PR. You have to run two. So, I ran a second one. 

 

And then I had another friend at the time, she was planning on running one on her birthday and I thought it was so miserable I’m like, “I can’t let her do this alone.” So, I ran a third. And then, of course, we ran a fourth. So, I wound up running about four marathons and in between ran probably more than 30 half marathons, just was running pretty much every weekend. And at the time, I was doing strength training. I had a coach that was working with me on increasing my speed and things like that. So, I understood the concept of training correctly, using strength, using self-care, and rolling, and all the stuff you learn as a runner. But I also at the same time because of my corporate job, I felt limited. I wanted something that I could lean on in case something happened with a corporate job. I wanted something that I could be a little more creative than I was doing as a trainer. And so, I started with course creation. So, I started taking all the courses. I tried to find out what am I an expert at. And everybody kept saying, “Well, what is something that you could talk about like come out of a coma and talk about?” And it was running. I had read like…

 

Shelli Varela: No question. 

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Yeah. Well, and I read like 20 books and I’d been doing all the research and I’ve been looking at all the stuff but I hadn’t done anything to “be certified.” And I say it like that because I felt, like many people, I needed to be an expert at something. I needed to have credentials. I needed to be an MD or certified in running. Everybody keeps telling me, “Well, you’ve run four marathons. I haven’t even run a 5K. That makes you an expert.” And I had a lot of people that I looked up to telling me that I didn’t need to be an expert. And then I wound up getting injured, not through running. I had a muscle tear and was coming back from the muscle tear when I came across Coach Valerie. And she had just moved up from Austin to Dallas. We’re both in Dallas and I was still working my corporate job trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I was blogging about running. I was building a Facebook group about running, had a small audience that I was building a list and she started talking to me about what she teaches. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is my expert.” So, my first thought was, “I’m going to learn everything I can from you and I’m going to become certified. I’m going to become your first certified coach. And then I will create my membership.”

 

Shelli Varela: And you will have the right to talk about it in your mind.

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Right. I felt that would validate me. And as we got to know each other better, I realized she had a pretty good following on Instagram. She was great with a list, but I’m like, “Okay. What are you doing with your list?” “Nothing.” She had an awful website. “Okay. This website is horrible. When you get these people’s names, when they give you an email, what do you do?” “Well, I email them a PDF.” I’m like, “Okay. Where does the email live?” “I don’t know.” This wonderful conversation that I was like, “Wait.” And so, I started helping her a little bit. I’m looking. She had this list of about 3,000 people she’d never talked to before. She had an audience of about 35,000 people on her Facebook, on her Instagram, no Facebook real following, had a pretty good YouTube channel but I’m like, “What are you doing with all of this? What do you want to create?”

 

Shelli Varela: And as a teacher, you’re like, “You’re killing me over here.”

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Yeah. And I’m like, “And then you’re sending a PDF that like there’s no pictures.” It was literally just written out like do this and it was like 1×100 meters and I’m like, “Well, okay, what if I don’t have it? How long is a meter, right?” So, I started asking all these what I would consider to be normal questions of a new runner. So, fast forward, I met her in August. In November, I said, “Look, I can make you money. I can do this. If you want to do this, let’s do this.” So, she needed money for Christmas. So, I hurried up and got her list and said, “Let’s do a Black Friday sale,” and I sold like 75 what are called video gait analysis in one day with a three email sequence of my story of meeting her. And so, at that time, I had somebody I was working with, Josh and Jill Stanton of Screw The Nine To Five. And they were coaching me and I told them about this and I’m like, “Okay. So, I’m going to learn how to be a runner now. I’m going to learn how to be a running coach now, and I’ll be able to create this,” and they were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Have you ever read Rocket Fuel?” 

 

Shelli Varela: Yeah. So, I’m going right there with you. 

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: She would go, “You’re an integrator,” because they could see how excited I was that those emails landed. I was excited to write the copy. I was super excited to be sharing her message because I believed in her message. Everything she was saying was exactly what I thought. And I was like, “What do you mean? I could be an integrator?” And they were like, “Yeah. Come work with her and you kind of do…” They told me the story of Rocket Fuel and then, of course, it’s I was… 

 

Shelli Varela: Can you share kind of a Coles Notes version of what that is for everybody listening? What is an integrator?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Yeah. So, the best story I tell people is that Walt Disney was the visionary. Roy Disney is the integrator. Every great visionary has somebody in the back that has their back that helps them stay focused, and that really can do the back end. So, I became her integrator. I’m her Roy Disney. And as soon as I mentioned it to her because I didn’t think she’d want to become partners, she was like, “Oh, heck, yes.” And so, I can tell you that a true visionary and this I’ll tell the audience is, “If you can’t keep an idea to fruition, you just keep coming up with new ideas.” Valerie will describe herself as a net. She will just like pick on ideas, “And what about this? What if I do this? What if I post on this? What if I do this kind of thing?” And I have to focus her all the time. No, no, no. We’re just going to teach them how to – so what we came up with was how to run pain-free. And that was after looking at her audience and looking at the comments that were coming back. She was talking about CrossFit, which is who she had been working with. She owned a CrossFit gym. So, she was talking about strength training, lifting heavy, CrossFit, and becoming a faster runner. And I said, “But your runners aren’t faster. Your runners are like me. They just want to run and not be injured. They want to run and actually enjoy what they’re doing.” So, when we changed her audience, that message within her audience from run faster to run pain-free, she went from 35,000 to over 100,000 in less than six months by just talking to her audience. 

 

Shelli Varela: Wow. 

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Just talking to her audience. 

 

Shelli Varela: So, let me ask you this. What do you think you saw about that, that she didn’t see? Like, as an integrator for people listening because I know there are so many people who have the vision and are the visionary. And it’s like, “Maah,” just like you said, it’s like, “Squirrel! I’m over here and I’m over there, and I have all of these great ideas.” What is it that you think as an integrator that an integrator sees that a visionary does not?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: The first thing was that she thought she had to do clinics. She had to travel to places, and have people be in front of her, and then she had to lecture and teach them and touch them how to run pain-free. And this was an argument we had for about even after we started the course because I had her create a course. But she still thought that the clinics were going to be what brought people into the course. And she kept telling me, “You’ve never seen a clinic, Caroline. You’ve never seen a clinic. You need to watch a clinic.” And it took about a year and we’d already done the course two times when actually we filmed her clinic. And it was at the clinic that I said, “Do you realize, of this six-hour clinic, you’re telling your story for two hours? You’re giving your entire background of how you started running, why you start,” why she started running, how she learned to run, what made her want to do this. And I said, “That is what’s making people learn.” And so, that’s what I want to tell people is that you think, “I need to have them in front of me or they don’t want to hear my story. They don’t want to hear how I learned this. They just want to know how to run pain-free. They want to know the strength. They want to know the role that I have to do.” 

 

And I was like, “No, no, no, no. They want to know what you went through.” And so, I focused all of her messaging and we focus the course on how she learned. How do you really learn a new movement? How do you really do this as you go along? So, it was a combination of focusing her mindset that she didn’t have to be in front of people, focusing that people would actually pay her a lot more than what she was charging. Of course, that’s a huge mindset thing. And now it’s that she doesn’t have to see everyone that her words, if articulated properly, can actually help people learn to run pain-free.

 

Shelli Varela: So powerful. I love, well, first of all, I’m the story alchemist so I completely vibe with all the things you’re saying. And I was speaking to someone recently and it echoes exactly what you just said. We were talking about sharing stories. And what I said is when you tell a story properly, often people are reluctant to do so because they’re like, “Well I don’t want to talk about myself or I’m saying the story again and again,” but what people sometimes don’t realize is when people hear your story, they feel their own. And when you tell your story in a certain kind of way, it builds a bridge of possibility so that they’re like, “Oh, I relate to you so I, in some ways, am you, and if I’m you and you did that, what then becomes possible for me?”

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Yes, 100%. And so, we share her story but now over the last six months to a year, we’ve been sharing my story of how I met her. All of our marketing that goes outside of her initial Facebook group is Coach Caroline and how I met her and how I’m just like they are because we all have this impression that we can’t do this, that we can’t fit this in, this is hard, all this mindset drama that we bring in. So, we’re actually both coming into this realization that we both have to tell our stories. And that’s really powerful as well.

 

Shelli Varela: So amazing. If somebody is out there listening, and they are sitting on a gift or they are the visionary, the upfront person, and they’re looking for a way to kind of get their membership site up and running and all of the things, what would you tell them with respect to what to look for in an integrator?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: So, there are two things I really want to bring up. One is because I’ve also for about a year I was helping other people. I thought this is what I would do full-time but I decided to keep my job. I’m doing much more creative stuff on my full-time job so I still have it. So, I relinquished those other two clients and just kept my partnership with Valerie because that’s my passion is runners. But I will tell you that those other two, the reason why I didn’t work with them is that they wanted me to be their vision. They wanted to be able to say I want to create a membership about let me just take something about strength training or mobility. Okay. Great. You need to then go live. You need to be able to speak to your audience. You need to have the methodology all framed out. You need to get up in the morning and want to share your love of whatever you’re doing with the world so that an integrator can then come behind you and create that content. The problem I had with my other two was they wanted me to be the vision. They wanted me to do to create business for them. But I can’t create your business. I can only amplify what you already are loving and doing. 

 

So, I want to tell people, “If you really want to do this, then go out there, let be messy, learn some of it. Get out there, get free, then you’ll know what to look for in an integrator. You’ll know what to look for in an ads person. You’ll know what to look for in terms of platform. Do I use Facebook? Do I use Instagram? Do I use YouTube right?” If you just go out there and say, “I have this idea and I want somebody else to come in and do all the work,” they can’t create your business. You have to literally get up in the morning and go, “I want to talk to people about this issue.” 

 

Shelli Varela: The golden question right.

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Yeah. And that’s what I was actually already doing. I was like going out for a run and thinking about how this is hard. And I had my little 80-person Facebook group, and I went live in that Facebook group and I said, “This is hard. This is slow.” So, I spoke my truth. And actually, some of those people are still in our membership today, three years later. So, I did bring them over.

 

Shelli Varela: That’s so powerful, and also makes so much possible for people who don’t yet know how to put all of the pieces together because one’s very practical, tactical, and the other is very creative and visionary. I don’t know. There’s just something that’s so beautiful about that. And also, two, as a person who asked to be upfront, we have all of these stories or limiting beliefs or it’s like, “I don’t like the way I look on camera,” or whatever it is. And so, can you speak to what it’s like to have an integrator sort of take that off your plate such that it’s like because in some ways, you’re a mindset coach too for visionary, right? Because it’s possible to get all caught up in your stuff but now you have someone in your corner that has absolutely clear perspective and says, “No, no, no, we’re just going to do this because…” What does that feel like for her having you in the corner?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: It’s really interesting because we went from a course and then, of course, to a membership on the backend after I went to TRIBE. And then when the pandemic hit, that’s when we decided to go ahead and go full open membership. Of course, we went from these big swings of 50 clients, right? So, you get this huge influx of money to now this little trickle of money. So, that started in August. And so, I started having to battle her mindset of I need to give them more, I need to give them more, I need to give them more. And she had been to TRIBE so she understood the concept of overwhelm. And so, what happened was over the holidays, she was talking about, “Well, they seem overwhelmed and I don’t know how to focus them.” And I finally just looked at her and I said, “Valerie, what would you if there was no membership, it was just you and me?” And I said, “I want to learn to run pain-free. What would you have me do?” One of the first movements is called the pose. And she said, “I would have you stand in the pose.” I said, “For what? For a day?” She goes out, “For like a week. You got to build up that core strength to be able to hold your body in that position.” And I was like, “Okay. So, we make them do pose for a week.” And she said, “No, I can’t do that. Nobody wants to hold pose for a week.” 

 

And I said, “Stop. You’re trying to be nice to people. They’re paying for you to help them with a problem and if the way they need to help them with the problem is to hold pose for a week, they need to hold pose for a week.” And so, we created this immersion starting in January, which is like how we’re moving into the next phase of our membership and that’s like we had to really focus people and say, “You’re not allowed to go out and run for three weeks. You have to trust us.” And that’s what we did in the course. We said, “Don’t go run for three weeks. Learn the course. Learn the methodology.” So, now we’re doing it in the membership and we’re getting fantastic feedback. Everybody’s saying, “Thank you so much. This was so much easier. I really appreciate it.” And that’s when I started speaking out and going, “You guys, I know you’re bored, or you think you’re bored, but you’re not. You’re learning a new movement. Would you let your kid go to a gymnastics coach and, ‘Oh, I learned how to do a somersault so now I’m going to go in the backyard and do backflips?’ No. You tell them to keep working on their somersault. The same is true when you’re learning a new movement such as running. You have to start and just practice that movement until it becomes better then you learn the next movement and next movement.” 

 

And that’s been really eye-opening for her because she was like, “Nobody will want to do this.” And I said, “I don’t care if they want to do it. This is what they need to do.” And when I spoke that to our membership, we went back to now it’s trickling again and it’s actually going pretty big because we’re starting to speak to that, “I’m not going to just sell you a quick fix. I’m trying to make this work for the long term. So, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m going to tell you what you have to do. And if you actually do the work, you will have the results.”

 

Shelli Varela: So simple, yet so powerful because we’re all wired to it’s like, “Oh, I have all this knowledge and skills and experience. I want to give you all of the things.” And it’s so counterintuitive that is actually much simpler than that and it’s actually much easier than that. But it’s people who have gifts. We want to give them all. It’s like if I need it, then you have it. Let me give it all to you. So, let me ask you this. So, you have an open membership site. So, many people have closed meaning that it will only be available to be joined a couple of times a year. When you look back at your membership site and how it’s grown, and how the two of you have come together to essentially create rocket fuel, what is the best piece of feedback that you’ve received from one of your members?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Actually, we just got it. It’s going to become an ad. So, we have a member and she was on a call. We were now doing Zooms, which we had started a year ago but nobody could work Zoom a year ago. Now, everybody can work Zoom. So, we have weekly Zooms where you come on and you work with Valerie live, and she can correct you in real-time. Well, her husband was watching over her shoulder, was kind of watching the videos, watching the lives over her shoulder, listening in the background, and going out and doing the work without following along. And then after about a couple of weeks, he said, “I’m going to give this a try,” and he logged in as her which I’m not saying please don’t steal my membership but it was just really funny because he came in and he said, “I actually just followed along behind her,” and he wanted to beat his time of a 430 marathon, and in less than four months, was able to run a 430 marathon and be pain-free. And he sent us in this fantastic testimonial and he’s like, “I kind of feel bad because I’m not technically a member.” 

 

But the idea is that if you really can hone like because we really honed the skill, right, because we really looked at what are the steps you have to take, whether they want to do it or not, you have to do the scales like when you’re learning how to play piano, right? Sometimes you have to do the stuff you don’t want to do in order to help your people get better. And so, that was really a great eye-opener for us was he wasn’t even part of the membership but just by listening in and getting over himself and following along with the steps, he actually cut his marathon time, which was lifelong. So, that was really great for me.

 

Shelli Varela: That’s amazing. Last question, what becomes possible for you because of a membership site? For those people who are listening and thinking, “Man, like this is super inspiring. I maybe don’t have a practical tactical mind,” you’ve now literally made something possible for those visionary people. What becomes possible for you and what becomes possible for people when they say yes to having a membership site?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: So, for me, and for Valerie, when we started this journey, I asked her if it were five years from now and you could do a magic wand, what did she want to create? And she wanted to create RunRX coaches around the world that were teaching this method. At the time, I was like, “Okay. I’m going to get on to that vision,” and that’s how we started. But here it is, like, almost three years later and we’ve evolved, and our version now is just we want like this year, we’re at 200 members, I want 500 members. I don’t even care about if we have coaches. I just want to help as many runners run pain-free as I possibly can and so does she. And so, that’s what I’m trying to focus her on is stop thinking about how do I impart this as a coach. Let’s just try to help as many runners learn to run pain-free as we possibly can. And in order to do that, you have to be scalable. So, that’s going to be your biggest thing. So, start with that really big vision is what I would say because that’s what’s going to get you to jump up in the morning and get on to that Facebook Live or videotape that cooking whatever you’re doing or helping somebody. I have another friend that I inspired that’s doing I think it’s like creating his own cola on YouTube and monetizing it. But the idea is if you know something that somebody else doesn’t, and you get up in the morning and you want to help them, just get out there and you will be fine. It will work out in the end. I do believe you kind of fake it until you make it.

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. If people are looking for you online, and they want to join your amazing running community to learn how to run pain-free, where is the best place they can find you?

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Well, the best place to find this is at our website, www.RunRX.fit.  It’s the prescription to run pain-free. Dot-fit, not dot-com. We also have a podcast where we talk about all things mindset about running, that’s run pain-free. It’s the Run RX Podcast but really you can link to everything at RunRX.fit. 

 

Shelli Varela: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us and thank you for making this possible for so many people who might have thought it would be out of their reach.

 

Caroline Bjorkquist: Thanks so much.

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