At over 200 lbs, Timothy Hipp looks more like a baseball slugger or a weightlifter than a runner, but that’s the beauty of running—you don’t have to look a certain way to do it, and do it well.

Timothy did in fact grow up playing baseball, and he also swam competitively. In college he got into bodybuilding and powerlifting, but as he grew older he yearned to be outdoors more, so he transitioned from the gym the trails, progressing from mountain biking to road cycling to triathlon and ultimately to marathons and ultras. The head of two health and wellness companies in Warrenton, Virginia, Timothy, who is now 47 years old and married with seven children, knows how to find good information on training, so it was inevitable that he discovered Coach Matt’s books and started training 80/20 style.

“The results were amazing!” Timothy reports. “I set a goal to complete the Grindstone 100 in 30 hours or less. My finish time was 29:05:15. The amazing thing is I never felt as though I had not trained enough during the race. I felt great, and I was actually sprinting up hills in the last 5 miles.”

You might think that someone who has as much experience in as many sports and fitness activities as Timothy to have nothing left to learn, but he has learned something from his 80/20 training experience. “It the long game that allows the body to adapt,” he says. “That is truly the key to this program; it creates the atmosphere for your body to adopt faster over time.”