Podcastskeyboard_arrow_rightSDS 861: From Pro Athlete to Data Engineer: Colleen Fotsch’s Inspiring Journey

117 minutes

Data ScienceCareer Tips

SDS 861: From Pro Athlete to Data Engineer: Colleen Fotsch’s Inspiring Journey

Podcast Guest: Colleen Fotsch

Tuesday Feb 11, 2025

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How does a CrossFit winner, bobsledder and swimmer go on to have a glittering career in data analytics and engineering? Colleen Fotsch talks to Jon Krohn about transitioning into very different career paths, how sports gave her the competitive mindset she needed for success in data science, and seeing the niche role of analytics engineering as a bridge between data engineering and analysis.


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About Colleen
Colleen is an accomplished athlete turned data professional whose career spans multiple elite sports. As a collegiate swimmer, she achieved All-American status, contributed to two NCAA championship teams, and set an American record as part of a relay team. Her athletic achievements continued as she competed in the CrossFit Games both individually and as a team member, before earning a position on the USA National Bobsled Team. Transitioning to data analytics, Colleen discovered a passion for data modeling and leveraging analytics to drive better decision-making. She now serves as a Technical Manager on the Data Platform team at CHG Healthcare. In addition she recently launched a fitness program, PRVN GO, that combines her extensive athletic experience with practical workouts designed to complement busy professionals' schedules.

Overview 
How does a CrossFit winner, bobsledder and swimmer go on to have a glittering career in data analytics and engineering? Colleen Fotsch talks to Jon Krohn about transitioning into very different career paths, how sports gave her the competitive mindset she needed for success in data science, and seeing the niche role of analytics engineering as a bridge between data engineering and analysis.

As a keen CrossFitter, Jon Krohn was excited to talk to another athlete-cum-data scientist! Colleen details her journey from competitive swimmer at college to CrossFit champion. In reminiscing about her path from competitive athlete to Technical Manager on the Data Platform team at CHG Healthcare, Colleen says, “If you had told my collegiate swimmer self that she was going to be on a data science podcast one day, she would have never believed you.” [08:50] She finds training and working with others incredibly motivating and feels that knowing other people are counting on her has been one of the most effective ways to achieve her goals.

Like every great athlete, Colleen ensured that she kept her focus on long-term goals, extending this approach to her career outside of sports. She knew she would need an education, so she studied for a remote, part-time Master’s in Kinesiology and Exercise Science at Michigan State University, followed by a Master’s in Applied Business Data Analytics at Arizona State University. Her sister-in-law, who was working as a data analyst at Netflix, gave her a first taste of data analytics, at which point Colleen enrolled in Sadie St. Lawrence’s course in SQL. Colleen feels that online courses are an excellent way to supplement technical skills, and she recommends that anyone starting a career in data analytics should prioritize short courses in SQL, closely followed by Tableau and Power BI.

Colleen also talked about getting a job in data science. For Colleen, having a passion for a different field can become a fruitful entry point, especially when that field has a lot of trackable information. Sports offers the perfect amount of training data that can also have a direct positive impact on performance, making data science a truly relevant field for sportspeople and sports enthusiasts. Colleen says that finding a community is also an essential step in getting fired up about data and mixing with people who may become colleagues.  

Listen to the episode to hear Colleen’s progress to CrossFit champion, guidance for overachievers, and how Colleen co-developed the app PRVN GO with fellow CrossFit champion Tia-Clair Toomey.

In this episode you will learn:
  • (05:49) Colleen’s path from athlete to data analyst 
  • (1:14:41) About the data build tool (DBT) 
  • (1:22:51) Colleen’s work at CHG Healthcare 
  • (1:32:45) How Colleen and Tia-Clair got started with PRVN GO

Items mentioned in this podcast:
Jon Krohn: 00:00:00
This is episode number 861 with Colleen Fotsch, data platform senior technical manager at CHG Healthcare.

00:00:13
Welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast, the most listened to podcast in the data science industry. Each week we bring you fun and inspiring people and ideas exploring the cutting edge of machine learning, AI, and related technologies that are transforming our world for the better. I'm your host, Jon Krohn. Thanks for joining me today. And now let's make the complex simple.

00:00:38
Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast. Today we've got a special episode for you. I enjoyed speaking with the fascinating pro-athlete turned data engineer Colleen Fotsch, that I ended up recording one of my longest podcast episodes in years. Colleen is a collegiate swimmer. Colleen won national championships and set an American record in the relay. As a CrossFit athlete she twice competed at The Games, which is the highest echelon of the sport, and then she simultaneously pursued a degree in data analytics while training with the US bobsled team. An injury ended her Olympic bobsled team dream, but luckily she'd been pursuing that analytics career in parallel. She began working full-time as a data analyst four years ago and has now grown into a data engineering leadership role at a healthcare staffing firm called CHG Healthcare in Utah, where she serves as senior technical manager of their data platform.

00:01:38
Today's episode essentially has two separate parts. The first half focuses on Colleen's exciting journey to the highest levels of three sports, swimming, CrossFit, and bobsledding. That part should be fascinating to just about anyone. The second half covers Colleen's transition into data analytics and data engineering. That part will appeal to technically minded listeners, particularly ones considering a career in or early on in a career in analytics or engineering. Over the course of today's episode, Colleen details the connection between a competitive sports mindset and data career success, proven strategies for being hired into your first data role later in your career, why being not smart enough for coding was a mental block she had to overcome, how analytics engineering bridges the gap between data engineering and analysis, and the huge benefits desk bound professionals can enjoy by including regular exercise in their week, including tips and tricks for developing or growing an exercise habit. All right, you ready for this fun episode? Let's go.

00:02:39
Colleen, welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. Where are you calling in from today?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:02:46
Thank you. I'm super pumped to be here too. I am calling in from Lehi, Utah.

Jon Krohn: 00:02:51
Nice.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:02:51
Nice and cold.

Jon Krohn: 00:02:53
What's Lehi like? Is that up in the mountains or?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:02:57
We do have a lot of mountains around here, so I'm about 25-30 minutes south of Salt Lake City.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:03
Nice. Okay. So it's kind of like ... I don't want this to sound derogatory, but do people sometimes describe it as a suburb of Salt Lake City or?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:03:14
Yeah, I would say so. I mean, it's very residential, I would say Lehi is definitely a little bit of a tech hub. We're kind of right in the heart of Silicon Slopes.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:24
Oh.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:03:25
Got a few tech companies not too far away. Essentially, that's the reason I moved to Lehi, was the company I was working for at the time is in Lehi, so I literally moved about a 10-minute walk from my office, which was a nice commute.

Jon Krohn: 00:03:41
Wow. That is nice. Yeah, and so you were introduced to me about a year ago by Joe Reis, who is a famous data engineer, a famous "recovering data scientist". He has had on his LinkedIn description that that's trademarked, but I don't know if that's a joke. But Joe introduced me to you about a year ago. Joe was on the show in episode number 595 with Matt Housley, whom you probably also know from Joe.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:04:11
Oh, yes. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:04:13
They seem to be inseparable.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:04:15
Yeah, I was on one of their Monday morning data chats on their podcast on LinkedIn a few months ago, which was really fun.

Jon Krohn: 00:04:23
I think that that's when I wrote you down as a prospective guest for this show too.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:04:28
Oh, nice.

Jon Krohn: 00:04:28
Because I must have seen clips of that and yeah, you and I chatted about a year ago, but at that time you had just started this new role, and so in my mind at that time, I thought, Colleen should have a bit more time in this role to be able to speak about what she's doing there, which now we'll get to do in today's episode.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:04:48
Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Krohn: 00:04:49
But before we get to the technical stuff that you're doing, management in data analytics, data engineering, let's talk about your journey to here, which we almost never do that on the show, so I don't know if I've explicitly said this on air before, but regular listeners will not be surprised to hear that this is explicitly our format. In a lot of podcasts out there, they start off by kind of going chronologically through people's history.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:05:15
Right.

Jon Krohn: 00:05:15
And usually that's a boring thing to do, because it's like, "Oh, you did your PhD there and then your postdoc ..." And that typically isn't that interesting when it's like, oh, it's really this open source library that they've been working on that recently and just published to the public. That's what you should be getting to. And so I'm typically start with what people are doing now, but with you, what you did in the past was so interesting that I think we should start there.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:05:44
For sure.

Jon Krohn: 00:05:50

My research on you goes back to you being a competitive swimmer. So is that where we should start your story?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:05:57
Yeah. No, I think that's a great start. I was a competitive athlete pretty much my whole life. I played a lot of sports, but swimming was the one that stuck and out of all of them I was the best at out of the other ones I tried. Basketball, volleyball, softball, all the things. And yeah, we moved around a bunch growing up, and honestly, swimming was my safe haven. It was my immediate group of friends, which made moving around a lot easier. I'm the oldest of six kids, all my siblings swam at one point or another. So it was also great for my parents to bring us all to one place, go get tired and then pick us up. And then I actually went to Notre Dame my freshman year and swam there. And then I ended up transferring to Cal Berkeley and finished out my collegiate career there. Was on two national championship teams, which was amazing. My junior and senior year was fortunate enough to be on a relay where we broke an American record twice, which was super cool.

Jon Krohn: 00:07:11
Whoa.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:07:12
It has been broken since, but it was around for a bit, which was very cool. That was by far the coolest experience ever, along with winning a national title. And then made it to Olympic trials in 2008, which was super fun as well. And it was cool, because going into college, I was competitive at swimming, but I wouldn't say I was Olympic trials caliber or a Cal Stanford caliber swimmer. And I peaked a little bit later. Which was one of the biggest reasons why I ended up transferring was just ended up having very different goals and found a great team and coach going to Cal. And yeah, it was incredible. Far exceeded my expectations of what I originally had thought was in store for my swimming career, so that was awesome.

Jon Krohn: 00:08:07
Yeah, that does sound like an amazing experience, and I candidly didn't know ... so from my perspective, what I mostly know about you is your prowess as a CrossFitter, because that's something that I compete at. Although to even use the verb compete with what I do is generous. But yeah, so I didn't even know that you had these incredible record setting, national championship winning swimming in your background, and then somehow you did ... so then what's the transition next? Was it CrossFit was the next passion after swimming?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:08:43
Yes. It's interesting ... it's funny to be sitting with you here today. I think if you had asked or told my collegiate swimmer or college self that I was going to be on a data science podcast one day, she would have never believed you in a million years. So when I was in college, I had a huge passion, still do, for fitness, athletics, being in the gym. And so I originally thought I want to be a collegiate D1 strength and conditioning coach. And so right after college I interned in our strength and conditioning department with our teams, got to work with a bunch of different teams, which was really cool. And then I ended up actually taking on the job as the swimming and diving strength and conditioning coach.

00:09:34
I actually got to coach some of the girls that were my teammates in college, which was really, really cool. And then I also got to work with men's water polo, men's and women's diving, and that was a super great experience. And while I was coaching, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do for fitness. Because my entire life I was in the water or in the gym for five, six hours a day, and I wasn't training to be fit, I was training to win a national title or to go faster, and it was never just about general health and fitness.

Jon Krohn: 00:10:10
That's what I was just going to ask, for the distinction there, because it sounds like to be fast or to win a national championship, that sounds like being pretty fit to me, but I guess it is-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:10:20
Oh, for sure. Yeah. And that was a byproduct of wanting to be competitive and wanting to be faster and better, but that was never the goal. And so now that I was switching from that to, well, I know it's important for me to stay healthy and move every day, but I was like, why do I go to the gym now? Just to be fit? If I'm being honest, it seemed a little anticlimactic compared to, my team's counting on me. I have to show up. The best version of myself for this. And so that was a big shift. And I knew I enjoyed and loved lifting, but I went through the phase of I don't want to get big and so I was going on the elliptical for an hour.

Jon Krohn: 00:11:10
Oh no.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:11:10
But then going and doing cleans. So, yeah, I was like, I have no idea what I want to do. And a friend of mine, when I was interning, I was also working part-time at a Lululemon, and a friend of mine was telling me about CrossFit. And I kind of heard of it and I was like, I don't know, that seems kind of strange. I don't know if I want to do it. She took me to a regionals in Northern California and I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. I was like, this looks like so much fun. Not really intending that I would compete, but we signed up the next day at a CrossFit gym in San Francisco, and I was hooked. I mean, beyond belief, I was going every single day. No rest days. I was so sore. And I was like, I don't care. This is so much fun.

00:11:56
Because one, I loved working out with other people. And then two, I loved the competitive aspect. Because I could walk in each day, there was a leaderboard on the white board. I was like, all right, who's the fastest? I'm going to beat them. And so that turned into, I did my first CrossFit Open, which for people that aren't familiar, the CrossFit Open is the first stage of getting to the CrossFit Games, which is essentially the Olympics or the World Championships of CrossFit.

Jon Krohn: 00:12:25
Let's talk about that in a bit more detail. It's something that I've competed in now for a number of years, and it's something that any listener out there can do. If you are already a seasoned athlete, you could, like Colleen already be a national title winning athlete, and CrossFit is a great starting point for you. Or you could equally be somebody who has not really ever exercised, and you could register for the CrossFit Open this year, and that would actually be a great baseline for future fitness. So anybody in the world can register for the CrossFit Open. So this episode is being released on February 11th, and the CrossFit Open starts on February 27th. So if you're listening to this episode and it's new, or if you're listening to this in a January or February in a future year beyond 2025, this probably also works. You should be able to go to CrossFit.com and you can register for the open.

00:13:24
And it's always been about $20 US. I don't know how that works in other countries. I don't know if it's just kind of at foreign exchange rates or if it ends up being 20 euros or 20 pounds or whatever, but about $20, it's not very expensive. And you are registered then for three weekends of competition. And you can do this competition at any CrossFit gym. So CrossFit gyms have coaches that are certified as judges of the Open, and they will stand there with a clipboard as you do whatever prescribed workout there is for each of those three weekends. Every once in a while they end up throwing two competitions into one weekend where it'll be like a 15 minute cardio workout and then some kind of strength thing for five minutes afterward. But basically you end up having three or four scored events over three weekends. You don't know what they're going to be until the Thursday night, North American time, and then you have until Monday to record the score with a certified judge at any kind of CrossFit gym that's in your area. It's a great way to get started. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world register for this. I'm going to cut a little bit to where, so you join the San Francisco gym, you're doing it every day. You're looking at the leaderboard and the leaderboard just in your gym and saying, I'm going to beat everyone today. And I expect that that accelerated pretty quickly given your athletic background. And so to skip the story ahead a bit, there's these different phases. So if you do well in the open, it used to work differently, and we can talk about your time a bit. Let's just talk about that. So in say 2014, for example, which appears to be according ... I have your CrossFit stats up right now at[inaudible 00:15:14] CrossFit.com

Colleen Fotsch: 00:15:14
Oh gosh. Yeah. That was my first Open.

Jon Krohn: 00:15:16
The first year that you did the Open in 2014, you were the 491st fittest woman on Earth from hundreds of thousands of women.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:15:28
Wow.

Jon Krohn: 00:15:28
And that was good enough to get you into the Northern California regional at that time. And so at that time, the way that it worked is they have these different regions. It ended up getting really weird and they got rid of it because people would just move to less competitive regions. But because there's so many people competing at CrossFit in California, you end up splitting California at that time, even into separate sub-regions. And so I guess it would have been the top 30 women or something in Northern California would've been invited to the regionals.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:16:01
Yes, I believe so. And yes. So I had, I remember watching the CrossFit games in 2013 when they were still in Carson, California. And I remember, I think that was the first year that they put handstand walking, some other stuff. Year to year, that's what one of the things that CrossFit is known for is that you generally know what you're preparing for, but every CrossFit games, every regionals, every Open is going to be different. Which is so different from what I was used to in swimming, where you specialize in very finite amount of events. It's not like I'm getting up to the blocks and they're like, just kidding, it's not 100 fly, it's 200 breaststroke. Good luck. That would be very unfortunate.

00:16:47
So you really have to be prepared for anything. And sometimes new stuff shows up and you're like, wow, I'm doing that for the first time today. I hope it goes well. But yeah, I remember watching the 2013 CrossFit Games and I was hearing about the Open and I was like, this seems really cool. And like you were saying, CrossFit gyms will usually do what they'll call a Friday Night Lights. So they'll have people do these workouts and heats, and it's really fun and people are cheering each other on, and it's just a really fun community event.

00:17:23
And I remember going into it thinking, yeah, it would be cool maybe in a few years to get to a regionals or a CrossFit Games or something like that. And I remember at the time I didn't have a chest-to-bar pull-up yet. And so I remember having probably a full on meltdown when... because they definitely came up in that 2014 Open. But somehow made the regionals. And I remember handstand walking was in that regionals, and fortunately they told us in advance, so we got to test it out a little bit, so we didn't look totally ridiculous trying to do it there. But I remember getting really humbled. I do remember when I was starting to get a bit more competitive and was starting to think, okay, I really like going to the classes, but maybe I need to do some more supplemental training, stuff like that. And At the time... Well, I enjoyed lifting in general, but strength was my strength. And instead of working on my weaknesses, I cherry-picked a lot.

00:18:27
I was like, hey, I'm going to do more lifting. I was like, those muscle-ups, we don't need to do those. I got real humbled at the 2014 regionals. I remember we had one workout that was 10 rounds of a legless rope climb, and that was very, very challenging. Also, the handstand walking. But there were other things in there, like a one rep max hang snatch, which I loved, and some other things. But it was a super fun experience and definitely got me hooked on just the mindset of, okay, I want to do this for a bit. And yeah, so just got back to training after that.

Jon Krohn: 00:19:10
And to underscore how wild just that is, and we haven't even really gotten to the ... I mean, the story is just developing. This is like we're talking about your first year of this sport. And trust me, listeners, it gets even more interesting. But even in that first year, you qualified for regionals on your first attempt. And that's something that there are tens of thousands of CrossFit athletes every year who are training full-time and have been training full-time for many years to try ... and when I say full-time I mean, probably not literally full ... it would be their primary pursuit. Everything about their life, they would only take a job that would allow them to be working out for maybe four hours a day, that kind of thing. So a lot of these people end up working in gyms, end up being CrossFit coaches. And there's tens of thousands of people like that around the globe who are just trying to get to that kind of level.

00:20:06
And today that would be more called, although it's changed in 2015, I don't even know if we want to get into that, but that would be what we would think about maybe as semi-finals kind of level now. Although even that's been kind of easier. There isn't exactly a comparison for the regionals, but to be the top 40 in your region that that is very, very fit. And it's a testament to all those many years that you were pursuing swimming at such a high level. So 2014, you make it to regionals, which is a crazy feat in and of itself. And then 2015, you make it back to regionals. I don't know how far we should skip ahead?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:20:51
Yeah, so 2015 was, I honestly, I don't totally remember a ton about that regionals, but I do remember, I believe it was 2015 ... so you were saying the Open now is three weekends. Back then it was five weekends.

Jon Krohn: 00:21:08
It was five, yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:21:09
So it was five weeks. And 15.5 ... so 15.1, so on and so forth, so 15.5 was the last Open workout.

Jon Krohn: 00:21:16
Just like software versions.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:21:18
Yeah, exactly. Except sometimes they feel worse as you continue to go on, which I guess that could be in software too.

Jon Krohn: 00:21:27
Yeah, I mean it could be a Sonos release.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:21:32
Yeah, exactly. And in the fifth week, so 15.5 that year, I won that workout in the world, which was super.

Jon Krohn: 00:21:41
In the world.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:21:42
In the world, which was really cool.

Jon Krohn: 00:21:44
Wow. What was the work out? Yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:21:46
It was thrusters and rowing. So it was 27, 21, 18, 15, 12. I think it finished with nine. So you start with 27 thrusters, 27 calories on the rower, 21 thrusters, and so on and so forth, all the way down to nine.

Jon Krohn: 00:22:09
To quickly define for our listeners what a thruster is, and there's been all kinds of terms in this episode that people may not know. I'll quickly try to recap the ones that have happened before. There was the muscle-up you mentioned?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:22:19
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:22:19
Which is like a pull-up but you end up on top of the bar. So you're doing a pull-up, but instead of just getting your chin over the bar or getting your chest to the bar, you end up with your entire torso and head up over the bar and you're stable there with your arms. So that requires obviously a lot of strength and agility. So muscle up, that's one. You talked about snatch. So that's a barbell movement where in one movement you get the whole barbell over your head in one swift movement. And then thruster is like you are standing on the ground with a barbell at your chest and you squat down to full depth, you hips go below your knees, and then you thrust upward with your whole body and you thrust the bar over your head. So like a snatch, you end up with a bar over your head, but in a completely different way. You do it from a squat.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:23:10
Yeah. So essentially a squat to press, but you're using the momentum of your lower body. So it's not just a strict press. But I feel like that's a very infamous CrossFit movement. I personally, when I was competing, I loved them. I mean, they're very painful, but that was my jam. Anything in a front rack position. I loved front squats, I loved cleans, anything like that. So that was really fun, but that was pretty wild. I remember doing it at that same CrossFit gym in San Francisco and watching Kara Saunders, who is a multi-year Games athlete from Australia.

Jon Krohn: 00:23:52
Multi-year podium.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:23:53
Has been on the podium. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:23:54
Yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:23:55
Very good. And I remember watching her video, and I remember doing it, and I remember looking at the clock when I was done. I was like, "Did I just go faster?" I was like, there's no way I just did that. And so it was pretty fun throughout, like you said, that would've been, I think I did it on a Saturday, so you're waiting till Monday to see if you actually won or not. And then it's so funny too, I think it's gotten a little bit better, but especially when you're really competitive in the space and during the Open, you start to get really, really secretive about your times and your reps, and you're not wanting to let anyone know, because you don't want to let someone know, because then they'll have a score to try to beat you.

Jon Krohn: 00:24:39
Yeah, exactly.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:24:39
So it was very, very top secret. But that's definitely what stands out as far as the 2015 year.

Jon Krohn: 00:24:46
Wow, that is wild. And so in 2014, you were the 491st fittest woman on Earth in the Open. In 2015, you leapfrogged about 400 women to become the 113th fittest.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:25:03
Oh, geez.

Jon Krohn: 00:25:03
And then, yeah, you went to regionals again this time it was a whole California regional. You placed about the same there as the preceding year. Then 2016, you continued to accelerate. You ended up being 80th in the world in the Open, which was fifth-fittest woman in Northern California. And then in regionals he finished seventh, which if I'm not mistaken, that's kind of a heartbreaking position to be in.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:25:30
Yeah. So they took top five. And I want to say I was in fifth going into the last workout, and I think if I'm remembering correctly, I was maybe within 20 points from a fifth place finish. And that was a hard pill to swallow, especially as you get closer and you start envisioning what that would look like-

Jon Krohn: 00:25:57
That must happen. You're like, "Oh my God. Just two years ago, just three years ago, I was watching the games for the first time, and now as long as I do well in this last event, I'm going to the CrossFit Games, I'm going to the Olympics of CrossFit."

Colleen Fotsch: 00:26:10
Yes. Right. Well, and like you're saying, at that point, I had, as I became more competitive, you start to devote a lot more time and effort into this. And so you're like, all right, all of this hard work is coming together and this is going to be it. And then to have it so close and to not get there was really tough. But honestly, looking back I think was a huge blessing. I was actually having some shoulder pain going into that year. Nothing crazy. And honestly, I figured, I swam my whole life. I had had some shoulder issues throughout swimming. Nothing that would prevent me from ... I could still snatch, do muscle-ups, all these things, it just wouldn't feel right. And so after that season, I ended up getting an MRI for peace of mind. I was like, I just want to know in my head that it's all fine. Well, lo and behold, it was not all fine. And my rotator cuff was 80% torn.

Jon Krohn: 00:27:13
Oh my goodness.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:27:15
Just an overuse thing. If anything, I think all of the strength building that I'd done in CrossFit in those past few years, I think honestly held it together for as long as it had been. And so I ended up getting surgery pretty soon after that. And then I knew that the turnaround time would've been too tight to try and go individual again the following year. And so for those who don't know, for the CrossFit Games for competing, there's the individual side of things, and then there's also the team side of things. And so a really good friend of mine, now one of my best friends, Molly Volmer, who was also an elite level CrossFit athlete, she reached out. She was with NorCal CrossFit, and she reached out, was like, "Hey, we're going to put a team together. Do you think you'd be ready in time?" I was like, "I don't know. But yeah. Let's do it."

00:28:10
And honestly, that was a huge game changer just as far as going through the rehab process and the ups and downs of that. But knowing that I was working towards ... my teammates were counting on me. I was like, I need to be ready for regionals next year. And that was a ton of fun.

Jon Krohn: 00:28:30
It seems like the team thing is a common thread. You got the world record in a team swimming event. And so I can only imagine that competing on a team again in 2017 was great. And I was taking a note as you were describing this team competition to the audience, but I don't know if you said that. So the teams are two males, two females on a team. You might've said that, and I just didn't.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:28:59
Yeah. So that's how they are today. Back then it was three and three.

Jon Krohn: 00:29:04
Oh.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:29:05
Yeah. Which made it a lot ... I would say a little trickier as far as just strategically, and not to get too far into the weeds of CrossFit specific things, but an infamous CrossFit team implement is this thing called the Worm.

Jon Krohn: 00:29:23
The Worm.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:29:24
So essentially it's this long sandbag that you move together and you have to move at the same time as your teammates, be really coordinated, otherwise, it is very difficult for everyone involved. And if you're all the same height, that's even better, which we were not, but that's okay, we made it work. But yeah, so we had three and three. Three girls, three guys.

Jon Krohn: 00:29:49
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00:30:29
Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. And so, yeah, I guess the other thing to bring home is that we've talked about the CrossFit Games and how that's like the Olympics. What makes it quite different from the Olympics is like you said, you don't you don't have specialists that specialize in a single event like the 100-meter sprint, and then someone, a completely different kind of athlete that is swimming or doing the javelin.

00:30:55
Instead, it's like the decathlon where you have to be good at a lot of different sports, except, as you already mentioned, it's even more diverse, because it's not just track events, which do sometimes actually literally get tested in the Games-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:31:09
Right, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:31:09
... but it's weightlifting and very long distance cardiovascular stuff, like a marathon row one year-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:31:19
Oh, my gosh.

Jon Krohn: 00:31:19
... which is crazy, a 42,000-kilometer row is one of the events of 10 events in a weekend. So, there's this huge amount of diversity. But almost everything that we've been talking about in this episode up until now has been this individual elite category where there's just elite men, elite women, you're competing as an individual.

00:31:45
Also, there's other ways that you can get to the Games, and they're now holding these on different days in different locations, but it used to be, until very recently, that you could also have... There was a teen competition with a couple of different age groups.

00:31:59
There's teens where you compete as individuals, and then there's also age group. So, if you're 35 and over, there's group categories, like 35-39, 40-45, and so on, all the way up to, I think 65-plus might be the highest category.

00:32:13
So, you have all these different individual tiers as the age group competitions. But the main thing is the individual athlete where, theoretically, anyone of any age, though they tend to be people in their 20s, early 30s, maybe some people in their late 30s make it as an individual, that's where most of the attention is focused.

00:32:36
However, the team, which is a completely different kind of thing to all the individual stuff, which, I've completely forgotten that it used to be three men, three women on a team, but now three men, three women on a team, that also, it gets a lot of attention.

00:32:50
It's really those two things. It's the individual elite, so individual men, individual females, and then, the team competition. Those are the three categories that people pay a lot of attention to. And yeah, it's really cool that you did that team as well.

00:33:08
It's fun to watch those competitions. They can do a lot more; some movements where people are having to do things in synchrony, some where they're not.

00:33:15
And that's also something, if you are somebody, if you've been listening to this episode and you're thinking, "Oh, I always love doing team sports, and CrossFit as individual, that isn't really for me," but by practicing a CrossFit, there are lots of local team competitions that you can do in all kinds of combinations, like male female pair or same-sex pair. There's lots of different ways that it works together, and so you could have that team experience.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:33:39
Oh, team is so much fun. It was always the goal to get to the Games individually, but I am so grateful that everything happened, leading up to that, for me to be on that team and with such amazing people. It's a totally different level of...

00:33:58
Also, me personally, I will push myself, I mean, I'm able to push myself a lot individually, but there is something different when you know someone's counting on you-

Jon Krohn: 00:34:09
100%.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:34:10
... and you're like, "I don't wanna do it for myself," but I'm looking to my right and left, and I need to do it for them. So, we're going to go to a dark place today and we're going to send it. It was so much fun.

Jon Krohn: 00:34:23
Yep, yep. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, 2017, because of your rotator cuff injury, you compete on a team, and you get first in California in the Regionals, which means that, for sure, you stamp your ticket to the Games for the first time.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:34:39
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:34:40
And so, not only do you make it to the Games, your team finishes 4th, which is crazy. That's super high.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:34:46
Yeah, it's tough because you look at a 4th, which is crazy, 4th in the world, that's insane, we definitely were a bit bummed that it's one spot off the podium.

Jon Krohn: 00:34:57
I know. I wasn't going to bring it up.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:35:01
I know, I know. But it's okay, we're still think it was a ton of fun, and I think the training for it was also really fun, because especially, as an individual, there's not only a lot of long hours in the gym, but times, especially training for the Games, when you're by yourself.

00:35:18
There's only so much peer pressuring you can do to get other people to join in on workouts when finally everyone's like, "Nope, sorry, I don't wanna do any of your workouts with you."

00:35:28
So, it's nice with a team. It's like, "Yep, sorry, we all have to do this together." So, that makes it a lot of fun.

Jon Krohn: 00:35:35
Yep, yep, yep. And then, in 2018, you were able to recover, and you got back to individual competition. You finished 71st in the world in the Open, you made it to Regionals again, and it looks like you narrowly didn't make it to the Games one more.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:35:55
I know, again. Yeah, that was pretty brutal, especially... My kryptonite that year was, well, you could, I guess I shouldn't say blame, but they added in not only handstand walking, but we had a handstand walk over a ramp, and then, down some stairs. So, we were doing all kinds of stuff.

00:36:16
But that definitely crushed... that workout crushed me a bit. But I won two events there, which was super cool. Definitely, there was so much progress made. At that point, I moved from Northern California out to Arizona to train full-time.

00:36:33
And at that time I had made a decision, because up until that point I was working and training, so I was coaching and training at the same time, and at that point-

Jon Krohn: 00:36:43
What were you coaching?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:36:45
I was coaching CrossFit.

Jon Krohn: 00:36:45
Okay, gotcha.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:36:47
So, I left Berkeley, and I was coaching CrossFit, coaching group classes, and then, also, doing some individual coaching as well. And at that point it was getting so competitive, and for me, I was like, "Hey, I wanna go all in."

00:37:02
I need to devote, not necessarily more training time, but more recovery time, and just want to focus all in on this. But also, at that time, I was still not totally sure, career-wise, what I was going to do afterwards. And so, I went back to school to get a Master's in kinesiology-

Jon Krohn: 00:37:21
Ah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:37:21
... thinking that I was going to stay in that field. And so, I was training, and then, I was in a Master's program, a remote one through Michigan State. And so, I was doing that, which was great because I got to do schoolwork between sessions throughout the day.

00:37:41
And then, yeah, 2018 was pretty brutal because I also put myself in a position where I was in a qualifying spot, and I remember the last workout was thrusters and legless rope climbs, and I pushed myself so hard that I, at one point, I think I failed a thruster, and that was essentially what cost me a spot.

Jon Krohn: 00:38:07
Yeah. So, again, finishing in the top five, making it from Regionals into the Games.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:38:12
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:38:12
But then, the next year, 2019, it's your best ever Open finish, 33rd in the world in 2019, and you made it to the Games.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:38:28
Yeah, I did. Yeah. So, it was interesting, too, that year, like we've been touching on, the CrossFit Games, when you compare it to other sports, is still very much in its infancy. The first CrossFit Games was in, I think, 2007.

00:38:46
So, still very young sports, still evolving, so things tend to change sometimes year to year. And so, that year, the Games definitely changed. That year they took national champions.

00:38:59
And usually, at the CrossFit Games, for the individuals, there's 40 men and 40 women, and this year I think they took upwards of 100 women and 100 men.

Jon Krohn: 00:39:10
Yeah, because it was, like you said, the national champions, if you got number one in your country...

Colleen Fotsch: 00:39:14
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:39:14
And I get the idea behind it, because it helps broaden exposure globally. CrossFit is concentrated particularly in the US. It is absolutely done all around the world, but there's a particular concentration of interest in it in the US.

00:39:28
And so, it ends up being that most Games athletes, or at least close to half of Games athletes in a typical year are American. And so, I totally understand the idea from CrossFit headquarters to say, "Let's get someone from every country."

Colleen Fotsch: 00:39:46
Yeah, like an Olympics play, essentially, is what it was almost made out to be...

Jon Krohn: 00:39:51
But it ended up being silly.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:39:53
Yeah, it wasn't my favorite, I'm not going to lie. And that, honestly, it was a great learning experience, though, because this is what I had been training for and hoping for many years.

00:40:06
And especially, I think, in sport it's sometimes easy to fall into the trap of feeling entitled to a certain experience, or, because you train really hard and sacrifice and all this stuff, and then you start to realize that, "Okay, I am not entitled to any of that."

00:40:25
Everyone's working super hard, and it's just the way it happened. It wasn't the Games that I envisioned or that I felt that me and a lot of other athletes deserved, but it was what it was. And I think it was a good opportunity for me to check into, "Okay, why am I doing this?"

00:40:46
Because it can't all be for just this, and I think that, as cliche as it sounds, you do have to enjoy parts of the journey, not all of it. Especially in sport, there's going to be many days of... there's no instant gratification whatsoever. It's very prolonged.

00:41:05
But I think it was a good check-in, and I think it started to shift my mindset of, "Okay, what am I going to do after this," and start to look into that and start to answer that question.

00:41:17
Because I think it's also easy to fall into a trap, when you are in elite level athletics, which I experienced in swimming too is, you're so in the moment and you're so dialed in and so bought in, and every decision you're making throughout the day is to compete and to be better than the next person, and it's easy to not want to think about what's going to be after.

00:41:39
Because you're like, "I don't need to. We're just focused on this." And you feel that if you're spending any time focusing on anything else, that's taking away from the moment at hand.

00:41:49
And I think that was a huge blessing to start to shift, "Hey, what are we actually going to do for," because sport has a finite amount of time that you can do it, "... what am I going to do as my career after this?" So, I do think it was a good shift into that direction.

Jon Krohn: 00:42:14
Mathematics forms the core of data science and machine learning. And now, with my Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning course, you can get a firm grasp of that math, particularly the essential linear algebra and calculus. You can get all the lectures for free on my YouTube channel, but if you don't mind paying a typically small amount for the Udemy version, you get everything from YouTube plus fully worked solutions to exercises and an official course completion certificate. As countless guests on the show have emphasized, to be the best data scientist you can be, you've got to know the underlying math. So, check out the links to my Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning course in the show notes, or at jonkrohn.com/udemy. That's jonkrohn.com/U-D-E-M-Y.

00:43:01
And congratulations on achieving... You spent five, six years pursuing this goal of making it to the Games. You've made it, you placed 27th in the world, which is wild when you think anybody at that... It's insane the kinds of things that people can do.

00:43:19
Anyone you can now look up on YouTube, look up across the Games event from any year, probably, the most popular ones will come up, and they'll be interesting, and when you see what anybody at that level is doing, it's completely... it's the kind of thing...

00:43:34
I train for an hour or two, five days a week, but I can't even... there's no universe in which I could imagine doing any of the things that they're doing in the Games no matter how much I train, especially at my age, I guess. But yeah, so congratulations on that.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:43:51
Thank you.

Jon Krohn: 00:43:51
And then, you ended up... You talked about realizing what you want to be doing with the rest of your career. At the same time, it looks like you pursued two options in parallel.

00:44:04
So, you'd started doing, as you were pursuing CrossFit full-time in the last couple of years that you were competing a really high level of CrossFit, you were also doing, as you already mentioned, a Master's in Kinesiology and Exercise Science from Michigan State remotely, part-time.

00:44:21
That looks like it took three years from your LinkedIn profile. So then, after the 2019 Games, and maybe with things like the pandemic happening-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:44:30
Right.

Jon Krohn: 00:44:31
... or the wrench that threw into the works for everyone-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:44:34
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:44:34
... you simultaneously, it looks like, pursued bobsledding-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:44:41
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:44:41
... at the national level for the US national team-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:44:42
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:44:43
... and doing a Master's in Applied Business Data Analytics at Arizona State, is that right?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:44:50
Yes. So, I was finishing up my Master's, and I would say, while I was doing that, I was starting to specifically think about, okay, what job am I going to get with this afterwards, and what am I passionate about, also, if I'm being honest, the financials of being a strength coach, not too great.

00:45:18
So, I was like, "Okay, is there something else I could look into here?" And my sister-in-law is a data analyst at Netflix, and I was starting to hear about the field and what that looked like. And without me really noticing it, I was essentially somewhat of a data nerd as far as tracking numbers for myself in training.

00:45:41
I love wearables, I love checking all the numbers, I like the documentation side of that and seeing what I can leverage and move the needle on, because especially at that level of athletics, everyone's training hard, everyone's lifting a lot of weight, everyone's going really fast.

00:46:00
So, it's like, "Okay, what can I really move the needle on?" And a lot of that stuff is lifestyle things, whether it's sleeping, your nutrition. And so, I was weighing and measuring all my food, when am I eating compared to when am I training, okay, I need to be in bed this time and I need to get good quality sleep.

00:46:21
So, checking all of these things, and then, also, overlaying that onto my workouts so my coach can adjust things based on how I'm recovering, and all of that, because it's a finite line between, you need to push and you need to spend time essentially suffering a little bit, but you can't put yourself too much in a hole to where you're now getting diminishing returns off of that.

00:46:46
So, kind of realizing, "Hey, this seems like a really cool field, every industry is using it in some way or another, this seems really cool, but I know nothing about it." And I had never coded before in my life. That was very foreign to me.

00:47:03
And to be honest... So, my dad's an engineer by degree, in mechanical engineering. He's been in the tech space for a very long time, and had always been like, "Hey, you should take a coding class here and there," since high school. I was like, "No, who wants to do that? I don't want to do that.

Jon Krohn: 00:47:22
So boring, computers, yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:47:25
Well, honestly, I think a lot of it was me standing in my own way of feeling like I wasn't smart enough to do that. I felt like, well, my gifts, my talents lie in athletics, not in anything-

Jon Krohn: 00:47:39
It's so interesting to me that that thought could ever enter your head, because I have been really impressed so many times in this episode by how well you articulate any points, and-

Colleen Fotsch: 00:47:50
Oh, thank you.

Jon Krohn: 00:47:51
... in my view, what a great job you do of thinking about the context that our audience might have, and giving them the key context that they would need, giving a part of your story. And I think that that to me shows a tremendous amount of intelligence.

00:48:06
So, it's interesting that whatever feedback loops you were getting in earlier life weren't giving you that same kind of reassurance that seems so obvious to me sitting here.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:48:15
Oh, thank you. No, that means a lot. And honestly, that's the biggest thing I got out of my Master's, I would say. I really enjoyed the program, it was a lot of fun, but that was my-

Jon Krohn: 00:48:28
This is the Arizona State Applied Business Data Analytics Master's, yeah? Colleen Fotsch: 00:48:31 So, this was my kinesiology Master's.

Jon Krohn: 00:48:33
Oh. Oh, okay, I see, I see.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:48:34
So, it's interesting, because going back a little bit, throughout high school and college, I honestly really struggled with balancing athletics and academics. Just, the academic side of things did not come easily to me, so, I was, honestly, easily discouraged.

00:48:51
Which is interesting because I'm very not easily discouraged on the athletic side of things. I was like, "It's going to be hard? Let's go." And it's interesting that it took me going back to school and realizing that I can transfer these skills from competing, from working hard in athletics to other things in my life.

00:49:13
And I'm sure I could have done that sooner, but didn't really have that aha moment until I went back to school. And that gave me, honestly, I think, the confidence to enter into the data field, because now, all of a sudden, I was like, "I feel like there's so many more options for me.

00:49:30
Because I know I may not have the technical skill set yet, but I can do hard things and I know how to learn and I know how to be coached, and I'm not afraid of these things anymore. I can look at a bunch of code, prior to actually knowing anything about coding, and now I'm not..."

00:49:52
I'm like, "Okay, I've done these other hard things. Why can't I do this?" And so, that was extremely eye-opening for me. And so, then I started to look at degrees and I started to take look in Coursera courses, like Sadie's SQL course was the first coding course I ever took.

Jon Krohn: 00:50:13
Yeah, Sadie St. Lawrence, if you listen to this show with any regularity, you will know her because she does our predictions for the year, for four years in a row now. So, it's either the first episode or the last episode of the year, to make predictions about the year ahead.

00:50:32
And she's actually done a couple of other episodes, unrelated to that, on the show as well. She's amazing. She has a SQL course. I think it's the one you're talking about right now. 700,000 people have taken her SQL course.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:50:44
Yeah, yeah. It was great. And honestly, it was just great for getting introduced to SQL because I knew that, along with the degree I was in, I just wanted to continue to make sure I was building the technical tool set to get a job in data analytics.

00:51:03
And while I was doing that, like you said, the pandemic happened and the world shut down and the CrossFit season was very up in the air, and to be honest, after 2019, I wasn't super pumped about what the Games was going to look like.

00:51:19
And so, at the time, a pilot, Kaylee Humphreys, who has won multiple gold medals in bobsledding, actually for Canada, and then, she is now on the US team, and-

Jon Krohn: 00:51:31
A pilot is one of the people in a bobsled team.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:51:33
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:51:34
So, you've got four people in a bobsled, right? What are they called?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:51:36
So, it's interesting, for the men, there's two-person and four-person. For women, we have Monobob, which is just the pilot, and then we have two-person, which is the pilot and a brakeman.

Jon Krohn: 00:51:50
Ah. Colleen Fotsch: 00:51:50

Yeah. So, she was the driver. So, you have your drivers who are actually steering the sled down the track, and then the brakeman, which I was, where we help push the sled at the beginning, we hop in, hold on, stay in the sled, make sure we're being very aerodynamic.

00:52:07
So, essentially you're just holding yourself in half as much as you can, and then, at the end, you're the one who pulls the brakes, which is very important because then you keep sliding, and it's bad news. So, at the time, I was still up in the air, so I'm getting this data analytics degree, up in the air about-

Jon Krohn: 00:52:28
Wait, wait, sorry, one second. I have one more have one more question about bobsledding.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:52:33
Oh, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 00:52:34
What do you wear on your feet?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:52:36
You wear ice spikes.

Jon Krohn: 00:52:37
You wear ice spikes?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:52:39

Yes. So, essentially, they're very similar-looking to track spikes where the spikes are on the ball of your foot, but instead of track spikes, you usually have what, five to seven larger spikes.

00:52:51
An ice spike, the entire ball of your foot is covered in super tiny spikes that will cut your skin if you get... So, they're very sharp, because they have to be, so you can run on ice and not fall over the place.

00:53:11
Yeah, so that was very interesting as far as... There's so much about bobsledding that... I had watched bobsledding on the Olympics, but had no idea how people got into it, what the training looked like for it.

00:53:24
And so, Kaylee reached out through Instagram, and she reached out... Well, actually, I think the most I knew about bobsledding was Cool Runnings, the movie. Great movie.

Jon Krohn: 00:53:37
Yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:53:39
And so, she reached out and just asked, "Are you interested in potentially trying out bobsledding?" And I was like, "Sure. I don't know how..." Because it's not like basketball or swimming, especially in Arizona, you don't go to your local bobsled track and try it out and see if you're any good.

00:54:04
So, at the time, the national team was training. So, there's two tracks in the US. There's one in Lake Placid, New York, which is their main Olympic training center, and then, there's one in Park City, Utah. And the national team was training in Lake Placid.

00:54:20
And she said, "Hey, you know, you can come out here, there's a spot, you can try it out, and then, at the end of the month, while you're out here, you can try out for the national team if you're any good and if you enjoy it."

00:54:33
Because some people will go out there, go down the track, and be like, "Nope, not for me. I'm fine," which, I don't really blame them, it's pretty wild. And at the time, with the height of COVID, it wasn't a, "Hey, you can fly in, try it out for a weekend," I had to commit to being out there for at least a month.

00:54:54
And at the time, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be fully done with CrossFit, but especially given that my childhood-into-college dream was to make an Olympic swim team, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, any opportunity to represent my country and to go to the Olympics, sign me up, let's go."

00:55:14
And so, I went out to Lake Placid, we trained for a few weeks before actually getting on the ice, because you actually need the conditions to be cold enough for the track team to be able to lay down all the ice, and there's a lot that goes into that.

00:55:32
And luckily, they have, essentially, a pseudo beginning part of the track that's on actual track material that you can practice getting into a pretend sled. So, it's not the first time that you go on the ice that you're like, "Oh, I've never actually done anything like this." It's definitely very different-

Jon Krohn: 00:55:55
The pretend sled is on wheels?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:55:58
Yes. So, it's on wheels on a track, and essentially, it's just the skeleton of what a sled would be, and so, that way, you're able to practice with your pilot, work on getting in. Because that was the biggest thing, especially when it was our first time.

00:56:16
Me and one of my good friends, Kelsey Keele, who also came from CrossFit, she was trying out bobsledding too, which was fun to have another person where we're looking at each other and being like, "Oh, my gosh, what are we doing right now?"

00:56:31
So, the first time I went down the track, the biggest thing was get in the sled. We don't care how fast you're going, you just need to get in the sled, because if you don't get in the sled, it makes it extremely hard for the pilot because they don't have the counterweight in the back, so then the back of the sled is just flying all over the place, and there's no one to pull the brake at the bottom of the track.

00:56:51
So, big no-no not to get in the sled. And so, long story short, I went down my first time, it was crazy. I wouldn't at all consider myself an adrenaline junkie, but for whatever reason, I thought it was really fun. And I just really liked the idea of, honestly, getting to compete on a team again and potentially make a run at an Olympics.

00:57:14
And so, a few weeks later, tried out for the national team, qualified for the national team, and then, that was 2021 with the intent of trying out for an Olympic team in 2022.

Jon Krohn: 00:57:28
And what happened?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:57:29
And I tore my ACL.

Jon Krohn: 00:57:31
Ugh!

Colleen Fotsch: 00:57:34
So, a few months prior to the qualification process starting for that Olympic year, I was training in the gym, doing weightlifting, which is really frustrating that it wasn't a bobsled-specific thing, because I've lifted, I've done so many reps up to this point, and I've never had any knee issues or anything like that.

00:57:57
It was just a freak accident, and ended up tearing my ACL, and it was far too close to the qualification process starting, and I was like, "There's no way that I'm going to be able to come back from this."

00:58:13
And that, actually... So, I was about to finish the data analytics degree, and towards the end of that, I knew that that was the goal. Whether or not I made the Olympics or not, I knew that. I was like, "My goal is to be a data analyst once I am done with this degree."

00:58:30
And because I tore my ACL, I was like, "Well, we're gonna start applying and interviewing a little bit sooner than expected." So, I remember literally sitting up in bed, post-surgery, with my knee brace on, starting to get my resume together, and being like, "Okay, we're gonna get this going."

00:58:48
With, also, in the back of my head of, I hadn't really processed that I could be done competing forever, potentially, and that was definitely a big shift.

00:59:03 But again, I think, now, looking back, not that I would want to relive tearing my ACL, but I think it was a huge blessing, because long story short, I got my first job as a data analyst for HOMii sooner than I was expecting, and-

Jon Krohn: 00:59:21
What's HOMii?

Colleen Fotsch: 00:59:24
So, HOMii was a tech real estate company, and essentially helping home buyers more easily buy homes, not giving as much money to real estate agents, and using our application in the process...

Jon Krohn: 00:59:40
Which is a huge racket in the US.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:59:42
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 00:59:42
The real estate fees, it's crazy. I don't think... So many things in the US are supersized rackets, healthcare being the biggest one of all.

Colleen Fotsch: 00:59:52
Right.

Jon Krohn: 00:59:53
But yeah, it's crazy. There's this standard, the buyer's agent and the seller's agent both get 2% on a real estate transaction.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:00:02
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:00:02
And any agent that tries to undercut that system, is excluded completely from the system.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:00:08
Yeah. So, essentially, it was a flat fee for the home buyer, and then, you would still have an agent involved, but the idea was not only that it was going to be good for the home buyers themselves, but we were intending for the real estate agents to also be able to continue to produce more and more revenue because they could get more and more people through the process, and that was really great.

 01:00:35
That team, which, it's really cool, because my manager at HOMii, I now work with in my current job. So, it's really fun that we somehow got to-

Jon Krohn: 01:00:46
Oh.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:00:46
... work together again. And I am extremely grateful for him because he helped start my data analytics career. I remember being a little intimidated putting together my resume, and being like, "Okay, how do I let them know that this makes sense?"

Jon Krohn: 01:01:07
Oh, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:01:07
Because you read through what I had done, and you're saying, "I was really proud of it," and I was like, "Okay, this took a lot of effort and a lot of grind and work ethic," but it really doesn't, on paper at least, does not transfer over really...

01:01:23
It's not like, "Oh, yeah, competitive swimming, CrossFit athlete, bobsledding. Oh, data analytics, for sure." That's not usually...

Colleen Fotsch: 01:01:30
Oh, data analytics for sure. That's not usually the trajectory.

Jon Krohn: 01:01:33
Yeah. Tell us about that. I'm sure we have listeners out there who are thinking about getting their first data job and for a lot of people that could be a data analyst job. CC

Colleen Fotsch: 01:01:40
Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:01:40
So what kind of recommendations do you have for people to take their background and shape it to look like, how did you get the interview? How did you end up getting hired at HOMiie?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:01:53
Absolutely. That's a great question. I would say that going back and getting education in the field itself is not only helpful for whatever job you end up getting, but I think for building the confidence and also being able to speak to how you can provide value to your future team that you're interviewing with. Also, I mean, going through not just a degree like the one at ASU, but things like Coursera and all of that are just great. I mean, I still use that stuff to continue to build a technical skill set and to just keep evolving because I think especially no matter what job you're at, sometimes you're really getting specific and into the nitty-gritty on one thing, and you don't want to lose that skill set that you once had. So it's always good to keep going back, but especially when you're first starting, I would say especially in data analytics, I really prioritize SQL, did some Python, but a lot of SQL also, Tableau, Power BI was fixated on that. Obviously, that's going to depend on what tool your team is using is going to depend company to company. But going after the more popular ones is really good and being able to speak to, because those will transfer over and that is not... the learning curve isn't going to be super steep on those.

01:03:14
But I also think there's a huge component to not just, and I don't mean networking in the sense of just meeting acquaintances and stuff, but really looking into, okay, what are the companies that I would like to work in? What are the industries I would like to work in? Do I know people that work at those companies, even if they're not specifically in data? Because I know for me, I got the interview at HOMii because I had a friend who I'd worked with in the fitness space who could speak to the kind of person I am, the team player I am, my work ethic. And she was working at HOMii at the time, not in data, but she was on the product side and could get me a connect with the manager of data. And was like, hey... So she could speak to the intangible things that I think are a little bit harder to put specifically on a resume. Because I think we would all love to just put on a resume, "Hey, I'm a hard worker." It's like, well, yeah. Okay, cool.

Jon Krohn: 01:04:18
Yeah. I have a feeling that when you're a national team, bobsledder, one of the fittest people on the planet, national title winner in swimming. There's a few hints that you might be a hard worker.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:04:34
That's definitely fair. But yeah, I think there's a lot that goes into also just going to Meetups if you can, Meetups in person. Obviously it's great that through social media and LinkedIn we can meet people, states or worlds away. But I think going to Meetups, there's a ton in Utah, which is really cool that I've really enjoyed going to, even when you're not looking for a job, it's just fun to see what other companies are doing and just to interact with more and more people in the space. So I think that's a huge component is being able to find someone in those companies that can flag your resume and just speak to you as a person, and so people can get a more holistic picture of what you're trying to do and what you would bring to the table.

Jon Krohn: 01:05:23
Yeah, meeting people in person at things like Meetups, and when Colleen says Meetup, she means Meetup with a capital. So you can literally go to Meetup.com.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:05:31
Right. Right. Exactly.

Jon Krohn: 01:05:33
There are in a lot of the world, you can find a data analyst Meetup or data science Meetup or an AI Meetup, and you can meet people and you could show up and say, "Hey, I just listened to a podcast episode where a pro athlete became a data analyst, and she said that it's a good career. And I'm interested, and I don't know much else right now, you could show up to a data analyst Meetup with that level of understanding of what's going on and you will be welcomed and you might get free pizza and a beer.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:06:06
Oh, yeah, no, totally. It's always a good time. And like you're saying, I mean, I went to a data Meetup not that long ago. Joe was there and the session was on AI applications, and I'm not doing that day to day, but I'm like, "Hey, this is interesting stuff." And it's also fun to know if that does come up. And in my day-to-day job, I have connections now that I can ask questions and hey, how did you handle this problem and troubleshoot and stuff like that. So I think being able to build that community, not just within your company, but outside of it as well, within the data space, is just really fun. And it's fun to meet other people that are fired up about data. Because sometimes you talk to people and they're like, that sounds really boring, and I don't want to talk about that. So it's fun to find people that you can connect with on that level.

Jon Krohn: 01:06:59
I'm sure no one who's listening to this podcast would understand what you just said. So yeah. Okay, cool. So that was some great guidance on going with career and data. After that you ended up working at Podium.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:07:14
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:07:14
Tell us about, so you had a data analyst role at Podium, what are they, what were you doing there?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:07:19
Yeah, so they are a software company. They originally started helping local small businesses gain more Google reviews. So essentially helping them get more reviews, getting more good reviews so that when you search for best tacos in Utah, if you have the most reviews, you're going to end up at the top of that search bar. And essentially over the years, they've grown into having many, many other features of their product as far as SMS, text marketing, just really helping the entirety of being able to connect really well with the business's customers without needing to hire a dozen more people to do that. So it really helped automate, whether it was phones, emails, again, like text marketing, being able to follow up, build a relationship with your customer and continue that relationship, again without spending the immense amount of money you would need to build out a huge team.

01:08:17
So we did work with big businesses too, but we were really, really passionate about helping local small businesses continue to grow, which was really, really fun. And there I started in product analytics. I got to work with the marketing teams, customer success, finance a bit. And so that was really, really awesome. And also while I was there, I started to get into a lot more on the analytics engineering front, which was really, really fun, especially since when I got into data analytics, I specifically thought, okay, I want to be an analyst because the idea of doing visualizations and that storytelling, that sounds awesome. I want to stay as far away from coding as humanly possible. Which is so ironic because it's one of the things I enjoy the most now. And I love the problem solving. I love just going down a rabbit hole and zoning in and putting the puzzle pieces together, but also, that was really fun to be able to do that side of things, but also know what insights I'm trying to derive or what questions my stakeholders are trying to answer. And so being able to be a part of both of those processes was so, so cool and just really fulfilling and really helping.

01:09:39
And I really liked that I got to level up in that instance at Podium was not just, "Hey, we need this, go build it." But being a part of those conversations of, "Hey, how do you think we should attack this? What else is available?" And being able to have that back and forth with stakeholders is really fun. And I think that's a really fun side of data analytics where you get to nerd out on that technical side of things, but you also get to create these partnerships and really drive change, which was really fun. And I learned so much being at Podium. And I felt like I really, really took off in my career and started to gain a lot more confidence around what I could bring to the table. Because I think especially getting into data analytics relatively late, versus someone that decides that they're going to be in data their freshman year in college, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have a decade to catch up on. Here we go." But that's also the cool part of data that it's always changing, so you are always new in some respect, which is really awesome too. But yeah. And I had a great team at Podium too, so that was a ton of fun.

Jon Krohn: 01:10:56
You used an interesting term, you said analytics engineering.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:10:59
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:11:00
And so is that the same as data engineering?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:11:05
So it's interesting that from what I've seen, I feel like it really depends on what company you're at.

Jon Krohn: 01:11:10
Sure. Sure.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:11:10
Because I've been-

Jon Krohn: 01:11:12
I'm asking just to get... Like you say, there's new things happening all the time. I do a hundred episodes of the show every year. I've got people from all different kinds of data backgrounds coming on, lots of people in data analytics, data science, data engineering, and I don't think I've ever come across someone say analytics engineering. So yeah, just-

Colleen Fotsch: 01:11:34 Really? Oh, very cool.

Jon Krohn: 01:11:34
Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:11:36
That's awesome.

Jon Krohn: 01:11:37
Teach me.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:11:38
Yeah, no, absolutely. So at least how it was in... Because it's interesting at CHG where I currently am at, and this was similar at HOMii too, we had data engineering and then data analytics, and there wasn't an analytics engineering arm in it. And not to say that there isn't analytics engineering going on, I think it's just company to company, what they decide to form their teams as. So at Podium, I would say as far as the funnel goes, data engineering would be your first touchpoint. As far as, "Hey, there's data somewhere, we need to pull it into our database." And they're working a lot on ingestion, setting up pipelines, making sure things aren't breaking. If they do break, they're the ones that are fixing it, that, and then the analytics engineering team would be more of the data modeling side of things. So they're going into, for example, at Podium, we were using DBT, and so we're using DBT to model all this data. Because we have all this raw data, model it to allow for our stakeholders to actually use it in our data visualization tool.

01:12:46
And so as analysts, we were primarily working in at that time in Tableau. And so we were definitely working cross-functionally with analytics engineering, with the data modeling side so they could better understand what we're actually trying to visualize, what's the story we're trying to tell, what's the question we're trying to answer? And so that's essentially how it flowed as far as the data. It would start data engineering, analytics engineering, and then analysts. And as we continued to grow as a team, our analysts kind of become... started to do some of the analytics engineering work, which was really, really cool. And I don't know, for me, that was really awesome because it allowed me to level up my technical skillset. And I mean, that's also super awesome when your job is the place that you're going and continuing to learn every day.

01:13:41
And I think that's one of the things that I love about this field in particular is that yeah, for sure, there's some days where you're like, okay, I have to do this process. We need this thing to be done. But for the most part, it's this fun world where you don't necessarily have to have done that specific thing before, but you know where to look and you've done certain things like it. And in the process, you're learning, okay, that definitely didn't work, don't do that again. But here's the thing. And that's a fun thing too, I think, especially as much as I think we would all want to just say, "Oh yeah, everything worked out the first time I tried it and it was great." But you also realize, again, cliche, but you learn so much more from the things that did not work. And you're like, "Okay, definitely not going to do that, or that doesn't work for this specific project, but now I know it exists and I now know about it." And I think that's the thing too, is just expanding your horizon of what's out there and what's possible.

01:14:43
And I think that's so powerful as just a subject matter expert in data, not necessarily that you have to have done all of these things. Because I think when I first started, I remember being my first day on the job and reaching out to my sister-in-law who's a data analyst, and I told her, I was like, "Okay, I think I need to take these 10 courses like tomorrow because I don't know how to do any of these things." And she was like, "Colleen, this is a marathon, not a sprint," but having the context of that, there are these tools out there and here's what you could do, I think that's really powerful. And that was really helpful to broaden my horizon of what a data analyst could do. And as much as I love building out visualizations, but I love that there was this other component that I got to dive into and learning more about data engineering and what that looks like, and just knowing more about the process. And I think that context helps a lot when you are speaking to a stakeholder, and it helps with knowing who to go to as well, but yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:15:54
Very cool. And so, one thing that you mentioned in that transition from data analyst, focused more on visualization tools like Tableau and moving a little bit up the stack to analytics engineering, you were getting more into DBT, right?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:16:10
Yes. Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:16:11
So tell us about DBT, why a company would use it, how you interact with it, what it does.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:16:18
Yes. So DBT is a data building tool, and essentially, what we were doing-

Jon Krohn: 01:16:23
Oh, I didn't know that.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:16:27
Yeah, so I actually think that, I looked this up actually, I would say a few months ago, because I wanted to double check, because I went to the DBT conference this year, which was a ton of fun. Because someone had asked me, and I was like, "Well, I believe it stands for data building tool, but I wanted to double check." I guess it used to, but now they have transitioned to just BDT.

Jon Krohn: 01:16:46
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That happens on time.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:16:50
But it's still data building tool. And so essentially we would work with, if we already had the data in our database, but it was in a raw format and we need to expose it or surface it in a way for our stakeholders to utilize it in a visualization tool, we would go in, we would take the raw source of it. And essentially, you're writing SQL more or less. So DBT also does have Python type of coding within it that allows you to, I would say, it allows you to do kind of SQL on steroids a little bit. So you get to do some different things with it that essentially allow you to, especially if it's something redundant in your code, they have different functions that allow you to just consolidate to speed things up, which is really, really nice. And so essentially that's what we were doing as far as my day-to-day.

01:17:54
I was going in, I would say initially wasn't building out models from scratch, but I would be adding to models that were in there already, adding different fields, adding a lot of business logic, because that was really important too. And what I really loved about DBT was that you can embed your business logic, your agreed upon business logic with your stakeholders, and then have it documented. And that was a really, really big thing that I love. So DBT has a documentation part of their tool, DBT docs, that allows you to have definitions. And actually they have an automated version of this now, which is fantastic because I'm not going to lie. When you're building out a model, especially from scratch, and let's say you have 30, 40 fields in your model, the last thing you want to go do is build out a document and then just write out all the definitions of all of these things, especially when you feel that, for example, if it says created date, you're like, well, it's created date, do I really need? But a lot of times, you probably need that definition because created date might not mean what you think it needs all the time. And so-

Jon Krohn: 01:19:03
It sounds like that's a generative AI assist coming in there.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:19:06
Yes.
Jon Krohn: 01:19:06
And it sounds like actually a great use of it. There's all kinds of times where generative AI is showing up in my life today. For example, I don't know, have you ever used or do you a WHOOP for tracking your sleep?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:19:18
So I have an Oura ring. But similar. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:19:22
Well, the WHOOP in the Gen AI mania of 2024, they incorporated in this daily gen AI guidance thing that I looked at it one time and I was like, oh, please never show me that again. You don't need that in your life. You're getting all the information you need. I don't need this kind of generalized, it's using general advice about fitness.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:19:47
Oh, interesting.

Jon Krohn: 01:19:47
Which I guess maybe somebody out there is finding it useful, but it's like, make sure you get lots of water in your day. And just...

Colleen Fotsch: 01:19:58
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm sure we could go off tangent on that, but it is interesting how AI is so powerful, and it's very cool, but it's interesting how, but it also doesn't need to be everywhere for certain things. But especially for.... Oh, sorry, you were going to say.

Jon Krohn: 01:20:18
But yeah, but in DBT automatically creating a documentation for all the fields that you have in a data file.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:20:21
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:20:21
That sounds like it can, at least you should be reading over that and making sure that it's accurate.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:20:28
Oh, absolutely.

Jon Krohn: 01:20:28
But it saves you the blank page problem.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:20:31
Yes. Well, and also now they have a feature where you can identify a field, I believe they're called doc blocks, where you can define a field, let's say in your initial staging layer model, and then you can reference that throughout all of the lineage throughout where that column goes or field goes in your downstream models, which is so nice. Because then it's just efficiency and you can spend more time working on the actual model itself. But I love that component. And I also think it was really, really good because then it forces the data team to work with your stakeholders and really come to terms with, "Hey, this is our logic and this is our definition of this thing."

01:21:18
Because you can't expect, especially if you're wanting to change how a team speaks about what, let's say active customer means or something like that, if your data isn't representing that, that's going to be really hard to make that change with your conversations. So having that not only for your stakeholders to reference back, but also when you have new engineers coming in, that's huge. When they're trying to learn what the data means and what granularity your models are and all of that stuff, that's just infinitely helpful. And so being able to be on a tech sack that was so, so nice. And again, it can get tedious especially, but I mean, now that we have this generative process, it's not taking long at all, but it still was so nice to have that as, no, this is just what we do. Any model that's created, everything has to have a definition. So essentially that's what we were doing. And then started progressing to building out models from scratch when we were getting new data in. And then exposing that into tools like Tableau or Sigma, and then building out dashboards for our teams to be able to use.

Jon Krohn: 01:22:36
What's Sigma?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:22:36
So Sigma is another data visualization tool. So Tableau, well, I guess you can run it a few ways, but essentially with Sigma, it sits right on top of Snowflake and works really, really well with that. So that ingestion process was removed. Anything we had in Snowflake we could build off of in Sigma. And it was really good for, I would say that initially when I opened up Sigma, it definitely can look a little bit like Excel, which gave me, I was like, "Ooh, I don't know." And then especially because I feel like, I'm sure lots of people in data can relate to this, but a lot of times you're trying to get people out of SQL, or not out of SQL, out of Excel. Not all the time, sometimes it's necessary, but for the most part, you want it consolidated, you want everyone to be looking at the same numbers so there's consistency when we're speaking about making business decisions.

01:23:42
But it was great because I think it has the capacity to allow for people that are in data analytics that are trying to do really high level analytics and insights with it, but it was great as far as for PMs and other people to get in there and they're really familiar with Excel. So they're like, "Oh, this is great. It's just like Excel Plus, and it has a lot of other features." So that was really great as far as adoption goes for both teams, which was really cool.

Jon Krohn: 01:24:14
Very cool indeed. All right, so now let's get to what you're doing now.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:24:18
Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:24:18
So you've been at CHG Healthcare for a year. Your title is very long. I'm going to read what it says on LinkedIn. It says, Senior Technical Manager of Marketing Technologies-Data Platform.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:24:30
Yes. Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:24:31
Do you want to tell us about that role?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:24:33
Yeah, definitely. So I'm on the marketing technologies team, which sits within our data platform team, and that's where also our data engineering org sits as well. And so essentially what I've been doing for the most part is right now we're heavily supporting marketing. So we are consolidating, centralizing, documenting all of our marketing data. And because for a while it's lived in a lot of different places, and this is not unique to CHG, this happens a lot. You've got a lot of disparate data. You need it in one place so you can make sense of it. So we can see customer's engagement with our content along with where they are in the pipeline. And just for background, CHG is a medical staffing platform. So our company, so we are essentially the middleman between hospitals, our clients and our providers trying to find and fill jobs for our clients.

01:25:37
And we do permanent placement, but we also do locum tenants, which is temporary staffing. So if a doctor is wanting to do a few months in Colorado and then a few months in Iowa and then California, they can do that through locum tenants, and our reps are providing them jobs and looking for their next jobs on a regular basis.

01:26:01
And so with the marketing technologies team, we're centralizing our data to surface those insights for marketing to make sure that they're putting the money where it should be as far as getting awareness around locum tenants and what we do, and then also re-engaging with our providers and our clients. And so we work a lot with setting up different tools in order to do that. And then as for me specifically, so that's essentially what I help oversee and working with engineers to make sure that we're on the right path with that.

01:26:45
I also got to, for a few months to, we were going through a data migration, and I got to work on the data engineering team, which was awesome, especially starting out at the company and learning all of new data. And there's a lot of data, especially healthcare, there's a ton. And so being able to just right away kind of drinking from a fire hose, get in, learn the data and get to work with, which was really cool, getting to work more on the ingestion side of data as well, because I had done a lot of analytics engineering, a lot of analyst work, but working more on, okay, what's the best way for us to ingest this? How do we make sure deciding on run times and all of that stuff or when things are breaking and all of that. So just seeing a different part of the funnel, which was really, really cool, so, so essentially day-to-day right now is very heavily supporting our marketing team, making sure that they have the data that they want, and then also bringing it in and attaching it to the data we already have to make sense of it. Because if we have a bunch of data, but it all lives in a bunch of different places, that doesn't really do any of us any good, so yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:28:05
Yeah. So it seems to me like what you're doing now could be called data engineering.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:28:08
Yeah, I would say so. I would that, yes, that is very true. I would say that day-to-day right now, I'm less in the weeds of actually coding, and I would say I'm doing a little more delegating than I used to at Podium, where at Podium I was full-blown, "Hey, you have this project to do, go do it." And then I do it and deliver. And now, it's more so being a little bit more on the end of strategically prioritizing, figuring out what we need to do next, timelines, all of that stuff. And then also working with stakeholders, making sure we understand the requirements of what we need to do. But yeah, so a little more delegating than I was doing before. But yes, still very, very close to the data engineering side, which I really love. I love that component. I love the technical side of things, and I think I'll always stay close to that.

01:29:08
And I think I just have such a passion for just getting in there and building things. It's just really fun. Kind of silly, but over the Christmas break, I'd never built an app before, but I recently started using Claude AI, which has been really, really awesome, and was tinkering around, and I was like, oh... I mean, it's not a pretty app by any means, but I was like, "Hey, this is fun." And so I think stuff like that. And even for going back to the question about people trying to break into the analytics space, trying to find what you're just passionate about in general and data and that technical side intersect, because that's where you're really going to start just zoning in and you forget that it's really even work or that you're trying to learn stuff, but you're just trying to figure stuff out. And that gets really addicting. And I think that's what really keeps me going.

01:30:11
And I love that it's that piece of, and maybe this transfers back a little bit to CrossFit specifically of, you show up to the gym and you're like, "I've never done that before, but I'll figure it out." And so I think that has transferred over into the data side of things of, "I haven't done that exact thing, but I don't know, it's going to be fun to figure it out." And getting to do that collaboratively. I think that goes back to even in the data space, finding that team and finding other people that are really fired up to build things, to change processes, to make things more efficient. And just joining forces, because those are the times when your job just doesn't feel like a job anymore. You're just on this hunt to make something better. And again, don't get me wrong, there are times where you just have to, there's necessary evils of, "Oh, I don't want to do this thing, I just have to do it." Or you are working alone on a project and stuff like that. But there's so many moments in between where there's opportunities to make it really, really fun. And I do think, especially if you can, for example, if you're trying to get into data analytics, like finding datasets on things you enjoy and tinkering around-

Colleen Fotsch: 01:31:30
... finding data sets on things you enjoy and tinkering around with that in a visualization tool. Like if you're really into baseball and you want to look up stats on baseball and put something together and stuff like that. So I think that definitely ties back into just finding other things you're passionate about because there's probably data that lives in it somewhere.

Jon Krohn: 01:31:51
Nice. Yeah, very cool. That was an amazing story, from all of the world-class fitness sport things that you've done, now into data analytics, and really just getting started. So it'll be exciting to see, maybe we can check in again in a few years and see how your journey has come along in this field.

01:32:10
But to return back quickly to fitness, you are not done. It's not like you're sitting at your desk all day. You still do CrossFit most days, I understand.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:32:21
I would say that I do CrossFit style workouts, but not CrossFit-

Jon Krohn: 01:32:25
Functional fitness. Functional fitness.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:32:31
Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:31
Yeah. And so on that note, so there's a company called PRVN, P-R-V-N, which is super well-known in the CrossFit community because it is the company of Tia-Clair Toomey, who is by far ... She is, I think at this point, unquestionably the greatest CrossFit athlete of all time. And she's still active.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:32:52
Hands down. Yes. 1000%.

Jon Krohn: 01:32:52
She's completely dominated the women's division every year she's competed. She took a year off to have a kid, came back, and crushed everyone again.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:33:01
Won. Yes.

Jon Krohn: 01:33:03 And by huge margins, there's never been anything like it in the sport. And she's still active. I mean, she might have more kids and she'll still just keep on going and getting first place it seems.

01:33:19
So Tia's company, with her husband Shane Orr, they have this company PRVN, and it's kind of a proven workout program because it's what I think Shane primarily, her husband, created programming that allowed the greatest CrossFit athlete of all time, the fittest person in history. And you have partnered with them to create something called PRVN GO. So P-R-V-N, Space GO. I'll have a link in the show notes. And this isn't a sponsored message in any way, I just think it's something really cool that you've done. And so this is a workout program that is designed to be very easy for somebody to follow if they have a busy lifestyle, maybe they have kids, they are traveling all the time with work, it allows you to work out with very little equipment or hotel gym level of equipment, if it's available.

01:34:12
Yeah, tell us about how this happened, how you ended up being associated with the fittest person of all time, and creating this program for her and her team.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:34:21
Yes. Yeah, another thing that I never thought was going to have the opportunity to do, like you said, not only getting to work with such amazing people from an accolade standpoint. Obviously, like you said, she's won the CrossFit Games many, many times, is undoubtedly just the best CrossFitter, and not only that, but a great person. Her and Shane are just great people and they are such hard workers, which just makes it that much better to get to work with other people that, again, are really passionate about building something great and definitely have the work ethic to back it up.

01:35:03
And so I would say now a few, maybe even close to ... I would say it was soon after starting my job at CHG, Nic Johnston, who's the CEO of PRVN, reached out and was like, "Hey, we want to partner up and work on a program together." And I remember texting him-

Jon Krohn: 01:35:26
How does that come out of nowhere?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:35:28
I know.

Jon Krohn: 01:35:28
What?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:35:31
Yeah. It's interesting because I forever am going to be ... I love health and fitness. I'm extremely passionate about it. And for me, it took me a while to figure out going back to what my workouts were going to look like because I had had this realization and confirmation, I was like, "I am no longer competing. I am done, not going back." And I needed to figure out what fitness looked like for me going forward.

01:36:07
And it's interesting because I would say for a few months after ... Even being a full-time data analyst, I was not going for the gym as long, but I was still doing very intense workouts. And if you didn't know any better, you would probably think I was trying to go back to the CrossFit Games with the workouts I was doing. And I think that's just what I knew for so long and I didn't really know what else I was going to do.

01:36:36
And I think there was also, if I'm being honest, I think, now looking back, there was so much of my identity that was tied up into being an athlete. And then I always think there was so much of my identity tied up into being super strong and good at all of these CrossFit movements. And I was having a hard time letting that go to be honest. But I started asking myself when I'm doing muscle ups or handstand pushups or anything like that, I was like, "Why am I doing this?" You totally can, I could keep doing those if I wanted to, but I had to have a check-in with myself of like, "Okay, what are my goals now? What's the goal with Colleen health wise, career wise, personal life wise? What am I working towards? And do my workouts indicate or match up with those goals?" And if I'm being honest, they were not. I was training, like I was trying to go back to the CrossFit Games essentially. I wasn't, but that's what it looked like and felt like.

01:37:37
And so over a few months I was starting to figure out and find a lot of joy into just going into the gym and moving, and not getting really hyper focused on a specific weight on the bar or ... It took me a long time to do a workout and not start a clock because I was so ingrained in my head of, "Well, I need to know how fast I'm going." So kind of reprogramming my mind. I very much still am competitive and I love getting to throw down with other people, but it was a good time to reprogram my mind of, "Okay, what does training for lifelong fitness and health look like?" Because I want to feel good not just now, but I want to feel good and strong and fit 20, 30 years from now.

01:38:33
I think I was starting to post different types of workouts and those workouts were, like you said, they were minimal equipment, mostly using dumbbells, getting more creative with more bodyweight movements. I'd travel and not get super stressed out about, "Well, I can't get to the CrossFit gym I want to go to." So I'm like, "Well, I'm just going to do a workout in my hotel room," and I'd post about that, and it would just be lunges and burpees or something like that. And that really resonated with people of you don't always need the quote, unquote "right equipment" or perfect setup and stuff like that. You can just sometimes just use yourself or just yourself and a pair of dumbbells.

01:39:16
And so I think with what PRVN was trying to do with this program and this track, because their other programs are specifically around CrossFit and this was going to be different. And CrossFit in the sense of competing, so needing to hit all of the movements that would show up in a CrossFit competition. And with PRVN GO there isn't those higher skill movements like a muscle up or handstand pushups or handstand walking. It's a little more different. So you have that functional fitness side with your cardio, but some bodybuilding exercises and really fun core stuff. And just stuff that honestly, I was getting really, really passionate about doing and I was seeing really good results without being in the gym for hours on end.

01:40:08
And I think also why that resonated with me was I had a drastic shift of, "Okay, I'm working a full-time job and I don't want to be in the gym for those hours. I don't need to be and I definitely cannot." I was like, "I can't afford to be in the gym for three, four hours a day." That doesn't make any sense. And I started to figure out and I think I also used to believe that I had to workout at the intensity that I used to in order to look and feel a certain way. And then I started to realize, "Oh, I can work out in this new way and still reach my new goals now."

01:40:46
And I think that was really exciting for me, and so I was starting to share that. And I think that was one of the reasons why PRVN and I really aligned on what they were trying to do and what was really passionate to me. And I think what's really fun for me with this program in general is I'm really working towards building a program that is rooted in the reality of people that are busy professionals, whether that's in a corporate tech space, whether that's being a full-time parent, just making it accessible for you to be really healthy and really fit and also enjoy your workouts.

01:41:25
And I think it's also been really, really fun to see the community continue to grow because, like I said, I mean, that was one of the reasons I started CrossFit was to work out with other people. And obviously when you have a really busy schedule and you maybe can't get to a class where you're working out with other people, it's really fun to be able to log in, do your PRVN GO workout, and communicate with other people that are doing that same workout but maybe in a totally other state. And it's cool just that community part of accountability, because I think also when you get into the grind of being super tired both mentally and physically from your job, maybe you had a hard week, or parenting or whatever it is, it can be really easy to be like, "Well, I don't have time," or, "I can't get to that gym." And the excuses can build up. And I don't think anyone would necessarily blame anyone for not going, but I think it holds people accountable to be like, "Hey, no, let us help you and let us bring this to where you're at." You don't need to totally change your schedule in life, this can fit seamlessly into your day-to-day. And I think that's what's been really fun.

Jon Krohn: 01:42:46
Yeah, I think it's great. Before I knew that this was going to be released as PRVN GO programming ... I follow you on Instagram. And by the way, Colleen has, at the time of recording, over 280,000 followers on Instagram. We'll have her Instagram handle in the show notes for you to follow her if you like. And you can see recently a lot of the posts are about these kinds of PRVN GO workouts.

01:43:09
But last Northern Hemisphere summer, before I knew that you were doing this PRVN GO thing, you were just posting workouts that I was like, "Hey, I'm actually, I'm traveling in England this week. There's no CrossFit gyms nearby that I can get to, but it's a beautiful sunny day. This is a 35-minute workout or 40-minute workout. I can do it totally just with my own bodyweight." And so I jogged out to a river in the English sunshine, which is a rare treat that must be enjoyed. And yeah, so I've done your workouts, thought they were great.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:43:45
Oh, that's awesome.

Jon Krohn: 01:43:45
You get your full body workout, while also getting cardiovascular in there. And yeah, you can do it in a pretty short timeline. So very cool program. I'll obviously have a link to PRVN GO in the show notes as well, I think I already mentioned that.

01:43:59
So this has been an amazing episode, Colleen. This is the longest episode I've recorded in a long time.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:44:05
Oh, really?

Jon Krohn: 01:44:06
Yeah.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:44:07 Winner. No, I'm just kidding.

Jon Krohn: 01:44:11 And yeah, it's interesting how the first 40 minutes or so we're about sport, and so I felt like, well, let's have a full-length episode then still about data analytics and data science tacked on.

01:44:26
So it's been an amazing experience. Before I let you go, in general it seems like it's obvious to say that every ... but maybe you know some actual facts that you can cite about how fitness makes a difference to your happiness, to your productivity, to probably generally achieving your goals, whatever they are. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:44:51
Oh, absolutely. I think that not only, like you said, from ... I believe, and that's another reason why I believe in PRVN GO so much and why it's been really fun to share this with my coworkers too, and get feedback from them too as well, that's been really fun, but I see it as a productivity hack. Because working out and producing that amount of energy is going to help you show up your best in your work life, in your personal life.

01:45:21
And I also think it helps with time management. I think if you're really regulated about, " Hey, this is just something I do," whether it's 30 minutes, whether it's 45 minutes, being able to allot that time I think allows you to prioritize the right things and it helps with overall discipline. And I know for me, that if I go a few days without working out, I don't feel the same. And I think I'm probably less enjoyable to be around, not just to myself.

01:45:54
But I do think that it helps. I think it helps with overall confidence. I think it helps how you just show up in work in general. And I mean, if we're talking from a scientific standpoint, it's just your body is going to function better if you are treating it better. That goes in from just daily movement, to what you're fueling your body with, and also with sleep. And daily movement is going to help those things as well. It's going to allow your body to actually function better throughout the day. It's going to help with your sleep and all of that.

01:46:30
It's interesting, because I do think it can be hard when you are very passionate and driven about your career or whatever it is your work is, going and you're like, "Well, I don't have time for that." But it's about making time for that because it's actually going to help this other thing that you're really trying to do well with.

01:46:51
And I think that also, I think a lot of people think you need to go zero to 100. If you're struggling to get one workout in a week and you're like, "Okay, I have this goal to do six workouts this week." It's like, maybe let's start with two days in the gym and going on more walks. I think walking is so underrated because especially when you're ... I mean, I know for me, I remember that was a real big reality check when I started my first data analytics job and I'm tracking my steps and stuff on my Oura ring, and I think I got 800 steps one day. I was like, "Oh, no, this is not good." I still worked out that day, but I wasn't moving. I was just sitting in my chair.

01:47:36
And so I think being really diligent about ... not necessarily that you need to carve out all this time for whether it's the gym or more walks throughout the day, but you can take the stairs instead of the elevator. If you have Zoom meetings that you can pop onto and be on a walk. If you can take one-on-ones with your manager outside and go walking.

01:47:58
Those are just little things that don't seem like they're a huge game-changer, but if you think about the entirety of a year and just what going on a 10, 20-minute walk throughout the day and taking the stairs and how that adds up so much over time, I just think that's huge. And I think especially in the tech space, I think it's not looked at enough as a beneficial piece to your career and that it actually can help you be a better data engineer or data analyst or whatever your role is.

Jon Krohn: 01:48:33
Great. Well said. And then something that you alluded to there and that I'm wondering, you have studied sports data for a long time. Obviously now you're a professional data analyst, data engineer. You're probably still studying a lot of data on yourself and your fitness.

01:48:48
For me personally, something that I've struggled with, it's kind of similar to what you said there, where somebody, they're working on one day a week and they're thinking, "I want to work out six days a week." I have a tendency to overtrain for where I'm at. I think there are people that I see at the CrossFit gym who are doing two hours of intense workouts five, six days a week, sometimes even seven. And I see them doing that and I try to do it for a week, and I then end up spending too much of my day just lying on the couch or lying in bed, just being like, " Oh no, what did I do to myself today? I had things to do and now I'm just too tired. I'm too tired to sit at my desk."

Colleen Fotsch: 01:49:36
Yes. Oh, yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:49:39
"I'm too tired to focus." Maybe ideally, is there some kind of data that I could be looking at, I know with maybe a Whoop and an Oura ring, general advice, or is there maybe just some rule of thumb or guidance that you have for people who tend to overdo it like me?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:49:57
Yeah. And that's the thing too. I think, one, it's checking in with what's the goal as far as how many workouts you're trying to get into, what those workouts look like, how long are they. And then if, let's say that is the goal, to get five workouts in, really high intensity, and also knowing that throughout the week it's probably good to maybe pick one or two workouts a week that you're just going to go full send at. Because doing that every day just isn't going to be sustainable. And I go off of just how I'm feeling that day. If I'm feeling like, "Oh, I got so much good sleep, stress levels are good and I'm feeling great," I'm like, "Okay, today's the day I'm going to push it." But then having the wherewithal to check in and be like, "Okay, I didn't get much sleep last night." And I personally love checking that. Every morning I'm opening up the app and being like, I got my readiness score and my sleep score, which I really like. And sometimes you have to take that with a grain of salt because sometimes it'll be like, "Hey, you should just stay in bed all day today." And I'm like, "Well, I'm not going to do that and I can't do that."

01:51:06
But I think checking in with how you're feeling and taking it slow, having a progression to the intensity or the amount of volume you're trying to do. I also think finding a program that makes sense for your schedule and your life. Because I think it's really easy to, like you said, get caught up in, "Well, someone else is doing something or I saw this thing on Instagram and that looks really cool," but they may not have the same schedule as you, or it's demanding in a different way.

01:51:41
And so I think, one, making sure the goals are set as far as, "What am I trying to do with my fitness?" And that doesn't have to mean, "Oh, I want to back squat this much weight," and all of that stuff. It can just mean, "I want to feel good, I want to look good, and I want to enjoy my training." Those can be goals. And so I think it's really about setting realistic expectations. And if you're trying to get somewhere and you know that the gap between where you're at and where you're trying to go is maybe a little bit larger, having a solid progression to that. And like you said, not jumping into the deep end right away.

01:52:20
Because that's a thing too, you want something that ... I really believe that when it comes to, whether it's nutrition, your health, consistency is everything. You're not going to get really fit or really in shape out of one week of working out. It's many, many days of making good healthy choices. And that doesn't mean perfect, it means roughly 80% of the time you're making these choices that are going to lead you to an overall healthier, happier life.

01:52:50
So I think that's the biggest thing, is finding something that's actually sustainable, with also allowing you, like you're saying, if that's something that you enjoy as far as going into a CrossFit gym and throwing down with your friends. I know for me, I'm like, if I did that during the week, I would be a pile of mush at work. My brain would not function, it would not be good. But I know on a Saturday morning, "Okay, I am not working on Saturday. I have the luxury of laying around a little more, so I'm going to send it a little bit." Just holistically looking at what your schedule likes, what your goals are, and then finding something that's sustainable so you don't feel like you're doing a yo-yo thing, whether it's in the gym or with your nutrition.

Jon Krohn: 01:53:37
Great advice. I will do my best to listen to some of your answer, your most recent answer. Awesome.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:53:43
Keep me posted.

Jon Krohn: 01:53:45
All right. Colleen, you've been extremely generous with your time today. We've gone almost an hour over the scheduled recording slot. Thank you so much. Before I let you go, I ask my same guests the same final two questions. The first is, do you have a book recommendation for us?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:54:03
Yes. Especially with us talking about getting into data, I highly recommend ... and we brought up Joe Reis. He has an amazing book called Fundamentals of Data Engineering with O'Reilly. And I still check this book, have read this book to this day. And I personally love it because I've read a lot of textbooks and this one I feel like is actually application-based, that I can actually take what's in the book and apply it to my job.

01:54:35
And I think especially, even if you're looking into getting into more of the analytics side of things, I think it's super, super beneficial to understand how the data engineering side of the house works. And honestly, it's something that I wish I had prior to going into my first job, so I highly recommend that. Even if you're not just starting out, I think it's a good one to reference.

Jon Krohn: 01:55:00
Nice. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I haven't read that book, but it's extremely well-reviewed. A lot of people talk about it, a lot of people post about it. It's one of those things I wish I had all the time in the world to be reading everything I could, and I certainly would've read that.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:55:14
Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah.

Jon Krohn: 01:55:16
And then, yeah, finally, how should people follow you after this episode? Obviously I already mentioned your extremely highly followed Instagram account. I imagine maybe also your LinkedIn. Where should people be following your professional work?

Colleen Fotsch: 01:55:31
Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, Instagram, Colleen Fotsch. And then on LinkedIn, excited to start posting more on LinkedIn, both work and fitness related and how those things marry together really nicely. So yeah, on both of those.

Jon Krohn: 01:55:51
Awesome. Colleen, thanks again for taking the time with us today. I had so much fun. This time went by so quickly.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:55:58
It did.

Jon Krohn: 01:55:58
It's been so awesome to have someone on the show. This is the first time we've ever talked about CrossFit at any length-

Colleen Fotsch: 01:56:04
Oh, awesome.

Jon Krohn: 01:56:05
... but it's been a big part of my life for over a decade, so to have an episode like this was super fun for me. I really appreciate it.

Colleen Fotsch: 01:56:12
Oh, amazing. No, this was great. Thank you so much.

Jon Krohn: 01:56:20
What a wonderful story and conversation today with Colleen Fotsch. In today's episode, she covered her athletic journey, including being on two NCAA National Championship swim teams, breaking an American relay record, and twice competing in the global CrossFit Games, demonstrably placing her amongst the few dozen fittest people on Earth at that time.

01:56:37
She also talked about how her transition to data started with recognizing how she was already nerding out on tracking training metrics, leading her to pursue master's degrees in kinesiology and applied business data analytics. She talked about how she progressed from data analyst to analytics engineering roles using tools like dbt for data modeling, Tableau and Sigma for visualization, and working with stakeholders to define and document business logic.

01:57:00
And she filled us in on how she continues to blend her passion for fitness and data through PRVN GO, a program she developed in partnership with CrossFit champion Tia-Clair Toomey's company, designed for busy professionals seeking sustainable fitness long-term. And this episode was in no way sponsored by CrossFit or PRVN GO. I'm genuinely just passionate about those products and companies.

01:57:23
All right, as always, you can get all the show notes including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Colleen's social media profiles, as well as my own, at superdatascience.com/861. And if you'd like to connect in real life as opposed to just online, I'll be giving the opening keynote at the rvatech/Data + AI Summit in Richmond, Virginia, on March 19th. Tickets are really reasonable for this conference, unbelievably reasonable, and there's a ton of great speakers, so this could be a great conference to check out. Especially if you live anywhere in the Richmond area, it'd be awesome to meet you there.

01:57:58
All right, thanks of course to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team. Our podcast manager, Sonja Brajovic; media editor, Mario Pombo; partnerships manager, Natalie Ziajski; researcher Serg Masis; our writers Dr. Zara Karschay and Sylvia Ogweng; and of course our founder, Kirill Eremenko. Thanks to all of them for producing another fun episode for us today. And for enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you, we are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You can support this show by checking out our sponsors' links, which you can find in the show notes.

01:58:25
And if you ever want have your own sponsor message read on the episode, you can get the details on how to do that at jonkrohn.com/podcast. Otherwise, share this episode with someone who might enjoy it, review the episode on your favorite podcast enjoying venue, subscribe to the show if you're not already a subscriber. Feel free to edit our videos on YouTube into shorts. You can do that to your heart's content. And most importantly, I just hope you'll keep on tuning in. I'm so grateful to have you listening and hope I can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come.

01:58:56
Until next time, keep on rocking it out there and I'm looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience Podcast with you very soon.  

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