Impact by the numbers
About Me
I build products and systems where technology, operations, and real users meet. Twenty-plus years coaching endurance and OCR athletes shape how I work. Spartan Race named me one of America's Top 10 OCR Coaches, and I serve on USAOCR's Coaching & Training Committee.
My career spans support, team management, Linux administration, and contract QA tester, IT Manager, and Systems Designer roles at Stainless Steel Studios. At Linedata Services, I spent five years maintaining 99.99% uptime for financial trading systems across the US, India, and Tunisia.
I founded Mountain Strength Fitness, grew it 15-30% year over year to about $400K before COVID, ran sales and onboarding, built scheduling, billing, and CRM systems, led 13 coaches, and eventually sold it.
At Harvard Business School, I deliver web-based simulations on an Agile team for 50 to 900 participants. I work with faculty, product teams, and program stakeholders, translate technical systems for non-technical audiences, and troubleshoot live in high-stakes environments. I also build Ruckfecta.
This through line shapes how I lead products and programs: systems, users, and performance.
Learning & Enablement
I help people learn complex systems and use them well.
Whether I am prepping faculty, facilitating a live session, or coaching a team, my job is the same: make hard things clear and help people do their best work.
Faculty enablement
I prep Harvard Business School faculty to run web app based simulations in the classroom. I cut their setup from 30 minutes to 5, write the guidance they lean on, and stay close so they walk in confident.
Live facilitation
I facilitate live simulations for 50 to 900 participants, in the room and remotely. I read the audience, keep the session moving, and troubleshoot in real time when the stakes are high.
Coaching teams
I led a team of 13 coaches at Mountain Strength Fitness and built the onboarding that brought each of them up to speed. I coach people the way I coach athletes: clear standards, honest feedback, steady reps.
Translating the technical
I turn technical systems into plain language for non-technical audiences. I write the documentation, build the runbooks, and make sure faculty, product teams, and stakeholders all understand what they need to do.
Featured Work
Things I've built.
Ruckfecta
The competition platform for rucking. A single Ruckfecta Score captures distance, elevation, and load, rewarding real effort, not just miles.
Rucking had no fair way to compare effort. Distance alone ignores the weight on your back and the hills you climb, so leaderboards rewarded the wrong thing.
I designed one score that combines distance, elevation, and load, then built solo rankings, team battles, and chapter competitions on top of it. I built and shipped the whole thing myself with AI-assisted development on Replit's Agent, a live product with free and paid tiers.
Selected for the Replit Race to Revenue cohort (Top 10). I used the cohort to test go-to-market, pricing, and positioning with real users, and let how people actually logged and shared their rucks shape the roadmap.
USAOCR Level 1 Coaching Certification
The official coaching certification for USA Obstacle Course Racing, the national governing body of the sport.
Obstacle course racing had no standardized way to train and credential its coaches. Coaching quality varied widely, and the sport's national governing body had no shared baseline to hold coaches to.
As a member of the USAOCR Coaching & Training Committee, I led development and instructional design of the Level 1 certification. I picked the platform, designed the course architecture, and co-wrote the curriculum across training systems, program design, and athlete development.
I shipped an 11-chapter, 52-lesson certification that the national governing body adopted as its official Level 1 standard, giving OCR a consistent baseline for coaching quality across the country.
Everest Debrief Generator
A tool that turns raw Everest simulation exports into class-ready debrief decks for Harvard Business School faculty.
Faculty spent about 30 minutes prepping each Everest simulation debrief by hand: cleaning data, building slides, and formatting scoring tables. The work was slow, repetitive, and easy to get wrong right before class.
I used AI-assisted development to prototype the MVP, then wrote the QA test cases, process walkthrough, and data-to-slides specification needed for a clean handoff to the dev team. Faculty upload an export and receive a finished PowerPoint with multi-slide tables, auto-splitting for large cohorts, and formatted scoring breakdowns.
Prep dropped from about 30 minutes to under 5, a 6x speedup on a recurring faculty task, with more consistent output. The internal dev team adopted the tool and re-implemented it for hosting on AWS.
Epic Race Training
Endurance. Obstacle. Hybrid. An online coaching platform delivering structured training programs for athletes who need running, strength, and grit.
Obstacle and endurance athletes rarely find programming that trains running, strength, and grit together. Most plans pick one and leave gaps that show up on race day.
I built a coaching platform on TrainHeroic and designed structured programs for everything from Spartan Stadion prep to 10K running plans. I run the full lifecycle myself: programming, content, e-commerce, registration, billing, and waivers.
I deliver progression-based plans to obstacle racers, endurance athletes, and hybrid competitors at every level, built around measurable outcomes so athletes can see their training translate to performance.
What People Say
In their words.
Rich consistently stays ahead of potential issues, highlighting the 'unknown unknowns' and making sure we are aware of risks or dependencies we may not have initially considered... During on-site execution, he remained calm under pressure and focused the team on solutions rather than escalating stress... It genuinely feels like we are working together as one team.
The Race to Revenue documentary.
I was filmed for this mini documentary series following the Replit Race to Revenue cohort, the same cohort I built Ruckfecta in. It follows the founders building real products and chasing first revenue in public.
Capabilities
I work across product, technical systems, program delivery, operations, and coaching.
Product
- Product strategy
- User feedback & roadmap
- Gamification & engagement
- GTM experimentation
Technical
- Systems design
- Python, SQL & analytics
- AI-assisted development (Replit Agent)
- Rapid prototyping to live product
- Specifications, QA & dev-team handoff
Program & Operations
- Cross-functional delivery
- Stakeholder management
- Client onboarding
- Live operations & technical enablement
Leadership
- Team leadership
- Faculty communication
- Training & facilitation
- Entrepreneurship
Coaching & Performance
- Endurance training
- OCR coaching
- Program design
- Curriculum design
The 5 Minute Entrepreneur
Quick episodes on business, mindset, and getting things done. Five minutes, one idea, every time.
Writing & Media
Writing, press, and conversations.
Epic Training
I spent five years writing this. 300 pages covering strength, obstacle technique, mobility, injury prevention, and race-day prep. Ran a Kickstarter that raised $9K to get it designed and published.
10 Trainers You Should Know
Obstacle Course Race Training
10 Things I Wish I Knew When Starting My Fitness Business
The Obstacle Racing Overlap
Winchester Business Leader
Let's build something useful.
I'm looking for product and program roles where technical systems meet real users, especially teams solving complex operational problems and shipping products people depend on. If you need a leader who can move between users, technology, and execution, let's talk.
Rich.Borgatti@gmail.com