Alex Morgan, Brian Urlacher
& More

I'll admit something kind of strange: years after my last competitive college football season, I still find myself curious about what my old teammates are doing in the gym. When one of them posts a lift or a race time, I get pretty curious. It's fun to see what they're into and what they look like.

For a while I wondered if that was weird. I think I've figured out it isn't.

When you compete alongside the same people for years, you build a specific kind of understanding of them. You know their pregame routine. You know how they respond to pressure. You know whose work ethic is loud and whose is silent. After college, I don't think all of that disappears — it sometimes gets redirected. One guy is a dad now lifting at 5 a.m. before work. Another runs ultras. Another barely trains but still beats everyone at pickup. Watching how teammates apply the same engine to a totally different life is genuinely fascinating to me.

It's also why I think the running club renaissance makes so much sense right now. People keep framing it as a loneliness story (people craving IRL), and sure, that's part of it. But I think there is a deeper thing going on.

Humans are social animals, and competition — even the friendly kind — pulls a different gear out of you. A Tuesday track meetup, a Saturday flag football league, a lifting partner who notices when you skip a session. That's the part that gives it meaning beyond just yourself.

The clubs coming back aren't a trend. They're a correction. We spent a decade making fitness more solitary, more Instagram likeable, more "optimize your sleep score." Now people are remembering that showing up somewhere where other people will notice if you don't show up is one of the oldest training tools we have.

Which brings me to what I'm building with IDNTY. The curiosity I have about my old teammates — that's not unique to me. Most former athletes have it. We want to see how the people we respect actually train, eat, recover, live. Not the influencer version. The real version. The "here's what I did today, here's why" version.

If I can build something that lets that curiosity flow — where my own efforts in and out of the gym are seen by people who care, and I can see theirs — I think it taps into something for anyone who's ever been on a team.

I still want to know what my teammates are doing. I think they probably want to know what I'm doing too. We just haven't had a good place to look.

Once an athlete, always an athlete. IDNTY — Athletes for Life.

Hope you enjoy this week's edition.

At 35, the two-time World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, and face of American women's soccer walked off the professional pitch for the last time — not because her body had broken down, but because she had chosen a new chapter.

Just weeks earlier she had announced her retirement alongside the news that she was pregnant with her second child. The woman who had scored 123 international goals in 224 appearances, led the USWNT to glory, and become one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet was stepping into motherhood times two, entrepreneurship, advocacy, and — most importantly — a version of herself that no longer revolved around 90-minute matches and national-team camps.

But here's what makes Alex Morgan different from so many legends who hang up their boots: she didn't retire her athletic identity. She evolved it.

It's the summer of 2004 (yes, we know some of you weren't even born yet). Brian Urlacher is already a four-time Pro Bowler, a Defensive Player of the Year candidate, and one of the most feared linebackers in the NFL.

At 6'4" and 260 pounds, with a 4.49 forty and a 38-inch vertical, he could have coasted on what he'd already built. But Urlacher wasn't wired that way.

He wanted that extra inch in the fourth quarter — the one that separates good from legendary. So he did something radical: he left the familiar walls of Chip Smith's Competitive Edge Sports complex in Atlanta and headed 2,000 miles west to the thin air of Truckee, California, just outside Lake Tahoe. For an entire month, at nearly 6,000 feet above sea level, he trained in conditions designed to break him down and rebuild him stronger.

This is one of the greatest training stories ever told, and one that can make a huge difference for you in your training and life.

As soon as the cleats came off, the structure vanished. Suddenly the 4,000-calorie training days, the team meals, the "eat everything in sight because you'll burn it off" mindset collided with real life: desk jobs, family responsibilities, fewer hours in the gym, and the quiet realization that your body no longer needs the same fuel it once did.

Some former athletes keep eating like they're still competing — and the weight creeps on. Others swing the opposite way, slashing calories or skipping meals because they're not training at the same intensity, only to feel sluggish, irritable, and disconnected from the strong, capable version of themselves they once knew.

The balance exists. And no one teaches it better than Leslie Bonci.

You've been there. The injury that sidelines you. The diagnosis that makes you wonder if the athletic identity you've carried since high school or college is gone for good.

For Todd Durkin — world-renowned strength coach, bestselling author, speaker to millions, and trainer to NFL legends like Drew Brees — that moment came in early 2021. After two decades of grinding in the weight room, training elite athletes, and building a global impact business, his back finally betrayed him.

That injury — and the grueling months that followed — became the greatest teacher of resilience Todd has ever faced. And it's exactly the story every former high school and college athlete needs to hear when life throws the kind of curveball no playbook prepares you for.