Mike Alberts is a Principal and Head of Business Development at Cohere Capital, and he has spent his career in and around deals. From advising on mergers and acquisitions to scaling operations, he knows how relationships get built in finance. The dinners, the conferences, the carefully arranged introductions. He also had a hunch there was a better way.
He is also a competitive triathlete, and a few years ago those two things stopped being separate.
The Vision
It started with a simple desire: bring together his work in mergers and acquisitions with his passion for endurance sport. On paper the two worlds don't overlap much, but in practice they pull from the same places. Discipline, long-term thinking, comfort with discomfort. The connection felt obvious. Finding others who felt the same way just required saying it out loud.
So he started mentioning it to colleagues, counterparts, people he met during deal travel and in conversation. The response kept coming back the same way: "I do that too."
Turns out the M&A world is full of endurance athletes. They just hadn't found each other yet.
One Conversation at a Time
When traveling for work, Mike started organizing group runs and rides with clients, colleagues, and local people who were up for getting outside and moving. Those workouts opened up conversations that no dinner or conference ever had. People showed up as people, not as their firm or their title.
It kept growing. Eventually it made sense to make it official. If all these people were out there training anyway, why not give them a reason to line up together? The M&A Triathlon Summit was born, built around an Ironman 70.3 race event and the straightforward idea that doing hard things alongside people you respect builds something that straight business meetings can't.
What Got Built
Twenty-one people showed up for the inaugural event. This past year, more than 30 toed the line. Nearly 200 are on the interest list.
It's been exciting to see the development of a community that grew from scratch, one conversation at a time, around an identity that a lot of people in the industry had never really said out loud before.
Race Day
This year's Summit was held at Ironman 70.3 Western Mass. With more than 30 athletes in matching Varlo M&A Triathlon kits on the course and in the crowd, the group was hard to miss. The finish line announcer even gave them a shoutout.
The better moment was harder to pin down. It was somewhere in the middle of watching a sport that usually feels pretty solitary turn into something shared. A familiar kit spotted ahead on the bike. A name called out from the crowd by someone met at a group run in another city months earlier. That's what race day looked like when the vision actually came together.
If It Can Happen Here, It Can Happen Anywhere
There was no budget for this, no formal program, no blueprint. Just a vision, a willingness to talk about it, and enough follow-through to keep showing up.
Most industries have people quietly training for things. They're in your network already. It just takes one person willing to surface it and give people a place to land.
It doesn't have to be a 70.3. A 5K, a group ride, a fitness class, a walk. The format matters less than the intention. Get outside the professional context and do something alongside the people you want to actually know. The relationships that come out of that are different from anything a conference or a client dinner produces. They go further and they stick.
It started with one conversation. Yours can too.
Varlo is proud to outfit the M&A Triathlon Summit community with performance gear that empowers. If you're building something similar, whether it's an industry community, a corporate wellness program, or just a group of colleagues who want to show up to a race together, we'd love to help.
Start at https://www.varlo.com/pages/custom-gear