What do you do with an extra hour?

There is a question I've never been able to answer cleanly, and it's the one that built everything here.

Not in the abstract. Not as a thought experiment designed to reveal your priorities. Literally. On one specific night in October, when the clocks roll back and the world quietly gains sixty minutes it wasn't supposed to have. What do you actually do with it?

Most people sleep through it. The hour arrives and disappears without ceremony, absorbed into the night before anyone decides anything about it. By morning you'd never know it was there.

But there's a certain kind of person for whom that answer has always felt like a small surrender. And I think, if you've made it this far into this page, you probably already know which kind you are.

October. 1:00 AM. Ottawa.

The air had that specific weight that Ottawa air gets in late fall. Not quite cold enough to be winter, but enough that you feel it when you breathe hard. Your breath shows in the dark. The city looks different at that hour — familiar streets that suddenly belong to nobody, like you've wandered into a version of your own neighbourhood that only exists after midnight.

Eighty people ran.

No prize. No camera crew. Nobody had been promised anything remarkable in return. They came because we said there was an extra hour that night, the literal 25th hour, and that running through the city while everyone else was asleep seemed like exactly the right thing to do.

I've tried a few times to explain what it felt like standing there at one in the morning watching it happen. I'm not sure I've got the right words for it yet. What I can say is that it felt like proof. Proof of something I'd believed for a long time without being able to show anyone.

That there are people who've always lived in that hour. They just didn't have a name for it.

The 25th Hour is what happens when those people find each other.

In March of 2024 there were three of us.

Me, and two others who showed up on a Thursday evening at seven because a run through the city sounded better than whatever else was on the table. No event. No formal sign-up. Just a time and a place and the vague, unspoken feeling that something might develop if we kept showing up.

We kept showing up.

Eighty people run with us now. Every Thursday, rain and cold and dark included. The post-run hang lasts longer than it needs to, which tells you more about who these people are than any description I could write. They're not performing community. They just found somewhere they didn't want to leave.

I couldn't have predicted that. What I had was a belief that if we built something honest, something without pretense, something that never settled for the generic version of itself, the people it was actually built for would eventually find it.

They have. And I'm still figuring out what that means.

I want to be honest about something.

The clothing, the races, the 1AM runs through a quiet city. Those things are real and we care about them deeply. But they aren't the point. They're evidence of the point.

The point is that there's a specific kind of person who has always known they have an extra hour in them. Who has felt, for as long as they can remember, a low hum of restlessness with ordinary limits. Who shows up not because anything is demanding it but because showing up is just who they are.

We didn't make that person. We just stopped pretending they didn't exist and tried to build something worthy of them.

That's where built to endure comes from. Not as a slogan. As a standard. Because endurance isn't about suffering — it's about choosing, again and again, to keep building something that matters to you. A body. A discipline. A life worth the effort it takes to live it.

What that looks like is different for everyone. The reasons are yours. The miles are yours. The journey has always been yours.

We just believe it's better when it isn't only yours.

The 25th Hour is still being written. The Thursday runs keep happening. The events grow. The apparel takes shape. The community does what real communities do, which isn't grow steadily and predictably but expand in sudden, surprising ways that catch even us off guard.

What we're building next, I could describe it now. But I think you'll understand it better once you've experienced some of what came before.

So the next step is yours.

Come find us Thursday at seven. We're always there.

Whatever happens after that. Well. That's what the 25th hour is for.