Randy Giveans is the kind of guy who makes you question just how well you are using your time.
For starters, he runs the equity research desk for shipping at Jefferies from his base in Houston, covering 28 companies and routinely logging 12-hour days.
He and his wife, Dorrial, are also raising a baby daughter — a development the proud dad disclosed to his clients on 4 March under the guise of “initiating coverage” on Finley Rita Giveans (ticker symbol: FRG).
The Giveans also find time to run a Bible study for married couples in their church’s congregation.
On top of all that, he may well be shipping’s most accomplished athlete, with a rigorous training programme that keeps him in elite fitness.
In early June, Giveans, 34, will make his annual trek to New York to compete in the Wall Street D10 Decathlon, a gruelling series of events that unofficially determines the fittest man and woman in the US financial community.
Giveans has finished in the top 10 four times, with third- and second-place finishes in the past three years. The athletes who beat him are former professionals from the National Football League.
How does he manage all this? Well, for one thing, his hyper-achieving ways are not new.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Giveans was valedictorian and president of his high-school class while playing six varsity sports. He earned a cross-country scholarship to Spring Hill, a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II college in Mobile, Alabama, and walked on to the basketball and golf teams as a non-scholarship athlete.
But are there simply more than 24 hours in a Randy Giveans day?
“Well, I don’t watch much TV, I don’t drink and I can get by on five or six hours of sleep a night,” he says, and he rarely eats fried or sugary foods.
And while TW+ did observe him tempted by an unusual mashed-potato mocktini at Heidmar’s annual tanker event in Houston last month, it is unlikely to have padded his 7% body fat — about half the norm for a man his age.
While Giveans’ athletic pursuits are impressive enough in their own right, there is another key point: he has raised $65,000 to fund paediatric cancer research and treatment.
The D10 event is closely aligned with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
“Certainly the charity is the most important thing,” Giveans tells TW+. “No one’s going to remember a couple of years from now who got second place in the decathlon. But the people we’re raising money for ... to see some of the patients and doctors come out to support the event, or to visit the hospital, as we had a chance to do a couple of months ago, and see everyone so thankful, that’s certainly rewarding.
“Everything else is just fun and it gives me something to train for rather than just running around out there randomly.”
Giveans likes to mix some fun into his sport. He has run six marathons, each in costume appropriate to the setting. He was Uncle Sam in the Boston Marathon, a cowboy in Houston, Saints quarterback Drew Brees complete with shoulder pads in New Orleans and a secret service agent in Washington’s Marine Corps Marathon.
Despite the cowboy get-up, Giveans broke the three-hour mark in Houston with a frantic finish. “The last three miles were the most painful 20 minutes of my life,” he recalls. Medical staff stuck a thermometer someplace that was not his mouth and found a temperature of 103.5ºF. They quickly immersed him in an ice bath.
Giveans has filmed a six-minute YouTube video on his decathlon exploits that shows him skipping the escalator at Jefferies’ Houston headquarters and sprinting up the stairs, briefcase in hand.
In another scene, he walks through midtown Manhattan, spies some scaffolding outside a subway station and quickly begins doing pull-ups. It being New York, passers-by don’t even give a glance. “Just another random dude in a suit doing pull-ups,” Giveans says.
But the D10 event is serious business. Up to 100 competitors must negotiate a 400-metre run, football throw, pull-ups, 40-yard dash, broad jump, 500-metre row, vertical jump, 20-yard shuttle run, bench press and 800-metre run.
Running events are the strength for the former college distance athlete in a competition in which he is often the small guy at 6ft and 185 pounds (1.83 metres and 75kg).
Giveans’ only finish outside the top 10 came last year at 14th. The analyst was nursing hamstring and shoulder injuries. On top of that, he had flown into New York the previous day from a week at the Posidonia conference in Greece.
“I wasn’t going to miss Posidonia, and I wasn’t going to miss the decathlon,” he says. His clean lifestyle meant “some jet lag, but no hangover”.
He feels healthy coming into this year’s competition, but notes the combined impact of being a new father and now holding the senior analyst’s position — he had been an associate under Doug Mavrinac until 2017 — has forced him to train smarter.
“Now I have a sedentary job at a standing desk for up to 12 hours a day and I’m also travelling much more than when I was an associate, grabbing food at airports. It’s tough to be as structured and disciplined in my diet and workout routine.”
He credits Jefferies with supporting his efforts in everything from donations to good wishes from colleagues, and reflects on how the competition meshes with his life view.
“I’ve always been into fitness, but this really helps me diversify my training. Growing up, I had some friends who swam or played baseball year-round. I’ve never been a specialist, I’ve always been more of a jack of all trades.
“I like to diversify my energies and my passions. I try to do that in my life as well. Not being a workaholic, but doing well in my job. Keeping time for family and for church. It’s all about trying to be balanced.”
This article is from TW+ magazine, which will be distributed with TradeWinds on 24 May
