the morning shakeout podcast
Mario Fraioli
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Host Mario Fraioli gleans insight and inspiration from top athletes, coaches, and personalities in the sport of running.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Nov 27, 2023
Episode 233 | Simon Freeman and Mario Fraioli on Seasonality and Consistency in Running
I recently sat down with my good friend and frequent podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, for the fourth and final installment (for this year, anyway) of our yet-to-be named quarterly conversation, which you can listen to wherever you get the morning shakeout podcast. An excerpt of this exchange can be found in Issue #38 of LtW, which comes out later this week. (You can buy a copy or subscribe here.) This time around, Simon proposed a philosophical discussion about seasonality and consistency and I was all about it. We talked about when to rest and when to build, running as a means to an end versus running as a lifestyle, the “flywheel effect,” and more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
Click here for complete show notes and sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Nov 20, 2023
Episode 232 | Ask Mario Anything
This week, I sat down with my right-hand man Chris Douglas and answered questions about the Olympic Trials Marathon start-time controversy, things I’ve changed my mind on, the importance of the weekly long run, time versus distance-based training prescriptions, and a lot more.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and apologies for all the ones I wasn’t able to answer in this episode. Got a question for the next Ask Mario Episode? Send it to me here.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
Click here for complete show notes and sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Oct 31, 2023
Episode 231 | Megan Young on Coaching, Learning, and Living a High-Performance Lifestyle
This week's episode of the podcast with Megan Young, Performance Coach with the Seattle Sounders professional soccer club. Megan is a rockstar with 15 years of experience working in collegiate athletics, and men’s and women’s professional soccer. She’s the 2023 National Strength and Conditioning Association Professional Coach of the Year and a voracious learner with numerous degrees and certifications on her resume. This was the first time I’ve ever spoken to Megan and it felt like catching up with an old friend. Megan has an incredible story and mission. In addition to her coaching successes, she was a collegiate thrower at UNC-Wilmington, she’s survived acute myeloid leukemia, and, as she wrote to me in some of our initial correspondence, her purpose in life is “building community and impacting others through education of a high performance lifestyle.”
We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, including where her insatiable appetite for learning comes from, the importance of establishing effective communication strategies with athletes and colleagues, and what she means by living a high-performance lifestyle. Megan told me who and what opened her eyes toward coaching as a career path, what that path has looked like for her over the past 15 years, and why she believes coaches need coaches. She also talked about the importance of care and connection in the role of a coach, understanding the difference between passion and purpose, her personal goal to impact 100 million lives through her work, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
Click here for complete show notes and sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Oct 9, 2023
Episode 230 | Stuart McMillan on Systems Thinking, Creativity, and the "Philosopher-Coach"
This week's episode of the podcast is with Stuart McMillan, widely regarded as one of the best sprint coaches in the world. Stu has worked with both professional and amateur athletes in a variety of sports with a focus on power and speed development. He’s personally coached over 70 Olympians at nine Olympic Games, over 30 of whom have won Olympic medals. In addition to his hands-on work with athletes, Stu runs ALTIS, an organization that trains athletes and educates coaches to perform at the highest level.
In this conversation, which easily would have gone another couple hours if we hadn’t run out of time, Stu and I cover a wide range of topics, from coffee and music to Stu’s former life as a DJ. We get into all things coaching, including how Stu got his start and how his approach has evolved over the past 30 years, creativity and how it influences his work, the role of the “philosopher-coach” and putting an emphasis on critical thinking and question asking, taking a systems approach to working with athletes and life in general, and so, so much more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
Click here for complete show notes and sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Sep 25, 2023
Episode 229 | Don Swartz on Coaching, Innovating, and Developing a Winner's Mindset
This week I had an awesome conversation with Don Swartz, who coaches my wife’s Masters swimming program at North Bay Aquatics in Marin County, California, and is someone I respect, admire, and try to emulate in my own life. Don was inducted into the American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2013, he coached several swimmers to Olympic, World Championship and Pan-American teams in the early-to-mid 1970s, not to mention a handful of world records (including Rick Demont in the 400m freestyle when he became the first person in history to break 4 minutes in the event), and he’s widely credited with revolutionizing modern-day swim training with the introduction and implementation of cycle training (i.e. alternating hard days with easy days) in the early 1970s. At 77 years old Don is still on the deck, coaching both youth and Masters athletes at North Bay, and he’s beloved by his athletes and fellow coaches alike. I recently sat down with Don for a couple hours at his kitchen table to talk about his coaching journey, how he approaches working with swimmers despite never being a competitive swimmer himself, founding the Creative Performance Institute in the 1970s and teaching the mental side of sport to coaches and athletes, how he stays sharp, what keeps him going, and a lot more. This episode of the podcast is the second installment of the Coach-to-Coach series and it’s an instant all-timer (it’s got some Frank Gagliano vibes to it), full of amazing stories, anecdotes, and practical applications for coaches, leaders, and community builders across a wide range of domains.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
— Goodr. Goodr sunglasses are just the best! They don’t bounce, they don’t slip, they’re polarized to protect your eyes, and they come in a nice range of styles and fun colors. They’re also the most affordable performance shades on the planet with most pairs costing only $25 to $35 bucks a piece. If you want to support the morning shakeout and treat yourself to a pair of goodrs, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout to get free shipping on your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes and sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Sep 12, 2023
Episode 228 | Brad Stulberg on Performance Coaching and Mastering Change
This week I had a wonderful conversation with my good friend Brad Stulberg. Brad, who works as a writer and performance coach, is my first four-time guest and his episodes are some of the most listened to in the six-year history of the show. In this one, the first installment of a new series I’m calling Coach to Coach, Brad and I discuss the craft of coaching and highlight the parallels and through lines that exist between working with athletes and working with executives and entrepreneurs. We also dive into his new book, Master of Change, and talk about how to navigate change: personally, professionally, athletically, and societally. Brad explains the concept of what he calls “rugged flexibility,” he differentiates between responding and reacting to things that happen to us, and a lot more. Brad’s been on a lot of podcasts of late (and they’re all really great!) but I promise you this conversation is very different from the other ones you may have listened to already.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
— Goodr. Goodr sunglasses are just the best! They don’t bounce, they don’t slip, they’re polarized to protect your eyes, and they come in a nice range of styles and fun colors. They’re also the most affordable performance shades on the planet with most pairs costing only $25 to $35 bucks a piece. If you want to support the morning shakeout and treat yourself to a pair of goodrs, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout to get free shipping on your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 28, 2023
Episode 227 | Simon Freeman and Mario Fraioli on Defining Yourself as a Runner
I recently sat down with my good friend and three-time podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, for the third installment of our unnamed quarterly conversation. An excerpt of this exchange can be found in Issue #36 of LtW, which comes out later this week. (You can buy a copy or subscribe here.) In this one, Simon and I talk all about defining yourself a runner, why many runners tend to identify themselves in a particular way, how identity influences the products you buy and the content you consume, the importance of diversifying your interests and pursuits in the sport, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
— Goodr. Goodr sunglasses are just the best! They don’t bounce, they don’t slip, they’re polarized to protect your eyes, and they come in a nice range of styles and fun colors. They’re also the most affordable performance shades on the planet with most pairs costing only $25 to $35 bucks a piece. If you want to support the morning shakeout and treat yourself to a pair of goodrs, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout to get free shipping on your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 14, 2023
Episode 226 | Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows on Community and Belonging
Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows is a runner and serves as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. I’ve always appreciated her perspective on running, the industry, and this beautiful and messy path we’re all navigating called life. This is actually the first of what will be a two-part conversation. In this one, we set the table: Get to know Jennifer a little bit, learn more about her paths to becoming a runner and a member of the clergy, and hear us talk about running, community, belonging and the various ways those things all intersect and interact with one another. It left me excited for part two, which we’ll record later this year and I’ll release in November sometime. In that one, we’ll talk specifically about the crews and clubs Jennifer visited with, who she met, what she experienced, and what she took away from it all.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
— Goodr. Goodr sunglasses are just the best! They don’t bounce, they don’t slip, they’re polarized to protect your eyes, and they come in a nice range of styles and fun colors. They’re also the most affordable performance shades on the planet with most pairs costing only $25 to $35 bucks a piece. If you want to support the morning shakeout and treat yourself to a pair of goodrs, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout to get free shipping on your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jun 12, 2023
Episode 225 | Ask Mario Anything
This week, my right-hand man Chris Douglas serves me up some listener questions in an old-school Ask Mario Anything episode of the podcast. In this one, I answer inquiries about my favorite books, “lighthouses” in my life, breaking through in the marathon, returning to running after a stress fracture, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith's new Spring Collection is now available, featuring a colorful refresh of some of my favorite training staples. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
— Goodr. Goodr sunglasses are just the best! They don’t bounce, they don’t slip, they’re polarized to protect your eyes, and they come in a nice range of styles and fun colors. They’re also the most affordable performance shades on the planet with most pairs costing only $25 to $35 bucks a piece. If you want to support the morning shakeout and treat yourself to a pair of goodrs, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout to get free shipping on your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 29, 2023
Episode 224 | Simon Freeman and Mario Fraioli on Working with a Coach
I recently sat down with my good friend and three-time podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, for the second installment of our yet-to-be named quarterly conversation, which you can listen to wherever you get the morning shakeout podcast or at this handy link. An excerpt of this exchange can be found in Issue #36 of LtW, which comes out later this week. In this one, Simon and I talk all about coaching: our experiences with being coached and what we got out of them, the different forms that coaching takes, the impact a coach can have on an athlete, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith's new Spring Collection is now available, featuring a colorful refresh of some of my favorite training staples. If you buy anything on Tracksmith.com, and you’re doing so for the first time, use the code MarioNEW to save $15 on your order of $75 or more. If you’re already a Tracksmith customer, use the code MarioGIVE and you can get free shipping on your next order and 5% of your purchase will go to support the Friendly House in Worcester, Massachusetts, an organization that is near and dear to me.
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 15, 2023
Episode 223 | Randy Ashley on Coaching High School Runners
My guest on the podcast this week is my friend Randy Ashley, one of the most incredible, unassuming, and relatively unheralded coaches I know. He’s worked with—and continues to work with—athletes of all ages and ability levels, from beginners to Olympic Trials qualifiers, and national champions. He spends most of his time these days as the head track and cross country coach at Christ School, a private boys institution in Asheville, North Carolina, where he’s had 8 kids win 24 state championships along with 4 state team titles in the eight years he’s been at the helm. Just a few weeks ago, one of his athletes, Rocky Hansen, became the 18th American high school boy—and first from North Carolina—to break the 4-minute mile. Beyond his charges’ amazing athletic achievements, Randy teaches them the skills they need to be successful in the rest of their lives as well. His kids aren’t just great racers, they’re top-notch human beings too.
In this conversation, Randy and…
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Apr 25, 2023
Episode 222 | Starla Garcia on Fueling For Running, Performance, and Recovery
This episode of the podcast is the fourth installment of a new 4-part series I’m calling Pillars of Performance. The main objective behind this series is to go deep with experts in the areas of training, strength and conditioning/injury prevention, sports psychology, and nutrition, i.e., the four pillars that support a foundation of sustainable performance no matter what event you’re training for or what level of runner you are.
My guest for this one is Starla Garcia, an Olympic Trials marathoner, registered dietician, and body and cultural diversity advocate. After sharing her story of how she got into running and eventually became a dietician, Starla and I talk all things nutrition and fueling for runners: maintaining a healthy relationship with food, being comfortable in your own body, how and when to fuel in training and in racing, eating for performance and recovery, hydration and electrolyte replenishment, different considerations for women versus men, supplementation, and m…
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Apr 11, 2023
Episode 221 | Dr. Justin Ross on Playing the Mental Game as a Runner
This episode of the podcast is the third installment of a new 4-part series I’m calling Pillars of Performance. The main objective behind this series is to go deep with experts in the areas of training, strength and conditioning/injury prevention, sports psychology, and nutrition, i.e., the four pillars that support a foundation of sustainable performance no matter what event you’re training for or what level of runner you are.
My guest for this one is Dr. Justin Ross, an avid endurance athlete and licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in health, wellness, and human performance psychology. In this conversation we bust some myths about sports psychology, unpack what it means to be a mentally tough athlete, discuss how to approach goal-setting and performance standards, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith's new Spring Collection is now available, featuring a colorful refresh of some of my favorite training staples. I recently rac…
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Mar 27, 2023
Episode 220 | Anh Bui, DPT, on Getting Strong, Staying Healthy, and Running Resiliently
This episode of the podcast is the second installment of a new 4-part series I’m calling Pillars of Performance. The main objective behind this series is to go deep with experts in the areas of training, strength and conditioning/injury prevention, sports psychology, and nutrition, i.e., the four pillars that support a foundation of sustainable performance no matter what event you’re training for or what level of runner you are.
My guest for this one is Anh Bui, Doctor of Physical Therapy, 2:53 marathoner, running coach, and certified strength and conditioning specialist. In this conversation, we discuss what it means to run resiliently, how to understand the difference between injury pain and normal aches, why strength training is important for runners (and how to best fit it into the week), the importance of pre-run activation exercises, considerations for Masters athletes, and much more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith's new Spring Collection…
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Mar 13, 2023
Episode 219 | Mark Coogan on Training Strategies for the Mile to the Marathon
This episode of the podcast is the first installment of a new 4-part series I’m calling Pillars of Performance. The main objective behind this series is to go deep with experts in the areas of training, strength and conditioning/injury prevention, sports psychology, and nutrition, i.e., the four pillars that support a foundation of sustainable performance no matter what event you’re training for or what level of runner you are.
My guest for this one is Mark Coogan, coach of Team New Balance Boston and co-author of the new book, Personal Best Running: Coach Coogan’s Strategies for the Mile to the Marathon. (You can learn more about Mark’s background as an athlete and coach on Episode 165 of the podcast.) In this conversation, Mark and I discuss his book, get into his training principles and the influences behind them, the importance of effort over exactitude, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith's new Spring Collection is now availab…
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Feb 27, 2023
Episode 218 | Simon Freeman and Mario Fraioli on Emerging Brands and Trends in Running
This week, I sat down with my good friend and two-time podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, which just celebrated its ninth birthday. For the past couple issues of LtW, Simon and I have had a conversation about a particular topic in running, which he recorded, transcribed, and published an excerpt of in the magazine. We did the same for Issue #34, which comes out on March 1, and decided to publish the entire audio conversation—which is what you’re about to listen to—as a podcast to complement the excerpt that ends up in the magazine.
In this episode, Simon and I had a great exchange about emerging footwear, apparel, and media brands and trends in the running space. It’s very much two friends with a lot of industry experience just shooting the shit and speculating about what we’re seeing and we hope you enjoy being a fly on the wall for it. The plan is to do publish these candid conversations as a…
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Dec 27, 2022
Episode 217 | Best of 2022
This final episode of 2022 is a compilation of highlights from 12 of the most impactful conversations I’ve had over the past 12 months. As I’ve written in years past, putting this annual episode together is equal parts exciting and impossible. It’s a treat to revisit all of these exchanges but it’s also a tough task to pick 12 that stood out. Each and every person that's been gracious enough to give me an hour or two of their time has taught me, inspired me, entertained me, moved me, or changed me in some way—and it’s my hope that they’ve done the same for you. This year's "best of" lineup, in order of release date, are: Bolota Asmerom, Luis Grijalva, Amy Leedham, Phil Shin, Nell Rojas, Tommy Rivs, Jinghuan Liu Tervalon, Tommie Runz, Peter Gilmore, Alison Mariella Désir, Chris Mosier, and Marielle Hall.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. TheFreshFoam X 1080 v12 is the shoe I run most of my miles in and it holds up week in and week out. The FuelCell…
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Dec 23, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 11
I’m excited to bring you the 11th and final installment of Common Ground for 2022, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. In this year-end episode, we talk about our running highlights of the year, podcast highlights of the year, music highlights of the year, and a lot more.
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our growing community on Patreon, where you'll also gain access to exclusive content like The Weekly Rundown, my Patreon-only podcast with Billy Yang, a live monthly Coaches' Corner discussion, and other perks that pop up from time to time.
Music and editing for this episode of the morning shakeout podcast by John Summerford. Grounded Podcast theme music by Jacob Shije (Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) and used with permission.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Dec 20, 2022
Re-Run with Bria Wetsch
This week’s Re-Run is with Bria Wetsch, who just a few weeks ago finished fourth at the U.S. Marathon Championships at CIM in a new personal best of 2:28.35. We recorded this episode in April 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, not long after Bria had finished 27th at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta.
I’m bringing back this conversation because of how honest and raw it was. In it, Bria told me about experiencing success at a young age and how she struggled to separate her identity and self-worth from her running results. She also recounts her experience recovering from double achilles surgery in 2017 and coming back to run a marathon PR 13 months later. She explained why she’s stuck with the sport despite various struggles over the past 20 years. Bria opened up about her fear of failure and battling perfectionism—but also how she learned to let go a few years ago and what that did for her relationship with running and competition, and a lot more.
This epis…
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Dec 12, 2022
Re-Run with Mike Smith
It’s been a busy fall and I haven’t been recording many new episodes of the podcast these last couple of months, so I’m re-running a few of my favorite conversations from years past. This week’s is with Mike Smith, who is the director of cross-country and track and field at Northern Arizona University. We recorded this episode over 2-1/2 years ago in the early stages of the pandemic. Mike is arguably the top collegiate distance running coach in the country. His NAU men’s cross-country team has won the national title six of the past seven years. His women’s squad finished sixth this past fall, their highest placing since 2007. Mike has been named National Men's Coach of the Year five times, and is only the second coach to win this award three years in a row.
I’ve been following Mike’s career since the mid-1990s when we were both running as high schoolers in small-town Central Massachusetts. This is a conversation about the path Mike’s followed to get where he is tod…
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Dec 5, 2022
Re-Run with Chelsea Sodaro
This week I’m re-running a conversation I had over three years ago with Chelsea Sodaro, who recently won the Ironman World Championships in Kona. When this episode originally went live in April of 2019, Chelsea hadn’t done an Ironman yet and she wasn’t even a household name in triathlon at the time. Nor was she a mom, which is a big part of what made her most recent victory so special and impressive.
In this conversation, we talked about how Chelsea got into running—for those of you who don’t know, before she was a champion triathlete, Chelsea was a world-class runner and a two-time national champion on the roads and track—why she transitioned into triathlon, and where she gets her competitive drive from. Chelsea told me how she’s dealt with injury throughout her career and the special relationship she has with Olympian Magdalena Boulet. We also discussed why she felt so alone and empty immediately after winning her first triathlon, the advice she’d give her younger…
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Nov 28, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 10
I’m excited to bring you the 10th installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. In this episode, we talk about our respective experiences at the New York City Marathon, we geek out on some recent cross-country action, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new FuelCell Rebel v3 from New Balance is everything I enjoyed about its predecessor but with a more supportive upper, a little more cushion underfoot, and a more durable outsole. What it doesn’t have is much more weight, checking in at under 8 ounces, making it a great go-fast shoe for tempo runs, track workouts, and interval sessions on the road. The FuelCell Rebel v3 is available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at your favorite run specialty retail store.
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, and/or join our gr…
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Nov 21, 2022
Re-Run with Fernando Cabada
Heading into this holiday week we’re going to re-run one of my favorite episodes of the podcast from years past. This one is from January 2020 and it’s with Fernando Cabada, a former professional distance runner who is still competing at an elite level. In fact, Fernando is now one of the fastest Masters runners in the country, running 2:16:51 at Grandmas Marathon back in June to qualify for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon. He’s also the Masters American record-holder for 50K, running 2:57:35 earlier this year.
In this conversation, which we recorded in-person in his hometown of Fresno, California, Fernando told me about his rough upbringing in Fresno, where he suffered abuse at the hands of his father, to the close relationship he has with his mother and how that’s even strengthened in recent years. We talked about being embarrassed by who he was as a kid and how he’s worked to put that behind him later in life. He told me why finishing second in a school yard race as…
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Nov 14, 2022
The Weekly Rundown with Billy Yang and Brendan Leonard
This week I’m sharing the latest episode of the Weekly Rundown, which is usually a Patreon-only podcast that I co-host with my friend Billy Yang. We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus since May, but we’re back with special guest Brendan Leonard of Semi-Rad—who you can listen to on Episode 211 of my podcast if you haven’t already—and the three of us catch up on what we've been up to of late, we talk all things NYC Marathon, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new FuelCell SC Elite v3 is going to be the shoe that I race the Boston Marathon in next April. It’s a next-level racing shoe with a carbon fiber plate and plenty of lightweight foam underfoot for a cushioned yet responsive ride. Right now there are select sizes remaining in an exclusive New York City Marathon colorway available on newbalance.com, so try and snatch them up before the holidays if you can, and they’ll be more widely available in early 2023.
Click here for complete sh…
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Nov 7, 2022
Episode 216 | Jake Wightman
I’m excited to share the recording from my live show in New York City this past Saturday with reigning world 1500m champion Jake Wightman of Great Britain. This past summer Jake pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the year, taking down Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen to capture his first world title. Jake, who is 28 years old and a native of Scotland, is also a Commonwealth Games and European Championships medalist, as well as a three-time champion at the 5th Avenue Mile in New York.
In this conversation, we talked about the world 1500m final and the tactics he used to take the win. Jake told me about what it was like to come off the high of that world title and still having to race in the Commonwealth Games and European Championships in the weeks that came after it. We discussed pressure as a privilege, what it’s like going into races now as a favorite rather than an underdog, and how he’s learned to appreciate his accomplishments over the years. Jake also talked about…
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Oct 31, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 9
I’m excited to bring you the 9th installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. In this episode, Dinée shares a couple personal updates, we geeked out and got excited about the upcoming New York City Marathon, which we’ll both be heading to later this week—we also shared some information about the respective events we’ll be involved in, so keep an ear open for those—we talked some music, of course, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new FuelCell Rebel v3 from New Balance is everything I enjoyed about its predecessor but with a more supportive upper, a little more cushion underfoot, and a more durable outsole. What it doesn’t have is much more weight, checking in at under 8 ounces, making it a great go-fast shoe for tempo runs, track workouts, and interval sessions on the road. The FuelCell Rebel v3 is available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at yo…
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Oct 24, 2022
Episode 215 | Marielle Hall
This week I spoke with Olympian Marielle Hall, who represented the U.S. in the 10,000m at the Rio Games in 2016. She’s also a four-time world championship qualifier, finished 8th in the 10,000m at the 2019 world championships in Doha, and won a national 15K title on the roads in 2020. This episode came to be a few weeks after I was introduced to Marielle last month in Mammoth Lakes, California, where she’s been training at altitude in preparation for her half-marathon debut later this fall.
In this conversation, Marielle and I talked about how she’s using this training camp as an opportunity to re-center herself and set the tone for the year ahead. She told me about traps that she’s gotten stuck in over the years and how she’s trying to maintain focus and keep the main thing the main thing. We discussed how she’s feeling now versus a year ago when she left the Bowerman Track Club, and when she knew it was time to change her training environment. Marielle talked to me ab…
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Oct 17, 2022
Episode 214 | Chris Mosier
This week’s episode is with Chris Mosier. Chris is a hall of fame triathlete, an All-American duathlete, a 6-time member of Team USA, and a two-time national champion and Olympic Trials qualifier in race walking. He’s also a Nike-sponsored athlete who, in 2015, became the first known transgender man to represent the U.S. in international competition. Beyond all of that, however, Chris is an incredible person who knows himself better than nearly anyone I’ve ever met and he’s an advocate, inspiration, mentor, and a role model to so many, myself included.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Chris and I talked about his relationship to sport and how that’s evolved throughout his life. We discussed identity and how he shows up in the different communities that he belongs to, as well as why he doesn’t want to be seen in any one particular type of way. Chris told me about navigating the world now as a white male and how that perspective differs from what he experienced earlier i…
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Oct 11, 2022
Episode 213 | Alison Mariella Désir
I’ve got a great episode for you this week with Alison Mariella Désir, who is making her second appearance on the podcast. If you missed our first chat, go back in the archives to Episode 168, where you can learn more about Alison, her background, how she got into running, and the work she’s done as a community builder and an activist.
This conversation was a very topical one and centered around Alison’s new book, Running While Black, which is available for pre-order now and will be available for purchase everywhere on October 18. We talked about the book, how it came to be, and how it evolved during the process of writing it. Alison shared some of her experiences of being a Black woman in a very white space, she told me about the impact she hopes her book will have, we discussed what “reimagining the run” could look like for future generations, and so much more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new FuelCell Rebel v3 from New Balance is everyth…
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Oct 3, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 8
I am super excited about this episode of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. It’s one we’ve been talking about doing for a long time, and it’s one that many listeners have been asking for: we’ve put together a Common Ground playlist! That’s right,10 songs from me, 10 songs from Dinee, and you can access them all from playlists we've made for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. There is no running talk this week but we go through each of the songs we chose, why we chose them, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
The Common Ground Playlist: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The Fresh Foam X More v4 from New Balance has quickly become a favorite of mine for recovery runs on the road. It’s packed with plenty of plush foam underfoot making it a perfect option for when I’m feeling a little beat up and want some extra protection between my foot and the road. It’s available…
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Sep 26, 2022
Re-Run with Deena Kastor
This week I’m re-sharing a conversation that I had in 2018 with Deena Kastor, which we recorded at her kitchen table in Mammoth Lakes, California. I’m bringing this one back not only because I was in Mammoth Lakes this past weekend but because Deena just ran 2:45:12 at the Berlin Marathon—at the age of 49, no less!—to earn the Abbott World Marathon Majors Six Star Medal for completing all six Major marathons: Berlin, London, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Tokyo. I look back fondly at this chat from a few years ago, in which we covered a lot of topics, from the importance of surrounding yourself with a great team, both in running and in life, to using disappointment as a means to fuel the next big breakthrough. We also discussed how coach Joe Vigil influenced her and helped shape her life philosophy, how training for and racing cross-country “feeds her soul” and helps her become a better racer on the track and on the roads, and so much more.
This episode is brought to you…
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Sep 19, 2022
Re-Run with Diljeet Taylor
I’m traveling this week and don’t have a new episode of the podcast for you but I want to take this opportunity to re-run one of my favorite conversations that I’ve ever had for the show. It’s with Diljeet Taylor, who is the head women’s cross-country coach and the Associate Director of Track and Field and field at BYU, which is one of the top collegiate programs in the country. We recorded this episode nearly two years ago when we were in the thick of the pandemic and it’s a great one to revisit or maybe check out for the first time.
In this conversation, which is really a masterclass is coaching and team building, Coach Taylor talked to me about the culture she’s helped build at BYU, why gratitude is so important to the strength of that culture, the importance of investing in people and not performances, and so, so much more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new Fresh Foam X More v4 is a maximum cushion shoe with a responsive ride that I…
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Sep 12, 2022
Episode 212 | Ruben Sança
This week’s episode is with Ruben Sança. Ruben and I go back a ways: When I was a senior at Stonehill College we recruited him pretty hard to come run at our school. He ultimately ended up going to our rival, UMass Lowell, where he went on to have a great collegiate career as a 4x All-American and three-time New England champion. It turned out to be the right choice for him as Ruben now works at his alma mater as the Director of Student Life & Well-Being. After college, Ruben made some big jumps as an athlete. In 2011 he represented his home country of Cape Verde in the marathon at the World Championships in South Korea and the following year he competed in the 5000m at the Olympic Games in London. In fact, it was during those Olympics that I first spent some meaningful time with Ruben and got know him a little bit. Ruben has also finished in the top-25 of the Boston Marathon twice and still competes regularly on the New England road racing scene. In August, he and his five-year-old…
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Sep 5, 2022
Episode 211 | Brendan Leonard
I am super excited to share this episode with all of you. It’s with Brendan Leonard, an ultrarunner, writer, award-winning filmmaker, speaker, and creator of one of my favorite websites on the internet, Semi-Rad.com. On top of all that, he’s also a new dad, which we talked quite a bit about in this conversation.
Brendan is someone whose work I’ve admired for quite a while now. He’s got an unmatched ability to tell stories, use humor, and share drawings that convey many of the things we all feel and experience as runners, and as human beings in general. In this conversation, we bounced all over the place, covering topics like ultrarunning, creativity, storytelling, self-employment, parenthood, where and how all these things overlap and intersect, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The new Fresh Foam X More v4 is a maximum cushion shoe with a responsive ride that I’m really enjoying for recovery runs right now. It’s super plush but also i…
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Aug 30, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 7
I’m excited to bring you the 7th installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. In this episode, we catch up on what we’ve both been up to of late personally, professionally, and athletically, we talk marathons, discuss music, and a whole lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The FuelCell SuperComp Trainer from New Balance is something else! This shoe is so fun to run in. It’s got 47 plush millimeters of foam underfoot and a super comfortable rocker profile that encourages efficient forward motion. It’s also got a carbon plate in there that helps smooth the transition from footstrike to toe-off. It's available on newbalance.com or at your favorite run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the podcast and treat yourself to a pair of goodr sunglasses, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout for 15% off your order. Look good, run goodr!
C…
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Aug 22, 2022
Re-Run with Katie Arnold
I am on a little bit of a hiatus from recording new episodes of the podcast so I’m taking this time as an opportunity to re-run some of my favorites from years past that some of you may want to revisit and others might be hearing for the first time.
This week, I’m bringing back an incredible conversation I had a little over three years ago with Katie Arnold. Katie is mom, a heck of an ultrarunner, and a great writer, whose memoir, Running Home, really spoke to me on a number of levels. In it, we talked about “smile” and “flow” and why those words are important to her when she races, reverse goal-setting and how this strategy sets her up for success, and balancing competitive running with the rest of her life. We also discussed the importance of observation and paying attention, how death can wake us up to the powerful realization that everything is changing all the time, and how her book came to be and what she hopes readers take away from it.
This episode is brought to…
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Aug 15, 2022
Re-Run with Karen Boen
This week’s re-run episode is an incredibly special one to me. It’s with my college cross country and track coach, Karen Boen, who is someone that’s had a profound and lasting impact on my life. Coach saw qualities and abilities in me 20 years ago that I didn’t know I had, and she helped me to not only become a better runner, but she taught me a lot about hard work, leadership, caring for other people, and what it means to be a good teammate and human being. A lot of how I think about training, and coaching, and life in general is due to her influence and I am incredibly grateful to have run for her during my time at Stonehill College.
We recorded this episode in June of 2020 and it’s an awesome conversation that goes through Coach’s life growing up in the projects of South Boston, to how she got into track and field in college, to accidentally falling into collegiate coaching at the age of 40. She also told me how she took a small team that was on the brink of extinction…
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Aug 8, 2022
Re-Run with Lindsay Flanagan
I do not have a new conversation to share with you this week but I am going to re-run a previous episode of the podcast with Lindsay Flanagan that was recorded in early 2020, just a few weeks before the Olympic Trials Marathon, where she ended up finishing 12th. Since that day in Atlanta, Lindsay has made some huge breakthroughs in the marathon and as a fan, it’s been super fun to watch. This past April she was 11th at the Paris Marathon in a personal best 2:26:54, and then, just a few months later in July, she won the Gold Coast Marathon in Australia, breaking the tape in a new course record, and another personal best, 2:24:43.
It was fun to revisit this conversation and hear Lindsay’s thoughts on the marathon and what she’s learned from it over the years, dealing with injuries throughout her career and navigating periods of time when she couldn’t run, what she’s learned as a coach of age-group athletes, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith…
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Aug 1, 2022
Episode 210 | Peter Gilmore
This week’s episode is a long one but it’s a pretty special conversation with one of my first post-collegiate running heroes, Peter Gilmore—who, incredibly and ironically enough, is now my teammate on the West Valley Track Club Masters racing team. In the early 2000s Peter was one of the top marathoners in the U.S. He finished 10th at the 2005 Boston Marathon and later that year represented the U.S. in the marathon at the world championships in Finland. The next year he finished 7th at Boston in a personal best 2:12:45. I didn’t know him at the time but I looked up to Peter from afar because he was everything I wanted to be in the sport: a scrappy underdog, a guy who wasn’t a star in college, he didn’t have a shoe contract, but he busted his butt and became really good.
In this conversation, we talked about all of that but what I was really interested in was his path back to the competitive side of the sport a few years ago after an 8-year break from serious training and…
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Jul 25, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 6
In the sixth installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast, we shared our respective personal updates before geeking out on all things World Athletics Championships, which just wrapped up over the weekend.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The FuelCell SuperComp Trainer from New Balance is something else! This shoe, which comes out in August, is so fun to run in. It’s got 47 plush millimeters of foam underfoot and a super comfortable rocker profile that encourages efficient forward motion. It’s also got a carbon plate in there that helps smooth the transition from footstrike to toe-off. It will soon be available on newbalance.com or at your favorite run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the podcast and treat yourself to a pair of goodr sunglasses, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout for 15% off your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click he…
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Jul 18, 2022
Episode 209 | Steve Magness
This week’s guest, making his second appearance on the podcast, is Steve Magness. Check him out back on Episode 156 if you haven’t already as it’s a good primer for this conversation, one which centered around the subject of his new book: Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness.
Now I’ll say this: Steve has been on a lot of podcasts doing promotion for his book and I did not want to rehash many of the conversations he’s already had to date. I can tell you that this episode is very different and we covered a lot of new ground. Steve opened up about his struggles with OCD, which isn’t something he’s ever talked about publicly before. We talked about the idea of toughness, and “tough love,” and how his perceptions of both have changed over time. We also discussed different leadership styles, what works and what doesn’t, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a wor…
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Jul 11, 2022
Episode 208 | Diane Nukuri
This week’s conversation is with Diane Nukuri, a three-time Olympian for Burundi whose career I’ve been following for 22 years now. Diane is an incredible athlete—she’s competed in three Olympic Games in three different events—and she’s one of the most versatile road racers of the past decade.
In this episode, we talked about her childhood in Burundi and how running came into her life. She told me how she’s used running as a vehicle for exploration and opportunity from the time she was a teenager and also what it was like to leave her home country for track meet when she was 16, knowing she wasn’t going to go back. Diane talked openly about adjusting to life in Canada and then the U.S., she me told some good stories about her partner, five-time U.S. Olympian Abdi Abdirahman, we discussed how having a good “off” switch has helped her have a long competitive running career, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking…
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Jul 4, 2022
Episode 207 | Marquis Bowden
This week’s conversation is with Marquis Bowden, who you may remember from Episode 132 back in the fall of 2020. Since that time nearly two years ago Marquis and I have kept in close touch and make it a point to catch up with one another every couple of weeks. His life has undergone a lot of changes since we recorded that first podcast: he moved from the only place he’d ever known, Los Angeles, California, to the mountains of Boulder, Colorado. He’s embedded himself into the running and cycling communities there and put himself on a path to chase his professional, athletic, and personal dreams.
In this episode, we talk about that transition and what it’s been like for him. We discuss trauma, hardship, reaching out for help, and prioritizing mental health. Marquis told me about trying to take his running to the next level, navigating injuries from both a physical and emotional standpoint, the importance of leaning into his community, especially during tough times, and a lot m…
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Jun 27, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 5
In the fifth installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast, Dinée tells us all about her experience at the recent New York Mini 10K, we talk about which events we were most looking forward to at the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships, we discuss music, of course, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a workhorse to run most of your miles in, look no further than the FreshFoam X 1080 v12. This shoe has the perfect blend of cushioning and responsiveness, it’s lightweight, it transitions smoothly, it has the most streamlined fit to accommodate a wide variety of foot types, and it holds up to heavy mileage week in and week out. The FreshFoam X 1080v12 is available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at your local run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the podcast and treat yourself to a pair of goodr sunglass…
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Jun 20, 2022
Episode 206 | Sid Baptista
My guest this week is Sid Baptista. Sid’s a lot of things: he’s a husband and a father, a runner, a community builder and leader, and also an entrepreneur. He’s the founder of the PIONEERS Run Crew, which is based in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, and he’s also the creator of PYNRS performance streetwear brand, an apparel line with a focus on serving diverse people, with diverse body types from diverse communities.
I’m super excited to share this week’s conversation with you as it’s one of my favorite ones I’ve had for the podcast to date. Sid and I covered a lot of ground: We talked about growing up as the sons of entrepreneurial minded immigrants in Massachusetts and how those experiences have shaped our career trajectories. He told me about his hometown of Dorchester, which is Boston’s biggest, most populous, and most diverse neighborhood, and how he’s seen it evolve over the past three decades. We got into running, Sid’s experience as a sprinter in high…
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Jun 13, 2022
Episode 205 | Simon Freeman
My guest this week, making his second appearance on the podcast, is Simon Freeman. Simon is the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, a beautiful, quarterly, coffee table-style publication for runners, by runners. (Check out the conversation Simon and I had for Episode 13 here and learn about his professional and athletic background, as well as the origins of Like The Wind, which he and his wife Julie launched back in 2014.)
In this conversation, we mostly geeked out about all things publishing and media. Simon told me about how Like the Wind has evolved over the past four years, the exciting position the magazine is in right now, and where he and Julie hope to take it moving forward. We also talked about the current running media landscape and how it’s changed since our last conversation, the current state of Simon’s relationship with running (and the big goal he has on the horizon), and a lot more.
Learn more about LtW, buy a back…
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Jun 6, 2022
Episode 204 | Tommie Runz
My guest this week is Tommie Runz. I met Tommie back in April at the Racers Roundtable that I hosted and he participated in a few days before the Boston Marathon. After talking with him for just a little bit that day, I knew that I needed to sit down with him for the podcast. That brief encounter led to this nearly two-hour conversation and it’s a really special one. In this episode, Tommie talks to me about the period of time he lived in Massachusetts, his troubled relationship with alcohol, and the journey he’s traveled to sobriety. He told me about when and how running came into his life and the path he followed to qualifying for the Boston Marathon. We discussed identity and how that’s shifted for him over the course of his life, what it’s like being a Black runner in his hometown of Detroit, and so much more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith is an independent running brand inspired by a deep love of the sport. Their Spring/Summer Collection is now ava…
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May 30, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 4
In the fourth installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast, Dinée has a lot of exciting updates as they relate to her professional life and athletic pursuits, we talk a little bit about a few of the high school track athletes that are exciting us right now, we discuss National Running Day, which is coming up on June 1, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a workhorse to run most of your miles in, look no further than the FreshFoam X 1080 v12. This shoe has the perfect blend of cushioning and responsiveness, it’s lightweight, it transitions smoothly, it has the most streamlined fit to accommodate a wide variety of foot types, and it holds up to heavy mileage week in and week out. The FreshFoam X 1080v12 is available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at your local run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the p…
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May 23, 2022
Re-Run with Frank Gagliano
This week we’re kicking it back to Episode 64 with Frank Gagliano, one of the greatest track coaches of all-time, which was recorded three years ago at his home in Rye, New York. Gagliano, who is now 85 years old, has coached at every level of the sport over the past 60 years—high school, college, and professionally—and he’s had great success at all of them. He’s coached 15 Olympians, 140 All-Americans, multiple national champions, and a world championships medalist. More importantly than that, however, the lessons he’s taught his athletes extend far beyond the track. He has a love for the sport, his family, his athletes, and his country that is unmatched. This is a conversation about coaching and life that had a profound impact on me—and I know it will do the same for you.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Open is a digital mindfulness platform combining Breathwork, Meditation, and Movement. I do a 5-10 minute breathwork class most days to get away from my desk…
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May 17, 2022
Re-Run with Laura Schmitt
I’ll be re-running a couple of my favorite episodes from years past in the feed this week and next and we’ll start by kicking it back to Episode 100 with Laura Schmitt, which was recorded in February of 2020 right before the world shut down. It’s one of my favorite conversations that I’ve ever had for the podcast and I’m excited to rerelease it. Laura was the longtime cross country and track coach at Redwood High School in Larkspur, California, where she was at the helm for 35 years and led some of the best teams and athletes in the state. She’s also a wife, a mom, and now a grandmother since we had this conversation over two years ago—not to mention an entrepreneur who founded a play-based preschool that’s still going strong today as well as the first treadmill studio on the West Coast. In short: she’s an incredible woman and someone I respect and admire immensely. In this conversation, we talked about running, community, coaching, family, parenting, and entrepreneur…
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May 9, 2022
Episode 203 | Jinghuan Liu Tervalon
Jinghuan Liu Tervalon is a mother and a runner from Southern California. She started running 14 years ago to deal with heartache and to do something for herself before she eventually found a community that she connected with and started training in earnest for races. She’s also a writer whose work has been published in Runner’s World and Women’s Running. In fact, last year she won a creative grant through the Brooks RunFulness Project to create a multimedia book project that showcases runners from the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. She serves on the board of Bras for Girls, and is an advocate for creating social change through running. Jinghuan is someone I’ve corresponded with over email for a few years now and in this conversation I got to learn more about her journey as a runner, and her work as a writer and an advocate. We also talked about identity, the role and importance of community, using her voice to tell stories and generate awareness, and a lot mo…
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May 2, 2022
Episode 202 | Tommy Rivers Puzey
I’m not even sure how to set up this episode with Tommy Rivers Puzey so I’ll just tell you that it’s a long, winding, and at times heavy conversation with someone I deeply respect and admire about life, death, cancer, identity, hope, potential, love, gratitude, and more that I feel privileged to have had in person and that I am honored to share here with all of you.
We recorded this episode the day after this year’s Boston Marathon, which Tommy finished in 6:31:54. For those of you who don’t know, Tommy wears a lot of hats: he’s a husband and a father, a philosopher and physical therapist, and mentor and inspiration to so many, myself included. He’s also an incredible endurance athlete with a resume that’s too long to list here but, for context, in 2017 Tommy finished 16th at Boston in 2:18:20. Fast forward to the summer of 2020, and Tommy was fighting for his life in an Arizona hospital after being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. He spent week…
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Apr 25, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 3
In the third installment of Common Ground, a monthly podcast co-hosted by me and Dinee Dorame of the Grounded Podcast, we catch up on all things Boston Marathon, talk a little bit about the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, look ahead to what’s exciting each of us in the month of May, and more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a go-fast shoe for workouts and maybe even racing, look no further than the FuelCell Rebel v2. It’s lightweight, low to the ground and incredibly lively. It’s available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at your local run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the podcast and treat yourself to a pair of goodr sunglasses, head over to goodr.com/MARIO or enter the code MARIO15 at checkout for 15% off your order. Look good, run goodr!
Click here for complete show notes, sign up here to get the morning shakeout email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Tuesda…
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Apr 18, 2022
Episode 201 | Racers' Roundtable
I’m excited to share the Racers’ Roundtable I hosted at Tracksmith’s Trackhouse this past Friday with guests Tommie Runz, Erica Stanley-Dottin, Mick Iacofano, Caroline Williams, Ken Rideout, Katie Kellner, and Colin Bennie. A mix of first-timers and veterans, elites and age-group competitors, locals and out of towners, we talked all things Boston Marathon: how the Boston mindset is different from other marathons, dealing with pre-race excitement, lessons learned from past Boston experiences, what they were most looking forward to on race day, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith crafts performance running apparel, inspiring publications, and distinct experiences that allow runners to indulge in the sport’s rich culture. When you shop at tracksmith.com and use the code Mario22 when you check out, you’ll get free shipping on your order and 5% of your purchase will go to the Tracksmith Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to give mor…
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Apr 11, 2022
Episode 200 | Mario Fraioli
This week I sit down with Chris Douglas, my right-hand man and sponsorship director for the morning shakeout, and he interviews me for the 200th episode of the podcast. In this conversation we take a trip down memory lane and discuss some notable episodes, we talk about how the show has evolved and grown over the past 4+ years, I explain how the pandemic has affected the past 100 episodes for better and for worse, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith crafts performance running apparel, inspiring publications, and distinct experiences that allow runners to indulge in the sport’s rich culture. When you shop at tracksmith.com and use the code Mario22 when you check out, you’ll get free shipping on your order and 5% of your purchase will go to the Tracksmith Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to give more people the opportunity to participate in Track & Field.
— Precision Fuel & Hydration. I’ve been a devotee to Precision products f…
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Apr 4, 2022
Episode 199 | Ben Rosario and Matt Fitzgerald
This week on the podcast I had an awesome conversation with Ben Rosario, head coach of HOKA Northern Arizona Elite, and Matt Fitzgerald, co-founder of 80/20 Endurance and prolific author of endurance sports titles, about their new book, Run Like A Pro (Even If You’re Slow), which was recently published. This was more of a Coaches Corner discussion than my typical interview-style show and in it we discussed what amateur runners can learn from their professional counterparts while covering topics like training volume, recovery, nutrition, having a champion’s mindset, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith crafts performance running apparel, inspiring publications, and distinct experiences that allow runners to indulge in the sport’s rich culture. When you shop at tracksmith.com and use the code Mario22 when you check out, you’ll get free shipping on your order and 5% of your purchase will go to the Tracksmith Foundation, a nonprofit th…
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Mar 28, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 2
We are back with the second installment of our monthly cross-cast series that I’m co-hosting with Dinee Dorame of the Grounded Podcast, and in this episode we…well, we cover a lot of ground! We talk about music we’ve been enjoying, discuss some recent events that excited us, like the world indoor championships in Serbia, the NYC Half Marathon, as well as the the upcoming Boston Marathon. We talked about where we’re each at in our respective running journeys right now, brought up some recent developments in the running industry, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a go-fast shoe for workouts and maybe even racing, look no further than the FuelCell Rebel v2. It’s lightweight, low to the ground and incredibly lively. It’s available in both men’s and women’s sizes on newbalance.com or at your local run specialty retail store.
— Goodr: If you want to support the podcast and treat yourself to a pair of goo…
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Mar 21, 2022
Episode 198 | Nell Rojas
I recently had a conversation with Nell Rojas, 6th-place finisher and top American at last fall’s Boston Marathon. She’s currently getting ready to line up for this year’s race on April 18. We covered a lot in this one. Nell filled me in on where she’s at in her Boston prep and how it’s differing from her approach last fall. We talk about the role running has played in her life and how that’s evolved over the years. We discussed identity and why “runner” isn’t even one of the first ways Nell introduces herself. She told me about her relationship to her dad and coach, the legendary Ric Rojas, we talked coaching and what she’s learned from the amateur athletes she’s worked with, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. If you’re looking for a go-fast shoe for workouts and maybe even racing, look no further than the FuelCell Rebel v2. It’s lightweight, low to the ground and incredibly lively. It’s available in both men’s and…
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Mar 14, 2022
Episode 197 | Phil Shin
This conversation with Phil Shin is one of the most meaningful and impactful exchanges I’ve ever had for the podcast. Please listen to it—all 2 hours of it. Phil is 51 years old, he’s a husband a a father, he’s a Boston Marathon qualifier, and he is out-running cancer one mile at a time. He’s actually going to run this year’s race on April 18 with his liver donor and friend Mark Murphy, who will be running his first marathon. Phil’s story is incredible, his message is inspiring, and I feel so honored to have the opportunity to share this episode with you.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The Fresh Foam 1080 v11 is an absolute workhorse and has been been my go-to trainer for some time now. When I want to go fast, the FuelCell Rebel v2 finds its way on my feet. Recovery days? Fresh Foam More v3 all the way. Race day? FuelCell RC Elite v2. Check 'em all out at your local run specialty store or on newbalance.com and consider adding a pair (or two!) to…
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Mar 7, 2022
Episode 196 | Russell Dinkins
I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Russell Dinkins for a while now and it did not disappoint. Over the past couple of years this man has helped saved the men’s track and field programs at Brown University, Clemson, the University of Minnesota, and William and Mary. He’s now the executive director of the Tracksmith Foundation, where he will continue that work while also helping create more opportunities and inspire broader participation in track and field through various forms of advocacy and assistance. Russell is also an incredible athlete: he competed at Princeton, where he was a 400- and 800-meter runner and a five-time Ivy League individual champion, and he’s still getting after it and competing on the track into his 30s.
In this conversation we talked about the path he’s followed in the sport, track and field as a vehicle for diversity and educational access, how his relationship to running has evolved over the years, what he hopes to achieve through his w…
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Feb 28, 2022
Common Ground | Episode 1
I’m super excited to share the first episode in what will be a monthly series I’m co-hosting with Dinée Dorame of the Grounded Podcast. I met Dinée a little over a year ago through the Tracksmith Fellowship Program and I’ve been serving as her mentor ever since. In that time we’ve become good friends, I’ve hosted her on my show, she’s had me on hers, and this new series feels like a natural evolution of what we’re both doing in our respective spaces.
We’re calling it Common Ground and it will be a little bit of everything from two people who come from very different backgrounds and upbringings but share a mutual love of all things running (and podcasting, and music, and plenty of other stuff too). In these episodes we’ll catch up with one another about where we’re at in our respective podcasting and running journeys, we’ll discuss what’s exciting us in the sport, we’ll talk about issues in the community and industry, we’ll riff on music that we’ve bee…
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Feb 21, 2022
Episode 195 | Hellah Sidibe
Hellah Sidibe is a former pro soccer player turned runner who strives to inspire and change lives through sharing his life experiences. Last year he became the first Black man to run across the United States, which he did in a quick 84 days, and he’s been running every day since May 15, 2017. His HellahGood YouTube channel has nearly 275 thousand subscribers, of which I am one of, and his energy and enthusiasm for running, life, and tackling big challenges is incredibly infectious.
In this conversation, I got to know Hellah a bit better and hear more about his story. He told me about coming to the U.S. from Mali as a kid and what it was like settling into his new country. Hellah told me about playing soccer throughout his life and how running, until just a few years ago, was something that he viewed as a form of punishment. He explained how making the commitment nearly five years ago to run 10 minutes a day for 2 weeks snowballed into something bigger than he could ever imagined,…
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Feb 14, 2022
Episode 194 | Amy Leedham
Amy Leedham is my friend, she’s one of my athletes, she’s a wife and a mom, and a badass runner to boot. We recorded this conversation in-person a couple weeks ago and I’m excited to share it with you. Amy told me about her nickname, The Punisher, and how it came to be, we dig into different elements of her personality and how they manifest in various aspects of her life, and we discuss how her relationship to running has evolved over the years, in particular the past two. Amy also describes the challenges she faced in returning to running after giving birth to her daughter Aila, she shares her best advice for other mothers who might find themselves in a similar situation, she told me how she’s developed a renewed sense of gratitude for being able to run, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith is a brand for committed runners like you and me. They aim to celebrate, support and contribute to running’s distinct culture in everything that…
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Feb 7, 2022
Episode 193 | Ted Metellus
Ted Metellus is my former Competitor Group colleague, current race director for the New York City Marathon, and just one of the best people in the entire running industry. Ted, who was born and raised in the Bronx, is the first Black race director of an Abbott World Marathon Majors event. He’s also an avid runner with 34 half marathons and two marathons to his credit.
In this episode, we cover all sorts of ground. I learned when running first came into Ted’s life, how his relationship to it has evolved over the years, and what it’s meant to him over the past two years that we’ve been navigating a pandemic. Ted told me about the path he’s followed in event operations, logistics, and management, what it’s like being a Black man in an overwhelmingly white sport and industry, what he means when he says that “you can’t teach care,” and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith is a brand for committed runners like you and me. They ai…
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Jan 31, 2022
Episode 192 | Ask Mario Anything #10
This week on the podcast I’m answering listener questions in the first and last Ask Mario Anything episode of 2022. (Fear not! You can still submit questions for me to answer on the podcast but this monthly installment of the show will be taking on a new format the rest of the year, which I go into more detail about at the beginning of this episode.) On the other side of the mic for this one, once again, is Chris Douglas, my right-hand man and sponsorship director for the morning shakeout.
In this episode, I answered questions about some of the more challenging guests I’ve had on the podcast, strength training, drills, long runs, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— New Balance. The Fresh Foam 1080 v11 is an absolute workhorse and has been been my go-to trainer for some time now. When I want to go fast, the FuelCell Rebel v2 finds its way on my feet. Recovery days? Fresh Foam More v3 all the way. Race day? FuelCell RC Elite v2. Check 'em all out at your local…
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Jan 24, 2022
Episode 191 | Luis Grijalva
This is the first podcast Luis Grijalva has ever been on and he’s got a great story to tell. Luis is a 22-year-old Olympian for Guatemala and finished 12th in the 5000m final in Tokyo, running a personal best of 13:10.09. He now runs professionally for HOKA and recently graduated from Northern Arizona University, where he was a multiple time All-American.
In this conversation, Luis tells his story of coming to the U.S. as a baby, growing up in Fairfield, California, and how getting into running at the age of 14 changed the course of his life. He told me about his experience qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics, navigating the challenges of traveling outside the country as a DACA beneficiary, and what it meant for him to represent not only his home country, but over half a million other Dreamers on the world’s biggest stage. We also discussed his relationship with coach Mike Smith, where he he draws his confidence from, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Reco…
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Jan 17, 2022
Episode 190 | Bolota Asmerom
Bolota Asmerom is an Eritrean-American who has called the United States home since the age of 10. The 43-year-old represented his home country of Eritrea in the 5000m at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. In 2004, he finished third in the 5000m at the U.S. Olympic Trials but couldn’t go to the Games because he didn’t have the Olympic A standard, and in 2008 he finished fourth in the 5000 at the Trials after some last lap contact. All these years later, running is still a huge part of Bolota’s life: he still trains and races locally in the Bay Area where lives, he coaches and advises a handful of athletes, and he’s also the co-founder and co-owner of Renegade Running, a specialty running shop and community hub in Oakland, California—which is actually where we recorded this episode.
In this conversation, which is one of my favorites that I’ve ever had for the podcast, we talk about opening a retail space during the pandemic, creating an inclusive community, and making running an…
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Jan 10, 2022
Episode 189 | Kate Grace
Kate Grace is a lot of things, not least of which is 2016 Olympian in the 800m and one of the top middle-distance runners in the U.S. for much of the past ten years. At the age of 33 she’s running faster than ever and isn’t showing signs of slowing down anytime soon. But there’s so much more to Kate than just her speed: I’ve always respected her for her individuality and outlook on the sport, I appreciate her attitude and longevity as an athlete, and I’m inspired by her confidence but also the fact that she doesn’t try to take herself too seriously.
In this episode, we talk about all of those things and then some, including how she keeps her emotions in check, why she thinks American women have been running so fast in the middle distances the past few years, and a lot more.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith crafts performance running apparel, inspiring publications, and distinct experiences that allow runners to indulge in the sport’s…
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Jan 3, 2022
Episode 188 | Dylan Bowman
I recently got on the mic with my friend Dylan Bowman, who first appeared on the podcast back on Episode 14 in 2018, and we caught up with one another about all sorts of stuff. In this episode, we talk about where we’re at in our respective lives right now, what we both have going on athletically and professionally, where we see certain parts of the industry going in the next few years, and a lot more.
For those of you who don’t know, Dylan is one of the top ultrarunners in the U.S., if not the world. Last year he finished second at the Hardrock 100 Endurance Run, running under the previous course record time, and he’s won or been on the podium at Transgrancanaria, TDS, Ultra-Trail Mt. Fuji, Tarawera, and other big races. He’s also the founder of FreeTrail, a training and media platform dedicated to the life changing sport of trail and ultrarunning, and he also hosts the FreeTrail podcast.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Tracksmith. Tracksmith crafts performance r…
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Dec 27, 2021
Episode 187 | Best of 2021
The 50th episode of the year is a “best of” compilation of highlights from 12 of the most impactful conversations that I’ve had over the past 12 months. It’s an honor and privilege to be in conversation each week with athletes, coaches, advocates, and others who teach me something about running, coaching, or living a better life. In this episode you’ll hear from 13 people whose experiences, insight, and/or advice stood out to me: Alexi Pappas (0:03:25), Craig Curley (0:10:51), Dinée Dorame (0:19:31), Nathan Martin (0:27:21), Keith Kelly (0:32:30), Jorge Maravilla and Stephanie Howe (0:42:08), Mark Coogan (0:51:16), Christine Gould (0:59:31), Alison Mariella Désir (1:05:56), Jon Green (1:14:07), George Hirsch (1:22:53), Alex Varner (1:32:05). I hope these conversations help you see what’s possible for yourself through the lens of running.
This episode is brought to you by:
— Recover Athletics. Recover Athletics has worked with the world's best sports physicians and Ol…
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Dec 21, 2021
Re-Run with Aliphine Tuliamuk
We’re taking the next couple weeks off to recharge so we’re re-running one of my favorite episodes from the early days of the podcast, a conversation I had in May of 2018 with Aliphine Tuliamuk. It was episode 15, I am fairly certain it was Aliphine’s first podcast, and at the time not many people knew her story despite the fact that she was nine-time national champion! Since then she’s added another national championship to her resume—the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials title—and now she’s a household name in American distance running. This is a great episode to revisit if you listened to it a few years ago and certainly one to check out if you didn’t. You’ll learn all about Aliphine’s upbringing in Kenya, how she got into running, what it was like coming to the United States and assimilating to a new country and culture, how she deals with pressure, and a lot more. (You might also want to listen in to episode 102 with Aliphine, which we recorded shortly after she won the…
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Dec 13, 2021
Episode 186 | Ken Rideout
“I think that that’s one of the most important or significant traits that you can have—as a runner, an athlete, a human, a colleague, a dad, a husband—is to be dependable if nothing else. I know I can depend on myself. When I wake up on a race day and I’m like, ‘Man, I really don’t wanna do this, the weather stinks, I don’t feel like I’ve done enough,’ there’s like two voices in my head: that Alpha and Beta, and the Beta’s like, ‘Go back to bed dude, this is crazy. No one gives a crap about this. You’re the only one that cares.’ And then the Alpha’s like, ‘Oh, hell no. We made a commitment to ourselves to show up and show out and deliver the goods and win or die trying and lay it all on the line.’ And it works. Some days you think, ‘Today’s not my day for a race.’ Like I said, the Beta starts telling the Alpha, ‘It’s not our day, we’re not ready,’ and the Alpha’s just like, ‘Dude, we’re going through the routine, we’re warming u…
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Dec 6, 2021
Episode 185 | Ryan Holiday
“To me, what grit is is not despairing and not giving up just because things are really hard or because things are going really, really poorly. The courage to be like, ‘Man, things have fallen apart, this is awful, but I’m going to figure it out, I’m going to keep going.’ To me, hope is one of the most courageous things there is, to continue on, to keep going, to try again after one has failed. There’s almost an element of irrationality in it. I think what runners do—and I forget which runner said this but I’ve always loved the quote—‘it doesn’t always get worse.’ So it’s really bad, you’re on mile 30 or whatever it is of the race, and it feels like your body is about to fall apart and you can’t go on, part of what your mind does is extrapolate out, ‘if it’s bad now, it will obviously get worse from here,’ and that’s actually not the case. You push forward and often it gets better.” Ryan Holiday is a runner and #1 New York Times bestselling autho…
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Nov 29, 2021
Episode 184 | Ask Mario Anything #9
“I’m not a high mileage advocate. I’m not a low mileage advocate. I’m a right mileage advocate. Find the right mileage that works for you—the most miles that you can run without compromising your performance in workouts or races, without compromising your recovery, without compromising your life outside of running, your relationship with your family and friends, work, etc. Find out what that is for you. It’s going to be a little bit different for everyone. There's a huge misnomer out there that, ‘Oh, if I want to be good at the marathon I've got to run over 50 miles a week. Or over 70 miles a week. Or over 100 miles a week,’ whatever it is. Everyone’s got a different idea in their head what they need to be doing; find out what that peak is for you and try to run as many weeks as possible at that volume in the 12-16 weeks leading up to a marathon—not every week, you should cycle, build in rest weeks, that sort of thing—but find that highest sustainable volume for y…
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Nov 22, 2021
Episode 183 | Alex Varner
“It’s hard to look back and see what resulted despite your best efforts. You know, sh*t doesn’t go the way you want it to all the time. You can’t do anything about that. OK, you can feel down—that’s natural—but if you can look back and say, ‘I did my best,’ you shouldn’t have any regrets around that. If you have strong regrets around it, it probably means you weren’t doing your best. There are screw-ups, that happens—that’s being human and living—but if you can forgive yourself for those and overall [say] I put my best for forward, what else can you ask for? What else can you do? That’s all you can do.” It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to share this week’s episode with you. It’s with my friend and sometimes training partner, Alex Varner, and we recently sat down at his kitchen table to continue a conversation that started a few months ago on some runs together about moving on from the sport of running, or at least reevaluating our relationship…
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Nov 15, 2021
Episode 182 | J.M. Thompson
“It’s possible to have a dysfunctional, unhealthy relationship to anything, right? So I would invite people to look at their own relationship to whatever it is they’re doing, whether it’s running or anything, and say, ‘How is this serving me? Or not serving me? Am I doing this to the exclusion of my responsibilities to my family, friends, loved ones, community? Or, in fact, is this practice of running actually foundational in helping me do that?’ My sense is that overall for the majority of runners and athletes it’s the second scenario which is true: that running actually tends to cultivate connection and gratitude and love and the ability to be of service to others. If it stops being that then maybe you want to look at that but I think it’s usually the case that it’s a positive force in people’s lives.” This week’s episode is with J.M. Thompson. He’s an ultrarunner, a clinical psychologist, and author of the new book, Running Is A Kind of Dreaming, a powerful…
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Nov 8, 2021
Episode 181 | Jenny Maxwell
“I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was a little girl I was selling lollipops at school. I had this relative who had these big lollipops, the 8-inch ones that were really colorful but not healthy to eat, but I would go to school—as long as they let me—selling lollipops until they said no. But I’ve always liked to be a groundbreaker and the thing about me is I don’t operate out of a mode of fear. I just don’t operate out of fear. I never have. And you have to have that to be an entrepreneur—you can’t have a lot of fear. Success is going to be hard to come by.” This week’s episode is with Jenny Maxwell. She’s the founder and CEO of JAMBAR, an energy bar for promoting community and eating healthy organic nutrition. This isn’t Jenny’s first foray into the energy bar market: she and her late husband Brian practically created it in the mid-1980s when they launched Powerbar, which they worked on together for 15 years until it was acquired by Nestle…
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Nov 1, 2021
Episode 180 | Leidy Klotz
“The thing that I’ve realized I like about competitiveness is that, yes, it’s fun to beat other people in a soccer game and that’s one measure, but the real thing that’s rewarding is continuously getting better at something, or continuously working at something and putting in this work and seeing what the outputs are and continuing to try to do better. And even now I think I’m hopefully not at a permanent stage where I’m going backwards—but recovering from an injury—and I’m not running any of the same speeds that I have run in the past, but I’m working at it and I find it really rewarding to be better than I was last week.” This week’s conversation is a little different from the ones I usually have for the show. It’s with Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies how we transform things from how they are to how we want them to be. He’s the author of the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, which is the spark that set off th…
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Oct 25, 2021
Episode 179 | George Hirsch
“If there’s stressful stuff, and who doesn’t have that, the run eases it. It absolutely does. We hear this, of course, from lots of people, and more and more people are figuring out what’s going on in terms of brain chemistry—it eases anxiety and stress, I’m talking about serious stress with people, clinical anxiety—but I feel that. And so years and years ago I kind of assumed a mantra, if you will, and that is you come home from work and haven’t run, and it is, ‘When in doubt, do it.’ And it’s served me well, and it still doesn’t mean I haven’t missed some days, but if I’m kind of on the fence, I’m a little tired, I don’t feel up to it, a lot on my mind—get out the door, get in some miles, and I always find that I’m better off for it.” The 50th running of the New York City Marathon is just a couple weekends away and who better to talk to about it than George Hirsch, chairman of the New York Road Runners, and someone who has been involved with the…
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Oct 18, 2021
Episode 178 | Dana Giordano
“My goals and expectations when I joined the team was committing to the Olympic Trials…but we were all changed through the pandemic. Who I am as a 24-year-old joining a professional team versus me as a 27-year-old kind of living through this high-end running thing, one of my number one goals is I don’t want to just be stuck on the domestic mile circuit. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right. And I was pretty bummed that my body tipped the other end of the scale and couldn’t quite figure it out…I think if I committed to keep going and training in the environment that I was in, it kind of would have been the same cycle, so I was like, ‘You know what, this might not be the most prudent move, but I’m going to end this and start a new chapter,’ so that’s kind of what I’ve been doing this summer, is figuring out what that chapter looks like.” My conversation this week is with Dana Giordano. She’s a top middle distance runner on the track who competed in the…
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Oct 11, 2021
Episode 177 | Bill Rodgers
“Talent is an interesting question. What is it really? It means, can you avoid injuries? It means, can you back off? When you get crushed, will you come back? I didn’t like that part. I think it’s a lot of different things. It’s not maybe a physical thing, but it’s a mental thing. When you see a lot of these athletes—a lot of you are here because you have that wherewithal. And maybe you got beat up, because we all get beat up in this sport—it’s part of it, it’s like a rite of passage. It’s just part of it. But it’s OK, it’s good.”This week on the podcast I’m excited to share a wide-ranging conversation I had this past Saturday with the legendary Bill Rodgers at Tracksmith’s Trackhouse in Boston. Bill is a hero of mine and I’ve long wanted to have him on the show and Boston Marathon weekend turned out to be the perfect opportunity for it. In this conversation, we talk all things Boston, of course, but also get Bill’s thoughts on his career, talent, trai…
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Oct 4, 2021
Episode 176 | Ask Mario Anything #8
“I mean, the work’s done at this point. I can’t gain any appreciable fitness between now and race day. I could screw up a lot if I’m not careful and that’s the biggest thing I’m trying to keep an eye on at this point, is when I have those moments where doubt sets in—because it happens to all of us, even if we’re really well prepared—where you’re like, ‘Should I do another mile or two?’ or ‘Should I do another rep?’ and that’s where you have to have the confidence to say, ‘No, it’s not going to make a difference.’ The difference is in the last 10-12 weeks, it’s not in 10 or 12 more miles, or 10 or 12 more minutes, or 1 or 2 more reps. You just gotta trust it at this point. And, I think having that attitude helps me carry the right amount of confidence into race day.” This week on the podcast I’m answering listener questions in the third Ask Mario Anything episode of 2021. (You can check out the first two here and here.) On the other side of the…
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Sep 27, 2021
Episode 175 | Peter Bromka
“If all that mattered to me was [to run] the best time possible in two weeks then yes, I’d probably go into the other field and just run with some people who I know are right around my fitness level, but luckily I’ve had fun at Boston a couple times and I realize that’s not all there is. It’s not only about squeaking out every second, it’s about having an awesome experience and I’m pretty pumped to compete. I think in the best way possible, when I think about that last stretch by BU and how horrible it is and how painful it can be to try to muster…you’ve got like two miles to go and you’re like, ‘I just wanna be done.’ My dream would be that there’s someone ahead of me and they’re another Masters runner that has a number on their back and I’m like, ‘I gotta catch that guy,’ because that’s what also makes it super fun.” Peter Bromka, who first appeared on Episode 92 of the podcast back in 2019, comes back on the show to geek out on all things Boston…
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Sep 20, 2021
Re-run with Sanjay Rawal
“It’s really inspiring to see someone push themselves and challenge themselves…Bringing out the achievements of people who are fighting the odds, and really putting into context today’s race, even for a pro, because even a pro is overcoming something tremendous each race they do—it’s never rosy. And understanding that hardship, I think, will give people context into the meaning of a particular race for a particular runner, whether they’re an amateur or the world’s best.” Sanjay Rawal is a New York City-based runner and filmmaker. At the time of this conversation in 2018 he had just released a film called 3100: Run and Become, which takes an intimate look at one of the most unique foot races on the planet, The Sri Chinmoy 3100-Mile Self-Transcendence Race. That race—which is the longest certified road race in the world—is actually going on right now in Queens, New York. Participants are attempting to complete 3100 miles in 52 days (or less) around the same half-mi…
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Sep 13, 2021
Episode 174 | Jon Greene
“My goal with coaching people is to teach them and have them understand why we’re doing what we’re doing so if I ever stop coaching them, or for whatever reason we part ways, that they are basically able to coach themselves the same way I was coaching them previously. My job is to eliminate my own job, I guess.” Jon Green is the 26-year-old coach of Olympic marathon bronze medalist Molly Seidel. He is also the head coach of Atalanta NYC, a New York City-based nonprofit that employs and supports professional female runners that are training to achieve their goals while also serving as core mentors for its youth mentoring program. As an athlete, Jon was an All-American at Georgetown University and ran professionally for a brief period of time before turning his attention to coaching. In this conversation, we go deep into Jon’s background as an athlete, we talk about our shared Central Massachusetts roots, and then turn our attention to coaching, where we discuss working with Mo…
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Sep 6, 2021
Episode 173 | Sabrina Little
“So in the classical tradition they often ask the question of what role athletics can play in the good life. And typically the way it is described is that it has a role in character development in sort of helping us to be more well-ordered such that we can flourish longterm. But they also express a concern that if you are having an outsized focus on athletics that it can be bad, both physically for your constitution, but also for your character. There are ways of participating in sport that don’t form you in the right way and so I’ve wondered about my relationship with running in terms of the sort of life that I want to have, in terms of the sort of life that’s suited to what it means to be a human and flourish, and I just don’t think sports has been an unqualified good in my own formation. I mean, there are certain qualities that are reinforced that are not…I mean, envy is the big example that I give, or a kind of intemperance, having an outsized affection for sport that c…
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Aug 30, 2021
Episode 172 | Brad Stulberg
“So much of groundedness is about building a life that you want to live in right now and those things are often in opposition to striving, because when you’re striving, when you’re really going toward something, it’s very easy to forget about watering the roots, tending to the base, whatever it is. But when you accomplish or you fail to do that thing, if you haven’t been taking care of all this other stuff, then there’s still nothing there and you still fill empty. So you could also argue it’s just about really focusing on what is there right now, what’s in front of you, and it’s not to say you become a zen monk that’s totally content. I would argue that it’s still great to strive but the texture of the striving changes, so instead of striving from a pace of compulsion—‘I need to win this and if I don’t I’m a failure’ or ‘I need to hit the best-seller list and if I don’t something’s wrong’—it’s much more that this is a great goal but it’s a…
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Aug 23, 2021
Re-Run with Mario Mendoza
“I think for me it ties back to seeing myself as more than just a runner but [as] a complete person in mind, body, soul. I’ve just found that when all the parts of who I am are aligned and enjoying everything then really the results, they’re going to come and you’re more patient for them—you’re not dependent on them to have this joy and this fun time being out there putting in the work. In my opinion, that become way more important than the fact that you’re going to go and hit these certain paces and you’re going to put in this certain amount of training to equal this sort of result. So there was definitely a transition there for me, where it’s like, ‘Hey, if I have found complete joy in this whole process, then the results will come.’ Some day they’re going to come, some day I’m going to have that breakthrough, but at least I’m already now enjoying where I’m at today.” I’ve been taking a brief break from recording new episodes of the podcast these pas…
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Aug 16, 2021
Crossover Episode: Mario Fraioli on the Grounded Podcast with Dinée Dorame
“The hardest step in anything is to start—that’s the hardest step. The second hardest thing is to stay with it. That sounds really obvious but I think keeping those two things in mind—you can’t stay with it until you start, so 1. Just get started, and then 2. When you stay with it, you’ll have days when you want to quit, and you’re like, ‘Is this worth it?’ whether it’s podcasting, whether it’s continuing on with the run, whether it’s being in a relationship. Staying with it is hard but that’s the second hardest part and you’ve got to keep working through that and I think having people who can help you with that, whether it’s in a mentorship role, whether it’s a training partner, or a partner, find those people, because I think it’s a lot easier to get through things—whatever it is—when you’ve got support from others.”Trying something a little different this week: I’m sharing a special crossover episode of the Grounded Podcast with Dinée Dor…
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Aug 10, 2021
Episode 171 | Ask Mario Anything #7
“A lot of athletes—especially when things are going really well—the last thing they want to do is take a break, even if their goal race is in the rearview. Trust me on this: You want to take your breaks as seriously as your training. It’s much better to take a planned break and be a little grumpy about it at the beginning than be forced to take a break sometime down the road because you’re injured, burned out, sick, overtrained, whatever it may be. I see this all the time, not only with athletes that I work with but people who reach out to me with questions, and people I train with—when things are going good, you want to keep them going, but we’re human beings. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, how good you are, we all need breaks. You need breaks to absorb training, you need breaks to shut things down mentally as much as physically, especially if you’re someone who’s doing hard workouts and long runs and always building toward the next goal. That takes a l…
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Aug 2, 2021
Episode 170 | Noah Droddy
“I think it’s because we’re always measuring ourselves—everything we do is measured. You go out for an easy run, you see your pace, you compare it to how fast you ran yesterday. You go to a race, you finish 10th, or you’re a minute off your PB—or you PB by a minute and you’re ecstatic. You’re always comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and who you want to be in the future. And then while you’re comparing yourself to you, you’re also comparing yourself to other people who are doing the same things that you do. You see so and so run amazing and say, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ but [then] you ask yourself, ‘Why am I not running amazing?’ You’re just always asking yourself these questions and I think measuring yourself in that way really leads you to…yeah, it’s not to prescribe too much self worth to the numbers. And just being like, ‘OK, if I could just run 2:10 in the marathon I’ll be happier,” and it doesn’t feel that way because then you run…
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Jul 27, 2021
Episode 169 | Fred Huxham
“If you get me talking about things that happened in college or I think about races in college I can just spiral in my own head and get frustrated and kind of disappointed with myself in the way things turned out. It’s definitely in the back of my mind. I would like to prove to myself that I do belong, whether it be at the NCAA level or the professional level, I just believe inherently that I am talented enough to do it. I just have to be patient and let it kind of come to me rather than go searching for it…I think Peachtree, although it’s just one result and doesn’t mean all that much in the grand scheme of the running world, it has meant a lot for me and validating what I’ve been doing for the last year and half, two years.” This is Fred Huxham’s first podcast and I am super excited to introduce him to you. Fred, who is 25 years old, just placed second at the Peachtree Road Race on July 4 in 28:45. That race was the 10K national championships and he finished just two…
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Jul 19, 2021
Episode 168 | Alison Desir
“What the marathon experience—that first marathon experience—did for me, was it gave me a perspective shift on life, which, wow, that sounds really lofty hearing myself say it back, but truly, everything was like so muddied and I couldn’t pull myself out. I had gone to really good schools and done all of the things I was supposed to do but I couldn’t pull myself out of feeling terrible and feeling like I was a failure and there was no blueprint of, ‘What am I supposed to do with my life?’ But the marathon gave me this very concrete training plan—like in 16 weeks, if you do this, you will get this—and never in my life outside of school had something been so prescriptive and easy. I mean, [it was] really difficult because you have to do that work but if even a stranger can promise me that if I do this work and I get that, then like f*ck yeah, I’m gonna do this. So I stuck to that training plan like it was my bible and what I saw was that it wasn’t magic but these ph…
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Jul 13, 2021
Episode 167 | Amby Burfoot
“One day we had a bad basketball practice. The coach was pissed off at us. He literally made us run the cross-country course as punishment. I was the worst player on the JV basketball team but I came back first when we had to run 3 miles in cross country and I just said, ‘Hey, maybe I should switch sports instead of fighting to be bad.’ And so I switched to running and running seemed to be a place where an obsessive personality and an infinite amount of work payed some benefits—and it did for me. I don't think it's quite as important now as I did 50 years ago but there's no replacement for hard work, is there?” Amby Burfoot is a legend in running and someone I’ve looked up to and admired since I first got my start in the sport over 20 years ago. A native of Connecticut, Amby won the 1968 Boston Marathon when he was a senior at Wesleyan University. After his competitive running career ended, he worked at Runner’s World, where he spent 25 years as an editor before retiring…
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Jul 6, 2021
Episode 166 | Christine Gould
“When I was out there, baking along the lake where it was really hot, all I was really trying to do was just keep moving forward, and whatever that entailed. So I was just looking ahead to the next aid station—like, what can I do to keep moving forward? It really became that simple, which, for as busy as my brain can be sometimes with thinking, is surprising because I really didn’t think much beyond that because I just knew how hot it was, and how else was I going to get to the finish line? I just have to move forward…It’s not always—I think we forget this as competitive athletes that all have goals—but it’s not always about the result too, it’s just sometimes how you do the thing and get across the line. We always learn infinitely more from the struggles than we do from our successes.” We are back with a new episode of the podcast after a brief hiatus and my guest this week is a really special one: it’s my favorite person in the entire world, my best friend and b…
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Jun 15, 2021
Episode 165 | Mark Coogan
“It's not just one workout that's going to make you have a good race. That's pretty simple. I've more come to the conclusion that I'd rather do 20 B+ workouts over 10 weeks instead of having four A+ workouts and then just go into a race. I think if I can get the consistency of this B+ type workout—when I do those, I feel like we're not stressing the body so hard that we're going to get injured—I feel like we're improving, getting physically better as a runner, but we're not getting as many little injuries or dinged up, or just soreness. And I feel like when we do that and then go to a race and try to do an A+ [effort] in the race, it just seems to be working a lot better for me. So I just think being really consistent over a long period of time, you know, you don't have to have any of these super duper workouts to prove who you are.”Mark Coogan is the coach of New Balance Boston Elite. His squad will be competing at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, beginning on June 1…
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Jun 7, 2021
Episode 164 | Lauren Hurley
“When I was doing triathlon I would get a workout and I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t do that. That’s too hard. No way.’ Now Tom tells me this workout and I’m like, ‘You’re crazy, but let’s go for it. Let’s try it.’ Because I don’t care. I don’t care if I fail. So I think that’s a huge thing for people. It’s like as soon as you step away from that fear of failing you open yourself up to so many things—and for so long that just held me back. Because really, and it’s so cliche, but anything is possible. And it’s been a big lesson I’ve learned throughout this short little running journey I’ve done and I’m gonna carry that through the trials. Do I think I’m gonna make the Olympics? No. But do I think I can run the Olympic standard? Yeah, I do. And I’m not gonna tell myself I can’t, you know? So that’s gonna be cool and exciting and I’m gonna carry that to Eugene.” Lauren Hurley is a friend of mine and it’s been super fun to watch her improv…
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May 31, 2021
Episode 163 | Thomas Reiss
“Running has been a big factor in my life. Running made me start my own business, I met my wife because of running—that’s how I ended up here. So running has always been a big factor in my life. I think that’s why I still enjoy running at my age versus just being done with it. I know so many guys who were really fast and they’re like, ‘I’m done, I don’t wanna run anymore. Why are you still running?’ [It’s because] I still love it—it has become part of me.” I first met Thomas Reiss at the Leadville 100 back in 2017 when he was crewing and pacing for our mutual friend, Brett Rivers, who I was coaching at the time. I knew Thomas as a veteran ultrarunner who had experienced some success in the sport but also that he was a badass designer whose logo and branding work I was familiar with and admired. I’ve been wanting to have a long conversation with him ever since and this one did not disappoint. Thomas, who is 53 years old, is a husband and dad to two teenage boys…
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May 24, 2021
Episode 162 | Abdi Abdirahman
“People know me as Abdi the distance runner, the funny guy, just outgoing, and that's all good, but they don't know the reason I came to the U.S.—how did I end up here, what was my choice, that struggle behind me getting here, at the end of the day, your parents, your family, what they've been through to get here. And that's the difficult part of the book, because that just brings back some memories because of the civil war in Somalia. It’s not like one day I woke up and said, ‘Hey, I'm going to go to America.’ It wasn't that easy. It was one day you woke up and you don't know what the future holds for you, you don't know where you're going to get your next meal, what happened, because it was a civil war. At the end of the day I'm thankful for everything that I've been through, and it's made me the person who I am today, but it wasn't the easiest though.” Abdi Abdirahman is one of my favorite people in the sport and I am super excited to share this episode with you. The 44-…
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May 17, 2021
Episode 161 | Aaron and Joshua Potts
“What we're doing, it's for the culture. It's not ultimately about trying to get money. We want to push the track and field culture forward. We want it to be more entertaining, we want it to be more fun. We're doing this for the athletes. And with both of us being athletes before, we understand those struggles and, I don't know, I'm really big on believing that track and field is a stage, it's an amazing sport, but the culture needs to be continually developed and advanced so we can showcase that—and that's the mission, it's something that's not about getting subscriptions or anything. We're really genuine and just want to push the culture forward and make track more of a mainstream sport.” Aaron and Joshua Potts are the guys behind The Running Report, a media outlet produced “for culture and by the culture.” They also co-host the 2 Black Runners podcast, where each week they recap the most recent running news, host insightful interviews with athletes from across all discip…
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May 11, 2021
Episode 160 | Stephanie Howe and Jorge Maravilla
“All of this adversity that we've been dealing with, you know, adversity is nothing new to me. I'm officially claiming that I'm the dean of Adversity University. As an immigrant, as a brown-skinned man, as someone—who, Spanish is my first language—having to always assimilate, having to always adapt, having always to comfort others with the comfort of who you are, those are just daily adversity situations and circumstances that I've existed with, so adversity is nothing new. And I've dealt with so many other adversities, from emotional to life, just like everybody else. We all have our stuff and it's how you face and deal with those things that build up your character, you know? It's no different than, ‘Sure, maybe I've placed well in a certain race,’ and honestly I hate to say this but I can care less how well I do or not, but that moment we described earlier where it took me 3-1/2 hours to walk 7 miles while I watched Stephanie win Western States—that to me was very charac…
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May 4, 2021
Episode 159 | Anthony Costales
“Over the last years, the main thing to me when I get into a race, I think what kind of changed my trajectory at least in the road stuff, was that I don’t want to look at times anymore—that was the big thing in the roads: I don’t want to look at times, I just want to compete. People would ask, ‘What are you shooting for?’ I’m like, ‘I just want to compete.’ And that’s kind of been my answer for everyone in most races that I’ve done over the last many years. There’s been a couple times I’ve gone out to a race that the competition, you could tell, wasn’t going to be too stout and you go out for time or a course record on that by yourself, but when there’s big competition, it’s just strictly about competing to me.”Anthony Costales recently won the Canyons 100K in Northern California in 9 hours, 11 minutes, and 40 seconds, defeating a stout field, which earned him a Golden Ticket to this year’s Western States Endurance Run. He’s only a few years into t…
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Apr 26, 2021
Episode 158 | Hillary Allen
“I don’t shy away from the hard stuff anymore. I know I enjoy hard things from a training perspective, [and] like super-challenging races, but that also goes emotionally—I can’t expect to be a better person unless I can work through those things as well, so I’m happy to talk about hard subjects.” Hillary Allen is a professional athlete, coach, teacher, and author of the new book, Out and Back: A Runner’s Story of Survival Against All Odds. She’s a returning guest to the show—be sure to check out her first appearance back on Episode 49 if you haven’t already—and she’s just one of my favorite people to talk to in general. In this conversation, we talked about her book, which was recently released. She told me about how it came to be, what she’s learned from revisiting it recently while she’s been recovering from foot surgery, and how writing became a cathartic exercise for her in recent years. We also talked about her stubborn and independent streaks, why aski…
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Apr 19, 2021
Episode 157 | Ask Mario Anything
“When I talk to the athletes that I coach, the number one thing that I'm trying to pay attention to throughout the course of our relationship is seeing and understanding how this pursuit of running fits into their life and everything else that they've got going on from family to work to hobbies—and yes, you can have other hobbies besides running—and also, how those things are affecting their pursuit of running because if you have a very demanding job, or you have a very active family, or you have a lot of other hobbies, that is not only going to cut into your training time—and I don't say that in a bad way—but it's another variable that you have to account for that can affect how you're feeling on a given day, how well your workout goes, or if you're mentally fresh to race or not. So I think it's important to understand that mix from both sides.”This week on the podcast I’m answering listener questions in the first Ask Mario Anything episode of 2021. On the other side…
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Apr 12, 2021
Episode 156 | Steve Magness
“Most of my life was spent chasing times, mainly because I ran really fast in high school—a 4:01 as you mentioned—and when you un 4:01, you know, it’s always in your head that, ‘Oh man, there’s a second and change that I can get out of my body to get in that elusive, venerated sub-4 club,’ so you think and you obsess over times and I certainly did to an unhealthy degree in my college and a little bit in my post-college life as well. So I think coming to terms with, and realizing and recognizing that that doesn’t really matter anymore, was something that was incredibly freeing for myself.”Steve Magness wears many hats in the worlds of running and performance. He’s been the head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at the University of Houston since 2012 and he’s also worked with numerous professional athletes at the Olympic and world championship level. He’s the coauthor of Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox, both of which he wrote with former po…
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Apr 6, 2021
Episode 155 | Kyle Merber
“Every single day for the last 15 years of my life I had a goal and I was able to tangibly work towards it day in and day out and all of my decisions were guided by the idea that I wanted to achieve this goal. There’s not many other things that are happening in the world or in my life where that exists. I have goals in relationships, I know I’ll have goals in my new work life, and longterm bucket list things I want to cross off but not necessarily things that every single day I’m seeing that input and output to the amount of effort that I’m giving towards it. I think that’s just really unique to track and field and running—I don’t think that even basketball players have that same experience.” Kyle Merber, like last week’s guest, Andrew Bumbalough, is a recently retired professional athlete. He spent his professional career training and racing with the New Jersey New York Track Club and Coach Frank Gagliano, where he put up personal bests of 3:34 in the 1500 and 3:52…
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Mar 29, 2021
Episode 154 | Andrew Bumbalough
“You just run so much when you’re training for the marathon that if you don’t truly love it, you won’t really enjoy it. I think for most of my career prior to that I was so focused on performance and valuing the competition and what it gave me from that standpoint but I think as I transitioned to the marathon I really became interested in this idea of running for running’s sake. And as I started to do that I started to notice other people. You go to a marathon, whether it be Boston or Chicago or wherever, you’re immersed in a sea of runners—you’re starting on the line with forty or fifty thousand other people and everyone has a different story of why they’re there and how they got there.”Andrew Bumbalough is a recently retired professional athlete who spent the entirety of his career training and racing with the Bowerman Track Club, where he put up personal bests ranging from 3:37 for 1500m to 2:10 for the marathon. Amongst his numerous accomplishments, he finished…
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Mar 23, 2021
Episode 153 | Shalane Flanagan
“I’m hoping that my position with Bowerman and what I’m doing is just the beginning of a whole bunch of other women getting into coaching—and especially at this level. I think there’s some great coaches at the collegiate level and high school level and they’ve been doing an amazing job, but I think to take it to this level as well, at the professional level, I feel like there’s very minimal women out there and I’d love to just hopefully be a resource and a mentor to some future women that want to get into coaching. That being said, I don’t have personal coaching goals, I just hope that it’s something even bigger than that—it’s actually a catalyst for a whole bunch of women to be in positions of power and mentoring and leadership and guiding.” Shalane Flanagan hardly needs an introduction, so I’ll keep this short: she is one of the greatest American distance runners of all-time—a 4-time Olympian, an Olympic silver medalist in the 10,000m, world cross countr…
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Mar 15, 2021
Episode 152 | Darcy Budworth
“I think I’m somebody where I grew up in a family of many people, a large family—and then also I grew up Morman, and so I grew up around many families that were very large and also my mom did daycare at our home—and so I’ve always just been around a lot of people and I’ve always had to be somebody that has found my voice among many people while also being friends with everybody. And it’s funny, when I was growing up I always had friends all over the place. I never realized until recently that that continues to be true. I feel like I’m a connector where I love just meeting new people and finding out about new people and then connecting different people with likeminded people, so I definitely think that’s probably the core of my being.” Darcy Budworth is the co-founder and race director of Take The Bridge, which is an underground and unsanctioned series of races that was born in New York City in 2015 and has since spread to numerous other cities around the world. I ra…
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Mar 9, 2021
Episode 151 | Hawi Keflezighi
“I would work around the clock, weekends, because I was passionate, and that's one thing I say to anyone that's passionate about what they do: make sure you do things that are sustainable, because no matter how passionate you are, no matter how much you love your job, if you're doing it 24/7, seven days a week, and you don't give yourself a break just because you love it, it's still work and it will eventually catch up to you. And I did have those moments when I was a one-man operation—I loved it, and that's why I was so quick to hire somebody else on my team, just to make sure we build the infrastructure to sustain ourselves for many years ahead.”Hawi Keflezighi is one of the top agents in all of endurance sports, and one of the nicest guys that I’ve ever known. He is the founder and president of Hawi Management and his agency represents some of the top athletes in track and field, road racing, trail running, and triathlon. His most notable client is his brother Meb, who he h…
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Mar 2, 2021
Episode 150 | Jenna Wrieden
“I think I just learned over time that I have to be able to trust my own instincts and portray whatever I’m saying to an athlete with complete confidence and with complete backing of the head coach because you never want to diverge. And I know sometimes young coaches, they’re so excited to coach, they want to do everything they can that is within themselves to start coaching but you have to remember [that] you have to back your head coach because you’re backing the culture and you’re backing what they’ve created and I think it’s really important to be a really good sidekick ven though you’ve got bigger goals than that. You’ve got to kind of fall in line with that culture and really cultivate it and have confidence in doing that, and over time then you get to come up with your own pillars or your own culture, but it takes years and years and years to do that, I think.” Jenna Wrieden is the assistant coach at HOKA Northern Arizona Elite, where she’s been on staff si…
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Feb 22, 2021
Episode 149 | Keith Kelly
“I don’t know where the desire to win comes from other than the desire to just feel like I’ve done my best and to know that when it’s all said and done that I can’t really have any regrets…The ability to go hard and to hurt yourself, yeah, I think some athletes have it better than others—and I would put myself, maybe I could at times, go fairly deep—and I don’t know really where that comes from. I think it’s one of those things where it was more of a desire just to know I’ve done my best, and if my best wasn’t good enough, which in many times it wasn’t, that’s OK, because then I could walk away and be like, ‘Well, that’s as good as I am.’ And I think knowing that can give any athlete a little sense of peace or a sense of calm.” Keith Kelly and I go back 20 years to when we were both competing on the New England collegiate racing scene. He was an NCAA Division I national Cross Country champion at Providence College and I…well, I participated in some…
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Feb 15, 2021
Episode 148 | Colin Bennie
“There were definitely a number of times where I found myself just trying to analyze every single aspect of what I was doing different from the year before, or what I wasn't doing different from the year before, and why there were any of these discrepancies in how I was running and I think that was the only stretch of time where I let myself get to that point because I realized that it definitely was an unfortunate sort of spiral to find yourself in because the more you think about, ‘Oh man, what am I doing wrong?’ or ‘What do I need to be doing better? Maybe that's why I'm not running so fast.’ There's no shortage and no way to stop yourself from finding more and more things that you can fix—or convince yourself need fixing—even when maybe all it's coming down to is you're spending way too much time in your own head and not just letting the training do what it's supposed to do and go along for the ride because sometimes it's really all you need to do.” Colin Benn…
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Feb 8, 2021
Episode 147 | Rajpaul Pannu
“Running, for me, is an act of a rebellion. There’s subtext in which if there’s a BIPOC person on the starting line and you see a picture of them in a sea of people, I feel like you’re really giving a narrative that goes against the grain in terms of what society is expecting of you or how society views you. So running, for me, is my personal act of rebellion. It is something that goes against the grain as to what you do as a first generation Indian-American. From our background, there is a huge emphasis on education in the sense of becoming a doctor, becoming an engineer—and doing something that I feel like juxtaposes that in a sense of what people expect out of you is rebellion to me.”Rajpaul Pannu recently finished second at the Hoka One One Project Carbon X 2 100K in 6:28:31—it was his debut at the distance and the third fastest time ever run by an American. The 29-year-old is also a 2:17 marathoner and math teacher who is currently splitting his time between Denver,…
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Feb 1, 2021
Episode 146 | Nathan Martin
“I like pushing myself and that's one thing about running, too: You can argue, there's not a crazy amount of technical stuff—like when you get into some of those track events like hurdles and stuff, it’s crazy technical—but, you know, it’s that idea that it's your will versus what your body's kind of telling you, right? Or, in some cases, like you're fighting against somebody else. So just being able to get into a race and say, ‘You know what, it's time to go,’ and just test your body is what I gravitate towards—and don't get me wrong, sometimes I do that and I'm like, ‘Why in the world did I do that? I am in so much pain,’ but a lot of the time it's just awesome that I have the opportunity to do that. I'm not necessarily a person who's going to back down from somebody. Sometimes I'll be cautious, like, ‘OK, this is not the right time to be making these moves.’ But, you know, when it comes down to the last little bit of the race, if I have something in me, I'm g…
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Jan 25, 2021
Episode 145 | Dinée Dorame
“I really try to reflect on why I love running in the first place and really—I’m not trying to be cheesy and fluffy about it—I really love the actual, physical action of running and I think that if you really love that, you will find a way to keep going because that’s ultimately what’s worth it. And I think if you are a slower-paced runner, that’s fine. I’ve learned to own my pace and recognize that I deserve to have goals and even if that goal is knocking just a few seconds off of your mile pace or something like that, and you’re comparing yourself to others on Strava, just keeping in mind that it’s your story and it’s all about you in that moment, and I think, in that sense, that is where I try to center myself and remember that I’m really blessed to be able to do this and I’m really grateful that yes, my feet have a lot of issues, but they also carry me every day across the land. So, I keep those things in mind and remember that there is a brighter future a…
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Jan 18, 2021
Episode 144 | Craig Curley
“I’m responsible for my life and what I want to do in this world. And whatever silly thing that I am good at, I’m going to pursue it and not look back. I believe I could be super fast and I don't want to waste those gifts. And that was kind of my moment of, ‘I'm gonna do this running thing.’ Because in the beginning it was really easy to be like, ‘I quit running, I don’t need to run competitively, I don't need to do any of that.’ But when that happened to me, that event, it changed me in the sense that there's lot of people who have different gifts and they don’t use [them]. And I wanted to make sure that I used my gifts because I think if we all use our gifts we could do something really special, not for ourselves, but for our family, and, if we’re really good, we can do something for our community, wherever we live.”This week's episode is one of my favorite conversations that I’ve ever had for the podcast and I am super excited to share it with all of yo…
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Jan 11, 2021
Episode 143 | Frank Lara
“I think at Furman I ended up doing a lot on my own, just thinking, ‘Oh, I have to do all this stuff to be good.’ So I ended up overdoing a lot of things that I ultimately was kind of wearing myself out trying to get all this stuff done—just in my head to have an edge on everybody. But I think a big factor now is just that I’m letting myself recover and rest and I go into every race feeling super good and super fresh because I have taken the time to focus on letting my body relax and only stressing it out when it needs to be stressed. I think that’s been a big factor...I found that giving myself actual ample time to recover and rest has been the biggest change for me. I think it's a big factor to the success I'm having now.”Frank Lara is a professional runner for the Roots Running Project out of Boulder, Colorado. He also works part-time for Strava as a community management representative. Most recently, Frank paced 20 miles of The Marathon Project at sub-2:09 pace, just…
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Jan 4, 2021
Episode 142 | Alexi Pappas
“If we don’t know what the most important thing to do in a day is, or in a moment, then we will become more like leaves, blowing with every breeze. And so I think there have been times in my life where if I wasn’t clear with myself on my own priorities or my goals then I was behaving more like a leaf and being blown around—and I don’t think we want to be like rocks, where we’re not affected by anything, but I think I’ve grown and try to be more like a tree where there’s some roots but you can still feel the breeze. I say this thing—that tomorrow starts tonight—and I really mean it when I say I just prepare as best I can for the next day or the next thing I’m doing so that I give myself the best chance at attacking what my north star is first.”Alexi Pappas is a professional athlete who holds the Greek national record in the 10,000-meters and competed for Greece at the 2016 Olympic Games. She’s also an award-winning writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared i…
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Dec 28, 2020
Episode 141 | Best of 2020
This week’s episode of the podcast—the last one for 2020—is a “best of” compilation of highlights from 12 of the most impactful conversations I’ve had over the past 12 months. To provide a little context: I put out 47 episodes of the podcast in 2020—totaling almost 100 hours of conversation—and picking out soundbites from only a dozen of them to highlight here was really freaking hard. I literally have notebooks full of stuff that I’ve learned from every single guest and I simply cannot express enough gratitude for all that they’ve shared with me and, in turn, all of you.In this episode you’ll hear from six women and six men whose stories, experiences, wisdom, and insight really stood out to me. They are, in order of episode release date: Fernando Cabada, Laura Schmitt, Nate Jenkins, Mike Smith, Mary Cain, Karen Boen, Faith E. Briggs, Mike Rouse, Brenda Martinez, Kilian Jornet, Diljeet Taylor, and Knox Robinson. These weren’t necessarily the most downloaded epis…
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Dec 21, 2020
Episode 140 | Alex Hutchinson
“It’s not just like you can have a bad race because you get too nervous. No. The very essence of, in the middle of a race, you’re asking yourself, ‘Can I maintain this pace? Can I speed up? Can I slow down?’ And that decision, which you’re asking yourself with every stride essentially, is not answered by, ‘I can’t speed up because some physical parameter is maxed out,’ because it’s not—it’s clearly not, you can keep going. Instead, it’s maxed out by your brain’s assessment of how hard you’re going and whether that is something that is sustainable and will get you to the finish line. And so fundamentally, you make that switch that, ‘Oh no, at every point, unless I collapse on the ground, at every point through a race, it’s been my mind that’s deciding whether I can keep going or whether I can speed up or not.’” Alex Hutchinson is the author of the New York Times best-seller Endure, which is one of my favorite books of the past few years, he’s a…
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Dec 15, 2020
Episode 139 | Knox Robinson
“I started to wonder decades later if running for me was the first time that I had ever had facts ascribed to my name. And I wonder if being lied about and called racial epithets from a young age and to know from age 4 or 5 that I’m living in a society that speaks of you in a way that you know is not accurate and you know is not who yourself to be. And so for an entire lifetime of people lying to you and lying about you, saying you did something that you didn’t do, saying that you were someplace that you weren’t, somebody saying or assuming you would do something or had done something that had never even entered your mind. I think running, and getting times, for the first time, for me, as a teenager, was the first time that I ever had experience with facts, you know what I mean? You can’t lie about your time. You can’t lie about your race. It’s there in the newspaper, in the results section, and I think that that experience was so intoxicating to me, that like, you could…
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Dec 7, 2020
Episode 138 | Chris Miltenberg
“If you’re going to be a good coach, you have to believe you’re really good, right? You have to balance humility with confidence. You have to believe you’re really good. And I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I believe I’m really good. And so, even then I did, even when I was uncertain, so I also did have this false sense of like, ‘Well, they’ve got to hear from me. I’ve got the answers. They’ve got to hear from me.’ None of that matters if you’re not building a connection with each of them every day. I think a lot of it was when I was young, man, [it was] ‘I’m going to put my stamp on this, this is what we’re going to do.’ I wish I could go back and have actually enjoyed it more.” Chris Miltenberg is one of the top collegiate cross-country and track coaches in the United States. He’s currently the director of cross country and track and field at the University of North Carolina, where he took over last year after holding the same position at St…
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Dec 1, 2020
Episode 137 | Ask Mario Anything #5
“I think you should ditch worrying about your heart rate and just go by feel. Easy is a feeling, it is not a number. Sometimes you need parameters if you are prone to running too hard on your easy days but you should be able to ask yourself, ‘Does this feel easy?’ and if the answer is no, you need to back it off a few notches. And even if the answer is yes, there’s no harm in backing it off a notch because an easy run, the purpose of it, is to yes, maybe get in aerobic work but it’s mostly to recover from the quality work that you’re doing and to be able to absorb it. And on a truly easy day, you really can’t go easy enough. I’ll tell my athletes sometimes, ‘I want you a step above walking.’ And that’s going to be different for everyone, or everyone’s perception of that is going to be a little bit different, but the point is, it needs to feel easy, it can’t just be your watch telling you that here’s the number that you’re supposed to be at and it’s easy…
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Nov 23, 2020
Episode 136 | Jae Gruenke
“What I love about running, and what I love even more about running than I ever loved about dancing, is how human it is. It’s a fundamental human gait: We crawl, we walk, we run, technically, apparently, skipping is also another gait, and so when you get better at it, for myself, I just felt more human. At that point in my life already, I had been through so many movement methods in trying to get myself together as a dancer: so much yoga, Klein technique, Gyrotonics, Alexander, Trager, everything that was out there I had done, practically, that I could find, and that was a lot. It all had effects, gave me different sensations. There’s a certain way that I feel after I do yoga, but after I run, I realize I feel more human, as in a member of my species—it’s really pronounced, really profound—and I really love working with that more than anything else.” Jae Gruenke is a highly sought-after expert on running form and technique. She’s also a Feldenkrais Practitioner, founder…
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Nov 16, 2020
Episode 135 | Diljeet Taylor
“There’s things we take for granted, as athletes, as coaches, and have those things taken away from you, you really just realize how much they mean to you and I think every opportunity we get to show up to work, every opportunity we get to showcase our talents, it should be done with gratitude, it should be done through gratitude. Gratitude should be the entry point to all that we do and all that we accomplish in life and I think as long as we keep that as our center focus, your perspective in sport and in life—you know, sport right now but definitely life in the future—it just changes.” Diljeet Taylor is the Associate Director of Cross Country and Track and Field at BYU, where she’s coached since 2016. In 2019, her women’s cross-country team finished second at the NCAA championships—only six points behind Arkansas—and it was the first time the Cougars had been on the podium since 2003. Prior to BYU, Diljeet coached both the men’s and women’s cross country and tra…
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Nov 9, 2020
Episode 134 | Matt Hart
“If the book tells you anything it’s just that there’s this long history from go of this kind of behavior, whether it’s sexist behavior or outright mistreatment of women I guess is probably the biggest one that comes to mind. It has been happening for a long time and when I first started reporting in 2017 or even in 2016 looking into Nike and on another assignment around the Nike ecosystem, I heard these stories that…I just couldn’t, when I first started reporting I couldn’t believe the stories I was hearing. They just seemed like, this must be made up, this is too ridiculous.”Matt Hart is a freelance journalist whose writing covers a wide swath of topics from sports science to adventure and exploration to performance-enhancing drugs, nutrition, evolution and more. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, Adventure, Outside, Men’s Journal, and other publications.Matt has a new book out and we spent the entirety of this conversati…
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Nov 2, 2020
Episode 133 | Carolyn Su
“By nature, diversity is uncomfortable, at least initially, right? Until we can embrace and accept the discomfort of having someone with a different opinion, a different life experience, and different idea, or way of doing things. That part is not trendy or glamorous. We like to think that diverse community—the idea of it is a lot easier to swallow. I think there’s a lot of introspection that needs to be done and we don’t all know how to do that, nor do we have the language, but we need to be willing to listen and learn and not everybody’s ready for that, I don’t think.” Carolyn Su is the creator of the @DiverseWeRun Instagram account, which she launched as a place to highlight runners from different backgrounds and share their stories with a wider audience. I first became aware of Carolyn a few months ago when she was featured in a Runner’s World article along with 10 other BIPOC runners speaking out about their experiences with racism and perceptions of diversity with…
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Oct 26, 2020
Episode 132 | Marquis Bowden
Where’s that work ethic come from? “For sure my grandmother, and I think growing up without a mom and a dad. You know, nothing was ever handed [to me], we had to work for everything. Also just seeing that’s what’s needed to survive in this world is the art of working hard. I don’t expect anything—I just want to work hard. I just take pride with having the magic in things, you know. I just want things to always go well. I know things will not always go well but I think my grandmother and growing up definitely with that chip on my shoulder and just having to work hard.”Marquis Bowden is a 31-year-old runner based in Los Angeles and he first came on my radar several weeks ago when I saw him featured in a film from Tracksmith called Race Day is (still) Sacred. I then started hearing him pop up in my podcast feed, which then sent me down the rabbit hole and landed me on articles about him in both Tempo Journal and Runner’s World, and I just knew we had to have a conversa…
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Oct 19, 2020
Episode 131 | Gary Towne
“What we do on the daily basis to have success in our sport sets you up so well for what you’re going to be doing in the real world. But just the pursuit of success in our sport does so much for success in the real world, I feel like. If you can train as hard we do for a 10K, say, and then go out there and just squeeze every bit of yourself out of yourself for 25 laps and mentally stay engaged that whole way and talk yourself through all the tough points of the race, I mean, you can do anything. Like, I have yard projects that are just daunting sometimes and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got this, you know?’ and it’s all because of my running background. So I feel like, you know, just what we do as runners goes a long way.”Gary Towne is one of the most underrated and under-appreciated collegiate coaches in the United States.Gary has coached cross-country and track at Chico State since 1996 and his Wildcats have been one of the top NCAA Division II programs in the country for ov…
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Oct 12, 2020
Episode 130 | Elle Purrier
“Yeah, I’ve had moments of like, ‘Wow, this is really happening.’ And so that’s pretty cool because I think it’s really important to enjoy those moments. I feel like people are always looking to the next thing and the next goal and that’s a huge part of the sport but I also think it’s really important to sit back and be like, ‘Wow, this is happening right now.’ I think just taking it one step at a time and just enjoying where you are is really important.” Elle Purrier runs professionally for New Balance Boston. The 25-year-old represented the United States at the 2019 world championships in Doha, where she finished 11th in the 5000m with a personal best of 14:58.17. Indoors this past winter, she broke the American record in the mile at the Millrose Games, running 4:16.85 in one of the most exciting races I’ve watched in quite some time. We covered some good ground in this conversation. Elle told me how she’s gone about her business during the pandemic and aft…
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Oct 5, 2020
Episode 129 | Kilian Jornet
“I think that’s probably what my mother said about being self-destructive: that I go until it breaks. I probably could start to find this balance much before but I’m just pushing it, pushing it, pushing it until it’s too late and then, like, ‘OK, or I die, or I need to change.’ And it goes up to that point. I hope that all these chapters are closed and that now the balance is here.”Kilian Jornet is one of the greatest endurance athletes of all-time. The 32-year-old Catalonian has won major ultramarathons like Western States, UTMB, Hardrock and others, he’s captured multiple world titles in ski mountaineering, and he holds fastest known times up and down Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, Denali, Everest, and other mountains.In this conversation we talked about how he’s changed his training focus during the pandemic and the biggest lessons he’s learned from taking a new approach, his relationship with competition and how it’s changed over the years, and how he thinks abo…
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Sep 28, 2020
Episode 128 | Brett Bartholomew
"You gotta go do it. Lean into the unknown. We have this term, especially when I work with football players, called contact adaptation. There’s a reason they had training camp prior to the season—it’s not just so they could squeeze in extra games, it’s so they can get used to hitting one another and what have you and that actually can decrease the risk of injury. Well, none of these coaches now have contact adaptation. They don’t expose themselves to anything, which leads to a higher likelihood of breakdown. The dose makes the poison. You’re all leaders in different contexts but you’re not leading if you don’t actually lead anybody and nobody can find you. You don’t have to coach world beaters, you don’t have to coach all day every day for 60 years—that kind of experience can be just as toxic as no experience at all—but you do have to lead somebody, you do have to create something. The core lesson there is you have to do. You can’t just ideate and be like ‘Y…
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Sep 21, 2020
Episode 127 | Matt Chittim
“It got to the point where I was looking in the metaphorical mirror and saying to myself, ‘Alright, what am I going to do here? You’re sacrificing your job effectiveness by doing as much as you can with this podcast as often as you can and by not making a decision, you’re making a decision.’ And ultimately it came down to the fact that I just believed that I could turn this into a profession. I didn’t exactly know how to do it or when it would happen but I just started to believe. And ultimately that belief kind of ruled the day for me.” Matt Chittim is the man behind the incredibly popular Rambling Runner podcast, which is a show about dedicated amateur runners who are working hard at the sport but also balancing running with the rest of their lives. On the other end of the spectrum, he also hosted Season 1 of The Road to the Olympic Trials podcast, which followed the training, racing, and experiences of some of America’s best runners as they prepared for the Olympic T…
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Sep 14, 2020
Episode 126 | Brenda Martinez
“I think over the years I started to realize it’s more than just running. There is more to life than just running. Obviously it’s a big part of what I do but I’m starting to realize that we need to make sure our happiness intact. I try to make that a part of my life. I try to stick to my schedule, I try waking up early, I try going to bed early, just trying to be positive. I try not to feel entitled and hopefully I’m this positive light for these kids. I just want to be a good role model more than anything. And I don’t want to ever complain or anything like that.” Brenda Martinez is one of the best middle-distance runners in the world. She’s a got a silver medal in the 800m from the 2013 world championships, she was on the 2016 U.S. Olympic team in the 1500m, she’s won a national title, and has stood atop the podium at numerous other events. The 33-year-old is a native of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., and she ran at UC Riverside where she was a national runner-up in the 1…
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Sep 7, 2020
Episode 125 | Marcus Brown
“Running isn’t always comfortable. It’s not always like some sort of nirvana that you’re jumping out of bed and clicking your heels to do. But having those kind of whys really kind of reframed me rather than having one why of, ‘it must be about the medal, it must be about the time.’ You have different whys…you need a pocket full of whys basically depending on the day to achieve your goals, really.” Marcus Brown, known as @themarathonmarcus on Instagram, is a six-star World Marathon Majors finisher from London. He hosts the A Runner’s Life Podcast, and he’s one of the co-founders of Black Trail Runners, a UK-based community and campaigning group that seeks to increase the inclusion, participation and representation of Black people in trail running. We covered a lot of ground in this episode. Marcus told me about his journey into running, how his relationship with it has evolved over the years, and why he views the marathon as a metaphor for life. We also discussed hi…
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Aug 10, 2020
Episode 124 | Mike Rouse
“I’ve said this many, many times. I’m 67 years old. I got busted when I was 33, got out of prison when I was 34. I spent the first 33 years of my life, Mario, everything was about Mike Rouse. Everything I did. What kind of great car can I have? How much money can I have in the bank? How big a house can I get? How can I have the prettiest girlfriend? How can I have the most success? The best title? How can I have all the things that society depicts as successful? Going to prison put me on a whole ’nuther plane and level. And I realized that the rest of my life I wanted to spend giving back because doing that is so much easier than trying to be somebody that you’re really not. So [for] 33 years, basically the first half of my life, was all about me. And since I was released from prison on February the 27th of 1987, everything’s been about everybody else. Now I can’t say that about every decision I’ve made and every action I’ve done, but for the most part, my life now is…
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Aug 3, 2020
Episode 123 | Sara Hall
“It’s kind of like what you pay attention to grows. What you’re the most aware of—if you’re focused on an area where you’re not measuring up and you’re beating yourself up about that instead of seeing yourself a certain way—Ryan puts it well, where he’s like, ‘The first step in becoming a mentally tough runner is to believe you’re a mentally tough runner.’ It kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think, ‘I’m not tough.’ But the opposite is [that] you start by believing that, then the more you lean into that, and believe in that, it grows.”Sara Hall is one of the best and most versatile distance runners in the United States. She’s won numerous national titles from the mile to the marathon and and she’s the sixth-fastest American female marathoner of all time after her 2:22:16, fifth-place finish at Berlin last fall. Sara is the wife of previous podcast guest, two-time Olympian, and American half-marathon record holder Ryan Hall, and the mo…
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Jul 27, 2020
Episode 122 | David Bracetty
“It was sort of like this coolness of everyone telling you [that] you can be awesome and you’re not aware of it yet, but you’re starting to believe it, you’re starting to follow in the steps of this path you think you’re destined to be on. And that—over and over—any movie with that theme, like goosebumps, I’m hooked. I remember watching an anime, Dragon Ball Z, growing up and I’m just like, ‘Man this guy just keeps getting stronger every time he trains. Holy moly, he’s doing things he never thought he could do.’ And honestly, once I discovered track after football I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been watching all those movies my entire life for.’ I think there’s something hidden deep inside of me that’s kind of special and it’s just a matter of time before it comes out. And I just loved that, and now I would say that’s transitioned to photography and directing. I feel there’s something special that I have to offer that is started and rooted in run…
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Jul 20, 2020
Episode 121 | Ask Mario Anything #4
“Running to me represents freedom and I don’t want to just confine myself to running to numbers, like trying to run to specific mileage on a given day or just running to specific paces every day. There’s a freedom to it and a fluidity that I think is really, really important…Not every workout has to build toward something or target a specific energy system, especially right now where there are no races to build toward. For me, and what I’m trying to preach to my athletes, it’s like, look, you almost gotta think of running right now as more of an outlet than ever. Like sometimes you just need to remind yourself what made this pursuit fun in the first place.”This week on the podcast you get to hear from me in the second Ask Mario Anything episode of 2020. I answered a number of listener questions about coaching, training, nutrition, making adjustments, my past struggles with disordered eating, and more. On the other side of the mic for this one is John Summerford, longtime…
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Jul 13, 2020
Episode 120 | Faith E. Briggs
“Who do we get to see? And therefore, who do we get to believe in? Not only to understand people better, but I think to understand for younger kids especially how they get to travel through the world and what their potential could be. It’s a lot harder to imagine yourself being something if you’ve never seen anyone that looks like you doing it. And we internalize these images of who gets to be a surfer and who doesn’t, or who gets to be a marathoner and who doesn’t, or who gets to be, you know, a politician, and who doesn’t. So yeah, that’s what I mean when I say representation.”Faith E. Briggs is a runner, documentary filmmaker, and advocate currently based in Portland, Oregon, and her work focuses on diversity and representation in the media and outdoors. Her latest film, This Land, is a story about land access told through a journey of inclusion and empowerment, where she and a few other runners ran 150 miles through three U.S. National Monuments and assess what is a…
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Jul 6, 2020
Episode 119 | Devin Kelly
“So many of my relationships with anything or anyone in life that I care about the most is a relationship of high highs and low lows. There’s something deeply human about a relationship with anything that can offer you the greatest joy in your life and also the greatest sorrow or greatest pain. Running grounds me toward that more viscerally perhaps than anything else. It’s a reason why I keep doing it. It more than anything serves as a sort of…I don’t want to say a metaphor for life because it is life, but as a way for me to understand life. So to deny it that is to deny it it’s ultimate complexity and I have to acknowledge that they’re are going be days that running makes me feel more joyful than anything and there are going to be reasons that have to do with running that are the reasons that make me feel maybe ashamed or maybe scared or maybe deeply sad—and that’s hard, but it’s real.” Devin Kelly is a runner, writer, and a poet based in New York City. His work…
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Jun 29, 2020
Episode 118 | Yassine Diboun
“One of the main things too is people just kind of sticking out like a sore thumb. It’s so unbalanced that I think people of color sometimes feel uncomfortable going into this sport that is just predominantly white. I’ve never really let it be any sort of limiting factor for me and I know there a lot of people of color that still feel that trail runners and runners in general that these are my tribe of people, it’s so welcoming. I don’t feel racism in our sport. That doesn’t mean it’s not lacking racial and ethnic diversity but I think the more that we start to see that diversity, the more people will say, ‘Oh, they’re doing it, I can do that too.' It’s the same thing with recovery, it’s when people start seeing other people do it, “Oh if they did it, then I can do it.” And so that’s kind of why I wanted to be more open about my recovery but also I wanted to be more open about this topic too, is to inspire people—like no, you’re welcome here.”This week…
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Jun 22, 2020
Episode 117 | Andy Blow
“I definitely don’t have any regrets in pursuing sport to the level that I did because I think one of the wonderful things about sport is that it’s a very simply definable thing and mostly it’s a quite healthy thing for a young person to go all-in on. I fully went all-in on sport—at one point, I lived, breathed, I must have bored people around me as a lot of us as athletes probably have done with my obsessive level of interest in it. When you go all-in on something, you gain so much learning from that, the kind of learning that you don’t get when you do anything half-assed. If you just go at it fully, full commitment, you learn and you get so much back.”Andy Blow is a friend of mine from the UK. He’s a sports scientist with a degree in Sports and Exercise Science from the University of Bath and he specializes in sweat, dehydration and cramping. A former elite-level triathlete, Andy won an XTERRA age-group world title and he also has multiple top-10 finishes at Ironman a…
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Jun 15, 2020
Episode 116 | Kamilah Journét
“While it’s terrible that it took murder for many runners to wake up to the social injustices that we face in America, I’m excited that it ignited a group of people who know what it means to keep momentum going—because that’s what this movement needs, this movement needs momentum, and every single runner knows what that means when I say that. So, I’m excited to see a group of individuals that has grown over the last few months take action to make change, to influence their networks, to diversify our sport, and to not stop until they can put their hands down and say, 'Wooof, OK, I think I did something today.' And then do it again tomorrow. Because that’s what we do too, so that excites me.” Kamilah Journét is a native of Southern California and began running track in junior high school. She told her coach that she wanted to be a 100m runner, eventually found her way into cross country and, well, let’s just say she discovered her happy place to be somewhere in between…
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Jun 8, 2020
Episode 115 | Karen Boen
“We really bought in—and I really bought in. Like, I really believed that we could be good, I really, truly believed that, and I got them to believe it. In fact, when we hosted our first NE-10 Championship, we had this snow squall come across the field. It was freezing, it was like blowing sidewards, and I bring the women into the sports complex, and I said, ‘Everybody, be quiet.’ I said, ‘Just listen to all the people who are complaining about the weather.’ And they were all listening. I said, ‘You’re going to march out that door and you’re gonna beat every one of those women that has been complaining about the weather because this is our campus.’ And we just like pounded our chests and we walked out there and we won. But I just remember loving it, and believing in it, and I just wanted people to believe in me. And to see it grow like that, it’s like raising a child. It was just so gratifying.”This week’s episode of the podcast is a really special one. I got…
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Jun 1, 2020
Episode 114 | Mary Cain
“I have a lot of goals in running and I have a lot of dreams in running but I feel like I love to run—period, end of sentence. And if that is kind of all I’m ever going to say about my running career from here on out, I’d maybe be a little bit disappointed, but at the end of the day, I want to run when I’m 80. I want to run with my family, I want to run with my friends, I want to run with my dog, and those miles that I can put in going forward, I hope they lead to really cool things on the track, but if they lead to really cool things through, you know, other opportunities that come forward in the future, that would be just as cool. So maybe looking ahead, I’m not trying to write my future out maybe like I used to, I’m just trying to go a little bit more with the flow and see where the run takes me.”Mary Cain is the youngest American athlete ever to represent the United States at the World Championships, which she did in 2013 as a 17-year-old high school phenom, finishi…
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May 25, 2020
Episode 113 | Kate Landau
“I did not enjoy the recognition. I would literally hide from newspaper reporters after races. But I was competitive and I wanted to win and I wanted to set course records and I always wanted to be the best at everything I did, so I think that was what really drove me was: I was the best, in our school, and then I wanted to be the best in the state, and then looked at being the best in the nation potentially. Even back then I loved the process, I always loved to run fast. I’ve never been someone who has been good at taking easy days and I can trace that all the way back to 7th grade—I just liked to go hard.” Kate Landau is a 43-year-old mom and physician’s assistant who most recently finished 14th at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in 2:34:07. Last year, she ran a personal best of 2:31:56 to finish 13th at the Boston Marathon—and the morning we recorded this episode she ran a 2:34 marathon completely on her own. A five-time All-American at Georgetown who competed in the 19…
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May 18, 2020
Episode 112 | Nick Willis
“It’s harder to stay as focused and motivated when I haven’t been running up to the standards that I’ve always set so high for myself. I haven’t necessarily been running as fast as I was hoping or winning as many races, so it’s been harder to be there 100% focused all of the time. You find yourself drifting and you’ve got to recalibrate all of the time. If anything, this situation has sort of given me a whole new vigor and excitement. It’s been the jolt of energy that’s needed and especially with the news just coming out it’s almost added accountability to prove that this system can work fine. So yeah, I think actually it’s only going to help because it’s given me that much-needed change of scenery to mix things up and not just be the same cycle I’ve been on the last 15 years.” Nick Willis won a bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Games and was later upgraded to silver after Rashid Ramzi tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs. He also took bronze…
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May 11, 2020
Episode 111 | Michelle La Sala
“I’m in a position where I cannot be afraid. What I do for a living, my life, my career, I have to get out there and be among the people. And if I’m not comfortable doing that, I can’t expect my runners to be comfortable doing that. But I think it’s going to be a job that every single one of us needs to take on head first and we have to figure out ‘Does this race saying they’re going to have gloves, hand sanitizer, masks, temperature gauges, all these things, does that make me feel safe?’ And if not, anyone who is listening, you have got to speak up and tell us what is going to make you feel safe. Because as a person who is in charge of branding at the New York City Marathon finish line, it’s a really special thing. It is the world’s largest marathon, it’s 51,000 people, and it is a sight. It is a feeling, I get goosebumps talking about. And if that has to go away because we’re afraid of people, that’s going to be a sad day. You know, it just is.” Michelle L…
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May 4, 2020
Episode 110 | Erin Finn
“Just having a group of people who accepted me unconditionally, who I knew had also been through hard times, who would be there for me, getting connected through a community group every week and making church a priority and just having these things outside of running just were so, so, so vital in giving me an identity and giving me a community and helping me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself. So yeah, it definitely definitely played a huge role in helping me feel less alone—through injury and then through other hard things.” Erin Finn is the real deal: She was a 10x All-American at the University of Michigan and a 4x runner-up at the NCAA Championships. She holds four school records for the Wolverines and has personal bests of 15:23 for 5000m and 31:51 for 10,000m. But those numbers don’t even begin to tell her story. Now in her mid-20s, Erin is a first-year medical student at the University of Michigan. She’s still running, putting in 80 miles a week aroun…
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Apr 27, 2020
Episode 109 | Mike Smith
“When I look at an athlete, the way I see an athlete, how they see themselves, how they feel about themselves, where they are in their lives, that’s going to show up on the track way more than the training, right? The training is only going to be in line with the athlete when those other places are in check. You can maybe fake it and get by for a little while but ultimately those things are going to reveal themselves more than the workouts, and the mile(age), whatever, any of that stuff. So, how people are feeling is, to me, the first part that you have to tackle as an athlete, then you can nerd out on workouts. But to get that order wrong, I think, you’re going to be dumbfounded at the lack of results.” Mike Smith is the director of cross-country and track and field at Northern Arizona University, where his men’s cross team country team won three-straight national titles from 2016 through 2018, and last fall, they finished runner-up to BYU; his women’s squad qualified for…
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Apr 20, 2020
Episode 108 | Nate Jenkins
“I honestly was hobbling in and with each mile that went by I’m like, ‘I’m still in the top-10. That’s Uta Pippig who’s cheering on the side of the road over there. I just passed a hobbled Abdi Abdirahman—he’s a 2:08 marathoner. And that guy up in front of me is Meb Keflezighi.' I remember catching Meb with 800 meters to go and Meb went right back by me, and I had a moment of ‘Oh, the dream was too much.’ And then I said, ‘No, you’re gonna hobble back by him because this is the home stretch of the Olympic Trials and he’s the reigning Olympic silver medalist and that’s the sort of thing you pray for when you’re a kid—to go back and forth with the Olympic silver medalist in the home stretch of the Olympic Trials, what more could you want?' So I think that was a big part of it, is just that perspective.”This week’s episode is a special one for me. I sat down and had a long conversation with my college rival, Nate Jenkins, one of the toughest competitors…
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Apr 13, 2020
Episode 107 | Liam Boylan-Pett
“Patience is such a tough thing to have in life, the world, in running, but it is such an important thing to have. I mean, it’s just that stacking on stacking on stacking of mileage and now in this venture, for me, it’s words. Not to say that I really love going back and looking at some of my early stories—and I think I did a good job at them—but now I’m excited about what’s coming next and some of the ways I’m going to tell these kinds of stories, even the ones I don’t know about yet.” Liam Boylan-Pett is the founder of Lope Magazine, an online publication that releases one longform feature story each month from the track, road, or trail. Liam has a Masters degree in journalism from Georgetown and his work has appeared in Bleacher Report, SB Nation, NBCOlympics.com, Runner's World, and other publications. Liam is also a hell of a runner: he ran collegiately at both Columbia and Georgetown, and then ran professionally for a few years, posting personal bests of 1:46.…
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Apr 6, 2020
Episode 106 | Bria Wetsch
“Every time I line up I don’t get as anxious anymore, I don’t feel like I’m gonna barf. It’s just, ’See what you can do. You have two healthy legs. You get to do this.’ Like, the sky is the limit. And if you don’t reach what you think you might be able to do, that’s OK too. Because I’m having fun. I’m more in the moment now, not thinking about the end goal of ‘Oh, I might not do as well’ or ‘I might suck.’ That’s fine.”Bria Wetsch finished 27th at the recent U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta, running 2:37:58, less than a minute off of her personal best. The 31-year-old lives and trains in Boulder, Colorado, where she also works as an accountant. Bria ran collegiately at the University of Oregon and prior to that, she was a national 2-mile champion, top-10 Footlocker finisher, and five-time state champion as a high schooler in her native Minnesota. We covered A LOT in this conversation and I really appreciate how vulnerable and brave Bria was in s…
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Mar 30, 2020
Episode 105 | Ali Feller
“Both disciplines attract that type of person, who can chase down specific goals, who is competitive, not necessarily with other people, but with themselves. I think that’s a big thing you see in dance and it’s a big thing you see in running—yeah, you’re competing for the top spot, you’re competing for the spot in the company, you’re competing for the lead role on Broadway, if you’re in high school, you’re literally at dance competitions that you want to win. In running, yeah, if you’re at the front of the pack, it’s the same: you’re competing to break the tape. But I think inherently what I see a lot of in both is this idea of wanting to be your best self in your discipline, and seeing what that brings out in you as a person.” Ali Feller is the host of the super popular Ali on The Run Show podcast, where every week she talks to inspiring people who lead interesting lives on the run and beyond. I’m a longtime listener of her show, she has a great range of gu…
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Mar 24, 2020
Episode 104 | Ask Mario Anything #3
“For me, I actually like being in the corner with my back up against the wall because it forces me to figure a way out. And I’m not feeling that just yet, or at least to a degree where I feel like I’m in trouble, but if I do, I’m going to figure a way out out of it. I don’t know what that is right now but you get creative with it.”We are back with the first Ask Mario Anything episode of 2020, featuring yours truly taking a wide range of reader and listener questions from John Summerford, producer of the morning shakeout podcast, who will tell you more about who he is, how we got connected, what he is working on, and how his relationship with running has evolved in the first part of the show. After that, I respond to a number of questions about how to adjust goals and training when your race gets cancelled or postponed, the Olympic Trials Marathon, my shoe rotation, coaching resources I recommend, how my wife and I met, and a lot more.Thank you to everyone who submitted ques…
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Mar 16, 2020
Episode 103 | Jody Bailey
“I’m obsessed with everything I pick. Whatever it is, I don’t really question it. Most of the time, my obsessions, I don’t know what’s happening when they start. I just tug on a thread a little bit and then just full on yank on it and connect it to a bus and drive it out of town...The idea of exploring and learning and my mind just exploded at university. Exposed to psychology for the first time, like Psych 101 just changed everything. It was like, ‘Wait, this is how we work?’ I know more about myself now than I ever did and I think that was the productive push to this idea of pulling on a thread that was good, and it was really sports photography that was that first passion that turned into something, rather than just a passive interest. I mean, when I was a teenager in high school I started building the internet and playing with HTML and CSS and thought it was neat that you could make stuff move on a screen, and I had my own little website for cars that I was building.…
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Mar 9, 2020
Episode 102 | Aliphine Tuliamuk
“The day that Kobe Bryant passed away, something snapped in me. I realized how short life can be—and I never met him, and I didn’t even know him much, but the things that people were writing about him, there was just something that made me snap out of it. I realized that I hadn’t seen my family for over 3 years. Why had I not seen them? I had not seen them because I was making excuses that I was working very hard to make the Olympic team, but I don’t think I had my mind and heart in it. In that moment, I realized that I was wasting time and making excuses and not really taking advantage of the opportunity that I had, and in that moment, I decided that I was going to fully commit to making the team. So that was seriously the day that I recommitted myself to making the team and believing that I was going to make it.” Aliphine Tuliamuk recently won the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta to qualify for her first Olympic team. She ran away from Molly Seidel in the last two…
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Mar 2, 2020
Episode 101 | Michael Olzinski
“I see coaching as an art form—and it’s the science [that] gives you the tools that you need—but just like we found out that you tie two strings together and you pluck it, it reverberates and it makes a noise, it doesn’t mean you can play Little Wing on the guitar. So we know what physiology looks like, what blood flow looks like, what muscle function looks like, but taking that and putting it into a program for a human being, to me, is an art form and that is an infinite pursuit.” Michael Olzinski is a good friend, coaching colleague, and occasional training partner of mine. He’s one of the most interesting people I know as well as one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. He’s got a Masters degree in exercise physiology and primarily coaches triathletes as a member of the staff at Purple Patch Fitness. He’s also the co-founder and head coach of the Nth Degree Athletic Club, one of the most popular and fastest-growing run crews in San Francisco. Mike played hockey an…
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Feb 24, 2020
Episode 100 | Laura Schmitt
“Coaching, I would argue, is the least about the workouts. In fact, if you’re a coach, you should have phenomenal workouts. You should have a progression that takes a child, an adult, anyone—in four years, of course they’re going to get better, you just have to write it out properly. It’s written in every book, you can pick up any book, anyone can be a 'give workout' person. What isn’t easy, unless it is, is knowing how to connect with a person, to get the most out of them, so they can feel good about themselves...You have to be very careful about how you connect with people. We as coaches have power, for sure, the people we are coaching can be vulnerable so you have to make sure you’re not taking advantage of that or crossing the line. That’s your job, it’s not the athlete’s job. As close as the athlete comes to you, you have to know where it needs to stop, where the line is, and a mature coach knows how to do that.” Laura Schmitt retired from coaching the cross…
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Feb 17, 2020
Episode 99 | Lindsay Flanagan
“I think I’ve just learned that whether you’re running a 5-hour marathon, a 4-hour marathon, a 2-hour marathon, we all go through the same struggles in training—whether it’s mental, whether it’s physical—and [my athletes] are always telling me, ‘Oh my gosh, we look up to you because you’re running 2 whatever hours,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m looking up to you because your training runs for your long runs, you’re out there for 3, 4 hours. That is amazing. You’re balancing your family, your job, your running—that’s what’s truly amazing. My running, that’s all I do all day is I go run. But you have all these other things you balance.’ So I think they just show me that with determination, it’s cheesy, but you can do anything because they’re balancing real lives and still running great, which has been really fun.”Lindsay Flanagan is a professional distance runner sponsored by ASICS and she’s gearing up for the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon on Febr…
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Feb 10, 2020
Episode 98 | Mike Fanelli
“As long as I can come across the finish line—whatever chosen distance, and I’ve raced them all—knowing that I couldn’t possibly have run one iota faster, that to me, that’s satisfying. I like being in that position, I like being under the pressure, I like finding myself in a state of uncomfortability. I like being in that space and I like really engaging in the self-talk, so for me, that’s my drug...Your potential is not comfortable. I dig exploring that. I’m my own little guinea pig.”Mike Fanelli has worn a lot of different hats in the sport of track and field over the past 50 years: he’s a solid athlete with a 2:25 marathon personal best and over 110,000 lifetime miles on his legs, he’s a great coach, having guided 14 U.S. Olympic Trials qualifiers, one national champion, and three times he’s served as head coach of a U.S. national team. He’s worked in marketing at major shoe companies, he’s represented athletes as an agent, he’s served as an elite athl…
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Jan 31, 2020
Episode 97 | CJ Albertson
"Obviously I’d love to be a world-class runner—like I’d love it, that’d be awesome—but I know there’s so much more in my life and so many more things I can do and my life isn’t just running. Obviously I knew I missed running, I will try to admit that, but I really did feel content. But I still had this feeling and I’m like, 'Well, it’s over now. It’s officially over. I’m done.' I’m running like 40 miles a week, just kind of having fun, I’m not competing. But it never really went away and then I don’t really know, I really just fell into the marathon."CJ Albertson is one of the most intriguing athletes heading into the Olympic Trials Marathon at the end of February. The 26-year-old ran a personal best of 2:13:40 at CIM last December to finish a close second behind Kenyan Elisha Barno. Last April, he ran 2:17:59 to break the indoor marathon world record and he’s broken 2:20 in each of the five marathons he’s competed in, most of them lower key efforts ne…
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Jan 23, 2020
Episode 96 | Greg McMillan
“It’s difficult for runners to communicate, ‘Why do you do this?’… ‘Do you want to be skinny?’ ‘Do you want to be healthy?’ It’s like, well, that’s nice but ultimately it was challenging myself, working hard toward a goal, being able to do something I couldn’t do before. I really liked that. I was telling somebody the other day [that] I’m still chasing that high school [runner]. I still chase high school cross country. I still love that moment where running, it comes down to a tunnel and it’s just me versus me and that dialogue in my head to try to get the most out of myself. I still love that—that’s why I keep running today.”Greg McMillan is one of the most recognizable running coaches in the game today. He’s the founder and head coach of McMillan Running, one of the world’s first and most respected online coaching companies. Greg started sending workouts to his athletes by way of fax machine way back when, which tells you how long he’s been in…
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Jan 13, 2020
Episode 95 | Fernando Cabada
“Running is something that I was always good at, something that I would do no matter what, it was always my little escape in some way. Whatever was happening at home, running would just make me feel a little better when I got to go out. It was just my escape and I needed it—I need it to this day. It’s the only time that I feel that nothing negative could touch me.”Fernando Cabada is a former professional distance runner who is still competing at an elite level. In 2006, he ran the seventh fastest American debut marathon of all-time, clocking 2:12:27 at Fukuoka in Japan. In the buildup to that race, before he even signed his first professional contract, Fernando broke the American record in the 25K, running 1:14:21, an average of 4:47 per mile, capturing his first national championship. He won two more national titles in his career at the 2008 U.S. Marathon Championship and 2011 U.S. 25K championship. He has personal bests of 1:02 for the half marathon and 2:11:36 for the marath…
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Jan 6, 2020
Episode 94 | Greg Billington
“I think it’s a release—it’s easier when you’re able to go all-in. If you have that second thing, that second chance, you have to constantly be deciding whether or not you’re gonna do it today, you’re gonna do it then—it’s way easier to be like, ‘This is happening now. I’m going all in and I’m going to either die or crush it today. And that for me is the key to success in so many things. The things I haven’t done well in is when I wasn’t able to go all in and I sort of second-guessed what I was doing, how long I was going to be doing it, the long-term implications. It’s all about being in it for the long haul and being all in.”Greg Billington made the 2016 U.S. Olympic team in triathlon and finished 37th at the Games in Rio. He retired from the sport a year later and took a full-time job working for Visa in San Francisco. While on a rotation in Dubai, he joined a local running club and ran the Pyramids Marathon in Egypt, winning it in 2:32. He then won l…
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Dec 30, 2019
Episode 93 | Best of 2019
This week’s episode of the podcast is a “greatest hits” compilation of sorts to round out 2019. I’ve gone through and culled clips from nine of the most impactful exchanges I’ve had over the past year with some of the top athletes, coaches, and personalities in the sport of running. Why only nine? One, putting constraints in place forces me to think more critically about the choices I’m making and two, three rows of three photos looked best in the cover art for the show.I feel really fortunate that I get to have these deep and layered conversations each week—many of them have a profound effect on me and teach me something about running, coaching, or living a better life—that I then get to turn around and share with all of you on the podcast. In this episode you’ll hear from Colleen Quigley, Frank Gagliano, Terrence Mahon, Hillary Allen, Brad Stulberg, Stephanie Bruce, Steve Jones, Sally McRae, and Ken Rideout. These guests in particular stood out to me amongst the doz…
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Dec 23, 2019
Episode 92 | Peter Bromka
“I am camped out in that third category of the emotions of the experience. I get a lot of messages from other dads who have jobs and have kids and have families—I sense in their writing to me that they’re almost saying, ‘Thank you for giving me permission to care about something that is totally superfluous but matters to me and that fuels my passion for the rest of life.' Because I just get the sense that when they lay it out—they have jobs, they have kids, they have a lot of constraints and responsibilities—but maybe they were searching for something to keep them fired up and just keep them happy about the day and they read my writing and they’re like, ‘Wait, this guy is not talking about splits, and he’s not talking about workouts too much, but he seems to be saying that it’s OK to really really really care about something that doesn’t matter.’ But it matters because life is just a journey.” I really enjoyed this week's conversation with my friend Peter Brom…
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Dec 16, 2019
Episode 91 | Ken Rideout
“Many times I’ve woken up and thought, ‘Oh, what can I do to get out of this? Can I fake an injury?’ And then I realize it’s just me. The only person I’m faking is me. The only person I’m lying to is me if I do if I do that. And the same thing with not finishing a race: I’m the only person that I have to answer to. One of the things that Teddy Atlas talks about on our podcast is being a game quitter. It’s much more painful and much more difficult to quit than it is to stick it out and give your best—cause you have to live with that quit and that failure for a fucking long time, and the pain of suffering through— especially a race where someone’s not trying to like, literally kill you—you can do this. And I get up and I find myself going through the motions and it’s almost like I’m on autopilot because in my heart I’m like, ‘No I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to put myself out there. I don’t want to be exposed.’ That fear of failing is inc…
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Dec 10, 2019
Episode 90 | Ask Mario Anything #2
"The first thing I tell athletes who are injured is: Let’s focus on what you can do, not what you can’t. You can’t run, and oftentimes when we’re injured that’s the thing that we focus on, 'God, I can’t run. This is awful. It sucks.' And yes, it absolutely does but you can do something in most cases. Ninety-nine percent of people who are injured can do something, so if you can do any of those things that I just described, go and do those and that’s going to give you a sense of purpose, it’s going to help you feel like you’re working toward something, and it’s going to help you either maintain or continue to develop your fitness. If you can’t, maybe it’s a good opportunity to get in the gym and work on becoming a stronger athlete. If the reason you got injured is because there’s weakness somewhere that you hadn’t addressed, then this is your chance to go and address that. And when you are able to get back to running, you are going to have a more solid foundat…
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Dec 2, 2019
Episode 89 | Jen Rhines
“I think, for me, it’s just if I can help people along the way, that’s great. There isn’t any big thing that I hope to accomplish or be remembered for. A good friend of mine pointed out, ‘When you help someone, you don’t know the ripple effect of that.’ So, if I can help someone, and that helps them do something else that affects a large amount of people, I think I would be happy with that. I think it’s just having good intentions and helping whoever needs my help along the way.” It was a real pleasure to sit down with three-time Olympian Jen Rhines for this week’s episode of the podcast. Jen is one of the most versatile and accomplished distance runners we’ve ever had in the United States. She made three-straight Olympic teams from 2000 through 2008 and competed in a different event at each one of them: the 10,000m in Sydney, the marathon in Athens, and the 5,000m in Beijing. Over the course of her 20+ year competitive career Jen qualified for 11 world championsh…
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Nov 25, 2019
Episode 88 | Coree Woltering
“So, the cool thing is a lot of my friends in Boulder were trail runners, so they’re like, ‘Hey, maybe you should just try trail running. You don’t even have to be fast at it—you could just try it.’ And I was like, ‘I guess I could but if I’m going to do it, I want to do it well.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’ll see, it’s going to be different.’ I mean, the first trail run I ever went on I was like, ‘This is really awesome. You get to be in nature. This is awesome. I love this.’ And then I did start thinking, ‘OK, so how do I get better at this?’ I think that’s just kind of part of my personality, I guess.”I enjoyed talking to Coree Woltering for this week’s episode of the podcast. Coree is professional trail and ultrarunner for The North Face. He’s based in his hometown of Ottawa, Illinois and loves to race at a variety of different distances and disciplines. The 29-year-old has run 5 hours and 30 minutes for 50 miles and he’s eyeing…
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Nov 18, 2019
Episode 87 | Lindsay Crouse
"One thing that has been really amazing about reporting on this industry is that I actually am really inspired by it and get really motivated by it and I’m just so motivated by all the amazing women that are balancing running with jobs and also families. I think every single woman that’s qualifying for the Olympic Marathon Trials right now, and all the women behind them too—sometimes it just comes down to talent, it’s not about work, and I totally respect that—what the women are doing right now specifically is amazing and I think I’ve kind of been like, ‘If they can do this, I can too.’ It’s very tiring and I can always stop. I think that’s important to remember and that’s what I tell myself when I start to get really tired, ‘I don’t have to do this, remember why I’m doing it, it’s because I want to.’ And I think that’s enough to keep me going."I had a great conversation with Lindsay Crouse, who is a producer, editor, and writer at The New York Times…
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Nov 11, 2019
Episode 86 | Bryan Hill
"Tapping into the side of you that has that internal drive is super important because discipline’s a really hard thing, right? Cadence and consistency to me matters, and when I know I’m off loop is when I don’t have that consistency or cadence. If you take any successful business, any successful athlete, the reality is what makes them most successful is some sort of cadence and consistency."Excited to share a conversation I recently had with my good friend Bryan Hill for this week’s episode of the podcast.Bryan is the co-owner and CEO of Rehab United Sports Medicine and Physical Therapy, which has offices in both San Diego and Seattle. A physical therapist by trade, Bryan was a collegiate All-American in soccer and played professionally for 5 years before opening Rehab United with his brother Sean in 2003. He took up running and triathlon after his soccer career ended and he also coaches a small roster of athletes in those two sports.In this conversation, we dug into Bryan’s…
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Nov 7, 2019
Episode 85 | Mary Ngugi and Jared Ward
“I had a breakthrough race in Boston and training for New York has been every bit as good as the training leading into Boston and even better in some aspects, so what I’d really like to do is, I think it would be successful if I validated that performance in Boston…and say, ‘yes, this is where I am and I belong.’ You know, I ran 20 miles with the leaders in Boston and that was the first time running with the international leaders in a marathon that long and so I want to validate that Boston performance.” —Jared WardI’m excited to share a special episode of the podcast that was recorded live two days before the 2019 TCS New York City Marathon with Kenyan Mary Ngugi, who went on to finish 10th in the women’s race, and Jared Ward, who was the top American male finisher in sixth place.Ngugi, who ran a personal best 2:27:36, won silver at the half marathon world championships in 2014, captured bronze at the 2016 championships, and owns the fastest half marathon ever run on…
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Nov 5, 2019
Episode 84 | Corrine Malcolm
“If you go into the race knowing it’s going to hurt and you’re OK with it, you’re stronger than most of the people out there—and I just latched onto that: this idea that if I knew it was going to hurt and I was ready for it and I could revel in it and embrace it and be like ‘OK, lets do this’ type of deal with the pain or with the discomfort, that made racing so much easier, and that makes a lot of things in life so much easier.” I had an awesome conversation with Corrine Malcolm for this week’s episode of the podcast. Malcolm is a San Francisco-based trail and ultra runner for adidas TERREX and she’s also been coaching athletes for CTS since 2016. A self-confessed science nerd with a degree in Health and Human Performance, the 29-year-old Malcolm was a collegiate cross-country skier and then raced on the U.S. national biathlon team before finding her way into trail and ultrarunning in her early 20s. She’s finished in the top-10 at the last two Western States Endu…
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Oct 28, 2019
Episode 83 | Christopher McDougall
“Their phrase they have at the Bird-In-Hand Half Marathon is, ‘The joy of running in community,’ and it’s on all their t-shirts, it's on all their signs: the joy of running in community. And that’s why I struggle with this idea of competition because these guys are very hardcore runners: they’re fast, they’re strong, they do Ragnars, they do sub-3 hour marathons, but always as a gang, as a team, like a cross-country team. So those things began to sort of connect for me: I’m running with these Amish dudes, they all run together. I’m running with these donkeys, they’re all having fun. I would finish runs with the donkeys and my wife and my friend Zeke feeling way better than other runs because we were going slower, we were communicating, your consciousness is off yourself, it’s on somebody else, so for me, I just started to feel and see the effects of running as a group.” Great episode of the podcast for you this week: I had the chance to sit down with New York Ti…
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Oct 21, 2019
Episode 82 | Jesse Williams
“Anybody that’s in this industry, especially somebody that was in my former position, you sit around all the time and complain about what’s wrong with track and field. I’m one of the biggest talkers when it comes to that, I always complain about what’s wrong. And I feel like I have a chance to potentially work towards one piece of the solution, which is an events series in the U.S., after USAs, not only where athletes can make money, but we’re doing things differently, and it’s more entertainment. We’re going to do our best. It’s exciting—very exciting.”Excited to share a conversation I recorded in late September with Jesse Williams, who was the head of sports marketing at Brooks for 13 years, where he oversaw the marketing and business side of the such initiatives as Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, the Brooks Beasts, the Brooks PR Invitational, and other athlete programs. Williams left Brooks in 2017 and took a year off from work to figure out his next move, and…
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Oct 14, 2019
Episode 81 | Steve Jones
"That’s how my whole career, my whole running career went—it was always trying to beat the guy in front of me, always trying to catch the guy in front of me. And that helped me—not just the training, it wasn’t just the training, it was that attitude going into races. And like I said, when I started winning races, I didn’t want to win them by one second—I wanted to win them by 90 seconds or 2 minutes. It was always about beating the opposition, annihilation I used to call it."This week’s episode is a really special one. I got to have a conversation with my favorite runner of all-time, former marathon world-record holder, Steve Jones. Jonesy, who is now 64 years old, broke the world-record in the first marathon he ever finished at Chicago in 1984, running 2:08:05. He won the race again a year later in 2:07:13—splitting an incredible 61:42 at halfway—just missing the world-record by one second.What I have always loved and admired about Jonesy is his no-nonsense approach…
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Oct 7, 2019
Episode 80 | Sally McRae
“There was definitely a time in my life where I had to tell myself, ‘It’s OK to be broken.’ That’s OK. The goal in life isn’t to be perfect—nobody’s perfect. There’s no one in history that we can point to that’s lived a perfect life. So, the reality is—and you said this so wonderfully when I was at UTMB and I was like, ‘I know this,’ when I was so disappointed in my performance, I was so down—and you said, ‘It isn’t about how you finish, it’s about how you respond to this journey and how you continue on.’ And I’m like, ‘I know this, I know this,’ and that is just a great reminder for everything in life because life, when it comes down to it, it’s the journey that’s the most fulfilling part.”This week I sat down with one of my most requested guests: Sally McRae. The 40-year-old mom of two is a professional ultrarunner living in Southern California and—in the interest of full disclosure—I’ve been her coach for a little over two years…
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Sep 30, 2019
Episode 79 | Jonathan Pierce
“That's the most dangerous place to be—is to think you know it all. I always just try to go into problems being curious. I’m always just like, ‘I wonder if I can solve this. I wonder if we can figure this out.’ And really, it’s not me, it’s not about me. It’s me and the athlete, or me and the athlete and the coach…and it just becomes this problem-solving thing, and a curiosity, and we’re communicating, ‘Hey, how do you feel with this? Do you understand? Yes. Is that what you sense too?’ You’re working with the person to get the outcome. You’re just the facilitator. The ego has to go away.” I recently sat down with my friend Jonathan Pierce, who I met in 2007 when we both competed at the national club cross country championships in West Chester, Ohio. He placed third overall that day to help ZAP Fitness win the team title and let’s just say that I finished way, way back in the field. The 36-year-old Pierce had a great running career—he competed collegia…
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Sep 23, 2019
Episode 78 | Jeanne Mack
“Why did it take me so long in order to decide that I needed to pull the plug on running? What was it that made me cling to the idea of running a little bit banged up for so long? [Figuring out the answers to those questions] is really cool. I’m getting deeper into figuring all that stuff out so that when I come back, I’ll have hopefully a really sturdy foundation to build on but then I’ll also have that knowledge to help me get a little bit further.” Excited to share a conversation I recently had with Jeanne Mack, an Olympic Trials qualifier in the marathon who moved to San Francisco from New York just a few months ago. Mack works as a copy writer at Strava, where she also hosts the Athletes Unflitered podcast. She ran 2:39:04 in her second marathon last fall at Chicago and she’s currently working through an injury so she can be at the top of her game for the Olympic Trials in February of 2020. This was a fun, wide-ranging conversation: we dug into Jeanne’s relationship…
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Sep 16, 2019
Episode 77 | Jason Koop
“One of the really cool things about trail and ultrarunning in particular is people go so far into the unknown and I think that, as an element of humanity, doing something where there’s a legitimate chance that you’re going to utterly fail and get taken off by a helicopter—right, that’s going to happen tomorrow, people are going to get flown out by helicopters—the fact that there’s a sport that people can participate in that has these neat elements to it, I think it’s good for everybody. It’s obviously good for me because I’m in the sport, I’m in it professionally and I earn a living doing it, but I just think it’s good for society to have those things that can really test you, so I just hope that the sport continues to maintain its edge, attract new people, be viable, and be fun to come out and do these types of events.” Really enjoyed sitting down with a coaching colleague of mine, Jason Koop, for this week’s episode of the podcast. Koop is one of the most…
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Sep 9, 2019
Episode 76 | Amelia Boone Brad Stulberg
“I actually don’t feel that added pressure. If anything, to me, it’s just about continuing to live authentically, and part of that living authentically is that there’s going to be ups and downs—it’s not a linear progression at all and just giving myself grace with that is really important—and sharing those ups and downs. There are so many people that talk about eating disorders after they’ve conquered them or when they used to struggle but are over that now—and you see it a lot in the running world and I’m really, really appreciative who talk about it, but they also talk about it as a thing of the past, that it’s no longer an issue—but I think more of the reality is that there are many, many people out there for who it is still an issue day to day. And I think if I waited to a point where I was totally over it and in a really solid recovered place, honestly, I probably would never talk about it.” — Amelia BooneI’ve got a unique episode to share this week…
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Sep 3, 2019
Episode 75 | Brian Metzler
“Sometimes we all want to get as far away from running as possible, right? And I say that in a lighthearted way but I think that anyone who has been involved in running in any way knows what that means. We love running to an obsession, and that’s great, but we also need a deep breath, a break, something else that is not just running. I find myself as a lot of things, and running is a big part of that, but that’s not the only thing I am.”Super excited to share a recent conversation I had with Brian Metzler for this week’s episode of the podcast. I’ve known Brian a long time—back in 2009-2010 we co-wrote the On The Run column for Triathlete magazine—and he was my boss at Competitor magazine and Competitor.com (now PodiumRunner.com) from 2012-2016. Before his stint as editor-in-chief of Competitor, Brian worked as a senior editor at Running Times, he was also the founding editor of Trail Runner magazine, and he’s written for almost every running and outdoor publication i…
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Aug 26, 2019
Episode 74 | Matt Futterman
"It takes a long time to write books, it takes a long time to run a marathon, it takes even longer to train for a marathon, but if you don't take any shortcuts, and you push yourself, and you do the things that you're afraid of, if you get comfortable with being uncomfortable, then that's where the magic can happen."Excited to welcome Matt Futterman, the deputy sports editor of The New York Times and author of the new book, Running To The Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed, to the podcast this week.Futterman is an avid runner himself—he’s run 23 marathons and has qualified for Boston—and we had a great conversation about his new book, which is largely about coach Bob Larsen and his quest to discover the training secrets that would lead American runners back to prominence on the world stage. We also talked about how he got into running and developed an interest in it, why track and running have fallen out of fervor with mainstream media and what…
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Aug 19, 2019
Episode 73 | Ask Mario Anything
"My relationship with running and myself was not in a good place—I was in a pretty low place. I didn't have a lot of great relationships in my life, I placed all this importance on running that soured my relationship with it. So that was definitely the lowest moment but it also gave me the most perspective and it's informed my perspective now—as an athlete, I've been able to stay healthy for the past 10+ years, I have a much better relationship with eating, food, my body image. But I've been able to use that experience in my coaching and in my writing to help other people who are dealing with similar things. So that lowest low, while I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, has also given me a perspective that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise."Trying something new on the podcast this week: Ask Me Anything! (OK, this is hardly a novel idea, but it’s a new format for me to explore.) In this episode, I'm on the receiving end of the mic with my assistant editor, Jeffrey Stern—who you will l…
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Aug 12, 2019
Episode 72 | Lee Troop
"Running is the most simplistic and puristic sport you can do. You put one foot in front of the other, you run as hard as you can for as long as you can, and whoever crosses the finish line first wins. But to see people now not have that joy—and I ask a lot of athletes, 'Why did you start running?' and a lot of them started running because they wanted to run with their dad or they wanted to make the school team, they speak with all this joy—and it saddens me that at this point a lot of them don't have joy. They've got tunnel vision, and they're gonna make it, and they'll sacrifice everything, and they come to training and you can just see that there's this tension in them and they just can't let it go. They've already analyzed, overanalyzed, and psychoanalyzed just the training workout and I'm like, 'Just let it go!' You'll have good runs and you'll have bad ones—if you have a bad one, catch up with some friends and go out and have a beer and just let it go. So, trying to get the…
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Aug 5, 2019
Episode 71 | Sarah Sellers
"When I finally got to come back to running, my number one goal was no longer [to] run as fast as I can—my number one goal was, 'I don't want to have to give this up long-term again.' And so that was motivation to have proper nutrition and to realize if I have to be five to ten pounds heavier than what I thought my goal weight was, if that's keeps me healthy, then it's worth it."I’m excited to welcome my third returning guest back to the show this week: Sarah Sellers. Sellers, who finished second at the 2018 Boston Marathon, will race this year's Chicago Marathon on October 13. We recorded this podcast in front of a live audience back back in early July at the Sports Basement in San Francisco. Sellers and I spoke for about 35 minutes before we opened it up to audience Q&A.I really enjoyed this one—we touched a on a lot of topics we didn’t cover the first time around back in Episode 28—including her decision to run Chicago this fall and what she’s changing about her approach…
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Jul 29, 2019
Episode 70 | Katie Arnold
"The way I approach running, it's totally a joyous pursuit for me—which doesn't mean that every day is happy, but I do it because I love it and I feel good when I run, and the racing is just a fraction of it. I had run all summer training on the happiness principle, where if I'm training happy and not stressed and I'm enjoying it, then I'm training strong and I'll be healthy. And so that was just a reminder to let it come from within and to tap into that deep pleasure I take in running that really has nothing to do with competition."Excited to welcome Katie Arnold to the podcast this week! The 47-year-old Arnold is one heck of an ultrarunner—she won the Leadville Trail 100 last year in 19 hours, 53 minutes and 40 seconds, which, incredibly, was her debut at the distance—and earlier this year she was second at the Ultra Race of Champions 100K. She’s won numerous other races throughout her career, and is hoping is to run the CCC—a 101K race that goes from Courmayeur, Italy to C…
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Jul 22, 2019
Episode 69 | Scott Jurek
“As long as I’m true to myself then hopefully that benefits other people and ideally it’s a symbiotic relationship and it’s something I want to keep doing—and again, I’ve got to find ways to tweak it, it’s all about tweaking that and finding things that keep me fueled to push boundaries that are still left there for me to explore and then other times just be content. It’s a funky balance, for sure. It’s hard to not have that drive, have that competitive spirit, but at the same time it’s still there once in a while—and appreciating it and fueling it a little bit—but overwhelmingly there’s not going to be as much drive, and that’s OK.”This week’s guest is Scott Jurek and he hardly needs an introduction, especially if you’re a fan of trail and ultrarunning, so I’m going to keep it as short as I possibly can: Jurek has won pretty much every major ultra race there is to win, including the Spartathalon, the Hardrock 100, the Badwater 135, and the Western S…
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Jul 15, 2019
Episode 68 | Tyler McCandless
"I don't care if somebody wants to criticize my 5K time from July 4—I mean, I got an opportunity to go and race and I went out a little too hard, I made a few mistakes, I learned a bunch from it. It was awesome. That's the point of it, that's the point of racing. So I think that's a really critical component: nowadays people race less because there's too much pressure on those results instead of focusing on the process."I was in Boulder, Colorado last week and had a chance to sit down with Tyler McCandless, a 2:12 marathoner whose career I’ve been following closely for the past 10 years. McCandless is not only one of the most underrated road racers in the U.S., he’s also one of the nicest guys in running, and you’ll see why in this episode.We covered all kinds of ground in this conversation—which we recorded just a few days before the birth of McCandless' son, Levi—from why he trains without a GPS watch to learning how to race aggressively and with confidence, balancing his…
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Jul 8, 2019
The Weekly Rundown | A Teaser
I’m excited to share a little something different with you this week: a recent episode of The Weekly Rundown, a Patreon-exclusive podcast I’ve been recording the last few weeks with my friend and collaborator, Billy Yang of Billy Yang Films and the Billy Yang Podcast.In this teaser episode, which we recorded last week on July 2, Billy and I talk about the Western States Endurance Run, The Prefontaine Classic, and Billy’s recent trip to Austria for the Infinite Trails relay race. It’s not Billy interviewing me or me interviewing Billy—it’s just two friends talking casually and unscripted about what’s been going on in our lives, the sport, and the industry over the previous week.Right now, this show is only available to our respective supporters on Patreon, so if you’re into it and want more, you can support my work directly at themorningshakeout.com/support. If you like this informal format, or even if you don’t—or if you like it and think it needs to be longer than…
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Jul 2, 2019
Episode 67 | Gwen Jorgensen
"When I was younger I really struggled with separating myself from sport. I really believed that how I performed is what defined me and I started to perform way better once I was able to separate myself from sport and realize that sport does not define me. And that's something that's just been huge for me."Really enjoyed talking to Gwen Jorgensen for this week's episode of the podcast. The 33-year-old Jorgensen is the reigning Olympic champion in triathlon, who, in late 2017, announced she was retiring from multi-sport racing to turn her attention to running full-time. Her goal: Olympic gold in the marathon. In early 2018, Jorgensen signed with Nike and joined the Bowerman Track Club to train alongside 2017 New York City Marathon champion Shalane Flanagan and reigning Olympic Trials marathon champion Amy Cragg under the watchful eye of coach Jerry Schumacher.We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, including Jorgensen's recent surgery to repair a Haglund's deformity in her righ…
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Jun 19, 2019
Episode 66 | Rachel Schneider
“Any time I step on a line it's this huge moment of gratitude—this is another opportunity to challenge myself, to push myself, to have the privilege to run with these women. So I think when I can frame it that way, and have that sort of perspective, it just adds so much more fun and joy and excitement rather than any anxiety or outcome or stress that is often easy to get caught up in results.”Super excited to welcome Rachel Schneider to the podcast this week. On May 16, Schneider ran 15:06.71 for 5000m to win the USATF Distance Classic. It was a nine-second personal best and, at the time, the fastest 5000m run in the world this year. That mark has since been eclipsed but she is one of the top female 5000m runners in the U.S. right now and one of only two American woman to have achieved the 2020 Olympic standard so far in that event.This was a fun conversation and amazingly, it’s the first time Schneider has ever been on a podcast. We got into her progression as an athlete, from…
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Jun 4, 2019
Episode 65 | Brady Threlfall
“I was hooked by the appeal that you could work hard and you saw those results. I think coming from team sports, where you could work hard and still not be successful because there was so many different aspects that had to click and go right for that team to be successful, whereas I noticed from a really early stage that if I did the work, I was going to be successful.”I really enjoyed sitting down with my first Aussie guest, Brady Threlfall, for this week's episode of the podcast. Threlfall’s a 2:19 marathoner, a coach with Run 2 PB, and host of the popular Inside Running podcast. In this conversation, which we recorded a few months ago, we got into his introduction to the sport and progression as an athlete, coaching and working with different types of runners, Australia’s rich running history, what running culture looks like in his country, how the Inside Running podcast came to be, what’s exciting him in running right now, and a lot more.This episode is brought to you by…
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May 27, 2019
Episode 64 | Frank Gagliano
“No, I'm not surprised [that I'm still coaching] because there's two things: My heart and my mind is in it big time. And as long as those two continue to be in it—and my health, thank the good Lord at the age of 82 is very good—I love it, and I'm not ready to pack it in at all. Actually, I have a lot of fire in my belly.”It was an honor and a privilege to sit down with Frank Gagliano, the 82-year-old coach of the Hoka NJ-NY Track Club, for a conversation about coaching and life that had a profound impact on me—and I know it will do the same for you. This one got emotional a couple times but Coach Gags opened up to me in a way he hasn’t elsewhere before and his story—and message—is really powerful. The man has coached at every level of the sport over the past 58 years—high school, college, and professionally—and he’s had great success at all of them. He’s coached 15 Olympians, 140 All-Americans, multiple national champions, and a world championships medalist. Mor…
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May 21, 2019
Episode 63 | Nicholas Thompson
“The great thing about running is: it’s all you. If your team does better in soccer, it might be you, it might be your team. You could actually get worse and your team could get better, but if you are getting faster at running, it’s you, so the improvement feels pretty intensely emotional, and that drew me in.” I’m excited to share a special live recording of the podcast that I did with Nicholas Thompson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, in front of a live audience last month in Boston. In this conversation, we spoke exclusively about aging and the marathon, which is a topic he’s written about for Wired. Last fall, Thompson—who is 43 years old—ran not one, but two 2:38 marathons at Chicago and New York, only 4 weeks apart, both faster than his previous personal best of 2:43. We recorded this episode at Tracksmith’s Trackhouse the day before this year’s Boston Marathon, where he finished in 2:34:27, a new personal best, running a nice negative split (which, if…
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May 13, 2019
Episode 62 | Scott Fauble
“I went to the lead, even over Heartbreak, with a purpose and with the goal of dropping people and injecting pace—and I think that’s maybe what surprised me the most, is that I was able to be an actual factor and be something that impacted the way the race played out, which is a new feeling for me in the marathon, particularly in World Marathon Majors. In New York, I was as far back as probably 20th pretty early in the race and was kind of doing my own thing, so that was the biggest surprise—being up front—and the way we got to the 2:09:09 here in Boston.” Stoked to welcome the morning shakeout’s first-ever guest, Scott Fauble of Hoka Northern Arizona Elite, back to the show to talk about his recent seventh-place finish at the Boston Marathon, where he ran a big personal best of 2:09:09. We covered a lot of good stuff in this conversation: all things Boston, of course, but also training and recovery, what the next several months are going to look like heading into the 202…
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May 6, 2019
Episode 61 | Katy Sherratt
"Homelessness is a label, it is not who they are. It is a point in time, it is something they are struggling through, it is not something that should be used to put a label on them and define them as a human—and that's what we try to change on those morning runs. When you're running with one of our members, who may be suffering from homelessness at that point in time, it's just a human to human conversation."I had a great conversation for this week’s episode of the podcast with Katy Sherratt, the CEO of Back on My Feet, an organization that uses running and community support to help combat homelessness and provide essential employment opportunities and housing resources for people who need it.We talked about Back on my Feet’s origins, how the organization has grown since it launched in 2007, and where it’s heading in the coming years. We discussed running as a universal language, the evolving role that running has had in Sherratt’s life, how she first got involved with BoMF,…
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Apr 30, 2019
Episode 60 | Terrence Mahon
"Watching from an athlete perspective, where all of a sudden he gets it, or she gets it, and you see that just click, and then it's game time, I think that's the biggest thing I get from an athlete. All these things you see as a coach, like 'this athlete should be able to do this, or should be able hit these times, or do this performance,' but it's all nothing because it's just you and me talking here and we know the science of it, and the method, but the athlete is the one who has to believe in it and believe in themselves. It doesn't matter how much you tell them how great they are, or whatever, until they get it. And watching that process happen, and how it happens differently with each athlete, is probably the most exciting part of coaching.” Really enjoyed sitting down with Terrence Mahon for this week's episode of the podcast. Mahon, one of the best middle and long distance running coaches in the world, is currently the director and coach of the Mission Athletics Club in San D…
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Apr 22, 2019
Episode 59 | Chelsea Sodaro
"A lot of us endurance athletes are obsessive and one of the things that makes us good is that we're able to focus on the very small details of our craft and spend a lot of time concentrating on improving those things. On the flip side, it's pretty easy to get too bogged down in the weeds and we can have a hard time stepping back and really seeing the big picture of progression, which is something that happens over a long period of time—not something that we can expect to happen in a matter of weeks or months or even like a year or two, and I think that's something that I've got into a little bit of trouble with in the past."I had a great time talking to Chelsea Sodaro for this week's episode of the podcast. Many of you may remember Sodaro by her maiden name, Chelsea Reilly, who national titles in the road 10K and indoor 3000m in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The 29-year-old Sodaro was one of the top distance runners in the U.S. not that long ago, with personal bests on the track rang…
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Apr 15, 2019
Episode 58 | Edward Cheserek
"They were doing 10-mile long runs by that time and I dropped them. And they were like, 'Oh, this kid is tough!' I was coming and going on rolling hills and my coach was like, 'Hmm, you ran the last mile in 4:55.' I didn't even know what that meant—4:55 a mile? I just ran. I used to clock [time] in kilometers, so I thought it was a kilometer, and I was like, 'That's slow.' But it was miles. A few months later I came back and ran my first indoor [race] and they were like, 'You can run!' and I was like, 'OK.' That's the moment I fell in love with the sport and I ended up quitting the soccer thing and just focused on running."Excited to share a recent conversation I had with Edward Cheserek on this week's episode of the podcast. King Ches, as he’s known throughout the running world, recently tied the IAAF world record for the road 5K at Carlsbad 5000, breaking the tape in 13 minutes and 29 seconds. I was fortunate enough to sit down with the 25-year-old Kenyan for half an hour a coupl…
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Apr 8, 2019
Episode 57 | Paddy O'Leary
"I always found myself working very hard to try and be the best at those little things but also enjoy what I was doing. This was evident at a very early age—I wanted to be competitive at something but I wanted to enjoy it while I was doing it. I don't think I gain most of my enjoyment from the competitive side of it and from the racing or the competing. It was more from the just being present there and enjoying seeing other people enjoy what we're doing and enjoying it with them."Excited to share a recent conversation I had with a guy many of you outside the Bay Area running scene may not have heard of yet: His name is Paddy O’Leary, he’s an Irish lad living in San Francisco, and he’s a North Face-sponsored trail and ultra runner who has risen through the ranks of the sport in just a few short years. He’s also got a fast set of wheels, having run a big personal best of 2:20 and change in the marathon last fall at CIM, a race he ran on somewhat of a whim after The North Face E…
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Apr 2, 2019
Episode 56 | Dena Evans
"A lot of the folks I interact with now, whether it's a newly post-collegiate athlete who's still got goals that they want to achieve, or a middle-aged athlete who has a general fitness goal they want to achieve, or they'd like go for that Boston qualifier, whatever it is, most of these goals are achievable if you stick with it and keep building the tower—I call it 'the Jenga tower.' My outlook on coaching, generally, is: Let's build the tower and we'll eventually get there. Sometimes you do have artificial timelines, but if you can avoid them that's better, and just concentrate on building on what you have done and not worrying about what you aren't. So I try to think inductively about coaching and I think that's partly due to some of these experiences—let's assume we're going to get there. It's just a question of 'how' and not 'if.'"Really enjoyed sitting down with Dena Evans for this week’s episode of the podcast. Evans is currently the coordinator and coach of the Peninsula D…
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Mar 25, 2019
Episode 55 | Ryan Hall
"I think what made me me was taking big risks and training really hard. And I think that's what allowed me to have such high highs but it's also why I had so many low lows as well. I think if I would have taken the edge off my training I probably would have just been a lot more steady in my results and not so up and down and all over the map. But also, in my mind, I don't know if I would have gotten to the same place—and for me, I would rather risk everything and see what's going to happen than play it safe and just get to mediocre for me.” It was a treat to speak with Ryan Hall for this week's episode of the podcast. Hall, who retired from professional running in 2016, is still the fastest American male marathoner (2:04:58) and half marathoner (59:43) of all-time. He made two Olympic teams and finished in the top-5 at numerous World Marathon Majors, including a third-place finish in Boston in 2008.We packed a lot into this 45-minute conversation, including his reflections on retir…
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Mar 18, 2019
Episode 54 | Erin Strout
"The bottom line is that a lot of people look at running and they want to try it but are intimidated by it—and I think the more encouraging and welcoming we are, starting from the top of the sport, the better it is. And so that's exciting for me to watch and to cover and I hope [elites] continue to be encouraging and welcoming."I had a great time sitting down with Erin Strout for this week's episode of the podcast. Just a few weeks ago, Strout was named the digital editor at WomensRunning.com and for my money, she's one of the top journalists covering the sport of running today. In addition to her work at Women's Running, Strout has also written for Outside, Runner’s World, Running Times, and numerous other publications.We covered quite a bit of ground in this conversation, including Strout's introduction to running, when she began to think of herself as a runner, and the evolution of her career as a journalist. We also discussed the current state of the sport, the collective ris…
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Mar 11, 2019
Episode 53 | Brad Stulberg
"Looking inside at the stuff that is scary and that you don't want to face, that's really hard, uncomfortable work. So in order to get to the other side, to truly feel compassionate for yourself and show yourself love, you have to come to terms with the ugly stuff. And that ugly stuff can be, 'I'm insecure,' that ugly stuff can be that, 'The only reason that I race is because I'm scared to die and this gives me something else to focus on,' it can be that 'I feel validated and my self-worth is from this,' like all kinds of stuff comes up and that's normal. We're humans, that's the thing. It doesn't mean that you're broken. And the more you can acknowledge that, be aware of it and be kind to it, the better chance you have of getting to the other side where suddenly you're just racing out of love."Excited to share my recent conversation with good friend and colleague, Brad Stulberg, on this week's episode of the podcast. Stulberg coaches executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes on their m…
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Mar 4, 2019
Episode 52 | Stephanie Bruce
"Things are going to be uncomfortable in life. You're going to have uncomfortable runs, uncomfortable races, uncomfortable conversations with family and friends, or standing up to your boss if you feel like you deserve a raise. All things like that, I think are just giving you a little more courage and a little more pep in your step to really stand up for what you believe in and push through those hard days and know that you're going to see light at the end of the tunnel.” Thrilled to welcome Stephanie Bruce of Hoka Northern Arizona Elite to the show this week. The 35-year-old mom of two young boys is a 2:29 marathoner, co-founder of Picky Bars, online running coach, and oh yeah, reigning national 10K champion on the roads.In this episode, we discussed what she’s focused on from a training and racing standpoint right now, why she thinks it’s important to get out of your comfort zone when it comes to racing, and the changes coach Ben Rosario has made to her training in the past se…
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Feb 25, 2019
Episode 51 | Scott Gravatt, Jeremy Bresnen, and Pam Hess
“Everybody runs. It's the original. You go to an elementary school at lunch time and everybody is running. It's intrinsic to us. And we lose that, whether we don't make the track team, whatever it ends up being, we lose that and I think that's a shame. And I think as a community and as an industry and everything we need to get back to this idea of 'run a block and a half, and then run five blocks, and then run 10 blocks.' And just that alone is amazing.” — Jeremy Bresnen of Ciele AthleticsI’m excited to share a roundtable discussion I hosted last November at The Loop Running Supply in Austin, Texas, with Scott Gravatt, who is the run specialty sales director at Nike, Jeremy Bresnan, the co-founder of Ciele Athletics, and Pam Hess, who is the co-founder, along with her husband Ryan, of The Loop.We covered quite a bit of ground in this discussion, which centered around running culture, what that is exactly, how it’s evolved over the years, and where it’s heading. There was ta…
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Feb 18, 2019
Episode 50 | Michael Wardian
"I hope people can find joy in what they're doing, I hope people find things that are exciting, I hope people can look at me and say, 'If that dude with a job and a family and 1.5 cars and all the same things that I'm dealing with can get out and do something, maybe I can do something too and maybe I can set a big goal and maybe I can find something that excites me and motivates me and I'm passionate about that I want to chase.' And then I hope they go out and they do it.”Stoked to welcome another awesome guest on to the podcast this week: Michael Wardian. Wardian is the exception to almost every racing rule and for his latest trick he just broke the Guinness World Record for running ten marathons in ten consecutive days, covering 262 miles in 29 hours, 12 minutes, and 46 seconds, or an average of 2:55:17 per marathon. He ran the first seven of those 10 marathons on seven different continents as part of the World Marathon Challenge and completed the last three around a certified 5K l…
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Feb 11, 2019
Episode 49 | Hillary Allen
“There were days when I was just so exhausted and I didn't even want to get up out of bed because I didn't even see the point. There was so much time that I spent wishing that the accident would have killed me because it felt like it was easier than to have to face the pain and face the challenges of everyday life. But then I'd receive a message and some voice of encouragement, sometimes from a dear friend, sometimes from a complete stranger, and it just built this community that I felt that I had near and far and it again let me discover the strength that I had within me, whether or not it was still there. Trail running, I felt, I could experience it in a new way but talking with complete strangers or my friends supporting me, it also allowed me to dig deep and find that within me.” It was a real treat to sit down with Hillary Allen for this week's episode of the podcast. Every week on this show I try to glean as much insight and inspiration as possible from some of the top athlet…
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Feb 5, 2019
Episode 48 | Jake Schmitt
“The idea of doing what you love doesn't happen by accident. Like if I went to drama everyday, sure I'd have fun but it would have been misdirected. And I was fortunate enough to have what I loved and learn it but really cultivate it and really be around other people that loved it. And that's probably the theme that will come out of this conversation, whether it's a peer of mine that I'm still friends with because we raced against each other in high school or Mike Fanelli, who was running around the track with me at age 50, or my parents—it doesn't matter the demographic, we shared that. And I want for our high school kids to have that. They're coming to practice with two coaches that love it so much, they're surrounded by teammates that really love what they're doing, and it's the culture that we have, it's the community we're trying to create.”Incredibly excited to welcome Jake Schmitt to the podcast this week. The 31-year-old is a three-time Olympic Trials qualifier in the mar…
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Jan 29, 2019
Episode 47 | Devon Yanko
“I just kind of started to give myself a little bit more credit for what I've done and stopped having that need to incessantly prove myself. Because nobody else is thinking of me that way, nobody else is quantifying other people that way, it's just yourself. And so I made the choice to stop doing that to myself because the priority for me is health—because I can't do the running if I'm unhealthy, and it's as simple as that. The racing doesn't matter; if I'm going to race terribly because I'm ill, then why am I bothering anyways?” I really enjoyed sitting down with Devon Yanko for this week's episode of the podcast. We caught up a little week before the recent Houston Marathon, where she ran 2:39:34—less than a minute off of her personal best—to qualify for the 2020 Olympic Trials in Atlanta.Yanko is a super accomplished athlete who has run almost 100 races of marathon distance and beyond. She's also won two ultra-distance national titles on the roads, represented the U.S. at…
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Jan 21, 2019
Episode 46 | Rob Watson
"You know, growing other avenues of my life has been really positive, and having an overall balance in my life, and not just having this laser focus on running. Because before, my running and my happiness were tied so close together that it was almost a dangerous thing. If I wasn't running well, the rest of my life was not going well either and it was nice to be able to separate that and separate different parts of life and get enjoyment and fulfillment out of hanging out with friends, and not being stressed about not running, and stuff like that. So yeah, it was a shift in mindset that was very important—it had to happen."I had a blast sitting down with Rob Watson for this week's episode of the podcast. Watson is a recently retired professional runner from Canada who won two national steeplechase titles and represented his country numerous times in international competition. He also has a 2:13:29 marathon personal best, finished 11th at Boston in 2013, and broke the 2:20 mark ten ti…
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Jan 14, 2019
Episode 45 | Colleen Quigley
"Like I want to make people happy, and do the right thing, and be successful. And I think a lot of people end up getting sucked into that and then have to be like, 'Wait, why am I doing this?' 'Do I want to be here?' 'Why did I make these choices?' and you have to rethink it and figure out what actually makes you happy and what you actually want to do. Luckily, just being competitive and wanting to get better and better and better at running has turned out pretty good for me because, when I sit back, I do love what I'm doing. But it is something you have to be careful of—like, 'Why am I so obsessed at being so good at that? Or not failing? Maybe it's OK. And I think that's something I'll probably be working with the rest of my life."Stoked to welcome Olympian Colleen Quigley to the podcast this week! The 26-year-old is a member of the Bowerman Track Club and has established herself as one of the top middle-distance runners in the world, specializing in the steeplechase. She competed…
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Jan 7, 2019
Episode 44 | Brogan Austin
"That's the great thing about competition or even just running in general—it's all about yourself. And maybe even greater than that, your running community is behind you and they want you to do well or set PRs. But as long as you're happy or you're doing things that are of value to you, I think people really rally behind that and I think that's what's so cool and unique about the running community. I just focused on myself [at CIM] and was trying to run a big PR for the day and the stars aligned and gave me an extra cherry on the top there to win a national championship, so it was all the merrier."Really excited to welcome reigning U.S. marathon champion Brogan Austin to the podcast this week. For those of you who don’t know, the 27-year-old Austin won CIM in early December, running in 2:12:39 to claim his first national title, set a massive personal best, and make his case as a contender for the 2020 Olympic marathon team.We had a great conversation a couple weeks ago and I’m st…
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Dec 31, 2018
Episode 43 | Kayla Nolan
"I think sometimes someone tells you their story, and you're listening to it and that's a value; other times you need to tell people about it in advocacy; and other times you need to do something about it to help create change. I kind of see Girls Gotta Run as an extension of that, really working to bring those stories, bring the experiences of the girls to an elevated level where more people can understand that, see that, and support them in making change."It was a real treat to talk to Kayla Nolan, the executive director of Girls Gotta Run, for this week’s episode of the podcast. Girls Gotta Run is the only non-profit organization in Ethiopia using the national sport of running to create safe spaces, end child marriage and expand access to secondary school for vulnerable girls.Nolan and Girls Gotta Run are doing some amazing things for women in Ethiopia using running as vehicle to drive positive change. We covered a lot in this conversation—from how Nolan first became connected t…
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Dec 24, 2018
Episode 42 | Nate Helming
“The number one thing is really taking ownership of what you do with your body and understanding that our ideas on strength and exercising, it's not the multivitamin. I can't eat like crap and take my daily pill and think I'm good. Strength doesn't work that way [either]. It's not like I can run like garbage, never stretch, ignore all these signals that my body is giving me all the time, but do this one exercise, and think everything is going to be OK. It needs to be flipped around.”It was super fun to sit down with my friend Nate Helming, co-founder of The Run Experience, an online community that helps runners train to become stronger, faster, and more well-rounded athletes. He is also my personal strength training coach and has helped me become a healthier, more resilient runner over the past few years.Nate and I caught up recently after a run and talked about his evolution as an athlete and a coach, how his own injury frustrations led him to think differently about his approach…
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Dec 18, 2018
Episode 41 | Lindsey Hein
"As far as balance goes, and how do you make it all work, some people call BS and say balance is not attainable, and I think there are moments in life where it feels like it's not, but I think if you can really hone yourself in on the things that are important to you at different parts of your life, it can be.” It was super fun to sit down recently with Lindsey Hein, host of the popular I’ll Have Another podcast, for a wide-ranging exchange that got into the weeds of podcasting (of course), including the origins of her show, how it’s evolved over the past 150+ episodes, what makes for a good conversation, and more.But that's not all! We talked about Hein's introduction to the sport back in high school and how her relationship with running has changed over the years. We also discussed the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy after she found out she was positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation—a story that caught the attention of Women’s Running magazine and landed her on…
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Dec 10, 2018
Episode 40 | Des Linden
"I talk about why I had success in Boston—it’s a 26.2-mile race that this year felt like 30, right? You add in the wind, and the conditions, and it suddenly feels longer, which is part of why I have this advantage in my mind. And so why not test that theory out in the actual distance? I think I can finish a marathon feeling like I can probably go another 10 miles, I just couldn’t go a lick faster, so let’s see how far we can extend that. I think those are all intriguing to me."I'm super excited to welcome my first returning guest back to the show: 2018 Boston Marathon champion Des Linden. Linden and I last spoke on Episode 3 in late January, a couple months before she won the race that changed her life. A lot has transpired since she broke the tape on Boylston Street in mid-April, including the launch of Linden & True Coffee, a coaching change, more media appearances than she can remember, and a sixth-place finish at the New York City Marathon a little over a month ago.Linden a…
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Dec 3, 2018
Episode 39 | Billy Yang
"I think my purpose is to share peoples' stories, share my story, share any stories that will impact peoples' lives. And I love the idea of the content that I create living beyond me, I do. I try not to get too wrapped up in legacy and all that crap but when I do allow myself to take a step back and look at the work that I'm creating, to have it impact people, beyond just the small circle of runners, to actually create runners—people who have told me that they started running, not necessarily 100 milers, but marathons, 5Ks, because they've seen a film of mine—man, you can't put a price on that."I really enjoyed sitting down with my friend Billy Yang for this week's episode of the podcast. Billy has been one of my most requested guests since I started the show a year ago and I was finally able to pin him down for an hour last week at The Running Event in Austin, Texas. (Spoiler alert: An hour wasn’t nearly enough time to cover all the things I wanted to cover, so I’m going to ha…
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Nov 27, 2018
Episode 38 | Dan Cruz
“I'm just excited about being a part of the sport—my love for running and the community continues to evolve. My boy, 4 years old, did the turkey trot yesterday and he loves to race. We go to the track at Point Loma Nazarene and [we're] raising that next generation of runners. There's a lot of up-and-coming athletes that I think are going to do some pretty incredible things and so again, I think it's on us, as the promoters of the sport, the media, journalists, the shoe companies, the industry people to all take a look in the mirror over the holidays here in 2018 and really decide, 'What do we want 2019 to look like and what do we want 2020 to look like?' We get to write our own history and change the game how we want it to be changed, so I think that cooperation and collaboration and storytelling is really what gets me excited about the future of running.” It was a lot of fun to sit down with my former colleague, Dan Cruz, for a freewheeling conversation that gets into the weeds…
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Nov 20, 2018
Episode 37 | Ladia Albertson-Junkans
"Running is such a passion for me and such a source of joy. It's really my way of experiencing life but also a way of exploring the world, and so I really look at it from that lens and I'm always interested in new ways of exploring either the planet or my own capabilities or bringing other people along with me who maybe haven't done something as long or as vert-y, or whatever, and that kind of is what drew me to trail running in the first place."Really enjoyed sitting down with Ladia Albertson-Junkans for the podcast this week. The 32-year-old is one of trail and ultrarunning's rising stars, along with being one of the sport's most versatile athletes. Albertson-Junkans, a two-time cross-country All-American at the University of Minnesota, has accomplished a lot in the past few years, and here are some of the highlights, in no particular order: She made her ultrarunning debut in 2017 at the competitive Chuckanut 50K in Bellingham, Washington, winning in 4:17:44, and then represented the…
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Nov 13, 2018
Episode 36 | Bart Yasso
"If some of the people at the very front would start with these groups in the very back and see people's journeys, they would be changed—and they would realize, not only are these people working so hard at it but they [will] actually physically see what they go through to get to where they are. You know, I have people come up to me at races and say, 'I know you won't believe this, but I used to weigh 500 pounds.' And you're looking at somebody that weighs like 180 pounds and they've lost 320 pounds, and they say, 'Yeah, I couldn't even walk out to my car without stopping and sitting down. I'd get out to the curb and had to sit down because I was out of breath.' And now they're going to run a marathon. How does this transformation happen? Something gets to 'em...there's something out there. When we connect those people, that's when our sport is really going to take off."It's an honor to welcome Bart Yasso to the podcast this week. Known as "The Mayor of Running," the 62-year-old Yasso…
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Nov 6, 2018
Episode 35 | Kim Conley
“Not to sound cheesy, but anything is possible. I think that when you set your mind to something, and make a plan on how to get there, then you just chip away at what the next step of the plan is and you keep working up to the next step on the staircase basically—and it’s amazing how far you can go.”Really enjoyed sitting down with two-time U.S. Olympian Kim Conley this past weekend after she finished fourth at the NYRR Abbott Dash to the Finish Line 5K, a race which doubled as the U.S. 5K road championships for 2018.The 32-year-old Conley, who has been battling a series of injuries since early 2017, is finally healthy again and setting her sights on returning to the track in 2019. Based in Sacramento, where she lives and trains with her husband and coach, Drew Wartenburg, Conley ran collegiately at nearby U.C. Davis, where she graduated in 2009 with modest personal bests of 16:17 for 5000m and 4:22 in the 1500. Despite not being fast enough to land a sponsorship deal after col…
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Oct 23, 2018
Episode 34 | Sanjay Rawal
"It's really inspiring to see someone push themselves and challenge themselves...Bringing out the achievements of people who are fighting the odds, and really putting into context today's race, even for a pro, because even a pro is overcoming something tremendous each race they do—it's never rosy. And understanding that hardship, I think, will give people context into the meaning of a particular race for a particular runner, whether they're an amateur or the world's best."It's a treat to have filmmaker Sanjay Rawal on the podcast this week to talk about his new documentary, "3100: Run and Become," which takes an intimate look at one of the most unique foot races on the planet, The Sir Chinmoy 3100-Mile Self-Transcendence Race. What is the 3100? In short, it's the longest certified road race in the world, and runners attempt to complete 3100 miles in 52 days (or less) around the same city block in Queens, New York. That's just shy of 60 miles per day, for two months straight, around…
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Oct 15, 2018
Episode 33 | Ben Rosario
"You have to look at it like a business. What do you want the culture of your team to be? Focus on that and make sure that the people you're working with are bought into what you're doing. Because I'm telling you right now, you could raise Bill Bowerman from the dead and he could write your schedule, but if you don't have the people that you're working with believing in you, and believing in each other, and believing in what they're doing, it's not going to work."It was a blast to sit down with Ben Rosario, the founder and head coach of HOKA Northern Arizona Elite, for this week's episode of the podcast.The 38-year-old Rosario, who started the team in 2014, has had a long and varied career in the running industry. As an athlete, he ran for the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, qualified for two U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, and finished second at the U.S. Marathon Championships in 2005. He moved back to his hometown of St. Louis that earlier that year, where he first worked as the speci…
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Oct 9, 2018
Episode 32 | Peter Ciaccia
“I could remember standing at the start line the next year and [seeing] how impactful what I do—that solidified it for me—how impactful a job I have to see the world come here and run this race. And when the howitzer went off, I couldn’t pull myself away and I was really overwhelmed at the time. It was a testament to all the work we do to put this on and just standing there and seeing the people run past the start line…it was just overwhelming, but it was something I’ll always, always remember.”Really enjoyed sitting down with Peter Ciaccia, president of events at the New York Road Runners and race director for the New York City Marathon, for the podcast this week!Ciaccia, 65, will be retiring next month after 18 years with the organization. He took over race director duties for the world’s largest and most popular marathon in 2015 and oversees the production of every NYRR event throughout the year. Ciaccia, who is “committed to growing and sustaining a vibrant, inclu…
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Oct 1, 2018
Episode 31 | Gabe and Justin Grunewald
"I grew up with faith and I do think that my life has a purpose—and maybe it's not what I thought it was going to be, but I think that it does help me at some junctures with this disease. This isn't how I would have chosen my life to turn out at all but maybe this is my way of fulfilling my life's purpose and trying to raise awareness for these rare diseases that really do actually need it. I would never have raised my hand to do this, but someone has to."I’m super excited to have one of running’s most impressive power couples joining me on the podcast this week: Gabe and Justin Grunewald.Gabe is one of the top middle-distance runners in the United States. She has run 4:01 for 1500m and was fourth at the Olympic Trials in that event in 2012. In 2014, she won a national title in the 3000m and has been competing at the top of the sport for close to 10 years now. But beyond all that, she’s got an incredible story, one that involves a near decade-long battle with adenoid cystic car…
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Sep 25, 2018
Episode 30 | Lauren Fleshman
"I'm not trying to build some empire where I need to be liked by as many people as possible. I just want to be myself and be myself publicly—until I don't anymore, then I'll just shut down all my social media accounts."Stoked to welcome Lauren Fleshman to the podcast this week! Fleshman, who turns 37 on Wednesday, is a retired professional athlete who still maintains sponsorships with Oiselle and a number of other brands. She's won two national titles, has represented the United States in numerous international competitions, and, in 2011, placed seventh in the 5,000m at the world championships in South Korea. These days, Fleshman wears a lot of hats: mom to two young children, wife to professional triathlete Jesse Thomas, co-founder of Picky Bars along with Thomas and professional marathoner Stephanie Bruce, coach of Little Wing, a small group of elite female runners based in Bend, Oregon, practicing writer, and one of running's most outspoken advocates on a variety of topics and iss…
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Sep 17, 2018
Episode 29 | Mario Mendoza
"To me that's faith. To me that's faith in running. So I think runners understand faith because a lot of times we don't really see something and it might even take years, but then it's like 'Whoa! Where did that come from?' But it was actually because you stuck with it—something in you believed."Really excited to have Mario Mendoza join me on the podcast this week! Mendoza, a 32-year-old from Bend, Oregon, is a five-time national trail running champion, three-time USATF Trail Runner of the Year, and has represented the United States six times in international competition. He's placed in the top-10 at the last two IAU Trail World Championships, finishing sixth in 2018 and ninth in 2017. We recorded this episode the day before his last race—a third-place finish at the Under Armour Mountain Running Series 50K at Mt. Bachelor this past Saturday—and two days before the birth of his son, Jair Giovanni Mendoza.We covered a lot of ground over the course of this hour-long episode: the me…
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Sep 11, 2018
Episode 28 | Sarah Sellers
"My goal isn't to garner more media attention or to shock the world or to even top Boston. My goal is to keep the love of the sport, to stay healthy, and to continue chipping away at times because ultimately I think [that] kind of like Des Linden has shown the world, if you are able to stay healthy and train consistently for a long period of time, that's where you get really good."Stoked to have Sarah Sellers on the podcast this week! The 27-year-old Sellers, who works as a nurse anesthetist in Arizona, was the surprise second-place finisher at April's Boston Marathon, running a personal-best of 2:44:04 in cold, windy, wet conditions. Sellers, who took home $75,000 for her efforts, didn't realize she was the runner-up until after she crossed the finish line.In this conversation, we talked a bit about what's changed for her since Boston while looking ahead to her next big race, the New York City Marathon on November 4. We also discussed whether or not she's felt an added layer of pres…
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Aug 20, 2018
Episode 27 | Kara Goucher
"When you have things that are out of your control, that are weighing on you and really causing you angst on a daily basis, your running is not going to be what you want it to be. It can be a great escape, it can be a place you go to find calmness and peace in your heart and your mind, but you're not going to perform at all what you're capable of performing."Thrilled to welcome Kara Goucher to the podcast this week! Goucher, who recently turned 40, hardly needs any introduction: She's a two-time U.S. Olympian, world championships silver medalist in the 10,000m, sub-2:25 marathoner, and has finished on the podium at both the New York City and Boston marathons. Beyond her competitive accomplishments, Goucher serves as a role model to runners worldwide, particularly women and young women, who are inspired by her example.We talked about a number of different topics over the course of 40 minutes, including how she's dealt with racing anxiety throughout her career, the impetus behind her new…