The Run Healthy Podcast

Alexi Pappas: Olympian, author, filmmaker, student of the sport, and all around awesome person talks about how she runs healthy. We go deep on nutrition, her mindset, and what it feels like to have your first major setback. Enjoy!

Meb Keflezighi is the only American to win a Boston Marathon, NYC Marathon, and an Olympic Medal. He's also possibly the nicest guy ever. Today on the show we talk about his time at an italian military boarding school, his 20+ year relationship with his coach Bob Larsen, and dig up some details you might not know about his legendary Boston marathon victory. Let’s get into it!

There was a time when running was the world’s simplest sport. No rules. No fancy equipment, just you, a pair of shoes and the road. Then, gradually every aspect of running seemed to grow a computer. Now you can have a GPS on your wrist, a pulse oximeter on your other wrist and an AI powered run coach in the sole of your shoes pumping technique advice into your bluetooth headphones.

But what role should this technology play in our sport? How does transforming running to a technologically integrated and socially networked passtime change the dynamics and affect our health as athletes. Today on the show, I sit down with Mark Gainey, one of the founders of Strava and dig into what we can all learn about healthy running in a connected world.

Dr. Cheri Blauwet is a former wheelchair racer with 7 Paralympic medals and 6 World Major Marathon trophies on her mantle. She’s also a sports medicine physician Brigham and Women's hospital & Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital while maintaining an assistant professorship at Harvard Medical school.

Dr. Blauwet has done extensive research on overuse injuries in adaptive athletes and athletes without disabilities, so if you’re looking for one person to talk to on the subject of healthy endurance sports, Cheri is that person. Today on the show, we talk about everything from her first Boston Marathon win to her thoughts on balanced training to the time Morgan Freeman actually narrated her life.

Do you like running? Well you might owe this guy a “thank you” for making the sport popular in the first place. Frank Shorter is the only American to win 2 medals in the Olympic Marathon, and his 1972 Gold at the Munich games is often seen as the moment that catalyzed the start of the running boom in America. On today’s show, we bounce around Frank’s 60 year running career while talking about wisdom he’s acquired on staying healthy and loving the sport. We get into what active recovery and cross training looked like in the 70s and talk about how how he learned to accurately read his body’s sensory data to help him perform his best. We also bust some myths about legendary workouts he used to do and talk about a few scenes in the famous running novel, Once a Runner, that he inspired. Frank joined James Randon and I for a conversation via Zoom.

To runners in Boston, there are few athletes more legendary than Bill Rodgers. Boston Billy may have been born in Connecticut, but when you win the Boston marathon 4 times and run 100 laps of the one and a half mile loop at Jamaica Pond in one week, the city of Boston is going to name you as their own. Bill is one of the greatest marathoners in American history. He’s won every road race you can think of, many of them more than once, and has manage to log over 180,000 healthy lifetime miles. Today on the show, my good friend James Randon and I talk with Bill about how he managed to turn himself from a smoker into a marathoner and have fun, all while winning more races and running more miles than you or I can ever imagine.

Today on the show I sit down with 2020 Olympic Qualifier Molly Seidel. This year at the US Olympic Marathon trials, Molly wasn’t exactly the number one favorite, but as the miles wore on and the field started to melt away, Molly endured. In her first ever marathon, she crossed the line in second place with a time of 2:27:31 and earned a spot to the Tokyo Olympic Team. We chatted about the mentality that’s allowed her to come back from injury and how she's perfected the art of getting race ready without getting hurt.

At Recover Athletics, it's our mission to help runners become injury proof and part of the minority of runners who go a whole year or even their whole career without sustaining an injury.  Every couple of weeks, I will bring you interviews with professional runners, former Olympians and top sports medicine professionals to hear their stories and pass along advice that you can use in your running career to go miles and miles injury-free.