We Run This

Our guest on the show this week is Shelby LeDuff.

A former Division I volleyball player, LeDuff tore her ACL, MCL, and meniscus three different times during college, and was forced to choose between pursuing her dream or being able to walk at age 40.  

“My entire life goal up to that point was to be a professional volleyball player and model. And then plan B had to happen,” recalls LeDuff. 

She tried coaching volleyball for a bit but found that teaching the sport brought a sense of sadness for not being able to do the thing she loved. 

After giving up coaching volleyball, and mourning the loss of her dream, the California native embarked on a career in personal and group fitness. After going through a bad breakup, Shelby gravitated towards spin and became an instructor. 

Shelby’s now teaches spin and other fitness classes while serving up daily fitness, beauty, health & wellness tips on Instagram.

In this interview, Shelby talks about the transition from athlete to fitness instructor, how she mentally focuses on exercise even on her worst days, how to maintain a healthy eating lifestyle even when the options aren’t so great, finding healthy alternatives when eating, the reason she doesn’t believe in cheat days, and why runners need to add spin classes to their training. 

My guest on the show today is fitness trainer, father, and husband, Jamaal Sanderson.

Jamaal likes to call himself “Fit Mr. Mom,” in fact, that’s even his Instagram handle. 

Jamaal's fitness journey started as a track star. He admits to being “115 pounds, soaking wet,” which isn’t much meat for his 5’10” frame. Jamaal naturally gravitated towards running. Jamaal thinks he still holds the record for the fastest mile in his high school at 4:15 but hasn’t checked in a while.

A fractured pelvic bone before college caused Jamaal to lose his scholarship and he lost his spot on the team. 

In this episode, Jamaal discusses his kids fighting about taking his classes, his transition from an athlete to a fitness “performer”, the reason he fell in love with spin, the importance of exercise and escape and the filthy playlist the moms in his class blast alone in the car. 

CJ Albertson loves to just wake up and give himself wild challenges. In the middle of the pandemic last year, with all races shut down, the 27-year-old Brooks runner decided to try and break the 50K world record. It took 125 laps in soaking-wet shoes, but he set the record in his first official attempt.

About a week later, CJ ran a 2:09 marathon on the treadmill- also a world record.

This makes complete sense for a guy who claims his favorite quote is “running is easy.” 

In this episode, CJ discusses his world record attempts - both on the track and the treadmill - and his ability to just wake up and set his mind to breaking records. 

Welcome back to another episode of We Run This. My guest this week is author and runner, Alex Hutchinson.

As the longtime “Sweat Science” columnist for Outside and Runner’s World, Alex draws on his background as a former national-team long-distance runner and Cambridge-trained physicist, as well as his own unique access to world-class athletes and scientists.

After debuting in hardcover in 2018, Hutchinson’s book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, is considered the definitive book on endurance and the mind for people looking to push their performance limits.

Endure is celebrating its paperback release along with updated information, the latest research on endurance, and a new afterword.

In our talk, Alex and I cover the discuss endurance and the tricks the brain plays on athletes of all skill levels, breaking old habits, the positive and negative mental benefits of social media in connection with pushing limits, and the limiting beliefs that keep people from achieving higher goals and believing what's possible and impossible.

Our guest on the show this week is New Zealand middle-distance runner, Nick Willis. 

Willis is the only two-time Olympic medalist for New Zealand in the 1500 meters. Willis won the silver medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and bronze at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

The 37-year-old Kiwi also holds another amazing record. He’s run a sub-4:00 mile every year for the last 19 years. 

Willis talks to us about breaking the record, when the record came on his radar, when he started running, competing in the Olympics, and his occasional love of packing on pounds. 

Plus, Nick and Chris make an announcement at the end of the show that every listener will want to hear. 

Our guest on the show this week is Olympic gold medal winner, Kaleigh Gilchrist.

Born and raised in Newport Beach, California, Kaleigh was drawn to the water as a kid and fell in love with both surfing and water polo almost immediately.

Kaleigh competed at the World Surfing Games for five consecutive years in her teens while helping her high school team to win a California Interscholastic Federation water polo championship. She also won back-to-back USA Surfing Under 18 Championships during high school.

Fast forward a few years and Kaleigh found herself representing Team USA in Rio winning an Olympic Gold Medal in water polo and is now splitting her time on the World Surf League Qualifying Surf Series and in the pool with Team USA.

It was during this time that Kaleigh struck up a friendship with another Team USA member - Kobe Bryant.

In this interview, Kaleigh discusses her attraction to the water, surfing almost since birth, striking up a friendship with the basketball legend, preparing to play in front of empty arenas, and the really weird place she keeps her gold medal.

Brian Gross's career in media and PR has taken him to some incredibly odd places - the offices of Def Jam Records, the AVN awards, on the set of several reality shows, and even riding in limos with people like Gene Simmons and Sasha Grey.

One place Gross never expected to end up was in the middle of North Korea, running a half-marathon through a country that eventually banned Americans from stepping foot on its soil.

The story of Gross running 13.1 miles through a hostile - at least now - country starts where most adventures end. A sex toy.

In this interview, Gross talks about how he got into the PR business, took up running, completed more marathons and half-marathons than he ever thought his body would allow, and his insane adventure through the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

This week on the show, we're joined by middle-distance runner, Nike Oregon Project member, and all-around character, Craig Engels.

Engels' natural running ability might not even be in the top ten most interesting things about the 25-year-old Ole Miss grad.

Engels missed the cut for the Olympic roster by one spot in the 800m and two spots in the 1500m but he's much more comfortable discussing the time he quit college and bought an RV to take across the country or one of his many boat-flipping projects. 

In this interview, the charismatic Engels discusses finding a passion for running track - after getting kicked off the high school soccer team for mooning a coach - committing to Ole Miss on the day of his visit and never leaving campus, people assuming he's not taking the sport seriously because he's having so much fun, and his next passion project - converting a double-decker bus into a party bus.

On this week's episode of "We Run This," we're talking to adventure runner and climber, Jason Hardrath. 

In 2015, while in the best shape of his life and the middle of training for an Ironman, Hardrath had his professional, athletic, and personal life "reset to zero." Hardrath was in a horrific car accident and statistically should be dead. 

In this talk, Hardrath explains how he went from a feeling of invincibility to a hard reset of everything he'd done in his life up to that point. 

The adventure runner also discusses his mindset during the incredibly heartbreaking setback, how a doctor told him in the days after his injury that he'll never compete at the same level again, taking what the doctor told him personally and his current quest to 100 "Fastest Known Times" in running.

This week on the show, we're joined by two-time Olympian, Nick Symmonds.

Nick competed for the United States at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. Though his focus has been on the 800 meters for the majority of his career, Nick also has a personal best of 3:56 seconds in the mile.

After his running career came to an end, Nick became a successful entrepreneur and YouTube star. His YouTube channel is filled with videos of the former Olympian racing go-kart, Teslas, and even includes fitness challenges like doing 300 push-ups a day for 30 days.

In this interview, Nick talks about competing in the Olympics and the mental crash that happened when that part of his life ended, where he gets the inspiration for his YouTube videos, getting smoked by strangers on the street, a secret cheat he does before his races, why commentating for NBC sucked, and how to win a race against friends.