the morning shakeout podcast

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...

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...

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 evol...

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...

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 creat...

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 evo...

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 a...

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 re...

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, w...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 ap...

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...

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, insigh...

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 anot...

“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 Alph...

“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. Th...

“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 fo...

“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 scr...

“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 run...

“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...

“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 p...

“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 wil...

“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 rig...