the morning shakeout podcast

“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...

“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 t...

“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...

“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, wh...

“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 wi...

“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 rememb...

“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...

“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 ...

“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...

“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 a...

“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 th...

“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 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...

“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 any...

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...

“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 clearl...

“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...

“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...

“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 notc...

“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...

“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...

“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 hear...

“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 need...

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 thi...

“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 tha...