THE RUNNING EFFECT PODCAST

-The Run Down By The Running Effect (our new newsletter!): https://tinyurl.com/mr36s9rs The myths runners live by are surprisingly hard to kill. Alex Ostberg is back with Dominic to dismantle four more of them. First up: the soft surface myth. Alex explains how the brain anticipates soft terrain and stiffens the legs before foot strike, largely canceling out whatever cushioning the ground provides...

Jess McClain went from anonymous to American course record holder in about two years. She'll tell you that it’s not actually that simple. The 2024 Olympic Trials were the moment the running world met Jess when she finished fourth in Orlando, out of nowhere—or so the story went. In this episode, she explains what that looked like from the inside: going in without expectations, with her husband Conn...

Website:  ⁠bicarb.shop  Riley Witt doesn't think you need talent to break four minutes in the mile—he just thinks you need to want it bad enough to spend $35. The Northwest Missouri State senior came on to break down the philosophy behind that take, and what followed was one of the more honest conversations about athletic ambition, economic reality, and the compounding edge of doing everything...

Mark Dowdle ran 306.6 miles in 73 hours, drove 20 hours home, picked up a puppy, and was back umpiring youth baseball the next week.  That's either the most unhinged post-race recovery plan in endurance sports history, or it's the most honest thing anyone's said about who he actually is. This is the conversation Dominic was saving for after the race—and it delivered on the hype. Mark w...

Luke Hopkins doesn't separate who he is from what he does—and that almost broke him. When a stress fracture pulled him off the training schedule he'd built his identity around, Hopkins had to face a question most high achievers never stop long enough to ask: what's left when the sport is gone?  In this episode, the guys dive into the psychology of performance: the difference between be...

Alan Webb still has the record. Twenty-four years later, nobody's touched it.  The American high school mile record (3:53.43, set at the 2001 Prefontaine Classic) has outlasted every shoe revolution, every bicarb protocol, and every perfectly concocted running shoe PR storm. In this conversation, Webb sits down with Dominic to talk about why that mark still stands, what it actually felt like t...

He ran 63 miles on a broken stomach, launched a product the same week, and called it a good weekend. Zach Pogrob is back—and this time, the conversation goes deeper than any race result.  A month before the BPN G1M Ultra, he posted a photo at 220 pounds and admitted he had no business toeing the line. He showed up anyway, ran until his GI system shut down at mile 50, kept going on fumes, and walke...

She threw up before every race. Now she's the fourth-fastest high school miler in American history. Ellery Lincoln is a Nike Elite junior from Lincoln High School in Portland, and her 4:30.00 at the 2026 Nike/Jesuit Twilight Relays didn't arrive as a surprise so much as an inevitability—the product of two years’ worth of illness, setback, and a mantra she and her mom built together: consis...

Trevor Painter doesn't coach world record holders by accident—he builds them, one hard session at a time. Painter is the architect behind Keely Hodgkinson's indoor world record and Georgia Hunter Bell's World Indoor 1500m gold, and in this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on exactly how M11 Track Club operates.  He opens with what makes Keely truly special: not just her talent,...

Jonny Davies ran 119 miles on a Texas ranch, vomited up half a bottle of water, and still had to be talked out of going back for one more lap. Fresh off his second BPN Go One More Last Man Standing Ultra (and 17 more miles than the year before), Jonny sits down with Dominic to unpack what really happens when the race strips everything away. He gets into the brutal physics of surviving Texas heat a...

He ran 3:58 off early-season training, and he's not done yet. Jackson Spencer sat down with Dominic just days after becoming one of roughly 32 high schoolers in American history to break four minutes in the mile, and the conversation is exactly what you'd hope from a kid with this kind of season: honest, grounded, and full of detail that never shows up in a results column. He walks through...

Vinny Mauri was working the floor at a running shoe store in Ohio. Then he ran 2:05:54 and became the fastest American marathon debutant in history. Nobody was watching. That's not hyperbole.   While the running world was fixated on Sabastian Sawe's sub-two-hour performance in London, a 25-year-old from Warren, Ohio quietly dismantled the record books at the Glass City Marathon in Toledo—r...

Charles Hicks ran 2:04:35 at Boston in his second marathon. His coach was watching from Eugene, trying not to lose his mind.  Alex Ostberg and Charles Hicks were Stanford teammates for exactly one year: Ostberg a fifth-year senior, Hicks a freshman who wasn't even first on the depth chart in his incoming class. Five years later, they're coach and athlete inside Nike's Swoosh Track Club, and they j...

He won Olympic gold in 2016, more with his brain, not his legs—and the running world never forgot it.  Matthew Centrowitz Jr., the only American man to win Olympic 1,500m gold since Mel Sheppard in 1908, sits down with The Running Effect for a wide-open conversation about what it took to become the most decorated American miler of his generation. From his 2011 NCAA title at Oregon to three World C...

Joey Miuccio came to Texas undertrained, ran 111 miles, and cried in a chair. He'd do it all again.   This one goes deeper than the G1M Ultra. Joey breaks down what actually separates a backyard ultra from Leadville. It'snot the distance, it's that you can never slow to a crawl. Every lap has a clock, and the clock doesn't care about your knee.  He hit mile 85 feeling invincible, convinced he'd be...

JOIN MY TEAM & SUPPORT A GREAT CAUSE: https://www.wingsforlifeworldrun.com/en/teams/5Nrld5?join=1 Every runner has a mental checklist of what's holding them back. Iron deficiency, life stress, ice bath mythology, and the gap between ambition and biology probably aren't on it—but after this episode, they will be. Alex Ostberg is back for the Rundown Recap, and he starts where most coach...

He came out of nowhere, tied a backyard ultra, and accidentally built one of running's most compelling brands—all before turning 22.     Now Kim Goldwald is back on the show, and this time, he left Texas without the crown. Kim returns to The Running Effect fresh off his second Go One More Ultra, where he finished 58 loops (241.5 miles) in brutal, rain-soaked conditions before his right glute gave...

The woman treating Olympic athletes says the sport has been coaching women wrong for decades, and she's built the clinic, the science, and the summit to prove it. Dr. Lyndsay Centrowitz is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, pelvic health specialist, and USATF medical provider on a mission to rebuild how running treats the female body. She owns StrongHER, a women's-only PT practice in Park City,...

He's 0.08 seconds from the four-minute mile, and Festival of Miles is the race he's had circled all year.  Caden Leonard arrives in St. Louis as the top-ranked high school miler in the country—coming off a 4:00.07 indoor and a 4:01.02 outdoor, the fastest mile ever run by a prep athlete on Texas soil. Last year he ran this same race through a stress reaction nobody knew about. This year he...

JOIN MY TEAM & SUPPORT A GREAT CAUSE: https://www.wingsforlifeworldrun.com/en/teams/5Nrld5?join=1 Martin Dugard has spent his whole life at the intersection of running and history, and  The Long Run  is where they finally collide. Dugard is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with over 12 million copies sold, a three-time Raid Gauloises adventure racer, a co-holder of the global circumnavig...

Forty-five days ago, he told TRE he didn't know if he liked running anymore.  Then he ran 37 loops.  Aleksander Piotr Lingauer showed up to the 2026 BPN Go One More Ultra carrying more than a race bib. He carried a childhood spent in foster care across England and Germany, a nervous system that had been shutting down in the weeks before the start line, and a verse from Joel written on his shir...

Most people spend years chasing a record. Jane Hedengren did it on her first try. On April 3rd at the Stanford Invitational, BYU freshman Jane Hedengren stepped onto the track for her first-ever collegiate outdoor race and ran 30:46.80, the fastest collegiate 10,000m in NCAA history. She broke Parker Valby's record by nearly four seconds.  That's who TRE is sitting down with this week.      But th...

Quentin Nauman is already a legend in Iowa. This spring season is the encore The greatest prep distance runner in Iowa history enters his final outdoor season with 10 state titles, two national championships, and one goal left unfinished.   Two weeks ago at Nike Indoor Nationals, Nauman anchored Iowa's DMR team to a national title in 9:46.23, edging Texas by under a second in a dramatic final 200...

Colorado-born elite runner turned entrepreneur David Perry is here—a guy who went from captain of Adidas Runners NYC to founder of one of the most talked-about jewelry brands in the athletic world.  David gained notoriety in the NYC running community before founding his own luxury jewelry brand, David Perry Jewelry. He was an All-America runner at the University of Portland, where he competed in C...

He won a world title on spring break. Monday morning, he was back in class. Cooper Lutkenhaus is 17 years old and the youngest world champion in the history of track and field. Weeks after Toruń, he sits down with The Running Effect to answer the question nobody else has asked: what does life actually look like on the other side of history? The Nike contract signed at 16. The high school coach he...