We Are Superman

Send us Fan Mail Happy New Year, everyone! Returning to the Hive is the always fun breakout star of ultrarunning, Annie Hughes.  We spoke with her in 2021 after she became, at age 23, the youngest-ever winner of the Leadville Trail 100. And she was a local resident to boot!  Annie ramped up her racing and success even more in 2022, capturing four more titles and many course records, all with the g...

Send us Fan Mail Following my running the LT100 in August, I went through two weeks of extreme fatigue, I was exhausted at times following doing only household chores.  I had an ok week after that, and then I was set back for another two weeks after receiving shots I needed for my trip to Africa.  Even after that, I have often struggled to feel energy on runs, frequently feeling out of breath eith...

Send us Fan Mail It’s our annual holiday tradition: Gary Stotler and I presenting Sober F*cking Christmas. Gary has had quite a journey in 2022, so we chat about both of our career’s twisting roads and what’s coming up for the holidays, including Gary’s own food struggles during the holidays and how he solves them. Of course, we pay tribute to David Clark, who recorded the first Sober F*cking Chri...

Send us Fan Mail We often talk about rebounding on the WASP. It may not be much harder than this since we spoke earlier in 2022 about Holocaust survivor Lili Berliner. Today we talk with Rick Townsend, whose lovely daughter Lauren was one of 12 students murdered at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Rick is the president of the Columbine Memorial Foundation, which maintains the beautiful mem...

Send us Fan Mail I’m excited to present the second WASP appearance by Dan Herman, who trains and counsels athletes out of Dan Herman Performance in New Jersey. Like we did a year ago, Dan and I have a fun and timely chat to keep you focused on your training and nutrition goals through the holidays and into next year. Dan is an amazingly insightful guy who’s had his own amazing journey. He was 375...

Send us Fan Mail As most of you know, the typical response in our medical system to your injury is first medication, sometimes physical therapy, then maybe injections, and finally surgery. In the previous episode, Sammie Lewis and I touched on some of the more advanced modalities available should you get injured. The problem can often be that if you need one of these, good luck getting our health...

Send us Fan Mail As I’ve mentioned, I’m a huge believer that if you want to keep working out without interruption, you must address your muscle imbalances and your overall balance, and in many instances work on your mobility, flexibility, and overall strength. These efforts should be happening year-round, but in particular we often have more opportunity to do so in the winter. So I thought it woul...

Send us Fan Mail With Thanksgiving around the corner, our focus is on family, so who better to bring onto the WASP than the creator of the Leadville family herself, Merilee Maupin? While Ken Chlouber and his rugged miner face and dressed in classic Western attire appears on the Leadville Race Series Web site and posters, Merilee, as co-founder with Ken, was the force behind creating the Leadville...

Send us Fan Mail I hope you caught last week Kelly Thrush’s jaw-dropping story of nearly drinking himself to death, how a liver transplant saved his life despite that he hadn’t yet gotten sober, and waking up from that surgery feeling gratitude for the efforts of so many to give him another shot at life. Kelly has grabbed that opportunity by the proverbial horns. He describes in this second part g...

Send us Fan Mail At this year’s American Heroes Run, Kelly Thrush of Arizona by far had the best cheering section, including a couple of adorable tikes, his niece and nephew, holding up a posterboard sign with the message, “From liver transplant to 100 miles, look at what you can do Kelly.” I had the fantastic opportunity to cover a few laps with Kelly and got to hear his remarkable story. An aspi...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve brought back Kathy Davis from VegInspired, who was on episode #217 on July 21, to expand on the benefits of plant-based eating, and more importantly, how to make it easy to do. Specifically, she recommends meal planning so as to avoid, when life gets chaotic, reverting to eating out of a box, i.e., reaching for the nearest junk food. Most importantly, she offers tips about ma...

Send us Fan Mail Training most of your life to make the Olympic team and then actually achieving that goal has got to be the crowning achievement of your life, right? For Hannah Halvorsen, it certainly was. It looks so glamorous to march in the Opening Ceremony, competing against the best in the world at the most awesome venues money can build, enjoying an unparalleled experience in the Olympic Vi...

Send us Fan Mail First I had a two-week malaise after running the Leadville Trail 100.  Then after receiving yellow fever, typhoid, and polio vaccinations for my upcoming trip to Africa, I went through a host of medical problems including debilitating cramps in my upper trapezius muscle, more fatigue, numbness in my fingers, and double vision.  So now I'm pretty much starting over, as I did a...

Send us Fan Mail There were stories galore at the 2022 American Heroes Run, David's tribute to first responders, military service people and veterans, and the lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. We also had a lot of record performances, perhaps due to a sudden 40-degree drop in temperature plus a steady dose of rain. Please listen to hear some of these impressive and inspirational tales of enduranc...

Send us Fan Mail I hope you enjoyed part one of the great storytelling with one of running’s legends, Roy Pirrung. Last episode I detailed some of Roy’s many incredible running achievements at a wide array of distances, and he and I talked about some of his many-varied experiences. In part two of this conversation we talk more about how the Italians tried to stop him from finishing a race, getting...

Send us Fan Mail When I first began running long distances, I subscribed to this obscure black-and-white magazine called Ultrarunning. It was nothing but race results and a few articles and letters to the editor. The community of ultrarunners was very small in those days, and there were a couple of names I’d always see standing out in the results. One of them was Roy Pirrung, a legend of the sport...

Send us Fan Mail It’s taken a bit to process everything from my Leadville Trail 100. The race for me ended at Twin Lakes, mile 40. My plan to fuel and hydrate better by going out at a conservative pace was obviously too slow and might have worked better had I not expended so much mental and physical energy dealing with a lighting system that wasn’t bright enough and my dicey depth perception and b...

Send us Fan Mail It's here!  Time to run the fabled Leadville Trail 100 for 700-800 intrepid runners and for me for the ninth time.  Here's a quick preview before heading to beautiful, magical Leadville.  Bill Stahl silly_billy@msn.com Facebook Bill Stahl Instagram @stahlor

Send us Fan Mail Get ready for a super-exciting and motivational episode with legends of ultraendurance racing, Mark Macy, known to many as Mace, and his son Travis. Mace is an adventure athlete extraordinaire, including competing in every one of the Eco-Challenges during its original iteration from 1995 to 2002. I would take up an entire podcast if I were to read off all of Travis’ racing honors....

Send us Fan Mail I'm excited to be just two weeks away from running the Leadville Trail 100, one of the toughest running tests on the planet. I'll be toeing the starting line there for the ninth time, and hoping to become one of the very few to finish it in four different 10-year age groups! I talk about how I've been training, my race strategy, nutrition and hydration plan, my crew...

Send us Fan Mail This is part two of a really fun episode with two very impressive track athletes, Camden Law of Chatfield H.S. and Jake Culig of Bear Creek H.S., who finished 2nd and 3rd at the Colorado 5A State meet in the 800 meters. As I mentioned before, even if you’re not a high school track fan, I think there is a lot to gain from listening to these insightful young men. In the previous epi...

Send us Fan Mail In June, I was volunteering at the Resurrection Aid Station at the Leadville Marathon and Heavy Half, and noticed a couple of groups running together wearing neon green shirts that said Team Leadville and STOP Veteran Suicide, which immediately drew my interest. Never one not to initiate a conversation, I chatted with a few of them – not holding them up from continuing their missi...

Send us Fan Mail This episode should be helpful to you if you're training for your first marathon or if you have run a few and are looking to tweak your training. I chatted here with Mike English, who I'd coached when he was in high school, then competed for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Mike drifted away from running while establishing his career and his family with hi...

Send us Fan Mail For me, the transition to eating plant-based wasn’t a hard choice. As opposed to some athletes who do it for performance-related reasons, I’ve become increasingly fed up with the food industry, particularly factory farming. We kill billions of living, breathing, intelligent animals, funded to a large extent by the government – through industry promoters who lobby for subsidies lik...

Send us Fan Mail I have a really fun episode for you. I have brought together two very impressive track athletes, Jake Culig of Bear Creek H.S. and Camden Law of Chatfield H.S., who finished 2nd and 3rd at the Colorado 5A State meet in the 800 meters. We had hoped to include Drew Costelow of Valor Christian, who’d won that race, but he had a family medical emergency, yet Jake, Camden, and I had a...