Stay ConnectedListen as Dana Giordano, a professional middle-distance runner, sits down and talks with some of the most inspirational and insightful women in running. Whether they’re doing amazing things on the track or working tirelessly to promote the sport as industry leaders and entrepreneurs, hear how they’ve found success.
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"I think I would like to see a wide recognition and acceptance that there is an infinite number of ways to be good. One of the things that irk me the most is when I see people and fans who are part of the same community and asking for very specific tips and tricks. 'How do I get fast?' or 'How do I do this?' and 'How do I do that?' I wish that everyone would recognize that every body is unique. Every backstory is unique. Everyone's personal life and circumstances are unique. Not everyone has the same support system or coaches. Feet! The same pair of shoes don't work for everyone. I totally understand that there are absolute basics that can apply to everyone like certain drills or foods that are known to be good on a tough stomach...but at the end of the day, I just wish there was more of a wider acknowledgment that there are a million ways to get to the starting line. Not everyone needs to be running the same amount of miles or doing the same workouts."
Thrilled to introduce my Boston Athletic Association teammate Erika Kemp. We are currently in Tallahassee, Fla. for a warm-weather training camp. Erika was the 2019 U.S. national champion in the 15K and also finished second at the 2018 U.S. 5K championships. She is a formally trained barista. She was a standout runner at NC State and attended high school in Mount Holly, N.J. She's got some interesting perspectives about how she views training, how she wants to improve and her goals for the future. Enjoy this candid conversation between me and my teammate. Hopefully, this gives you a little bit of an inside look at what training camp is like and how we keep ourselves entertained.
▶ Follow Erika on Instagram: @imtinyrik
"I was in medical device marketing and I was trying to get into more into social media for that company. I'd always hear Gary Vee talk about TikTok. I thought, 'What is with this? Does he have stock in TikTok?' I never understood it. I thought I'd join it for fun and I made a video almost immediately. I'm the type of person who won't understand something unless I do it myself. I just put something up there. I didn't put a running video up until months later. I just let it go and forgot that I had TikTok. It was maybe the second running video that went viral almost had two million views. I was like, 'What? This is a video of me running with my fogged-up glasses.' There was no story behind it. Nothing. It went viral and I figured I'm onto something here. If this is what I'm doing anyway: I'm already trying to run. Maybe I can meet other people who are trying to run? Something about it seemed to be relatable to other people. That's how it took off. It's just luck."
In this episode, I welcome a TikTok star. I've been on the social media platform for about a year. At first, I spent a couple of months just observing and then I finally started making my own videos. It is addicting. One of the first people I followed in the running space on TikTok is Mrs. Space Cadet, also known as Erin. She has nearly 400K+ followers on TikTok. She'll take us through her learning experience from not being able to run a mile to completing her first marathon. She runs in a banana suit. She'll paint herself gold. She's just utterly authentic and amazing. I love being Erin's TikTok friend. Join us for a fun conversation where we bounce around her experience of becoming a marathoner, her goals for the future and how TikTok is her job. This is a fun episode and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
▶ Follow Erin: @immrsspacecadet
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This episode hits at the core of why I started this podcast. Women reportedly only receive 4% of all sports media coverage. When I learned of this statistic, it truly stuck with me for years. In September, I was scrolling on Instagram and a cool project popped up where it was the New York Times' sports section with all men's sports coverage cut out. There was occasionally a little picture in the corner but it was mostly empty. The visual representation gripped me and I wanted to know more about the person behind the project. Katherine Burgess is a runner and graphic designer based in Pittsburgh. Her project examining the New York Times' sports section is just one of many projects that she's put together. Her goal is to combine some of that passion for running with her creative energy and skills. She's multi-talented. In this episode, we discuss what got her interested in doing that project, her thoughts on the media coverage of women in sports, her background in Division II running and much more.
▶ Follow Katherine: @katherine_kart
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Welcome back to Season 2 of More Than Running with Dana. In this first episode, I sit down for a candid conversation with media extraordinaire Michelle Sammet.
Michelle wears many hats working with World Athletics at international events. She is a content creator by trade and has close relationships with many athletes who she assists with their own respective storytelling. As an announcer, social media expert and writer, Michelle works tirelessly to bring world-class coverage of athletics to life.
In our conversation, we talk about how Michelle got her start in the sport from her hometown in Germany to how she's using her work to elevates female voices. It’s only fitting that a podcast about sharing women’s stories in running kicks off its second season with an expert.
Welcome back and I hope you enjoy the conversation!
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A quick bonus episode of "More Than Running" as we're in-between seasons. We get to catch up with the inaugural guest and 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials runner-up Molly seidel as she gets ready to run the London Marathon. The race is typically held in April but was postponed until October and then scaled down into an Elite-only race involving 19 clockwise laps of a 2.15-kilometer course around St James’s Park and finishing on the Mall as per tradition. Seidel is one of three American women racing.
Molly tells us what it's been like living in the 40-acre biosphere where all elites, coaches and staff members have been quarantined ahead of the race to prevent any possible coronavirus outbreak or spread.
➡️ Follow Molly on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bygolly.molly/
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"As athletes, we all have to address: Who are you if you are not racing and what do you represent to your community? What can you share? What can you give? I want to be a mentor to girls and women. I want to be inspiring. I want to tell my story. If my story isn't interesting when I'm not racing then that's a problem."
To put a bow on the first season of More Than Running, Dana Giordano sits down with producer Chris Chavez to unpack what she learned from speaking to 11 inspiring women in the first 11 episodes of her podcast. Plus...learn what Dana has in store for Season 2!
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“I am definitely not the first person to write about the history of fitness but I will say I think I am one of the first people who is connecting fitness culture in America to bigger political and cultural questions and doing so in a kind of popular way...I draw on the work of amazing scholars who have been working on fitness and physical culture but their work has been more within the academy. That’s a real privilege to be doing real research and to help amplify the work of people who have come before. As to why people haven’t thought about this as a meaningful and historical topic, it’s interesting. A lot of times, there’s this irony that our nation is obsessed with fitness. It’s being pushed on us all the time. ‘Work out!’ ‘Buy this machine!’ ‘Join this gym!’
At the same time, we’re one of the least fit nations out there. The question that animates my research is: How did we become a country obsessed with exercise? That is a really new thing. But also, why are we not more fit? Why is access to fitness not a democratically assured right, if most people in America would tell you ‘Yeah, exercise is a good thing.’”
On More Than Running, I try to talk to women from all aspects of the sport of running and beyond in order to expand my own personal knowledge and learn from thought leaders in their respective fields. This week’s guest is no exception to that; Natalia Petrzela is a self-described “scholar, writer, teacher, and activist” and I will add mother, podcaster, fitness instructor, and runner to that impressive list.
After discovering Natalia on Twitter, I was drawn in by an interesting Jezebel article she wrote about the history of “working out from home.” Natalia is currently writing a book titled Fit Nation: How America Embraced Exercise as the Government Abandoned It, which tackles questions about fitness culture in America, access to fitness, and our fitness identity as a nation. Most recently, Natalia was featured on NPR’s Code Switch discussing the whiteness of Running and its historical origins dating back to Bill Bowerman’s 1977 book title Jogging which sparked the jogging boom for white America.
In this episode of the podcast, we bounce around and discuss Natalia’s own fitness identity, her goals as a historian, and her hopes for the future of fitness. Enjoy!
Jen Rhines is one of the most accomplished American distance runners in history. She's made 15 U.S. national teams including three Olympic teams. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, she competed in the 10,000 meters. Four years later, she ran the marathon in Athens. In 2008, she dropped all the way back down to run the 5,000 meters in Beijing. Jen has been an Adidas athlete for more than 20 years. From her website, she boasts that she ranks in the top 10 all-time for the United States in the 3,000 meters, 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters. We chat about her longevity in the sport and how most of her PRs came between the ages of 33 and 36. We'll also learn about her introduction to pro running, what she thinks has attributed to her successes, an inside look at her favorite Olympic memories and much more.
Jen currently lives and trains in San Diego, where she helps coach the Golden Coast Track Club alongside her husband Terrence Mahon.
For the first time, we have a co-host as Daniel Winn, a professional runner with the Brooklyn Track Club in New York City, joins the show. He was a former teammate of Jen's with the Boston Athletic Association.
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“I don’t really feel that I need to disprove the idea of burnout. But to me, it’s all a mental thing. The only reason you really walk away is because 1) You just come to hate it and you never really want to do it again or 2) You never come to terms with the fact that you might have to do it differently to get back there. As young women, you wake up, you drink a glass of water, you put your shoes on and you’re out the door. The older you get, maybe you need to stretch a little bit beforehand or do so some extra drills. It’s kind of understanding that’s OK and that your body is going to grow, change and adapt. The longer you’re in the sport, the more you’re going to create rhythms for yourself and knowing that being 24 is still young and there’s a lot of life as a runner and otherwise to live.”
Mary Cain joins Dana Giordano for a conversation just days after she announced that she is now a full-time employee of Tracksmith and will help oversee the company's New York City community engagement as a manager. Cain made headlines last fall when she came forward with allegations that she was "emotionally and physically abused" by coach Alberto Salazar as a member of the Nike Oregon Project. She has become one of the running's biggest advocates for women's sports and safe coaching practices as a result of sharing her story. Mary is still training at a professional level and is targeting the 2021 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in the 1,500 meters, 800 meters or 5,000 meters.
In this conversation, Dana and Mary discuss how Mary overcame her longest injury cycle, her drive growing up, tapering intensity, balancing the concept of burnout, how the New York Times op-doc came about and much more.
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“The more I ran, the more questions I started to ask about this space. When I would run, I never saw anyone who looked like me. I am an African American woman. I lived in a neighborhood that is not African-American and is a predominantly white and Latinx population. Running in the neighborhood I started to wonder, ‘Do black women run? Do other African American people run? Because I’m not seeing them. I knew I couldn’t be the only person to run. This kind of peaked my curiosity and the questions that I had about this space.”
Tiffany Chenault is a sociology professor at Salem State University and the Black Girls Run Boston chapter leader. She is also working on a book about race and its place in the running community.
Dana and Tiffany discuss how she found the sport and her initial reaction to seeing very few women like her on the starting line, what got her hooked (she's now run 46 half marathons in 46 states) and the changes/conversations that can take place to do better.
Note: This conversation was recorded before the death of Ahmaud Arbery sparked a greater conversation about diversity, race and representation in running.
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▶ Follow Tiffany on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/tiffygc1/
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