Hard Days
Conversations with outdoor athletes about their hardest days — what happened, what it took to keep going, and what it cost. Now in season two, with new episodes every other week.
Listen wherever you already listen
Three to start with
If you don’t know where to begin, these three. All of them are in both apps above.
- Joe talks about Vol State and journey running S2E02 — the Vol State 500K, 314 miles across Tennessee, except Joe’s own count came to 334. Mostly about the strangers who put him up along the way. 84 min
- John Robert Mckay aka The Blind Donkey Runner Episode 19 — running ultras blind, with guides, and with the light and shape and color he does still see. 74 min
- Andreas and Steph of No Binary No Problem Episode 17 — the first all non-binary team of color to finish The Speed Project, 300-odd unsanctioned miles from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and what it took to take up that space. 66 min
What the show is
Every episode is one athlete and one day. Not their best race — the day it fell apart. I ask what was actually happening in their head out there, what got them to the next mile or the next pitch, and what it took out of them afterwards.
The answers are rarely the ones the sport likes to tell. Nobody talks their way through a hard day on grit alone. What shows up instead is usually smaller and stranger: a person they didn’t want to let down, a promise they’d made, a way of talking to themselves that they’d built on purpose.
The show started life as Trailing Off, and the name changed once it became clear what people actually wanted to talk about.
Why I make it
It’s the same question I ask in coaching, just with a microphone in the room. I coach the head game for endurance athletes, and the people on this show are the evidence that the head game is learnable — nobody arrives able to do this.
So if you want a sense of how I ask questions before you ever book a call: this is free, and there are a couple of dozen hours of it.