On the day before the Bandera Endurance Trail Race earlier this month, Olympic 10,000-meter runner and filmmaker Alexi Pappas decided that she wanted to change her entry from the 50K to the 100K. The race directors were accommodating, if a little surprised; it’s more typical for entrants to move down in distance. Pappas’s request seemed especially bold since she had only been jogging four or five miles a day in recent weeks and was, in her own words, pretty “undertrained for the 50K.”
She ended up completing the course in twelve hours and eight minutes—good enough for a twelfth place finish in a women’s race where the performance of the day was Courtney Dauwalter’s record-breaking sub-nine hour finish. Afterwards, an exuberant Pappas took to Instagram to congratulate Dauwalter and gush about ultrarunning’s all-in-this-together ethos. “The amount of comradery out there is a much welcomed refresh to the hyper competitive vibe in many sports,” Pappas told her 128,000 followers.
At a time when the definition of what it means to be a professional runner seems to be shifting from a performance-centric…
