> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.practically.fit/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Matt Fitzgerald on Dying to Run: Long COVID, a 100K, and One More Finish - URL: https://www.practically.fit/matt-fitzgerald-on-dying-to-run-long-covid-a-100k-and-one-more-finish/ - Published: 2026-10-05T01:11:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T01:12:54.000Z - Author: Alex Johnson - Tags: Podcast, Recovery & Mindset, Running Long COVID took running away from Matt Fitzgerald for more than three years. With no sign of recovery, he signed up for the Javelina Jundred, a 100K trail race in Arizona's Sonoran Desert, and ran it on a day of record-breaking 99-degree heat. On this week's episode of the podcast, OG co-host Jen joined me to interview Matt. Matt talked about his new book, *Dying to Run: An Athlete's Quest for One More Finish,* which chronicles his race at the Javelina Jundred. He explains why he needed closure, why the race had to be 100 kilometers, and why he felt he had already won the morning after he registered. No spoilers: you'll have to read the book to find out how the race ends. Matt also talked about running as a dependency, how competitiveness and spirituality fit together for him, why he wants running to be a big tent, and how to adjust your goals when a race goes wrong. [*Dying to Run*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTBMZYGC?ref=practically.fit) is available in print, digital, and audio wherever you buy books. For Matt's coaching and training plans, visit [8020endurance.com](https://www.8020endurance.com/?ref=practically.fit). #### Read The Transcript Matt Fitzgerald on **Dying to Run*: Long COVID, a 100K, and One More Finish ****Alex:** Welcome to Practically Fit, Real Fitness Over 40\. I'm Alex. ****Jen:** And I'm Jen. ****Alex:** And today we've got a special treat on the podcast. We'll be talking to Matt Fitzgerald, who has written an amazing book about his quest to find closure from long COVID and run an ultramarathon. We're excited to talk to Matt in a moment, but first, Jen, my OG co-host, welcome back to the podcast. ****Jen:** Alex, I am so excited for this interview we're doing, and happy to be back on the show. It seems like it's been a minute, as they say. ****Alex:** Yeah. How many years was it since we did the original season of the podcast? It's been almost three years, right? ****Jen:** I think three years, yeah. In between, I feel like I've become practically unfit, and now I'm on a journey back to being practically fit again. So I'm just happy to follow along and join in every once in a while. ****Alex:** That's awesome. And that's a great segue to Matt's interview. I think we're going to find it really inspiring, so let's get into it. Meet Matt Fitzgerald ****Alex:** Today's guest is Matt Fitzgerald, an acclaimed endurance sports author, coach, and nutritionist whose many books include **How Bad Do You Want It?*, **80/20 Running*, and **Chasing Mastery*. He is co-founder of 80/20 Endurance and creator of Dream Run Camp, a residential training camp for runners of all abilities in Flagstaff, Arizona. After a career writing about athletes pushing the limits of human endurance, Matt was struck by long COVID, and running became a distant memory. Doctors had no answers. Despite serious health risks and a lack of training, he decided to run a 100-kilometer ultramarathon in a record-breaking desert heat wave. His new book is **Dying to Run: An Athlete's Quest for One More Finish*. Matt Fitzgerald, welcome to Practically Fit. ****Matt:** Thank you. It's great to be with you. Two Loves: Writing and Running ****Alex:** We're so happy to have you on today. The book is amazing, and we're going to talk more about it, but I wanted to start with your love of writing. Your dad was an author, so I know you attribute your love of writing to him to some extent. Do you love writing or running more, and how did you discover your love for each? ****Matt:** That's a tough one. I think writing is the one I love more. I got both from my dad. I grew up in New Hampshire, and by the time I was old enough to read, I could see my dad's name on the spines of novels on the bookshelves at our house. He didn't tell me to be a writer, but I developed a liking for it when I was quite young. I had the perfect in-house role model and coach for writing. And then running was the same deal. I was nine years old when I decided I was going to be a writer when I grew up, and I never wavered, never changed my mind at any point. Then, just two years later, when I was 11, my dad ran his first marathon. It was the Boston Marathon, which in those days was quite different. My two brothers and I actually ran the last mile with my father and crossed the finish line with him. I'm fond of saying I'm pretty sure I'm the only runner on earth whose first mile ever was the last mile of the Boston Marathon. It was a galvanizing experience — I felt ten feet tall. The very next day I ran six miles on my own, at 11 years old, back home in New Hampshire. Same deal there: I never wavered, and never even considered giving it up for another sport. So they both go back to my father. From Lone Wolf to Community ****Jen:** Wow, that's really incredible. I want to hear a little bit more about your running crew, Matt, Dream Run Camp, and the importance of having a fitness community. ****Matt:** I've always really been a lone wolf as an athlete, and I think that's part of the reason I liked running. I was a soccer player before I became a runner, and you hear this from a lot of runners who come from team sports: I like that my performance depends only on me, and I don't have to depend on ten other players. I have introverted tendencies, and I'm also kind of headstrong and self-coached. I would create plans for myself, and I didn't want to deviate from my plan for the sake of running with a group. Developing long COVID in my late 40s kind of changed that. First of all, it took running away from me entirely for more than three years. Then in 2024, I decided I needed closure — and, we can maybe get into it, it specifically had to be a 100-kilometer race. I couldn't just run a 5K and say, "Okay, I'm bowing out." But I wanted that journey to be different. I did not want to be a lone wolf on it. I had started Dream Run Camp in Flagstaff, Arizona, and built a community around our home, really, and made all these new connections. I also had existing friends who knew how much I had suffered and struggled with long COVID, and how devastating the loss of running was for me. The idea was that I was going to do one more race, hopefully survive it, and then move on — because I didn't sign up for the race because I was recovering from long COVID. I signed up because I wasn't. So I wanted it to be a collective endeavor. First of all, even if I'd wanted to do it alone, nobody would have let me — my closest running friends would have said, "I want to be there, I want to support you." And I wanted a slightly different relationship with running. I'd always been very competitive and very ambitious in my goal setting, but I simply wasn't healthy enough to have that competitive orientation. So I needed a different approach, something more collective. And I really needed the support, even on a practical level — I had eight people who flew in from various distances to support me at the Javelina Jundred. I could not have done that race without them. The Worst Pain Ever Felt ****Alex:** Let's talk about a question you often ask your new runners at Dream Run Camp. Matt, what's the worst pain you've ever felt? ****Matt:** The reason I stopped playing soccer, and became a runner, was that I suffered a catastrophic knee injury on the soccer field when I was 14\. I blew out my left knee and completely severed my ACL. I didn't even know what an ACL was. This was the mid-1980s, and I had a good repair, but the surgeon said, "All right, you're done with soccer, and don't take up skiing — don't do anything with side-to-side motion." I thought, okay, I'm a runner. That was a whole new level of pain, and the recovery was even worse. For years and years, that was the worst pain I ever felt, until I got COVID-19 in early 2020\. I'd never been so sick. I've always had a propensity for a hacking cough when I get colds and flus, and my childhood cough came roaring back on this occasion. They were like exorcisms — discrete half-hour coughing fits, I timed them, like clockwork, as soon as I got out of bed in the morning and again when I went to bed at night. My wife had to leave the house — not the room, the house — because it was too painful even to watch me. One day I coughed so hard I thought I'd broken a rib. My nurse practitioner brother said that's impossible, you probably tore cartilage. Whatever it was, it was like being stabbed in the lung with a letter opener. And then I kept on coughing. Every subsequent cough was the same — about 600 coughs total in one of those 30-minute fits. So it was like being stabbed in the lung with a letter opener 600 times, twice a day. That was the worst pain I'd ever felt until I ran the Javelina Jundred with unresolved long COVID on a day of record-breaking heat in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. I use the word "pain," and some people quibble with that — it was really more of a composite agony, a total excruciation, mostly related to a nervous system that went into a shock state called autonomic hyperactivity. Everyone was suffering out there. It's a hundred-kilometer race, and there's actually a hundred-miler happening at the same time on the same course. It was 99 degrees Fahrenheit and everyone was miserable, but I was three or four times more miserable than anyone else because of my underlying condition. It was the dumbest thing you could possibly do with this disease, which is what I did. Long COVID and Redefining Running ****Alex:** We're going to talk more about the race in a bit, but I want to dig into your experience with long COVID and how it affected your running. One thing you noted in the book is that your friend Eli approaches running as a spiritual practice, whereas you're more goal-oriented. So when you ended up with long COVID, how did that change your personal relationship to running? ****Matt:** I like that question. What made me fall in love with running was that it was a source of bonding with my dad. I didn't get into it because I wanted to go to the Olympics, or even because I wanted to run in college. My dad did it, he made it look cool, I looked up to him, and I started doing it. That's all running really meant to me at first — something I could do with my dad and talk about with my dad. My dad was not a fast runner, but it turned out I was actually pretty good at it. I was an all-state runner in high school, and so I became competitive, but that was a second layer. The first layer was a completely different hook, that bonding thing. So running has always checked a lot of boxes for me. I've gone back and forth with Eli on this: he thinks there's a tension between a competitive orientation and the spiritual fulfillment you can get from running. For me, as I put it in the book, running is never more spiritual than when I'm stretching myself beyond my existing limits, and it takes a competitive orientation to do that. When you get to that place — say you're 40 miles into a 62-mile race and you want so badly to be anywhere but there — everything is cleared off the stage of your interior life, and you're left alone staring at your soul in a mirror, asking yourself, "What am I made of?" I love that, and it's a deeply spiritual experience for me. When I fall short in those moments, it's because I need to grow, and when I succeed, I actually level up and grow. There's a poster on a wall at Dream Run Camp that says, "You don't have what it takes — you find what it takes." That's what I love about running: to be the best runner I can be, I have to become a better version of myself. So for me, there's no tension at all between the spiritual and competitive dimensions. However, when I went to run the Javelina Jundred, it was a different deal. That's a race I might have been able to win at my peak, and I was showing up knowing I was going to get my butt handed to me. It was going to be very humbling — I wasn't used to being a middle-of-the-pack runner. That forced me to focus on other aspects of running, which was a challenge I was conscious of and wanted to embrace. I wanted to see if I could have a very nourishing relationship with running that is post-competitive. And I think I more or less pulled it off. Writing Like a Runner ****Jen:** Matt, one of the things I love about the book is that you combine your real-life running stories with Stoic philosophy and some of the philosophical underpinnings you bring as a writer. You talked about writing like a runner — what does that mean to you? ****Matt:** Each of us has one brain, one mind, and we bring the same mental toolkit to everything we do. A lot of runners are writers, which is interesting, but I can see how the same personality type might be drawn to both. You have to chip away. You can't train for a marathon in one day, and you certainly can't write a book in one day. It takes discipline, patience, persistence, and the ability to keep showing up day after day. I also bring that athletic mindset. When I sat down to write **Dying to Run*, I wanted it to be the single greatest running book that's ever been written. That's a very athletic way to approach it — I want to win the book, like I'm treating writing as a running competition. I don't think I wrote the greatest running book ever written, but I wrote the best book I could, because I had that mindset and orientation. Endurance sports are also very time-consuming: if you want to reach your full potential, you have to be willing to put in a lot of time and stretch yourself repeatedly. Writing and running are the same in that way, too. I've written something like 40 published books, and you don't do that unless you're putting in high-volume training as a writer. So I have one mind, just like the rest of us, and I bring the same toolkit to both writing and running. Running as Addiction ****Jen:** One of the things you talked about, maybe on the darker side, is running as an addiction, and that really resonated with me. I actually started running to quit smoking, and I used to joke, and still do, that I just traded one addiction for a slightly healthier one. So is there a point at which a healthy habit like running could become unhealthy? ****Matt:** The answer to the question you ended with is certainly yes. "Addiction" is a loaded word, so I'm really talking about a physical and psychological dependency — but it's a bona fide dependency. There's research on this: exercise addiction is a diagnosable condition, and it's pretty serious. It's often comorbid with eating disorders. Usually, if you have a full-fledged exercise addiction, it's a net negative for your well-being, and that's part of what makes it an addiction versus a dependency — it's hurting you. For me, I would get injured all the time, even before long COVID, and my wife would say, "You're injured again? Why do you do this to yourself?" The answer was, "I can't stop. I also don't want to, and I don't care how often I get injured. I'm a runner and I'm just going to keep running." There were costs, prices I paid, even in the sacrifices you make. For decades I wouldn't do late nights or go out drinking. I always had a big race coming up, so if I had an opportunity to take a trip somewhere I wouldn't be able to train, I might not take it, even though it would have been great. There are negatives that come with that level of commitment to anything, and in my case, running. But then there's all the good that comes from it. Early in my relationship with my wife, it was a source of tension — my running was like a mistress, an uninvited third party to our relationship. That was kind of her perspective, and we would squabble about it. Eventually I made some compromises, but for the most part she saw it as, "I actually like you much better when you're running, so go ahead and run." So I got a lifetime hall pass. There's a beauty in allowing yourself to become dependent on something that, on balance, is really nourishing for you. But if it's taken away, as running was for me with long COVID, it's devastating. It feels like a piece of you has been ripped out. You can't just say, "Oh, find another hobby." No, it doesn't work like that — it's specifically running. As I put it in the book, the loss of running left a running-shaped hole inside me that only running could fill. A Big Tent for Every Kind of Runner ****Jen:** Absolutely. I want to get into the race itself, because one of the other things I loved was just hearing the description. I've never run an ultramarathon, but I loved hearing about you and your crew and all the people who do ultras for whatever reason. There's one line I absolutely love in the book where you say, "People have always told me that I look like a runner, but to me, everyone here looks like a runner." Then you describe people in costume, people who maybe don't look like the stereotypical runner we picture in our minds. I remember when I first got into running, there was a bit of controversy where more competitive runners were resistant to casual runners entering races. So I'm curious how you square this acceptance of people of all types who love running with your own more competitive drive. ****Matt:** For me, it's quite easy. I get that there's an elitist element in the sport, but just because you're a front-of-the-pack runner and very competitive doesn't mean you have to look down on people in the middle or the back of the pack. You simply don't have to. Running has always been a sport for me, and I like approaching it as a sport. But another thing I like about it, and Dream Run Camp really showed me this, is that anyone who wants to come train and live in our house for a period of time in Flagstaff is welcome. And it's amazing — there are a million different ways to be a runner. You can toss people into buckets, like the competitive college runners who come in the summer, but it's one of the beautiful things about running, the oldest sport known to humanity, that it can be so many different things to different people. I like it to be an inclusive big tent. There are practical considerations, like what the time cutoff should be in a big-city marathon, and you can have a healthy debate about that. But as someone who, independent of being a runner, cares very deeply about the health of the sport — I mention this in the book — when my dad ran the Boston Marathon in 1983, it was almost all men, almost all white men, almost all American white men between the ages of 30 and 50\. It was super homogeneous, and that was invisible to me in 1983; I just saw a bunch of people running. I didn't know what was coming. That was the tail end of the first running boom. But running just kept growing and growing, and as it did, the running population became more and more representative of humanity as a whole. You started to see more women running, people from different countries and races, people who didn't run in college and started when they were 43 without any athletic background at all. I saw it becoming more and more diverse, and I thought the more diverse running becomes, the better it gets. It's like being at a party that's diverse — you're going to have a better time when everyone isn't a carbon copy of one another. So for me, the two things can coexist. I can be very fixated on running a fast time and beating as many people as possible, and also cheer on the diversification of the running population. Taking the Risk: Signing Up for the Javelina Jundred ****Alex:** Matt, let's talk about the Javelina Jundred, which is obviously a race with a big tent. We'll talk more about the race itself in a moment, but the section of the book where you recount it blow by blow is really compelling. One thing that stood out was something you referenced early in the race, about getting carried away with your pacing in longer races. I think any runner can identify with that, regardless of their chosen distance. I'm a 5K guy, I like running fast, and I've done that. But what's different in your experience compared to most recreational runners is that the consequences of getting carried away at the Javelina Jundred might have been more costly. You put it that you might end up in a medevac helicopter. So what was it like going into this race knowing that a real potential outcome was facing a serious medical issue, or even, as the book's title references, death? ****Matt:** I've always been a risk taker. I'm not into all kinds of risks, but there are certain kinds I'm very willing to take, including athletically. I feel like we get one go at this life on earth, and I don't want to look back at the end of it and say, "Man, I should've, would've, could've." I just want to go for it, live the way I want to live, and do the things I want to do. That's what I've always done. Long COVID really took that away from me. When you end up a patient with a chronic illness, suddenly doctors are calling all the shots, and doctors hate risk. They say, "Don't do this, don't do that, be careful." I got tired of that. I want to be responsible for my health, but I felt like the disease was winning either way: either I take a risk and it kills me, or I give up all risk and I'm alive, but I'm not me anymore. I'm not living anymore. When I lost the ability to run, I wanted it back, but I felt I couldn't run again until I beat the disease and was healthy again, because you can't run when you're sick. But when one year of no improvement became two years, then three, I thought, I really need closure. And who actually says I can't try to run an ultramarathon with a chronic illness? Maybe I can't, but I can try. I'm a coach too, and I see with the athletes I coach that it's hard to internalize this, but I didn't care how it ended. I thought I would fail. I thought I was attempting something that was probably impossible. I signed up for the Javelina Jundred at midnight on New Year's Eve 2023, 2024, right when registration opens, and when I woke up on New Year's Day, I felt like I had already won. I had made a choice consistent with my values and the way I want to live my life. I wanted to pull it off, I wanted to finish, but I didn't expect to, and I also didn't care. Just going for it, rolling the dice, shooting for the stars the way I had before I got sick felt like a double middle finger to long COVID. Like: you had me there for three years, you had me, but I'm calling BS, I can actually try to do this, and you can't stop me. Inside the Race: Heat, Course, and Rookie Mistakes ****Alex:** I don't want to ruin the finish of the book for our listeners, because I want folks to have the same experience we did reading it. There are a lot of twists and turns, not only on the race course but in your story as you recount the race and the aftermath. But I did look at some photos and video of the race, and I was really struck by how happy everybody looks at the beginning. It's a big party, compared to the end of the race, with people's faces covered in pain. For listeners who aren't familiar with the Javelina Jundred, explain what the course and conditions are like, and what you were trying to achieve doing this race after long COVID. ****Matt:** The Javelina Jundred is a very popular ultramarathon. They do a 100K and a 100-mile race on a loop course in McDowell Mountain Regional Park in the Sonoran Desert, a little ways outside of Phoenix, so a very hot place. They do it on Halloween weekend, so it's very carnival-esque, with costumes and all that, but it can still be quite hot in the Sonoran Desert in late October. It just so happened that it was record-breaking: the record for that date was 98 degrees, and it got up to 99\. You're sitting ducks out there — it's completely exposed, a proper desert. In the 100K, you do three 20-plus-mile loops. It's not super technical, it's runnable, but it's all trail and pretty rugged. You're not going up and down mountains, but you're doing a fair amount of climbing as well. So a lot of different challenges are at play, the heat being the biggest. They have aid stations sprinkled throughout each loop, and the first time around everyone's all smiles, wasting energy and having fun. By the second loop, and for sure the third, all that was gone. People were dead silent, with thousand-yard stares, looking like they'd been dragged behind a horse. ****Alex:** You also talked about some rookie mistakes you felt you made during the race, like the clothing you wore in the sun. Tell us a little about that. ****Matt:** That was unexpected, because I had been a runner for more than 40 years when I got sick. I've written dozens of books for runners, and I've been a coach since 2001\. There aren't many more experienced and knowledgeable runners out there, and I took all that for granted. But I did go three years without running. Super shoes, for example — the carbon-plated shoes were quite new when I lost the ability to run — so when I came back to the sport, there was all this new technology, everything was different, and I had to get used to gear again. I had also been focused on road races and triathlons, and was only just getting into ultras before I got sick, so I wasn't actually a super experienced ultrarunner. When I started training for the Javelina Jundred, I felt like a bit of a beginner again, which caught me off guard. I thought, "Oh yeah, I've got this, I know everything." And then on race day it was magnified. I enumerate them — it ended up being something like 15 minor-to-major mistakes, just dumb stuff, like literally wearing the wrong clothes and not having enough coverage out there. Some of those mistakes were pretty costly. Action Crises: Adjusting Goals Mid-Race ****Alex:** Matt, another point I really enjoyed was where you outlined the concept of an action crisis during a race, where runners realize they can't meet their goal. Talk about your approach to adjusting goals mid-race, and why that's such an effective psychological strategy. ****Matt:** As any runner knows, the sport is mentally challenging, and to succeed you need a mental toolkit to bring to those challenges. As a coach, I see it all the time: some athletes struggle to adapt when plan A goes out the window. I've always prided myself on being an athlete who can adapt. Say you get injured eight weeks out from a marathon — can you still show up on the start line healthy and fit enough to pull it off? Then there are the action crises that occur during a race. I did a triathlon once where I got on the bike after swimming and realized that all of my gels had fallen out of the back of my racing suit, and I had no nutrition for the 112-mile bike ride. Now what? You don't want those things to happen, but they will. You can really separate yourself as an athlete by not panicking, getting resourceful, and MacGyvering solutions. And if you can't achieve your original goal, can you come up with another one that keeps the race meaningful enough that you can at least give your best effort? That's ultimately what you feel proud of — not that the weather was great and everything went your way, but that there were challenges, things went wrong, and you showed up as the best version of yourself. You made good decisions, still tried as hard as you could, and stayed positive. Someone asked me, "You probably hope you have a good day with long COVID," and I said, no, I know I'm not going to have a good day. I'm expecting my illness to be the story of the race. I'm going to get out there, and my body is going to betray me. It's simply going to happen — and it did. So I wanted to be ready for it, and to make the best of it, turning lemons into lemonade. Matt's Other Books, and Where to Find Him ****Jen:** Absolutely. We don't want to spoil the ending of this amazing book, because we want people to actually read it. So let's talk about some of the other books you've written besides your newest, **Dying to Run*. If you had to pick one of the others to recommend to our listeners, what would it be, and why? ****Matt:** Probably my most popular one is called **How Bad Do You Want It?*, and it dovetails with the last question. It's about a theory of endurance performance called the psychobiological model, the idea that we don't actually encounter physical limits directly as endurance athletes, because we always hit psychological limits first — basically a limit to your pain tolerance. You encounter that before you ever break down physically. Injuries are a different thing; I'm talking about good old-fashioned performance limits. Each chapter tells a different real-world story about a household name — there's a chapter on Greg LeMond, for example, and another on the great Ironman triathlete Paula Newby-Fraser. They're all stories that show how you can approach your true physical limits by working on your psychological limits and closing the gap between the two. It's narrative and story-driven, but there's science in it — it's like hiding spinach inside a cheesy casserole to get kids to eat it. I tell good stories in this book, but you end up learning a surprising amount of sport psychology along the way. ****Jen:** Well, that sounds like my next read, Alex. I love sports psychology in all forms. Matt, we could stay here and talk with you all day, but thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and our listeners. It's a really inspiring, amazing book, and I really appreciate you being here. ****Alex:** Right on. I appreciate it. Matt, where can people buy the book, and where can they follow you online? ****Matt:** Interestingly, I'm not only the author of this book, I'm also the publisher. I'm a co-owner of a small publishing company called 80/20 Publishing, the sister of the aforementioned 80/20 Endurance. We're distributed by Simon & Schuster, so anywhere you normally buy books, you can buy **Dying to Run*. It's available in print, digital, and audio formats. And if you're interested in more of the coaching side of me and training guidance, you can go to 8020endurance.com. Alex and Jen Debrief ****Jen:** So, Alex, after hearing that interview, are you ready to go run an ultramarathon? ****Alex:** I am not. But I'm very inspired by Matt's story. ****Jen:** Yeah, totally inspiring. I just feel like now I have no excuse for not pursuing my fitness goals. ****Alex:** Yeah, I had the same thought, just listening to him talk about everything he went through to get to the Javelina Jundred and do the race. And again, we didn't spoil the end of the book — it's really amazing, and we encourage folks to read it — but the journey he went on really puts things in perspective for your own daily routine. ****Jen:** Totally. What was the biggest takeaway for you? ****Alex:** Well, I really liked the part where he talked about action crises in a race, because we're not all going to run an ultramarathon, and most people never will. But the idea that you may go into a race — whether it's a marathon, a half marathon like Abbie likes to do, or even a 5K like I like to do, or I've been working on my mile time over the summer — and face days when you're competing with yourself or against others and realize it's not going to plan. I had a race like this recently over the summer where it was so humid that after mile two, I was going to— and I guess I kind of did what he was talking about, which was adjusting my goals mid-race, right? I think that's a lesson a lot of people can take away from how he approached this race. To me, that really resonated. ****Jen:** Oh, I totally agree. That was big for me too. It takes a lot of humility to be able to adjust your goals and say, "Even though this isn't exactly the way I want it to come out, I'm still going to make something out of it." The bigger thing, though, reading the book and listening to Matt, is that I've kind of re-evaluated my own relationship with running. It has become a little more like a spiritual practice, and I've let go of some of the competitive element. That's been really hard, but I find it makes me more consistent — I just show up for the love of the run versus the goal I'm trying to achieve. That's an adjustment I've made over the past couple of years. ****Alex:** Yeah. With the way it's been changing for you, are you planning on doing any more races, or are you just doing it for your own fitness and practice, like he talked about with that spiritual practice? ****Jen:** Oh no, I'm doing another half marathon at the end of the year. I keep saying I'm not going to, and then I keep doing it, because I do need a training plan and a schedule to stay on. But I'm trying to approach these races from a more philosophical perspective — it's not about getting a certain time, it's more about showing up for myself and finishing for my own satisfaction. ****Alex:** I think that's a great approach. The other thing I took away, which we touched on at the beginning of this chat, was just how inspiring the story was. If you're facing a rough week, or you've got a busy day, or you don't feel like working out, you can get kind of defeated. But hearing what he went through with long COVID, and then going out and doing a 100K race — like I said, it really puts things in perspective. So next time you're having a bad day and dreading your run, take a step back and think, "It's not really that bad. I'm a little tired, but if I need to do my workout, I'll get out there." ****Jen:** Totally. So I'm going to ask you the Dream Run Camp question: what's the worst pain you've ever experienced? ****Alex:** Oh my gosh. Yeah, we should ask each other this question, right? I'll answer it like Matt did. Originally, I was about seven years old, and I was on a skateboard in the back alley. I'd never really ridden a skateboard before — it was some friend's — and I was going down the alley, hit a circular drain, did a flip, landed on my arm, and snapped it. That was the worst pain until I was about 42, I think, or maybe 41 — it was several years ago now, I've lost track — when I snapped my ankle playing soccer with the kids. Both bone breaks were probably the worst pain I've ever felt. What about you, Jen? ****Jen:** Well, thankfully I've never broken a bone — knock on wood. The one I can talk about on air would be gastroenteritis. It was so painful I really thought I was going to die. I mean, cold sweat. I went to the doctor the next morning, really thinking there must be something terribly wrong with me, and he said, "No, it's gastroenteritis, it's common, and you're going to be fine, even though you're going to feel like this for another 24 hours." So that was pretty bad. ****Alex:** Yeah. It's interesting that he starts his run camp with that question, but there are lots of great questions like that in the book, and lots of philosophy from Matt. You heard how you can buy the book — it's in stores now, and we encourage you to go check it out. Wrap-Up ****Jen:** Yeah, absolutely. Very inspiring. In fact, I went for a run after that. Thanks for having me on the program, Alex. I'll come back anytime. ****Alex:** That's right. Abbie really wants you to come on to debate which is the best race distance, and of course she wants you to represent the marathon, since you've done so many. ****Jen:** Oh boy. ****Alex:** Yeah, that's something to look forward to, Jen. We'll have fun with that. But for now, that's it for this episode. We hope you enjoyed the special interview with Matt. We'll have more of these in the future — we really want to get high-quality guests for the show, so we'll be looking out for more. If you have comments on Matt's interview, please shoot us an email at [alex@practically.fit](mailto:alex@practically.fit). And until next time, remember: when it comes to fitness, you don't have to be perfect, you just have to be practical.