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“The biggest takeaway after writing the book was: I really believed in myself this whole time. For a long time, I thought of Ryan as a hero of my story. But I realized I’m actually the hero of my own story. I hope everyone feels that way.”
My guest for today’s episode is Sara Hall — a 2:20 marathoner, the former American record holder in the half marathon, and the runner-up at the 2020 London Marathon, which remains the best performance by an American woman in that race since Deena Kastor’s win in 2006. She has been competing at the highest level of the sport for more than two decades, and somehow, at 43, she is running more marathons than ever.
Sara just ran the Boston Marathon in 2:31:55 — her fifth marathon in six months — and one day after crossing that finish line, her debut memoir hit shelves. It’s called For the Love of the Grind, published by St. Martin’s Press.
If you’re expecting a highlight reel of an athlete’s greatest moments, you’re going to be surprised. Sara goes into the doubt, the disordered eating, the ego, the psychedelics, the cost of ambition on the people she loves most, and what it actually took to keep believing in herself through two decades of professional running — through missed Olympic teams, the adjustment to the wave of super shoes hitting the sport and long injury stretches.
The book opens with London 2020 — 21 loops outside Buckingham Palace, alone in the wind and rain, thinking about dropping out — and it uses that moment as a lens for everything that came before it and everything that followed. It is honest in ways that will catch you off guard and it makes the case that longevity in this sport is not just a physical story. It is a mental, emotional, and spiritual one, too.
In this conversation, we talk about the writing process — her goals when she set out to do it, the imposter syndrome, and the decision to publish the book while she’s still competing rather than waiting for the career to be over. We get into her six-marathon stretch, what went so wrong in Boston after 16 miles of feeling great, and what it meant to watch her daughter Hana cross that same finish line on the same day.
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Buy “For the Love of the Grind: A Memoir” here.
Find Sara’s upcoming book events here.
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Host: Chris Chavez | @chris_j_chavez
Guest: Sara Hall | @sarahall3
Produced by: Jasmine Fehr | @jasminefehr
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