Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track podcast.

This episode bundles all of the pre-race interviews we did for the women's field at the 2022 Speedgoat 50K by UTMB,

taking place this coming Saturday, July 23rd at the Snowbird Ski Resort outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.

We talked with Erica Flowers, Hillary Allen, Jennifer Lichter, and

Addie Bracey. One thing to note, this interview series is brought to you by Kodiak Kix. If you use

single track 15 at checkout, you're going to get 15% off your next order. With that, let's get started.

Erica Flowers, welcome to the single track podcast.

It's great to be here. Thanks, Ben.

We have talked with many Nordic skiers in the lead-up to this year's Speedgo 50K race, and you're another one of them.

I've become quite fascinated by this group of athletes, so can you give us a bit of background on how you got involved in that sport and where it took you before where you started to talk about mountain running?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I feel really lucky when I was 10 years old.

My parents moved from Missoula, Montana to Bozeman, Montana, and they signed me up for the ski team as a way to

get to know some new friends and build a community in Bozeman.

And at the time, I just thought it was a fun excuse to go hang out with some of my new friends

outside and play in the woods and scoot around on Nordic skis.

But I think that's still a lot of

what I love about endurance sports today. So I kept skiing from the time I was in fourth grade all the way

through high school and I had the chance to race a bit internationally in high school, which I think

really set the hook. And then raced for Dartmouth College out east in New Hampshire for four years and then my senior year

I'd planned to go to med school and kind of pivoted and decided to pursue ski racing full-time.

So I joined a team called the SMST2 team based out of southern Vermont and ski race professionally

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