Welcome to the Allie on the Run show.

I'm your host, Allie Feller, and I just wanted to say hi and happy holidays and a few other things.

I won't keep you here long.

No fancy music in this one, because my editor, Tyler, deserves a break.

Let's give a collective shout out to Tyler, can we?

He has been with me since episode zero of this show. Yeah, there was an episode

zero, which sounds kind of dumb in hindsight, but someone told me to do that. So I did. It was an

introductory episode about what to expect on the Alley on the Run show. And you know what? I've

never gone back and listened to it, so I kind of wonder what I said. I'll explore that sometime.

Today, we are more than 850 episodes in, and Tyler has had a hand in every single one of them.

So Tyler, my day one or day zero, thank you for everything. I hope you never hear this,

because you didn't have to edit this episode, and you should not listen to the Allie on the Run Show in your free time. But if you do, Tyler, thank you truly.

Okay, as is tradition now, I'll be checking in next week, next year, technically, for the annual

state of the Alley on the Run Show episode and we'll do some real reflecting in that time together.

But I couldn't let 2025 come to a close without making sure you know exactly how important you are to me.

2025. This year included the highest highs and the deepest, darkest, scariest lows.

It was the year when I finally started to come back into my own,

to live a fulfilling, meaningful, fun life. I had cancer in the rearview. I had divorce

starting to be in the rear view. Life was looking good. And then a few days after my 40th birthday,

it felt like the rug was ripped out from under me,

and the ground beneath the rug crumbled, and I sunk into the kind of quicksand that we all learned so much about and really feared in elementary school.

I went into this year thinking Rock Bottom was behind me.

...