Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track Podcast. I'm your host Finn Melanson and in this episode we meet with Addie Bracey, a coach and professional trail runner for Nike based in Denver, Colorado.

Addie recently published a book titled Mental Training for Ultra Running and that's where we focus this conversation. We cover a lot of topics

from the book, including the importance of finding your why, managing stress response, getting

comfortable with being uncomfortable, the benefits of self-talk, and way more. Let's get started.

Addie Bracey, welcome to the single track podcast. Hi, thank you for having me.

We could probably do an entire episode on your running career.

And maybe we will in the future.

But for today, I want to focus on a book you recently wrote called Mental Training for Ultra

Runners.

But in case there's anyone that isn't familiar with your story,

could you give a little bit of a background on how you got into trail running and how you got

into sports psychology? Yeah. I would much rather talk about sports psychology than my own running

anyway. So this is, this is perfect. But I've been a lifelong runner. I kind of had the traditional running

route with running in high school. And then I ran at the University of North Carolina, ran track

and cross country. And then finished that and was still kind of improving. So had a hard time

like walking away from the sport. And I did probably another 10 years of track and marathons kind of at a high level,

ran some Olympic trials in the marathon and the 10K. But around 2016, I kind of like plateaued

and just wasn't getting any faster and was actually kind of getting slower. And at the time,

I didn't know a lot about trail running and mountain running. And I kind of just figured my running

career was over and like happenstance, I guess, was introduced to the sport and did a few mountain

races shorter distance, which at the time you were a little easier to swallow than some of the

longer stuff I do now and had some success. But I think more than anything, just really enjoyed it.

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