Welcome back or welcome to the single track podcast. I'm your host Finn Melanson, and in this

episode, we are talking with John Kelly, a professional endurance athlete and now two-time finisher of

the Barclay Marathons. We get his thoughts about the media attention and public perception

surrounding the race, what draws the general public to our sport, his views on using

intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation for high performance, creating the ideal Barclay

athlete, and why he's interested in going after the Appalachian Trail FKT in the future.

Before we get started, this episode is brought to you by Rabbit.

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With that, let's get started. John Kelly, welcome to

the single track podcast. Thanks very much. Happy to be here. There have been a lot of takes on

what it takes to finish Barclay. There's this idea that it helps to have a left brain disposition that's gotten a lot of runway.

But you had a comment a few years back that I want to resurface here.

You suggested that no one who is primarily extrinsically motivated will ever finish Barclay.

And that is fascinating to me.

And why do you believe this to be the case?

Everyone reaches that point out there where, you know, you're going to hit a wall.

There's going to be every part of you that is telling you to stop, telling you to sleep,

take a nap, whatever it is. And there is just, in my opinion, there's not enough

extrinsic motivation in the world. There's not enough tweet likes or Instagram likes or any of

that. Nothing is going to push you past that point.

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