Hey, fam. Welcome to the free trail podcast. Of course, I'm your host, Dylan Bowman here today with Mario Fraoli, my dear friend

and my neighbor, somebody I look up to in a lot of different ways. He is back for our annual

tradition. He has been on the show probably four or five times at this point, but for at least the

last three years, Mario and I connect for an annual check-in at the beginning of the new year. We talk about our lives and

careers and our running, especially just two dudes talking through what we're up to, what we're

inspired about, what we're thinking about, what we're struggling with, all through the lens

of our running and our careers as two guys who love the sport and who make our livings within it.

If you don't know, Mario is the author of the Morning Shakeout Newsletter and the host of

the Morning Shakeout podcast. He's also a coach to many athletes across all formats of running.

He's one of the most respected people in the sport. And more importantly, he's just a super high

character, high integrity person and a good friend. As we always do, we go long form with this one.

90 minutes felt way too short. So we might drop a part two this year because we actually did get

a lot of great crowdsource questions on Instagram, most of which we don't

get to in this conversation. What we do talk about is our respective relationships with running,

our respective careers, how those two things fit together. Longtime podcast listeners will also remember

that Mario and I sat down for a very long conversation when the Ironman UTMB merger was announced a few years ago.

So we had a lot of people asking us to revisit that topic here. We spend some time talking about

some of the current events in the sport in the back half of today's episode. Hope you enjoy.

Before we get to it, a heads up. We're of course heading to the Black Cane

in 100K next week. Who would miss out? We're planning to drop some athlete interviews on Thursday.

We'll do our pre-race show live on Friday morning, some proper trail gating before the big race.

All will be hosted on the free trail YouTube channel.

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