Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track Podcast.

I'm your host Finn Melanson, and in this episode, I'm joined by Mary Kate Shea,

who serves as the senior director of pro athletes for road race events through the Boston Athletic Association.

Every year, Mary Kate is responsible for recruiting and facilitating the experience of hundreds of pro runners at marquee

events like the Boston Marathon, the BAA 10K, and the BAA 5K.

Given her wealth of knowledge and experience in the realms of pro athlete recruitment and

sponsorship, event management, and sports marketing as a whole. I thought it would be great to have

her on the show to consider the merits of her position and how her dedicated year-round, full-time

role, could be implemented more often at individual races, but also at scale in our sport and

sort of wondering how that might benefit our world as a whole. In this conversation, we talk about what it

takes to build and maintain a world-class running event and why her role in the process is so

pivotal, how pro athletes are researched, recruited, compensated, and generally taking care of at

races like the Boston Marathon, and all sorts of lessons and takeaways for interested athletes, operators, and media personnel

in the trail world. With that, let's get into it. Mary Kate Shea, it is a pleasure to have

you on the single track podcast. How are you doing today? Great. Thank you for inviting me.

This is exciting. I love trail running. Love the ultra-being. Well, I was just going to say

from what I gather back in the 90s, you pitched a story on and trace into the Boston Globe. And so

I guess I say that to say that you already have a lot of interest in our ultra-trail-running world.

Absolutely. I grew up on the south of Boston and lived away for many

years and when I came back, I joined the Marshville Roadrunners and in that group there was a gentleman

by the name of Roger Welts who just passed away last year. But there was a great ultra group and he set

many 50K American records and

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