Hey, Vim, welcome to the free trail podcast. Of course, I am your host, Dylan Bowman.

Great to have you here. Today, our guest is Mike

Foot, the longtime pro trail athlete for the North Face. He's also the race director of the

rut mountain runs, the iconic September race in Big Sky, Montana that has become one of, if not

the biggest race by participation in the United States of America.

Mike is an old friend. We go back a long ways.

We came up in the sport at around the same time, and we have a lot in common, so it was great to finally have him on the show.

I've wanted to do this episode since the podcast's inception.

And we intentionally connected at this moment in history to coordinate with the recent release of a new film featuring Mike on the North Face YouTube channel.

The film is called Shining Mountains.

And it was produced by fan favorite Ethan Newberry, aka the Ginger Runner,

documenting Mike Foote, Jen Lichter, and Stephen Nam doing a 12-day expedition through Glacier

National Park. We talk all about it in the podcast, so I won't spoil anymore here in the

intro. The film is about 17 minutes long. So after today's episode,

go check it out. I put a link in the show notes to make it easy. In addition to the film, we

discuss what makes Mike the person he is. We discuss his path as an athlete and where he is

with his running at this moment. We discussed mentorship, his long-term

friendship with Adam Peterman. We talk about the meeting of trail culture. We talk about

conservation, the rut, fatherhood, and a lot more. I hope you dig today's chat. Before we get

to it, a big thank you to Speedland, the presenting sponsor of every

episode of the Free Trail podcast. We just announced an event that Free Trail is doing in partnership

with Speedland in between Broken Arrow and Western States. We're calling it the 100 mile happy hour,

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