Welcome back or welcome to the Single Track podcast. I'm your host, Finn Melanson, and this is a

22, Havillin 100 pre-race interview with Stephanie Flippen, a professional trail runner for Hoka

based in Evergreen, Colorado. Before we dive in, if you are a fan of Single Track, please consider

supporting the show with a rating and review in your podcast player,

a donation on Patreon, or use our sponsor discount codes, all of which you can find in the show

notes of this episode. With that, let's get started. Stephanie Flippin, welcome to the single

track podcast. Hey, fan, thank you so much for having me. So I want to get right into it,

although I have a couple questions before we get to the main topic at hand, Havillina. If I got this

right from my research for at least the first few years that you were in the running scene,

you considered yourself like a middle of the pack runner. You weren't really

applying much structure to things. But you've also admitted that you were happy during that time.

And I guess given that, I'm curious if we can talk about what switch flipped for you that made

you want to be more intentional, more committed, more interested in working to achieve your potential.

Yeah, that's such a fun question.

I always really appreciate talking about like this time in my life.

Yeah, so I really, like I started running like consistently my first year in medical school.

That was really a way for me to have like a stress outlet. I would vividly remember

like being in the anatomy lab like with cadavers, like studying for hours and then just needing

a break. And I'd run over to my medical school's gym and hop on the treadmill while it was just

like, like just snowing like feet because I was in Chicago.

And yeah, I think the main reason why I really didn't have, like, the bandwidth, you know,

and the time and even like the emotional energy to really put a lot of like structured and focus

...