Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Welcome back to the Pillars podcast. So glad you're here. Of course, I am Dylan

Bowman. And today, I'm very happy to have you join us for an incredible chat with a returning

guest. That's right. Today, the amazing Stephanie Case returns to the program to educate

and inspire us all for a second time. If you don't know

who Stephanie is or you missed her first appearance on the show, she is an awesome ultra-runner

who has accomplished incredible things over the course of her career. But more importantly

and perhaps more impressively,

she is also a human rights lawyer for the UN who often travels and works to help people

in war zones around the world.

We talk about both of those things in this episode.

In fact, you can kind of think of it as a two-parter.

Both her athletic life and her professional life are covered in great detail.

In the first half of the show, we go deep on the recent events unfolding in Afghanistan, where Stephanie has been working for a long time.

She started a nonprofit in the country back in 2014 called Free to Run, whose mission is to

empower women and girls through sports. And because she has a long history of advocacy work in the country,

I wanted to have her on to help me and to help us together understand

what is actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan,

what the situation was like as the Taliban reasserted

control over the country and what we, the running community can do to help our fellow

runners, our brothers and sisters currently battling for their freedom and for their ability to even enjoy the simple

act of running that we all take for granted every single day. It is pretty powerful stuff.

And once we traverse that somewhat intense subject matter, we transitioned to talk all about

...