The Lucie Beatrix Podcast
Lucie Beatrix interviews inspiring humans of all walks on life that share her love for running fast and far, creating interesting stuff, and changing the world for the better.
The Lucie Beatrix Podcast
Stories That Need To Be Told: David Alm On Writing and Running
David Alm shares his journey of becoming an award-winning journalist and running as a form of meditation, revealing how his punk rock roots and rebellious spirit shaped both his writing and running.
• Starting with a one-way ticket to NYC and a few thousand dollars at age 24
• Living in the Lower East Side, NYC in the late 90s/eary 00s
• Beginning running on his 23rd birthday after smoking cigarettes for a decade
• Running a 2:49 marathon in only his second race (without even knowing what Boston qualifying meant)
• Writing award-winning features on subjects like Sha'Carri Richardson and Rachael Rapinoe
• Creating the East River 5000 race series as an alternative to commercialized running events
• Developing deep connections with subjects through extended conversations that reveal intimate details
• Finding stories in unexpected places, often dark
• Covering stories of marginalized communities
• Starting banjo playing in his late 40s and building instruments with his father
My guest today, david Alm, is the prolific journalist behind several features for GQ and cover stories for Runner's World, and he's also a runner himself. Today, we are going to talk about what goes into his work as a writer, runner, race director and even musician. This is the Lucy Beatrix Podcast. Welcome, before we get into your work as a writer, where are you from?
Speaker 2:I grew up well. I was born just outside Chicago and I grew up on the western side of Illinois near the Iowa border, like right on the border, and I went to college in Minnesota. Then I moved here in 1999 when I was 24.
Speaker 1:Cool that. My next question was when did you come to New York City? So you came here right before Y2K.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, I moved here I think on November 6, 1999 and New Year's Eve was like. I was here six weeks, seven weeks, and then went out for a huge epic new year's eve thinking it might be the end of the world.
Speaker 1:Um, so can you real quickly, because I'm I love New York City. I know you're a fan of New York City. You've obviously lived here a long time. Uh, what was New York like then versus now?
Speaker 2:so that's a great question. I moved to New York because I grew up loving New York movies like I loved I don't know which of these you might have seen, but like Desperately Seeking Susan, classic Madonna movie, beat Street, classic hip hop movie set in the Bronx in the early 1980s. You know there were like, but even like, even even grittier films like Taxi Driver, that kind of stuff. The New York I moved to looked a lot more like that than the New York of today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but.
Speaker 2:I moved here kind of like right as it was turning. You know it's becoming more. It was becoming cleaner.
Speaker 1:Which neighborhood did you move to?
Speaker 2:I moved to the Lower East Side Cool and I was. I was down there at a time when friends of mine who grew up in New York would always describe it as like a little further downtown than anybody wants to go People. I remember a friend was visiting me one time and we were walking back to my apartment and she was quite concerned. Like she was like, are you?
Speaker 2:sure this is safe, Like you know, because there was back then, like Orchard Street really didn't have any, it was dark, I mean it was almost without streetlights and there were just rats everywhere. It was a completely different neighborhood.
Speaker 1:Totally different. What was your work when you first moved to New York?
Speaker 2:I moved here without a job. I moved here with just a couple thousand dollars in the bank that my grandmother left me when she died. So a couple thousand dollars and a dream A couple thousand dollars and a dream and a one-way ticket, literally like I bought a one. I'd only, I've only, I think, ever bought one one-way plane ticket in my life and that was to move to New York City, because I was so committed to making it work.
Speaker 1:I love that, that's. That's the same thing where I came here, just kind of like this is just going to be where I live and I'll figure out the rest.
Speaker 2:Precisely so I here. I was 24 years old and I wanted to be a journalist, you know, in part because I liked writing, I liked magazines. I had done an internship in Minneapolis at a magazine and I just really liked. I liked the idea of I remember thinking can? I don't want to be a lawyer, I don't want to be a doctor, I want a life that will be packed with unpredictable experiences and I want to constantly learn new things.
Speaker 2:And so journalism seemed like a good path to that end. So I moved out here because this is where the magazines were and very naively thinking I'll just get a job at the New Yorker First job. And I landed in New York and I called I had I had already somebody that I had worked with at that magazine in Minneapolis. The publisher knew the publisher of the New Yorker and he said I'll send you a meeting, I'll send him a letter, connect you. And then I called that guy every day for like a month and a half or every couple of days and I just he never returned the phone call.
Speaker 2:So I finally had to find other work. I ended up fact checking for a little while at an academic magazine called Lingua Franca. Then I got a job working at my first full-time job and to this day my only full-time job that I've ever had was working for a magazine called the Silicon Alley Reporter which covered the dot-com boom and bust. So at 24, 25, I'm going to all these dot-com parties and eating caviar every night, and eating sushi and surrounded by ice sculptures, and going to launch parties, because it was like all this money was just being thrown at these ridiculous ideas.
Speaker 2:Like people coming up with like I'm going to offer free feng shui advice online and then get an investor to pay for this.
Speaker 1:Does that kind of remind you of the startup culture? I guess 20 years after that, or I guess like 10 years, when there was a second wave of what you're describing. I think with the startups and stuff where there was just so much money thrown into ideas of companies that weren't really. I describing, I think, like with like the startups and stuff, where there was just so much money thrown into ideas of companies that weren't really I mean, I feel like the dot-com era, sort of like.
Speaker 2:It was like the prototype of that and it was just there were so many insane startups and so I was covering the startups and I was going to their parties and they were burning through cash like you wouldn't believe, Wow.
Speaker 1:But it was an interesting introduction to New York. Yeah, because it's almost like you move here with a couple thousand bucks in a seedy neighborhood, but then you're also being exposed to the wealthy bougie side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and without having to pay for anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was a good and I was making like $32,000 a year at that job. I see, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's like an interesting dichotomy, the two different kinds of living in New York. But I feel I relate to that a lot because when I first moved here I had nothing but like I was going to all these really fancy model party scenes. So it's like just like seeing both sides of New York and the potential Totally. But so before we get into your work as a writer or all that stuff, I actually want to touch on your running journey because I know your running started. It must have started young, or when did you get into running?
Speaker 2:on my 23rd birthday.
Speaker 1:Oh, really okay so you got into running. I would have assumed you were running in like high school or something based on your times, because I looked up your prs, which is something I always do when I'm vetting everybody out. I'm like, okay, well, let's see like how, like what are their prs? And you, you run a sub-three marathon. You've run sub-60 minutes in the 10-mile distance, which is the most important distance to me, as many of my listeners know Sub-60?, sub-60, yeah, yeah sub-60 minutes in the 10-mile distance.
Speaker 1:You've broken 17 minutes in the 5K 1620. 1625.
Speaker 2:1625.
Speaker 1:And a five-flat mile.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, it was a 459, but because of the rounding up, yes.
Speaker 1:Well, regardless, regardless. You're really fast and so, like you get a lot of street cred in my book for how fast you are, especially considering you, I guess, started later in life. How did? How did running happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the running journey. Let's see so, as a kid I was, I was always pretty good athletically. I was a swimmer, I was a skateboarder, I was a dirt biker, I was into trick bikes as a little kid, you know. And then I started getting into well, okay, so around the age of 13, 14, I was skateboarding a lot and, as a lot of kids in the 1980s who were skateboarding and listening to punk rock, I also started smoking cigarettes and other things and I just got out of kind of that athletic mindset and I was never a competitive person.
Speaker 2:I was never interested in being on a team. I didn't like soccer. I didn't like playing team sports. It just didn't jive with me. I was a good swimmer but I didn't like the swim team culture, even though I could go and win an event at a meet. I just didn't like being on a team. So I ended up getting into. I just started rebelling and I spent my teen years, like I always tell people, I was too busy pretending to be a French intellectual than I was. I was running, so I kind of spent the next 10 years of my life just smoking cigarettes, yeah, yeah and and other things.
Speaker 2:But like I wound up, uh, I I started road biking when I was 16, 17 years old and that was because, I don't know, I was just feeling really biking when I was 16, 17 years old and that was because, I don't know, I was just feeling really depressed and I was feeling really anxious. And I had an older friend who was a big road biker and he would take me on these really long bike rides and it became this really meditative thing that I started falling in love with, just going out, because I'm from the Midwest, so I could go out and ride for like 80 miles on these like farm in this farmland and just really I grew to love that. But then I kept, you know, I went to college and I was still I would ride occasionally in the warmer months but the rest of the time I was just smoking and reading and you know I was in.
Speaker 2:I started as an art major. I was like I was a very art arty.
Speaker 1:So arty smoker.
Speaker 2:Arty smoker.
Speaker 1:And that set the stage for then. That makes these times even more impressive to me because it's, like you know, like to find the sport later on. I obviously relate to that a lot because I started running in my 20s as well. How did it go from that to running these fast times?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean so 23,. My dad, on my 23rd birthday, my dad took me to dinner with my mom and then he took me out to. I was talking about getting into running and he said, oh, you should. Um, this is actually relates to other things, but he gave me a bunch of his old t-shirts and I really liked these t-shirts. I had a really cool aesthetic which led to him saying you know why don't I go buy you a parachute?
Speaker 2:So I went out and ran a mile that night when we got home from dinner and it was kind of like the best drug I'd ever taken. It was this incredibly, it was a rush and I thought I want to do that again. So the next day I ran another mile and then the day after that and I spent the next seven years just running completely on my own. I never ran races. I didn't wear a watch, I wasn't interested in mileage. I never ran with other people. Well, occasionally I would run with somebody, but for the most part it was like a form of meditation, like the bike had been. And then I went to graduate school and when I finished grad school I was 27.
Speaker 1:Was this Minneapolis? It was in Chicago, oh, in Chicago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I left New York. I moved here in 99. And then 2002, I went to grad school, and when I finished my degree I was suddenly bereft. I had nothing to do, I had no goals, I had no projects.
Speaker 1:I had no, like you know, grad school is a really intense thing and you're constantly like embarking on a new class, a new book, a new paper, a new you know, and it's like a really tangible goals on a calendar, right, and so without that, I was like I need something, and so I spent the summer kind of down.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine suggested we train for the Chicago Marathon, and so she and I were like we just got really into that, and that was in 2004.
Speaker 1:So your first marathon 2004.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was. I was still 29 at that point. And then when I turned 30, but you know, again, I ran it without a watch, I wasn't interested in time, I wasn't competing, it was just can I finish a marathon? And then I realized I really enjoyed that. So I ran another marathon, ended up running a sub three in my second marathon, which was in New Orleans, and I didn't know what that meant. People were like oh, you should, yeah, this is in 2006. And people are like are you going to run Boston? And I was like why is everybody asking me if I'm going to like, why not Cleveland?
Speaker 1:Or I had no idea what the Boston Marathon meant.
Speaker 2:I didn't even know I'd qualified, I didn't know what that meant, and so I discovered all of that. And then I applied or I registered for the Boston Marathon, because back then you could do that without.
Speaker 1:You could just register without qualifying.
Speaker 2:No, without Like it didn't sell out.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see, Because there's like enough spots, yeah, so in.
Speaker 2:February of 2006,. I just signed up for the Boston Marathon, which was in two months, and I went and ran it.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And then I thought, okay, maybe I should try a shorter distance, and then that led to 10Ks and 5Ks Wow.
Speaker 1:Okay, this blows my mind partially because I feel like I'm hearing myself a little bit, because I obviously started running later and then, also, not knowing you, qualified. That was my story At CIM. I ran and people were like, oh wow, sub three qualified and I'm like I have no idea what any of this is but, and running alone, meditation, that's all how I came into running.
Speaker 1:But so then, as you started doing the track distances later, that's kind of what I did. But I also think of you like if I didn't know any of this. I always thought of you as, like the track guy I'm like oh, David, Alm, 5,000 meters, because you hosted all the track events that I just assumed this, but, um, I guess I was wrong.
Speaker 1:So once you, once you started running the marathons and then you decided to go into the shorter distance, is that when you started structuring your training to be more like speed, specific and like having more time goals or anything like that?
Speaker 2:I guess. So I mean, I I don't really remember how, like the evolution, I just remember that when I realized I had a certain ability to run, you know, and it's funny, like you say fast, I don't, you know, whenever you're a runner, like you never feel like you're fast. Totally you know so many people faster. And you're like who am I? Like I'm not fast.
Speaker 2:You are realize at some point that, uh, the the challenge of each individual distance was kind of like a different. I just liked the project of the 5k. I wanted to like, but I again, even there I was never like aiming to run sub 17 or I was never aiming to run sub 35 in the 10k.
Speaker 2:I was never aiming to run sub whatever in the half, like they were just these. These were just things that happened in the course of, you know, being as fast as I could be at that on that day. I totally get this.
Speaker 1:It's exactly the same with me. Like I feel like once I like broke 35 in the 10K, it's like, oh, what does this even mean? And oh, it was like kind of a. I always think of it like it was a mathematical equation of like, okay, training looked like this, and then this is the result it's because I was doing K repeats at this pace and that just turned into the like. It just becomes like a linear thing and it's not necessarily like the goal, but you, just once you do it, you're like you check that box and you're like okay, that was.
Speaker 1:That was interesting. But I did notice that for for the sub 60, 10 miler, I think that was the one, or maybe no, maybe it was the one 20 half in Staten Island, when I was looking through your Strava, there was one where you had like a long period where you had PR for the first time after like since 2012,. It was like you PR in 2019, again after 2012. So it was almost like a period where you it seemed like you really came back into the sport in a more competitive way.
Speaker 2:And the sport in a more competitive way. And I was wondering if you had joined a team or if age of 32 and 36 and that was like half everything. Everything was between 32 and 36 and I'm 49 now.
Speaker 1:So when it was like the in 2008 through 2012 roughly 2008 through 2012 roughly, and then I did have a lull and I think during that lull I, you know, I've suffered injuries, I've had torn hamstrings, I've had like you know just like various ailments that have come about um, I've also kind of lost desire yeah, like life happens, yeah, so you get in the zone, then you kind of fall out of the zone and then yeah yeah, um, but I think I do remember in 2016, at age 41, I ran within like two seconds of my four mile pr.
Speaker 1:That was a big deal to me because it could have been seven years since my four mile pr, but yeah, I don't remember 2019 there being a big I just it was something that I noticed and it I guess it stood out to me because it kind of reminds me of my own phases in running where, like, sometimes you're just running, you don't really care, and then wildly, you have a PR in a distance that you've. You're like oh, and I was just curious, like if maybe you had like started training with New York, because there was like a boom in New York, I think around 2016, where everyone was joining these track teams and they were all racing and stuff or doing all the races, and I was just wondering if there was like a community that you had kind of like fallen into.
Speaker 2:Well, definitely, I mean. So I was on Central Park Track Club for a really long time from 2000. I started training with Central Park in 2007 and I left last year, so 17 years I was-.
Speaker 1:With that team.
Speaker 2:I was with that team. I was involved with Central Park Track Club, but in 2015, I moved to my current apartment in Bed-Stuy. I've always lived in Brooklyn. As long as I've been in like. For the last 20 years I've been in Brooklyn and 10 years ago I moved to Bed-Stuy and I was suddenly surrounded by people who ran for NBR. So I just started running with North Brooklyn Runners a bunch even though I still was, at least technically, on Central Park track club and running with like James Chu, I know, you know.
Speaker 2:James, you guys ran this morning, I think um, you know, running with James, and then you know my friends like Kieran and Xander, wolverton and Alex you know all those, all those. Nbr guys.
Speaker 1:That kept me motivated because they're all like except for james like 10 to 15 years younger than I am, so it's good to just have that group of people to train with right and like rubbing shoulders with people talking about running in a different way of like oh, I gotta do that 20 miler where I'm doing tenant marathon pace versus just running for fun yeah, and unlike the central park community, they all live in Manhattan and I don't, and I never like I never really felt like I fit in on Central Park anyway.
Speaker 2:You know I've liked you know I have some very close friends on Central Park, but it's a very it's a different kind of a vibe than NBR Right lot to be living near the people that I was running with, because then we would hang out, we would have drinks, we would have brunch, we would like invite each other to our parties and it just became more of like a social scene that also was very dedicated to fast running.
Speaker 1:I totally get that. I think that like it's interesting for someone like me as well. I think we're very similar in this way, where it's like there are the teams and we might have been affiliated with certain teams at different points, like I. I was on NBR for a little bit. I was I'm still on Brooklyn track club, but it's like who you actually hang with and literally run with are maybe not the same.
Speaker 1:Like it's just the people that you have, like my guys. I have a wolf pack of guys that I have pictures of back here that are just like we were all on different teams. We're not on the same team, we're not training for the same races, but we just run together and we're homies forever, yeah, but um, okay, well enough about running.
Speaker 1:I just I went down a little rabbit hole there just cause I was curious, cause, like I, I just definitely respect your times. You've done a lot of like um, you've done had some great accomplishments with running and I thought it was worth like bringing up. But the thing that I really want to talk to you today about is your writing um, because over the past few years you've written some major stories, um, one that comes to top my mind. There's many but um, you wrote about the gaslighting of shakari richardson surrounding the olympics. Um, the ban with um the cannabis test positive, uh made it so that shakari couldn't go to the olympics and that was an amazing piece and that was like one that I definitely saw like circulating a lot and it opened up a really big conversation around the country. Like everyone was talking about that topic, so it was kind of like a household conversation.
Speaker 1:But you've also covered close to home stories of you know, people that we can consider a friend and like, for example, somebody from who used to be on MBR, connie, this cover story that you did that was about her escaping the Hasidic community or the Orthodox community. I guess it's the same thing Escaping and finding their way on their own away from this community through running and literally. And so I was wondering, when you're covering a story that's like a national household name Sha'Carri Richardson versus someone you kind of know in the New York community, are there challenges of covering somebody who's very famous versus someone that you're just an acquaintance with?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. Those were two radically different experiences. Like the Sha'Carri Richardson piece, I wrote in a day because that had just happened. You know, she had just gotten the you know the positive drug test and then she just got the ban. She was just told you're not running in the Olympics and the thing that and then Sha'Carri was on the Today Show and the thing that struck me about shakari was on the today show and the thing that struck me about her performance, like her appearance on the today show, was that the way she was questioned it was sort of like and that's where the term gaslighting came because people in the comments were like look up gaslighting.
Speaker 2:This isn't gaslighting. You don't know what gaslighting is. What I was getting at was the way that shakari was kind of being pushed into a corner and made to like feel bad about what she had done, rather than the journalists talking more, having a more elevated conversation about the ethics of this ban and whether or not, and you know what like they were kind of forcing Sha'Carari to say I'm sorry, I know what I did was wrong, I'm really begging for forgiveness, basically, and I and that was really troubling to me because I didn't think that she had anything to apologize for. I didn't think she needed to beg for the forgiveness, but knowing how sponsorships work, knowing how, um, the just the way that the media treats especially a young black woman who gets busted for for weed and is an athlete and supposedly you know a role model that they were trying to, I, I just thought that they were trying to make her feel guilty in a way that they that was inappropriate and insensitive to her and to the realities of cannabis policing, you know, and wada world athletic, drug, drug association and so on.
Speaker 2:So I think, or doping, anti-doping, but um, yeah, so that story, basically all that happened. And then I emailed my editor at runners world and I was like I'm really bothered by the way that she was interviewed on the today show. I feel like there's an op-ed here. I don't like writing op-eds and I'm happy to talk about that in a minute, but I wanted to weigh in because I was really bothered and at the time my editor said you know, right now we're treating this as a news story. Let's hold off on offering opinions. But then after a couple more days, she got back to me and said okay, we're ready to like share an opinion, and so I, she.
Speaker 2:But we had to move quickly because it was breaking news and so I had to just basically like sequester myself for half a day and just work on it. But I never interviewed her, I never had a chance to sit down, I wasn't able to like be with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, um, I was able to finally be with her.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, I was able to finally get her agent on a text exchange. I got his number and he basically declined an interview, but he did share his feelings that he said you know, this is a really troubling situation and I hope that it. I hope that it inspired some conversation and reflection at the national level, international level. So that was a really good experience. But it was not the same as writing about Connie or any of these other pieces that have required many months of in-depth conversations, long, thoughtful, yeah the piece on Connie was pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:I knew Connie and I actually we had done a shoot together in like 2016, uh, for nike, and I had no idea, like I, I knew some stuff, but I had no idea until this and then it then it like really came like the whole story of like just what her life was like before and having a child, and just to have somebody tell it was just pretty amazing, um, because it's like here's someone I just was running with and I didn't even realize that this, this was going on, but amazing story, um.
Speaker 1:And then our friend, drew reynolds, I think, shot the cover too, it's cool that we're all we all just like right, are so close, um, but your style of writing is so distinct, um, especially in these long, long form pieces where it feels like you're literally sitting with them, with your subject in their darkest hours, even where it's the moments where you wouldn't expect someone to get out of somebody, and I wanted to get the listeners a taste of that. If you haven't read any of Davidid's pieces, so if you don't mind, would you read, um, a piece that you wrote, uh called the other rapinoe, about the soccer player. Uh, that was actually published in, uh, this year's best sports writing book. Um, I just was hoping you could read the intro, yeah, um, just so people can get a taste of what your style is like.
Speaker 2:Sure, my bookmark, by the way, is from Myopic Books, so shout out to Myopic Books in Chicago. Okay, so the intro, just the first paragraph, Just the first paragraph yeah, the house was dark.
Speaker 2:Rachel Rapinoe walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. She sliced a banana in half, placed a pint of vanilla ice cream on the counter to thaw and scooped a pat of butter into a sauté pan. The pat morphed into a puddle and began to bubble. Rachel added cinnamon, brown sugar and brandy, stirring the mixture slowly over low heat. As the sweet, nutty fragrance of bananas foster filled the kitchen, rachel's loneliness began to melt away. Her nightly Vicodin was just kicking in.
Speaker 1:Amazing. That is the example of. That's an example of the level of intimacy and I'm just wondering how do you foster that kind of trust with your subjects?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a great question. So each of these pieces is very different. Rachel and I have had the pleasure of having a really long lunch with Rachel, but after this story was published in person. Other than that, all of our conversations were conducted over zoom, because she lives in portland and I'm in new york, and so we just developed this routine of getting on these zoom calls and it was like every week we would spend an hour or two having a really long conversation that I think we did like six or seven of these, in addition to multiple phone calls and text exchanges. We were just sort of like on speed dial with each other for for several months, just getting to know, like developing, I think, a rapport and a relationship that allowed me to just like really the way that that came about.
Speaker 2:That intro is, you know, I was basically just just getting Rachel's whole life story, and when I first made contact with Rachel it was in the summer of 2022 for a different story I was writing for a different magazine, and it was kind of a roundabout way that I ended up on the phone with Rachel Rapinoe, but I asked her a little bit about her life, about her past, and she told me oh, you know, I grew up, I was a soccer player too Megan obviously is famous, but I was also a great soccer player. But then I had all these injuries and that led to opioid addiction. You know I have a family history with addiction, like my brother's a heroin addict, and my you know grandparent, grandfather, was an alcoholic, and you know she was describing like these and I remember saying like wow, somebody should write about you like you're. So that began a process of just getting to know her and it was very matter of fact, very factual, just like tell me what happened then. Like tell me about your childhood, where were you living, when did you start playing soccer? And just asking these questions. And when she mentioned the opioids, like she said, you know I had this injury and I was back in Reading where I grew up recovering from this meniscus tear that I was on.
Speaker 2:I was prescribed Vicodin and every night I would just take Vicodin and it was just sort of like, even if I wasn't in pain, I would just take Vicodin because I was lonely and I felt sad and I was depressed and Megan was off in Chicago living large, and here I am stuck in Reading, and so I just asked her like what would you do? You know, because you're, when you're writing these stories, you all, you always have to be thinking I need to paint a picture, I need to tell a story, I need to create a scene. It's not enough to say I was taking Vicodin every night, because that would be a boring sentence it's like the exact moment, like eating, like eating the ice cream.
Speaker 2:So I asked her like what would you do? And she said I'll never forget this moment in the conversation. But she was like she kind of laughed and said, well, you know, I don't know if you're going to want to include this, but I would make bananas foster. And I said really, and she and she was like yeah, I never ate bananas foster. I didn't. I had never had it before, haven't had it since.
Speaker 2:But during that period when I was on vicodin, every night I would make bananas foster and I didn't really know exactly how to make bananas. So I looked it up and I found out that it has all these ingredients that you have to like simmer the butter and then you have to put in the cinnamon and the brandy and you have to do all this stuff. And it occurred to me that the aesthetic of cooking bananas foster is a lot like cooking heroin in a spoon. The aesthetic is very similar and I thought that is the perfect image to lead this piece with, because you never know where those in the middle of a conversation, somebody might say something you'd be like there it is. That's my hook, yeah.
Speaker 1:Incredible. I thought that was such a, even though that that story is obviously not about a runner and, like a lot of the stories that I've that I've read are, um, I thought that was just such an amazing opener for a piece. It makes sense why it's in this book. Um, but yeah, I was so curious, like how, how you can paint these pictures, cause that's something that's in all of your articles and pieces. Um, but that leads me to my next question of how you find your subject. So you, you said that you realized with Rachel that, while everyone's talking about her sister, that you had heard something and you're like, okay, no, the story needs to be about you. Put a frame around you. How do you find your subjects? Is it like that, or are you just hear something?
Speaker 2:and it clicks. It's always kind of just keeping your ear to the ground and always thinking like looking around the corner like where's my next story?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm curious. So Sophia real quick. This is the latest issue of Runner's World and the main story here is about our mutual friend Sophia Camacho, who's actually a podcast alum. And shout about our mutual friend Sophia Camacho, who's actually a podcast alum, and shout out Sophia. And when they were here, they were talking about working with a journalist because it seemed like it took several months. You were going to the drag shows. You were just living amongst Sophia. So in a case like this, how did you hear about Sophia?
Speaker 2:So Sophia was connected to me through James Chu back in, and actually James is also. James and I are such good friends. Connie Allen came about because I'll just go back really quickly, Way back in 2016,. I was at McCarran Track with James and Connie was doing 200-meter sprints and he pointed to her and said she's one of my new athletes. Like, she just hired me to coach her in the marathon and he was like she's kind of interesting. You know, she um not kind of. She's really interesting.
Speaker 2:She grew up in Hasidic Williamsburg and she, you know, had the whole like she had the wig and had a baby at like 19 and then she got out and I remember had a baby at like 19 and then she got out and I remember just filing that away and thinking that is such an interesting story. And so when the pandemic hit and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, I reached out to kanye and I was like hey, we don't really know each other very well. We've met, but I'm a writer and I would love to write about you and she was reluctant because she said you know, people have asked me and they and they always seem to get my story wrong, like somebody from NYU made a film about her at one point and she was really unhappy with the how it came out with the.
Speaker 2:It was a student film project, but it just didn't they took too many liberties, they they presumed too much and I said, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take enormous care with this so that's how Connie Allen came about.
Speaker 2:Similarly, in about a year ago right now, in March of 2024, sophia had posted something on Instagram about. They had written an essay about something that had happened to them in high school and they were looking for a professional editor or writer to read it and give them some guidance on what they could do with this essay. And so James forwarded me their story and said you might get in touch with this person. They're a great athlete, they're in Brooklyn Track Club. And so I, kind of as a favor to James and also just out of curiosity, I was like yeah, sure, I'll take a look at the essay and so got in touch with Sophia. They sent me the essay, I read it and I knew immediately that there was a worthwhile story here. I mean, it was like it was. But at the time I remember thinking like I feel like this is going to be a better story as a reported piece about Sophia.
Speaker 2:I mean, Sophia is a very thoughtful writer. There was a lot of merit in the essay that they wrote, but I I knew that it should be about more than that one period of their high school.
Speaker 1:I totally agree and if anyone didn't see the Sophia episode or read the article, sophia is a non-binary, incredibly talented athlete that has Olympic potential, 229 marathoner and is still quite young, but also comes from this story of an abusive past and um. How they came into the sport is really dark. So, um, yeah, but I thought that that was an amazing um piece that you had written, because it really shows more than just the dark stuff, like it shows the drag and the finding performance, and well so yeah, and so to that point, if I, if I can just interject, um that that initial conversation didn't isn't when the reporting on sophia began.
Speaker 2:That wasn't until september. So even though I had laid the foundation in march and developed a rapport with sophia, it wasn't until september that I actually got an. And I don't know how much I should go into detail here, but I actually initially wrote it for a different publication and it was a very prominent publication.
Speaker 1:I think I know which one.
Speaker 2:And that publication killed it the week it was supposed to be published.
Speaker 1:And I never really got. You don't know why.
Speaker 2:The most that I could gather from all this was that they didn't see the value they the. My editor was sort of like the intermediary between other editors and me, so it was kind of like I I, but what I gathered was they just didn't see why Sophia mattered.
Speaker 1:They didn't see the.
Speaker 2:They didn't see the. You know, it was a really frustrating experience.
Speaker 1:And that's pretty heartbreaking because it's I mean, I'm so invested in Sophia's story. I love Sophia, so yeah I'm. But if it's not right for that, that's probably a good thing, because maybe the audience wouldn't have been the right audience.
Speaker 2:You know it was a great thing for a number of reasons. The the first really big thing that made it great was this is before they won new york and before they, uh, set a pr of 229 this is before, like there were it was. The original publication date was end of october, so I had six weeks to, or like seven weeks to go all in and I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning, putting in 16 hour days like embedding myself in Sophia's world going to as many drag shows as I could.
Speaker 2:I was like living as much their life as I could and as much as they would let me in. So when it got killed, I was heartbroken. But then I realized actually this is great because if I write it for a magazine like Runner's World, where I know I'm going to have great editorial support, I know that they're going to give me a higher word count, which they did. It doubled the length and they recognized the importance of Sophia, the value of Sophia, and it gave me a longer timeline because now the story you've read it it goes up through January.
Speaker 1:With Valencia included, with.
Speaker 2:Valencia and with all of this and the election.
Speaker 2:And so the timeline is much richer and so it's a more consequential story. So I'm really glad that it got killed. But, yeah, I only share that part of the, that history of the piece, because I think it's worth knowing for a couple of reasons. One, publications are still, you know, a little bit reluctant to touch stories like Sophia's, for reasons that we can only guess at. But also the importance of like perseverance, like if you believe in a story, don't give up on it. And the photographer that shot the photos, the amazing pictures, mary Kang, was the photographer that had been or hired originally for the original publication, and she too was like we can't give up on this Right.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, sophia is just getting started. Like this is. It's great that it happened when it did and I think, like, as time goes on, um, I mean, I believe there's a documentary being made about them right now, but, um, yeah, so I'm glad that you were the person to tell it and got it, got to have the, the, the length added and um just makes the arc of it, uh, more interesting. But it's an amazing piece. It's in the most recent issue of Runner's World, so people should go check it out. But so we've talked a lot about running stories that you've written, but you've also written non-running stories and non-athletic related stories, and one of those pieces we were just talking about this morning, if you don't mind describing the piece you wrote for Mother Jones, which we do have here somewhere, this one- yeah, I should say like the writing about running thing is relatively new.
Speaker 2:I didn't really do this until the last five or six years.
Speaker 1:Like.
Speaker 2:I had written a few pieces for Runner's World like 10, 12 years ago, but for the most part my writing career is like these, like profiles of athletes is a kind of a new part chapter yeah, it's just like the tip of the iceberg and it's maybe something that exposed your work to someone like me, because I was in the running community.
Speaker 1:I just happened to read, but you've written. You have a vast body of work. That's not with athletes, um yeah you were even a ghost writer for a while.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, I ghost wrote for a web designer um the guy who developed flash so if you've ever heard of flash, um, I was his ghostwriter for a couple books and I wrote about film for the for a really long time oh, I wrote about, like documentary film.
Speaker 2:Uh, he was a filmmaker and a web designer, um, but I also wrote features about filmmakers and, uh, critical work about film my back, my academic background is in film history and film theory so, like I, that was kind of my main focus for a really long time. But then I stopped and I mentioned earlier not writing, not liking op eds. Part of the reason I wanted to get away from writing about film is that I got sick of having opinions. I got really sick of having a take.
Speaker 2:I feel, like the internet is flooded with takes, everybody's got a take, everybody's got an opinion. And I was like I don't, I don't want to write opinions anymore. Who cares what I think like, I'm just some, I'm just somebody yeah everybody else.
Speaker 2:What I wanted to do instead was tell original stories that had never been told before, and I wanted to find a way to like bring that out, and so that's when I started writing these longer do you feel like uh, it almost makes me think about, like with musicians, um, when they get boxed into a niche thing.
Speaker 1:so sometimes it helps to have like a thing like? I obviously had you on my podcast today because I was like, okay, writes about runners and that's how I know you, but at the same time it's like, oh, like, oh, wait, wait, wait. I have like this whole other like, all this other time that I put into all these other things. Do you feel like it helps, though, to have like a niche thing of like writing it Like? I'm just asking as like. So my dad was a journalist as well. He wrote about food, and that was his thing, and he wrote about other stuff, but like the stuff put into this box and then it like kind of is good, because then you're the person that people go to. Do you think it's like that's something that people should try to find like their niche, or I?
Speaker 2:mean, it's a great question. I I think there there are definitely benefits to having like I. I love writing about people. I like people. I find people interesting. I like learning.
Speaker 2:I like finding that you people interesting. I like learning. I like finding that you know. I like finding that thing that motivates a person to run as fast as Sophia Camacho does. I like finding that, that inner narrative that is kind of buried within a person that you can bring out through good storytelling. That's, that's what I really like to do, but I feel like that can be applied in various ways and so, like this Mother Jones piece you mentioned, that story is about the website Omegle, which I had never heard of until about when was it Three years ago? Yeah, like April, march, april of 2022. The child of a close friend mentioned that they had this experience on this website, where they were asked to do really inappropriate things for the benefit of this man in his 40s, and I was like Kind of like chat roulette a little bit like chat roulette and I was like what the hell is this?
Speaker 2:I had never heard of it. The difference between Omegle and chat roulette is on Omegle, you'd never had to enter login information, it was totally anonymous. And so I was like I've never heard of this before. And then I started asking friends, kids, because you know, I'm in my 40s. I'm like I'm glad I didn't know, because if I were, a man in his 40s who knew what a mega was.
Speaker 2:That's a problem yeah, um so I started asking my friends, kids, and they were, and I noticed like pretty much anyone under 25 all knew what a mega was. People over 25 kind of touch and go, like some people did, most people didn't and I just. It sent me down this rabbit hole of learning everything that I could about the legality. And then I stumbled upon a lawsuit where there was a woman in where was she? Australia suing Omegle for maybe Fiji suing Omegle for $22 million for abuse that she had suffered as an 11-year-old girl, for abuse that she had suffered as an 11-year-old girl. And I talked to the lawyer bringing the lawsuit against Omegle, Kerry Goldberg, and it just went. It became this like really interesting piece about this dark corner of the internet and the way in which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which basically is the 26 words that created the internet basically it mean the section 230 says a platform is not liable for the things that are done on the platform.
Speaker 1:So like you can't sue at&t if somebody uses a phone to call in a bomb threat, right, or if you can't like it's, it got tricky around the elections because Facebook with the politics stuff, exactly, yeah, yeah and so, like all of these social media platforms, always trot out Section 230 and say Section 230 allows us to do this, like we're not responsible, we're not publishers, we're merely a platform.
Speaker 2:So that's how Omegle was able to operate with impunity, for, I mean, it was founded in 2009. And up until last year, 2023, it operated with total impunity and leading to the abuse of a child who was really I was really close to and led I mean, this led them to attempt suicide and I was just like I need to figure this, I need to. I was motivated to.
Speaker 1:Get to the bottom.
Speaker 2:Get to the bottom of it and give a. And also I was shocked that no one had ever written.
Speaker 1:About it.
Speaker 2:About it Like there was a BBC investigation from years prior, but it was much shorter and it was much shallower and I wanted to tell a true, like deep magazine worthy piece.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so that. But like it was similar to writing about Rachel Rapinoe or writing about Sophia Camacho or any of these people, because in that piece I found a subject I had to. I had to write about a person. You know, all these stories are only compelling insofar as they are human stories. So I had to find a human that would allow me to write about them and I found this young woman, very brave young woman in Wyoming named Alana, and she and her mother, crystal, allowed me to interview them extensively about, and so Crystal and her daughter Alana became, like kind of the main subjects of the piece.
Speaker 2:So very similar to interviewing Rachel or Sophia. I just spent a lot of time. I really got to know Crystal, I really got to know Alana and got to know their lives, got to know their personalities, I got to know their histories, I got to know everything about them, down to the details of the little town in Wyoming where they live, because Alana, like my friend's child, had been groomed and abused on Omegle and it led her down a really dark path and so that.
Speaker 2:But it's like telling human stories, it's always about finding that humanity in a larger narrative, whether it's opioid addiction like Rachel Rapinoe or abuse and opioid addiction and being a non-binary athlete like Sophia Camacho, opioid addiction and being a non-binary athlete like Sophia Camacho it's always finding that human story.
Speaker 1:that then you use to telescope out and tell a bigger picture, right? So, because you just mentioned this, there are a lot of noticeable themes in your work. You have a lot of common themes in the body of work by David Alm and these include escaping trauma addiction. These include escaping trauma addiction um feature. You feature marginalized communities, um like lgbqtia, plus bipoc people like you're. You're very good at putting a frame around people who don't often get a lot of um attention. You've also um like. These themes are very prevalent in your work. Do you seek, do you feel like you're seeking them out, or does it come up as your um, as your writing? I mean, I guess with the Omegle story, you sought that out because you saw a need for a story about this thing that nobody was talking about. But with all the other articles that I've read, does it just like? How does that work? Like you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Like you have your themes that I feel like you stick with. But yeah, I mean it's funny, it's I'm. I'm glad you brought it up, because I I never know how to talk about this or think about it. I mean, I'm a cisgender white man in his 40s and I'm straight like I'm none of I'm the least marginalized on the planet.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm thinning slightly on top as you, um, but no, like I think it. For me it comes down to. I think a lot of it originates in kind of what I alluded to before, but like this you know, in the 1980s I was like this punk kid. I was going to punk shows and I was hanging out with punks and when we were going to like warehouses and mosh pits and I was surrounded by kind of people who felt like they were thrown away by society, even though I wasn't like, I came from quote-unquote good family. I had both mom and dad at home, I had I, I had I wasn't, uh, impoverished.
Speaker 2:I had a good, stable, middle class childhood. But I found myself through various for various reasons. I was just rebelling against the structures in the society that I was around, you know, like the church and the and middle class values and like everything about the Midwest and all of it I just started really rebelling against and that put me in very close contact with a lot of people who had it a lot worse than I did.
Speaker 2:And I think it just made me, I don't know. There's like a certain amount of anger that I feel towards society about the way people are treated and the way, um, kind of the mainstream sort of champions some narratives and sidelines others, and so I don't go seeking out like I didn't. I wasn't looking for. You know somebody like ty richards right, we have to mention thai.
Speaker 1:Um so ty, richards is this is the cover story that was about the weed running. What was the article?
Speaker 2:It's called are runners ready to get high? I think so.
Speaker 1:Are runners ready to get high? Ty Richards was on my speed project team and I didn't know anything about him until we were running the speed project and I was like he's the one who has destigmatized cannabis and running and runs like the run club that they just get high and go run. And so you wrote the story on that, so you weren't looking for this, or you just-.
Speaker 2:No, I wasn't looking for that. I wasn't looking for Sophia, I wasn't looking for Connie, I wasn't looking for any of them. But when somebody mentions something like Ty came to me because my friend Katie, who's on my Hood to coast team I run hood to coast every year in Oregon she is a big proponent of cannabis and she loves you know, she loves her weed, and so she uh, found him. She was in San Francisco, but she found him online and she was like do you know that there's a cannabis run?
Speaker 1:club in Brooklyn and I was like whoa, that's so cool.
Speaker 2:I want to go. I want to. I just want to go hang out with them.
Speaker 1:I wanted to go on a run about see what it's about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the more I read up on tie, I was like there's a story there. And so it's always about, like, keeping your ear to the ground and not seeking. I don't go looking for stories. I wasn't looking for a non-binary elite runner to write about, right, I'm not looking for any of these. But in order for me to write about them, there have to be these elements that make me think there's got to be like. I have friends who are like oh, you should write about so and so, and I'll be like why?
Speaker 1:and they'll say because they're fast it's like that's not, I could not care less. Yeah, that is not, that's that's. It's interesting. Um, to me that's it's almost like so, as a podcast host, sometimes when I'm finding guests, that's the most boring person in the world is like no offense to elite runners, but like they it's. There has to be something else. There has to be some kind of other story of why and you know so I, I completely understand that, and I think that for me, finding a good story is so much more about where they've come from, where they're going. What is a running story that you want to tell, that you haven't been able to yet, that you don't mind sharing, that it's not in the works right now.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:You share one, because I have one that I want to share too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the kind of story that I want to tell it doesn't have to be running or not.
Speaker 1:It could be any story that you want to tell that you just haven't found the right way to yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I'll tell you, like there is one story that I really am trying to find a way to tell and it's it's a tough one, but and it's tough for a variety of reasons Emotionally. I mean, all of these are very tough emotionally. I've had to go into therapy.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask that because you're living inside their world.
Speaker 2:It's really difficult, like the heaviness, like I've had emotional breakdowns, I've had. There have been like dark periods and it's not because of one individual story, it compounds and it's. You know, I don't pretend to be a robot that can just sort of like put on the journalist hat and like I'm a human you know, and I connect with these, these subjects, because they're humans too and I develop a lot of empathy for them.
Speaker 2:So this story would be difficult. Because it difficult, because it's heavy, but I also was friends with this person. But you might recall, a year ago, back in July last year, there was a woman named Marissa Galloway who was murdered by her former partner's mother.
Speaker 1:I do remember the story Upper East Side. Upper East Side, yeah, yes, and Central Park Truck Club yeah, she was on Central Park Truck Club. Yeah, I remember.
Speaker 2:So I knew, knew marissa, she was a friend and it's a wild story. Yeah, morning yeah and you know, the only publication that really covered it in depth was um of all places. The new york post, like, really covered the, the daily unfolding of that. You know what happened, and then the when the husband fled and went back to Chicago, and then you know.
Speaker 2:Then he came back to New York and it was like all the different layers of the fallout. But I wanted to tell a different story. I wanted to tell a story of Marissa and the way in which the I mean running was a big part of her life. She was a volunteer coach at Fordham where she had gone to college. She was very well loved by the people within her running community. She was a special ed teacher, so she has a really, I mean, she was naturally a very nurturing person and I wanted to tell a story that got away from the sensationalized coverage of her as a um, you know, just like an upper east side mom who was murdered like I.
Speaker 2:I felt like the the daily coverage didn't capture the wholeness of marissa and I wanted to tell that story and but ultimately I wanted it to be a story about the toxic relationship that grandparents can bring into.
Speaker 2:The fact that this woman murdered Marissa and then killed herself with the next bullet is an incredibly dark, gothic tale, and on a beautiful July morning, right in broad daylight, in broad daylight yeah, and so I wanted to like use it as an opportunity to I don't say I shouldn't say use it, because that makes it sound too opportunistic, but like I wanted to tell a story that really humanized and gave the full scope of marissa Galloway, but then also look at it through the lens of family systems, family relations. There's a whole story that hasn't been told about why she was living with Marissa, why Marissa had to get out of that apartment. I wanted to unpack the depth of that whole story in a way, and so I'm using past tense, because I've shopped this around a little bit and it hasn't gained traction.
Speaker 1:But maybe at some point.
Speaker 2:At some point, and that's kind of the moral of the story is you have to file away ideas Like I sat on Connie Allen for four years before it actually became a story Materialized.
Speaker 1:Right, so you kind of have these little like banks of. This is the beginnings of a story and maybe, when the right time place arises, you can put it out there again and see if somebody bites.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have the same thing. I have people that I've kind of like thought about okay, is this gonna ever be a thing? Um, and it just it happens when it does, and sometimes the world isn't ready for something. So it's like you kind of have to wait for the world to be ready for your story, um, but I always say I'm kind of have to wait for the world to be ready for your story, um, but I always say I'm kind of curious as a writer, um, so a while back, uh, actually it was through you you helped me get a story published in runner's world. Um, I had that.
Speaker 1:I had met someone through Instagram and I was like I want to write a story about this person. I flew out to El Paso, shot it, wrote it, did the interviews, spent like a weekend with this person, and it was one of those things where it's like you are interesting and I need to tell this story. And that was the piece I did about Blank Bruno, who is also a non-binary athlete like Sophia, and it was more about like what is? What? Does it look like to be a non-binary athlete in 2022, when I guess, you know, it was like just starting to have, there's just starting to be conversations.
Speaker 1:But, um, my question is feedback. I was scared to death when this article got posted because and this is maybe where I need to get a little bit thicker skin but I was afraid of the comments, like I was like I don't want to read the comments because I'm afraid someone's going to say you're stupid or, like you know, or even the worst, criticize the subject of my story. I didn't want anyone talking negatively about the subject of my story because I got to know them I, they became a friend and I was afraid that I had put a frame around someone and put them in a public place that I'm, like, somehow responsible if there's feedback that's negative or positive, anything, it's just like. Am I ready for that burden? How do you feel about that kind of stuff Like feedback?
Speaker 1:Uh like negative criticism negative criticism or um, like, if somebody just says I'm not thinking, I don't think this is a real thing, but I'm like David Allman isn't a good writer, huh, like, I don't know. Like, if you get any kind of like negative feedback, how do you take it?
Speaker 2:well, I mean. I don't think anyone's ever said that, but like, yeah, it doesn't affect me because I I know it's not true. Um, if it were true, it wouldn't. I mean, I know the process. Like I have really good editors. You know, I've been very fortunate and I'll name them like runner's world. Leah Flickinger is a a master, like one of the best editors on in the country, in my opinion. Uh, she, I don't know. If you recall, mitch jackson had that incredible piece about maude arbery yeah, that was an amazing piece yeah, won the pilitzer prize runner's world won a pilots.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I forgot about that leo was the editor behind that. You know, um, my editor at gq is now at the atlantic, alex hoyt. So he's now a senior editor, or I think that's his title. But you know, editing features for the Atlantic. So these are like the creme de la creme of the editing world and if my piece is, I work on them, with them, and they get their stamp of approval and then it gets published in a major publication.
Speaker 1:You know it's fun.
Speaker 2:If somebody comes along and says you're not a good writer, I'll be like. I think I would beg to differ.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, like I guess what I was kind of going back to was, like you mentioned in the very beginning, when you use the term gaslighting about Sha'Carri Richardson and somebody who's like're, it doesn't affect you, I guess I I don't have a thick skin so like any negative thing. I just I'm like I I have to get it out of my, I can't look at it.
Speaker 2:So you don't have that kind of yeah, no, because I know, I know what I if I knew what I meant, and my editor knows what I meant, and plenty of other people, because it's not just you and one editor, it's like multiple editors read a piece before it gets published and if it passes through all those layers of very smart, critically-minded people giving it the green light by the time it gets published you know.
Speaker 1:Well, here's. I understand what you're saying, but another question I have about that is like have you ever had and you don't have to say which person or anything but have you ever had, and you don't have to say which person or anything but have you ever had negative feedback from the person you wrote about? Like that they're like, hey, like you know, I that's not how I wanted it, or something. Or like that I didn't, that's not how I am, or something Like have you ever had that?
Speaker 2:I've never had someone say that's not how I am. I've never had anyone accuse me of not capturing them accurately. What I have had is somebody a famous runner that I wrote about took issue with details that I included in my piece because I had gotten these details from a different source than from our interview but the source I got the details from were was from a book that this person had written and I was like, but I, you gave me this from the source material and you told yeah so that, and this book is in the public domain, but so there was a little bit of friction there.
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:But you know, it was like we discussed it and we worked through it and ultimately it was okay. But it wasn't it. So it had nothing to do with me mischaracterizing them. It had everything to do with them not expecting that I was going to use material that came from a different place in our interviews.
Speaker 1:I see interesting. Um, well that we're coming up on time, but I really did want to touch a little bit more on the stuff outside of writing quickly. So talk about the races you host or direct whatever you call yourself, because I know on the phone before we had this podcast, you mentioned how this came to be. But real quick, I actually set my PR in the 5K at your event in the middle of the pandemic, because there were no races and I was in the best shape of my life and I had nowhere to take it out on or like, do do the like, show that I was fit and you were hosting these 5ks on the track 5000s and I jumped into two of them and I ran um sub 17 minute in the 5k, thanks to you. So how did the east river 5000 idea come to be?
Speaker 2:yeah. So, um, there's like there I can give you a long version, short version, I'll try to give you a shorter version. Uh, in 1991 I was 15 years old and I wanted to see this dutch band that I really loved called the Legendary Pink Dots. They were in the Netherlands. I was in Illinois, iowa. We wrote them a letter, some friends of mine and I, and said would you like to come in Any chance? You're going to be playing? Will you be touring the US anytime soon? And they said in fact we are playing the US. Why don't you get in touch with our booking agent in New York? And so I got on the phone, called this booking agent. Next thing I know he puts us down. He's like okay, you have a date.
Speaker 2:We were 15 years old, we didn't know what we were doing. We had to go find a venue, we had to find Sound and Lights, we had to create a concert in two months and we pulled it off and we packed the room and we ended up putting that dying blues club on the outskirts of Davenport, iowa, on the map and it became a destination for bands around the country and even other international bands to play in for a while, like for multiple years after that and that experience kind of like it was that again that sort of like punk rock, sort of like DIY. I want to do something. I want to see a band that's I'm not going to get to see if I don't create it. So in 2019, that band was going on a 40th anniversary tour and I wanted to write about it. I wanted to.
Speaker 2:I pitched, like all these publications, including my hometown newspaper, I want to write about this band and how I wanted to see them. So I created a concert and thereby created a scene in my hometown. Nobody wanted, nobody would publish it. My pitch fell flat and so I was like I want to. I just I was just really bummed out. I was depressed, I was nostalgic for being able to create something out of scratch. And so one day a friend of mine was he commented on one of my dad's old running shirts that I was wearing and he was like that's a cool shirt and I said, yeah, it'd be kind of cool just to create a race. And so this kind of like desire for a different kind of race than I was experiencing with nyrr and these, like I felt like racing was just becoming so corporate so expensive. The t-shirts were hideous, everything was broadcasting, like all these sponsors all over the back and they were they were ugly, they were shitty tech shirts, and I was like I want to create a cool shirt.
Speaker 2:I want to have a simple, low-key race, kind of like the ones that my dad ran, and I want to create something new, like I did when I was 15. I want to just make it. And so that was the East River 5000. A year later, we had the Superfund 5000. And at the time I was going to have different races all over the five boroughs and the East River 5000 name stuck because I liked it. And then that so 2019 was the first race, and then over the years I had I've lost track of how many track races we've had. Now we have these, uh road relays that we've started doing. Uh the ecadon, which is a 50 kilometer relay race. Uh beach to brooklyn 5x5k. So they're like it's just a series that I kind of. It's the kind of racing that I wanted to see happen that we didn't have, and so kind of like creating that legendary pink dots show. I just I was just like let's just make it happen that's uh, that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like that. I I've kind of been holding out. I ran into our friend Jim Isman recently and I he said he was hanging out with you or he was talking to you at some point and I was like, hey, you have to ask him. This is before the podcast was planned, but I think you have to ask him when he's gonna put on another race. I keep checking the website. I really want another race because I don't like the big races. I don't want to do a big race. I like it's like the the worst thing in the world to have to wait to sign up for something in eight months and just have it be such a pain. Um, and I was like I wonder if we could convince David Alms to put on a 10K. That would be really cool 10K on the track. But it was just funny because, like, in my mind, you're the guy for that. But I guess what is the plan? Like, what are the next races that you have coming up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So I'm doing one in June which is going to be a very small, low-key trail race, which I will hold off on details for now, which I will hold off on details for now, but it's going to be. I will tell you it's going to be in Prospect Park and it'll be on the trails in Prospect Park and we're going to keep it very small, like 20 to 30 people. And the reason we're doing it there is and we're calling it the Glacial 1000, and we're doing it there in honor of the glaciers that created Prospect Park.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:And so the 1000 means like in 10 miles you can gain a thousand feet with almost never doubling back. This idea was brought to me by a guy in Brooklyn Track Club named Kyle Oberman, who had kind of charted out this route, and then he and I ran it together last week and we're like OK, we got to make this happen it out this route.
Speaker 2:And then he and I ran it together last week and we're like, okay, we got to make awesome this happen. The next track race will be another Sid Howard track classic, which will be it's scheduled for July 12th, and that'll be the 5000 you did that a couple years ago, right we did one last year and then we did one in 2021 that's, I did that one.
Speaker 1:I remember it was really hot, yeah, um, and he was there and said, yes, he's always there. And he had the iconic t-shirt. Right, that was the yellow shirt. Yeah, the t-shirt's also a funny thing because you've brought it up a few times. But the iconic race t-shirt and that's something that you guys or your, you guys you make. Where there's t-shirts involved, art, like, uh, you hire somebody to make these. Well, it is, I mean, I think the plural is is Like.
Speaker 2:I always say that East River is a collective Like. Yes, it's my idea. I founded it. I run the Instagram. I'm in charge of sort of like the brand identity, as it were. I don't like to call it a brand. It's not a brand.
Speaker 1:I know what you mean. It's not a brand Down with brands.
Speaker 2:But like I'm in charge of, like the sort of the aura that. East River is supposed to give off, but then I couldn't do it without these incredible designers that are so happy to participate and contribute their work, and you know Sean Micah, who's a really close friend. Oh, yes, yeah, I know, sean, he's done a bunch of my race shirts Logan Emser, Luke McCambly, the Orange Runner, Sebastian Spear.
Speaker 1:All these artists that have contributed to the tease. Yeah, james's wife Sarah Mezian has done one, and she's not even a runner.
Speaker 2:She's in the community, yeah exactly so it really is a collective effort of designers and photographers, and Chris Fortyris, 40, who times the race, and his girlfriend becca, like you know.
Speaker 1:so we're we're a collective and collectively, we we try to make great things yeah, a lot goes into making those events happen. Um, I just have such great memories of of doing those races. Um. So, since we are, uh, out time, what do you have going on next, or what's next for David all um, you know, in the next foreseeable future as far as, like you know, are you trying to write a book, or is there anything like the some big um milestone that you're hoping to achieve?
Speaker 2:Um, I'm hoping to turn 50 successfully. It's happening in August hoping to turn 50 successfully. It's happening in august, oh wow. So yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of it, like, uh, I have hood to coast to race. Um, I'm, I don't have any big writing projects like I'm right now, like I'm, I'm really focusing on getting better at music oh, that's amazing, I was gonna.
Speaker 1:that was actually one of the questions I was going to ask is like tell us about the music which we don't have much time for today, but you're playing the banjo, you're playing shows occasionally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I go to like bluegrass meetups where we play like public, you know, at bars.
Speaker 1:Is it here in New York? Yeah, at bars. Is it here in new york? Yeah, they're all over. Oh, I'll totally come. Can I go?
Speaker 2:sunnies. Yeah, I mean you should come to sunnies on a saturday night awesome, that's the best place.
Speaker 1:Oh man, blue grass in new york, that's so cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um but it's yeah, it's cool, and I mean I've been playing the guitar since I was 12, so the guitar is like my main instrument, but I learned the. I started learning the banjo a little over a year ago. My dad and I built two banjos last summer, and so right now I'm just kind of interested in seeing where that goes.
Speaker 1:I love that I love that so much. I love that you're turning 50 this summer and music is your focus. I was just talking to someone about how I'm a music head. I love music. It's like my labor of love. That's never loved me back and I've never done it on a big level. I had friends that were in bands and I've always just been like I need to like put more into it and I sometimes I just wrap myself up in like, oh well, I'm 36 and music, but it's, it's not real. None of that's real. It's like it's just a construct. That, um, yeah, so I relate to that a lot. Yeah, and I think that's kind of funny that like if somebody asked me what I was working on right now, I'd probably say music. That's what I was working on the way here I was like it's the thing that's always in the back of my mind but yeah it's just like it's just part of you, um.
Speaker 1:But so yeah, on that note, before we go, can you give me a couple albums that I should check out that I haven't heard of? I know you love um Boards of Canada like. I do and, uh, you like Laurie Anderson Big Science. I was going down a rabbit hole with that recently and I noticed you'd posted about that on instagram. Give me a couple albums I need to check out that are kind of in that world or something that you're like. You need to check this out do you know?
Speaker 2:the two bands that I'm like in a major kick with right now are a band out of texas called this will destroy you, cool, and they're like I've heard of them atmospheric, uh, very this will destroy you.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like.
Speaker 2:So the other band is called Mono and they're a Japanese band and they're both kind of like Sigur Rós, but without vocals and very like. It can be very quiet and it can be very swelling into these like majestic orchestral sort of like they. They're it's. I think if you like boards of canada, this will destroy you in mono or my two jams right now heady.
Speaker 1:I like heady music, that's my thing. I go down these like I'll go on like long walks just listening to uh. Music has the right to children, like I did that yesterday. It was like sunny and I'm like nobody understands but me um in this situation.
Speaker 2:It's transcendent. That album is transcendent.
Speaker 1:Love it um, so anyway, thank you so much for coming to the show. Um, is there anywhere that people can find you like? Do you have a social media that you care about sharing, or sure I mean um.
Speaker 2:I I am on Instagram under my. My name is Dalmatis, like Dolma, like Greek grape, like stuffed grape leaves, but with an, a Dalmatis there's. No, I'm not Greek um but, I was recently actively encouraged to set my Instagram to private by a journalist named Lauren Markham who covers. She's done a lot of reporting on surveillance, particularly around the border, and brilliant journalist and she compelled me to-.
Speaker 1:Set it to private. Set it to private. I need to do that. I feel this. I've heard a lot about this kind of stuff and I'm yeah, I'm way out there and I wish I wasn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but for what it's worth. She has over 3 000 followers, but they're private. But it's private, so, like I, think it's more about keeping it locked from any bad actors, so I think I'm going to set it to private, but people can request.
Speaker 1:They can request um well, anyway, thank you so much for coming on my show. Um, it's been a pleasure. I feel like we barely scratched the surface, but hopefully my listeners got an idea of who David Alm is. Check out his work. It's great. You can Google him and a lot of the articles will just come right up, so that's one way to find some of his pieces. Yeah, so thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you and yeah, until next time. Just be fast, just win.