Updated July 10, 2025 02:18PM
3 Ways a Mentor Can Change Your Running—and Your Life—From Alexi Pappas
When you’re trying to improve, sometimes asking for help is the best solution. And Pappas notes that mentorship can come from unexpected sources.
(Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
When Olympian Alexi Pappas was just 4 years old, her mother took her own life, leaving a void that led her to seek out female mentorship. Finding guidance and inspiration from women helped her not only navigate personal challenges but also fuel her success on the track.
Pappas, who competed for Greece in the 10,000 meters at the 2016 Rio Olympics, details this in her 2021 memoir, Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas. In it, she devotes a chapter titled “Mentor Buffet” to exploring how mentorship became a cornerstone of her growth. Late last summer, Pappas, now 34, launched a podcast of the same title, devoted to highlighting that very topic.
“I’ve always been searching for mentors, people who know more than I do, people who can help me level up faster than I could ever do on my own,” she explains in the podcast intro episode. “Mentors are everywhere, and they can help us change our lives if we let them.”
The podcast has featured high-profile guests, like actors Rainn Wilson and Zach Braff, Saturday Night Live alum Melissa Villaseñor and Grammy-winning artist Estelle. The show will also feature more running-specific conversations with guests like middle-distance runner and 2024 Olympic 1500-meter gold medalist Cole Hocker, transgender and nonbinary runner advocate Cal Calamia, and DJ and music producer Diplo, who Pappas paced in his first marathon at the 2023 Los Angeles Marathon.
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Each guest talks about transformative experiences gained through mentorship, and most admit their mentors haven’t come from obvious places in their lives. Those same kinds of life-changing experiences are available to runners.
“There’s so much wisdom that can always be applied to athletics if that’s what people care about,” Pappas says. “Just like athletic wisdom can always be applied to non-athletic circumstances [as well].”
Here are three of those lessons runners can apply to their own lives.
Assume You’re Brilliant
This lesson, to simply be confident and go for what comes naturally to you without questioning if it will work out, is a piece of advice given by Wilson, who is the featured guest on the show’s first episode.
“It’s about confidence after he stepped in as an actor and second-guessed himself for a while before learning to accept himself as an eccentric, unique human, which can be scary when it’s something that’s never been done or come from you before,” Pappas says.
Pappas has applied this lesson to herself and her own dreams, explaining how her Dartmouth track and cross country coach, 1996 Olympic marathoner Mark Coogan, was the first person to tell her she could make it to the Olympics, which allowed her to finally believe it for herself. Under Coogan’s mentorship, Pappas became a two-time All-American runner at Dartmouth, and, three years later, she finished 17th in the 10,000 at the Rio Olympics in a personal best of 31:36.16.
“It goes hand-in-hand with the idea of suspending your disbelief, which is an ingredient to chasing any big dream, especially an athletic one, and for me it came into play when someone else believed in me more than I believed in myself, and I assumed that they were right and that I was capable,” she says. “I think that can help a lot of athletes because we often try to subscribe to what’s been done before and just replicate it and become something else when the greatest athletic expression is when we are our most expanded selves, and that might be unique to each of us.”
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Mentorship Is Available to Everyone
Pappas wants her guests to be mentors for her listeners, and says that mentorship isn’t just for adolescents or young adults; rather it can be useful for adults of any age to seek out, even if they’ve never experienced it before. That can include runners who are stuck in a training plateau, lacking confidence in their abilities, or need guidance in another area of their life.
“Mentorship does sometimes come in the form of somebody approaching or connecting with you, but it’s something that we can and should seek out, and [athletes] can seek it out in satellite ways, like listening to podcasts or reading articles,” she says. “I think finding people and asking for help is important and it’s not a crime. It’s OK to ask people for help, and they might be busy or unable to help, but people are [often] more generous with their wisdom than we might assume.”
In fact, Pappas is inviting listeners to seek mentorship from her, with a new segment called “Help Me Please.” Listeners can email with their questions seeking advice, which she will answer in a monthly solo episode.
“I’m especially excited to get nerdy with the running-specific questions and draw from my experiences as a competitive athlete,” she says.
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Expand Your Definition of What a Mentor Is
Pappas emphasizes that it’s important to consider what a mentor means to you because if you view it as a scarce resource, it can seem very limited and unattainable. A mentor could be a coach, a fellow runner, a friend, or even a competitor that you admire but don’t even know.
“Some of my [first] mentors were ‘satellite’ mentors, like [former professional soccer player] Mia Hamm and Britney Spears, and other people I looked up to from afar, who I would never even get to talk to,” she says. “Later, [as I evolved as an athlete], pros like [Olympic medalists] Deena Kastor and Shalane Flanagan, as well as my college poetry advisor at Dartmouth, who encouraged me to turn down poetry grad school to chase my Olympic dream, became big mentors in my life.”
Right now, Pappas says 2020 Olympic bronze medalist Molly Seidel is a mentor. Like Pappas, who broke her collarbone in an accident while attending the Paris Olympics, Seidel has dealt with her fair share of injuries since her own Olympic moment. The two shared an apartment together in Paris, where Pappas was able to lean on Seidel for advice about not rushing her return to running after sustaining a serious injury and subsequent surgery. Pappas emphasized that recreational runners can seek this type of mentorship from their peers as well.
“My mentors have been across different disciplines and ages, and I’ve outgrown some of them, but it shows that you can learn one thing from people and that is still mentorship,” she says. “It’s a lesson, it’s a moment, and it’s not just a relationship. It can be just friendship and advice, too.”
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