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What happens when you have two very big but different dreams vying for your focus? Do you choose one? Or do you risk it all to pursue both?
This was the dilemma faced by today’s guest—a woman who knows a thing or two about what it takes to execute at the highest level.
Meet Alexi Pappas—Olympic athlete. Award-winning writer. Poet. Filmmaker. And so much more.
An extraordinary runner, Alexi set the Greek national record in the 10,000-meters and competed for Greece at the 2016 Olympic Games. An equally noteworthy artist, her words have graced the pages of The New York Times, Runner’s World, Women’s Running Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, and Outside.
There's more. In the exact same year she competed in the Olympics, she also co-wrote, co-directed, and starred alongside Rachel Dratch in Tracktown, her first feature film. Executing on just one of these goals is an exceptional accomplishment. Doing both in parallel is downright superhuman.
More recently, Alexi co-wrote and starred alongside Nick Kroll in Olympic Dreams, the first non-documentary-style movie to ever be filmed at the actual Olympic Games.
Profiled in every major publication from Sports Illustrated to Rolling Stone, my interest was recently piqued by an amazing New York Times OpDoc (produced by friend of the pod Lindsay Crouse), which poignantly portrays the emotional toll of chasing an Olympic dream.
In her excellent new memoir Bravey, Alexi dives deeper. An exuberant and unflinching primer on the struggle of self-actualization, it’s the beautiful story of surviving trauma and navigating disparate dreams—filmmaking and athletics—in competition for her attention. Why she refused to pick just one lane. And how, setbacks and deep lows aside, Alexi ultimately succeeds at both.
How is possible that this human is so good at so many things simultaneously? And what is the cost (if any) of setting the bar so high?
I needed to know more.
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