“I, um, ran a hundred miles like a day ago in Colorado,” Alexi Pappas says by way of introduction over the phone last week. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility for what an Olympic runner might do with her weekend, but it’s still taking its toll on Pappas, who made her way back to Los Angeles (with some help up the stairs from her Uber driver).
Pappas, the Greek American runner who competed for Greece in the 10,000 meters at the 2016 Olympics, is in a stage of her life now where she’s all about trying new things. Lately her running career has shifted into being a guide for blind athletes for the Paralympics, as well as competing in ultra marathons.
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“One, I do believe in myself. Like deep in my heart, I believe I can do anything, I really do,” Pappas says of the appeal of ultra marathons. “I trust my body. I believe I’m sturdy. I believe I’m an athlete. I believe I love adventure. And I think what drew me to it was, I mean, I’ll be honest with you — I feel like I’m so responsible and busy in my life and take care of a lot of people. And I love being a mentor and a role model, but something about ultra running is like, you give yourself the gift of being in one place. You have one purpose. You are meant to be there. So you’re just meant to be moving to the finish line and people are supporting you and you’re supporting them, too, right? But it feels like a tremendous gift to receive nature and let my body move and feel like being in that place is like my absolute purpose.”
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The reflective weekend came right as she dove into promotion for her new book, “Bravey,” which is a young adult version of her 2021 memoir “Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas.” The project is deeply personal for Pappas, who lost her mother to suicide at a young age and has since been vocal about mental health for athletes.
Pappas notes that while other memoirs from her publisher, like Trevor Noah’s and Michelle Obama’s, were edited by the book editors into a new version for young adults, she knew she wanted to tweak her original book and write new material for the young adult version.
“The adult book is more memoir, and it felt like a meaningful point in my life to reflect. It’s not a diary. But I think the young readers’ adaptation was a lot more about being accessible and instructional to young people in a way that was not as much about like, who am I? I tried to only use my narrative in service of sharing wisdoms that I wish I would’ve had when I was that age, particularly about mental health, because I grew up very, very confused about that,” Pappas says.
She approached the process “kind of similarly to the ultra marathons” and went on a retreat to get serious about it, in Joshua Tree.
“I just wrote what I had thought about in my life; since writing the other books I’ve grown a lot. And regardless of who this book was for, I knew that there were things that I’ve learned and wanted to write about,” she says.
She reached out to her friend Maya Hawke to discuss the new book, and Hawke ended up writing the foreword.
“It’s really lovely because her challenges growing up were really different from mine. But we vibrationally connect. We have a similar feeling about the world. We’ve fallen down, things are hard, but we’re generally pretty curious, ambitious people who want to stay on our own terms,” Pappas says.
In her current career stage she feels “like Tarzan,” flying from one place to the next, she says. In addition to the running and writing, she’s also working in Hollywood and was in the middle of pitching a show related to running when the strikes hit.
“It just feels a lot like sports to me,” she says of working on a TV show. “My athletic career translated into the arts, because you think about it, there’s a season, there are your best episodes, there’s OK episodes, people come and go, there’s a team.”
As she looks toward the future, she has her goals and her plans for her career, but she’s adamant about leaving open space for life to happen.
“I think the way to approach life is like, you have the whiteboard that are your goals in life, the ones you would write down for yourself. And then I think those are important and I have those, like I want to keep guiding, for example. But then there’s also the whiteboard that is completely blank, and it’s the one that the world brings to you,” she says. “It’s opportunities like this [Colorado] race. And I think that having both is really important.”