"I'm very comfortable not writing perfectly. I think a lot of writers have difficulty writing because they can be such good editors that there's almost this like, inherent need of sometimes rereading the same chapter over and over again and trying to make it perfect. And so I think, for me, I'm very comfortable with the idea of, like, let me just get stuff on paper," says Mary Cain, author of This is Not About Running: A Memoir.

It’s Mary Cain! She’s @runmarycain on Instagram and she serves on the board of The Army of Survivors and the founder of the nonprofit Atalanta NYC which employs professional female runners to serve as mentors to girls in underserved part so the city. For a certain subset of people they’re gonna be like, Who dat? To them, I say, Mary was a running prodigy in the 2010s, the fastest high school girl in America and one of the fastest across all ages before the age of 18 in events like the 800 meters and the 1,500. She was recruited by the now disgraced Alberto Salazar for the Nike Oregon Project where she was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused by Salazar in a win-at-all-costs culture.

In 2019, she published a video op-ed with the New York Times that brought down the Nike Oregon Project and Alberto Salazar. It lit a fire and this book is also lighting a firestorm as well.

This was a really fun conversation. I was working in specialty running retail when Mary exploded onto the scene, so it was just really cool to chat with her. Part of the appeal for her coming on this show was to talk about the writing, which she’s not really going to experience on this book tour, which will primarily be on the running shows. She was very generous with her time and we talked for almost 90 minutes on topics like:

Her love of Hemingway

Procrastination
Writing in the present tense
The benefits of reading when you’re writing
Finishing as a skill
Not writing perfectly
Sticking to artificial deadlines
Seasonality in writing
Support networks
Starting from pure anger
The monetization of fake advocacy
And the one sentence she wrote that I wish I wrote

Mary is a medical student now at STanford University and basically runs for fun. This episode will pair well with my conversations with Maggie Mertens, Christine Yu, Lauren Fleshman and Renee Hess.

I had a real blast talking to her and I think you’l enjoy as well. Parting shot on my marathon experience, but for now, here’s the super cool Mary Cain.

Episode 525: Mary Cain Started with Pure Anger in 'This Is Not About Running'

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara

Episode 525: Mary Cain Started with Pure Anger in 'This Is Not About Running'