Welcome to episode 175 with Allie Bailey, who is an ultrarunner, coach and author.
She was the first woman to run 100 miles across a frozen Lake in Mongolia, has ran the full length of the Panama Canal, crossed the inhospitable Namib Desert three times, and completed a 1,000-mile off-road version of the classic Land’s End to John O’Groats route in just thirty days.
Allie has finished over 200 marathons and ultramarathons in some of the most extreme places in the world and she ran most of them while battling depression and alcoholism.
For many years Allie had a dream career in the music industry, working with major record labels and meeting some of the world’s biggest bands. Throughout this time, she was also struggling with mental illness and alcohol addiction and originally started running to help her mental state.
Running didn’t save Allie but it started to become a big part of her life. After reaching another crisis point in 2021, she was forced to admit the depth of her problems and start to work on getting better.
In this episode I chat to Allie about her relationship with alcohol, how it started, how it helped and how it started to wrong.
We chat about her journey to finding running and how it didn’t save but her did give her the time and space to start making sense of her mental health.
And we chat about recovery and what it looks like for her, the ultrarunning community, the music industry, some of her incredible running challenges and what it was like to revisit some incredibly dark moments to write her book ‘There is No Wall’.
It was awesome to chat to Allie! She has spent so much time working on herself and has an incredible amount of self-awareness, I really took a lot from this episode.
You can find out more about all aspects of Allie’s work on her website here: alliebailey.co.uk and you can connect with her on social media @ab_runs.
You can connect with me on social media @propermentalpodcast or via www.propermentalpodcast.com.
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Thanks for listening!