Lauren Wingenroth Archives - ��ԹϺ�� Online

Comedian Pat Regan Is Running’s Funniest Superfan

ntriolo — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 12:15:31 +0000

The cult-favorite podcast is, according to its theme song, about “boys, sex, fucking, dating, and love.”

Sometimes, that’s true. The co-hosts, comedians, and best friends Catherine Cohen and Pat Regan, love to ask guests if they “hooked in highsk” (had hookups in high school) and occasionally recount their own sex lives in great detail. More often, though, you’ll find them debating the merits of various brands of chipotle mayonnaise, reliving childhood nostalgia, or unpacking a weird conversation they had last week.

But about once an episode, Cohen will excuse herself to use the bathroom, or to retrieve her delivery order, and Regan, who is a stand-up comedian and a writer on the hit HBO show Hacks, gets the mic to himself. That’s when Seek Treatment becomes the world’s funniest running podcast.

For a brief few minutes, Regan monologues on recent races he’s seen, how his own training is going, and the running world’s latest controversies. What makes Regan such a singular comedic voice—his obsessive, encyclopedic mind; his penchant for intense parasocial relationships; his ability to make the mundane profound or hilarious—also makes him a fascinating cataloguer of running history, with an uncanny ability to recall exact race results from a decade ago and precisely how watching that race made him feel.

An Accidental Runner

But Regan almost wasn’t a runner at all: Growing up on Long Island, New York, Regan, 34, wasn’t interested in sports. Worried he wouldn’t make friends in high school, his mom encouraged him to try out for cross country, “famously the sport that doesn’t make cuts,” says Regan. At a time trial, Regan was 39th out of 40, only beating someone who walked the whole time. “I was really bad, and I hated every second of it,” he says.

Regan skipped spring track but returned to cross country his sophomore year. Slowly, he began to see improvement. “I started paying attention to my times and seeing them get faster,” he says. “It made me feel powerful that I could get good at something that no one expected me to be good at.” The summer before his junior year, he got serious about his training. “I didn’t know anything about training—I just ran as hard as I could every day,” he says. It paid off: Regan entered his junior year as one of the top runners at his school.

Regan’s growing obsession with his own finishing times also fueled his interest in the wider running world. “I think I had low self-esteem,” he says, “and I loved to have this measurable thing where in this one small, arbitrary aspect, I’m numerically better than I was six months ago.” He began scouring , comparing himself to other high school runners across the country.

Injuries sidelined Regan for most of his college career at Loyola University Maryland, which only gave him more time to spend on LetsRun.com and FloTrack, checking in on how his high school competitors were doing and deepening his obsession with professional track.

“All of a sudden, you have all these names in your head of people you’ve never met, and you know when they’re racing, and you’re rooting for some of them, and you don’t care about others, and some of them you are randomly rooting against, and you don’t even know why,” he says.

Watching Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher battle it out at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials was formative, as was following Jenny Simpson’s epic 2009 season and seeing Chris Solinksy break 27 minutes in the 10,000. “No running coverage has ever made me feel how I felt at the Payton Jordan Invitational in 2010 where Galen Rupp was supposed to break the American record and Solinsky stayed on him,” says Regan. “I’ll always remember the full-body chills when Ryan Fenton said, ‘When is it going to creep into Chris Solinksy’s mind that he has a shot at this American record?’”

Running and Addiction

After college, Regan moved to Brooklyn to pursue stand-up and improv comedy and would run occasional races. But by his late twenties, running had largely disappeared from his life as he struggled with alcoholism and Adderall addiction.

In his now six-and-a-half years of sobriety, “there have been different bouts where I’ve been like, I’m gonna give running one last go,” he says. “I want to run a good marathon, I want to see what’s there.” One of those bouts came earlier this year, when he was determined to PR in the half. “I don’t have the ability to manage myself and prescribe appropriate training, so all of a sudden I’m running 90 miles a week,” he says. “I run myself down and addiction is part of that.” To break this cycle of overtraining, Regan has decided—at least for now—to focus on lifting instead of running.

From Runner to Superfan

What’s never wavered, though, is Regan’s love of the sport. Current favorites include Krissy Gear, who he picked to medal last week at World Championships. “I remember watching her steeple opener this year and thinking, if she is within 300 meters of someone going into the final 800, she will beat that person,” he says. He’s also a longtime Bowerman Track Club fan, which he jokes is a “hot, cancelable take,” and has been rooting for Elise Cranny since she was in high school. “I always like the stalwarts to have a comeback, so I want to see Emma Coburn run well, too,” he says. ��ԹϺ�� of Team USA, “it really feels like the summer of Faith Kipyegon,” he says. “I love her so much—there’s something about her energy that feels so likable and pure.”

If Regan sounds like someone with a future in calling races, that’s on his radar, too. (He’d love an intro to Olympic medalist and Real Housewife of Atlanta, Sanya Richards-Ross, who often calls races for Peacock.) For now, adjusting to a new relationship to running, where he is just a fan, can feel strange.

“I feel guilty talking about it when I don’t do it,” he says. “But I don’t know that I’ll ever not follow it. The people who are good at it—I understand why they love it and it’s so important to me that they run well. When they have a breakthrough, it feels so good for me, and when they have a rough patch, I feel for them. I just get what it’s like to want it so badly.”

The post Comedian Pat Regan Is Running’s Funniest Superfan appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

From Broadway to the London Marathon

ntriolo — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 17:28:46 +0000

Tuesday morning flights out of Boston following Marathon Monday are notorious for their hoards of grumpy, sore runners shuffling down the aisles and straining to lift their suitcases.

In 2019, musical theater performer Sarah Bowden, 40, was one of those runners, though she was neither grumpy nor sore. Instead, she hopped off a plane in San Francisco, 24 hours after finishing her second marathon in 4:01, and was onstage that evening in the touring production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

“I’ve always been like this,” says Bowden. “I’ve always had this extra energy—my family calls me an Energizer Bunny.”

This weekend, the Australian-born, New York City-based actor will put her boundless energy to its greatest test yet—running the London Marathon in the midst of performing in Moulin Rouge! on Broadway in New York City, eight shows a week, all to .

Bowden admits that many people, including her theater colleagues, think she’s crazy. And yet, if you look at her resumé—both as an accomplished performer and as a runner—the decision to run London tracks. Before 2017, Bowden wasn’t a runner at all. But while performing in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Berlin, Germany, she was inspired to raise money for an organization that serves disabled adults after they came to see a show. On a whim, she decided to sign up for the Berlin Marathon, and go from zero to 26.2 miles in a few months.

“I didn’t really train,” she says. “I would just go for a run a half-hour before the show sometimes. I thought, I’m a dancer, it can’t be that hard. You just put one foot in front of the other.” The morning of Berlin, Bowden woke up feeling sick, but decided to push through. The race took her around six and a half hours. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

A Six-Star Challenge

She may have been a one-time marathoner, were it not for the fact that, while on tour with Charlie, she happened to pass through Chicago during race weekend in 2018. While on a boat tour, she noticed two women in their 80s wearing large medals. They had just earned their sixth star for completing all of the World Marathon Majors, after working towards it for 20 years. Bowden learned that, unbeknownst to her, she was already one-sixth of the way to her own fancy medal.

Shortly after, the tour stopped in Boston, where Bowden visited the Boston Children’s Hospital and hatched her next plan: Run the Boston Marathon to raise money for the hospital. This time, she used Peloton’s training program, with a goal of breaking four hours. She found that she loved running in a new city every week, and says that even with the travel and performing, it wasn’t too physically taxing. (She calls Charlie a “relatively easy dance show.”)

On marathon weekend, she had a two-show-day in Los Angeles on Saturday, flew to Boston on Sunday, finished one minute short of her goal on Monday, and flew to San Francisco on Tuesday to get back to the show.

London Calling

Even for Bowden, Moulin Rouge! is a beast. The nearly three hours of nonstop dancing has her jumping into the splits, leaping into her partner’s arms, and doing countless can-cans. And though she started training for London with a plan, Bowden soon had to abandon it to ensure she could make it through the show eight times a week.

“The plan was stressing me out too much,” she says. “And I’m not doing this marathon to stress myself out. I’m doing it because I want to raise money for a good cause, and I want to have a nice time doing it. So I threw the plan out the window.”

Bowden performing Moulin Rouge! on Broadway. (Photo: Sarah Bowden)

That has meant fitting in runs whenever she can, with whatever energy she has leftover from performing. Sometimes, that looks like running 10 miles in between her two shows on a Saturday, during the short break most performers use to take a nap. Other weeks, she logs hardly any miles at all, like recently, when she was feeling under the weather and needed to save everything she had for the stage.

“I have to be mindful of being able to give 150 percent on stage every night,” she says. “And whatever I have left in the tank is what I can give to this run. The running has to come secondary to the work.”

Her longest run of this cycle will be the 13 miles she ran spontaneously on a recent Tuesday, potentially risky, as Tuesday marks the start of a Broadway performer’s workweek. She was surprised by how easily it came, and how well she recovered—a testament to the fact that dancing for nearly 24 hours a week counts toward aerobic fitness and time-on-feet. Bowden also does yoga every day and takes dance classes one-to-two times a week. For recovery, she hits the steam room, or uses Moulin Rouge!’s staff physical therapist.

“I’m not great at taking care of my body,” she says. “I kind of just thrash it around.”

Bowden’s greatest challenge this weekend in London will be taking it easy and resisting the temptation to take a second crack at breaking four hours, since, true-to-form, she’ll only have the Monday after the race to relax in London before landing in New York City, mid-afternoon on Tuesday, where she’ll be back in costume by 7 P.M.

Setting herself up for a successful return to Broadway will require smart pacing and a focus on taking in the course’s sights and sounds, rather than the time on the clock. “I want to absorb all the people and open my eyes and look around me,” she says. “I’m trying to have this lovely balance of running the race and raising money and doing the right thing, while still keeping my body in some kind of shape to do a can-can on Tuesday night.”

Her bosses at Moulin Rouge! aren’t worried. “They’re used to my crazy and know that I’m pretty reliable and consistent,” she says. “If I say I’m gonna run a marathon and come to work the next day, then I’m gonna show up.”

On to New York

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bowden’s path to six stars will likely be a relatively quick one: She hopes to knock out the New York City Marathon this year and raise money for , and then tackle Chicago shortly thereafter, perhaps in 2024. Tokyo, where she lived early in her career, will be “the cherry on top.”

For now, she’ll use London as an opportunity to give back in a way that’s heartwarmingly full-circle: “I made my Broadway debut in Moulin Rouge! last year, and it was a dream come true,” she says. “The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants wishes for kids who are terminally-ill, so I wanted to pay that forward and help somebody else have their dreams come true.”

For Bowden, running is a much-needed outlet from the demands of a performing career. “I’ve been judged my whole life,” she says. “You go to an audition; you’re good enough or you’re not good enough. It’s rewarding work, but it’s work. Whereas with running, I can get physical and sweaty, but there is no judgment with it—no one’s judging how fast I run, or how well I run. It’s really freeing.”

The post From Broadway to the London Marathon appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

Lauren Wingenroth Archives - �����ԹϺ��� Online