This story kicks off a series of stories over the coming months that highlights some of the top voices in the sport, past and present.
Ali Feller loves the color gold.
She has gold picture frames that hang in her office, a gold insulated water bottle among other items that are made up of the metal.
Why gold? Feller simply says that it’s the best. She also says that it makes her happy, it makes her feel good and it makes her confident.
The feeling that gold brings her is what she aims to bring to those who watch, follow and listen to her as she grows the sport through the art of storytelling.
Feller is the founder and host of the Ali on the Run podcast, which she started in 2017. Since then, she’s recorded over 500 episodes, which are released twice a week. As you’re reading this story, she’s releasing another episode for her audience to enjoy.
This aspect of her career isn’t what Feller had in mind growing up. When she was young, she told her father that she wanted to be a secretary when she grew up.
“I’ve always envisioned myself in an office setting,” Feller said. “I do thrive with organization. I never wanted to work for myself, I never wanted to assume any sort of risk. And here we are.”
Feller created the show with the goal of making people feel good, and to give all athletes the opportunity to share their stories, especially the athletes who unfortunately don’t receive many opportunities to do so. She credits the sentiment to Alison Wade, the creator of the Fast Women newsletter.
“Everyone comes to this sport with a story, and they’re all worth sharing,” Feller said.
Feller’s 500 plus episodes all have one thing in common: there’s no catch or strings attached. She doesn’t conduct her interviews based on any agenda or specific format. Feller says that she chases curiosity in her interviews with her guests.
“I don’t think about it as a balance,” she said. “I am a human asking questions to other humans. Yes this person probably is an exceptional athlete, but they’re human first.”
Comfort and making the experience fun for her guests is one thing that she looks to do not just in her podcast interviews, but during her live shows with her live audience and when she’s conducting post-race interviews with athletes after their races.
She also brings creativity to what she does, which puts a smile on the faces of those who follow her and who she comes across.
Feller got the idea to make a creative “congrats bag,” which was a celebratory bag that she brought to the Trials of Miles track meet. Feller bought a bag from the store that said “congratulations,” came up with questions, cut them up with scissors, folded the paper up and put them in the bag with Starbursts. Then, at the end of the post-race interviews with the athletes, she had each of them pick a fun question from the bag, like “what’s your favorite pasta shape,” for the athlete to answer.
“When I’m doing live shows, it’s how do I make my guests comfortable, how do I make my guests laugh and smile,” she said. “When I’m interviewing people after their race, how do I help this person celebrate the awesome thing they just did, while also knowing they probably don’t want to be doing an interview right now?
“I try to make it fun for them, which in turn can be fun for the audience.”
Whether she’s interviewing athletes at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, hosting a live Ali on the Run show in big cities like Atlanta, or giving an inspirational speech to listeners in Boston as the speaker for Ted Talks back in May, Feller is never really out of her element. She credits that to being a dancer growing up.
“Being a performer my whole life has made me comfortable doing a lot of what I do,” she said. “I do love an audience, I love performing. Some of what I do now is out of my comfort zone, but it won’t always be. I seek out feedback from people I respect, and those are the people who’s feedback that I listen to. Anyone else doesn’t matter.”
In addition to creative storytelling and giving a platform to all athletes to share their story, Feller is big on the art of community and kindness. She has a facebook group centered around community and kindness, and it’s something that she practices in addition to preaching.
“The community is the number one most important thing,” she said. “Even going back to when I was blogging, I went through a long period of depression. I was very sick, I had days when I did not want to be alive. Rock bottom, I was at my rock bottom. The kindness of strangers and internet friends and the comments that they would leave me literally brought me back to life, and I don’t say that lightly.
“I think that I want to pay that forward and I want there to be more kindness in the world. The world can be a really awful place a lot of the time – I think the past three years have been pretty terrible in a lot of ways. And if this little corner of the internet where I can have a tiny bit of control can be a nice place, come join us. I think spreading kindness and leading with kindness is a really good way to go.”
A lot has happened since the Ali on the Run show launched in 2017. 500 episodes created and counting, over 10 million downloads and countless smiles along the way. What started off as a hobby has now turned into a powerhouse and a platform that is being used to tell stories, bridge the gap between athletes and fans and advance the sport in the process.
Not too shabby for someone who didn’t have any expectations when she first started.
“I didn’t have expectations, which is nice,” she said. “Instead of saying it’s a dream come true, it’s like all of this is a dream that I didn’t really know I had. There were little dreams along the way that I did have, but big picture, no.”
