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Jeff Garmire and Allison Powell join Kevin on the day Rewritten premieres — the film Allison directed about Jeff's Appalachian Trail FKT, out now on the Free Outside YouTube channel.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of depression and suicidal ideation. Resources are listed at the bottom of these notes and at the top of the episode.

We start where the film starts: Denver, a corporate job, twelve-hour days, and the drive home where Jeff realized that if the worst option was on the table, then literally every other option was too. That realization became the 2016 calendar year Triple Crown, a dehydrator running before sunrise, a daily blog, and about $15,000 raised for suicide prevention — as much a way to open a conversation he didn't know how to start as it was a fundraiser.

Then we get into the AT: fifty miles and roughly eleven thousand feet of gain a day for forty-five days, and the parade of things that went sideways. Two left shoes in a resupply box (meaning two right shoes were sitting somewhere else). A broken pole in Shenandoah. A missing box. InReach messages so garbled Allison couldn't tell if Jeff was typing fast or coming apart. And the text, two hundred miles from the finish, asking whether he should hike twenty miles backward to retrieve every piece of electronics he owned.

Allison gives the crew-from-2,000-miles-away perspective that rarely makes it into these stories — staring at a dot, sleeping with the ringer on, waking at 4am Mountain in case something had gone wrong at 6am Eastern, and the night she ended up on her knees on an Airbnb staircase during her cousin's wedding weekend. Jeff talks about the six or seven months of mental work that let him rewrite his A goal mid-effort without it becoming soft quitting, why a "why" can be simple, and what five years of therapy has done for him.

Also in here: how the film came together, Allison's pitch for more producers in adventure filmmaking, her Moab 240 and a hard-won love of red rocks, where the title came from (and Jeff's extensive brainstorming before agreeing she was right), and a stop-the-episode moment near the end when Allison catches us leaving out the small matter of the ring Jeff carried in his pack for the entire trail.

Watch Rewritten on the Free Outside YouTube channel.

Learn more about the Trevor Project or donate: https://www.thetrevorproject.org

Mental health resources
The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US): call or text 988

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Part of our miniseries on The Cutoff, the new Aravaipa/Dylan Harris film. Kevin and Peter sit down with Robby Chaney, who describes himself as a runner, hiker, and death marcher, and who has spent more time chasing cutoffs than almost anyone in the sport.

Robby's first trail race was a 40K in 2018 that went so badly he wrote off trail running entirely. New shoes he'd never worn, a vest he'd never used, and temperatures over 100 degrees. Then a volunteer request for a race called Cocodona 250 landed in his inbox, and the number stuck in his head. Six years later he has four 200-mile finishes, a starring role in a film about the very thing he's spent his career outrunning, and a 2026 Grand Slam on the calendar.

We get into what the back of the pack actually looks like from the inside: 100-plus hour races, aid stations where you turn around and walk straight back out, and the compounding physical, mental, and emotional cost of days on course. Robby also walks us through his 2025 Cocodona, where he made it to roughly mile 220 before his lungs quit on him in Walnut Canyon. Pulse ox in the low 80s, an IV, and a search and rescue extraction. (Peter, who also got to mile 220 and didn't finish, offers a competing explanation for his own DNF: he got tired.)

The conversation closes somewhere we didn't expect. In 2002, Robby was stabbed by a stranger and left bleeding on the street. He woke up in the ICU and was told he'd probably never walk again. He used a cane for years. He turned 50 last month and is signed up for close to a thousand miles of racing.

In this episode:

• (01:15) Aspirational ultrarunner: what "death march" actually means
• (02:26) What people get wrong about the back of the pack
• (05:41) From a miserable 40K to signing up for a 250
• (08:25) Coldwater Rumble 2024 and learning what a cutoff is mid-race
• (11:04) Respecting the cutoff without fearing it
• (13:37) DNFs as data points, and the trekking poles that cost him Mogollon Monster
• (16:27) Getting the email from Dylan and Emily, mid-race, on a ridgeline
• (19:40) What happened in Walnut Canyon
• (23:37) 2002, the ICU, and the twenty-year road back

The Cutoff is out from Aravaipa. Follow Robby's 2026 season with us.

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In this special edition of Distance to Empty, Kevin and Peter sit down with Jen Novobilski, one of the runners featured in The Cutoff, the new film from Dylan Harris and Aravaipa Running.

Jen's path to a 250-mile buckle started on a rainy day in Alaska in 2007, when she and a friend bailed on a hike and signed up for a half marathon instead — one minute running, one minute walking. Marathons turned into a 50-states goal, the pandemic turned that into her first 50-miler, and the company she kept did the rest.

She talks about finding out mid-race that she'd be in a film (filmmaker Bradford caught her hugging her crew at the start and tracked her down at Crown King), and about only learning last week — from our episode with Jamil and Dylan — that the movie was really about the cutoff all along. Her first reaction was ego. Her second was admiration for how the crew handled it.

We get into her 2025 Cocodona 250: roughly five hours of sleep across the whole race, no real dirt nap until past mile 200, hallucinations, a full head-to-toe clothing change in the downpour before Fain Ranch, and snow on Mingus that felt like home. (She did not bring rain pants. Who brings rain pants to the desert?)

Jen also breaks down the Skydive Ultra — where the skydive itself counts against your cutoff — and previews her next big swing: the Iditarod Trail Invitational 150, starting days after this recording, with a kid's sled her nieces and nephew decorated and her grandmother sewed the zipper into.

At 51, with a regular job and a regular life, her message is simple: if she can do it, so can a lot of other people.

In this episode:

• Accidental ultrarunner: from mountaineering to a rainy-day half marathon
• Alaska running, sled pulling, and the Susitna 100
• The Skydive Ultra 100 — bacon, hallucinations, and losing two hours to the jump
• Getting recruited into The Cutoff at mile 37
• The "observer effect" of running with a camera on you
• Sleep deprivation, weather, and why the 2025 Cocodona was the hardest year yet
• Why crew and pacers made the finish possible
• Escalation, "normalizing Norman" friends, and what's actually being chased
• What Jen hopes people take away from the film about the back of the pack