Alexi Pappas

Mind Wide Open

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship! Olympic athlete, filmmaker, and award-winning author Alexi Pappas and Lily forge a fast connection in their discussion of losing parents to suicide, befriending pain, and creating art. Lily and Alexi explore the duality of beauty and terror that comes with the similarities between them and their late parents. They also discuss Alexi's struggles with severe post-Olympic depression, and how practicing self-care is a necessary superpower, not a weakness.

For more information, guest bios, and resources, go to www.mindwideopenproject.com

Find Lily on Instagram @lilycornellsilver

Originally aired JUNE 22, 2021

Alexi Pappas is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and Olympic athlete. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Runner’s World, Women’s Running, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, and Outside, among other publications, and she has been profiled in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, New York,and Rolling Stone. Pappas co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the feature film Tracktown with Rachel Dratch and Andy Buckley. Most recently, she co-wrote and starred alongside Nick Kroll in Olympic Dreams, the first non-documentary-style movie to ever be filmed at the Olympic Games. A Greek American, Pappas holds the Greek national record in the 10,000-meters and competed for Greece in the 2016 Olympics. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Dubbed a “renaissance runner” by the New York Times, Alexi Pappas competed (and broke records) for Greece in the 2016 Rio Olympics and was training for Tokyo when the pandemic hit. As a writer, she has built a supportive community on social media with her free-spirited persona and inspirational poems. She is also an actress and filmmaker, co-creating and starring in the films Tracktown (with Rachel Dratch and Andy Buckley) and Olympic Dreams (with Nick Kroll), the latter of which was filmed at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics as part of their Artists-in-Residency program and premiered at SXSW ’19 with distribution from IFC Films.

Pappas’ latest artistic feat is an empowering, funny and fearless memoir-in essays: BRAVEY: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas (The Dial Press Hardcover; On Sale January 12). Pappas candidly opens up about what she has learned about confidence, self-reliance, and mental health, including her struggles with post-Olympic depression and how her mother’s suicide when she was four-years-old altered the course of her life and set her on a journey to self-actualization.

BRAVEY is filled with personal stories that span from Pappas’ early search for female role models, to her ongoing fight to pursue both her athletic and creative dreams, to learning about motherhood from a chance meeting with Maya Rudolph, who wrote the foreword to the memoir. Pappas’ charm and go-after-it attitude are evident throughout, as she reveals her honest and entertaining reflections on each touchstone moment and the valuable lessons she learned along the way—foremost among them, how to be brave.