Two of My Favorite Hobbies Combined into One Person

Who is Alexi Pappas? For starters, she's a professional athlete for Nike's Oregon Track Club Elite, a filmmaker, an actor, and a writer. At Dartmouth College, she majored in English and creative writing, while also running for their cross country and track and field program. Afterwards, she pursued her Master's Degree at the University of Oregon and continued to run there as well. I look up to Alexi Pappas because we are very similar in the sense that she ran in college and aspired to be a filmmaker, just like me, and she still continues to run professionally and is currently working on her next film, Tracktown.  

Some people don't realize how hard it can be to balance athletics and school. For me personally, I take athletics very serious and try to improve myself when I'm not working on filming. It's important to find a good balance however, and whether that's taking my camera and laptop to practice to work on a video for a few minutes before practice begins, or working on an idea for a video on a flight to our next meet, in order to succeed in both. In an interview, Alexi was asked how she can balance being an athlete and a student, and her response resonated with me. She said, "being a student athlete is difficult, but it rules. I think a huge part of managing the commitment was me realizing it was my choice to take on both athletics and academics- having a good attitude about writing a final paper on a six-hour long bus ride to a championship race can be grueling, but it can also be fun!" I feel the same way, it was my choice to pursue both filmmaking and running, and now I even work on videos about running. 

Her film Tracktown, which she wrote, directed and produced with her boyfriend Jeremy Teicher, is not autobiographical, but it's about a little girl named Plumb who's growing up as a runner, and she said the character shares some characteristics with Alexi. She began writing the film in 2013 and the Sundance Institute's Creative Producing Lab Program and the San Francisco Film Society soon picked it up, according to RunnersWorld.com. With more and more people hearing about it, more people have joined her team as well as runners such as Nick Symmonds, and Andrew Wheating.  

In an article with RunnersWorld.com, Alexi spoke of the similarities between running and part of filming and said showing up to set is like showing up to a race or practice. "Even if you're feeling off that day, you do your warmup routine and get into in and give 100 percent of whatever you've got that day," Pappas explained. "I try to remind myself that even though the process is so hard and intense, in retrospect, it rules. I've never felt more excited about something." This is definitely how I feel, although I've never acted in any of my videos, when I've finished a video and I'm about to share it, I get this feeling in my stomach like I do before a race. 

With the olympics less than a year away, Alexi planned her schedule to film the Tracktown movie two summers before preparing for the Olympics. She said filming the movie during the summer of 2014 was strategically planned so that she could focus the next two years on making the US Olympic team. Tracktown is currently in post-production, and Alexi is currently training for the Olympic trials.

Her attitude towards being a filmmaker and a runner is really inspiring because it shows that you can do both, and actually succeed in both. When her movie comes out, you know I'm going to purchase a ticket to go watch it in theaters. When she's on tv during the Olympic trials, you know I'm going to be cheering her on.