We did a podcast with Tyler today before he attempts to break 50k world record on Friday.
He's definitely a blue collar runner. Got out of college and was cleaning the toilets in a hostel in Ecuador while trying to live the life as a runner. We've got some textual highlights as well from the podcast if you don't want to listen as well.
Just a few quick quotes (more in article):
On training in Quito right out of school: "I was living in the windowless basement of this hostel with three 3 other guys in this tiny space. I was working 25 hours a week for essentially room and board and I thought ‘This is great.’ I work 5 hours a day and this gives me time to train and my weekends to race and I get food and I get a place so sleep. What more do I need than that?” "
On high school: "t wasn’t until my senior year where we got a new coach who really connected with me John Waldron, who really instilled with me this idea that running is something you can better at (with hard work and training). This is how naive I was about the sport. I essentially thought fast runners were fast and slow runners were slow and that was it and I was a slow runner and there was nothing I could do about that. It was this very basic idea he instilled in me that ‘hey if you train you can get better at this’. To me that was a really powerful idea."