Oladimeji Ajegbile, known online as Hello Dim, went viral for filming bike rides through Edinburgh with his two-year-old son perched on the handlebars, narrating every tree and bus he sees. He's also a former architect, UX designer, startup founder, stay-at-home dad, and, as of last year, a runner who clocked a sub-50 10K on roughly two training runs and just finished his first half marathon with a 50K trail ultra on the calendar.

Zoë and Brendan talk with Dim about why the toddler videos connected when a decade of content didn't, the 90-day rule he uses to test every new pursuit, what the Piston Cup in Cars taught him about chasing medals, learning to ride a bike at 21, running the Union Canal in the pitch-black Scottish dark, getting dizzy at 30K of a track ultra, and his Substack essay on why achievement won't fix your emptiness. It's a conversation about being a beginner on purpose, making things for the process instead of the result, and what happens when the internet decides which part of your life it wants to see.

Singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy joins Zoë and Brendan to talk about the strange and surprisingly rich overlap between running and making art. She shares how watching her mom run planted the seed early, growing up close to the Western States course, how Courtney Dauwalter and Addie Bracy helped draw her into ultrarunning, and why learning to sit with discomfort has changed far more than her athletic life.

Margaret also talks about quitting social media, writing songs on a typewriter, finding solitude in anonymous hotel gyms, and the logistical challenge of training while touring in a van. Plus: the financial risks of falling on your guitar-playing hand, the unexpectedly deep musician-to-ultrarunner pipeline, and what Margaret might learn from how ICU nurses train for ultras.

Sam Robinson writes the Substack Footnotes, works as a content designer at YouTube, and has a PhD in seventeenth-century science, religion, and philosophy, which makes him exactly the right person to ask why we're all trying so hard to optimize a sport whose whole appeal is that it's beautifully pointless. Zoë and Brendan get into the tension with him: distance running rewards incremental gains and deferred gratification, and it's also the least efficient way imaginable to get from point A back to point A. Sam talks about racing above Stinson Beach with his head down, missing the view; about eating a protein bar in the shower at 4:58 a.m. to make a 7:30 meeting; and about how a three-year-old and a torn meniscus have both forced a slower relationship with the sport.

The back half turns to Sam's piece on the fragility of type two fun and the male friendship crisis, what happens to shoulder-to-shoulder friendships when the run club scatters and the knee gives out, and whether shared mileage alone can hold a community together. Along the way: Robert Caro, Oliver Burkeman, Benjamin Franklin prosecuting his breakfast, and the unsettling possibility that morning-routine influencers have never actually seen American Psycho.

Read Sam at footnotes.substack.com. This episode is brought to you by Running Warehouse - join our club here.