About the show
Blame It On Ultrarunning
A no-rules ultrarunning podcast about what the sport does to people.
Ultrarunning has never been only about distance.
Spend enough time inside the sport and the miles start touching everything else: identity, relationships, ambition, fear, ego, grief, friendship, addiction, discipline, spirituality, failure, recovery, reinvention, aging, purpose, and the stories people tell themselves about who they are.
Blame It On Ultrarunning exists for those stories.
Humor. Grit. Heartbreak. Breakthroughs. Spirituality. Scars. Madness.
Why this podcast exists
Because the race result is usually the least interesting part.
Traditional endurance coverage naturally gravitates toward performance: how somebody trained, what they ate, how fast they ran, where they placed, what went right, and what went wrong.
Those things can matter. Blame It On Ultrarunning simply keeps going.
What did the sport expose? What did it cost? What did it repair? Why did somebody keep coming back after getting crushed? Why did somebody else finally walk away? What happens when endurance becomes identity? When does suffering become growth, and when is it just suffering? What changes when the finish line fails to deliver whatever a person thought would be waiting there?
That territory is where this show lives.
What "no-rules" means
No canned formula. No required hero story. No fake arrival.
"No-rules" is not a claim that anything goes. It is a rejection of the idea that every guest, episode, or conversation must fit the same polished endurance-media template.
An episode might be hilarious, uncomfortable, deeply practical, philosophical, irreverent, painful, spiritual, profane, hopeful, or completely unexpected. A conversation can wander if the wandering gets somewhere worth going.
The standard is not polish. The standard is whether the conversation is real, interesting, curious, and worth hearing.
The philosophy underneath it
There is no finish line for becoming a human being.
Ultrarunning loves finish lines. Life is less cooperative.
One of the ideas underneath Blame It On Ultrarunning is that achievement does not magically resolve a person. The buckle, the record, the race, the comeback, the perfect season, the next identity - none of them are permanent arrival points.
That makes the questions more interesting. What did you learn? What are you still wrong about? What changed? What refused to change? What are you chasing now, and why? What did the trail teach you that you could not have learned from somebody else's motivational quote?
Who belongs here
Anyone with a real ultrarunning story.
Blame It On Ultrarunning is not reserved for elites, champions, influencers, or people with perfect race résumés.
Runners belong here. Race directors belong here. Volunteers, pacers, crews, partners, families, photographers, writers, medical people, characters, legends, newcomers, veterans, finishers, and people with spectacular DNFs can all belong here.
If ultrarunning unraveled your life and/or transformed it into something glorious, you belong here.
Founder & Host
Eric Steele
Blame It On Ultrarunning was founded and is hosted by Wichita, Kansas ultrarunner, race director, writer, organizer, and endurance storyteller Eric Steele.
Steele entered ultrarunning in the 1990s and has spent more than three decades living inside the sport from multiple directions. His athletic history includes 70-plus ultras and seven 100-mile finishes, including Leadville, plus Badwater 135. His organizing history reaches back to founding the Kansas Ultrarunners Society and helping establish the early Kansas ultra community before later race-directing projects and Epic Ultras.
He has been close enough to the sport to love it, question it, laugh at it, get hurt by it, reinvent himself through it, and understand that the interesting part is almost never just who crossed a line first.
The show is built around that perspective: stay curious, detach from the tidy outcome, and keep digging until the story underneath the story finally shows itself.
Launch
This is the starting line.
The full Blame It On Ultrarunning podcast site is launching soon. Episodes, guest pages, show notes, transcripts, listening links, and additional stories will be added as the show rolls out.