The Hobby Jogger Podcast · Hosted by: WeeViews & Branch Sauce

E55 | Age Is Just a Number: Joyce Berryman Takes On OCC

·53 min·1 clip

I was 36 years old and I had kind of forgotten Joyce, and there at the gym I just had time to recognize that.

Casey and Rob open by remembering how they met Joyce Berryman at OCC, at a restaurant-bar sitting high on the mountain. The setting gives the whole conversation an easy, personal feel right away. Joyce joins from Morgantown, West Virginia, and the hosts immediately treat her like somebody they are genuinely glad to have met in the wild. They ask about the race and the route that brought her to it. Steve, Joyce's father-in-law, comes up fast because he is the one who built the training loop she used before OCC. He put together a 10-mile circuit at Cooper's Rock and told her that if she could run it twice, she would be fine. Joyce says he was exactly right. The hosts give him a respectful hard time and decide he may need to be hired. Steve also gets a little backstory because he had run UTMB, then stopped around 35 miles. Joyce explains that he was dealing with medical issues and had also been living in Baton Rouge, so he had to cut back on training. Even so, he kept his focus on coaching her. That family support becomes one of the episode's strongest threads. The conversation keeps circling back to what that preparation felt like in real life. Joyce's background in Morgantown gives her steep hills to work with, but the hosts point out that hill training at home is still a different animal from climbing into the kind of elevation OCC throws at runners. They talk through the gap between a few thousand feet of local climbing and the much bigger mountain environment of the race. Joyce is careful about what her local terrain prepared her for and what it did not. The hosts stay with that practical angle instead of letting the talk drift too far. They keep translating the race into the kind of questions regular runners ask themselves before a hard day out. That keeps the segment grounded and easy to follow. By the end, the episode lands as a warm race story with real training details, family chemistry, and a clear sense of how big mountain efforts get made possible.

As heard by us

A mountain race story that stays practical, warm, and quietly hard-earned.

Joyce Berryman's OCC story makes a daunting mountain race feel reachable. Casey and Rob keep it moving with runner-to-runner questions that draw out the nerves, the logistics, and the family coaching without losing the thread.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a mountain ultra story shaped by family coaching, altitude, and race-day nerves.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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