Alexi Pappas Veers Far From Her Lane

EUGENE, Ore. — Alexi Pappas’s hair bun, wound as tightly as a coach’s stopwatch, slowly unraveled as she quickly completed her workout, tendrils snaking down the nape of her neck as on some Medusa figure.

As Pappas trotted over to the Hayward Field railing, winded and sweat-soaked, to retrieve her spike bag and swig from a Nalgene bottle after completing postrace interval work, minions awaited.

Teenage runners — some in buns of their own, others sporting ponytails — descended to seek selfies or autographs or just get a word and a smile from Pappas, a professional distance runner whose free-spirited persona off the track, perhaps more than her performances on it, has made her something of a cult figure in the insular world of track and field.

One college runner — Alyssa Harmon of Northwest Christian University, who had competed in the same invitational as Pappas that night, the Oregon Twilight on May 6 — even ripped off her bib number to be signed. Pappas took the race bib, tightened the green scrunchie keeping the bulk of her bun intact and wrote in a spidery, left-handed scrawl, “We came to Oregon, made it our home, now run brave whether together or alone.”

Hanging back, too shy to approach but projecting near Bieberian levels of adoration, were two high school runners, Rachael Reiter and Booy Rogers.

“Love the bun,” Reiter said. “Love that about her. The bun almost has its own fan club on, like, Twitter. I tried to run in a bun once. It totally fell apart. She can pull it off.”

How to account for this phenomenon? Pappas, 26, is a world-class runner, among the fastest seven or so American women in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters — impressive, yet seemingly not worthy of veneration.

Of Greek descent — her grandmother was born there — Pappas has dual citizenship and has been accepted onto Greece’s 2016 Olympic team in the 10,000 meters, having easily met the Olympic standard of 32 minutes 15 seconds (she finished in 31:46.85) at a race in Stanford, Calif., on May 1.

Yet her appeal far transcends her results. Pappas is a poet, essayist, actress and filmmaker whose semi-autobiographical movie, “Tracktown,” which is set in Eugene and in which she stars as a middle-distance runner seeking a life of balance in a sport of immersive dedication, will have its premiere on June 4 at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Pappas writes a monthly poetry column for Women’s Running magazine, musing on topics including the sublime scent of trail running (“steeped on me like tea”) and the sweet pain of sprinting (her insides “gasping screeching flapping baby bird beaks”).

Her essays on the running life, including arch observations about training with men, have appeared on several running websites. She has also performed improv comedy in Los Angeles; wrote a one-act play, “The Lonely Boy Eats Lunch With His Lunch,” performed at Dartmouth College, her alma mater; and co-wrote the feature film “Tall as the Baobab Tree,” directed by her boyfriend, Jeremy Teicher, who also co-directed “Tracktown” and was named by Filmmaker Magazine one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2013.

Pappas may be the only elite track and field athlete who quotes William Faulkner from memory, and is almost certainly the only one who turned down fully funded offers to pursue a writing master’s degree from Columbia, Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, to run professionally.

Yet for all her pursuits, it is Pappas’s insouciant, cockeyed worldview, expressed via social media — her Twitter posts are part Tony Robbins motivational, part Tom Robbins surrealistic — and her lack of pro-athlete pretension that draw fans, primarily teenage girls who run cross-country, to her.

“Whatever I am to these girls, I’m happy to be,” Pappas said. “The bun is something that, if your hair is long enough, anyone can do. That’s a connection to make with young runners. Rather than tweeting out, ‘Just ran 100 miles this week’ — not healthy for them, anyway — why not a picture of my hair?

“I didn’t start it, by the way,” she said of the interest in her hairstyle. “A high school team in Oregon had tweeted me a picture of all of them wearing the ‘Alexi Bun.’ I retweeted it. It took off from there.”

She paused to wipe away a wisp of hair escaping from the labyrinthine, Marge Simpson concoction atop her head and then splayed her hands across the fire-engine-red picnic table that serves as a centerpiece in the South Eugene loft/film-editing studio she shares with Teicher. Her smile faded; her brown eyes widened. She turned serious.

“But I’m not a cartoon character,” she said. “People read my poetry and this and that, and when they meet me at the track, they think there’ll be a — ta-da! — a show or something. At home, I’m mostly quiet and often asleep.”

Molded by Past

So what, then, makes Pappas run … and write … and act … and emote at will?

It could be a response to her upbringing in Alameda, Calif., a spit of land between Oakland and San Francisco Bay.

Her mother, Roberta, committed suicide when Alexi was 4. Pappas said she had few memories of her mother — memories of memories, actually — and was effusive in her praise for her father, John, and her older brother, Louis, for raising her (“Louis taught me to shave my legs; my dad took me bra shopping”) in a house devoid of a feminine influence.

When she came of age, Pappas talked to her father and her mother’s close friends, seeking to understand her mother’s actions but also simply to find out what her mother was like.

“How can someone be so sad that they’d want to leave?” Pappas said. “What I think it was, maybe she didn’t have someone to share what she was going through. Her close friends told me she didn’t talk or emote, at least not like I do.”

As a teenager, Pappas vowed not to be so insulated. She would instead fling open her interior life like French window shutters flapping in a stiff breeze.

“Alexi tries to be open and talk honestly with people,” said Teicher, who met Pappas at Dartmouth when they were studying film and theater. “She talks about her fears and how hard things can be. That’s why people are drawn to her. That’s also something I, as the boyfriend, actually admire.

“Making an independent film is hard. It’s hard to keep pushing forward and be positive, just like in her running. But she keeps me going.”

For Pappas, self-expression is a form of self-preservation.

“When I think of my mom, it makes me … I don’t know, let’s just say that’s why at least somebody knows everything about me,” she said. “I mean, if I have a bad sandwich, I’ll tell Jeremy. If I see a weird leaf on a run, maybe it’ll become a poetry tweet. I’m making it so that people hold on to the things going on inside me.”

Pappas’s varied interests, as well as her intention to share them, have raised a few eyebrows in Eugene, where the populace takes its running quite seriously. Pappas and others say they have heard the criticism that she could improve her times if she stopped dividing her interests.

“She gets criticized from all angles — the film and the track and field,” said Jordan Hasay, an elite distance runner who was Pappas’s teammate on the University of Oregon cross-country team that won the 2012 N.C.A.A. women’s title. (Pappas was granted a fifth year of eligibility after graduating from Dartmouth and ran for Oregon while completing a master’s degree.)

“But that’s what works for her,” Hasay said. “You find happiness in different areas. It wouldn’t be enough for her to focus on just one thing. It doesn’t hinder her, only enhances her.”

Pappas’s coach, the Olympian Ian Dobson, said he not only accepted but also embraced her choices. When “Tracktown” was filming last year in Eugene, forcing Pappas to miss three weeks of training, Dobson did not object, he said. He said the fact that Pappas “came late to the sport” — meaning college — gave her “fresher legs” and more maturity.

But that can also be a disadvantage when it comes to racing strategy and picking up the nuances of training, Dobson said.

“Maybe she’d be better if the film took this much time,” Dobson said, holding his hands a few inches apart, “instead of this much time,” his hands now a foot apart.

“But if the film wasn’t there, I don’t think that would be good for her at all,” he said. “Alexi has momentum in her life. That’s what she runs on. She also has the ability to be focused on more than one thing without diminishing either.”

‘A Bundle of Potential’

People, it seems, have to accept Pappas on her terms.

She was one of the top prep distance runners in California as a freshman at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland but ran afoul of coaches who wanted her to focus exclusively on running.

“I was 16, with frizzy hair and braces, and wanted to explore soccer, student government, theater and boys,” Pappas said.

At Dartmouth, she was the “slowest runner on the team” her first year because she wanted to “go to parties and explore the full college experience,” she said. Now, training with Oregon Track Club Elite, she wedges in her cross-training, exercises and core work between her film projects. She edits her writing and then naps in the altitude tent wrapped around her bed.

“The film and creative work have kept me healthy,” Pappas said. “On an average day, I’ll finish my workout, my postworkout fuel, and come back here excited to work on the film. I’ll bring my bowl of mush down for breakfast into Jeremy’s office and look at what he’s editing.

“You cannot run 24 hours a day. There’s a mental and physical benefit to having something else in your life.”

Teicher, a self-proclaimed nonjock, said: “There’s a lot of emotional overlap between what we’re trying to do as filmmakers and what she’s trying to do as an athlete. It’s uncomfortable and challenging.”

Pappas, in her slightly skewed perspective, sees herself as, well, a certain tuber primed for consumption.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a potato, where you start out as this thing,” she said. “You can’t eat a raw potato, but you are a bundle of potential. You can become any number of things — breakfast, lunch, dinner. Potatoes can be fancy next to a prime rib or mashed, or you could be fries next to a humble hamburger. I feel excited now because the running and filmmaking are what my potato self is becoming.”

Teicher laughed. “Your potato self?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “The other thing about potatoes: They don’t rot the way other food does. They don’t decompose. They grow eyes and ask you to make them into something. I’ve wanted to become something, and it’s always with bright eyes and not fear.”

But Pappas acknowledges a certain amount of, if not fear, then excited trepidation for the immediate future. She will spend most of the summer — when not in Los Angeles for the film festival — doing high-altitude training with the Greek Olympic track team in Font Romeu, on the border of France and Spain; competing in the European Championships; and then returning to Mammoth, Calif., for more altitude training with her mentor, Deena Kastor, before heading to Rio de Janeiro in August for the Olympics.

“This might open up a whole new world for me and my running scope,” Pappas said. “I’m officially on the team, and I’m now the national record holder in the 10K, after my time at Stanford. There’s already been a bunch of articles about me in Greece. It’s very exciting.”

Did those articles mention the bun?

Hard to tell, she said. The language barrier and all.

“My mission,” she said, “is to be conversant by summer so I can hang out with my new teammates.”