“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.