Knox Robinson On Why Running Is An Act of Rebellion

What is running culture? I suppose the answer depends upon whom you ask. For example, Sanjay Rawal's perspective will likely vary from that of Shalane Flanagan. If you ask Knox Robinson, his definition will have little to do with splits and podiums — and everything to do with movement as an art form. Running as a means of personal and philosophical expression. The physical voice of literature. Poetry. Music. And Politics. For Knox, running as an act of rebellion — a means to unshackle oneself from pressures and expectations both external and internal. Freedom from the lies others tell us. And liberty from the lies we tell ourselves. This week he explains. You're not going to want to miss it. Based in New York City, Knox isn’t just a great runner and coach. He isn't just a great writer. And he isn’t just the co-founder and captain of Black Roses NYC — a diverse & heavily tattooed collective of amateur New York City runners who routinely gather to hammer out intervals through downtown Manhattan then go slurp ramen and spin vinyl. Inhabiting a space in defiance of labels, Knox is the kind of human who, when asked to describe himself, effortlessly pulls the perfect quote from the poetry of Amir Baraka: “[I am] a long-breath singer, would-be dancer, strong from years of fantasy and struggle.” It follows that Knox's relationship with running also fails easy definition. Despite his father's passion for local 10K's, Knox showed little to no athletic promise as a youth. Nonetheless he notched his way up to national caliber at Wake Forest University. Then he walked away from the sport altogether for the better part of a decade. He studied black history, art, literature and poetry. He pursued a career as a spoken word artist. He worked in the music industry managing artists. And he served as editor-in-chief of Fader – the ultimate print destination for all things hip hop, indie music, urban style and culture — jet setting to Fashion Week parties in Paris and penning thoughtful cover pieces on everyone from Kanye to The White Stripes. It was his son's birth that compelled Knox to dust off his trainers and revisit his connection with athleticism. Expanding his relationship beyond the scope of performance, he began to imagine new horizons for his role in sport. With this epiphany came a new life. And a mission: to leverage movement as an art form — running as physical manifestation of both individual expression and communal cultural identity. This is his story. One of the more intimate, earnest and layered conversations I've had in recent memory, I left this exchange better for having had it, thinking more deeply about my own relationship with running, and how I can better impact others. My hope is that it does the same for you. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  Running is one of our oldest tools, and it's there for all of us at our disposal to feel. And feeling is free, and feeling is freedom. It's a way to throw off all our pressures and all our expectations and all the sort of lies that other people have sold us and all the lies that we tell ourselves. All our self-hatred and our self-doubt and all our minimizing, whack relationships and bad dates and mistakes that we've made in the past, whether that was last night or last year, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Running is a chance to do something new.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  And so that is rebellion when given the choice between running and succumbing to that vortex.

• 1:56Rich Roll?

  That's Knox Robinson, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:11Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about running culture. But what specifically do we mean when we use that phrase? What are we trying to connote or convey by virtue of those words? And I would imagine, I would suspect, that the definition is going to vary depending upon who you talk to, where that person is coming from. For example, Sanjay Rawal's perspective on running culture, well, that's going to differ a little bit from that of, say, I don't know, somebody like Usain Bolt, for example. But if you ask Knox Robinson, his definition of running culture is going to have very

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  little to do with things like splits and podiums and everything to do with this idea of movement as art form, movement, running as poetry and politics, as this expression of both individuality and community. And I would say that, in fact, for Knox, running is an act of rebellion. My name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. And today, today, I'm basically ecstatic to share what I think is one of the more intimate and one of the more profound conversations that I've had.

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  It's a conversation that is fundamentally about running, of course, but also about so much more. Based in New York City, Knox isn't just a great runner. He isn't just a great coach and a great writer. He isn't just the co-founder and captain of the Black Roses NYC Run Collective, which we're going to talk about today. It's this crew of tattooed amateur New York City runners who routinely gather to hammer out intervals through downtown Manhattan and then go eat ramen and spin vinyl and drink beers. This is a guy who, when asked to describe himself, quoted the poet Amiri Baraka, quote,

• 4:16Rich Roll?

  "I am a long-breast singer, would-be dancer, strong from years of fantasy and struggle." End quote. And I think, I think I'd agree that...

• 4:30Rich Roll?

  That quote rather beautifully captures the essence of this, this ardent purveyor of running culture, how he thinks and how he lives. And this is also a guy who, after a collegiate running career at Wake Forest, stepped away from the sport altogether for the better part of a decade. He went on to study black literature and poetry. He pursued a career as a spoken word artist. He worked in the music industry, managing artists, and he served as editor in chief of Fader, which is kind of the ultimate print vortex of hip hop, indie music, urban style, and culture. And it wasn't until Knox's son was born that, that he basically rediscovered running

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  and this new life, creative expression and community building through running began to unfold. A few more things I want to mention about Knox before we, we immerse ourselves in his world, but first. All right, we did it. We got through that. I appreciate you guys sticking with me. I love my sponsors. I really do believe in all the products that I mentioned and their support, and more importantly, your support of them, makes the show possible. So gratitude.

• 5:55Rich Roll?

  So this conversation spends very little time in the shallow end of the pool. Knox is deep, his story is compelling, his storytelling even better. I did my best to keep pace with his insights and I'm not sure what else needs to be said other than that I just love everything about this exchange and I think I'm just gonna leave it at that. I was very moved by this human and I think you will be too.

• 6:29Rich Roll?

  Let's do this. Nosh, man, great to meet you.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I'm excited to be here.

• 6:34Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you taking the time. We're in a little rental conference room here. It's a little bit echoey, but we're just gonna have to live with it, man.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  No, this is cool. This is like-

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  I think it'll be good.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:47Rich Roll?

  Slide up on that a little bit more like that. And I wish, usually when I do these at home, I video them now. I've been capturing them on film. Now I wish I had a video camera so we could all see what you're wearing right now. Because I don't know what that is, but you're rocking some serious fashion.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  It's humid today, so I made sure I had to wear like, an African shirt just to breathe out a little bit.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  I know. And what was the, what you were wearing, like a, I don't even know what I would call it, like a shawl or like a, some kind of wrap?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  There's, yeah, there's, I got it in Japan on this last trip I was over there and, you know, there's a technical name for it. I'm not gonna call it a kimono, because it's not.

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  It's not.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  It's definitely, and it's, nor is it a yukato, which is like, the summer kind of like wrap, full length, but it's like a two-piece linen, you know? It's kind of like a Japanese version of, in the hood, what you call a short set. The baseball short set. But it's, yeah, it's linen and not as breathable as you'd think, so I'm a little saucy after walking around today.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  Well, I think it's thematically consistent. You're wearing an undergarment that's African, an outer garment that's Japanese, and I think that's fitting, given that you, you, for me, like, represent, you're like the, this person who's right at the vortex, like the eye of the storm, at the intersection between running, culture, art, poetry, music, politics, like, all of these threads kind of inform everything that you're about and everything that you do and how you express yourself.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Vortex is the right word, right? Because the vortex is intense and can be crushing. An intersection is just kind of like Robert Johnson, like sticking his thumb out, waiting for the devil to come by to sell his soul.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  Right, that's a passive.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I'm cool. The crossroads, I'm cool with. The intersection, I'm cool with. But a vortex, definitely, when you bring in all those axes together, it can be a lot. And, but at the same time, once it's like part and parcel of how you literally see things and how you interpret things, it's, at least for me, it's tough to think about a really hard run without like, certain lines of poetry coming up, you know? Or like, a forgettable country music lyric that you wish you never learned coming up, you know? So it's, these things all exist inside of us. And so it's difficult to distinguish.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  It's like that old Chinese chestnut about Zhuangzi. Once was dreaming, had a dream about being a butterfly. And then when he awoke, he didn't know if he was like, a man who had had a dream about being a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly now dreaming that he was a man.

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It's tough to really know if running is like, ah, everything, and it makes me think about poetry, or if I'm like, running a lot because I'm a failed poet, you know?

• 9:53Rich Roll?

  Well, I think any one of those kind of topic headings is something that can either, well, I was gonna say can unify us. I think they can also, I mean, with politics, they can also divide us. But poetry, music, and certainly running, these are, these are like, things that we can all share in kind of a collective consciousness that bring us together, right? If that's a consistent thing. And you use running really not just, it's interesting because, you know, you're a coach and, and, you know, you're a 230 marathoner and like a 110 half marathoner. I mean, you're a fast runner and, you know, in your club, you've got people who are interested

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  in performance, but it's not really about that, right?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky because.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Man, you could sit people in Black Roses down, you know, at the Mexican spot after a session. And yeah, the conversation doesn't really like always kind of lean or tack towards racing or performance.

• 11:00Rich Roll?

  It's so refreshing.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right. Because I know you've been where it's not like that. It's all about, you know, splits and your garment and Strava and all that nonsense.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially rather than like the people that I've been hanging out with. It's more like different eras of time. Like, I feel like as a youth in the 90s, I feel like I learned, formally, I learned a lot about running and multi-sport activities from like an empirical perspective, just because of a couple of coaches. And it was that era of like data, that 90s kind of thing. And then, and yeah, you've seen that kind of come back and forth in different eras. But like what I love now is actually the weird friendships I have with elites and gold medalists

• 11:52Speaker 01

  and silver medalists or world champs or whatever is actually super similar to the relationship I have with just everyday passionate athletes. And like, these people aren't really taking that empirical thing and pushing it all the way out. I mean, I, you know, I was training with, or staying in Mo Farah's camp.

• 12:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I know. I want to get into this. You were training. It's okay, you can say it. I'll say it for you.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  It was propositional, you know, like I was training around, like, you know, next to behind. Definitely wasn't like training with Mo Farah, but, you know, his training partner, Abdi, did invite me out to the camp. And so I was afforded this opportunity to go out to the camp and stay for three weeks.

• 12:32Rich Roll?

  In Ata Sababa.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the guys. Man, these guys weren't talking about no science, no marginal gains, you know, it was like Arsenal transfer rumors, you know.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Virgil, shoot, Virgil Off-White releases and, uh, and then their sessions, how they organize their sessions. This is like to watch, you know, one of the greatest runners of all time, like at the office is, is crazy, you know? Um, it really took me back and then I learned.

• 13:07Rich Roll?

  So walk me through that. Like, I want to hear more about that experience of, I mean, you're here, you're with, you know, two of the best guys in the world and the guys they train with who are also, you know, you've never heard of these guys, but they're probably, you know, some of the best runners in the world.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  They live a very simple life. Their approach to training is regimented, but also very, um, I don't know what the right word is. You, you, you would know it better than I, but, um, it's, it's sort of a, a natural flow approach to how, it's based on feel as much as anything else, right? Which is so what you would not think in this quantified self era that we find ourselves in right now.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Feel is the only thing that's going to get you through. I mean, when you're standing on the starting line of the New York City Marathon and whether you're in the front line or you're in the back, like, no watch is going to like get you through, no data, no Britney Spears power song playlist is going to like get you through. You gotta know what's inside of you. You gotta know what you, what you got. And, and if you'd like to look at these elites, when it comes time to battle, when it comes time to go for the gold or to, to grasp that cup, like they're reaching inside for something that they have. They know it's there and they know they're confident that like other people don't have it, you know? In some ways, otherwise they're, sometimes they're just like reaching for theirs and going for it.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  And you can just see that that's what the preparation is. Like, how much weightlifting can you do, you know? But when you see someone enacting a plan at the Olympics on the last lap or in the final round, you're like, it's, it's incontrovertible.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  To see them do that because you know they've been preparing for that move, one move for three years.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Like when Galen and Mo did that, like in the last lap of the 10,000 in London, you know, they had been, you could just tell they had been talking about that for every day for three years.

• 15:10Rich Roll?

  Right. So when you're there in Ethiopia and you're watching these guys train, like, you know, what is it? Tell me what that, that experience is like.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  It's a major freak out because like you're like, what am I doing?

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  You have a cool life, man. You get to go and like hang with some pretty badass people.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's cool until you're like in the, this is like everything I've ever done is like, this was a cool idea. And then you're in the, I mean, like honestly, yeah. Everything I've ever done is like, ah, yeah, this will be cool. And then you're in it and you're like, what? And that was even this last trip to Ethiopia, like,

• 15:52Speaker 01

  how it even happened was absurd, you know, like it was just to backtrack. It was a, before the New York City Marathon, I rode out with the sub elites. I like skirted into the sub elite bus.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  But the sub elite bus gets the same, near the same treatment as the elites. And everybody's chill. So nobody really cares. So we go out to the start line on these elite buses. We're held in like a complex, a warm up track indoors. We have all the same amenities. And it's like, well, I go and do my meditation. I'm on my headspace wave. I'm doing me. And then I have all this time to kill. And I'm like, well, I'm not friends with any of these local elites from New York who like all work on Wall Street and like have like sharp haircuts and are like on their, it's just a big cultural gap.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  So I was like, let me just go sit by the brothers.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  You know, who cares? And it was Meb, his last, uh, last three days, you know, um, Abdi, Cameror, who won, um, uh, Wilson kept saying, and jumped in after dropping out of Berlin. So I was like, all right, I know some of these guys at whatever level. And then Abdi is super chill. So I'm hanging out, just trying to mind my own business. I'm not trying to fraternize, whatever. And I'm just like, hey, man, um, why don't you come out to Ethiopia? Uh, I'm gonna be there with Mo, helping him get ready for the London Marathon. I was like, yeah, cool.

• 17:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you don't, you don't say no to that. So you're trying to be all cool about it?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just like, yeah, cool. And he was just trying to be cool. He was just trying to make conversation in front of his friends with like, the regular homie from New York. He was trying to like, have common with his New York homie in front of the other guys.

• 17:41Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. I know New York.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, yo, what's up? Hey, man, um, come on out. Oh, yeah, cool. I will. I just showed up.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you were there for a couple of weeks, right?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I was there for like, three weeks. Cause I'm not gonna go, I mean, you know, you gotta go. And you gotta, uh, you gotta take the whole trip, you know? Um, and, uh, yeah, like, one, one of the first experiences, and apologies for being a little discursive, but one of the first experiences I had with, uh, going to an elite camp, um, I was friends with Leo Manzano, um, and Trenier Moser, and then folks in that John Cook group in the, in the days leading up to the 2012 Olympics. And I was starting this running magazine. It was gonna be cool. And I was used to coming from like, that journalistic practice of

• 18:31Speaker 01

  like, the fly-in, 36 hours, get the story, I'm out, you know? And, um, so I was like, yo, Leo, I wanted to start the camp. I'm just gonna come in, photographer, take some pictures. I'm starting this magazine. And he's like, hey, man, well, um, why don't you come and just stay the whole time? He's like, you know, you might learn something about running. And I was like, Yo, bro, I'm starting a magazine about running. Like, what are you trying to like?

• 19:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Obviously, I know about running, or I thought I did. And yeah, it was just such the face punch that I just went to like, altitude in Mexico and like, live with Leo, you know, in this cycle before he got the silver in London.

• 19:16Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  You know, so you gotta like, call people's bluff. You know what I mean?

• 19:21Rich Roll?

  Well, also just to embrace the experience rather than like the result of like, okay, how am I going to get a story out of this and just be?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I mean, that's always like a journalist tree in what I worked as a journalist. Uh, and as an editor at this, uh, like a kind of

• 19:39Rich Roll?

  Fader, right?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Fader Magazine.

• 19:40Rich Roll?

  Editor in chief of Fader.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Editor in chief of the

• 19:42Rich Roll?

  That's such a badass job, man. There's so many layers to your life.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  You had to, I had to treat it like it was a badass job. I mean, it was badass.

• 19:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Um.

• 19:51Rich Roll?

  You got to interview Kanye.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I was, did Kanye's first cover. Like, yeah, I mean, wild anecdotes about Kanye.

• 19:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Early on. Um, a lot of, a lot of folks in that time. And yeah, I had to treat it like it was a badass thing. Obviously, that's how you sow the seeds of your own dismissal.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  So I did, uh, I was, you know, run out of town on a rail after a while, but what are you gonna do? Like, go and be editor in chief and then like, play it safe? Were you gonna go and just like, start lighting shit on fire on the first day? Oops.

• 20:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:23Rich Roll?

  So when you're at these elite running camps, like, what are the, you know, what's a day in the life of these elite runners in, in Ethiopia?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Well, everything's disorienting, right? Like, with, within most camp, like, all the easy runs were done in complete silence and like, almost like military.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Like martial regimentation. Um, it was really tense. And then when they'd go to like these epic workouts on the track with the coach and the pacers and like all the gear laid out on the track and multiple spike changes and all the fueling and the hydration. I showed up to like, check out this epic workout and he's playing like a Drake playlist off of, uh, off a Beats pill or something.

• 21:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  You know, and I was like, first of all, how could you listen to Drake and then perform? Like Drake is like, that makes you soft. You know, you listen to Drake, you're texting your girl like, I miss you. This thing was like, turned up listening to Drake. I was like, okay, who knew? So he's turned up listening to Drake and he's just like, obviously tearing through his pacers. And of course his pacers are like Olympians. His best pacer, Basir, just got a silver medal at the European Championships a couple of weeks ago. Uh, the obviously, the, all these young guys. So, yeah, it was like listening to Drake and like having a good time. And then halfway through the session, I'm just like on the sidelines and he's like, mate, could you go in my bag and um, could you take some pictures on my phone? You know, just so I could have them later for Instagram.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And then he gave me like the password to his phone.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I was like, this, this guy? That y'all, all this around this guy and like, he asked me to go in his bag, take out the phone, gave me the password and then asked me to take pictures.

• 22:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So of course I'm a New Yorker. I was mad that he had the better phone. I, all I cared about was like, I knew I should have got the iPhone.

• 22:23Rich Roll?

  He's got the 10 or something?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  He did, he had two 10s. And I, I was like, I didn't want to get the 10 before I went because I didn't want to break it and, or lose it or get robbed. So then I show up and like, Mo has two 10s.

• 22:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Humiliating.

• 22:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but he's Mo.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but still I'm from New York.

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's right. Well, it's interesting. I mean, obviously you'd think it would be the other way around. Like the easy runs would be jocular and they'd be telling jokes and having a good time and, and then super serious on the track. So, you know, what do you take from that? Like, what is it about their approach that's different from our approach? And, and how is this, you know, feeling and benefiting them in a way that maybe we're missing?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Man, it was so basic as to almost be embarrassing, but just the whole idea, the, the training is going to be what it is. The competitions are going to be as intense as you'd imagine they're going to be. That level is so rarefied. I was almost embarrassed to like, watch these guys create a good vibe and like, that leveled up the performance. I mean, the Drake and then a whole training camp of just your friends, your homies, and it's all banter and arguing and like screaming at each other when they're messing up the pace and like yelling at each other from across the track. It was just like, it was incredible. And I was like, whoa, just creating

• 23:43Speaker 01

  the vibe just creates in turn, this mindset, this whole energy field, you know, what I mean, they call it collective efficacy, you know. But it was wild to watch, you know?

• 23:59Rich Roll?

  And they don't know what their workout's gonna be until they tell the day, right?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's another thing too, that I have observed that from like, my own training with elites or being around elites, but also my training partner where I live up in the woods, outside of New York City, is went to two Olympic trials and the marathon in the in the 90s. And when I first met him moving up to this town.

• 24:25Rich Roll?

  He's the truck driver guy, right?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Bus driver, yeah. Great, great athlete, great, great lifelong competitor to this day. But I, I just moved to the town to like, hide out from New York. Dude didn't know who I was. The guys in the little training crew didn't know. They, they never asked what I did. They didn't care. And I just showed up at the track on Tuesday, like when, when they said to show up and just proceeded to get it cracking. And that was amazing. Like, you know, in New York, everyone's always like, in your business all the time. I saw you at this party. Who's making this money? Why'd you get fired from the fader?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  You know, but like, up there, it was just about like, lacing up and, and, and tearing up the track or like, you know, battling each other in the long run. And so, that's similar to what I've seen in elites. Like, you don't have to like, have the three month training program. It's, it's about that. So, when I was out there with Mo.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  This day, they're building up to the session and like coach had like dropped some red herrings, what it's gonna be, but the excitement, like the boyish excitement that Mo has like the night before a big run, or like days in advance, he's like chomping at the bit and there's like lights in his eyes, he's like, what's it gonna be? And the coach will just like fake him out or whatever, and he knows that's not it. Ah, no, okay, okay, cool. So you'd think, I wasn't around all the time, so you'd think the coach had emailed him or whatever, man, we were out at this one training grounds, they do their warm up, they do all the activations, I'm sitting next to the coach, and then after it's all over, Mo comes over and is like, so what are we doing today? And I was like, oh, that's crazy. First of all, no one does

• 26:09Speaker 01

  that. These tryhard runners out here, much respect to all the coaches out there on the internet sending immaculate plans, six months of a PDF, got it. But you gotta think what it means if Mo Farah is getting the workout in the moment. That men, that means, obviously, he spent the night thinking about it. He spent time narrowing down the possibilities for what it could actually be, because he's trusting his coach, right? So, let's say he narrows it down to three scenarios, so then he's played out all three workouts. That means he's already psychologically prepared for three different caustic scenarios.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  The coach chooses one, and Mo's into it, but just think about what that means in competition. He's already cycled through, what, 90, 95% of like eventualities?

• 27:03Rich Roll?

  He's had to visualize alternatives and then adapt in the moment.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And sometimes that means he's racing kipchoge, so he's thinking about that, but Mo probably might not even think about that. He might just think about like, what could actually happen on the day, you know?

• 27:19Rich Roll?

  That's real coaching, though. You know, I think as much as we want to know, you know, every day what we're doing and have it all mapped out, like, if you really want to perform at your peak, you got to be malleable and adaptable. And if you have a coach who really knows you, that workout's going to change based on, you know, what that coach's perspective of how you're warming up. Like, you know, when you're totally in tune with your coach, the coach knows, you know, a good coach will know, okay, I got to back off, or today's the day where I can really hit it hard. And making those micro-adjustments in the moment is a huge differentiator. And we're so programmed to want to know exactly what we're doing every single day.

• 27:59Rich Roll?

  And when you get into that automaton kind of schedule or routine, you're removing the possibility for some, you know, marginal to pretty huge performance gains by learning about that, like, mind-body connection.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  You know, the more experience you have, your super experience, you know, you don't need a coach, you know what you need, and I'm sure you adapt day to day based upon, you know, that internal barometer that you have about, like, what is going to best serve you.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's fascinating, and I mean, it's almost like you can learn, again, no disrespect to anyone's bookshelf out there, but you could learn a lot from, like, listening to jazz and reading poetry, you know? Just because, like, you can read the same poem, short poem, like, over and over for 20 years, and then, like, on the 21st year, something's going to happen where you're going to understand, like, another level of meaning to a word choice, or like, a line break, or the rhythm in a line of poetry. Just in the same way that, you know, this new John Coltrane, a new old John Coltrane album just came out over the summer, and it was the last time he, it was like, his

• 29:11Speaker 01

  second attempt to go into the studio and record the energy of this amazing composition called Impressions. I think ultimately the analysis is he felt they were both attempts for failures. But... Man, you're thinking about like John Coltrane, like tried to capture this amazing live song in the studio, failed, went back and did it again. Still an epic piece of recorded sound. But what are the aesthetic choices that he's like making, not only on the day, but minute to minute? And that's more instructive for, for me, that's also very instructive for executing a marathon as much as, you know, reading about like, you know, whatever kind of like.

• 29:53Rich Roll?

  Well, once you know the basics of what you need to do, right?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  With these new runners though, they don't want to know the, they, and I call it ABR, like people do anything but running. And I'm like.

• 30:04Rich Roll?

  Cause it's easier to sit around and procrastinate, well, should I do this workout? Or should I, and you trick yourself into thinking that you're actually doing something.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Right. I'm just, right. I'm just gonna do cryo instead. I'm just gonna like lift weights instead. I'm just gonna do this. And it honestly, I don't know, I'm not an expert. I'm not a certified coach, but.

• 30:21Rich Roll?

  You go out to Africa.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  If you go out to Africa, look, I'm just saying.

• 30:26Rich Roll?

  Run.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, yeah, what I saw was it comes down to hard long runs and it comes down to long tempos.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Like every, you gotta build to those things. But like, I feel like a lot of new runners or emerging runners or a lot of like even experienced runners, they don't want to know that like, and I had to learn. I, and when I was living in New York, I was like blazing up these like 18 mile long runs and finishing all fast and like slapping high fives at the end with my homie and all that. Like 18 mile long run finishing fast on adrenaline, ducking taxis. That's like the worst thing for your training. Cause you get into a marathon, it ain't no taxis. And it ain't 18 miles.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. The long run, that's a different approach. But I, I love this idea of, of looking to completely other, completely different forms of expression to learn how to become a better runner. Like, and this idea of jazz is amazing because jazz is all about, like great jazz is about being present and listening. Like being so tuned in to what is happening in the moment that you can respond with the appropriate note.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  And in many ways, that's kind of like what we're talking about with running like that that that connection with self. So you know what the next step is.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, don't want to be ageist, but in that way, it is like sometimes like

• 31:53Speaker 01

  a game that you unlock with the intervening years. Like when I was a kid, my dad listened to jazz. I had a problematic relationship with my dad, so I hated jazz.

• 32:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  But I used to wonder, you know, when he was like listening to it.

• 32:07Rich Roll?

  And he was a runner, too.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  He was a runner, right? So I was like, ah, right.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  But I used to wonder how you could like, tell who was playing an instrument, just like listening to it. If there was, you couldn't tell by the sound of their voice. Now, that's comes like almost second nature to me, just because I've listened to like a lot of music.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  You'd never mistake Tupac's voice for Kanye West's voice, you know, well, for a lot of reasons. But um, yeah, so, so in that sense, it's, it's interesting. So you're listening to voice, but then you're also thinking, you're also like unlocking like what they were trying to share. So you're experiencing that on your own, but then you're also thinking what they were trying to do in the moment as they are arranging it and recording it. And like, that's also a trip. There's just a lot of levels to it.

• 32:58Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. It's cool. Well, let's uh, I want to track it back.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Rich Roll?

  Let's go back. Let's go back to your problematic relationship with your dad.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  He gets mad. He gets mad. He, he went to the doctor's office the other day and was like, I was on the cover of like Outside Magazine. So he was like, ah, yeah, the doctor's slipping out. Oh, my God. Oh, I read this. I keep the copies in the office. That's your son. He's doctor slipping out. So my dad's like, yeah, let me go and read. And I did the usual thing where I just like diss my dad like.

• 33:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, in the article?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 33:30Rich Roll?

  No.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  What am I gonna be like, oh, he's, oh, you're not gonna print. That's not printable. Oh, my dad's my greatest inspiration. Boring.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So I just was real. And then my dad's like, yo, why you gotta like, talk about my running so bad? I was like, well, you wasn't, you, you wasn't really putting it down. I thought you were, but you know, I was four.

• 33:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but when I see, I mean, I've read up on, you know, some of those articles and whatever your relationship was with your dad, you're very clear in saying like you looked up to him, he was a hero, you got excited for his races and you know, he was all about, you know, he was all about running at that time.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Sure. Um, I learned, yeah, I learned those early lessons from him, not only like the community aspect, the vibe, like it's something you did with your homies, like on a, on a Sunday or whatever, family's out or whatever, but also I learned the melancholy because like, you know, you think your dad's gonna win the race, you're four or five and then when he doesn't like win, then I was like distraught.

• 34:34Rich Roll?

  What's wrong?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  I was embarrassed that my dad didn't win the race, but he was, he was a middle of the pack guy. So now I look back and I'm like, man, I was learning lessons early on, like, oh my God, or if his best friend beat him, you know, and I had a crush on like the best friend's daughter, then it was like double heartbreak.

• 34:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, I got it. Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Levels.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  But you didn't take to running right away.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I had like, yeah, I had other pursuits and uh, on an athletics level, cycling actually was one of my first passions.

• 35:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I went, I went deep. I, people asked me like how, and I think I saw the movie Quicksilver.

• 35:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I remember that. Kevin Bacon at his best.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Which is tough to say, cause that's a lot of, there's a lot of best Kevin Bacon. So it was Kevin Bacon, but in the beginning scene, he has that race, impromptu race with the bike messenger.

• 35:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  The bike mess, who flips him off and like spits on his cab in the end, right? The bike messenger was Nelson Vales, the Olympic medalist.

• 35:39Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  From the streets of New York, who started off as a bike messenger, went to the highest heights of competitive cycling on the track. Um, black dude, badass black dude. And I was like, yeah, that was like, that's what's up. Okay. So I got into cycling, got a beater bike, rode around my town, upgraded, upgraded, got into, you know, biathlons, didn't swim very well. Um, but then one summer I crashed and flatted in like all my races, like flipped, peloton running me over and people like, yo, you gotta choose running kid, cause you're losing too much blood.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:22Rich Roll?

  So that was it then, that was, the cycling career ended?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still, I still love it. I still follow it. I still kind of like fantasize about it. I was like, ah, next big check. I'm gonna go and get the 7-Eleven team bike. I'm gonna just ride around in the 7-Eleven kit.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  I was all about the 7-Eleven team.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Of course. So much so that, um, yeah, I still follow all those guys on Instagram now. We're their kids or whatever.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  Who was it? It was, it was Bob Rol, I think was on that team. Eric, Eric Hayden was my dude.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  Cause that guy just dominated speed skating and then went right into pro cycling and rode, rode for 7-Eleven for a while.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the era when they were just like, that American approach. They were pulling in like anybody, you know, that I like, oh,

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Ned Overend, you know, like, or, yeah.

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  Davis Finney, I think.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  Was on that team.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And now his son is like doing his thing too. So, and then Hampstead was just free to be like the glory boy, like amazingly when he toured Italia. So, all that stuff was a cool moment.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  And then running after that.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the reality is like, didn't make the basketball team. Didn't make the volleyball team.

• 37:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  It must be said that like my school.

• 37:42Rich Roll?

  First of all, like, was this, was this, was this in San Diego?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  This was like in the suburbs of Buffalo. This was like, this was later on. So this was like, not even like, nothing.

• 37:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, you had to be the only black dude on a bike.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. But like, once you're like the only black dude doing like anything, you cease to forget it. So now when we're in, in like, kind of like a resurgence of like, I kind of rather disparage and we call it like Negro firsts, like, okay, I'm the first black guy to step into a Starbucks today. Like, okay, like, so I, I don't know. I'm acutely aware of like those politics and like, those are part of my, my politics as well. But I wasn't really thinking about that. Cause when you're getting your ass kicked or you're getting dropped on a hill, like you're either gonna care about being black or you're gonna care about like catching back up, you know? And like the times where you kind of like take on, and this is, happens to now. I talk about it runners, with runners now, the time like,

• 38:38Speaker 01

  you allow some of that other emotionality of, of, of, of being black.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  To come in while you're running or racing, it's it's too much.

• 38:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, this happened to a woman in Black Roses. Very strong sister from from Brooklyn. Very strong personality, black woman. And she went to a 50 K trail race. And it was tough. It was wet. It rained, you know, and it was a tough race because when she fell and like cut her knee or just like hurt her hand or whatever. After like the second or third time, like she just started thinking about being black. I don't know. I've talked to a handful of folks about, you know, black folks who are involved in the outdoors and it's not so much like. Yeah, I don't know. It it there's weird nuances to it, you know?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  It's not so much like there's no one black on this mountain or like everybody in the tents are white. It's like, okay, that's maybe for some people, but there's like a a watery emotionality to you where like your racial consciousness can like bubble up. Probably due to lack of oxygen, but it can just bubble up and you're acutely aware, you know? So anyways, being like.

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, it it's it's interesting because within the universe of running, there's all these subcultures. And, you know, I think I heard you say one time like running is running is profoundly black. Right. Which I want to explore that idea with you. And I think that's true for a variety of reasons. And if you go to, you know, track and field and marathoning at the at the elite level. You know, it's it's a black sport, but you go to trail runs, you go to ultra marathons. And there's like no black people. It's a totally different subculture.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. It's cool to take a break. It's cool to take a break. No. But, uh, you know, I I think, you know, trail running in some ways is is a little bit newer. I think it there are. There have been like filters of access, obviously, historically and all that kind of stuff. I think through framing it up on social media has like kind of increased accessibility or like creating the idea in people's minds. And I just also think that I don't know how I really feel about an activist approach.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  To being a race director, no pun intended. But um, I just kind of think sometimes I see these fields. I was looking at like a field of an elite mile and it was like, they're just like every time, every field was like, white, white, white. That's cool, but like, that's not really like what I'm seeing. I'm seeing like, there's, there's a couple of folks, and I don't just mean like, you know, naturalized Africans or American Africans, Africans in America. I mean, like, there's like black Americans out here who are speaking to distance running and speaking to trail running.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  You know, and they don't always have to be like, whatever we all would perceive blackness to be, you know? But I just think just the tableau, the look of something, the feel of something can shift a lot.

• 41:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So when you say running is profoundly black, like, what does that, what does that mean?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  It, it, I, I, I just have to say that because obviously like, the roots of running are in Africa. And indeed, it was running coming together in the human toolkit and a lot of analyses anyways, that precipitated the species explosion from, from Southern Africa. But also, all the way through, there's just been like, there's been black folks all the way through, you know? There's, there's been Ted Corbett, you know, at the Helsinki Olympics in the 50s. There's, there's been, you know, Daryl General, you know, kind of like winning Marine Corps and being like a legend in, in the DC community.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  But also, I think my frame of reference is, is, is a little fracked, but just growing up in San Diego at that time, my dad and his friends had afros and shortshits and mesh singlets and Nike waffle racers and were out there doing it. And like, they did it in a soulful, black way. And then like, the, the popular running lurch of the time, like, You know, I'm a collector of like ephemera, but these sort of, you know, chapbooks and little manuals published by Runners World and other kind of like small publishers in the, in the seventies, like the covers were always black dudes. You know what I mean? Like the, the art all through them is always like black dudes wearing like amazing tracksuits, talking about like marathon workouts.

• 43:30Rich Roll?

  Rocking like incredible hair.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was like, really? Long run with that Afro? Like, okay. You know, so, so that's cool. And then like, obviously that just immediately connects to like the, the dominance of, of the Africans on the distance stage, which again is also cultural. I think much more than, you know, genetic or whatever. Like that wasn't a fait accompli. Like if you read the, the, the actual history of like Africans at the world level, it just happened, just now.

• 44:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  You know, if you talk to Herman Silva, Mexicans were running, running in the nineties. You know, Africans were just trying to steal in there and get a win when they could. But like Mexico was churning out like the best in the world for that. And then things shifted, you know?

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  What, what do you think happened that, that produced that shift?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Um.

• 44:25Rich Roll?

  Cause it's, I mean, at the marathon level, I mean, Africa just dominates.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, the depth. I mean, like obviously the, the pre-existing conditions for, for that are there. Has been studied, like soft surfaces and altitude carbohydrate.

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  But that's always been there.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now if you're like have, you know, agents going in and you know, supporting people.

• 44:48Rich Roll?

  Support.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  For sure. And so then like what's, whether it's the return on investment or the low overhead, what it takes to sort of like sustain and pull one champion out, you know, that's, it's.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  The economics are kind of there. And then what one champion, or what one system, or what one program can do to sustain a cultural economy, and then to say nothing of like, the corruption on like, a structural level, how much money there's to be made from being corrupt.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but well, I would also think that, that, you know, guys like Mo and Elliot, these guys have to be rock stars, you know, back home, right? That's got to like, create interest in young people. And then, you know, suddenly, everybody wants to be a runner. And then

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  infrastructure comes in to support that.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Elliot's from Kanye. He trains in Kenya. He's lived in this camp his entire adult life. Mo trains in Ethiopia. We were staying, we were training on Kenanisa Bakhale's track. Like, they're not friends. They're competitors. And, uh, yeah, so to see Mo get so much love in Ethiopia was crazy because he's from Somalia.

• 46:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  You know, they're, you know, Orthodox Christian or Catholic Church Christian. There's some Muslims there, but like Mo's Muslim, the whole training camp is Muslim. They were just saluting Mo up like he was like one of theirs. It was, it was crazy. And he just gave love back. So it was really kind of like a real Pan African vibe. It really felt like, this is crazy. I hope he doesn't, no offense to you. I hope he doesn't hear this.

• 46:27Rich Roll?

  I doubt he listens to this.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Right. Like, Mo doesn't listen to the original podcast. But it was almost like a Bob Marley thing, you know? I just felt like he was such an ambassador for like, African excellence and black excellence that like, people were just like, hollering his name out in the street as they drove by out of a truck.

• 46:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  You know?

• 46:45Rich Roll?

  It transcends any kind of national border. Why do you think he would react negatively to hearing that?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I don't know if he likes Bob Marley. He likes Drake.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  But yeah, it was like a, like a, yeah, like a classic, classic figure in that way. And it was also interesting him giving that love back and, you know, him speaking, you know, amharic to people in the streets. And then the other thing is, this really kind of tripped some people in his camp out, or the coach, or whatever, like, while Elliot's off in this camp, living in this kind of like monastic environment, like Mo's, the camp in Ethiopia is like right in a kind of a busy town with a commercial roadway. Uh huh. Um, it drove the coach crazy because as soon as you'd leave the complex, he was like right out on a highway running. And then again, in more comedy, the coach would like load up the truck and like, I'll meet you at the training grounds. You run up for

• 47:40Speaker 01

  three, warm up for three miles and I'll meet you there. And just to think that this multiple like gold medalist is like stepping out or running in traffic around like oil trucks on the highway. It was crazy. At the first opportunity, he will duck off into like the coffee stand and just sit. And he had to have like two cups of like strong Ethiopian coffee before the workout. While the coach is like, or if the coach was with him, or we'd be going out to the long run, get up at like 5am, drive out to the other side of the city, had to stop for Ethiopian coffee. But Ethiopian coffee is not like in the Pacific Northwest where you go through the drive through. This ain't Starbucks. This is like they making it there per cup. Uh huh.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Like toasting the beans. It's a whole thing. Right. You're there for a while. A while. We got to this one and there's like a whole authenticity. We got to this one roadside nondescript shack. The woman couldn't figure out the, the electric cords were burnt out. So she couldn't like get the hot plate working to toast the beans. So while, while Abdi and Mo were trying to figure out the wiring, she was putting like fresh grass branches down on the dirt to like recreate the floor of a traditional home. This is like every day. Wow. The coach saw her putting down the grass and he's like, oh no. We're gonna be here forever.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  And we were there forever for one tiny cup of coffee. But he had to have it. Yeah. He, one time he said it, you know, I'm sure he like, he does present himself as like the.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  The, the true, true, true gentleman, but like one time he like stepped into a coffee shop. He's like, I need that real shit, not that machine shit. Give me that real shit. I was like, yeah, exactly. Real shit.

• 49:29Rich Roll?

  They're literally roasting it there.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like per cup, ro- roasting the beans and then like beating it with by hand with a, a metal stave like.

• 49:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  No grinders, anything and, uh, and then they'll pour it for you. He puts tons of sugar in it and then he's like, okay, now I'm ready to run like four minute miles like at altitude like, yo, I'll have two cups too.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, cause that's a crazy elevation up there in Alasababa, right?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Eight thousand, yeah, eight, I mean, the long ones would be at 10,000 feet. Like it was, that's comparative to like Boulder or something like that, or even Mexico City. That was, it's a little extreme.

• 50:08Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Rich Roll?

  All right, let's go back. So you, you get into, you, you get into track and field in, in high school, right?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  I was the slowest kid on the team. My mom always says that like, they were turning the lights out on me when I was finishing the two mile. The other kids were on the bus with the engine on, ready, waiting for me to finish. And then I would like fall down at the end, like it was like the feet of exhaustion.

• 50:32Rich Roll?

  I have a hard time believing that.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  This is real, like I'd so humiliate.

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  Create a little empathy for your dad after this experience.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Why didn't you tell me? Um, yeah, and I was just like a tryhard. I don't know, I just.

• 50:45Rich Roll?

  You, you, you didn't get too discouraged to quit? Like what kept you in it?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I guess it just felt real to me. I guess it just felt like failure was real. Failure at like my own hands was, was real. But a one second improvement was real. Finishing, this is terrible. This is not the mindset of a champion, but finish second to last is an improvement from the previous week.

• 51:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  When you were last.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  There's a self-determinatism to it and, and you start to be able to do that math of, oh, if I do this work, then I improve. And you're responsible for that.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the other thing that I've had to come to understand later, and this is a little tangential, but I think I loved, for someone like me who's very qualitative, I think I loved quantitative aspect of it. I loved the time in your performance. Cause when.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  These days we're understanding fake news so much bandied about on all sides, from all directions. I'm now realizing that like, the black kid in me growing up around white folks in the 90s, where like, you'd be out running, like, people would just like scream racial epithets as you were like, running out in the country training, that, that was just people racially harassing you in your school, or whatever. I think, or people like accusing you of stuff that you didn't do, like projecting racist stereotypes on you, that like, you had no idea even existed. I think I was really attracted and enamored with early on, the, uh, the time next to your name.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Like, I did that. You can say whatever you want about me, like in the hallway, or you can say like, I did this, or I did that, but like, the fact is like, right here with numbers and letters, it's like, that's real. You know? And then like, after a while, once I got better, your name's in the paper, that, I think that like, really crystallized it. You know? It's pure. Yeah. And that fueled you? Yeah, yeah. I think that, that also led me to like, wonder what else is possible. All, all the way along through my running, also, just, we're talking about Mo Farah these days so easily, but like, I've, I've had like, similar experiences with that, like,

• 53:09Speaker 01

  my entire running career, but also my life, where I've, at any given point in time, I've always been around someone who was the best. And so I feel like, since I was maybe 16, um, I used to train with these guys, some of these guys still hold records in New York State, you know? Guys who were running like, 414 miles, eighth graders, or whatever. To, to see that psychology, very different from my own, but to see that, good, bad, guys who are burnt out, self-destructive, but just to see what it means to be the best, and like, how you got to be the best, I've seen that.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  From Leo Manzano, Abdi and Mo, I've seen that with my training partner, Mike Solinsky, up in Beacon, New York, and I saw that in high school. And then in college, I ran briefly for a D1 program. And when I walked into the locker room for the first day as a freshman, three of the guys in the locker room were on the junior US cross-country team. Like, half the US team was in the locker room, like my teammates. So, you know, I was just used to like seeing the kind of best. And I think the writer in me observed it and took notes on that and kind of like, you know, internalized that in some ways that now comes out as storytelling.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, there's a comfort with being a small fish in a big pond on some level because it affords you the opportunity to rub elbows with greatness and learn from the best. And that seems to be, this is like a pattern of yours.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm definitely, definitely attracted to that. I love, I love watching. I mean, I love like being in the mix and on a fly on the wall and all the things that go into that. I love dialogue. I love the musicality of people's voices. I love perspective. I love the sudden revelations of someone's character. I mean, just to like be around Mo, that's just a recent example only, or around Elliot Gibchogie. Like, I had like a weird experience with Gibchogie, the opposite of Mo. Like, after I was in Ethiopia, I went out to work on a Nike project in Kenya. And with all this commotion, all this stuff going

• 55:31Speaker 01

  around Mo, and three photographers and a videographer, like somehow it all just stopped and everybody was elsewhere. They were scouting, they were in the woods. And I just like sat with Elliot in the camp, just both of us next to each other for like two hours, just vibing, silent, nobody around. Bizarrely, I was sitting there by myself. He comes, picks up a lawn chair, like brings it over and sits next to mine, and then just like sits down next to me. And we just chill. Like, that kind of like...

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Quiet kind of vibe is equally as intense as kind of like, you know, studying Mo's character in Ethiopia.

• 56:12Rich Roll?

  And being comfortable with the silence and not feeling like you have to hit him up and.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  That's exactly what you're thinking. You're like, now's the chance where I can ask him how to run a good marathon. And then instead you're just like,

• 56:27Rich Roll?

  what's up?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Let's see what happens, you know? It's crazy.

• 56:32Rich Roll?

  And you ended up going to Monza, right? You were there, you were on site for the Breaking Two and all of that.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was incredible to watch visceral experience, man. I, it was, it was tough to watch. Like when you say vortex, I mean, he was in a vortex in that experience and bizarrely, I cried at the end, like as a father, the father in me, like was like watching someone else going through such a difficult experience and watching it and knowing there was anything you could do to like help or reach out and be like, it was like watching your own kids like have a tough experience, you know?

• 57:14Rich Roll?

  Where were the tears? What was that about though?

• 57:18Speaker 01

  I just think

• 57:21Speaker 01

  the fragility of, of being human. I mean, that's what it was. There's a lot of levels to that from like Nike levels to production levels to science levels to quasi-science levels. But the human level of

• 57:39Speaker 01

  this guy, I don't use the phrase, this guy just doing it, you know, or very, very nearly just doing it.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Was like hit me right in the heart. And like as he was finishing, yeah, I just was like, I was lucky it was raining. I was like, I had sunglasses on because I was crying underneath the sunglasses. Like, yeah, I'm cool.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  It was impossible not to be moved by that. You know, I went into it a little, not really jaded, but kind of like, all right, like, what is this? You know, and then the more I watched it, I was like, I was all in. You know, it was incredible watching that.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Everybody from the Nike side, I'm not here to tell tales or whatever, but like, it wasn't like a belief system on the ground in the days leading up to it. It wasn't like Pacers, it wasn't everybody around like, oh yeah, we're gonna do this. This is a Nike moment. Everyone's like, ah, yeah, well, let's just see.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  And it was like, it was kind of like, the only person who thought he could do it was Elliot. That was bizarre to watch.

• 58:39Rich Roll?

  So close. I talked to Alex Hutchinson, you know, Alex, yeah, on the podcast, he was there as well. And he was expressing the same thing, like, it was just so incredible and moving to be witness to that, to that event. And, you know, there was a lot of production that went into that and a lot of showmanship, but at the same time, on its like, purest level, like, this is a guy who's trying to do the impossible, you know, and he came so close to doing it. And forget about all the bells and whistles, like, just at a very base level, like, it's such an amazing thing to watch.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, Nike, because of the production, I mean, they, they created the, the semblance of having a tight grip on everything, and then they, they did, but also, you know, it was a totally speculative endeavor. There was drama in the Pacer camp, couple Pacers cracked, the times that the pace fluctuated here and there, like, that, there was probably, you know, kind of panic at the controls at a certain point in time. So, you know, behind the scenes, I'm sure that it was definitely a fraught environment. And like, just Kim Choki at the center, it was just like a vision of calm, you know?

• 59:59Rich Roll?

  Right. And then you got to go pace at Caesar, right? Was that right after that?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  It was the day after, yeah.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  The next day?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Rich Roll?

  For his book.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Um, yeah.

• 1:00:10Rich Roll?

  So you get to have the experience on the track.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  On the track, and then, yeah.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  And they had the pace cars and everything, they just basically set it up exactly the same way?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, to run a half marathon, like, for his gold pace. And, uh,

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  That's, that's a crazy thing too, because like that's, you know, on a Nike level or on a media level, that's like a high level asset, as you'd probably say, like, uh, in, in, in espionage circles. So, um, couldn't mess that up. But at the same time, if you're an experienced runner, or if you're, yeah, like, experienced athlete, like, well, how are we gonna mess this up? We're gonna mess this up by like, following the plan that they have. So at a certain point in time, I was like, cool, what do you want to run? Cool story, bro. This is what we're gonna do. You know, like, I would like to do this, I would like to do that. I was like, yeah, we, we're leaning into the pace.

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And, and it went off well, right?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Huge PR for him, um, on a writerly level, because he's such a, a incredible writer.

• 1:01:11Rich Roll?

  So for people that don't know, he was covering the Breaking Two story throughout, was he for Outside? Was he writing for?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  For Wired.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  For Wired, that's right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Rich Roll?

  Um, and then he's put together this book.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  This incredible book, Two Hours. Yeah, then, that's, uh, that's good. But you know, like, even in the Wired coverage, and this is why I was like, really edified to, to be asked to run with him, the Wired coverage was weird, in the way that I like weird things. He'd be like, properly skeptical of Nike's swoosh talk and innovations. He'd be reporting on like, the lives of these athletes in a beautiful, elegant way. But then, he has these passages where he injects something personal, and very emotional. Um, and I was like, that's real writing. I mean, this guy's writing for Wired. Like, you don't have to put in this kind of like melancholy side note.

• 1:02:04Rich Roll?

  No, they were like, real think pieces.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I was just kind of fanned out over that. But then, writer to writer, I was annoyed, because as we were finishing, it starts raining halfway through, he gets to take his shirt off, he's, he's leaning into the pace. And then as we're finishing, the sun comes out, we have a lap to go. And then in the distance, we're in rural Italy, some church bells start tolling, not even ringing. No, like, tolling.

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  It's like, writerly providence.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I was like, this guy gets everything. A Tesla and then all of a sudden they were just like dong dong and I was like, this is whack. These writers get all the luck. I gotta like, I gotta like get drunk and get thrown through a window to get a story.

• 1:02:50Rich Roll?

  Then he, then he starts to wax poetic about it in his book and people think it's not true.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:02:56Rich Roll?

  It's like, there's no way it happened like that.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was mad.

• 1:03:07Rich Roll?

  Well, speaking of, of being sort of reasonably skeptical of Nike, not to go on a tangent here, but because it's so timely. Yesterday Nike announced its new campaign with Colin Kaepernick, Just Do It. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot being written about it and a lot, a lot being discussed at the moment. And super interested in, in kind of your perspective on that.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I mean Nike is classically disruptive.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I'm like a black dude on the left, so I didn't think it was disruptive. I, I saw the ad, I was like, oh, when's that? I didn't know.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  That's my, I looked at it and I was like, okay, that's cool, but like, maybe they should have done that a year ago? Like if it, maybe it would be a little more edgy if it was last fall or last winter.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:03Rich Roll?

  Now it seems like, yeah, okay.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:04:05Rich Roll?

  But then I saw, like, none of your reading, like, oh, wow, like, there's a whole thing here, you know?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Right, people going crazy.

• 1:04:12Rich Roll?

  I would have met, like, it would have been amazing to be a fly on the wall in their creative meetings around this. Cause I have a suspicion that, that, that perhaps this campaign did come together last year. And maybe there was some people who were like, let's do it now, just do it, let's do it now.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  Like, well, maybe the board was like, well, let's wait a little bit.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Rich Roll?

  Seems a little, it's, cause to me it seemed safe to do it now.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Rich Roll?

  It's almost too safe.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Rich Roll?

  Obviously not, like I'm misreading the culture, I guess.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Right, yet again, like, if we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's like, we're misreading culture left, right and center, like. Yeah, that's super interesting. And obviously like the, the crazy media reactions or the reactions that have been reported in the media, like people burning their shoes in the front yard and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  Cutting their socks off and stuff.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, okay, that's intense, but. Um, I can't yet. The trial is going forward. I mean, the lawsuit, that's big.

• 1:05:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  So if anything, um, it's interesting that Nike would like drop that after like such a crazy event. Like what, yeah, what was the, what was the dialogue in, inside the berm, as they say? Like, what would be the internal dialogue in Nike to, to go through with that? Really interesting decision making.

• 1:05:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So I guess it's more provocative than I would have imagined. And, and I think, you know, it is, it is a company and a culture that, that began as a, as a disruptive, you know, movement.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I think one of the things about Nike, at least from my perspective, um, from what I've observed.

• 1:05:46Rich Roll?

  Do you work with them professionally or you're just, you're just like a, are you like an ambassador?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  I, uh, man, I, I don't think anybody there would ever say I've behaved professionally.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Um, but I, I definitely have like, I've, I've been a consultant. I definitely was a founding coach of Nike Plus Run Club.

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  And then my group, Black Roses NYC, has, has received support from, from, uh, from the very beginning, since we started in 2013. So I'm a, I'm a friend of the brand at least.

• 1:06:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  But, uh, yeah, I, I, I just think it's interesting that, um,

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  they're also very provincial. They're, they are, what I like about them is they are, they're a young company. You know, even though they're like a global, you know, sort of

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  a global multinational corporation, they are very rooted in this Pacific Northwest ethic. Um, as befits the founding, uh, founding, uh, genius, Bill Bowerman. So a lot of their decision making and a lot of their vibes like come out of like that.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  That point of view. And so I keep thinking about this reaction. I haven't thought about it. Super problematic, but like, I don't know if like, the people at Nike care so much about people burning their stuff. Like Nike cares about like Nike people. And everybody else

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  can can can burn in any way, shape or form, you know, so.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  Well, the brand loyalty for, you know, people that love Nike is unparalleled.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I guess, but also, I mean, like, on a political level, on a racial level, I'm not here to say that, like, Nike, like, loves black people, or Nike's like a champion for, like, what black people are trying to do in America. I don't even know what black people are trying to do in America, like, so I'm not saying that Nike in 2018 is an apologist, is a corporate apologist for, like, the efforts of black America.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  But I think that they care about their people, you know, and they care about themselves. So I think that's what I'm getting, you know?

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Rich Roll?

  You know, more will be revealed, I guess.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Once, once Walt, once the, once the street closes, right? Because

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  as of midday, stocks are taking it.

• 1:08:21Rich Roll?

  Oh, are they?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  I was bad.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  I was bad.

• 1:08:24Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. That's interesting. I'll bounce back.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  I think it was, you know, I applaud the move, man.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  You know, what, what side of history do you want to be on?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I guess that's a question that I, I would love that for a lot of us to ask, like, that, that's a real question, you know? And, you know, I was in New York, this is, has nothing to do with anything we've talked about. So, full disclosure, this just is like an experience that's, as you might relate, under, under the skin of, of a lot of New Yorkers. I was here on nine 11.

• 1:08:59Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  And watching it with your own two eyes, watching these towers come down and just like, remembering what happened on the day.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  You were watching history. Yeah, sure, Obama's inauguration was history. But like, this was a before and after of history. This was like a side of history, you know? Or in some senses, in analysis at the time, this was the end of history. And so I think once you've been around

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  momentous experiences or occurrences, you very much have to understand, you have to keep your eyes open, right? That's kind of like a sixties idea, like, keep your eyes open. You know, keep your eyes on the ball because you really have to understand everything for yourself. So you know which side you're going to be on because like 20 years from now, it's going to be a very different analysis or understanding from like what's happening day to day.

• 1:09:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Where were you in New York when nine 11 happened?

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  We were supposed to shoot Lenny Kravitz for the cover of the fader, just a few blocks from the towers. And I didn't want to be around Lenny Kravitz looking jacked up. So I went to the barber shop, got cleaned up at the barber shop. And I was walking down the street in Brooklyn and, uh, and heard the boom. And then, you know, Brooklyn, a crackhead came around the corner and it's like, a plane just crashed into a building downtown. And I was like, oh, again, because the month before a Cessna had crashed into like, clipped the bank tower in downtown Brooklyn. So I was like, oh, God, traffic, you know? Um, and then again, then the world kind of ended, or at least like stopped and went in a different direction. That was sort of my facile understanding of it.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Now we know that it's much more complex. But yeah, so I went over to sort of my coworker's place. We, we were watching it from Brooklyn. Then we went up on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, watched it. And then bizarrely, we got on bikes and rode to ground zero.

• 1:11:01Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like went over.

• 1:11:04Rich Roll?

  They let you cross a bridge and everything?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  There was, there was nobody not, there was nothing. I mean,

• 1:11:09Rich Roll?

  Early in the day.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Everybody was just shattered and shocked, like law enforcement, God bless them. Everybody was just shattered, you know? So it's like, we rode right up to ground zero.

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  After they fell.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, smoke everywhere, all in the streets and like, just flicking away with our little 35 millimeters. Like, we didn't even know where she was just crazy.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Crazy day, you know?

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Wow. You must have amazing photos from that day.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  We've never seen the photos. I don't think, I don't think we ever developed the film.

• 1:11:41Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  Just because you couldn't, you couldn't bear to?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I remember months, I, I didn't ride the subway for months after I rode my bike, like, you know, to, to work, like, through, all the way through December. And then I remember, like, but once I was on the train, I was reading, like, something that, uh, Paul Oster wrote in the, in the New Yorker about it. And I made it like two paragraphs in and I just burst into tears and I was like, I can't even handle this. You know? So anyways, weird side note.

• 1:12:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  But about, I, I think, you gotta think about like what, what side of history we're on in, in various moments, you know?

• 1:12:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, uh, you know, it's something that I, that I'm always thinking about in terms of like, how I manage social media, like, do I participate in this? Do I, you know, it's like, I don't want to be on the sidelines and say nothing, but I also don't want to, you know, get in all sorts of arguments that go nowhere either, you know? And I probably defer too much to not saying anything because I don't want the aggravation of like a bunch of nonsense coming into my field. But I think it's imperative that we all think long and hard about where do we stand? And what side of history do we want to be on? You know, because we're at a pivotal moment right now. There's a lot at stake. Things are super crazy. They're probably going to get crazier.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  And, you know, where are we headed collectively as a culture? You know, I think we can argue about politics, but on some level, there's a crisis of consciousness happening right now. And, and, and, and we need to, we need to like raise the floor on like how we comport ourselves and how we treat our fellow man. It starts with our own individual behavior.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I definitely have, grew up with an activist ethic. I definitely, you know, have shut down like my college campus with a megaphone on the steps of my, whatever. I definitely, you know,

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  I, I definitely have, have, uh, have notched, notched a couple, you know, silly forays into, into politics, but, um,

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  So it's not frustrating. I'm like super engaged now on a personal level. But again, since you brought up social media, like what I'm doing with First Run is almost exclusively running.

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Because I feel like, yeah, as much as I want to weigh in, as much as I want to post a funny meme, or I got cute kid, like as much as I want to like post that, it's just kind of like, I kind of feel like in a crisis, if people are like going through their phone and they're just seeing like this dude running every day, that I feel like hopefully that that's a constant and that can provide people inspiration, you know. I'm not putting myself at the level of greats Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but that's always the, that's kind of a polarity in the black community.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Not everybody, you don't get to, you don't always get to choose which side you're on, the King or the, or Malcolm. Like for me, I'd love to be in the mix, maybe, but for whatever it is, like there's a running boom. I have like something to offer, I'd like to think. And so I gotta, I gotta stick with that. I gotta like, that's my wheelhouse.

• 1:15:09Rich Roll?

  Well, First Run is very specific and it has a certain aesthetic. And I think when you visit that page, like you know, okay, you, you kind of know what you're going to get. And you're very conscious and making sure that you curate that experience to kind of serve that idea. But what's beautiful about that is it is, it does produce this unifying effect, right? Which is kind of what you're all about.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  That's the editorial approach. I think like my own appetites when I was a writer and an editor, I, I, I loved, I love small town newspapers. I love police blotters. I love gazettes.

• 1:15:45Rich Roll?

  Police blotters.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, my mom still, my mom was still cuts up the police blotter and like saves the scraps. So when I go on a visit, she's like, okay, read this one. And just, okay, now read this one, you know? So I just love, I love that. And I love the idea, you know, even America's greatest writers were like shoestring reporters, you know, whether it's, you know, Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson, like in Puerto Rico, Zorn El Hurston and Langston Hughes, traveling down south and filing dispatches back to newspapers in Harlem.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Those are kind of always like my aspirations. I love just like getting off little pieces, little vignettes that kind of make people think about something and go in a different way. Talking to town or, you know, that, that, those are, those are my appetites. Those are my tastes. So if I could just tell stories and, and, and kind of like have people fall in love with running, if, if someone's training for their first marathon and the little stories I'm telling, whether like, ah, running is so hard, or running is revelatory, or running is beautiful, or running is a good excuse to get to the beach, if that's making their first marathon journey easier, that's cool. Cause when you're training for your first marathon, you're like pulling everybody into your drama.

• 1:16:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:16:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  And like people.

• 1:17:01Rich Roll?

  And you're looking for that inspiration and those nuggets of wisdom everywhere you can.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Right. And your roommate doesn't understand and your boss doesn't understand it and all that. So if.

• 1:17:10Rich Roll?

  And it's all new to you.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  It's all new. So you're like burning bright. And if, if you can just kind of like connect with sources of inspiration and like, ah, this person gets me, you know, as runners get one another, then I, I, I, I hope that, uh, that that's part of what's happening.

• 1:17:25Rich Roll?

  Well, the, your writing is beautiful.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  In these posts and I'm wondering why you haven't written a book yet. Well, you did that. You worked on that one Africa soccer book, right?

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I did work on a.

• 1:17:36Rich Roll?

  Essays.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  A book.

• 1:17:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But your own book about running and your aesthetic and like this, this idea of running culture. Come on, man.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  I, I would love that. I mean, I'm a.

• 1:17:46Rich Roll?

  That book would be the bomb.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I'm a writer. I, I know. The book could be a piece of hot garbage and I would still be proud. You know what I mean? So I don't, I don't, I'm not even, you know, I'll send you this poem later by W S Merwin about, uh, John Berryman. And, um, Merwin, obviously lives in Hawaii now, still alive. Uh, and it was at this time where he was a tutor for Berryman's kids on Mallorca or something. Berryman was an alcoholic and spinning out of control in his life. Um, but Merwin asked Berryman for advice, you know, on how to be a good writer. And Berryman's like, gives him a bunch of crazy shit, like paper your walls with rejection slips. Save every single one and just like absorb it all and get down and pray to the

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  muse. And I mean that literally, like pray for like the muse of poetry. But then at the end of the poem, spoiler alert, I'll ruin it for everybody who's not going to read it anyways. But he says. He says, how can you be sure that what you ever write is any good? And Berryman's like, you can't, you can't, you can never be sure. You die without knowing. If you have to be sure, don't write.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  So are you hanging on to that?

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, I don't care. Listen, if there's a book out there with like sketches on a cocktail napkin and it says Knox Robinson on the cover, I'm good with that.

• 1:19:08Rich Roll?

  So get it together, man.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, get these cocktails.

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  Seriously. No, I, I think you have a, you have a great book in you.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Jokes aside, I would love to write. And so, you know, not as a call to action to your listeners or whatever, but I definitely, having worked as an editor before, I could use the support of, of, of someone to come in and be like, hey, let's sit down and like have a coffee. And I think like, you can move in this vein or you can move in that. Or if I could just like pitch three concrete ideas for someone to walk it in. The other thing is too, it's just like in the music business, people releasing mixtape, mixtapes and stuff like that.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  I, I would take like 10 grand and print up my own book and just like sell it at races.

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  We're going to talk after this podcast. I'm going to get you whatever you need to get this going because I want to read this book.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  What do you think, what do you, what do you think it would be? Cause on one hand, it could be like.

• 1:20:00Rich Roll?

  I could, I, I mean, I think, I think there's a lot of different books that you, that you could write, but I think the book that I would want to read from you would be a book that is sort of part running primer for that first time marathoner. And it's not a training plan book, but it's sort of inspiration and perhaps a little bit of guidance. But what you bring to that conversation that nobody, it's like, what do you have that no one else has? What can you say that no one else can say? And what you bring to bear is this perspective on culture. And it goes back to being, you know, this vortex at the intersection of art, culture, poetry, music and running, and how running unites all, how all of these things relate to each other in the context of running

• 1:20:42Rich Roll?

  to inspire this sense that running is more than just your time or, or, you know, crossing the finish line at a race. But that it is, it, it, it's, you know, I want to say lifestyle, but that's not even, that doesn't really describe what I'm trying to get at. It's, it's an ethos, right? It is a, it is a way of life. Right, and you're the prism through which you perceive that and live it on a daily basis is unique and your ability to express it is is beautiful. So I think it would be a gift for you to find a way to really channel the best of all of that into like this primer,

• 1:21:24Rich Roll?

  you know, that people would and, you know, it could be, you know, it could have beautiful photography in it. It could bring all of that experience that you had, you know, being an editor in chief at Fader to create a book that's unlike any other running book that's ever existed.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  I would love that. I mean, I draw inspiration from from other books, you know, on running, for instance, that that are unlike others that have ever existed. So I would love to kind of like be inspired by those. But it does resonate. People want that cultural aspect. I fact of the matter is, when I was in this camp with Mo Farah, like, I did not get along well with this coach, this amazing coach. And it got to loggerheads by the end of my time there. It's a pretty caustic experience.

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  But what was the beef, man?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  It weren't just from different worlds. Like, obviously, like I said, I just showed up.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  I'm like, who's this guy's getting in the way of my vibe here?

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  I'm just like a black dude from New York who's showing up with like, the prototype Nikes and like, all black, everything clothes and like luggage and like, a photographer sliding into me and like, the guys are cool with me. It was just everything. I realize if if you've been in a certain world, this guy's like been an elite athlete or around elite athletes, that's his experience. You're meeting like a guy like me in your training camp and, you know, obviously, it's like a little disruptive. But it came down to like, one of the many amazing accusations that he made was that I was gonna leak the workouts, either to let's run or like leak, leak, leak.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  The reality is I was taking copious notes because it was fascinating to watch.

• 1:23:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  You know, but I'm not gonna like leak. Um, but the whole time I was in Ethiopia, nobody ever asked me in my time since, nobody's ever asked me about a single workout. I didn't get a DM, nothing Instagram, what were they doing? Like, all anyone ever asked was the recipe for this peanut butter tea that they made at the training camp. Like, my phone's still hot, like, yo, you better come with that recipe, yo, like, that's all I need. But that's culture.

• 1:23:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so what you're saying is we are at this moment where the the interest is in culture. The culture transcends the performance agenda.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  I think also.

• 1:23:54Rich Roll?

  As a point of interest.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think what's happened, and this is kind of what I, I guess maybe I hope to do in the beginning, I think running has been dragged into culture or like, uh, we have like a cultural analysis of running when before it was sports, you know? It's like now all we hear is like, culture, culture, culture. You don't hear the word sport so much, you know? Um, and so it's just amazing that two words that didn't even remotely coexist in the same space, running and culture can now be fused in a hashtag or like seen in a way, like even major brands, the bereft of ideas are still like, running culture. Like, trying to sound the words out like awkwardly.

• 1:24:37Rich Roll?

  Well, a great example of that is the work that you're doing with Jay Bird right now. These, these, this Run Wild series is insane. Like, the latest one, I emailed you about this, like, the Tokyo video is off the hook. It's so well executed and it just gets you so jazzed up. Like, you want to join one of these running collectives in an urban environment and just run the streets and they're, they're beautifully produced. And, and that's like the perfect vehicle for you.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  To travel to these places, immerse yourself in the quote unquote, running culture and find out, you know, the commonalities and the differences all across the world.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been amazing. I mean, it's a credit to the director, Tim Kempel, obviously, from Camp Four Collective, who is just-

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  That guy knows what he's doing.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, he's seen it. But I was just laughing today, like, this guy is, like, jumping out of a helicopter and shooting on Chamonix, but-

• 1:25:31Rich Roll?

  That's his background, is that-

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a world-class rock climber.

• 1:25:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. I thought he must have been like a music video director or something.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Nah.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  This is a world-class rock climber trying to make a music video.

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  And he's coming to me like, my whole idea is, we're gonna just shoot this thing like a music video. And I'm coming out of the music business, it's like, I don't wanna shoot a music video, B. I'm trying to do, like, I want you to shoot some rock climbing shit in Tokyo. So it's just awesome to see, like, all that energy come together and then to watch him as, like, a filmmaker work, to watch an artist at work. His process is very different from other filmmakers that I've, that had the opportunity to work. So, he's awesome. Jaybird team is awesome. They're open to so much, open to damn near anything. So, that's cool. And the music guy in me, and the music obsessive in me loves, you

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  know, them as like a music company. Like, they're always like, ah, the product is awesome, but they're, you know, running, running. I was like, let's talk music. You guys are a music company. And like, everybody at the company has like a weird music background or has that passion inside too. So, that's cool.

• 1:26:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we were talking just before the podcast, because I've been talking to those guys as well, and they were expressing the same thing. I was like, wow, you guys are like, a content company. Like, I always thought you were a hardware company. But they're, everything that's coming out of them is all about, like, creating an experience that transcends just the technology of what they're selling, which I think is pretty cool. And- You know, you see other brands getting out, we're gonna make this video series or whatever, but they've really, you know, taken that idea to a different level. So are you going to a more city? Like, how many episodes of this are you gonna do?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Well, I just came to New York. And so then I was like, super stressed. They came to New York and I was like, okay, Tokyo is incredible, London, my homie Charlie Dark, the icon of like global running and-

• 1:27:28Rich Roll?

  And that was, was that in Shoreditch?

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was like on a rooftop at dawn, like mixing off music beats, like playing to the city. I was like, oh, God, I can't catch a break. Then I gotta come to New York and I'm just gonna be like eating a slice of pizza, waiting for like the bus or something like that. What am I gonna show you in New York? And we, we took them into like deep culture. We took them into like deep Brooklyn with a couple of women, you know, running down Flatbush Avenue. We definitely, we got to see some performance aspects of Black Roses. Um, so people did do a long run, finish at exhaustion, cursing and like passing out on a track in extreme heat. So that's part of our DNA. Um, there was like a DJ set at our rooftop, playing some records.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  So there was, there was some, some, uh, there was some, it was definitely accurate vibes.

• 1:28:15Rich Roll?

  That's cool. And you're, are you gonna go, are you traveling to more cities for this or?

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't wanna reveal, I don't wanna jinx slash reveal with this next one, but the one, yeah, they had a couple of things, options, and I just like bided my time. And then like when the time was right, they're like, hey, remember that, that such and such place you mentioned? I was like, yeah. They're like, do you have connections? I was like, yeah. So hopefully in October, we're gonna be jetting out to see something really, really special.

• 1:28:41Rich Roll?

  So, yeah. So when someone says to you, running culture, I mean, this is, this is almost a phrase that you've helped coin, or if not coin, like introduce to the culture, to the culture at large. Uh, so what does that, what does it mean to you? Like, how do you define that for yourself?

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  You know, I I could be more sophisticated, you know, if I had a graduate degree or something. But if you think back to like the anthropology class that you like took when you went to college, like 101 and culture was this tribe, this nation, the Yanomami in the rainforest in the Amazon, Napoleon Shagnon's perspective on it and like, this is what culture is. This is what society means. That's my definition of culture. What are the attributes and like the ways of living that a particular group of people share? Now, it can be the Yanomami Indian, it could be the Gichi Gula folks living off the coast of South Carolina in the Sea Islands.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  So what commonalities do runners have? Because what happens after you like fall in love with running and become a runner? I love watching it happen, no matter how different you may be from from me or you, like that transformation, that transfiguration that that happens, that renders you defunct from like dating certain kinds of people, having certain kind of jobs. Once like a lot of your life is scuttled or subjugated to your dreams of running, then like you're a prisoner of culture, you know, to paraphrase this this book by Jean Genet, yeah, you're you're a prisoner of of the culture and you find yourself an acolyte

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  and an adherent of, you know, the commonalities.

• 1:30:31Rich Roll?

  A certain set of agreed upon parameters.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Not even agreed upon, right? They're just those are the parameters and you find yourself like.

• 1:30:39Rich Roll?

  In the ether that we subject ourselves to consciously or unconsciously.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I love it that it's it's deeper than like, you know, which hydration you're going to use. It's so much deeper than like which shoe you run in, like all that kind of stuff like. Oops, sorry, brands, but like I don't even feel that relates to the culture at all. I kind of feel like there's so many levels under that.

• 1:31:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  That there's a frequency and that's where the culture is.

• 1:31:05Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So let's talk about Black Roses. We just, we, we, actually, we just like skipped over like a big part of your life. I mean, basically, like you ran, you ran in college, you ran at a certain level, you were training with like super fast guys.

• 1:31:21Rich Roll?

  At some point, you were no longer the last or second to last guy. Like you competed at a pretty high level, but then you, you put running in the, in the rear view. Right?

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  And you moved to New York, you're thinking about your career. You get a job at like a muse, at an African history museum through Maya Angelou. Like, it's like.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Rich Roll?

  Maya Angelou is like your teacher or something?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. So.

• 1:31:48Rich Roll?

  I mean, break that down because how does that work?

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Well, she was on faculty at Wake Forest University where I went to school and.

• 1:31:55Rich Roll?

  She was literally your teacher?

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Like, yeah. And that was, yeah. So.

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  She teaching poetry, obviously, or?

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Uh, she was, she was, I don't want to be crazy, but she is bigger than poetry, right? So.

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  She couldn't, she couldn't.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  But I'm trying to think of the class that she is.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  She was just like teaching the human experience.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  So what's your job, man? I'll, I'll teach the human experience. Like she, she taught the human experience.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  People could pull that off, but she's one of them.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Right. And it would be everything. I mean, so it was all her works. It was like everything from like a two line utterance from a slave in the Roman Empire all the way up to, you know, something that was written in the 2000s.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Also, I was, was the guy, it wasn't too many brothers in the class. It was like the kind of thing where it was just like the good, meaning, good natured white kids like were like flocking to this class. Like Maya Angelou, you know, so, but I was, I was like, helped her down the stairs into her car like after every class. So it was like, I kind of had like a special.

• 1:33:08Rich Roll?

  You create a little bond.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Little bond. And I violated the bond, like every semester, every class, she cooks dinner at her house.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  So it's like a big thing to like go to Maya Angelou's house where she's chefing. Man, the day it happened. One of my favorite poets was making a rare appearance on the east coast. He's a west coast beatnik guy from the 50s, 60s, who never comes out east. And he was in another part of the state and like, me and this woman from just drove there and saw it and like I skipped dinner at Maya Angelou's house to go see Gary Snyder read.

• 1:33:52Rich Roll?

  That's a crazy dilemma. Favorite beat poet versus poet laureate.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Dinner, cookie dinner.

• 1:33:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cookie. How do you make that decision? I feel like she would appreciate the decision that you made? Or does she take it personally?

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, she took it personally.

• 1:34:07Rich Roll?

  She did?

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:34:09Rich Roll?

  You saw that poet? I'm right here.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  I think I'm good. I'm the, I'm the young, I'm the young poetry brother, like helping her to the car every, after every class, skipped the dinner.

• 1:34:17Rich Roll?

  Snubbed her.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Snubbed the dinner and then come back into class the next week and she says, "Mr. Robinson, your presence at dinner was greatly missed." For the whole class? And I was like, all I could say was like.

• 1:34:36Rich Roll?

  That's devastating.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  I was humiliated. And I was like, I greatly missed the dinner. That's all I could say. I just like, like sunk down.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  Did you tell her what you did?

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Of course. And think about it, Maya Angelou like knows all these guys. She was like, before she, yeah, she was a living, she was a beatnik.

• 1:35:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  You know, if you talk to.

• 1:35:01Rich Roll?

  You know, see the protege or the real thing?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Right. Well, she was around all these guys in the 50s in San Francisco. So I told her like who I saw and she's like, uh huh, okay. And then I think, I think I like passed out in her basement after graduate, on graduation night. That was awkward. I'm a narcoleptic, like a vague narcoleptic.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  Not, not because you drank too much?

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  No, no. I was, I was, I was pretty straight laced in, in school. So yeah, so it wasn't, it was, it was, it was fine. It was, it was great. She definitely had, had a lot of affection for me. And then, yeah, got me my first job in New York, like in a really bizarre episode where she just called the director of this museum up from her desk phone as I like sat there like. And just told the guy to hire me.

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  Right. So of course the guy does.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but without anything to do. So I just, again, I just show up on the first day. They have a desk, but like I didn't have, all I did for like a year of working at this museum was make like white wine spritzers at events once a month. And then like, I just went into archives and I just read. So I spent a year reading like unpubished manuscripts of like Langston Hughes. I spent a year like going into archives and looking like Basquiat paintings that have never been displayed before. I just like would be able to go into like pull out actual physical copies, typewritten manuscripts of like my favorite writers. I just spent a year reading.

• 1:36:33Rich Roll?

  Did you have this, you know, deep interest in the history of black culture prior to this? Or did that experience in the museum and the access to all of that material, did that like sort of provoke that for you?

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  The best thing was I was like, it was an era in New York and indeed in the world that was like a a renaissance in black arts and culture. So I was there in the music and spoken word scene and all that. And so I was definitely came to New York as an aspirant to like join that scene. I thought I was gonna have a spoken word CD out.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  That was gonna be your thing, right?

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, like poetry.

• 1:37:08Rich Roll?

  You say that you like, you're dismissive of yourself when you, you know that you are, right? Why? Just own it. You can still do it. You do it in your writing already.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  I was at open mic nights, you know, like I was like getting on the mic and like, you know, second to last on the, on the microphone.

• 1:37:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but look, look what you did in running, man.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  It was the same experience. It was excruciating.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was crazy. But so the best thing happened was that I kind of had like a a very, what I would probably say today is like a middle class understanding of black culture. Like, here's the politics. Sure, I was on the left. I was like more Malcolm than Martin. Here's like the canon. This is what I think. And the amazing thing about the diversity of all of our world cultures and all of our experiences. But the amazing thing for me was that at this first year in New York, I just got to see all the weird stuff, like all the third stream stuff. I got to see amazing writers who wrote two books in the seventies and never published again because they couldn't. I got to think about, you know.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Not John Coltrane versus Miles Davis, but I got to think about Sun Ra like as a third stream artist. So it was my first time. And then at the same, at that time, I was also hanging out in downtown in clubs in New York and seeing like black indie rock bands like jump off the stage into a crowd of like three people, you know? And so I just had this whole experience where I just was reading and looking and seeing like black folks living like any kind of way they wanted to. It was incredibly inspiring for me because I was just, it just freed me up from like any sort of preconceived notion. You know, when you read about like my favorite writer, Amir Baraka, when you realize he was, again, a

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  jazzy, no pun intended, like beatnik poet and was writing his opinions on the jazz music and blues and white critics will never understand it. And there was one moment where he was at a party, you know, being super intellectual and talking all loud and Charles Mingus is behind him and Mingus just turns and is like, funny, he thinks it's about him. And just like the humbling experience of recognizing that it's not about you. As a running note, Sonia Richards Ross's one time told me that her dad always reminds her the same thing, that there's no one person bigger than the sport. There's no, even Usain Bolt is like in the firmament of what all of our hopes and aspirations are. And so

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  for me at the time, it was just really humbling just to be a fly on the wall, just be a kid in the, in the mix, like watching something amazing, watching magic happen, or like finding a book that I didn't know existed, you know, and, and reading about it and, and loving it, taking it to the heart.

• 1:40:01Rich Roll?

  But some sense that you wanted to pursue some type of career that, that would place you at the center of like this culture?

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you definitely want to make it and you're young. So you want to like, yeah, it's New York, I want to be famous or whatever like that. But again, I had all these like bizarre experiences. My, my first day in Brooklyn, when I like my

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Idols at the time was like a dude who was on the first season of Real World, became a writer, became a journalist, a famous hip hop journalist. And he was like eating a slice of pizza at this pizzeria. I sat down next to him. He started talking to me and I was like, holy shit, this is Kevin Powell, like my idol. And he said, uh,

• 1:40:46Rich Roll?

  First season of Real World?

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Rich Roll?

  When they had that dope apartment in New York.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:40:51Rich Roll?

  I remember that.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. So all of a sudden, I'm sitting next to Kevin, uh, Kevin Powell. And he's like, oh, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm here, writer. He's like, listen, for the first six months, do everything, go everywhere, go to every show, go to every open mic, go to rock everything possible and then pull away from it and forget it all and just like do you. Now, I just took that as like the best advice.

• 1:41:15Rich Roll?

  Great advice.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's curiously enough, like, uh, a Czech writer gave the same advice to Langston Hughes in 1925. He said, hide and write and study and think. And between those two sort of piece of advice, that's kind of like what my acumen is as a writer and as a, as a journalist and probably even as a runner.

• 1:41:39Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. But before the journalism career cropped up, you had, you, you did this tour as a, as a manager, right? You were managing bands?

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  After, after, so.

• 1:41:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, that was after. That was, that was after Fader?

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, after.

• 1:41:51Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  So I was at Fader and was just sitting around and, you know, you're hot, you know, there's, you're hot when you get fired, you know? So a, a super amazing music label from, from London, one of the most reputable indie labels came and kind of like forced a label on me. Like, what do you want to do? You can do whatever you want. Put out the music you were writing out. I was like, yeah, cool.

• 1:42:15Rich Roll?

  To be an A and R guy, you mean?

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  Just to be, yeah, A and R, sure, but also like to like have my own label.

• 1:42:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  You know, but without caught up in like the. The business strictures and all that kind of stuff. I can just put out whatever I want of my own imprint, let's say. Uh huh. Um, but after Fader, I kind of resolved that I didn't want to be anyone's boss ever again. And um, I just didn't really take to like come in the office and checking in and reporting and all that kind of stuff. So I did one amazing reggae compilation of roots music from, from Kingston and Brooklyn. Uh, but I didn't really have like the bandwidth to pursue it. But anyways, after the label thing didn't really take off, I

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  found this band that I really wanted to put out and it was like a cosmic jazz brass band of like eight blood brothers from the South Side of Chicago. Who are like,

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  they were hard rocks. They were like young dudes. Their dad was Son Ross's first bandleader and like they kind of grew up. They were the youngest sons of 27 kids that their dad had. Wow. In this sort of cultural context, black cultural nationalism context of Chicago. So they grew up totally Afrocentric, totally vegetarian slash vegan.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Only playing their father's music. It's not even like they would play like jazz standards. They only, once they started writing music, they only played their music. And the only music they ever studied growing up was their father's music. And they studied before school, went to public school. But then of course, imagine you're like South Side of Chicago, vegan. Your dad's like a weirdo musician. You're. Yeah, that, that road gets narrow. Right. So they went to school and like became rappers. Uh huh. So they could all rap and they wanted to be like a rap group. But they came to New York and they started playing in the street in Chicago and then playing in the streets of New York. Their own compositions that are like this incredibly like addictive. They're called hypnotic brass ensemble. And that's the word for the, the way the music sounds like

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  that very North African gypsy Aeolian mode, but with like a pulsating rhythm that is just so uh, enrapturing. Hmm. So I was trying to put these guys out. Um. And I ended up kind of just like helping them out. Like, they were like playing in the street making two, three thousand dollars a day.

• 1:44:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  Like, and splitting it up every night and then like going out and playing again. I was like, hey, this could be bigger. Like, we could put out something. They went to Europe. I always remember I ran the New York City Marathon, finished, and then like jumped on a plane and went to Germany to like catch up with them for their first tour. And just, they played in the streets and made a lot of money. And I had pressed up some records with my own cash and we were selling them in the street. It was just a very mercantilist, like, retail operation. So from there, the economics were finite. Like, an eight-piece band means like eight plane tickets and hotel rooms.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  So then I was like, okay. So then I managed a four-piece, guys who are like prog rock from Soeto in South Africa. That was four guys. And then you'd be on tour and you'd see like a DJ just walking through the airport with like the laptop and a carry-on. And you're like, ah, that's what I need. And so then I ended up managing like an emergent rapper, kind of like a post-Kanye rapper named Theophilus London, who was like a great, kind of impactful artist at the time. And of course, within six months, he wants to play with a band. I was like, okay, this is killing me. So shout out to all the guys.

• 1:45:56Rich Roll?

  Are those guys all out there doing it now?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Like, they're all still touring the world. They're all still crazy. I just went to South Africa to run comrades.

• 1:46:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did? Oh, you ran comrades.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I ran comrades. And then like the day later, I'm like back with the guys in the studio. They're like, we're in the studio. Let's hang out. And I was like, I just ran 56 miles. And we're in the studio and guys are like taking three hours to like tune the drums. Like, I'm gonna stick with this running shit. I can't go back to the music business at all.

• 1:46:29Rich Roll?

  So you did that for a while?

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Rich Roll?

  And then, I mean, the inciting incident seems to be when you had your first kid, right? Because you weren't running at all. You're partying and doing whatever, right? Staying up late.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then the experience of watching my son Raul come into the world was just super affecting, you know, like as adults and now more than ever, we sit around dragging our knuckles about the state of the world and how bad everything is, rightfully so, tearing each other's eyes out. But then when you watch a child being born, you're watching like one of your own species like demand their place in the human community. And there's no other way I know how to talk about it. It's just so powerful and it requires such a singular unity of like body and mind and spirit that I just thought, man, when was

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  the last time I ever did something? Yeah, everything's cool. I'm a, you know, editor in chief of the magazine. I got an expensive Amex. I'm flying in and out of Rio with Diplo or whatever. But it's like, when's the last time I did anything with that singularity, that unity? And the only thing I could think of was running. And so the very next day, like I started running in this, you know, park across the street from my house, like one loop, then two loops, then three loops.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  How long had you taken off?

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Uh, probably 10 years.

• 1:47:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, without really any running at all?

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Zero running. I think the only time I thought about it was when the marathon came through the neighborhood every year. And then also there's always like that one day in the fall that smells like cross country or the leaves are changing and you have like a flicker of like remembering what it was like to run as a kid.

• 1:48:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I listened to an interview recently with Davi Diggs from Hamilton and I didn't know that he had been like this killer hurdler. Like he was like top flight, like Olympic trials, like super fast. And when he embarked on his career, he kind of put it in the rear view mirror. And I can't remember, maybe it was Marc Maron, I can't remember who was interviewing him, but the question was like, well, why didn't you, why didn't you just keep running? Like, he's like, because you go to the gym and people are trying to lose a little bit of weight or they're out jogging. And he's like, when I went to the track, it was like I was working on my superpower, you know? And once you kind of let go of

• 1:49:03Rich Roll?

  this idea that you're going to be a superhero. He found it difficult to like have a different kind of relationship with running. And that's kept him from pursuing it. Is that a similar, is that something similar to your experience? Or was it just, I'm done with that?

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  I think in a specific sense, maybe my own departure from running, distance running is tough in a different kind of way, but it was, it was kind of super poignant. So I didn't really revisit it, I didn't really choose to revisit it. But I do always think about that, that scene in like probably the first Superman where he's all washed out and he's like got a five o'clock shadow and he's drinking in a bar and all that kind of stuff. I feel like that, like even Superman having a bad day is like going to the dive and it's like, I'm gonna be here, no one knows who I am, you know, and like, he's not even Clark Kent, he was just like dirt, the uniform was like dirty and he's drinking whiskey in the back of the dive. And I was like, oh, that's real, you know, like even if you have your superpower, you

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  can sort of like, it can come and go, you know? The muse visits you, like, it come and go, so, so yeah.

• 1:50:15Rich Roll?

  So Raoul's born, you get back into running.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Rich Roll?

  Did you have a sense that you wanted to make, I mean, when did it, when did it occur to you that this could be like a path for you beyond just being in touch with running as something enjoyable?

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in short, I mean, I definitely like threw myself into it. I still had like the reference point of like an NCAA D1 bro where I was like, oh, my first marathon, I go out and run 115, I qualify for New York City automatically, oh, cool, I'm gonna run 230 in my first marathon, cool, boom, boom, comedy ensues, I'm training, I'm training, I'm training, whatever, whatever, but I had, life changes and everything, but I, I moved up to the country.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was it was in New York City Marathon in two thousand and eleven. I had gone to South Africa uh with this rapper I was managing, acted crazy there. Then we went to Paris for some shows and like Fashion Week.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  And hanging out with Kanye and Virgil and then like more trouble there. So I was definitely like burning.

• 1:51:25Rich Roll?

  Like real trouble or you're just mixing it up?

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, what's real, what's?

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  I don't know, man. We can go there if you want.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Nah, it's, yeah, alright. It's it's in the past.

• 1:51:36Rich Roll?

  But you're you're, I mean, you're you're blazing a bright light, right? Like, I mean, it sounds super cool. Who doesn't want to go to Fashion Week with Kanye? You know, it sounds like you're you're like living the life that everybody, you know, wishes they had.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and at the end of the day, like, it's not sustainable.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Um, so anyways, I hadn't been running, whatever, and so the marathon came up.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  But you had to get out of the city. You're like, I need a, I need like a little purge here.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was like, my kid and his mom moved to Seattle, all like the kind of landmarks and touchstones that I had were kind of like too filled with like memories of young fatherhood, so I didn't want to like deal with it. And then I was traveling so much that I was like, let me just put my stuff up in the country in like a safe house instead of like a overpriced apartment in Brooklyn. So when I come into town, I can just like hide out in the woods and then like go back on the road again.

• 1:52:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like a safe house, like safer stuff, but also like a legit safe, safe house. Like I'm getting out, yeah, I'm gonna go hide.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, of course. Um, so yeah, and it's just like Superman, like I tell you, like one night, like in the safe house, like in this town, just like revitalized me. I could come back like dangerous the next day. I'd be like, I'm back! Um, and it's still, it's still that way.

• 1:52:55Rich Roll?

  And that's where you meet that dude, right? That you start training with.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Just running one day, I was out, I was lonely, I didn't, didn't, and I just saw these guys like half a block away. But of course you can appreciate it, like, we were running the same pace, so I wasn't catching up on them.

• 1:53:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  I had to like drop the-

• 1:53:11Rich Roll?

  That's not supposed to be happening.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  Right. I'm like, ah, these guys aren't getting any closer. So I had to like drop the hammer to like catch up to these dudes. And then just imagine like- There are these white dudes and all of a sudden like a black dude just comes up to you like all sweaty sprinting and it's like uh I didn't know what I was gonna say I was like yo I was following you and they're like so and um so yeah fast friendships were formed in the instant but um yeah so I came back from from wilding out on the road and then ran New York City Marathon and like guys in the industry or guys in the streets and Brooklyn like well what are you gonna do I was like yeah I'm gonna get uh I'm gonna get top hundred and I got a hundredth place

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  and the hundredth place is the last name when they print all the results of the New York Times it's the last name on the first page Yeah, that's a big deal. That's all anybody looks at. Right. You look at the first ten names. Billboard one hundred. And I got a hundredth and my name was right there on the front page so uh so yeah so after that like things shifted like people around New York and our kind of little creative community or even in the running urban running community that was kind of like again hanging out on the sidelines um just tossing back margaritas people like yo you got a hundred I thought you were just like a guy I thought you were one of us and I'm like no I'm one of us look we're drinking I got seven inch shorts on everything's cool and they're like nah nah nah

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  nah nah what's up with this Yasuo eight hundred workout is that for real and I'm like nah man that's fake so all of a sudden like dudes men and women were kind of like coming up Getting you up for advice. Yeah and I was like begrudgingly you know started kind of like giving it a little bit and then also at the time I kind of really had this idea to start a you know a premium running magazine called First Run and I ended up taking the last little bit of money that I had from the music business and spending it all to like shoot eighty percent of this magazine like flying in a photographer to shoot like Olympians at altitude in Mexico and like all this kind of stuff and then

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  When it came time to push the button, print, you know, at the print house or whatever, it was just kind of like Instagram was more fun. Like, I didn't want to like get tied into like selling ads and like, you know, chasing checks and like another meeting in Detroit, trying to crack Big Auto for an ad, you know?

• 1:55:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, magazine business is tough.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:46Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be tough, really tough now.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would go in, you know, shout out to anybody out there. I would definitely go in and like edit or, you know, publish, co-publish a magazine because I still love it and I like know it like in my heart of hearts.

• 1:56:02Rich Roll?

  But the idea, the idea was really, I mean, this twist of like interviewing interesting people about their first run, but also really a running culture magazine, like looking at that this intersection that we've already spoken about. And there is no magazine that exists like that. Cycling has a few magazines that mimic that, some of which still exist and some of which have gone away. Like Peloton was pretty, that was kind of like in the vein, right?

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26Rich Roll?

  So that magazine still exists?

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Don't even know.

• 1:56:28Rich Roll?

  I don't know if it's still around, but there isn't anything, nobody has created anything like that for running.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's awesome.

• 1:56:34Rich Roll?

  And more people run than ride bikes.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, if you just think, if you had this publication like on your coffee table as you're training for your first marathon or your, your 50th, like a publication that, that feels like, yeah, this person gets me. I have to say like, in light of like political shifts and stuff coming to the fore, like in the Me Too era in the past year, that I definitely see now is like my idea for a magazine was super limited. It was gonna be, you have to be focused, can't be everything to everybody. But it was very much like a loose, lush, like older bro lavish premium experience for like rich dudes. It was an

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  idea. That's not me, but in terms of like, who could I shovel this idea off onto, you know? It wasn't like a super pluralistic thing, you know? But those are my references at the time, like.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  Purple magazine and Olivier Zahn and just kind of like these figures in like fashion and publishing on an editorial level. I wanted to create that, what I perceived to be that romance and that glamour that I also felt was running. Like if you hear about like Leo Manzano training at a high altitude training camp and he's like in the sauna afterwards or he's in the cooling jets, like that's an experience that like you feel a rich dude is trying to have as he's training for his marathon. It made sense to me. Nike was coming out with their premium collection designed in Japan and you know, watches were getting more expensive and having features. There was just all these kinds of things and then you could also bring into cultural element to that. Obviously, it's something that Monocle magazine is probably

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  always cooking up because it's very much, that was part of the inspiration and Tyler Brule, I guess apparently is a big fan of runners, running and has always said he wants to like do a running magazine. I think he's helping.

• 1:58:33Rich Roll?

  Bringing a literary flair.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Rich Roll?

  Sport.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also like a little fashion and style too, like being a little transgressive, like shot Leah Wallace for the cover of the first issue and she was just kind of like, you know what, let me introduce a running magazine and let me put this like empirically beautiful black woman on the cover and be wearing like a US ATF sweatshirt in the middle that does.

• 1:58:55Rich Roll?

  And you use like proper fashion photographers.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  Sure, to shoot elite athletes.

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  You know, again, another.

• 1:59:02Rich Roll?

  I like the idea. I wish that magazine existed. I would, I'd like, I'd definitely buy it.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Yo, because my fashion friends, my fashion friends are like, what are you doing? And then elites are like, what are you doing? It was definitely oil and water.

• 1:59:16Rich Roll?

  Missing every, yeah, I got you.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  It's a, and everyone, everyone dug it. And I like to think that, you know, that early thing kind of like helped proliferate some, some images and some visual language out there that I think people have picked up on.

• 1:59:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think they have. And so, so you make this decision not to go forward with the magazine, you put it all into Instagram. Which is super cool, like, you know, what you're doing with that is amazing work. And then with sort of the dispensing of advice with all these people who are like, tell me what to do, you start to cobble together just this group of people that ultimately becomes Black Roses.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of us, a core of us, were running with New York City Bridge Runners, the legendary crew that kind of like kicked this whole movement off. Shout out to Mike Stace, the founder. But yeah, like, it was a running boom, and in that era, people just had questions. People had a thirst for knowledge, and they were either gonna get it from the internet, and they were either gonna be running Yasuo 100s, and then like, crashing out in a marathon, or you could kind of like, give them at least what I sensed was training. And so, Black Roses NYC, when we started, wanted to have our cake and eat it too.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  It definitely is like, set up around like, a conservative, traditional, training schedule on a weekly level, but our conversations and our calculus is definitely at least half-informed by culture.

• 2:00:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you don't call it a club?

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  No, don't even call it a club. I mean, yeah, it's funny, you're like, what could else? No, but, you know, we call it a, it's...

• 2:01:00Rich Roll?

  A collective? Is that what you call it?

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  I like to call it a collective, because the idea when we started, like, everybody was gonna pitch in and kind of contribute what they were bringing, you know, whether you were an art gallery artist, or a bartender, or an out-of-work bartender, or a fashion person, or a photographer, and that's has happened, you know, on a cultural level. But, very swiftly, I also came to realize, people like me, were just trying to show up and like, get insight and running, and like, work on their running, so, I gotta like, I gotta, I gotta serve that, also.

• 2:01:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it has, you know, it's, I mean, it has the veneer of cool, like, it's, you know, this is not like, investment bankers, like, this is like, the cool people you wanna hang out with, right? Like, the art directors, and the, you know, graphic designers, and the photographers, and the musicians, and out-of-work bartenders, and the like.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think there might be a Wall Street guy who crept in just now.

• 2:01:58Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Yeah, but like, he's a novelty.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  Right, and he, I think he's got like, full tattoos, like, I've never seen him with a shirt on, but like, I kinda... I kind of think this tattooed guy is like, you know, so yeah, so, you know, not in any filter or whatever. And I'm definitely on the side. I'm like a post 2008 crash guy. Like I left the banks and like work, you know, put my money in a credit union when I have it. But uh, so yeah, I'm definitely not like Wall Street, you know, that type. So it is, it is like a cultural outfit for sure.

• 2:02:28Rich Roll?

  And why black roses?

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Uh, it comes from this amazing reggae song, dancehall reggae song by Barrington Levy, Black Roses in My Garden. That's about the rarest flower that you never see.

• 2:02:40Rich Roll?

  Uh, and so what does that mean in terms of what you're trying to cultivate?

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's a, I think it's a call out to the kind of individual that comes into the squad. They're super diverse. Um, all walks of life and people who didn't even know each other before. And like, for some reason, they, something in them draws them to the squad. I was rather uncharitably the other day saying that like some kind of like flaw in them brings them to the squad. And someone's like, well, yeah, you have that too. I was like, no, I'm a nice guy.

• 2:03:15Rich Roll?

  But um, A part like left of center in some way.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Definitely left of center. And a lot of times there's been people with like intense heartache that need healing and a distance running practice sometimes offers that. I'm definitely not a mental health professional and have learned the hard way that creating that context for people to explore their pain and come out on the other side is definitely not to be taken lightly. So that's something that I, I have had to revisit and kind of,

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  think about it a little more chastely. Um, but in the, in that sense, it is sort of that kind of like pathos coming together to, for, for self-improvement and the improvement of a group and a community.

• 2:04:03Rich Roll?

  And that idea that the, the, the black rose, this rare flower. Needs to be taken care of or tended to with a little more attentiveness.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:04:14Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful, man.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  It's a, it's an inspiration. It's an inspiration on tough, when it's tough times, like the song definitely very simply, you know, puts it out there for like, for what it is about. Like you gotta water it.

• 2:04:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And at the same time, there is like, I mean, you had a bunch of people qualify for Boston. Like it's legit training.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Rich Roll?

  So it's not just like, hey, let's look at the street murals.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I laugh about it. Like I, I feel like if you come in Black Roses, like the weird thing is, again, you're like a bartender, you could come around Black Roses and then like sit down with Galen Rupp and like talk about his training. Like I've just seen it happen bizarrely, you know? So you come through Black Roses and just my perspective and what I bring is informed by

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  a handful of experiences and a handful of people. I just like learned it, you know, from them in first person. And that's what I have to bring. I'm not like the kind of like organized coach with like a file on everybody and like the desktop on the laptop charting out data, you know? But like, trying to feel.

• 2:05:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying to feel my way through it.

• 2:05:23Rich Roll?

  So can anyone show up or do you have to, is there some how to, I mean, with your profile kind of getting more and more out there, you probably have a lot of people, probably too many people who want to be part of this.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  I'd like to think so. That's cool. Um, but like, that's not even my concern. Um, that's something I don't ever pursue. Uh, my default mode is not returning emails. So like, I don't do that. I just, that's, you know, like you're not gonna like crack a marathon by like emailing, you know? Obviously I shouldn't be returning the emails.

• 2:05:58Rich Roll?

  But, um. It's getting harder these days.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  It's rough. It's like, what happened? This was the savior. Now it's just like, um, but honestly, if you like, come up, if you come out and show up, if you find us. That's cool.

• 2:06:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so make it a little bit hard, like make people have to work to figure out what's going on. And if they really want it, they'll they'll figure it out.

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the model is like, you, oh, cool. Oh, I love green tea. Zen, zen, zen. I want to join a monastery. Cool, you want to join a monastery, fly to Japan, sit outside in the snow, outside the monastery gates for six days and wait. And then on the sixth day, they're going to open up the door and like, see if you're still there and be like.

• 2:06:38Rich Roll?

  Like the dude who is trying to get into Fight Club.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  It's that exactly, you know?

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's it draws its inspirations, you know, from like even my studies of East Asian religious philosophy when I was in school and trips to China and Japan, like, you know, that's, that's kind of like what it is. I do have like a certain kind of profile where I was a music journalist and all that, but also I translated Tang Dynasty poetry and like speak Chinese and like, definitely.

• 2:07:09Rich Roll?

  You speak Chinese?

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm more Daoist than I'm like.

• 2:07:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  Confucianist, you know, like, yeah. So it's like.

• 2:07:17Rich Roll?

  There's a lot going on.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  There's a lot going on. And I like to go out, like, when I moved to this town and I could just show up and like, take off the Saint Laurent suit and just get on the track. I like just showing up to the track and like pushing people past their zone. And people aren't asking me like this or that.

• 2:07:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I've heard you talk about this before, but I've had this experience myself, which is when you're, when you're with other people, when you're training, when you're working, it's, it never occurs to me to ask somebody like, hey, what do you do? Like, what's your job? Like, it's just not part of the vernacular. And I don't know whether that's just because there's some unifying principle around running in a collective group that brings people together on a different level where suddenly that just is not relevant.

• 2:08:03Rich Roll?

  But I think that's something that's, that's like really cool and special about that experience of, you know, group training.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's funny. I mean, there's a guy in the group now who was part of like, a like, a raging hot indie band in London, like, very recently.

• 2:08:23Rich Roll?

  But like, no one knew or something?

• 2:08:25Speaker 01

  Well, people who like that kind of music do. But the great thing about Black Roses is like, it's a super diverse group. Like, one day, Malcolm Gladwell, cool with Malcolm, Malcolm came out, trained with us.

• 2:08:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Awesome thing about Black Roses is like, half the people are showing up and be like, oh, oh, my God, what is that? And then the other people like, yo, who's the dude in the orange jacket with the Afro? Who's his barber? Malcolm gets on the track. We're doing like 12 by 400 or something.

• 2:08:54Rich Roll?

  He's fast.

• 2:08:55Speaker 01

  He tears through the group. Takes his shirt off. He's just running like guns out, like tearing up these 400s. And I like beating people up to this day about, I was like, what was it like looking at Malcolm Gladwell's back before he dropped your ass?

• 2:09:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Like, you know, like, what was it like your favorite author dropped you on the track?

• 2:09:14Rich Roll?

  Like, not only is he smarter than you.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. He dropped you. He put the hammer down on you. Malcolm Gladwell ran 456 at Fifth Avenue. What did you run? Okay.

• 2:09:25Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:27Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:28Rich Roll?

  That must have been a moment.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  That's, that's how that, that goes. I mean, but for me, like, that experience is exactly the same as like, Abdi calling me up or like kicking it with, with those guys and or like hanging out with Elliot, you know?

• 2:09:45Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be cool looking back at all these experiences that you get to have that are really a function of you making this decision like, hey, I love this thing. I'm going to invest in it because there's no clear career path. Like, hey, oh, I was a music manager. I ran a marathon. I did pretty good.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Rich Roll?

  But like, you're not a pro athlete. You're not, you know, but you've been able to create this thing out of whole cloth based on your passions.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would like to, I love that I have, um, like a lot of young people kind of like follow me on Instagram for inspiration. Cause you know, when I quit running in the nineties in college, like, what did you do? And I still feel like that's the same for like a lot of young people. Like, if you don't get the college scholarship, do you keep running? Like, how, how would you, if you were in high school on the track team, maybe you were good, maybe you weren't, whatever. You didn't get a scholarship, like, how did you, how would you keep running? Like, what are, what's the catchment? What's the safety net for kids to keep pursuing something that hopefully that they love? You're a D1 athlete, or D3 athlete, or juke, or whatever.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  How do you, how do you keep doing it if you want to? Or even if you don't, how could you like, touch on that inspiration? And I like showing young people that there's like, an older dude who loves it. And like, loving it can mean like, linking up with Ricky Gates and like, jamming in the Rockies for, for six days straight, you know?

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  I feel that, I feel, I feel like, when I see who's digging on it, high school elites and college elites. I'm like, yeah, there's something you can do like, after this, if you don't pick up a pro contract, you know?

• 2:11:27Rich Roll?

  Where do you want to take this? Like, where, do you think about what you want it to become? Or do you just show up for the experience?

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, this, this moment, it's, it's, it's tough, like, as seasons change, you know? And so, I gotta think about what my next moves are, and, and all that. And so, I definitely do hope it, it, it be, it, it changes, you know? But, man, like, two years ago, I went up and, again, I visited burnt Heinrich at his cabin in Maine. Like, typical approach. I drummed up his email off like, an obscure university website, emailed him. And like, burnt Heinrich like, wrote me back. It's like, sure, we'd be delighted to host you. And I just drove up with my son and a photographer, like, showed up to the cabin. And like, stayed, and like, my son bonded with burnt Heinrich.

• 2:12:20Speaker 01

  And like, caught frogs with burnt Heinrich, and like, went home with tadpoles. And like, now burnt Heinrich sends books to my son.

• 2:12:26Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  So when you think about someone like that, who's like, made a career of writing, and has been passionate about running his whole life, and has kept that through. I like to think of it like that, hopefully, that I'm setting up enough, sort of...

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  Or I'm riding enough waves that I can kind of continue doing what I'm doing as a as a rock on tour, as a storyteller.

• 2:12:51Rich Roll?

  Another reason why you gotta write this book, Matt. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold you to it.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  I need to, please, please.

• 2:12:58Rich Roll?

  All right, we gotta wrap this up and close it down, but I want to end it with one question. The Tokyo video that you did opens with a line, a voiceover line from you, which is, "Running is an act of rebellion." So it would be great if you could kind of explain that to round this thing out.

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  Nobody wants you to run. You're supposed to just be a digit. You're supposed to just be like a cipher. You're just supposed to be like a one or a zero in the code. You're not supposed to like have your own volition. You're not supposed to get out and like think for yourself. You're not supposed to like feel, you know? And running is like the first and the most crucial thing, aside from getting up in the morning, that like you can actually feel. It may be good, it may be bad, it may be hot, it may be cold, it may be hard, it may be easy, it may be like endorphin based, and it may be just like rage inducing.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  But like, running is our, one of our oldest tools, and it's there for all of us at our disposal to, to feel. And feeling is, is free, and feeling is freedom. And so when I say it's rebellion, it's a way to throw off all our pressures and all our expectations and all the sort of like lies that other people have sold us and all the lies that we tell ourselves, all our self hatred and our self doubt and all our minimizing, you know, all our quack relationships and bad dates and like mistakes that we've

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  made in the past, whether that was last night or last year, 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Running is a chance to, to, to, to do something new. And so that is rebellion when given the choice between running and...

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Succumbing to that vortex.

• 2:15:14Rich Roll?

  I think he just wrote the foreword to your book.

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  Right there, man.

• 2:15:21Rich Roll?

  That was beautiful.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:15:22Rich Roll?

  It's good talking to you, man.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This is super special.

• 2:15:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. If you want to connect with Knox, the best way to do that is probably...

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  Email.

• 2:15:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:34Rich Roll?

  He'll probably read it, but he's not going to email you back.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Of course, I'm reading that shit.

• 2:15:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Instagram, right? First Run on Instagram?

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:41Rich Roll?

  Anywhere else?

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:15:43Rich Roll?

  If you want to, if you're in New York City...

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  Come hang out.

• 2:15:45Rich Roll?

  You're spinning vinyl, right, in Brooklyn?

• 2:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Rich Roll?

  On Sunday nights, or when does this happen?

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Once a Sunday a month.

• 2:15:50Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  From like 2 to 5 p.m. At a great reggae bar called Lover's Rock in Bed-Stuy. Come through. But I'm around, man. I'm like, I'm in the streets for better for worse. I'm like, I'm with the people, so, you know. Wherever they bees at, that's where I'm gonna be.

• 2:16:08Rich Roll?

  That's where you're gonna be.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Awesome.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Great talking to you. Really appreciate it.

• 2:16:12Rich Roll?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:16:13Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:16:17Rich Roll?

  I would say "super cool" are two words that come to mind. My heart is full. I just love that exchange. I could have kept going on with him for hours and hours longer, and I really hope that you connected with Knox as much as I did. Definitely want to have him back on the podcast at some point. Oh, and this was obviously recorded before Kip Chog crushed the Marathon World Record in Berlin. Knox ran that race as well, so how cool was that to hear him talk about hanging out with Elliot? Very cool. Anyway, let Knox know how this one landed for you. Hit him up on Instagram @FirstRun, and you should all follow him there as well.

• 2:17:01Rich Roll?

  His posts are always beautiful and thought-provoking. As always, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com to expand your experience of today's conversation beyond the earbuds. And if you are looking for additional nutritional guidance, you don't know how to cook, you don't like cookbooks... You're trying to get more plant-based, you're plant curious, but you're not sure where to start? Check out the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. There you will find thousands of plant-based recipes, totally customized based on your personal preferences, unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and amazing customer support seven days a week from experts, people who really know

• 2:17:43Rich Roll?

  what they're talking about, ready to answer all of your questions, no matter how frivolous. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. To learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work that we do here on the podcast, share it with your friends, your favorite episode, put it on social media, whatever, hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or on whatever platform you enjoy this content, and I appreciate you. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for graphics. DK for sponsor relationships. And theme music, as always, by Anna Lema. Thanks for the love, you guys.

• 2:18:27Rich Roll?

  I will see you back here next week with another incredible episode. Who's going up next week? Let me look at my calendar. Hold on a second here. We have, ooh, Jedediah Jenkins. He was on the show three years ago. I just recorded an episode with him yesterday. And, oh my God, I love that guy. What an amazing human. That's a really good one, so you have that to look forward to. It will publish on September 30th, 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. Until then, get out and go for a run. Peace, plants. Namaste. [music]