On Sobriety, Prison & His Quest to Become The Fastest Human To Run Across The United States

People ask me all the time, “Who inspires you, Rich?” For the most part, the people that inspire me are people you've never heard of. Everyman guys like Josh LaJaunie who toil tirelessly yet essentially anonymously to actualize profound personal change. The single dad working two jobs that still finds a way to lose 50 pounds, get off his statin medication and run his first 10K. Or the soldier stationed in the Middle East doing his best to eat plant-based despite confronting tremendous daily obstacles. Then there are guys like Charlie. The story of Charlie Engle first found it's way into my consciousness back around 2006 or 2007. I still vividly recall hearing Charlie relate the facts of his experience in a radio interview he did with a host I cannot recall. What I do recall is just how moved I was by his journey. A story that didn't just click with me, but one I related to with every fiber of who I am. Addict. Alcoholic. Sober. Ultrarunner. Father. Felon. Inspiration. Charlie is a man of very high highs and very low lows. A man with addiction and athletic stories of Gilgamesh proportions that make Finding Ultra sound like pre-school recess. An alcoholic crack addict essentially living out of his car, it took gunshots in his Toyota 4-Runner and the birth of his son in 1992 to finally get sober. Ultrarunning became the focus of his affections, an affair that took him to stunning heights and accolades, the nadir being an unprecedented 111-day run across the Sahara Desert with compadres Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin — a feat chronicled in the Matt Damon narrated documentary entitled Running the Sahara. Life was pretty good. Certainly not entirely balanced, but hey, nobody's perfect. He had done some amazing things. Maybe he had a shot at some modicum of happiness after all. Then came quite possibly the most improbable, unpredictable challenge he could ever imagine facing. A saga with all the trappings of a bad B-movie. An obsessed local IRS agent illogically hell-bent on justice. Wire taps. Garbage probes. And the requisite wily female dispatched to enchant and entrap. A saga culminating in a federal conviction for mortgage fraud for misstating income on so-called “liar loan” documents (something hundreds of thousands of people did), Charlie heads to Beckley Federal Prison in West Virginia. A poster child for everything awry with the mortgage backed security crisis and fallout of recent years, Charlie serves 16 months. How do you survive something like that? And yet Charlie comes out the other side not just intact, but quite possibly more whole than when he entered. A man changed by the experience, but maybe more attuned to what really matters. And a man running better than ever. Just one year after his release, Charlie returned to the Badwater 135 to clock a 5th place finish and break the master's world record by over 3 hours. Next up? Aside from getting married this weekend, Charlie will attempt to run across the United States faster than any human being ever has previously. A feat he calls Run 2 Boston, Charlie and wheelchair athlete extraordinaire André Kajlic will line up at the LA Marathon on March 9, complete the 26.2 miles and then just keep going. And going. Until they reach Boston, where they will run that marathon. All in an effort to raise funds and awareness for the victim's of last year... Read more HERE. Enjoy! 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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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Welcome to episode 67 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Charlie Engel.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. Rich Roll here. It's the Rich Roll Podcast, the first one of 2014. Happy New Year, everybody. Hope you guys had a great holiday season. I certainly did. What do we do here? Well, each week, except for the last two weeks, sorry about that, you guys. Hey, man, I need a little vacation, too. I need a little bit of a break. I've been overcommitted. My intention was to make sure that there was a new podcast every week, but things got really crazy and just I overestimated, or I should say, yeah, I overestimated what I was going to be able to deliver. So, sorry about that, but that will not happen again.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  It is a new year, and one of my strong convictions for this year is to really turn the volume up on the podcast. That is my focus, getting you the best guests and, of course, never missing, doing at least one per week. And... At the beginning of January of each year, that's the time of year where you sort of sit down and take stock of your life, what's working, what's not, what do I need to discard, what should I turn the volume up on? And we can always use a little inspiration, right? It's always nice to hear the story of somebody who has done something extraordinary, maybe done something even so extraordinary, you didn't even think it was possible that a human being could accomplish that.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And today's guest certainly fits that bill. Charlie Engle is a guy who I have admired from afar for quite some time. He's a great source of inspiration to me, somebody whose story I've followed for many, many years, but until today I had actually never met him in person. We were both at Badwater this last year, I didn't actually meet him, and I've spoken to him on the phone, etc. And actually could have interviewed him via Skype some months ago, but I really wanted to do it in person. And I'm so glad that he was passing through Los Angeles today en route to Big Sur, where he's getting married in a couple of days, which is cool, to sit down and chat with me. And we had an amazing conversation in excess of two hours.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  So many points of commonality and interest that I have with him, I could have literally spoken to him all day. Everything from alcoholism and addiction recovery, to our love of ultra-running, to this search, this ongoing search for a balanced existence, and what does it mean to be happy and content? How do you sort of pursue a healthy relationship with your partner? What is it like to write your memoir? He's in the middle of writing a book called Running in Place about his experiences. We talk, of course, about some of his big races, like running the Gobi Desert and running Badwater, which this past year he broke the Masters' record and got fifth place.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  You might, if you've never heard of Charlie Engle, you might have some knowledge of one thing he did, which is he was one of the three guys who ran across the Sahara Desert a couple of years ago. And it was documented in a documentary, not surprisingly, called "Writing the Sahara", where over 111 days Charlie and two other guys traversed the entire Sahara Desert in this wonderful documentary that's narrated by Matt Damon, that I believe you can get on Netflix, or you should be able to find it anywhere. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. It's pretty remarkable. We talk about that, and we talk about Charlie's next big adventure, which is that he is on the cusp of attempting to break the world

• 5:03Speaker 01

  record for the fastest transcontinental run. In other words, he's going to try to be the fastest person to ever run across the United States. And he's kicking that off on March 9th. He's going to run the Los Angeles Marathon, and then he's going to keep going. And he's going to go, and go, and go, until he gets all the way to Boston, and run the Boston Marathon. He's doing this to honor and raise awareness and funds for the victims of the Boston shooting from the previous year. And he's doing it along with a guy named Andre, I think you said Krylek, Krylek, who is a disabled athlete who is going to

• 5:45Speaker 01

  try to break the wheelchair record for fastest person to wheel across the United States. So that's kind of amazing, that they're partnering up to do this together. We talk about that. But what is really kind of distinctive and amazing about Charlie are these incredible high highs and low lows of his personal life. Everything from, you know, suffering from crack addiction, and, you know, essentially living in his truck and getting shot at, to the high highs of crossing the Sahara, or, you know, winning some crazy ultra marathon, to then being incarcerated, being convicted of mortgage fraud, and going to prison for

• 6:28Speaker 01

  16 months federal prison. It's fascinating to hear him talk about what it was like to be incarcerated, and...

• 6:36Speaker 01

  How he navigated that experience while keeping his head high and retaining a positive attitude, not just retaining a positive attitude, but exuding it to the extent that he was able to inspire his fellow inmates. He continued his running, even did his own self-styled Badwater Race, running around the prison yard until he had completed 135 miles. And in so doing, getting some of his fellow inmates out and running themselves and some of the personal sort of stories of some of his friends in prison is quite touching and interesting in its own right. So, a remarkable epic life story, a very

• 7:19Speaker 01

  dynamic personality, someone who definitely knows how to spin a yarn. As talented as he is running, his greater talent may be his compelling and dynamic personality. But anyway, he is a great guy. Again, I am grateful that he took the time to sit down with me to share with you guys his story and I find it to be very inspiring and a great way to kick off 2014. So, I hope you enjoy it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, introducing Charlie Engle.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  How you doing?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. There's a lot going on right now.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  There is, man. I appreciate you taking the time to swing by the house on your way north.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Well, based on this beautiful setting right here, you can ask me to swing by anytime you like.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Right. It's cool. We're sitting in the garage. It's gotta be like 74 degrees out or something like that. We have the door rolled up, which is why you can hear the leaf blower guy or whatever's going on.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's 74 in North Carolina too right now.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Negative 74, maybe, you know. Beautiful day here. I know the rest of the world is gripped in a polar vortex, but we're pretty lucky here.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  I feel bad for them right now, but I'm gonna let that go just for the minute and just enjoy where I am.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Right. Be present, Charlie, right?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Wait, have you been talking to Anastasiana back there? Because being present has not been easy for me lately.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  It's not my default, but I've been told that it's a better way to live that way.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I hear that too. I'm gonna try it sometime.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  So you're getting married?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  I am. I'm getting married in three days. So Saturday up in Big Sur to beautiful woman Anastasiana Hatcher. Sitting over your behind you.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Sitting behind you. I can verify that she's quite lovely.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  I'm just really glad that she hasn't gotten a chance to speak to all that many people who know me up till now.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  That's why you're racing to marry her as soon as possible before she finds out.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Trying to keep things isolated.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Good, man. And there's, you know, there's so much to talk about. I just tweeted out that we were gonna sit down and talk and I was just thinking, there's so many things I want to talk to you about. We could be here all day, you know? I mean, so many points of interest and relatability from the addiction story, the recovery story, the ultra running, you know, the epic sort of adventures that you have in the works right now. I mean, I don't even know. I don't even know where to start. But I guess what I'd like to start with is what's about to happen. You're about to embark on this cross-country run, this attempt to break the world record for fastest guy to run across the United States. So let's talk about that a little bit.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Great. Yeah, I'm calling it Run to Boston and it's because I'm running to Boston.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's a very creative title, Charlie.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  It's the way I work. So, no, but I'm, along with a good friend of mine, Andre Kailik, we are going to begin at the LA Marathon. When the gun goes off and run the marathon in LA. Unfortunately, it goes.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  That's March 2nd?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  March 9th.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  March 9th, okay.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  And unfortunately, it goes east to west.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to double back.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Which is really annoying. I mean, it seems like such a small amount of distance, but it goes.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Well, if you, if you miss breaking this world record by four hours or so, then we can point our finger at that, right?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  That would be bad, but we need the mileage anyway, so it's actually okay. So we'll start there, run to Santa Monica and, and symbolically, you know, be at the coast right there and then turn around and head back when everybody else is enjoying their, their beer and bagels and continue running that day. Andre is actually.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Andre Krajjlik?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  It's actually Kajlik.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Kajlik.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Andre, I wrote about him several months ago in Runner's World. I did a feature for Runner's World about Andre. He and I met in Brazil just a year ago during the Brazil 135. Sort of a Badwater sister event over there. And I come across this guy, 20 miles into the race, who's in a wheelchair and he's going up this incredibly steep climb. And I'm like, I'm seeing him like I'm seeing a, I don't know, some sort of, you know, ghost out in the middle of the, of the jungle. And I get closer and indeed he is in a wheelchair.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So he's like, it's like an off-road wheelchair?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. He's put off-road wheels on this somewhat standard racing style wheelchair, a little more upright than the ones you see, like in the Boston Marathon. And he's going up this hill. He's actually got a guy with him, a crew member who has a knee in his back. So he's not helping him at all, but he's making sure that when he rolls forward six inches, that he doesn't roll back.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's gonna ask if there's some kind of braking mechanism to prevent you from going backwards.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  There's not. He needs, he needs to work on that. But, and I, I come up and I speak to him for just a second and I continue on up the, the mountain and I'm with a friend of mine, Chris Roman. We're running next to each other and Tony Portera, two guys who've done Badwater before many times. And I will freely admit, I turned and looked at them and I said, there is no way in hell that that guy is gonna make it to the finish line. It wasn't a-

• 13:03Speaker 01

  How many miles in were you?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're like 20 miles in.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And I know what's coming. We hit these jungle portions where there were muddy, single track, you know, I mean, not the kind of thing you can be in any sort of chair.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  When he got out of his chair, tethered the wheelchair to a tether, literally went on the ground, he'd go 50 feet up, pull the wheelchair up behind him, go another 50 feet, pull it up.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Anyway, 62 hours later, he finishes this race.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And I went and asked him if he would mind if I pitched a story to Runner's World about him.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  And he said, sure. And I did, and they loved the idea. And he was the first in a series of stories that I'm doing called Hard Won Wisdom.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Where most of the article is really their own words, quotes from them. But Andrea and I started talking about, I told him, I said, you know, something I'd really like to do is to take another shot, because in 2008, I tried to break the same record.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  So I'd like to take another shot at the transcontinental record. Would you be interested? I just asked him if he'd be interested in doing it, because I thought it might be cool for, you know, for a guy in his position to take a shot at that record, too. He calls me back a couple of days later, and he's the one who said, hey, I was just looking at the calendar, and did you know that the LA Marathon and the Boston Marathon are 44 days apart?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  This year? And I'm like, wow, that sounds like a terrible idea.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Let's do that.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Well, the thing about that, too, is that at least the cross-country running record is, what is it, 46 days?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  It is.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  It's close to that, right?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  But the cross-country wheelchair record is like 71 days or something like that. So he's looking at, oh yeah, I'm gonna cut this in half.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't want to be overconfident on his part, because he wouldn't like it. But, I mean, I think, well, yes, pun intended, the wheels would have to come off for him to not break-

• 15:04Speaker 01

  To not break it.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Right, because he's just, you know, he won the, he won Kona in the hand cycle division a couple of years ago, not this past year, but the year before. And he's just a- He's a tough guy, you know, and he is, um, his story is amazing. You know, he lost, uh, he lost his legs, uh, wasn't a, wasn't born that way and didn't, didn't fight in any wars, you know, had a, a crazy, almost unexplainable accident in Prague. Went out with some friends and had a few cocktails and went his own separate way later that night and ended up falling off a plane, train platform onto the tracks and got run

• 15:47Speaker 02

  over by five subway cars. And, you know, it took one of his legs all the way up to the hip and the other one mid femur and broke every rib on one side. And I mean, there's absolutely no, no logical reason that, that he should still be alive after that accident. But he, you know, he's gone on to not just live a full life, but a, you know, really a fully functional or more than functional life. And so I'm, I'm, I'm excited to have some, you know, company like him. It's very, it's very humbling. And I think again, that he'll, he's actually going to attempt this record in a, on a basically

• 16:29Speaker 02

  stock wheelchair, like a, like a street wheelchair.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  You're kidding, not, not with the zip wheels on it and the whole thing?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Why is that? Why is he handicapping himself further?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  I think it's a message in a way. I mean, he wants to, he, he wants to say, cause he's, these racing wheelchairs are really expensive and there's a lot of folks out there who are in wheelchairs and the idea that you can't have exercise or that you can't be active because of that is something that he feels very strongly is not the case. And so, you know, he'll have to make some modifications and it may not be, you know, fully stock, but it will certainly be as close to it as he can make it.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Wow, that's amazing. And just, you know, in case people are, are not comprehending what we're talking about here, the intention is to, you're basically going to have to cover about 70 miles every single day in order to cross the country in 44 days. And that's running or wheelchairs, rolling 70 miles every single day without any rest day. So how do you even begin to approach that, not just physically, but mentally?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Those people that know me know that the mental part of it is, that is the big question. And it may just be that I don't have enough going on up there to really think about it.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, to backtrack, when you, when you ran across the Sahara, that was what 111 days or something like that, right? So you've gone more days, but that was around 40 some odd miles a day, right?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  It was, it was gonna be a record if we could make it all the way across, which of course we did, it was going to be a record, whether it took, you know, 75 days or 150 days, it would be a record. So when the inevitable logistical or physical problems came up, they didn't really curtail the possibility of the record. The only thing that would do that would be if, you know, if Libya hadn't let us into Libya. In this case, and if we had a bad day in Africa, we could, in fact, I could call it, you know, a short day. I could say, okay, today we're gonna do 40 miles instead of 50 or whatever. And that's just not the case with run to Boston. You know, we, we have to cover 70 miles every

• 18:48Speaker 02

  day. And I, I made a lot of mistakes in 2008.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  When you're, you and Marshall were doing that run across the US.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, it was, you know, one thing is, I spent a ridiculous amount of time before that expedition. I mean, for six months, having to deal with almost every aspect of the production. There was a film, there was, you know, me dealing with my own training and all of that. And I really just didn't, we had a great production company, Next Productions, that was doing the production of the film. And they were awesome. But I was really left alone for all the rest of it. This time I have a partner in Andre, who is equal in his approach to the way we're doing this. And he is taking on, you know, a lot of the

• 19:36Speaker 02

  planning and logistical tasks. And in 2008, I was left to do those myself. And, and I also overtrained. I made the mistake that I tell other people don't do all the time. I was just-

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Well, it's because it has to be so daunting and so fear provoking that you almost can't help yourself from overtraining.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I need to run 500 miles a week. When I'm crossing the country, 500 miles a week and that's for six weeks in a row. And that is an absurd, if I actually think about that, uh, I would recognize that it's simply, you know, not possible. I mean, and, and

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So it's back to the moment.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It's back to the moment.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Being in the present moment and being in the now. And we had an interesting conversation on the phone the other week where you were talking a little bit about this and you were saying, you know, in, in sort of reflecting back upon how you overtrained last time and, and this understanding based on your experience that, that the body will adapt. You just have to get through the first two weeks and then the body almost sort of says, okay, I get what's going on.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  You're trying to kill me.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Kind of adjust, but you've got to take those first couple of weeks really easy and cautiously.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and the first time I was absolutely a, a slave to the schedule. Like if it said, we had to run 70 that day, I ran 70. When had I stopped at 60? I might've actually salvaged a decent night's sleep and, and whatever. I just wasn't willing to, to change it. This time, would I love to run 70 on all those first days? Absolutely. Because any day I don't run 70 is another day I've got to run farther than 70. But the reality is if I destroy myself in the first two weeks, then it's a moot point.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Done.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter what happens after that. So I've been working actually with Jeff Galloway. He's been kind enough to help me with some training programs that initially made no sense to me at all because Jeff believes very strongly in sort of a run, walk approach when he's training people for marathons. And when I reached out to him to say, hey, here's what I'm doing, you know, can you help me figure out a way where I can actually cover 70 miles a day in 15 hours or less? Get, uh, you know, some time to eat, get a quick massage and hopefully get a minimum of seven hours of sleep.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Can you help me? And he absolutely stepped up and said that he thought he had a plan for me. And, and he has given that to me. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's, it's very strange as a runner sometimes to Walk, you know, to sort of, you know, fast hike, which I actually do pretty well, but to, to slow it down and realize that the goal, of course, is to get to the finish.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it seems counterintuitive and yet at the same time, it seems completely elementary. Like if you, if you, if you just have to cover those 70 miles, you know, between when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night, it seems logical to me that the best way to do that is to incorporate walking into it. And even, you know, after I crewed Badwater this past year, people were like, well, what, you know, what is it like? What kind of pace are these people running? And I'm like, you don't understand, like, there's a lot of walking. Every time there's an incline, people are walking, they're marching, they're doing a fast paced hike or what have you. So to me, it seems like that would be, of course, that's the answer to pacing yourself all the way across the US.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Well, Badwater is a great example because when I, when I speak to audiences very often, I'll, one of the first questions I'll ask, because I'll say, okay, who in here can run an 11 minute mile? Most everybody in the room raises their hands. I'm like going, just one mile, 11 minutes. They're like, everybody's got their hands up. Like, okay, if you could do that for every mile at Badwater, you would set a new course record. No, you wouldn't just win, you'd set a new course record. And people are looking around going, what? Like, yeah. I said, it's also, you know, it's like, it's like running on the sun and it's, it's crazy hot. And there's other things that just happen that you can't imagine would happen. But in Running

• 23:52Speaker 02

  America, I mean, Running America back in 2008, what I learned, I tried to be proactive and account for every possible thing that could go wrong. And I think I did that to, to a certain degree, but every possible thing did go wrong. And so while I was, while I had acknowledged those things might happen. I really wasn't completely prepared for what to do about it when they did.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  For like, what would be an example of something going wrong?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  You know, well, the best example is three days before that run started, I actually was diagnosed with a, a staph infection called MRSA. And I'd never heard of it before. I didn't even know what it was. I'm like, okay, little staph infection. I'll, I'll take some antibiotics. The doc who was with us actually said, look, you know, you really can't take antibiotics right now. First of all, they probably won't help. But if you do, they just destroy your system and you're getting ready to try to run 70 miles a day. So I'm not sure what I could have done any differently there, other than, you know, not getting the hot tub, but uh, you know, it, I, I think that the-

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And ultimately, that's what, that pulled you out of the race, with infection.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  It was, and I had 20 different injuries that took place that are fairly normal. Most were overuse injuries, tendonitis, blisters, I mean, you name it, things that are fairly common, but you deal with them. And as I said before, the body has an amazing ability to adapt to stress and to overcome those things. And one after another, these, these injuries, the, the doc did an incredibly great job of helping me and they all went away but one. You know, and I had this tendonitis in the front of my right ankle and my, my right foot had gone numb, basically, and

• 25:45Speaker 02

  and he, he basically said, one day, look, it's going to be permanent. You know, the nerve damage here is going to be permanent if you keep running on it. And I still have three toes that are numb on that foot. But you know, it's, it's, and I, I, against everything inside me, I made the decision, you know, to, to stop at that point. I jumped on a bike, actually, and rode the rest of the way across the country and, and supported Marshall and, and was- You know, as good of a cheerleader as I, as I could be for him and hopeful that for the project overall that he would be successful and he, and he, and he was, he did make it. So that was great.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  But looking back on that and thinking, all right, here's what I'm going to do differently this time. You're not going to overtrain. You're incorporating this run, walk method. What are some of the other things that you're going to do a little bit differently?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Well, nutritionally, I'm really going at it differently. I've always had the attitude, honestly, that calories are calories, especially during a race. And, you know, my joke was, in the Sahara even, there was a time when it seemed like, you know, everyone might quit and I might continue on. And I always made the joke that if I can get, you know, some candy bars and a, and a camel to go with me, then I'll be fine.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Let me go.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  You know, this time, very much thanks to Estacianna, I'm, I'm looking at my nutrition a lot differently. And I'm a vegetarian and have been for many years. But this time, I'm taking that more seriously and realizing that I do need to fuel my body properly for something like this. And not just assume that because I eat, you know, 5,000 calories worth of junk food in a day, that that's going to sustain me.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  In the long term. But actually Badwater and hundreds and some of those things, you, to a certain degree, you can get away with that. You know, you need to eat some good food, of course, and have good nutrition, but you can get away with.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you're not getting up and doing it day, day after day after day. But that stuff's going to add up for you. And, and, you know, I think a lot of people don't realize, and you're doing a multiple day event, when you're eating, you're not eating for how you're going to feel in the next hour, you're eating for the following day.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  You know, and you have to always be bearing that in mind, even if you're not hungry, making sure that you're on top of that stuff and you're not running into too much of a deficit.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not about bonking. Like, I'm not worried on any given day about. Bonking because I'll, I'll take in enough calories hour by hour to, for that not to happen, but it is, how am I going to feel later in the day and how am I going to feel tomorrow? And, well, really the answer to that is I'm going to feel like crap. I mean, there's no doubt.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  But how do you minimize just how crappy you're going to feel?

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, minimizing it and, and.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So what are some of the foods that you're going to be relying on?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Um, eating things that are, uh, for example, real bread, Ezekiel bread and, and things that, you know, as they, uh, my, my dad of all people said something to me today that, that was funny. Uh, and he was quoting a nutritionist, so I can't remember his name, but, um, and he said basically if it, you know, if it won't rot, you shouldn't eat it.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  And, and kind of the philosophy of, uh, eating things. I, I've found that when I cut dairy out almost completely a long time ago, you know, now if I, if I were to dare, I made a big mistake, uh, probably five or six months ago, there was some regular milk in the refrigerator. We were out of almond milk and, you know, I used it on a bowl of cereal and it, you know, it freaked my stomach out for about two days.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And, uh, I learned that of course, uh, not only is that not right for me, but, uh, it's, you know, milk is not something that we sort of naturally.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Are meant to drink. We, we, we teach our bodies to tolerate it by drinking it all the time, but.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  It's also quite inflammatory too and acidic.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  So when you're trying to kind of repair your body as you go, not, not really the best thing to be taking in, I don't think.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Well, and I am a, I think I'm a pragmatist when it comes to inflammation. I take, uh, you know, I take a fish oil supplement, uh, Ascenta is a company that I've been using for a long time and I think they have a really pure product and, but I'm also taking Advil. You know, I mean, it's a combination of things because with the, with the sheer volume of miles that we're talking about in something like this, uh, it, it is my job as much as anything to keep inflammation down to a minimum. I use Arnica regularly, which is, you know, which is great both as a topical. Gel and then also as a sublingual pill.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  And that is a natural anti-inflammatory. You know, I'm a, I'm a big believer that those kinds of things can make a huge difference. And then, you know, look, just the obvious things, fruits and vegetables and, you know, I do eat, you know, bars of all kinds of different types and, you know, out there, I'm not going to really use gels and such because it's, you know, I don't ever really need that.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Instant rush.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Interval training.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Right. I don't need the instant rush to get over the, you know, through the wall. I need something that's long-term sustaining.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Right, like a lower glycemic version of a sugar.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, and, and you know what? The rest of it is mental. I mean, my friend Ray Zahab from, from Running This Era, you know, it's, it's, it's one of the best quotes ever that, you know, these things are 90% mental and the other 10% is all in your head.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It's true, man. Well, I mean, it's pretty exciting. It's, uh, I just, I can't even wrap my brain around it, you know? It's going to be quite an adventure.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Where are you at in terms of sponsorship and kind of having all the, you know, T, the Ts crossed and the Is dotted to have the crew all sorted out?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, it's a daily work in progress right now. So we're only a couple of months away from the start of this expedition.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Clock is ticking.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And we are, I feel incredibly lucky. Just a few weeks ago, a group called The Campus Agency in Boston actually came on board to, to really try to run the ship here and, and bring in sponsors that made a lot of sense for this. And their connection, of course, to the city of Boston and to at least tangential, tangentially, the bombing, you know, from last year. I mean, this.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  You know, this run, many, many things are going to happen around the Boston Marathon this year to both honor and acknowledge what happened last year. And we certainly aren't, you know, we want to just be a respectful part of that. And the run to Boston is absolutely, though, to support Boston in a general sense and, and support running. I mean, we, you know, as well as I do, that I'm biased, of course, but runners are by nature resilient and stubborn. And, you know, if somebody does something, as, as heinous as that was last April, the

• 33:13Speaker 02

  response is going to be overwhelmingly to, to make a positive move towards, you know, rejecting anything that would, you know, dampen the spirits of an event like that. But overall, also acknowledging, people lost their lives. You know, they were permanently changed. Some of the people that survived, of course, lost, lost limbs and that affected not just them, but families, their whole families. And I think it's, it's a critical thing for us to just acknowledge that and just say that.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  You weren't there, you weren't there.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  I wasn't. No, I wasn't. Like everybody else or those that weren't there, you know, the news was, I would say, that was as fast as any news has ever traveled, given the way.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  It was crazy.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I was actually at CNN headquarters in New York City, sitting with a news producer, friend of mine. And, you know, in the offices, they all have the TVs on, right? They're all watching TV. And when it, when it happened, and I watched CNN like jump on the story as it was unfolding live. And it was insane how quickly they got on top of it and stuff was broadcasting live from the moment it happened to, to, you know, editorializing it.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Crazy, you know, across the world.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  No doubt. Well, and, and, you know, as it should be. I mean, they certainly, they certainly spend an incredible amount of time and energy on.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  The Kardashians.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. On things that you just roll your eyes and shake your head. And it's like, really? And, and, you know, and I am, I'm biased by everything about Boston. You know, I've been very lucky to have run Boston, you know, quite a few times in the past and. Well, one of the things that I say, I've run it, I think, five times now over about 20 years. And so the interesting thing is, you know, 20 years ago, I was a much different person. I was newly sober. I was 20 years younger, not surprisingly. Funny how that works. And all I cared about was going fast. Like, I wanted to break three hours at Boston. And, you know, and I did. And like, that was my big goal. And, and then the next time

• 35:23Speaker 02

  I found that, you know, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of cute girls at Wells Lake. I should stop and at least acknowledge them, you know. And, and then the next time it was like, wow, there's a bunch of kids out here that are handing out orange slices. I should take those and high five them. And so, you know, my times-

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Comes more about the experience.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, my times changed. And, and the point being that I changed. Boston didn't change. That marathon course is exactly the same every time. And that's the beauty of it. You know, it's, it's, you know, the support of the community and the attitude of the runners and just everything about it is so, you know, it's, you know, it's almost an otherworldly experience. But, you know, we, of course, and, and me, in this case, you know, I've changed. And, and that's a cool thing to sort of acknowledge when you're running on a course like that.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's kind of incumbent upon someone like yourself that if you're going to undertake a race or an adventure, that it has to be about something more than you. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm going to run across the US. Well, other people have done that. Other people have done it faster. I'm going to try to be the fastest. But, but, you know, why are you doing, like, what is driving you to do, what is the undercurrent that it, that is creating this compulsion to show up for this kind of adventure? And I'm sure, you know, there's many reasons for that internally. Maybe your therapist knows a little bit about that. But, uh, but, uh, or your sponsor. But, uh, you know, but

• 36:55Speaker 01

  to tie it to something bigger than yourself, like this cause of Boston. And, you know, you, you have to do that.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Well, you can, and again, my, my answers change. And it's not, it is because I, you know, hopefully I, I morph and change. And, you know, I'm, I'm really, I like to say that-

• 37:14Speaker 02

  These types of adventures, these long, very painful, they're not things that I, I don't think they're good for me, like healthy. I don't, you know, people have said is this, you know, how do you feel about what this is doing to your body? I'm like, it can't be good for me, you know, and I'm not, I'm not the one saying that it, you know, that it is. However, it is something I am compelled to do. And it is probably, not probably, it's related certainly to my addictive nature and, and certainly an obsessive personality to a degree. And my, my lifelong goal has been finding balance and marrying Estacianna, who is a much more balanced person

• 37:57Speaker 02

  than I am, is, is part of the, is, is part of what I think the, the growth that I've been able to experience over these last few years where a lot of things have happened to me. You know, I've gone through a lot and, well, I'm fond of saying, because I believe it so deeply, that just because something seems impossible, doesn't mean I'm not supposed to try it. Because the likelihood of completing this run to Boston and breaking this record, it's not like I'm sitting here saying, oh yeah, I'm gonna do that, you know, and it's not about playing the, you know, the mental game we sometimes do with ourselves where we feel like confidence is going to overcome it. This is too, it's too big, it's too difficult for that. And, and so

• 38:40Speaker 02

  humbly, I say that I am going to give it my best shot. And that I hope that I've learned some more things about myself along the way and that I can also acknowledge some positive things, both in Boston and, and in other ways and about sobriety. And we've got some great charitable partners that are coming on board and, and really just make it a, you know, make it an experience that somehow. Helps me get along further and be, you know, be better in general.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Again, back to this theme of showing up and being in the moment, right?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I don't want to be afraid. I am afraid of it. You know, I'm, I am afraid. You know what I'm afraid of? I'm afraid that three days into this thing, I say, I shouldn't even pick a day because that makes me nervous. Some, you know, a few days into this thing, but like, you know, I'm gonna, something's gonna happen and I can't go on. And it's like, I, I tend to, um, my, my successes have been pretty broadly watched than, and my, my failures, both as a human being and, and as an athlete have also been pretty, uh, pretty easily viewed by anyone that wants to take the time.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're like, uh, it's almost like, uh, in the world, according to Garp, when the airplane crashes into the house and he says, I'll buy it. It's pre-disaster, right? It's never gonna happen again. So you had these epic fails. You've experienced, you know, incredible lows in your life. So the idea of showing up and running across the country and not making it, it's like, eh. You know, like I was in jail, you know, I was, I was a crack addict. Like, what is that? Who cares? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, is that water off your back? I mean, of course you're afraid and you want to succeed, but you know, in terms of perspective and proportion.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Well, we all think that everyone's watching us too, you know, like, like that somehow what we're doing, even if you're just a, you know.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  That's a self obsession of the alcoholic mind.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Everybody in the world cares about whether or not I succeed at this. And the reality is.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And at the same time, everybody hates me.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Right. And, and that may be true, but you know, it's, it's certainly not true that every, you know, nobody else's life is like hanging on whether or not I complete this thing. And, and that reality in some ways is very, um, it's refreshing and liberating. Yeah. Because I'm gonna, you know, yeah, I, I, this crazy thing happened a couple of years ago and I end up in prison and initially there was a part of me that thought, you know, wow, this is. You know, yeah, I think everybody, certainly anyone who knew me or knew of me at that point seemed to know that this thing had happened to me. But then very quickly.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's like giant articles in the New York Times about it, so.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and in a way that was cool. I didn't have to be the one to step up and say.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Defend yourself.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  This was, yeah, wrong or right. I let other people do it and I'm happy to say that, you know, they did it. They did it well, you know, there's always gonna be, it's really funny that, you know, because running this Sahara is such an interesting movie and it's 500 hours of film boiled down to 90 minutes of documentary. So people who see that film have a tendency to think that that they know me, like that is me, like every, if I yelled at someone or if I.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  It was definitely edited so that you come off on the dickish.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  No doubt, exactly. And I don't deny that I am sometimes, you know, I mean, the thing is that I think it's fair to say that I have my, you know, I have my moments. I'll be the first one to say I am, I am not an easy person to, you know, to be around sometimes. I'm not fair. I'm, I'm driven in ways that are occasionally embarrassing to me, but certainly as a, you know, as a human being that I, you know, I say things I wish I hadn't said and you know, and all that, but I, I think that through recovery and through a lot of things, I'm, I'm pretty quick also to apologize for my shortcomings, but not for being who I am.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  You know, this is, this is the, this is the package that there is and it makes me really good at a few things and it, I suck at some other things and

• 43:00Speaker 02

  you know, it was, it was very refreshing though, as it, as a strange way to put it, to be in prison and knowing, seeing so many things being written and printed and talked about out there about how.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  You know, how unfair it was and how wrong it was and, and, you know, I didn't need to say a thing.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Right. And I want to get into, into that, into that part of the story a little bit. But to kind of backtrack, I mean, I first, the first time I heard an interview with you, it must have been like 2007, maybe. It was before I'd ever done any of this stuff, any of the Ultraman kind of things. And I think it was, it was either Bob Babbitt, or it was, you know, that guy Kevin at Endurance Planet, maybe? I'm not sure. And, and the question was something like, you must get this all the time, that, you know, all this, the ultra running and all of that is just, you've just transferred your addiction onto your running. And, you know, what do you say to somebody who, who,

• 44:07Speaker 01

  who accuses you of that? And you had a real, I don't know if you remember, but you had a really fascinating answer to that question that really stuck with me, because it's something that I struggle with and, and I feel that same question all the time. Do you remember what you said?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  I know what I would say now, so no, I don't remember.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I'd be interested to hear what you say.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  What I would say now is, you know, is that drugs and alcohol absolutely masked everything that I ever was, no matter what that was. It was, it was a mask. It was my way of hiding from anything. And running and adventure actually shines this huge bright light on exactly who I am. You know, there's no, there's no, there's no way to mask that when you're running 100 miles. Eventually during 100 miles, you will become exactly who you are, you know, for better or for worse.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  That's, that's not always the, the best thing. So, but I mean, my, my feeling today anyway is, is that, did I say something more brilliant back then?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  No, I think it was, it was pretty much around, I can't remember exactly what you said, but it was essentially thematically consistent with that, which is that, you know, when you're using drugs and alcohol, you are, you're hiding from the world, you're afraid, you're, you're cowering. And when you're running and embracing these incredible adventures, you're saying yes to life. And you are inviting challenge and inviting community and inviting.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  You know, inviting the opportunity to confront and walk through fear into your life.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  You know, and acknowledging imperfection. I mean, I'm, I'm as imperfect as any person you'll ever meet. But I, I know that through, through running and through scraping away those outer layers that we pretty much all wear all day, every day. You know, running, once you get to the, you know, whatever it is relatively for each person, you know it when you see it, you know, because I don't care if you're just running five miles. You know, for someone who's never run five miles before, by the time they've run three miles, they're thinking, you know, they're, they're, they are raw. They're that raw human being and that's what I want. I want to be that raw person and see what's, you know, what's down there. And drugs and alcohol did nothing but,

• 46:31Speaker 02

  of course, hide all of, all of that and made it impossible to ever have an actual, real emotion. And, and with running, my emotions are sometimes too, too real, but I would rather have that any day.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  But also acknowledging, not trying to deny the fact that there's this addictive compulsive nature within you that, that certainly is attracted to doing that and is, you know, drives you towards that and allows you in many ways to be able to not just entertain the idea of, of these feats, but actually see them through. You know, it's like, of course, like if somebody says, well, you just transferred your addictions. Well, it's like, well, yeah, you know, yeah, in many ways that's true. I can't say no to that. But, but it's, it's in a, it's a way to access the best part of who you are by finding out exactly who you are.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  I agree completely, but, but here's another funny, I mean, people who tend to be that critical and tend to, you know, when they, when someone says to me, haven't you just transferred? I usually take that as a criticism. I don't usually take it as a comment. I usually hear them saying, something is wrong with you.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  And there may very well be, but I don't necessarily appreciate them saying it. And, and the thing is, you know, it does tend to come very often from people who maybe haven't gone out there and pushed themselves to their limit, whatever that might be. And maybe they're just exploring and trying to figure out if they should. Maybe it makes them feel better. To acknowledge, you know, someone else's shortcomings.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Or that you you're doing this only because you have a disease.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. Something's clearly wrong with you. And again, I say to them, you are probably right. But here's a, you know, here's another funny example there. I think, you know how you you touched on why, like, do these things? And one of the other reasons why is simply because my my hope is that I do, in fact, become that I become better, that without making myself better, I certainly don't have the capability of ever truly helping someone else. And that's in running and recovery and any other part of my life. If I'm not, if I'm focused on other people all the time. How does that make, you know, that can't necessarily make me better. I can do both things in conjunction.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  But I use the example of, like, most of my big runs, I've had some cause attached. Water for Africa, you know, I played a part in raising $6 million to build wells. And I'm I'm immensely proud of that. You know, what I helped to build there grew into water.org, which is Matt Damon and my friend Gary White. And I introduced the two of them. I fought to bring them together. In fact, when when they actually, you know, sort of refused to work together for a while and I worked and I'm proud of that. You know, with Running America, the first time in 2008, it was, you know, the United Way and some other nonprofits.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  And I love attaching something because if I'm going to do something, why not try to also do some good. But I'm also honest enough to say that I'm selfish. You know, I'm really doing this as much as anything because I, as a human being, want to see if I can do it. And what happens, I see very often, is that people run for charity all the time and or for nonprofits and such. And I totally, you know, I'm supportive of that. I admire it and all of that. But here's the here's the conversation I hear in offices. Like, the runner is in the office there where they work. And the runner is telling other people, you know, yeah, I'm going to run this marathon. And people are looking at him who are non-runners and saying,

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Why would you, I don't even drive my car that far. That old say, why would you do something like that? And that person is then pinned into a corner and they say, well, I'm doing it for cancer, diabetes, or for-

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It's a disingenuous response because it's not really true. I mean, it's great that they're raising money for that and they're trying to make it somewhat about something other than themselves. But yeah, it's not, there is a level of, you know, not being completely frank about the motivations.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  It's okay to do something just because you want to see if you can do it. And I would hope that anybody who ever toes the line of a marathon, or an ultra, or any race for that matter, is at least partially driven by this desire to see how good they can be and what they can accomplish. And at the same time, if they can, absolutely, if they can honor something that's important to them, or raise money for it, or whatever it is they might do, I completely support that. But I'm always telling people, try to acknowledge the fact that you're accomplishing something big, and you should be proud of that just for you, and not necessarily-

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Feel comfortable saying, I'm doing it because I want to see if I can do it.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a runner and I want to see if I can run 26 miles in X time, or just if I can survive it and not throw up on my shoes, or, you know, whatever it might be.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Throwing up on your shoes, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  No, there's not. I think it's a, you know, I think, I think we're, people are biased against those of us that vomit on our shoes regularly.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Alright, well, let's step it back. I mean, for people that aren't familiar with your story, and in the show notes, I'll do an introduction to this interview and all of that, and in the show notes on the website, I'll put links up to some of the articles. But I do want to hear, I do want to get into a little bit of the addiction story, because personally, that's so resonant with me. You know, growing up and sort of, you know, being a college kid and having your needs met, and then just going left on the world, you know, like, what is, what's going on? I mean, somebody would say, you're a crazy person. Like, what happened?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  What didn't happen?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  You know, I was, I was a pretty, I was gonna say I was a typical high school kid, but I probably was

• 52:34Speaker 01

  You kinda had hippie parents, though, right?

• 52:36Speaker 02

  I was a little above, but I was a little above, I don't wanna say above average, but you know, I, I did a lot. I, I played, you know, five sports in high school.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  You were like football captain, quarterback, right?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  And I was student, student class president and, and then student body president my senior year. And I, you know, made good grades and had a good SAT and was going to a good college at UNC Chapel Hill. And all, you know, I mean, I, I like wrote and produced a radio show actually in high school. I'm sorry, a TV show, a closed circuit show in our high school every morning. So, I mean, I was, I was up at five running. At six, I was at the radio station getting the AP wire because we didn't have, you know, I didn't have a BlackBerry or a, or an iPhone at the time. And, you know, I'm doing all these things all day, every day. Well, I, I get to

• 53:27Speaker 01

  The world's your, the world's your oyster.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  I'm the man, right? And I get to UNC Chapel Hill as a seventeen year old freshman. And like, there's no banners that are saying, welcome Charlie, we're so glad you're here, you know? And, uh, and it took me, you know, probably a whole couple of weeks to realize that, you know, going to a place like that with four thousand other freshmen, I was basically average. You know, average at best even. And there were a lot of very talented, you know, athletes, students, dancers, you know, they were better looking. I, I tried to reserve the fact that I was funnier than other people, but I don't know that I got that one either. But, you know, and what I found pretty quickly was that I was really good at one thing

• 54:14Speaker 02

  and better than everyone else, at least in my dorm, and that was drinking.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  I was, I was awesome. I was, uh, I was world class and I planned on setting as many records as I could. And that was not conducive to making good grades or studying or

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Did you do the, the fraternity thing?

• 54:34Speaker 02

  I did ultimately. And, and again, it, it dates me a bit, but in North Carolina, where I went to school, the drinking age was eighteen for beer and wine when I went to college. And as I was, while I was there. Uh, it actually changed to nineteen and then to twenty-one, but I mean, it's to stay just in front of the curve, uh, in that. But, you know, I joined a fraternity my, my second year and certainly wasn't their fault, you know, they, you know, we would, we would party and I was, I was introduced to cocaine at that point. It was the eighties though. It was like, it was ubiquitous. It was, it was as common as, you know, marijuana, like

• 55:14Speaker 02

  always has been, or alcohol. And, and I, it just didn't seem, it seemed like what everyone else was doing. I, I tried it and it took very little time to realize that when I would do it, you know, I'm seeing two or three sunrises in a row without sleeping while the other guys, you know, they might do whatever, a couple of lines, or they might do, they might do some, and they're actually going to sleep at four o'clock in the morning and getting up and, you know, going to class or doing whatever it is, you know, they were, they were truly the definition of recreational users.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Right. But there's a big difference between sort of understanding that, like, kind of that clicking in and going, oh, like, I do this a little bit differently than everyone else. Um, I mean, a normal person would say, well, that's when you start to rectify the situation. But, you know, I know for myself, very early on, I was like, I'm definitely an alcoholic. But I would never admit that. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was, because I knew that I drank differently. And I have a huge scar on my leg from a lost weekend I spent at UNC in nineteen eighty-six.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Was I there?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Where I woke up, I don't know, were you, maybe, maybe we partied together. Were you there in eighty?

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Wait, did I hit you with an ax handle?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe, maybe you caused the scar on my leg. I wouldn't be surprised. Um, but what happened to me was that, that set in motion a, a chain of events to protect my future right to continue to use. It's like, oh, well, hmm, you know, I better, I better really kind of watch myself because I want to continue to be able to do this. So if it gets too out of control too soon, then I'm gonna have to do something about it, or I'm gonna have, somebody else is gonna tell me I have to do something about it. So it was all about trying to preserve your ability to continue to be able to party. And, and of course, never being able to get that balance right or that mix right. And it just continues to get worse and spiral out of control.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Well, I went to my first AA meeting when I was 23 years old in Atlanta.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  And I didn't get clean and sober until I was 29. So that tells you something. And so the acknowledgement of the problem.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Was there very early on.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Self-knowledge will avail you nothing.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you're right, exactly right. And I, and I absolutely kept fighting it and kept, you know, of course I changed my, uh, my plan a thousand times, you know, I'm, I'm not going to do, you know, drugs. I'm just gonna drink. I'm not gonna drink liquor. I'm just gonna drink beer. I mean, whatever it might be, I did it. I did at least seven or eight geographical changes, which is common for addicts. You know, where I would go somewhere and I'd move to Seattle and get a new job and a new girlfriend and a, you know, life would be fantastic for six months and.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Then you wake up and you go, oh shit, I brought myself with me.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  I gotta move again, darn it. You know, and that would, that would be what would happen is then, you know, within a year, I'd be off to some other city to, to do it better. And of course do it exactly the same the next time because sure enough, there I was. And, and it, it just took what it took. The last time, yeah, the last time was, uh, at least the last time up to now, as we say.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Uh, was, uh, over 21 years ago and it was a very memorable.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Because you and I are gonna go, we're gonna go.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  We're gonna go hammered right after this.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, right after we finish the podcast.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  People ask me every year.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Why wait until we're done? Let's see what we have in the cabinet.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  People ask me every year, they're like, oh, I'll tell them, yeah, it's my sobriety birthday. Like I don't celebrate my regular birthday, but I celebrate my sobriety birthday. Like, what are you gonna do? I'm like, I'm gonna go get shitfaced.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  And they'll look at me like, really? I'm like, no, I'm not, but.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Well, people would be amazed how many people relapse on their first year anniversary.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Because only the alcoholic will think it's a good idea to celebrate a year of sobriety by getting drunk.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  You know, that makes perfect sense to me.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Well, clearly they've proven that they're gonna drink like a normal person now. So.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I messed it up. I'm, I messed up, you know. Jobs and and certainly my own life and wasted a lot of time. I mean, I did my first, my first three marathons I ever did, really my first four were still when I was very unsober. And, you know, I'll never forget, in fact, doing my first marathon, which was Big Sur back in nineteen eighty nine. And I, I mean, I didn't enter the race until about a week before the race, did essentially no training. But I'd been out doing some running and and I just decided that this was another way. This is how I could prove clearly I'm not an alcoholic or an addict if I can go out and do a marathon.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  So I entered this, entered this race and I go and and I, and I do actually finish the thing. And in a, in a decent, you know, I think, three and a half hour time, you know, no, having no idea what I was doing. And Big Sur was a fairly hard marathon and and I get to the finish line and I'm looking around. There's all these people hugging and crying and they're like, I mean, this amazing thing. And it's, it's, uh, I make the joke, if anybody watches Dexter, it's like Dexter trying to figure out, you know, when he's watching other people have emotions. And and, you know, he's trying to figure out what, not only why he doesn't feel that way, but how to fake it.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  And, you know, like, I desperately wanted to find somebody to hug and cry so that I could feel fantastic about what I'd just done. And instead, I just went out and got drunk that night.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Right. And you bring up an important point, which is this idea, and I relate to that, I used to do this all the time. This false pride that takes over, like you test yourself, say, well, if I can go out and do, run this marathon, I can just bang out these marathons in the weekend, then I must not have a drinking problem. It's artillery to, you know, sort of. You know, use it as you will to continue to be able to justify your drinking and using, right? And also like, hey, look what I did. Like, not only did I, you know, run, I went out, I got completely shitfaced. I woke up, I was hungover, and I still ran a marathon. Like, what did you do this weekend? You know what I mean? And it's like, there's no humility

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  in that. There's a complete false pride thing that takes over that leads you in a very dark direction ultimately.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  I was, at the end of those first few marathons, I could not have been emptier. And it actually even goes back to what we were talking about before, because I had the raw emotion, like I'd done this work, and I had indeed scraped off those outer layers to find that I was absolutely, completely empty inside. And at least drugs and alcohol,

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  you know, gave some texture to the emptiness. And then being, you know, having that not as a crutch, really, it really was something I couldn't imagine at the time. And I was doing, you know, I was at 25 or 6, you know, I wanted to, like, I think I bought my first house right around there, and I bought cars, and I wanted to be and was like the top salesman at whatever job I was doing. And those were all nothing more than my proof that clearly there can't be any kind of a problem. If, if I can do those things, then, you know, how could I possibly have a problem?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Right. And that looming sense of emptiness is so terrifying that the only way to deal with it is to drink more and use more.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Fill it. I could fill it up that way, at least, you know, temporarily. And, and that's, of course, what we all do in that situation. And, you know, and it taught me, it, it did teach me, I will say, it, it did teach me how to suffer properly. You know, the things I did to myself then, that's true suffering. And when I'm, when I'm out running, and whether I'm falling apart or having a great run, I mean, even races like Badwater, people tend to think that, oh, you know, you, you did it, and you had a good time, and like a good finishing time, and you placed well, and whatever, so you had a fantastic race. Like, somehow, that means that you didn't struggle during the race. And like, Badwater's a race that...

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  You know, I've never not thrown up at Badwater. Like, it's the only race I've ever thrown up in, in fact, but I've done it every single time. Like, something about the, the heat mechanism there. Just the, the point being that there's a series of ups and downs during that race that are inevitable. And no matter how I plan, they're going to happen, those, those, those downs. And that's what I finally had to understand. Well, it's what I've had to understand about sobriety. It's over 21 years. That didn't stop me from going to prison a couple of years ago. You know, it didn't, it didn't stop, you know, my first marriage from falling apart. It didn't stop, it didn't stop anything. Life just continued to roll on. It's just that I actually had to be present for it, which was, which was really-

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  You had to feel it.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, damn.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  You know, it's sort of that idea that, uh, you know, sobriety doesn't promise you anything other than, uh, you know, a life without drinking or using, you know? And there's this, this notion, I think, when you come in and you have the pink cloud, that all your problems will be solved. And, and in fact, you have to sort of deal with the wreckage and all of these problems, but you actually have to feel them and you're like a loose, you know, a raw nerve ending at first. And, and, but, but the beauty of it is to be able to walk through those challenges and those difficulties with dignity. And, uh, and, and that's something that I think you did in spades, you know, in terms of your, you know, your prison sentence, your jail sentence. I mean, you know, I've been following you on Twitter for a long time and I remember,

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  you know, you would send out these tweets and I'm thinking, is he allowed to tweet from jail? Or is his son doing it for him? Like, how is this even? I'm like fascinated by the, like, the, just the pure logistics of how that happened. But persistently putting out, uh, you know, this positive message, this refusal to allow this experience to control you or to lapse into some kind of victimhood. Um, and then to read subsequently or during the latter stages of, of your tenure, you're there, the impact that you're having on your fellow inmates. And these guys that are starting to run and are losing tremendous amounts of weight and are kind of rediscovering their lives in a new way.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it was, that part of the experience was fascinating and it, and it is the, you know, one of the basic tenets of- Of addiction recovery, which is attraction rather than promotion. I certainly didn't go into prison and say, hey, all you, all you fat guys over there, you guys should come run with me.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  You know, it would have been a great way to get my ass.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Get shanked.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Right. And so instead I simply just did what I do. I just went and I, I, I ran and I worked out and I, I actually found people. There was no AA in prison, if you can believe it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Really? That's amazing.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  In federal prison.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  I can't believe that. I mean, I've done tons of panels and jails and stuff.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  In, in state and in jails and those places, absolutely. They, they have pretty active programs.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  But federal?

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Nope. No formal AA.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Is there a reason for that or?

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Well, I ended up teaching, which is funny, addiction recovery, uh, classes. And they were well attended, but guys got certificates. You know, you were sort of required to do a certain amount of, of that kind of work. Uh, while you're there, which is good. It's good and healthy, but most of the guys sitting in there were there to get the certificate. And like any AA meeting though, I would absolutely, you know, I just did what I would do and hope that somebody maybe got something out of it. Um, but it's a, it's a, it's an interesting thing. So I was in Beckley, uh, federal prison and there is, it is actually ironically a drug education prison.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Meaning that they have a program where guys who, I mean, 90% of the people there are there for drugs anyway.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Most for, for selling, not for using, but, uh, you know, they were required if they wanted, they had a chance to get time off of their sentence. If they completed this very long nine month, uh, you know, drug education program.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  But basically the, and I'm sure the, I'm sure the, the prison and the, the program would argue with this viewpoint. My viewpoint was that the program basically said, You're bad. You have destroyed your family. You've destroyed your lives. Don't do drugs. Like that was, that was the extent of the education, you know?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  So it wasn't really recovery oriented. It was more of a sort of a nine month shaming process.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  No, you're a piece of shit. Don't do drugs, you know? And, and so stop doing that. And, and while a lot of people would probably think that's a good approach somehow.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  The Nancy Reagan, just say no approach.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  The fact is that can be, that's all well and good. People can be, you know, feel strongly about how they view people who, who do drugs or have gotten in trouble with the law for doing drugs. But the reality is if the goal is to actually turn out people when they come out of prison who are better than when they went in and more likely to make a contribution to society, then shaming them is certainly not the way, you know, to do it. And very little is spent on, on treatment, as we all know. I mean, uh, it's been proven time and again that every dollar that's spent on prevention

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  will come back tenfold. Whereas, you know, every, every dollar that's spent on incarceration and on sending these guys. That's why, you know, it's another reason, Rich, that I never, I really, it would be embarrassing to me to complain about my plight and how I might've felt about how, you know, how that all happened to me. When I'm in there with guys, African American guys who got 20 year sentences for a small handful of crack that I had in my hand, tons of times. And if I had been a black man in this country in those times, I would have been stopped driving the car that I would have, that I was driving.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Which was just a Toyota 4Runner. It's not like it was fancy, but I would have been stopped. They would have searched me. They would have found that and I would have been the guy getting 20 years. But I wasn't that guy. I was the white guy driving the car in the hood that for whatever reason, just never, you know, that didn't happen. So, you know, I knew that it would have been embarrassing to me being in there next to guys who really had their lives, their whole lives taken away from them. And, you know, and actually the, you know, the sentencing and the Congress and everyone else is now acknowledging that the hundred to one.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Crack to cocaine sentencing guidelines were very possibly the most, you know, unfavorable and really unforgivable sentencing guideline ever handed down in any country. And so there are some changes being made to those guidelines now in acknowledgement that that was wrong. Anyway, my point of all that is I would have felt like a total idiot.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're also a human being who's been incarcerated and could very easily hang your hat on this, you know, argument as to how you'd been wronged. And, you know, in recovery, they say, you know, justifiable anger is, you know, a luxury we cannot afford. But that's, you know, a stupid little, you know, annoying saying. And to be able to, you know, to be able to actually embody that when you're in the scenario that you're in, I mean, is no small feat.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Well, I knew very quickly, and even after I got arrested, I mean, I'm sitting there in this holding cell, knowing that my life had just changed forever. And that was the night after, the day after the Running America premiere.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Right, you had the premiere and then it was the next day. So just, we should probably complete the timeline a little bit so that people that don't really know your story can understand what we're talking about.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Essentially, you're, at the end of your drinking and using, you're essentially living out of your car and smoking crack, essentially. And there's some kind of altercation that involves bullets in your forerunner.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  And your son being born that catalyzes, you know, you embracing sobriety.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it is in Wichita, Kansas, which is, I always say, if you can get sober in Wichita, you can get sober anywhere. No, there was good sobriety there, but it was a place where, I don't know why it was different. I just sat there on the curb that day, looking at the police going through my car. And I'd been up for six days without sleeping or eating. And it was another in a long line of those episodes. And, you know, I just remember looking and thinking to myself, okay, this just seems like a pretty good time to quit. And...

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  I'm not a religious person, you know, I'm certainly spiritual, which is sort of one of those catchphrases these days, and we don't have enough time to go into all of that because it's, we could talk all day about that, but, you know, I, I don't know who I was praying to, but I absolutely said, you know, I would like to have this obsession removed because I'm gonna die, you know, and I, I really wasn't, you know, I didn't, some days I wanted to, but not, not that day. And somehow that weight was lifted from me and, you know, I started into recovery that day for the first time ever, seriously. I had certainly dabbled in it from time to time and, you know, I went to a meeting that

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  day and I went to a couple of meetings every single day without missing a day for a year and my life changed, very slowly it changed and I became present. And, and I struggled, I struggled today staying present, but, you know, at that point, everything changed.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Right, balance being the fickle, I always say balance is the fickle lover that is disinterested in my affection.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Well, I got, I got sober and, and ran thirty marathons in the first few years, so clearly I had found balance.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, right. So you, but you go, you go off and you kind of, you know, for lack of a better phrase, make history doing these incredible endurance challenges, you know, the most notable of which is running across the Sahara with, with Ray and what was the other guy's name?

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Kevin.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Kevin. Documented in this incredible documentary, which if you haven't seen it, you should definitely check out, called Running the Sahara, that's narrated by Matt Damon, it's captivating and, and brilliant and amazing. And in many ways, you know, you're sort of on top of the world, you know, you've, you've got an agent at the William Morris Agency and you're flying around giving motivational speeches and planning your next crazy endurance adventure, when a, a young man by the name of Robert Nordlander gets it into his, into his skull that there's something, there's something a little amiss with this Charlie Engle character.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Well, apparently being an ultra runner is a

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Suspect in its own right.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Right. You're suspect if you're a runner and you're spending a lot of time training. You know, somebody might want to know how it is you're managing to make a living if you're spending all that time running. And that is, that is just how it, you know, it's how it came about and it was a

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  He was like a local IRS guy, right? So he's in your town, you're in the local papers and you're getting a little attention and

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  And he's, you know, for some reason, you know, it's, he's got it in him that he's gonna

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, he decides to start digging and every time he hits a wall, you know, and again, it's difficult to go into all, of course, even to even touch on the real details, although there'll be, uh, many of them will be in a book soon, but you know, the fact of the matter is the Patriot Act is, um, is something that I learned a lot about during that time because in essence, every time he hit a wall, he was able to basically take some action to, to change the investigation in a way that allowed him to, yeah, to just, once he hit a wall, for example, this supposedly started off as a tax investigation.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  You know, he was curious about, you know, how I, how I paid my bills and my taxes. And when he checked into it, you know what he found? I paid my taxes. And there was no, and I always say to people who are self-employed especially, I'm like, you let the IRS look through 20 years of your tax returns, if you're self-employed and find nothing. I, I challenge you, you know, to that same thing, but that's exactly what he found was, it was absolutely nothing. And for some inexplicable, and you know, the, I have the memos that show that and those all came out at trial and you know, so there's no secrets there and because I pay my taxes, but You know, for some reason, it didn't end there. And that's, that's where I'll probably

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  never understand it. Why?

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Right. Suddenly, he decides he's gonna be a DA, right? Like, he's becoming a prosecutor. He's, I mean, you know, as in his role at the IRS, you would think, well, inquiry done, you know, I explored it. There's nothing there. I'm moving on. But

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  That's his job. And even if, even if you don't like, I mean, he's famously quoted in the grand jury investigation, he's famously quoted as saying, you know, if I'm riding down the street and I see somebody driving a nice car and I don't think they belong in it, you know, I'll run their tags and pull, and pull their tax returns. And like, apparently, I mean, that's a direct quote from the grand jury. I mean, there's no, there's no doubt about what he said. And I was like, really? That's, that's where we live now? That, that, uh, you can just do that? I mean, but anyway, that's the way it went down.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Right. And with the latitude allowed him under the law because of

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  The Patriot Act, absolutely.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  You read about these crazy sort of spy novel episodes in your life where they set you up, there was a woman who was planted, you would go on a date with her, you think it's a date, but she's wearing a wire and all kinds of craziness.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, and basically, I acknowledged at that time, you know, the fact that in hindsight, I had gotten a couple of, of loans, you know, mortgages that were, you know, just like everyone else was getting. I didn't know I was getting them, just like most people didn't know they were getting.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  There's stated income loans.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Stated income loans, right. I mean, that was just what was being given. I mean, as a, as a borrower, we don't go into a bank, or I certainly wasn't sophisticated enough to go to a bank and say, I want this type of loan. You just, you just go in and you fill out whatever paperwork they tell you to fill out, and you either qualify or you don't. And I did, you know, I did that exactly the same as I had done a dozen times before, no different in any way, shape or form during that, you know, 2005 to 2008 or whatever time period, you know, it's widely acknowledged now that it was much easier to get a loan. You know, look at, I forgot, I forgot who it was in the New York Times today. I think

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  there was, uh, is it JP Morgan paying another $20 billion in fines? I mean, they've paid something like $100 billion in fines around that whole thing.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  And to say that a borrower, not I wasn't in the real estate industry, I wasn't, I was just a guy, just a, just a guy with a little bit of local notoriety, to think that I could somehow, you know, manipulate the system in some way, uh, that I was some genius mastermind, which anyone who knows me well can attest, that's not the case. Uh, you know, it's just absurd. It's, it's actually just, it's laughable, but what happens is, you know, when you're, once you're in the system, you know, he investigated me for over 700 hours, uh, just my taxes, just my taxes. And, and you know, it's my opinion, you don't do that and come up empty. You know,

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  you find a way to reach, you know, to reach an end result that is desirable for, for them. And I think it was a little, you know, again, years later now, everyone sort of understands that we're, you know, the banks are still answering questions about what happened, but none of them are going to prison. They pay a fine.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Right. Essentially what happens is you become this poster boy for mortgage fraud, for better or worse. And, and technically there are some improprieties there that allow them to say, you know, yeah, you violated the law here. Um, and let's, let's not look at, you know, sentencing guidelines. Let's make this guy an example because meanwhile, you have to look at it in the context of what was going on contemporaneously in America. We're in this mortgage crisis all of a sudden. We need to point fingers at people. And rather than taking the guy up JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America or Countrywide, you know, or whatever, let's look at, let's, let's make Charlie, you know, let's make Charlie

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  the bad guy. Ironically, like the Countrywide, uh, headquarters are like just down the street. If you want to go visit after, after the podcast.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  There's probably some kind of alarm that'll go off.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  I'd like that guy to be doing, he should have done my time.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  There's a lot of people, there's a lot of people that would, that would say that. And I think we're all still waiting for those guys to be held accountable for a lot of the things that were going on, but whatever.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  It'll never happen.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Right. So, so here you are, suddenly you're going to be, you're going to be the guy. And, and kind of in retrospect now, the revisionist history of the whole thing is it, it backfired in the other direction because with all of the kind of, you know, journalism that transpired. Around your tenure, you know, you ended up coming out looking, you know, like the victim in the whole thing.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Well, and I was, and I mean, I, you won't hear me say that very often, and I don't want to dwell on that. But I, what I also knew, and sobriety is what taught me this, recovery is what taught me this. I had a choice, like when that happened and when I, a good friend of mine actually said to me something that I was one of the greatest compliments I've ever been given in my life, like, because the people around me were devastated. You know, of course, my family, but my, my friends, I mean, people by the hundreds were, you know, were just didn't know what to say. I mean, they looked at me like I, I had a terminal disease and, and it was like, what do you say to a guy who's getting ready to go off to prison? And, and it was me that was consoling them most of the time.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  And so my, my great friend, Chris Justice, who helped me with many things, you know, he basically said, you know, you're, you're spending all your time making us feel better instead of the other way around. And, and what I figured out quickly though, and it was again, because of, because of my long-term recovery, I believe, I believe this, and that is that I had a choice. I could either be miserable or I could be as positive as was possible. And it wasn't pink cloud positive. It wasn't like some false positive. Like I, I had to say, okay, I'm gonna find a way to make the best of this. And I, I have no idea what that even means yet.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  But, you know, ultimately I went in there just, just saying that

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  I can be one of those guys, and I saw them every day, who had long prison sentences and they, they checked off the calendar every day. And to me, that would have been maddening. I don't know if I would have made it through my short time. You know, it was a year and a half, which is a long time, but relatively speaking, not that long compared to many of them.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Right. Sixteen months, but it was a sentence longer?

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  Sentence was 21 months, and the way the federal system works is you sort of get a, you get a pre nearly 15% discount on your sentence. It's, you get your good behavior in advance. And if you screw it up, they can take it away. Right. And then technically you, you. You normally would get-

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  So generous of them.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. You normally would get 10% of the halfway house. And so that's what I got to. That's why it was a, it was a 21-month sentence. Basically, I had to serve 18 months of it. But after 16 months, I was released to a halfway house in Greensboro. Which actually, by the way, was far worse than prison.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, in a, in a camp, like where I was, basically there were nonviolent criminals, generally speaking. I mean, a lot of them are-

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Well, Beckley was divided. There's a, there was like a minimum security and a medium, right?

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  And a medium, right. And the medium, you know, I got to know some of those guys too. Cause they would graduate from there. I don't mean graduate like high school, but you know, they would move from there if they, if they were less than 10 years left on their sentence and, and whatever, they might come to the, to the lower security place. And, you know, what I, what I, what I found was, of course, that, you know, these were almost all just regular guys. But when I got to the halfway house, you have guys from all security levels that are being dumped into the halfway house. You know, so you got some-

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Some rapists and murderers and some, you know, some, some genuine bad guys in there. And you're, you know, 30 people stuck in one room on bunk beds and you can't leave. It was, uh,

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  How-

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  It's tough.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  How different is it from, I mean, my only sort of point of context, other than doing the occasional panel, um, you know, in downtown LA, is what I see on television or what I see in movies. You know, my, this is what, this is the way a prison guard acts and behaves. It's all informed by media that I've seen. It's all, you know, crafted by a screenwriter and a director. So how, how, uh, you know, how different is the real life experience of being in a place like that? Versus, you know, what did you expect and how is it different?

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Well, of course, I feared the worst. You know, all the time. I went in there on Valentine's Day 2011. That was the first day of my sentence. And you know, my, my major concern was being someone's Valentine that night.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  And, or any night. And, uh,

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Or any morning.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Or any morning, or any time. And that, you know, that didn't happen.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  I'm debating asking you the question of, you did become somebody's Valentine.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  We'll never tell. We've been sworn to secrecy.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Maybe that'll be in the book.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  You'll have to read the book. Exactly. So, uh, but it was, you know, it was very similar in, in many ways to what we do see on television. The, the difference is I, of course, being on that side of it, got to see the human aspect of it. I got to know guys and I got to know their families and visitation. I got to see their pictures and hear their stories and hear about their lives. And, you know, it's a funny thing about running and working out, you know, all of us who do that understand the camaraderie that's built. And so every day out in the rec yard, when we're doing whatever workout we might be doing, or running around that quarter mile loop

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  and talking and, and just, you know, commiserating, it was fascinating to find, you know, the similarities were far greater than the differences. And, you know, and it is true. Most of them, you know, the large majority of people in there came from poor backgrounds and they were, they were destined for prison. I, I watched this, um, I watched this amazing documentary just this past week called The House I Live In. It's on Netflix, by the way. They didn't pay me to say that, but it's, it was so fascinating because it really explained so much around the history of incarceration in this country and where.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  You know, where it came from and, and why we have 14,000 statutes on the books that are actually punishable by prison sentences. I mean, it's, it's, it's amazing the things that are illegal and, and yet, you know, 97% of the people who are in prison are there for nonviolent crimes. So what we do is we, we lock up the people that we're mad at, not the people that we're afraid of.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  And what is the percentage of incarcerated people that's related to substance abuse?

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  Almost all.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  It's gotta be, yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Almost all, over 90% are related to drugs and, and less than 1% of those have anything to do with the word, you know, kingpin.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Almost all of them are just regular drug users.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  And yet the lack of, of treatment and, and rehabilitation within the system, it's almost nonexistent.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  It's shocking. I mean, we, we in this country, we have 5% of the population of the world in the United States, yet we have 25% of the incarceration in the world. So, you know, in the, in the free, I don't know what the answer is, but I, I know that we haven't found it. And the tough on, tough on crime is the words, but it's really tough on drugs is, is the way it plays out. You know, it just really means that, you know, alcohol and, and other drugs have, just have better lobbyists, you know, I mean.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Well, and the more privatized incarceration becomes, then, you know, then the K Street lobbyists start lining their pockets and this is not going in any other direction other than to continue to expand.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Well, if you build it, they will fill it, you know, is how it goes. And, and here's the thing, I'm certainly a liberal at heart, there's no doubt, I'm a, I'm a. You know, I'm a liberal guy, but from a fiscal standpoint, no matter which side of the political aisle you're on, if you take a look at the economics of locking people up for incredibly long sen- you lock up a 20-year-old for 20 years on a drug sentence, that person will end up being a ward of the state or a ward of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Right, and what is it, like $60,000 a year or something like that?

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  It's crazy. And that's maybe, and that's only the hard cost, maybe, of what it, you know, feeding them, housing, that doesn't count, that doesn't actually take into account the, the cost of maintaining the entire system. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a crazy, crazy big number. And when we were, although I don't know when this was, when we were flush with cash or felt like we were in this country, then that was fine. Everybody gets behind tough on crime. You don't want to be the politician that stands up and says, you know, we should ease up on these guys some. But what, what it's done is create this situation where now we have to pay for it. And, and it's not just paying for it while they're in prison, it's paying when they get out. And, you know, I don't know, as your neighbor, would you

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  rather have the guy who, who's actually had some strong rehabilitation and learned a skill and, and had some positive things happen as your neighbor? Because they're going to get out and they're going to move somewhere, you know? Or would you rather have the angry guy who just lost, you know, 20 years of his life and feels like he was wronged and he's just wait, basically, he's just waiting to go back?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Right. Because he can't, well, and he can't get a job and he's dependent upon the state to, you know, provide.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Recidivism rates are 70%. I mean, that's why most guys go back. They can't, they just can't quite. Get over the hump and, and it's not even to say, I mean, there's programs to help guys. There's all those things, but it's, it's easier said than done, you know? I mean, for me, I get to check that box.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  For the rest of my life.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  The, uh, the, the article that I enjoyed the most on, you know, all this sort of articles that are out there from, you know, outside men's fitness, New York Times, all that kind of stuff that, that kind of talks about your, your prison experience was the one in, um, the Oxford American. Cause that really got at the heart of like, this is what it's really like. I'll put a, I'll put a link in the show notes up to that, but it was a very touching piece.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Leslie Jamison wrote that and she was incredible. You know, she came to, to visit me and what's funny is it goes back to, to running, right?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Right. Cause you had met her at an ultra, right?

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  I met her at the Barclay. I met her at the Barclay and her, she wasn't running, but her brother, uh, was actually running the race and she wrote a, a piece about him for the race. I wrote a piece about the race for runner's world, actually, uh, that got put off being published. It actually was published in runner's world while I was at Beckley, which was, which was pretty fascinating.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Do the, do publications like runner's world, are they scared of you now or like?

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  They're, they're, they just love the story.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they love the story and I, I give, I give David Willie and the guys at runner's world, great, you know, great credit for recognizing that, you know, readers are sophisticated enough to make their own decisions and it's, and if I can tell a decent story, I mean, that's what it should be about, right? If I can, if I can tell a decent story, I mean, I used to make the joke that I'm, I'm,

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  even with running the Sahara, you know, a lot of people might admire me for that. Some people really dislike me for it. I mean, it's all over the board, but my attitude is if something happens where people actually have a strong opinion and want to talk about it, I'm happy.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's good, right?

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  I still get, I got a note last week from a guy like on Facebook who said, you know, uh, you know, you were, you were the biggest jerk in that movie in this meta. And I wrote, he gave some reasons and I wrote him back. I said, I said, dude, I couldn't agree with you more. I said, you know, but just, just realize that it's not always exactly, you know, exactly what you see. And that's the way everything is. That's the way, that's the way prison was. That's, you know, again, I'm, I'm hoping that in writing, I can tell that story. In a way that doesn't, you know, I don't want to bore anybody and we're not going to go into all the details in the book of, of, you know, every miniscule thing that happened at trial

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  or in prison, but the book is really going to be a running book more than anything, but, but I mean, there is room to kind of talk about all of that.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Right. So the, the working title is Running on Empty.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  Running in Place.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Running in Place, sorry. And I had the great privilege of reading the proposal and, and some of the, the sample materials, the sample chapters that you've already prepared. And it's, it's a barn burner. And I, when I first reached out to you, I think I even said on Twitter, I was like, I can't wait to read this guy's book. Like this is the book, you know, like if you like Finding Ultra, this is like Finding Ultra on steroids times a billion, you know, like the epic tale of Gilgamesh or something. But I'm interested in where you're at right now in the process and you know, what, you know, how, how long is it going to be? And do you know kind of the trajectory of how you're going to get this book done and out?

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  I've got a fantastic agent and we, with the help of a professional team, really, we managed to put out a, I think what is a really good proposal and that proposal's actually out to publishers.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, you went out with it, all right.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  Just now, literally, literally just now. And we, we've had a couple of great responses already. And I'm hoping that in the very near future, there'll be a, an announcement to be made that, that, you know, then it's like, it's kind of like, it's kind of like entering a race though. Then I actually have to write it.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  Which as you know.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  Is.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Just one day at a time.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  It's our part. I wrote about, I think I wrote about a thousand pages when I was at Beckley. And so if I could just, you know, transfer all that over and it was useful, that'd be great. But again, as you know, that's not the way the process works.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  But, but it's not, you're not staring at a blank page. You have all this material to work with.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  You know, I've done enough.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  It's not like you don't know the story either.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's mine. I can't, I can't really be wrong. Can I? You know, the question is can I make it compelling? And I, and I like to think that.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  That it'll be, you know, I'm here to say as always that it's a work in progress and so am I and I will never have all the answers to, you know, who I am and why I do things and I don't think any of us do and if I quit asking those questions then I'm in trouble. I'll tell you something, actually, Estacianna, who I'm lucky enough to be marrying on Saturday, you know, asked me one of the hardest questions I've ever been asked at one of our first dates and she sort of looked at me probably wisely wondering, you know, what was going on with

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  me and because there's all these tales of misery, you know, I'm good at overcoming the difficult things and, you know, putting myself sometimes, you know, some of the things I did myself, some were done to me, which is like most of us and some things just happen and I'm good at setting my mind to that. But, you know, she asked me the question, you know, do I, do I have any clue how to be happy? Like how to just be happy? Like if things were going fantastically, could I just be happy? And I thought it was the most amazing question ever because I realized right away that really the answer to that

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  question was no. You know, I've never really understood like, like how to be happy and I'm hoping that there's, you know, that there's, that ability's gonna grow in me. Certainly with, with, with her, it will be forced to grow because she's, she's much better at it than I am. But it's, it's an interesting thing, you know, I think maybe I've relied on suffering and my desire somehow to suffer and find my discovery through suffering.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  That that's the way I've always functioned and so.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Well, you have you have alcoholism. It's the ism. It's the I seek misery.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Right. But you know, happiness, happiness, I don't think is a a destination. It's a it's a process. And I think it, you know, I think that you get glimpses of it, or I get glimpses of it, when you can get out of yourself and be of service. And when you're tapped into somebody that you care about and when you are expressing yourself authentically. You know, and I think that in terms of your book, if all you do is share your experience and you do it honestly with integrity and you allow yourself to be vulnerable in that process, that it will be difficult and you will suffer, just like you do in an ultra.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  But there will be a sense of satisfaction. And I think we talk a lot about happiness, but it's really about like, are you going to be a satisfied human? I think that's more, that's a better sort of inquiry, or one at least I can relate to a little bit more.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  I agree. And if the the fear, although it's not rational, but it doesn't have to be rational. You know, the fear is somehow that if I'm content, like even for five minutes, that I'm going to lose some edge. Like that, oh, my God, now I'm going to sit on the sofa and and eat popcorn for the rest of my life. And and that would just be terrible. And and it's finding, it is, it's trying to find some sort of a balance where I can enjoy myself. I can enjoy just being and not always be looking forward to whatever that next thing is. And and I, you know, I vowed now, you know, that when when Run to Boston is finished this year.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  You know, I'm gonna, it's not even so called taking a break. It's just gonna do nothing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, it's, it's time to be married and to work on life, actually, instead of always working on, doesn't mean I won't be looking forward towards something, you know, at some point in the future, but it's, it's finding that next thing that she and I can do together. And that, uh, you know, we can, we can travel to some great place. I mean, we took our first, we got engaged in Puerto Rico and it was the first time I had traveled, traveled, I was gonna say out of the country, Puerto Rico's a great area. Exactly. In more than 10 years.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  That I had actually gone somewhere, if you don't count prison.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, well, Beckley, but you ran Badwater at Beckley.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  So technically you went there to do that, right?

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. But we had an actual vacation.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  And now she's a former pro athlete, so we ran every day and we, you know, we, we certainly were very active, but I wasn't there for an event, although the event turned out to be getting engaged.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  You didn't, uh, you know, dissolve.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  No, I, apparently I got through the dismount, so, you know, it's, uh, it's been a, it's been a strange and interesting learning curve these last few years. And the, the oddest thing about it is, you know, if I knew I could be here right now, uh, you know, getting married on Saturday and, and just all the things going on for me, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even change the last few years.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  And the, and the difficulties and you touched on it a second ago, being at Beckley, I, I had some of the most satisfying times of my entire life while I was in there.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  Because there's, there's nothing like, you know, watching somebody else transform and, and knowing that I at least had a small hand in helping them change their own life. Whether it was losing weight or, or, you know, or just running or, you know, working out or changing their, their attitude towards how they ate. I mean, even in, even in prison, you know, you got this, this issue with eating all the time. So I don't know, it was just really, it was wonderful.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think what's great about that is, um.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  By the way, I don't want to do it again, by the way. Just to be clear.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Let's try to, yeah, let's try to avoid that, right? What I loved about it, though, was that it really was this kind of, um, you know, we're using the principles of recovery in that, you know, you referenced it earlier, you know, it's a, it's a program of attraction, um, not, uh, not, uh.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  Promotion.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Promotion or recruitment. And so you would just go out and run every day and you weren't like trying to get anyone else to go with you. You're like, this is what I'm doing. And then slowly, you know, these guys are starting to show up and I love the characters. They're like Butterbean and Bootsie and, and Block and these guys.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  You know, the, from what I can understand, like the furthest thing from, you know, being an athlete or being a runner, some of them tremendously overweight. And over the course of this 16 month period, like one guy lost 180 pounds or something like that.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, Adam.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's so schmaltzy that it's like, oh, what is this, a Disney movie? Like this is the, you know, the guy, you know, you could see the montage sequence in the, in the movie about how that all transpires. But there's, you know, there's real beauty in that.

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  Well, there's some good guys too. I mean, that again, through whatever circumstance, you know, I mean, some of them are just addicts. Some of them, you know, had other, other issues or just bad luck or whatever. And there were a few genuine bad guys, of course. I mean, you know, prison isn't full of people that, that shouldn't be there.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  There's a few that should, but generally speaking, you know, they were just regular guys. And I, what I found funny is nobody ever, of course, came up to me, uh, initially guys even made fun of me to a certain degree, which is not unusual for me, but, um, you know, through time and the fact that they saw me continuing to run and to do these things, you know, they would never like approach me in the middle of, uh, you know, the chow line or something like that. They would come up to me sort of surreptitiously and say, hey, uh, you know, man, I'm thinking about, I've been thinking about running. You know, what, what, what do you think I should do? Like very quietly.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  I even had a couple of the guards in there who, who came to me for running advice and that was totally against, you know, any.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  And they're not really allowed to.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  No, no. And they were, you know, again, and those guys.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Were, you know, some of them weren't good guys. I mean, unfortunately, you take guys and give them some power in a situation like that. And, and, and there were a lot that really treated people poorly, but there were also plenty who were, you know, were in fact just doing their job, you know, and I never held that against them. And, uh, were good guys. And if they asked me, you know, how to start a running program, I'd, I'd tell a, uh, an officer, just as much as I'd tell a, you know, an inmate, because running is running, man. If you're, if you're willing to, if you're willing to take a shot at it, then I don't want to ever discourage anybody from getting out there and, and finding out what they can do.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Hmm. And are you still, are you in touch with these guys still?

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  You, you know, that's the, that's the irony. No, is the, is the answer. And the reason is not because I don't want to be, but it's not allowed.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Oh, a former inmate can't correspond with somebody who's inside?

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And actually technically I can't, I mean, it's been interesting for me just because I'm, I'm easy to find. You know, out here in the world. And so if somebody that I was in there with wants to find me, you know, through whatever social media or anything else, it's, it's, it's pretty much impossible to stop. Uh, although I do laugh every once in a while, I get some kind of note from somebody and I, I tell you the truth, it'll be their real name and I have no idea who it is. Because they've got a name.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not Butterbean. Yeah, Butterbean, right.

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's interesting. It's not allowed. So it's, it's been, it, it, it's weird and frustrating. It'd be like going to college, you know, for, for years with guys or being in a fraternity or being on some team sometime. And then when that's over, never being allowed to have contact with them again. And it's, uh, I don't know. I mean, I assume.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Can you go visit or no?

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  They won't let you visit or?

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Nah, I can't visit. I can't vote. I can't.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Is the rationale is that you're, you could be some sort of proxy for them to take care of business in the outside world on their behalf or something?

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  Not only that, it's just that technically, you know, if you, if you have supposedly bad guys that are all, you know, continuing to have contact with each other. Then that could somehow lead to something. I mean, the irony I've always found in that is that, you know, prison is essentially, you know, criminal college. I mean, you know, I don't want to say what I could do because I'd probably get myself in trouble. But you know, the, the stories you hear and the things that you learn how to do.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  You've got some skills now.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm, my drug pass is, uh, gonna be right where it belongs. And that's in the past forever. But you know, the, the ways people do things. I mean, and I will say that, you know, meth is the killer of today, you know, very much like other drugs have been in the past, but it's the, it's the scourge of the earth right now. And, and you can make it in a bathtub. And so it's a, it's bad news. But I mean, I guess the, the idea is that they don't want guys, you know, being able to get together when they get out of prison. And there's, you know, I, there is some logic to that. But once you've shoved them together, uh, to, to basically share information in, in, in tight quarters for

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  months or years together, you know, that ship has kind of sailed.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  But so it's frustrating though. I mean, I got, you know, these guys who, who were my friends, are my friends. They'll always be my friends. I mean, uh, from that time, I, I don't have any idea what's happened to any of them at this point.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. And so we kind of glossed over the fact that you actually ran, ran your version of Badwater when you were in prison. It took, you had to do it over a couple of days, right?

• 1:48:09Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:48:09Speaker 01

  Did they let you run a couple of hours a day?

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they, they discourage, I think the rules probably even say you're not supposed to run more than, you know, three miles at any time or something. And, uh,

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  They made an exception for you.

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Well, they, they, you know, they didn't really make an exception. I just sort of did it. But, um, you know, it is, I still had to go inside for, you know, count. And obviously I had to sleep inside.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  But they let you go out in the yard all day and do it?

• 1:48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. A camp is interesting because, you know, you do have, you have jobs. I mean, my job was working in recreation. And so I had to like clean the pool tables every morning. And there was some, I had specific jobs. Um, and then I taught classes, uh, the addiction recovery classes, those kinds of things. But. You know, in a, in a sense at a, at a camp, there is, you know, there's guys in there that have to work. You know, I was lucky enough that, um, you know, I had some support. It was my own money, but I had some, I, I had the ability to get some money every month sent in. I mean, there's a limit to that. It's very complicated, but suffice it to say, some guys in there, there's nobody that they don't have anybody on the outside.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  If they don't earn $10 or a hundred dollars or whatever it might be that month, then they can't go buy, you know, a new pair of tennis shoes at the commissary, or they can't get, you know, snacks or coffee or anything else. And so those guys work.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  And very often what you'll see, not to be too detailed, but where you see a camp, you'll usually see like a medium prison, a higher level security. And it's really a lot of the guys at the camp, it's their job to actually take care of the grounds or whatever it might be for, for the higher level security presence. So it's a very intricate, interesting, weird, twisted system. But, um, you know, for me, I was able to, uh, to teach my classes and to do those things in a way that allowed me, you know, a lot of, a lot of freedom during the day. Yeah. And so, I mean, I could go, I could go run, so.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  And you're just running around a, a yard that's what, like a quarter mile in perimeter or whatever.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  I call it a goat path because it even had a hill. So I had to decide that I want to run the, the, the direction that meant that I went up a sharp, steeper hill on one way, or the other direction had a much, you know, yeah, you had that short, steep down, but you had a much longer gradual up. I don't know. It was very, you know, like any runner, I overthought it just about every day.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Laying in bed at night, like pondering this deep, you know, decision that you have to make.

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  Is that way faster or is the other way faster? But, you know, I got to where I was doing, I mean, I, I did speed work. I did all kinds of stuff in there and even was able to, you know, I ran a few five minute miles in there and did some things I hadn't done for many, many years. So just because. I had the time to do it and you know, I read.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  You're not gonna be returning any phone calls or anything.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  I read a hundred and fifty books. I wrote every day. I, you know, I did my best under really stressful circumstances to take care of my, my body, but also my, my spirit and that, that was done by helping other people. And look, you know, from being in recovery, talk about helping other people, sounds very giving and very generous and you know, we know in addiction recovery that the thing that I can do that is, is absolutely the most selfish thing I can do and best for me is to help someone else. And so I set my sights on, on doing that and still, you know, hopefully still do, you know, I get a lot of requests to,

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  to speak and to do things, you know, with, you know, talk to kids and adults alike and, and I try to never say no to those things just because I think it's, it's what I'm required to do.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you wanna, if you wanna keep it, you gotta give it away.

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  So how did the Twitter thing work? You gotta answer this. It's driving me crazy.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I had a, I had a,

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  the, the way prisons work these days is they do, federal prisons are equipped with computers these days. It's very expensive and it's very limited, the amount of time you can spend on it. So what I would do is I would actually write my tweets,

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  in advance and sometimes I would mail them out in a, in a letter. Sometimes I would get on email, but that was heavily, that was monitored by, by the system, but it wasn't illegal. It's not, you know, again, there, it did turn into a, they didn't care for it. Let's just put it that way.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  They weren't happy about the fact that you're tweeting from.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  No, they weren't happy about it, but the fact of the matter is, and someone else had to actually, you know.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Type the tweet into the thing. Right.

• 1:52:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. But that happens every day, you know, all, all over the place and it's not illegal. There's not, and I wasn't. You know, if I had been sending out posts that said, you know, here's how you sneak some contraband into me.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  Or, you know, naming the guard by his name.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  Or yeah, anything, or even, or even an inmate by his name, then that's not cool. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have done that. But, you know, it was all generic. I mean, my, my favorite one was I did this whole little series called Overheard.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Uh huh. I remember that. Yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  There was some, there was some funny stuff, you know, because, because guys in there, you know, would just say, you know, say some crazy things, you know, it was, it was, I don't even know if I can give an example.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  Well, I'm standing in line, you know, for lunch one day and, you know, these two guys are talking in front of me and one of them looks at the other one and says, now wait a minute, exactly what part of the cow does the liver come from? It's like we were having liver and onions that day. And another guy asked me, he asked me, he's like, now, you know, how many laps around this track equals a cupcake? You know, things like that. And I mean, they're, they're just, they're great, funny, you know, genuine questions and some, and also some heart wrenching things, you know, guys who

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  No doubt.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  who hadn't seen their kids for 10 years and they're getting a visit that day and, you know, things like that. I mean, it was a

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  I mean, speaking of that, how has that kind of colored your relationship with your sons? I mean, how is that?

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  Man.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  How's that impacted?

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  Well, my kids are doing great, but I couldn't have, I, I couldn't have been taken away from them. Is there ever a good time? But they were teenage boys and, you know, one of them, my youngest, is now a freshman at UNC in Chapel Hill and, and he's, you know, to say they survived it and got through it, okay, is just to acknowledge the physical manifestation of what happened. I mean, you know, they're still alive. They're, you know, they're doing their thing. They're living their lives, but you know, it's a, it's a pretty scary thing, you know, for a teenage boy to just have, have their dad, you know, taken away.

• 1:55:10Speaker 02

  And, and my older son's had some addiction issues himself and, you know, he's doing fantastically right now and he's a, he's a personal trainer and I'm, I'm hoping that both of them get to come out during run to Boston and spend some time out on the road and helping out and. You know, they're, they're doing well, but it, it, you know, it destroyed my family. You know, and it, and the, the shock waves from that will probably never go away fully. You know, but I say to them the same thing that I'd say to anybody. Nobody can ruin my life, except for me.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  Nobody gets the, the right to do that, not, you know, not, you know, some federal agent, not prison, not a prison guard, not anybody. You know, I'm fully capable of messing up my own life.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Right. But to kind of come out of Beckley and, and carry that pain of knowing that, you know, what happened really impacted those boys. You know, in a, in a profound way. And how do you, you know, kind of move forward with that?

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Well, as a father, they, they, you know, I called them and I wrote and I would do all the things that I could. And it was, you know, at the beginning, we had a lot of contact and as, as time moved forward. You know, what I was, and this is my, my kids are loving boys who both will, you know, hug and kiss me in public, you know? And, and I judge that as, as success as a father, but they, they to protect themselves actually had to like withdraw from me to a certain degree. I mean, it was almost like too painful to hear from me.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  And, and I tried to respect that and to not try to be, and one of the hardest things to do is to try to stay in touch, but also try to not be like a parent. Like I couldn't, I couldn't tell them what to do from the situation I was in. And, you know, again, and I watched other guys, I learned from other guys. I had a guy, you know, Block, who was listed on your, your list there, you know? And he had a, a son who was one of the top basketball players in the country. And he's the first one who said to me, man, you gotta let it go. You gotta let it go. Cause I'd call and I wouldn't hear back. I'd go weeks sometimes without hearing from my own kids. And he'd say, you gotta let it go. They're in their own pain right now.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  And you just gotta let them get through it. You can't save them and they can't save you. You know, do your time, don't let your time do you.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Right, right. And there's this incredible.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Dichotomy between, you know, your Beckley, which equals imprisonment, and running, which is ultimate freedom, right? These two worlds butting up against each other. And your ability to find freedom through running during your imprisonment. You know, it's kind of like this Venn diagram kind of situation. And I was thinking about that last night when I was going to bed. Like, the two extremes butting up against each other. And, you know, somebody who's used to experiencing that kind of freedom, going all the way to the other side.

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  Well, and I had a close friend who said to me, you know, before I went to Beckley, and he was honest with me. He said, you know, I can't imagine anybody less suited to lose their freedom than you. Because I am, in a way, even my conviction, in a way, was a, was an attack of lifestyle. You know, because my lifestyle is not normal. I don't, you know, I've never worked like nine to five. And, and I, not, not because I, I just really have proven myself very incapable of being able to do it. And so it's really a shortcoming. It's not a, anything else. But I always sacrificed some security and money and those things to maintain my freedom.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  Because that's what I wanted. I wanted to be able to go run, or to go travel, or go to a race, or go do those things when I wanted to do it. And that was more important to me than having money in the bank. And...

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  So the irony is all the more, you know, palpable.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I look at, you know what? It's the same reason that just a couple of days, I got up at five o'clock in the morning to go run around a track in North Carolina for 10 hours in training and working on my pacing, as I was saying. I did that because I want to, you know, prove to myself, not to anybody else, but that I can do the things that are are difficult and that I don't want to do and that I know I'll be stronger if I can do it. And prison forced me to face that, you know, a thousand times over.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and it's a way of sort of staying connected to that experience, right? It's sort of like the the homeless guy who's given a bed and still sleeps on the floor.

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you almost don't want to get too comfortable and I I will say to, you know, I'm, I don't like to be a fear monger, but I never imagined something like that could have ever happened to me. And most people can't, you know, most people don't go through their lives thinking, oh, man, at any time I could be arrested and go to prison. You know, and and yet, uh, and not to get off on another big tangent, you know, you look at all the stuff going on with Edward Snowden and just the, you know, all the things being disclosed now, um, it's a, it's an interesting place we live in these days where there's very little

• 2:00:46Speaker 02

  privacy, there's, there's very little that's not suspect and somehow we've become afraid of our own shadows and that somehow justifies that, you know, that nothing should be private any longer.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  It's a very bizarre mashup because on the one hand, we've never had more access to more information. So there's a level of transparency that you would think would translate into, you know, sort of greater sovereign, personal sovereignty, et cetera. And yet, at the same time, we have this clampdown kind of happening or this consolidation of governmental power that we're all kind of signing off on willingly, kind of volunteering for it. And in a, in a very Orwellian kind of sense, you know, that we, you know, people say, well, the NSA can, you know, access your iPhone and it can turn on your camera and and the microphone and listen to you and everyone's like,

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  okay, all right, so, you know, what are we doing tonight, you know, like we're just sort of yawning over this whole thing.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  Well, then we feel powerless.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, well, what am I supposed to do, you know, I guess I'll enjoy my day or.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  I'm not going to give up my iPhone.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Forget about that.

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  Well, and it is, you know, we laugh about it, but it is, it's a question that I think, I mean, I'm, I'm sort of enjoying watching it in the media because it's become. You know, it's become a really hotly debated topic as it should be, you know, and I don't, I don't have the answers and I consider myself to be,

• 2:02:16Speaker 02

  I consider myself to be a true patriot. I mean, I am a patriot. I certainly believe in all the, all the basis of what this country was built on and its freedoms and, and I think it's very debatable that we even resemble any of that, you know, vision that our, that our forefathers had, you know, these days. And, and some of that is inevitable change that's come through growth and technology and, and other ways, but, but some of it's a, a, you know, a psychological shift that we're just comfortable and we're just kind of okay with the stuff that, that we feel powerless to control. And, you know, I don't have the answers either, but I, but I know that, I know that, you know,

• 2:03:01Speaker 02

  asking the questions and continuing to talk about it is really important. I think people are, are a little fed up and, and, and worried though, you know, about, about where the direction it's all heading. And I'm, I'm glad we should be worried.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  But we're not, we're not sort of rallying in the streets like Vietnam era.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  We're too distracted.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  We're too busy for that.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  Well, we're busy, but we're, we're busy doing what? We're busy distracting ourselves with, you know, technology and convenience.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, disposable content.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  And running.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Well, running is very good, yeah. No, well, it's, we've been going for almost two hours. I don't want to keep you too much longer, but we do, I do want to say, you know, could sort of, you know, in the wake of getting out of Beckley, it was a, a mere year later where you show up at Badwater, right? And, uh, I mean, what were your expectations returning to that race?

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  You know, I wanted to be under the radar, like as much as I possibly could be, which is, you know, at that point was not possible.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially at Badwater, I mean.

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  But, but Chris Cosman, the race director, who, who I consider a friend and a great guy and.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  He lives down the street here.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  I saw him at the supermarket the other day.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, in the canyon there. And, and actually the, you know, we don't have time to talk about it today, but everybody out there should, should Google Badwater right now and the national parks and all that stuff.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  I tweeted, I tweeted about that. I mean, I'm sure you saw that article about the, um. The radiation and that caused a big reaction with people because you know, it's kind of a suspect story, but there you know, basically there's not going to be any adventure core racing in Death Valley next year. They have their permits were not rubber stamped for the first time.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  It's crazy. I mean, the economic impact alone in Death Valley, you know, is is fantastic. And the tourism, I think that tangentially comes from the notoriety that a race like Badwater has. I mean, it brings people from all over the world to Death Valley.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  See this place.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's gonna.

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  I mean, do you have any behind the scenes knowledge about that that you can impart or no?

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  I really don't, although that I know that every summer, there's a lot of Germans around in Death Valley. It always fascinates me. They're in Dead, they're in Badwater. I don't know if you noticed this.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  Well, all the kids that work in the restaurants and the hotels are all from strange foreign countries doing their like year abroad. And I'm like, you got sent here? You came to, this is your American experience? Like stuck in the middle of the desert at age 19? You know, like, what do you guys do all day when you're not working?

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  Well, it's a, you know, and Badwater is a great race for a lot of reasons. It's certainly a very difficult race, but it is like, like most big ultras, it's a family, you know, you go to Western States, you go to Leadville, any of these, you tend to see the same people generally over and over. And it's this big celebration really of something difficult and interesting and beautiful. And, and for no reason, that's been taken away for this year. I mean, literally for no reason. And hopefully people will, you know, at least write to the right appropriate people and, and complain. But anyway, to my race this past year, I went there, Chris gave me the race

• 2:06:13Speaker 02

  number two, like he assigned me number two. And, and usually race numbers are assigned based on your previous year's finish. So obviously that wasn't the case for me. So I don't actually know this, but I assume whoever was second the year before didn't, didn't come. You know, last year, otherwise they would have been assigned number two. So whoever that was didn't, didn't make it um last year. So he gave me number two, which to me instantly put like tons of extra pressure. Like there was some expectation. Uh, and in fact, somebody before the race, I overheard a comment that someone made, a woman made that, you know, that I didn't deserve number two. She didn't know I could hear her.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was like, I, I will admit to sort of going, okay. But you know, I really went there with a, I think a good conservative plan and I, I, I went there to win the race though. I would never have said that out loud and never will before a race, but in my mind, that's the mindset that I, I had to have. And I was fortunate enough to, to run a time that, that actually was fast enough to win a whole lot of the years in the past.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Right. And break the master's record.

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I actually broke it by three hours and, and had a, if there's any such thing as an easy race at Badwater, I certainly had the easiest one I had ever had.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  I saw you a couple of times. You didn't look like it was easy. You didn't look like, you didn't look relaxed. You did not look relaxed.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  Dang it. That's.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  But you were killing it the whole time. I was happy to see you up there. I remember, what's the, is it um, what's the town where you come in and you get all the ice?

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Well, there's stovepipe.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  I think it was stovepipe. It was, it was like three in the afternoon when the heat was really dialed in. And I saw, I saw you, I was getting ice for Dean and I saw you coming through and you ran into the bushes to go to the bathroom or something like that and running by and, and I was like, wow, you're really up there, man. You were, you were killing it. But you didn't look like, you, it wasn't like you're like smiling and waving. You know what I mean? Like it's, it was really hot.

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  Well, my, my crew and, and Estacianna, I was really just trying to impress, I was really just trying to impress her.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  She's laughing.

• 2:08:24Speaker 02

  That's the only thing I was trying to do was to impress her. So I had to look good. But you know, the fact is I do, my crew always knows that I actually, I joke the whole time and I, even if I'm miserable, I do enjoy the experience tremendously. I like being out there, but this year, I don't know, two things happened, I think, that, that made me have a great race. May- maybe three, if I just count uh, having an awesome girlfriend at the time, but um. She taught me how to hydrate properly, which is sounds, sounds like a funny thing, but.

• 2:08:57Speaker 01

  And for a guy, the guy who ran across the Sahara Desert needs to be told how to hydrate?

• 2:09:02Speaker 02

  Well, I used to show up in Death Valley every year and I'd maybe start drinking extra water a few days before. And certainly when I got out into that dryness and hotness, I would ramp it up. The fact is, what I figured out was my dehydration was chronic and that, you know, as a runner, I'm almost, I never had done a great job. So a couple of months before that race, I really, thanks to her, started focusing on hydration. The other honestly is, it was the shoes. I actually switched to Hoka's and, you know, I had run in some fantastic shoe brands before that had supported me well. Newton, most recently, and they're a fantastic brand with great.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  But Newton's the opposite of a.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  They are. And I, and I really, you know, for, for ultra, for someone my size, I'm a little bigger than, than most of the guys that were up there where I am in the race. And Hoka being a fairly new brand, I never had an experience like that in my life. I mean, I actually ran the next day after Badwater.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:06Speaker 02

  And two days later, I ran five miles with no pain. And I'd been in a wheelchair before, after, you know, after Badwater with a variety of other brands because it's just a, it's a hard race.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a hard race. It's hot and you get dehydrated and everything else. So hydration made a difference and, and again, I would, I would be disingenuous if I didn't admit having something to prove. You know, I went there fearful that I would fall apart. I hadn't done the race in a few years. I was 50 years old and I was like going, you know, deep down, I was like, should I really be doing this again?

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  Or should I, you know, I think people expected me just to go out and be. You know, just a participant.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  And, and I went out and was lucky enough to have a good day and, and race well and have fun doing it and, and actually feel good when it was over and I've never had that experience.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think you surprised a lot of people too. I think there were a lot of people there that didn't expect you to perform at that level.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, I was probably one of them. But, you know, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I, I don't, you know, you, if you go into Badwater or any race like that ever thinking you're going to do a certain thing, you're probably going to get your ass handed to you. So, you know, I, I knew that if I kept a good plan and as always, I was pretty far back in the pack halfway through and I didn't start going faster. I just maintained and managed to catch a few people.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  The front pack was, was pretty aggressive.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  They were.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  Overly aggressive.

• 2:11:38Speaker 02

  And usually a few of them will, you know, fall off and that, that happens every year. You know, they're, they're going after it and, but it was a great experience. Again, I, I credit Chris Cosman and the Badwater family for welcoming me back and there was no, you know, there was never any discomfort around any of that and I had a blast. I had a blast. I hope, I hope the 2015, I get to do it again.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they're going to do it, they're going to have the quote unquote Badwater race. They're just not going to do it in Badwater, right?

• 2:12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, correct.

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  So it's going to be out like in the Salt and Sea area or something like that?

• 2:12:15Speaker 02

  Correct. Chris will find a way. He'll find a way to make it happen and to make it a good, good event. I mean, he's, you know, he's a brilliant, tough race director that, that puts on safe, really, really wonderful events and I hope, I know he'll do the same this year, even, even without Death Valley.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Speaking of events that go from very low points to very high points, you've been public in talking about this expedition that you've wanted to do going from, what is it? The Dead Sea to the top of Everest. I mean, are you shelving that for now or is that still on the bucket list?

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  It is very much still on the bucket list and it's, it's something that I would like to do on all seven continents to go from the lowest point on each continent to the highest and it'll, it'll probably, if I get to do it, it'll take. You know, the rest of my life in all likelihood, I've promised that for this year, you know, we'll get through Run to Boston and kind of focus on life as much as possible for the rest of the year and on hopefully finishing a book and doing those things. But, you know, I love this metaphor of lowest to highest because I feel like I've been at that lowest point many times.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Except for you, it's not, it's not this linear thing. Your courses should go, they should, they should go high, low, high, low, high, low. There should be a lot of up and down.

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  Well, if I could put all seven continents together on the same expedition, that would, that would happen, I guess. But I absolutely am still, that's still on the agenda. And, you know, sponsors and finding, you know, finding companies that, and angels out there too, that support the things that I believe in is important to me. And certainly something that, you know, that I'm always looking for those partnerships. And I've been very lucky in the past to find good ones and people that believe in what, what I believe in. And I'm confident that will happen again.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Cool.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  That sounds like a good place to end it.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  So now do I get to ask you some questions?

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Well, that'll be the next time.

• 2:14:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Or we can go running now and you can do that.

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  That'd be great.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you want to, you should start your own podcast. You're a radio host. You do a podcast. I'll start a network. You can join my network.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  All right. That'd be great. I would do it in a heartbeat.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  I'm sure you know plenty of characters that could entertain people.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  I know a few. I know a few. I know a few.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Cool. All right. So, Running in Place, coming to bookstores probably next year. Run to Boston. If people want to support, follow, do you have like a donate, can people donate? If people want to support this? Is there a place for them to go online and learn a little bit more about?

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. So just, I mean, it's pretty simple. Run to Boston and the two is the number two. So Run2Boston.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  Dot com.

• 2:15:10Speaker 02

  Because of Andre and I. Dot com and at Run2Boston on Twitter. We actually just got that handle today.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you did?

• 2:15:16Speaker 02

  You know, somebody else actually.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  I would imagine somebody would, yeah.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  Well, but it was just a guy.

• 2:15:20Speaker 01

  They weren't using it?

• 2:15:21Speaker 02

  It was a guy. It was an Italian guy who ran Boston a few years ago and, and, you know, he had one follower and didn't ever post anything. And so, uh, so we got that. And then there's a Facebook page that just went up. My first, uh, my first article on the online, the digital version of RunnersWorld.com.

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:39Speaker 02

  I mean, really RunnersWorld.com is the best place to follow it.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  Follow it.

• 2:15:43Speaker 02

  Because they're gonna not only post the things that I do, but their own stuff. And, you know, most runners are there anyway. So it's an easy way to follow it. And there will be at least one post a week written by Andre and I.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:57Speaker 02

  Uh, separately. We're telling our own kind of stories.

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  And you're documenting this on film, aren't you?

• 2:16:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  You have your crew all sorted out for that?

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  And, you know, yes, but it's gonna be a much lower key affair than certainly not a Running the Sahara and, and not even at this point, Running, Running America. It's really just, it might just meet me with my Handycam and, uh, and out there talking. But, um, you know, maybe some GoPros attached to some things. But it's, it, you know, this time I certainly want to tell a story, but, um, you know, I'm gonna do it more through, through writing and through, you know, the RunnersWorld portal, generally speaking, just because they've been great about, uh, wanting to help tell the story.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  And obviously they're fully invested in the story of Boston and of, you know, the, the, the purpose behind Run2Boston and, and helping to tell an organic, uh, story. You know, that one doesn't need any embellishment.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:56Speaker 02

  It's just a, it's a, it's a poignant story on its own. And so, yeah, it can be Run2Boston.com or just the RunnersWorld.com site will always have an update. And, and absolutely, we hope that people will, will sign on to receive daily updates and.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  The one thing about running for 44 days in a row is there's, there's, you know, you can ignore a couple of days and you don't feel like you've missed very much.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Are you gonna have any, like a live GPS tracking kinda thing?

• 2:17:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, so we'll have some mechanism that will, there's a couple of possibilities there with some of the apps that are out there and, and other ways of doing the tracking. So yeah, people can get on anytime and see where we are and.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Including the NSA.

• 2:17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Well, they're, they're welcome to watch.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  And Robert Nordlander, he'll be watching very intently.

• 2:17:49Speaker 02

  I'm sure. When I left Greensboro, he, he apparently took up running, so.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  Oh, he did?

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  Fascinating thing.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it was interesting.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  You guys are gonna be buddies.

• 2:17:59Speaker 02

  We are. We're gonna run, run together someday. I fully expect that.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would like to see that, actually. Cool. All right, and if you wanna just know a little bit more about Charlie in general, charlieingle.com, right? And on Twitter, at Charlie Engle, E-N-G-L-E. And go to richroll.com on the, the page where I'm gonna host this episode. I'll put up a bunch of links to some of those news articles, like the New York Times and Outside and the Oxford American One, which is my favorite, and other good stuff, including, and the Run to Boston site and all that kinda stuff. Cool?

• 2:18:30Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  All right, man. So we'll get you back on the road, so you can go enjoy your wedded bliss.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I'm ready.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Thanks again for dropping in. I'm glad it worked out.

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  Thanks, Rich, for having me. I'm looking forward to, to coming back someday.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. When you're, when you, when you finish the run and break the record, you gotta come back.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  That's a deal.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  And then you gotta come back again when your book comes out.

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  That's a deal. Happy to do it.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  Anything I can do to help with the book stuff, too, let me know.

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  Well, we, we figured out we have a lot of problems to solve out there, and I think we can do it. So, yeah.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  Cool, man. All right. Best of luck, man. Can't wait to, I'll follow you online for this.

• 2:19:03Speaker 02

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 2:19:04Speaker 01

  All right, man. I'm outta here. Peace. Plants.