Rebuilding My Body & Starting Over After Spinal Fusion Surgery

This is a solo AMA focused on my diet and fitness routine in the aftermath of spinal fusion surgery. I walk through the specifics — what I ate, how I trained, how I went from 207 pounds and completely atrophied to dropping 37 pounds while building lean muscle — and the salient lessons I've learned about patience, consistency, and approaching reinvention with a beginner's mind. There's also a broader conversation about aging, agency, and what it means to stop trying to get back to who you were. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Plant Power Meal Planner: Get $10 OFF your membership with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://mealplanner.richroll.com/ Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at👉🏼https://www.airbnb.com/host Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange 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.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout. How about this, you guys? We're outside, outside of the black void. It's like another dimension out here. The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day, and I'm back with another solo episode of the podcast. The first two that I have done have been received with overwhelming positivity. Thank you for that. I'm gonna be doing more of these.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  When I put the word out that I was looking for questions to answer, thinking I was gonna do an AMA, maybe answer four or five questions, the vast majority of the responses that I got pivoted around my diet and my fitness routine in the wake of spinal fusion surgery as I engage with my recovery and am in this sort of rebuilding process. So this AMA is gonna be singularly focused on that because I have a lot to say about this. And in addition to a lifetime of training experience, experience with nutrition, I've also learned a lot over this past year.

• 2:11Rich Roll?

  Many things that I think are salient and hopefully helpful and applicable to your life. So, diet, training, longevity, reinvention, transformation, let's fucking go.

• 2:27Rich Roll?

  So the way I want to open this is with a little bit of background because I don't want to assume that everybody knows my story. I was a swimmer as a young person. I competed at Stanford University in the late 1980s as a butterflier at a pretty high level, kind of a bench warmer on that two-time NCAA winning team, but a member of that team nonetheless, where I was training every single day with Olympic gold medalists and world record holders and NCAA and American record holders. And I bring that up solely to make the point that I know a lot about training. I've been pushing my body and submitting to voluntary suffering for the better part of my entire life. So that was the 80s. The

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  90s was a decade of decadence where I pursued my first career as a professional alcoholic. Needless to say, that did not work out so well. At 31, I ended up getting sober and so I spent that decade, the decade of my 30s, trying to repair the wreckage of my life, rebuild myself up emotionally, mentally, and spiritually so that I could become a productive member of society. And during that time, I was very career focused. I wasn't focused on my physical fitness. That fell by the wayside. I ended up gaining about 50 pounds, living this sedentary, fast food lifestyle. And that came to a head shortly

• 3:54Rich Roll?

  before I turned 40, when I had a bit of a reckoning, this sort of existential crisis about what I was doing with my life, pursuing this career in corporate law, that coincided with a health scare one evening, that was an inciting incident that led me to basically reinventing my life whole cloth, changing my relationship with food and with nutrition and with physical activity. And that led to a period of time in my mid-40s when I was competing in ultra endurance sports, ultra endurance athletics. In 2009, I competed in a race called the Ultraman World Championship.

• 4:36Rich Roll?

  Which is a double Ironman race that circumnavigates the entire big island of Hawaii over three days. I finished that race as the fastest American and six fastest in the world. And then in 2010, I did this thing called Epic Five, where I completed five Ironmans on each of the five Hawaiian islands in about six days. In the aftermath of that, I started experiencing some lower back discomfort as well as some numbness on the bridge of my left foot. So I went to my holistic chiropractor. He took an X-ray of my lower back in, I think it was in the summer of 2011.

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  And it was immediately clear from that X-ray that I had what my chiropractor described as a grade two spondylo listhesis. This chiropractor is a very holistic practitioner. In the course of his career, he has advised his patients to undergo surgery, maybe five or 10 times over, you know, 30 years of practicing. And he was quite clear with me at that moment in time in saying like, you're going to have to get surgery for this. I didn't want to hear it. I wasn't all that symptomatic at the time. I proceeded to ignore him and continue to train through it. The pain wasn't that significant.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  I thought that maybe I could figure out a way to alleviate the numbness on my own. And so I essentially spent 15 years trying to resolve this issue short of surgery by wandering in the wilderness of every imaginable alternative healing modality while also continuing to push my body as hard as I could. When you live in Los Angeles and you mention to somebody that you have a lower back issue, everybody seems to have a guy who saved them that you must see. And I saw all those guys. And I did all the stuff. I did acupuncture, all kinds of wild chiropractic techniques.

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  I did PT and I did PRP, which stands for platelet-rich plasma injections.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  None of this seemed to work, but I was very committed to figuring out how to fix this problem without having to go under the knife. In 2017, I competed in a race called the Otillo Swim Run World Championships in Sweden, where you basically swim across these islets that are off the coast of Stockholm and crawl up on islands and run across them and jump back in the sea. It's like an eight-hour, I don't know, like, you know, 80-kilometer race that I completed, but I completed it in pain. And that's actually the last time that I actually trained for something hard and completed a race, so almost a decade ago.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  After that, the pain just continued to worsen until it became very difficult to even sit up in bed. The numbness that I was experiencing in my left foot started to expand until it covered the entirety of my left foot and began creeping up my shin towards my knee. And that's when things got serious and I realized that what I was doing was not working. My mobility was so compromised that I really couldn't run anymore. Like I said, I could barely sit up in bed. I couldn't lean over at all. My leg would throb at night in extreme pain, and I knew that I was going to have to take

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  some more significant steps to have this problem resolved. And it was around this time, probably two and a half years ago, and this is to illustrate the kind of like nadir of this whole situation. I was at a birthday party, and I was talking to a friend of mine who I'd known for many years and kind of sharing with him what I was experiencing and his girlfriend, who is a physical therapist, and they were offering some advice. And then this other person kind of walked into the conversation and joined it, and he said, "What are you talking about? Oh, my lower back pain, this is what's going on." And he said to me, have you read the John Sarno book Healing Back Pain?

• 8:59Rich Roll?

  Now, anybody who has a lower back issue might be able to relate to the annoyance and the irritation of being recommended this book. It comes up all the time. And the premise of this book is that your lower back pain is essentially an emotional issue that you have stored in your body, an unresolved emotional wound that is requiring redress. Now, I don't dismiss the possibility that that is often the case, but I was adamant that in my situation, this was not true. But he goes on to tell me that he read this book, he had debilitating back pain, and after reading the book, he was like 80% better.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  And I asked him, well, what did you do from reading the book that led to you feeling better? And he basically just said, well, all I did was read it. And I was like, that is insane. But the ripple in this story is that the guy who was telling me this tale was none other than Tobey Maguire, Spider-Man. And he had suffered a back injury as a result of being in all these Spider-Man movies and the kind of rigorous stunts that he had to perform. And I thought, well, maybe this is a message from the universe or from God. Like, God has delivered Spider-Man to me to tell me this story. So I thought, why not?

• 10:22Rich Roll?

  You know, I have resisted reading this book forever, so I'm finally going to read it. And what I did is I downloaded the audiobook and I went out on my bike the next day and I listened to the entire audiobook while I was riding. Went home, went to sleep that night, and the next morning, I literally couldn't get out of bed. My back had seized up so badly.

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  So take from that story what you will. Maybe I was riding too hard or shouldn't been riding at all. It's not to say that that book doesn't have some sagacious counsel, but in my case, it sort of illustrated like, hey, it's time to do something different. And yet, it was still a year before I went and saw a proper neurosurgeon. And when I sat down with this surgeon and he looked at my scans, my latest MRIs and x-rays, he basically just said, "This situation can only be resolved with surgery. There's just no other way with your very specific type of spondyloles thesis." It starts with something called a pars defect, which I was born with.

• 11:34Rich Roll?

  It is a tiny fissure, a little fracture on the bony backside of my L5 vertebrae. And because I've been so hard on my body for so many years, literally hundreds of thousands of flip turns and God knows how many miles of running, this fracture obviously got aggravated and exacerbated, which led to an instability of that vertebrae in my spine. My L5 slid forward and down until it was sitting upon the nerve roots that emanate in between L5 and S1. And that impingement is the source of my numbness and all of my sciatic pain and the like. And essentially, what he told me is, "This is an engineering problem.

• 12:18Rich Roll?

  Like, there's no amount of glute activation that is going to move that vertebrae back into place. And that misalignment in your spine, that instability is only going to grow worse. And unless you submit to this surgery that I'm proposing, very quickly or very soon, you're going to have drop foot." So that was all the information that I needed. And one year ago, on May 8th, almost exactly a year ago, I underwent what is called a 360-degree spinal fusion surgery.

• 12:54Rich Roll?

  That surgery entails going in through the abdomen. They basically slice you up in front, fillet you, open you up, reach in and scrape out the disc in between L5 and S1 and replace it with this perforated cage that they screw in. And inside that cage is bone grafting material that, over a very long period of time, grows those two vertebrae together, the L5 and the S1. Once that is completed, I'm flipped over on my back and they opened me up on my backside. They installed these rods that they then screwed in. It was about a six-hour procedure.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  And I'm so grateful that I underwent it because it was successful and it has resolved the problem. But there's an additional problem, which is that I completely underestimated how challenging this recovery would be, how much patience it would require and how long it would take before I started to feel like myself again. It's just been far more intense and protracted and extended than I could have imagined or that I expected. I was just in absolute agony, extreme pain for weeks, unable to literally do anything except do these short walks and then lie down in bed.

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  I was able to successfully wean myself off the pain meds, but I can tell you that it was absolutely excruciating. And I would say for the first five months, as the pain lessened week by week, I started to lose hope that I would ever feel like myself again. Yes, I could get up and I could walk around, but the pain around the wound and the healing process was so slow that it didn't seem like it was ever going to mend. So along the way, being so sedentary, I started to experience a decline in my mental health

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  and my enthusiasm for life, unable to do anything except very slowly walk around. You know, I started to put on weight. I gained about 40 pounds. And just showed up at the studio and put a smile on my face and did the podcast and kind of continued my work and also tried to make progress on this book that I'm writing. But I was really operating at about 30%, so unenthusiastic about my life and really struggling to hold on to something to look forward to. And it wasn't until I reached about close to seven months into my recovery where I started to feel like I could move

• 15:46Rich Roll?

  a little bit more, still very much not feeling like myself, but at least do a little bit more than walking. But it had been so long since I had exerted myself that it took me a long time to make the decision to start engaging in the recovery process, in the PT, in being kind of more conscious of the foods that I was eating. But it wasn't until I had hit about eight months into my recovery where I just got tired of being this big-bellied guy with a gray beard, wandering around aimlessly in my bathrobe. Like, I just finally had had enough of that and realized like, it's time to turn a corner. Like, I've got to

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  start taking care of myself a little bit better. I've done it before. I know how to do it. I did it when I was 40. And now here I am again at 59, having to do it again. Still in pain around the region of healing because it does take 12 to 18 months for the fusion to fully set. And also, all the muscles that got sliced up have to like, you know, repair themselves. So that takes a long time. But I did feel robust enough to begin to engage with taking care of myself and get involved in my own recovery process. And the way I decided to do it, and this is absolutely key, was to approach it not

• 17:12Rich Roll?

  from this perspective of how quickly can I get back to that person I was before, to the runner, to the ultra endurance athlete, but instead...

• 17:23Rich Roll?

  Approaching it from the perspective of who can I become in the future by really taking advantage of this situation, not as a setback, but as an opportunity for growth and transformation. It's just a tiny mindset tweak or perspective tweak, but that honestly has made all the difference in how I'm engaging with this sort of phase of life that I'm in right now. So diet, like I said, I put on about 40 pounds. I think I tipped the scales at 207 pounds in November. And so the first thing that I did before even engaging with anything that you would

• 18:07Rich Roll?

  consider to be exercise was focus on what I was eating. Because I have found that it's actually easier to lose weight when you're not doing vigorous exercise or in some kind of intense training cycle. Because you don't have to contend with the heightened appetite and cravings that come with that. So this was over the holiday period, which made it a little bit tricky. So I started with a few very simple rules, the first of which was no bread, nothing with gluten in it, no refined grains. I added into that, nothing with added sugar in it. And of course, no ultra processed foods, just focusing on whole foods.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  Whole foods with an eye on reducing the carbohydrate aspect of the macro nutrients. Not cutting out carbs altogether, but just being a little bit more mindful, particularly because I wasn't exercising, to not overdo it on the carbs and to focus more on the plant based proteins, on tofu, on lentils, on beans, on quinoa and on tempeh, like making sure that the majority of the food that I was eating, portion wise, was

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Protein first. And again, the key was portion control and just making some really hard and fast rules around that. Nothing extreme. I didn't go on some crazy restrictive diet or anything like that. But just by making those subtle tweaks and being patient, not in a hurry, is how I have been able to lose over 35 pounds in about 100 days, very gradually. Patience has been key and I've been able to stick with that routine, not perfectly, allowing for some imperfections here and there. But by consistently practicing those

• 20:10Rich Roll?

  rules and doing my best to adhere to them, I've been able to drop all of that weight. And the thing about making slight little changes like this is that once you start to see results, even if those results are very small, that obviously gets you more emotionally engaged in the process. Then you get excited about building upon that. And with consistency, you create momentum and momentum is its own fuel source, its own source of energy, something you want to protect. Because once you have momentum, these choices that at one point in time were difficult or somewhat difficult, become second nature and just, you know, habit without having to even think about it.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  And then about 30 days into this process, I started to fold in exercise and I'm going to get to that in a second. But today, I have gone from 207 pounds to 170 pounds. I've dropped my body fat percentage from 20% to 10.8%, all while increasing my lean muscle mass along the way. How do I know this? I know this because I have one of those body composition scales. I don't know how accurate it is, but this is the information that it has provided me. So take from that what you will.

• 21:39Rich Roll?

  All right, let's talk about the fitness piece. I'm not going to go into excruciating detail on every single exercise that I do. I think that would be quite boring. But I do want to say that I started this by just doing the easiest lift possible. And by lift, I mean the most basic PT exercises. Pelvic floor work, glute activation, core activation. Very subtle, gentle movements that require almost zero exertion. And I think that was important in helping to break the seal and make it easier for me

• 22:22Rich Roll?

  to go back into the gym, knowing that I wasn't going to be able to just start bench pressing or anything like that. You know, that would be a terrible idea. And by doing that every single day and not holding on to any kind of expectations of progress, I realized some very gradual progress. And just like with diet, that got me more emotionally engaged with the process and made it easier for me to wake up every morning and first thing, get right into the gym and get to work. And basically, that is how it began. Simple walking, either outdoors or on the treadmill, and then these basic PT exercises.

• 23:04Rich Roll?

  An extremely elementary routine that's easy to replicate, that isn't time consuming, but is actually important. All of these tiny little movements that I had been advised to do many years prior. But when you're training for something and you're time crunched, it's easy to dismiss those things. All the foam rolling, all the little glute activation exercises, because you just want to get out and run or swim or ride your bike. But now I'm making that the centerpiece of what I'm doing every day. And by making those little things the big things, that is actually really moving the needle for me and has already proven to be.

• 23:52Rich Roll?

  Incredibly beneficial in restoring my connection with my body and then just building upon that very gradually. So again, a lot of core activation stuff, subtle, tiny little things. When I began, I couldn't hold a plank for more than 10 seconds. I think I could only do like two pushups. I was so atrophied from having not moved my body in such a long time, which is such a precipitous decline from being this guy who is at one point named one of the 25 fittest men in the world, like just a, you know, an incredibly ego-deflating, you know, kind of humbling experience. But it's been fantastic because I'm in this blank slate,

• 24:35Rich Roll?

  reboot the operating system opportunity where I get to just let go of all of that and avail myself of this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to basically approach my physical fitness from a tabula rasa perspective, completely starting over. What would it look like if the universe made you stop and you couldn't do anything? And then in the aftermath of that, you had to begin at the very beginning. And now I'm in this phase where I have this incredible

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  gift to create a brand-new foundation for long-term stability, agility, movement, flexibility, later aerobic capacity, and ultimately, of course, longevity, healthspan extension. And so that's the mindset that I'm approaching this with, not as a setback or some kind of failure or, you know, kind of terrible thing that has happened to me, but instead, this incredible opportunity, like, oh my goodness, what would happen if...

• 25:51Rich Roll?

  You had to just stop and you had to figure out how to be still with yourself without being so uncomfortable that you're gonna explode and feel like you have to run away. And then with that stillness, how can you rebuild yourself back up better than you ever have been before? What an incredible opportunity. And so that is the mindset tweak that I am approaching this with every single day. And that allows me to feel enthusiastic for the process, to feel grateful for this opportunity that I've been given. And that has layered it with this level of joy that I can't say that I have experienced in the past.

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  Like I've always approached fitness and my athletic pursuits with this hardness, you know, I'm like, almost like I'm punishing myself and I have to go harder and harder and harder to see what I'm capable of. And this is a softer version of that that not only feels more sustainable, obviously, for obvious reasons, but also is giving me a degree of happiness that my relationship with fitness I think was lacking before. And in that I can see my own personal growth. As for the exercises themselves, like I said, they're super basic. If you're really interested at some point, I can share them.

• 27:21Rich Roll?

  We have plans of kind of taking you inside my routine. At a certain point, I'll be telling you guys about that more. But for now, suffice it to say that it's all really elementary stuff. There's nothing that I'm doing that that any of you couldn't be doing yourselves. And it is those little things that are the big things. And I am building this foundation day by day and I'm seeing results without having to like overexert myself and push myself too hard. And that's been really encouraging and uplifting. I alternate my resistance training days where I'm doing very low weight, high rep stuff.

• 28:04Rich Roll?

  Again, very careful to not overexert myself or to do anything that is compressing my spine or putting pressure on that lower spine or or overactivating those lower back muscles. Always focused on making sure that my core is engaged. And then on every other day, doing aerobic work, very low tier zone two on the indoor trainer, my Zwift kicker bike, or on my Wahoo kicker treadmill. And that's been great. Again, super modest. I cap these workouts at an hour 90 minutes max so that I can leave energized.

• 28:45Rich Roll?

  And that has been an exercise in a different kind of discipline, the discipline to hold back. Because the last thing I want to do is do anything that is going to compromise my healing, anything that's going to set that back in any way. And as somebody who is prone to extremes and always, you know, is wanting to push things or go the extra mile or outwork everybody in the room, it does take a different degree of discipline to not do that, to do less than you can, less than you want to. And I think that is an important lesson that I've learned that is applicable not only to people who are in the process of recovering from a surgery like

• 29:27Rich Roll?

  I am, but also for those who are approaching their later decades in life, where recovery really does become much more important. And you have to be much more conscious of being gentle with yourself in between those hard efforts, so that your body has the extra time that it needs in those later years to repair itself, to restore itself in the aftermath of exercised, exercise-induced stress. And so to summarize the lessons that I've learned over the last year, and then particularly the last few months, as I've gotten back into fitness and exercising, it's not rock and science. Patience. Patience is everything. The little things are the big

• 30:12Rich Roll?

  things. We tend to

• 30:15Rich Roll?

  Overestimate what we can achieve in small periods of time and wildly underestimate what we can accomplish when we extend that timeline. I've always been a long game player. I'm a tortoise. When the game is long, the tortoise is undefeated. And so I'm trying to inhabit that kind of tortoise energy. I'm not in a rush to accomplish anything. There's no urgency to what I'm doing right now. So this gentleness that I'm bringing to it, again, has brought me joy. And I think there's a profound lesson in that. Consistency is everything. You've heard it before. I've said it a million times.

• 30:54Rich Roll?

  But the best way to create it and sustain it is to create these light lifts, these low lifts. What is the easiest way to get you in the gym? What I do is I set myself up for success the night before. I have my gear ready in the morning, so I'm actually already engaged in the process the evening prior to the workout. So when I wake up in the morning, I feel like I've already taken action on that and it's easier to follow through. The other aspect of that is setting yourself up for success by starting with very low lifts. If all you can do to get into the gym is promise yourself that you're going to do a simple stretch, then commit to that.

• 31:38Rich Roll?

  You get in there, you do that stretch, you do a single push up. You, I don't know, you know, one glute activation exercise or one core activation exercise that's so easy to do, you would do it watching television, you could do it in bed, you know, before you go to sleep. You start with that and then what you'll notice is now you're engaged and it's easier to do the next thing and easier to do the next thing after that and easier to do the more difficult thing after that. And before you know it, you're in a full blown workout. When you do that, you create momentum. Momentum is sacred. You want to protect it. When you have it, go out of your way to basically make sure that it is perpetuated.

• 32:23Rich Roll?

  Because once it's interfered with, it's very difficult to get back. So treat it as sacred. And then, like NBA legend Chris Paul said to me on the podcast a couple of years ago, just keep stacking days. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. Final thing is creating accountability. You want to be accountable to yourself. It's always helpful to be accountable to other people. And that's one of the reasons why I started sharing on my Instagram stories, just these little photos of my LED clock when I go into the gym in the morning. Ironically, people seem to enjoy this, so I kept doing it. But I'm doing it not so much for anybody else out there,

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  but really as this practice that holds myself accountable. Because now I've created this expectation that every day, I'm going to take a picture in the gym or maybe a little video, and there's going to be a photo of that clock, and everybody's going to know what time I got in there in the morning. And it's just a little layer of pressure that I put on myself, a degree of accountability that makes it a non-negotiable, that when I wake up, okay, I gotta go do that. Even though nobody cares if I miss a day, like, what's going to happen? Nothing. But it's just a little bit of a nudge to help you get over the hump on those days when you just don't feel like it.

• 33:51Rich Roll?

  So find your own accountability practice. It could be joining a friend in the gym. It doesn't have to be the gym. Whatever it is that you're, you know, new habit that you're trying to practice. Some degree of accountability such that if you miss a day, somebody is going to notice. Somebody might say something. Or maybe it's just a practice of accountability to yourself. You will know. And then the biggest lesson or takeaway takes me to this notion of failure. How we think about setbacks, how we think about failure. So in addition to being a masterclass on patience, this recovery process has really been A powerful reminder that perspective is actually a choice.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  That I actually have agency over how I feel about this stage of life, over this recovery from this surgery that I'm enduring, over the kind of setbacks it's imposed on my health and wellbeing and my fitness and my identity as an athlete. And that by approaching it, not as something bad that happened to me that I have to get over, but instead as this extraordinary opportunity to grow, to learn, to ultimately transform and to become somebody new as a process of engaging with it, has just been an amazing experience that I would have not expected.

• 35:19Rich Roll?

  This journey of discovery that gets me out of bed every single morning, excited about what I'm going to discover, what I'm going to learn and who I can become in the process. In other words, it's not how quickly can I get back to being that guy who can run every single day? It's about, oh my goodness, who can I become on the other side of learning how to sit still with myself? Learning how to be patient? Learning how to approach my fitness from this perspective of joy and self honoring and self love, rather than self flagellation or suffering or it always having to be hard?

• 36:02Rich Roll?

  And that's been the real nugget because I'm not naturally wired to slow down, let alone stop. I know how to push myself. I know how to strive. I know how to get up before everyone else and get after it harder than every single person and outwork everyone in the room. And as a result of this facility for, you know, going hard, I have built an incredible life that I'm very proud of. But this journey of healing has also taught me that this superpower that I've developed is also my greatest Achilles heel because it's robbed me of the ability to be present. In my life to actually enjoy this incredible life that I've built.

• 36:46Rich Roll?

  It's prevented me from truly being able to connect with not only myself, but with other people, the people that I love, to be able to truly give and receive love to the fullest capacity. And I don't want to live that way anymore. Recovering from this surgery has given me this opportunity to reconfigure my relationship with myself. This opportunity to learn how to be present, to value what's really important. What's really important isn't the next mountain that I'm going to climb, or the next accomplishment around the bend.

• 37:29Rich Roll?

  I've done a lot in my life, and I know at this stage in my life that

• 37:35Rich Roll?

  those things aren't going to seat whatever is ailing my soul.

• 37:42Rich Roll?

  What I need is to learn to open my heart, to enjoy that life by being present in it. And this experience has given me that lesson. It's almost like the universe just designed it specifically for me. And it reminds me of how I got sober and the way that the universe knocks when you're living out of integrity. So for example, when I started drinking, first it was fun, then it was fun with problems, and then it was just problems. And along the way, the universe started to knock. Hey, you're kind of out of control. I'm going to throw a little chaos in your direction. Or suddenly, things that used to work out for you aren't working out.

• 38:25Rich Roll?

  It's the universe's way of saying, you might want to look at this behavior and course correct. And those knocks start gently, but if you don't heed them or pay attention to them, they start to get a little bit louder, and then they get louder. And there's a little bit more drama and a little bit more chaos and more consequences. And if you continue to ignore them, basically, you're headed for total life dismantlement, which is what I needed in order to get sober. Like basically, at the end of my drinking, it was a pretty desperate case of loneliness and hopelessness. And that's what I needed to wake up and basically grab the reins of sobriety and start rebuilding my life.

• 39:11Rich Roll?

  But the universe had to knock pretty loud before I was willing to listen. And I think in this instance, starting back in 2010, the universe started to knock and say, "Hey, I'm going to throw you this little back pain here because there's something in your life that is out of alignment that you need to look at." Figuratively and actually, like literally, my spine was out of alignment. You've got to fix this. But there was something in my approach to life that was also out of alignment. This hardness, this self-flagellation, this proclivity to put yourself in a position

• 39:49Rich Roll?

  to suffer as a way of feeling alive, or to give myself a sense of meaning or purpose. If I wasn't suffering, if I wasn't pushing, then I wasn't worthy, or I didn't feel worthy of love and acceptance. The pain got worse. The universe is knocking, trying to get my attention. "Hey, I think you need to slow down. I think you need to look at this." And I had to endure pain for 15 years until I was completely debilitated and forced into a corner in order to heed this message that the universe, for a very long time, has been trying to tell me, which is that the answers that you're seeking are not in the hardness or in the suffering, they're in the surrender, they're in the letting go, they're in the

• 40:33Rich Roll?

  stillness, they're in developing the capacity to be with yourself in peace. Because only in the present moment are you capable of experiencing the full capacity of love, self-acceptance, compassion, all of these things, gratitude, serenity, that I struggle so mightily to experience in my life. And so, this has been the greatest gift that I could have ever been given, because it's given me a masterclass in how to begin

• 41:08Rich Roll?

  To get more still, to get more present, so that I can truly enjoy this life that I've been blessed

• 41:17Rich Roll?

  to experience. The point in all this storytelling and this discussion of the Knox and the universe is to say that every so-called failure, something we call a failure or setback, is actually always an opportunity in disguise, an opportunity to grow, to learn, to broaden yourself, and to expand your perspective, so that you can expand your experience of life. The final thing I want to talk about is goals. Why am I in the gym every single day? Why am I sharing it publicly? What is my goal? And I want to start this part of the discussion off by saying that at this phase in my life, I'm actually not a huge fan of setting goals.

• 41:59Rich Roll?

  If I do have a goal, it's to be more present in my life, which is sort of an anti-goal. And I say this as somebody who has a lifetime of setting goals, working towards them, falling short of achieving them, and successfully achieving them. And I think goals are super important. They add structure to your life, they give you something to focus your attention upon, and the process of working towards them is a self-esteem building process of learning about yourself and giving you a sense of possibility in your life. So, super valuable. But I think for me, right now, my life is less about goals and more about being present,

• 42:42Rich Roll?

  being open to what's happening, being able to pivot and be malleable to what is actually happening in my life. Because, as I said earlier, like, I know that achieving any goal that I set for myself in the material realm really isn't going to sate whatever continues to be lacking in my soul. That will only be satisfied through connection with myself, with other people, with spirit, and by deepening my capacity, once again, to give and receive love. These are not goal-oriented tasks, not in the traditional sense at least, but...

• 43:25Rich Roll?

  All of that being said, I'm gonna be contradictory here because I have set a goal, one that I'm holding loosely. And that is a goal to structure my days, to hold myself accountable. And this goal is twofold. First, I want to be as fit as possible by the time I turn 60. I turned 60 on October 20th. So I have this window of time between now, which is spring of 2026 and October 20 of 2026, to see what's possible in the gym. Like I said, I've never been a gym person, but what would happen if I went in there and really focused on building my muscle mass and getting lean and getting ripped?

• 44:07Rich Roll?

  And that's kind of fun and exciting because I've never done that before. And I want to see if it's possible, not just for me, but for anybody who is engaging with their later years on the precipice of turning 60, to do it as a plant-based person. Can I put on all this lean muscle mass as a 60-year-old person who has been plant-based for nearly 20 years at this point? It's a fun challenge. I don't have to take it that seriously, but it does get me enthusiastic and engaged with this fitness journey that I'm currently on right now. And also as a testament to what's possible in the wake of undergoing a significant surgery

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  as hopefully inspiration to anybody else out there who is in the process of considering such a surgery or is contending with the aftermath of it and the very difficult recovery process. And the second goal is really a celebration of the first, which is to participate in the New York City Marathon in November, which I think is in early November this year, very shortly after my 60th birthday. Not to set a PR, not to even necessarily run the whole thing, but just to be able to participate, to be able to cover the distance as a runner or a walker, among many other thousands of runners and walkers, to just celebrate movement, a return to movement.

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  Not for any kind of like self-gloryfication. I've done so many hard endurance events in my life, I've got nothing to prove. But again, just to kind of celebrate being alive, being restored in the wake of this surgery and to enjoy.

• 45:52Rich Roll?

  Being an endurance athlete, again, even if it's on a very modest level into my sixth decade, and to do it as an act of service, again, to show what's possible, to express joy, because joy is enthusiastic, and that's really what I'm interested in these days. Not PRs, more gratitude, more presence, more joy. And that is a priority that would not have been possible had I not undergone this surgery, been forced to stop, been compelled to kind of reckon with my inner demons and my discomfort of being still, and the challenges

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  to my identity, my tendency to compare where I am now versus where I used to be. I've been able to really let most of that go and just be okay with who I am right now, knowing that we're all in a process of becoming all the time. And I'm excited to figure out who I'm going to become, and I hope you are as well. In conclusion, train where you're at, not where you used to be, where you think you should be, where you feel like you deserve to be, or where you want to be, because you can't solve a problem until you're in full acceptance of it. That's absolutely essential.

• 47:16Rich Roll?

  And whether it's diet, nutrition, training, fitness, or some other kind of healthy habit that you're trying to master, try to approach it from a place of joy, with a learning mindset, and try to let go of the hardness, like you're punishing yourself, like I have to lose weight, or I have to get fit, or, you know, I don't like how I look. Like, all of that self-loathing and negativity and heaviness isn't necessary. Do it from a place of self-reverence, or self-love, or self-honoring. And in my experience, and this is new for me, that's what opens the

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  door to joy and to gratitude. And when you have those, it opens the door to wonder. And when you have wonder, then it raises the ceiling on how you think about

• 48:10Rich Roll?

  Possibility in your life and this journey that we're all on all the time towards becoming. Who can you become if you approach these seemingly difficult things from that place of joy, from a lighter place, a place of self-respect and self-honoring. That's what I'm trying to do. Maybe we can do it together. I'm not saying this is easy. It's definitely counter-programming for me, but so far it's been worth it. And I can tell you that I'm happier in my life and I am more present. And I'm also just as engaged with my health and my

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  fitness as I ever have been, but without all the hardness and the heaviness that I have historically always associated with it. Final thought, you don't have to do any of this. Remember, these are things that we get to do. They are gifts of being alive. So that's it. I hope you found it helpful. I would like to know what you guys are working on. What is a goal that you've set for yourself? What is an aim or an ambition that you would like to see realized in this year? And how can I help you get there? Leave a comment below with your thoughts. We read all of them. And maybe it will be the subject of a future solo episode. These have been

• 49:34Rich Roll?

  really fun for me. Definitely out of my comfort zone. Hopefully I'm getting a little bit more comfortable with this format, a little bit more relaxed. And I'm enjoying it. I hope you guys are as well. And we'll see you on the next one. All right. Peace, everybody.