Born To Run Free (For a Lifetime) with Christopher McDougall + Eric Orton

Reaching your athletic peak is a laudable goal. But ambition extracts a physical and mental cost. How do you break free from cycles of burnout and injury and fall in love with running again? Today we cover this topic and more with legends Christopher McDougall + Eric Orton. In this conversation we dive deep into the world and stories of Christopher's book Born to Run, as well as talk with Christopher's running coach, Eric Orton, about the practical – naturalistic – running drills, principles, practices and philosophy to become bulletproof to injury – and set you up for a lifelong love affair with running. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think too many of us start to stray into the world of exercise as punishment, as a test of our inner worth. Exercise is a sense of joyfulness, of creativity, of artistry. And artistry can take any kind of form, but if you believe that your ability is to create, not just to destroy, not to beat somebody else, beat yourself up, beat down your body, but to really create and relish, then you start to get on the Kabiyo path.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  And you know, I tell a lot of beginning runners, don't view starting running as a workout, or as a form of fitness, or a way to lose weight. Create the joy first, and everything else will follow. And that goes into learning to be efficient, not thinking it has to be hard.

• 2:00Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:04Rich Roll?

  Back in 2011, just before the start of this podcast, a hugely influential book was released that greatly inspired me both as a writer and as an athlete, and made the entire running world seem to stop and pay attention. That book, of course, was called Born to Run, and it's about this hidden tribe of super athletes called the Tarahumara, and the secrets behind their ability to run insane distances. And now, over a decade later, I finally had the honor and the privilege to sit down with the author of that mega bestseller, Christopher McDougall, as well as the co-author of its sequel, Eric Orton. Yes, you heard me right,

• 2:46Rich Roll?

  Born to Run 2 is here. In this conversation, we dive deep into the world and stories of Born to Run, as well as talk with Eric about the practical, naturalistic, running drills, principles, and philosophy to become bulletproof to injury and set you up for a lifelong love affair with running. These are the ideas that formed the backbone of Born to Run 2. Along with race-ready recipes and shoe recommendations, Born to Run 2 focuses on training regimens, training regimens to help get you in shape, corrective drills to perfect your form, as well as tons of great advice on how to add more joy to your running and how to find a local running community. These were some of the concrete guides that were

• 3:31Rich Roll?

  actually missing from Born to Run, all of which solidifies this new book as a must-read for every runner out there. In addition to being the Born to Run 2 co-author, Eric is also Christopher's running coach. He was a character in the first book. And before he left the podcast studio, Eric actually ran me literally through a handful of drills and PT positions to help me work through my chronic back pain. And I have to say, it helped me tremendously. So, thank you for that, Eric. In any event, it's all coming up in a sec, but first.

• 4:13Rich Roll?

  Okay, waste a moment longer, we will not. It is now my great pleasure to present you my conversation with Christopher McDougall and Eric Orton.

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  Well, welcome, gentlemen. I'm so excited to talk to both of you today. This is a real treat for me personally, and I think it's going to be for the audience. And my intention going into this is twofold. On the one hand, obviously, we have Christopher McDougall here. I want to hear all his amazing stories from his journeys emanating from Born to Run, a book that we all fell in love with several years ago. And then also to have it be kind of part tutorial, practical tools for running and lifelong pain-free fitness with you, Eric. So I think together, we're going to create a really cool, unique experience. And to kick it off, I mean, I just have to say that, you know, Christopher, like I just, you know,

• 5:10Rich Roll?

  my heart is bursting wide open just to meet you. Like, your book and the work that you've done has been such a huge influence on me, both as an athlete and as a writer. So this is long overdue. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a long time. So I'm just super excited to meet both of you guys and be able to do this.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  That is really super heartwarming. Thank you. Thank you.

• 5:31Rich Roll?

  I remember when Born to Run came out, it came out in March of 2011, right?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Originally 2009, the hardcover.

• 5:39Rich Roll?

  Oh, 2009.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Actually, Rich, can I interrupt you? I want to start things off. We brought you a little gift. This is a hand-woven Taromara running bracelet.

• 5:46Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  And Eric and I are both wearing them. Brought you one, just because, you know, it's a little ritual that the Taromara do before they do like a multi-day event. We're on the same team. We're gonna, you know, it's like, if you feel pretty, you run pretty. So I just want to get us to...

• 6:02Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate that. I'm lighting it on right now. Right? Was this made by?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  Taromara?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  Taromara?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  That's what he said.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  I was always unclear on how to exactly pronounce that.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  We have a friend who has a contact in one of the villages and will, you know, buy these hand-woven bracelets. And we sort of like to have them... Give out to people.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  I had one experience running with a Toto Motta. I did a running event for Runners World Magazine in Mexico City several years ago. And one of the guys came up and I was able, it was at a track, like at a university, but I was able to kind of run right, tuck in right behind him and run behind him on a track. And I've never seen anything like it.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  That's smart.

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  The, it's one thing to talk about their form and how free they are when they're running, but to actually experience that close up and to really see how effortless it is and how joyful it is. I mean, this guy looked like he was walking and he's running, I don't know, seven minute pace or something like that. And it just looked so smooth and easy and fun. It was really remarkable. It really stayed with me.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  What gave you the idea to tuck in rather than run next to him and try and chat?

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  Well, I was, I was like, I need to, I want to learn if I can get in lockstep with him. And I know Eric, this is, you know, a lot of, a lot of your tools and your drills are kind of similar in that regard. I mean, it was just instinctual, I think, at that moment.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  But most people don't do that. And it was an education to me, the first time someone said, get in right tight behind me. I always thought you run next to somebody.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Right. That's what Micah did with you initially, right? Get as close behind, you know, I don't know if I was that close to him, but you know, I was trying to kind of track him. And it was a really cool experience. And you know, I remember when I was wrapping my head around like, the experience that we're going to have today, I was recalling attending a book event. It must've been, I think Born to Run had been out a little bit. So maybe it was 2010. It was at Book Soup in West Hollywood. And you weren't there. It was a Born to Run event, but Scott was, Scott Jurick was kind of hosting it. And he was telling stories from the book and from his, you know, career and experience. And I just remember, it was my first time meeting Scott in person and

• 8:19Rich Roll?

  we were both like in the midst of writing our own books at the same time. And I'm just coveting this like massive, you know, sort of imposter syndrome, right? Cause I had this opportunity to write this book. Here's Scott. He's the greatest ultra runner ever, also vegan. I'm like, well, you know, why is anyone going to read my book? And then I'm reading Born to Run and I'm hearing these stories and I'm like, what am I even doing? Right? I should remember. And I also remember Peter Sarsgaard was there.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  And that's because.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I was actually there that day.

• 8:51Rich Roll?

  Were you?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I was.

• 8:52Rich Roll?

  Do you remember this?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I do remember being a book suit. I don't remember meeting you then. We had done a run earlier in the day up in Griffith Park and then had that event afterwards. But because Peter and Scott was there, I was trying to give them all the mic time. And I kind of had to think like, oh, you know what? I think we've all heard enough talking. So I think I came on and said, thanks, everybody. And that was like, almost the only thing I said.

• 9:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is. I mean, it's a vague memory.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:21Rich Roll?

  My recollection is that Peter was there because at that time, there was an effort to turn the book into a movie. And Jake Gyllenhaal was involved. I know he showed up at Leadville and there was a lot of energy around that. And then like, what, my first thing is like, what happened?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:36Rich Roll?

  It all fell apart or what, what transpired?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  That's an episode in itself.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's kind of cool. So let's look at the rosier glass half full part, which was, it was a really fun experience. What happened was Peter was on the set of Green Lantern and he had all this like massive prosthetic makeup they were putting on. It was like a four hour process. So he was reading Born to Run. Someone like slapped into his hands. When he's in the makeup chair, he's reading this book. And then at one point he said, I got out of the chair and called my manager and said, I really want to be involved in this film. And at that point, producers had it, but they didn't have a director or screenwriter. They had a screenwriter, but not a director. So Peter calls up and he said, I would love to direct this film. Uh, I'm an aspiring kind of baby runner myself. So Peter got involved and I first got wind of this when I got a phone call at home from one of the producers, one of the producers saying, hey,

• 10:25Speaker 01

  we know that Leadville races in a couple of weeks. Would you be interested in going and camping out there with Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard? And I'm like, yeah, I could probably clear out my schedule to go camping with Jake Gyllenhaal. And so then Eric and I blazed on out there, but these guys were going to like, you know, bushwhack and be up on the mountain in like a pup tent. And I'm like, you know, dude, I did enough of that stuff. No, thanks. So we were, we rented cabins down by Twin Lakes, these little rustic cabins. And the first night these guys arrived, like a freaking monsoon blew in. And the next day we get a little knock on the doors, Peter and Jake like drenched to the bone like, hey, uh, can we come in and dry off?

• 11:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  So that to me was a lifelong memory was Jake Gyllenhaal occupying my little bathroom, taking a hot shower and coming out. And I just remember the aroma like, ah, you know, aroma of Jake is really good. Like whatever product he uses, like eucalyptus-y. Uh, so we spent a nice weekend there. Uh, Jake is a fantastic athlete and a fun dude. Uh, good guy to hang out with Peter likewise. And, um, but what happened basically to cut to the end of it was that it became so mired in what the story was. And this was a particular challenge for me writing the book. I wrote an entire draft. We can get into some writerliness.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I wrote an entire draft of the book and turned it in and my editor called me a week later and he goes, yeah, um, you should think about starting over. They literally trash a hundred thousand words. And I knew he was right. Um, it's a hard story to tell because there's a lot of chainsaws juggling at the same time. And I think what happened with that Sarsgaard Gyllenhaal attempt was they just got stuck in the quicksand of what story is it? And they just kind of churned in the mud for years trying to get a screenplay together and it didn't work.

• 12:17Rich Roll?

  It never, it never panned out. Yeah. To me, I mean, on, on, on the surface, it appears to be a very difficult book to translate into a, you know, cinematic narrative. But my sense was always that the story lies with Caballo Blanco. Like it's Micah Tru's story. So you have to show, you have to like go on that journey through his point of view, not yours. And the stuff that, that, you know, you talk about in the book can come in, but the arc really is Micah. And if you tell that story, then you can with tangents tell, talk about all of the other things. I don't know if that was the direction of it, but.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  It wasn't unfortunately, uh, but that was the revelation that I had was, you know, I first tried to write this story, I come from a magazine writing background, which is like, you gotta smack people in the face quick, get their attention and keep their attention. And so to me, the most dramatic moment in the story is when you get these two hard partying surfers and suddenly they're lost in the Hila, in the Chihuahua backcountry. And this could be it for them. So I kept trying to open the book with Jen and Billy going off on a run and then vanishing. But there's way too much backstory to be then folded in. And then after turning in a draft with that starting point, and my editor said, you know, why don't you shred it and start over, I had to take the step back and I realized the

• 13:37Speaker 01

  same thing. This is Caballo's story. The beginning, middle, and end is all Micah. And the story has got to track him. And that's when I understood how to tell the story.

• 13:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the conclusion to the Micah True, AKA Caballo Blanco story had yet to be fully written when the book came out. It has since been written. And there's something interesting about where we are right now. We're in Agora Hills, right? So can you talk a little bit about how that chapter finally concluded after the book?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny because Eric and I were talking about this on the way over. It might have been like 10 years, almost, almost within a few months, 10 years to the moment of where we are now, when this all happened.

• 14:16Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I was here, and it's eerily familiar to me because I was here at the Agora Hills Library. They had asked me to come in to do a book event. And at the time, I was researching my next book, Natural Born Heroes. And through a very tenuous series of connections, I had arranged to have a breakfast with Rick Rubin, you know, Ace music producer Rick Rubin, for that research on that book. And all this is happening, I'm flying in, I'm trying to arrange this breakfast with Rick Rubin, and my phone dies on the way here. And I arrive at the library and get out of the car. And there's someone very anxious looking at the door and sees me and just starts bustling over to me, very concerned. And they get

• 15:00Speaker 01

  up to me and they go, oh, thank God you're here. I go, I think I'm on time, right? They go, no, it's not that. Maria's trying to reach you. And I don't think I know any Marias. And he hands me the phone and I return the call to whoever it is. It's Maria. And it turns out it was Caballo's girlfriend. Maria Walton, and she's, "Oh, thank God I reached you. Micah's missing." And like, well, that's kind of what the dude does, you know, he was always missing.

• 15:25Rich Roll?

  And maybe just explain a little bit about who this guy is if, you know, for the people who have not read More than a Run, to kind of contextualize it a little bit.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  So Micah True has always lived in my mind as sort of half man, half ghost. Just a guy that is always there, but not there. When I first heard about him, I was in Mexico City on the sign of the New York Times Magazine. I was supposed to be tracking down known associates of a woman named Gloria Trevi, who was a hugely famous Mexican pop singer. And she was accused of secretly running this brainwashing sex cult and then going on the lam. So you think a story like that is gonna occupy your attention. But when I traveled from Mexico City into Chihuahua, I kept noticing these pictures of people in a running posture, wearing like dresses and sandals.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And in my hotel, there was a little magazine, and they explained that this group were the Taromara, and they could run hundreds of miles in their thinnest of sandals, and they're doing it deep in the old age. At the time, I was a discouraged, had long given up on running. I was a big dude, like 260 pounds, and had been told by doctors that running is bad for every human body, particularly bodies like yours. And so I'm looking at this magazine, and I'm thinking to myself, there's no way this crap is true, you know, there's nobody running 100 miles. I'd never heard of an ultra marathon, you know, the marathon was the ultimate challenge, right? Vittipides died. They're saying this guy ran four marathons in flip flops, in a dress, and he's 72 years old, like, no way.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  But I kept seeing these images on the license plates, you go into a little taco shop, and there's a picture on the wall. So I started to ask around, and they say, "Oh, those are the Taromara, and they're down in the copper canyon, and they're hard to find, but they're amazing runners." So I think, well, this is cool, I can double dip on my assignments as a freelancer, I'll just get a story for Runners World out of this, in and out, couple interviews, you know, double pay. Find a guy, takes me down to the copper canyon. We actually, after a week of searching, locate a taromata village and discovered that the way you remain a reclusive tribe is like not talking to strangers. But they did tell me about a guy, a guy they call Caballo Blanco, the white horse. They said, you should go talk to that guy. And 50% of

• 17:42Speaker 01

  my mind is like, great. And the other 50% is like, they're just trying to get me out of town. So when I finally tracked this guy down, Mica True, it was just like they had described. He was a big, tall dude who had come down to the copper canyons from Netherlands, Colorado, in search of the same thing I was looking for. But when he found that he never left, he'd been down there for 15 years at that point, running with the taromata and sort of mimicking not just their running, but their lifestyle. Like, he felt that he had discovered something very powerful and life-changing, and to the point where he never wanted to leave.

• 18:16Rich Roll?

  And he was running upwards of 170 miles a week, or something like that, right? Just like unbelievable mileage.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Here's the thing about it. So Luis Escobar, our friend who came down with us later, he would say that Caballo's range was unlimited. And that's what really stuck in my brain, was it wasn't like he was doing X number of miles per day, is that the world was his playground. Whatever he felt like doing, he had the range to go do it.

• 18:44Rich Roll?

  Wow. So this guy becomes the central figure, the protagonist in Born to Run, and all the stories are kind of through his lived experience and what can be gleaned about the nature of running, the human body, et cetera, and all the stuff that you talk about with minimalism. But true to his word, Mica True, right, he's living this very off-the-grid lifestyle for a very long period of time. And in the wake of the book coming out, at some point goes missing when you're out here in Agoura Hills.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  So one of, to me, one of the happiest accomplishments of the book Born to Run is that Caballo got a girlfriend.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  And he got a killer girlfriend, Maria Walton, right? Yes. Dude, she's a dream, just loving, tough, smart, and like everything he needed, like, yeah, he got an email out of the blue from some woman saying, hey, I want to train for a race, I like the book, and he's grumble, grumble, grumble, and so he gave her some kind of a curt, rude response, and she was not to be dissuaded, and they became, you know, they became boyfriend and girlfriend. So she was the one who reached out to me and said, hey, he's missing. And I went, well, you know, what do you expect? Yeah. But then she said something that really caught my attention. She said, he left Watahuko tied up, and overnight. Is like wolf dog.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  His wolf dog is the only way to describe Watahuko. And that really caught my eye, because this, I was in Boulder once, and Kabaya was back in the States, and he shows up at this like very Tony Boutique brew pub, and he walks in with this frigging wolf on a chain, and it's in a cast, because this dog had never been out of the copper can, he had literally had like adopted a feral creature and made it, you know, his partner. And so he shows up in Boulder, and the first day, this dog like walks in front of a bus and gets hit, and so there's a cast on its leg, and so Kabaya was like carrying this thing around, brings it to our table, and this dog is like snapping at people's food at other tables, and Kabaya was just like, no problem.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  But, so he was inseparable from Watahuko. He would never, ever leave that dog tied up. And so Maria tells me this, I'm like, again, walking into an event, a speaking event, there's an audience there, and I got this phone call, my phone's dead, and I said, well, wow, okay, have you talked to Louis, Louis Escobar? And Louis is a character unto himself because he's the one guy I wish there was more of in Born to Run, but there's just so many big personalities Louis almost got a little bit sidelined. But he's kind of like, he's the uncle, you know, he is the steady uncle that's life at a party, but at the same time, in a pinch, you're in jail, you call Uncle Lou. So I said,

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Maria, have you called Louis? And she said, oh yeah, he's on his way. So then I borrowed a guy's phone, called Louis, and Louis is typical, driving out of Santa Barbara, he's texting people, driving with his knees, and he was on his way down to the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico where Cabaya was last seen. So I said, all right, dude, I got this talk, I'll be done, I'll drop off my rental, pick me up at LAX, and that's what happened.

• 21:56Rich Roll?

  Right, so you go down there and the ultra-running community kind of turns up for this manhunt, right? Scott Jurek shows up, I think, did Timmy Olsen show up as well? Bunch of people, right?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Skaggs Brothers turned up, what's the guy's name? This guy from Canada, slipping my mind, it's killing me because, oh man.

• 22:15Rich Roll?

  Bunch of people though.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:17Rich Roll?

  Except for one notable character, Barefoot Ted, because he had a different perspective on what might have been happening.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  So Louis picks me up at LAX and I jump into his truck and he already had like two other people and we're bombing down the highway, we swing over to pull up Pat Sweeney, who jumps in, and a lot of these people I'd never met, but it was the kind of weird orbit that had developed around Mica, which is that within a year or two of the book coming out, suddenly people who were fellow spirits had connected with him and loved him. And so I'm like in his truck, I'm like, I know Louis, like who does everybody else that are racing to the rescue? So we're bombing down the highway, and oh, people are Venmoing money to Louis, like, I'll pay for your gas, you guys are gonna need Taco Bell. So his phone's ding, we had to shove him in the backseat because dude, you cannot be driving anymore.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And on the way, I get a message from Ted, which is the...

• 23:16Speaker 01

  The most infuriating but loving thing about Ted, which is he says stuff that just makes you want to just rip his head off, but in retrospect is true. So he sends a message like,

• 23:25Rich Roll?

  He's an acquired taste.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  He's exactly right. I feel like the closer I get to Ted, the more anxious I get and the further away I get, the more I love him. So there's like a magnetic polarization.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And so he's sending this message like, it's like, why are you going down there? He predicted this. And he said that someday, man, I'm just gonna walk off into the wilderness like Geronimo and lie down and that will be my end. I'm like, Ted, shut up, man. You know, we're trying to help this dude. Like, why are you saying he's dead? But that was it. Ted, I think if Ted, Ted is a super loving guy. There's never a no that comes out of his mouth. Much as he drives me crazy, you ask Ted a favor, he'll double it. But in this instance, he's like, no, it's over. Which was infuriating, but.

• 24:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he was right. So, you know, eventually the body is found. Wasn't he sort of at a creek bed with his, his feet or his legs in the water? And it was unclear, like they did an autopsy. There's a lot of uncertainty about how and why he died. The conventional, isn't the conventional wisdom that it was some kind of Fadipides cardiomyopathy? But you have a different view on that, don't you?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  So it was a weird scene. We get down there, it's sun up, search and rescue is super well equipped to deal with this. They know the Gila. And then Luis Escobar gets right up in the face of the head searcher. And he goes, he knows something, you got some of the greatest ultra runners in the world standing in front of you. You should cut them loose. And this guy, his credit, because this could have turned into a disaster. Suddenly you have 15 people missing. And he's like, okay, quadranting off, you know, go to town. And they just launched, you know, Kyle Skaggs, Scott George, everyone just pouring off in every direction to run through the mountains. And what's weird is, To a scientific fact, they knew he had to be north of the park station. Because he'd last been seen running right up the highway.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  They had the times figured out he had to be north of there. So for three days, we're searching this, every crevice, like not a sign of the guy. And a couple of guys who had known Micah for a long time go, well, if he absolutely has to be north, he's south. And they just turned around with the opposite direction. And then very quickly, they found him. Yeah, his corpse lying by the side of a creek. And in some eerily irritatingly barefooted way, it was the most beautiful final resting spot you can imagine. So they did an autopsy, they thought it was cardiomyopathy. But other endurance athletes with a science background said every endurance athlete has got an oversized heart, like that's nothing. They just haven't dissected enough endurance athletes.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Their estimate, which seems to me the one that has the most fruit, is that he had a parasitic invader in his body. Because he'd had these fainting spells on occasion where he'd just drop over. And he had contact, he thought he had West Nile for a while. For about three months, he was just flat on his back. And this was not too much prior to the incident. And so I had to believe that he would have had an undiagnosed, you know, sort of a tropical parasite that was probably, you know, carving away at his heart.

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  Mythic figure who lived, you know, the way he wanted to live and, you know, died in a manner befitting, you know, who he was. You know, it's kind of an incredible story.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I hate to mythologize it too much, but, you know, you talk about this old west figure that just wanted to head out into the hinterlands and carve his own little lifestyle. And to find like-minded souls among the Taramata. Oh yeah, he was at home.

• 27:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How do you think about balancing, you know, that kind of fidelity to principle with like being, you know, somebody who lives in the world and? You know, has a family, et cetera. Like, there's so much to be learned from that type of courage, but also, you know, you have a different mission, right? So how do you like wed those two things to try to, you know, create the life that on some level, you know, takes the best of what he had to teach us?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  You know, it's a fundamental question that I've asked myself a lot because not only do I ask it how he lived this way, but when I look back on that whole adventure of Born to Run, I'm like, what's everybody doing here? Like, why is Scott Jorick here of all places? Why isn't he bottom of a canyon with some race by some dude who he doesn't even know? Why aren't Jen and Bill here? Why is Eric Orton here? Eric has a very successful coaching business in Jackson Hole. Why isn't El Paso getting on a Greyhound bus? And over, over time, I realized that I think all those people involved in that adventure, we're looking for the same thing. They're trying to find a way where they can turn the thing they love into a lifestyle,

• 28:18Speaker 01

  not just recreation, not just the 45 minutes you carve out, you know, when you're on the treadmill in the afternoon. And I think the answer in the end comes down to that. This idea of, I think too many of us start to stray into the world of exercise as punishments, as a test of our inner worth. And I think every person down there, and you can look at Scott as a very particular example, is exercise as a sense of like joyfulness, of creativity, of artistry. And artistry can take any kind of form, but if you believe that your ability is to create, not just to destroy, not to beat somebody else, beat yourself up, beat down your body, but to really create and, and relish, then you start to get on the Kabbay path.

• 29:12Rich Roll?

  That's really the secret sauce of Born to Run's success, right? I've heard you talk about this quite a bit. Like, when people ask you, like, why did this book break out and become such a massive hit? Like, in retrospect, looking back, this idea being that running, it wasn't a narrative about running as, you know, a suffering vehicle for personal growth, which is kind of like what my book's about, right? But it was about finding the joy in the community, right? That this should be a joyous, expansive experience that's fun, and it's your journey towards discovering that for yourself.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Oh, but I would counter, I would rebut your point, because you were on a path to lots of unhappiness and pain and destruction. And you found something that sort of had a glow.

• 29:58Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  But I'm curious, so your writing process, what was that like for you? So was it a long period of sort of dark nights of the soul, where like, am I ever gonna finish this?

• 30:05Rich Roll?

  You're trying to flip it on me, right?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Well, I'm curious.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  I'll tell you a little bit, but this is about you. But, yeah, I mean, it was, look, it was my first book, and I don't have a, you know, a history or a career of being a journalist. So it was definitely, yeah, a lot of, you know, dark nights of the soul and panicking and, like I said, imposter syndrome and the like. Like, I just was delighted that I had a book deal. I couldn't even believe that, like, somebody was like, really? So, you know, I was determined to, you know, write the most, you know, authentic version of this story that I possibly could, because, as I mentioned earlier, and I've said this before, I knew Scott was writing a book. And I was like, well, my book can't be anything like that, and it shouldn't be anything like that. Like, what do I have that's unique to me, that could be helpful to other people?

• 30:51Rich Roll?

  And I realized that the value of what I had to say was gonna be deeply wed to the extent to which I was willing to be honest and vulnerable about, like, my own pain and my own... Foybals and failures because that would be the emotional like connective tissue that could hopefully speak to a broader audience beyond just like the running community, right? Like I, my goal was to write a book that wouldn't just live within running circles, but connect and speak to, you know, a broader audience of people, which you did so beautifully and successfully. You know, mine wasn't nearly as successful as yours, but you know, I'm proud of what I was able to do.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  You're doing okay, Rich.

• 31:33Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a different thing here, but anyway.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  That was it. That was it. You were writing a book about athletes for people who may not be athletes. And that was my total orientation for Born to Run was that the sports movies I love the most are sports I don't give a crap about, you know, like Bulldore. Yeah, right. Tin Cup. I don't think I've ever hit a golf ball. I will die a happy man if I never do hit a golf ball, but I will watch the crap out of Tin Cup. Bulldore, I don't play baseball, don't watch baseball, love the movie. And that was my thought is like, if I can take this activity, everybody thinks it's one thing. And if I can show them another side of it, and I think you had the same orientation, like if I can take my story and

• 32:18Speaker 01

  just not really about hammering my butt in triathlons, but it's really about letting yourself explore and discover. And I think the other, there's a freedom, which I think we probably both had, which is that you're not quite sure if anyone's ever gonna read this.

• 32:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  And at the time I wrote Born to Run, the running bookshelf was pretty thin. It was Ultra Marathon Man, which was a great adventure, and then a bunch of stuff about how not to get chafed

• 32:44Rich Roll?

  Right, like really practical type books.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  And regurgitating the same stuff.

• 32:47Rich Roll?

  Except for Murakami.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  You know, although I tell you, that was right around, I'm not sure if that was before or after Born to Run, it was almost at the same time.

• 32:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  But even then I was willing to say I'm in a different category. I'm a different age group because, you know, he's a super successful novelist and I'm some Jiboney magazine writer. So, but I think that was it, that you and I had a common experience of feeling like we could say what we wanted and it be as. Open and exposed because there's a good chance no one's gonna read this.

• 33:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Eric, I promise we're gonna get to it.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Oh, you're fine. You're fine. You can see I'm a lucky man. I've been two and a half weeks with this guy, hearing all these stories.

• 33:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, he's a very skilled storyteller.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  So you know what? We're good. Kabayo's spirit animal for Eric was El Gavilan, the hawk. I'm just watching.

• 33:35Rich Roll?

  Hovering above.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm watching. Watching. Yeah, and then dropping the talons into you. We're good.

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  Two observations on what you just said. The first being that, you know, on this, on this kind of spectrum of suffering to joy in terms of our relationship to fitness and running in particular, you know, my, I would still submit that like my book was about like how suffering can be a tool and a teacher for personal expansion and growth. But I also think it's a, it's an unsustainable fuel source. Like now, you know, we're about the same age, maybe almost exactly the same age. Like now, my relationship to it is so much different. Like the joy, finding the joy and doing it for the joy as opposed to a

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  performance goal or, you know, some kind of self-flagellation is much more appealing, exciting, and ultimately more expansive, right? And that's what, you know, we're gonna get into the, the new book. But that's a huge message of, of this new book, like Born to Run being kind of the why and Born to Run 2 being the how.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Isn't it funny that fun is like a dirty word in endurance sports? Fun, I enjoyed it. I had a good time. Like, no, dude, you're not serious then. It's gotta be, you know, run yourself into the ER. You didn't leave it all on the table. And to me, like, that's the gap in our human evolution as athletes. We start off that way as kids. And it's, it's been funny. We've been, we were at a group run in Chinatown, New York, Run for Chinatown. And as we were talking to Leland Yu, as he's describing his own immersion to running, these little kids were just ripping around back and forth in the playground. And I feel like, why are we talking to you, dude? We should be talking to these kids because what they've figured out is it. But what happens is we sort of take kids, we sort of pin them

• 35:26Speaker 01

  up in their desks. And over the time, by the time you're ready to get back out and move again, you've lost that fun component. But it's, and sexually, it's so important.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 35:38Rich Roll?

  Born to Run was not an instant New York Times bestseller. I think that would surprise a lot of people.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:45Rich Roll?

  Like, it's kind of amazing the grassroots work, heavy lifting and campaign that you devoted yourself to, to get this book out there. And the difference between kind of how people perceive that book now versus what you were actually doing when it came out.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  I still don't know, really know what happened. I don't know when the electricity started to spread. But the book came out in May of 2009. And the first kickoff events that my publisher had arranged for me was to have a talk in a running shoe store in New York. This is a book which says that running shoes are the, the, the cause of all evil in the known world. And they put me into a running shoe store. And there was about three people there. And I sort of talked to them and don't know what I'm doing. They left and that was the end of that event. And I did a couple of others. Go to bookstore, talk to four or five, basically friends. And that was it. So after a week, book tours over, book is not reviewed at all.

• 36:41Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Runner's World wouldn't.

• 36:43Rich Roll?

  No reviews at all?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  To this day, Runner's World has never written an article about Born to Run.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  Get out.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Will not touch it.

• 36:49Rich Roll?

  Because it's too offensive to its advertiser base.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. I can take guesses. But, you know, I think-

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  Sold, I mean, four million copies? How many, how many copies of this book have you sold? Four million copies?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, in that range. So, early on, it's May 2009. This book is going out like a flickering candle. And I'm thinking, I'm not, I'm not done yet, you know? I got more to do. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, every day, there are people getting together to run. I just got to go to where they are, rather than telling them to come to me. So, I was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So, I went to my local bookstore, say, hey, can I buy 100 copies of books from you? And I bought them cash out of my pocket. And then I'd resell them. So, if there was a 5K race, I'd rock up, open the back of the truck, have a box of books there and say, hey, guys, give me two seconds before you run. Got this book, may really dig it. There's a handsome guy on the cover, Billy Barnett. Anyway, that kind of stuff. And, you know, at a race, people have got other things on their mind than buying a

• 37:45Speaker 01

  thing that they now have to carry around. But bit by bit, it started to gather. And then I would start to show up at races and people had already heard about the book and were kind of curious about getting a copy. They'd only have one or two copies in a Barnes and Noble at a time, so they were, they were selling out fast. And I would show up with 30 books in my truck. And that was it, May, June, July, just kinda, you know, hucking it, hucking it. And then out of the blue, I get a phone call. It was August. I remember this because I was supposed to go back to Portugal. I used to work as a foreign correspondent and visit friends for a birthday. And I get a call, say, hey, um, Jon Stewart would like to have you on The Daily Show. Like the week after next. He's got a little opening right before they go on hiatus. And I go, you know, it's actually not, not a really good time. Can we reschedule it?

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And they go, no, no, we can't. Idiot. And I'm like, all right, fine. I'll go on The Jon Stewart Show. And so his producer's husband was a big fan of the book. Jon Stewart had a producer and the producer's husband was a member of the Central Park Track Club. And the husband was just like on his wife and John, you gotta get this book on, whatever. So I, again, I don't know the backstory of how it actually happened. But then low and behold, like seven days later, I'm walking onto The Daily Show and that's when.

• 39:01Rich Roll?

  Right. That was the big inflection point. And then did you end up hitting the New York Times list after that?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  It might have, it might have been on just before that. I don't recall, but that was to me the surprise when I, when I snuck onto the bestseller list. There's the list and there's the extended list and all of a sudden, whoa. There's like the 15 and there's the extended list and all of a sudden, hey, Born to Run, look at that. And it might have been just before that.

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  And then it just built from there and it continues to sell. Like if you go on Amazon, it's always the number one book in the running category. And probably in, you know, the broader sports category as well.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  It's you and me, man.

• 39:35Rich Roll?

  It's crazy, man.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  It's you and me, man. Gold and silver back and forth, right?

• 39:39Rich Roll?

  I'm way, you know, it's like, there's a huge gap there, brother.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 39:43Rich Roll?

  That's all right, you know? Um, I mean, that's really inspiring to, uh, you know, see the power that grass, you know, grass movements like that, you know, still hold to get a message out there that's worthy of being heard. And, you know, the power of just sharing one to one to one, like people just saying, this is a great book. Check it out. It's very cool. But I'm sure a lot of people told you not to write a follow-up. Born to Run 2, a sequel. I think you compare it to Vin Diesel.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Authors don't come out with Fast and Furious 7, you know? Don't touch that. So here's what happened. Here's an untold part of the story that you don't know, Rich. I was actually contracted to write another book. I was writing a book called King of the Weekend Warriors. And the idea was that there are extremely high performing endurance athletes out there that most people have never heard of. Because they don't care about podiums or anything. And I got a buddy in New York. He's got seven different Guinness World Records. He gets intrigued by an idea. For instance, he wanted to be the person to do the fastest traverse of the entire New York City subway system. At the time, he was working for a bank and he hacked into the mainframe computer of the bank.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  And started running the millions of computations to figure out the best traverse of the New York City subway system. It's an extremely complicated mathematical equation. And he figured it out. He came up with a plan. And then he trained for it because it's a real physical challenge. You gotta sprint between stations and you gotta map things out. You gotta go out of one station down to another. Running in the tunnels or? No, you're actually taking the trains. You're taking the trains. But it's tricky. So you have to hit every single stop faster than anybody else. And a number of people have done this over the years. It's one of those like underground records. Where people like it because it's a mathematical like tri-level chess problem that also has a physical component. So my buddy figures this out. He has a plan and he goes off and does it and he breaks the world record.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  He has the world record for the highest ascent in 12 hours. So the most vertical feet gained in 12 hours. And the way he did it was he had his wife standing at the top of a skyscraper of a building that he had an office in. And she held the elevator for 12 hours. So he would run up the stairs, run in the elevator, he hit down, come off the elevator, hit, you know, 75, whatever the top floor was. He'd run up the stairs and did this for 12 hours, up and down, up and down. His poor wife, hold the door, hold the door.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  But I was fascinated by this guy because I would say to him, hey, you know, how about this? You should jump into one of the backyard challenges. He's like, dude, I would never do that. And he explained his logic. That's you against other people.

• 42:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I'm against me. Same. I wanted to write this book, but I'll tell you why. And this is going to come across as offensive to some people. And I know, yes, I do sort of mean it that way. To me, where I realized halfway through the book was, I'm not writing a story for the right reasons. I'm writing this to wave a finger at David Goggins and say, dude, you're wrong. You know, you should not end your race on the floor in the emergency room. You should end with a smile on your face and sense of achievement. And I felt like I'm not writing, I'm arguing. And I just felt the wind coming out of my sails as I worked on this book. I'm not telling a story for the sheer joy of it. I'm telling a story because I feel like I know something and I'm going to argue with this guy. And it just soured on me. And I'm thinking to myself, ah, it's the wrong reason. So what is the

• 43:12Speaker 01

  right reason? At the time, I get a lot of messages all the time from people asking me for training advice. And I'm like, you can do better. Like, don't ask me. You know, I'm not that guy. And then like that day, I'm opening up my inbox and there's like 10 messages. Hey, I've got plantar fasciitis. What should I do? You know, what shoes should I buy? And it just clicked. The book you should be writing is the book that people have been asking for. But I never thought I was in a position to do it. I just didn't know enough. And then I thought, but I know someone who does. We really need to take everything that was not in Born to Run and put it in Born to Run 2.

• 43:46Rich Roll?

  Sure. So that brings us up to you, Eric. Why don't we start at the, at the beginning here? Like, how did you first meet Christopher? And what was the process of getting him ready for that first 50K race that he wanted to run? I mean, the whole thing with Born to Run is about how you didn't see yourself as a runner. You thought those days were in the past. And, you know, I'm a big guy and knees and et cetera, and all that kind of junk. And you really rewired his thinking and created an approach that, you know, basically allowed this guy to blossom and become, you know, an ambassador of, of the sport in the broadest sense of the word.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we first met in 05.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  He was doing a magazine article on my training in Jackson Hole. And it was right when he came back from the Copper Canyon the first time. And I'm like, you just did what? Cause I, I moved to Colorado in 91 and it's right when the Taramara who had raced Leadville 100. So they, they just came on my radar. I'm like, oh man, this is, this is, this is legit. And, um, and that was back when there was no internet. And you know, the mythology of what they're doing was proliferated because you couldn't find any information about them. So here I am, like walking into meeting this guy who just spent time with them and we just kind of hit it off.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  And so we were, we were supposed to do a two day, kind of, I was like the flavor of the month for this magazine article. And it was like the America's greatest workout or something, something crazy like that. And so he, we met day one, I kind of went through what I had scripted. And then it came really, really obvious to me, here's a guy who really, really wants to run, can't, doesn't think he can, been told he can't, and I ripped up my script for day two and we went to work and.

• 45:46Rich Roll?

  And at that point in time, I think, you know, how we kind of explore this is super important. Cause I think a lot of people watching and listening see themselves in that way.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:55Rich Roll?

  Um, and I'm kind of going through something right now, you know, that has forced me to reframe, like how I think about my, my running and I'm curious to explore that with you as well. But at that time, were you, would you consider yourself to be kind of a traditional running coach? Did your approach change as a result of your exposure to this new way? Or had you already kind of cottoned on to this more minimal, naturalistic approach to training and.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  It's, it's just been a lifelong, you know, I was an athlete growing up. So I've always looked back in all these little points in my life that have really just accumulated. Um, so at that time, when I met Chris, um, I, I just kind of have a feel for what an athlete needs. And it's, it's.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  It's a combination of research, school knowledge, my awareness of my own body, my awareness of seeing athletes, good and bad, you know, and sometimes seeing bad is really, really helpful. And then knowing the psyche of the athlete, you know, the, what was most important with Chris and I was for me to see his desire to run and being so frustrated that he can't. And knowing a lot more about Chris now is that that was the rebel in him. He really wanted to run because everyone's told him he can't. And so it's then just, I mean, I can't, it's just a feeling of, from a coach of what an individual athlete needs.

• 47:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So in the case of Chris, though, he comes to you and you have this keen observational ability to kind of look at someone, their posture, how they walk, et cetera, and immediately hone in and identify like, oh, here's what's up and here's what we need to work on. So what is that process like?

• 47:49Speaker 02

  So for Chris, it was, it was two things. It was one, just kind of dialing into the form, you know, and for me, that's, that's an easy part. But it was also starting to see that really specifically what he was doing that was causing some of the trouble that he was encountering is that he, he didn't have the ability to run easy. You know, we go out for our nice, long conversational zone to run. He really didn't have that ability. So every time he went out, it was kind of morphed into this moderate effort that was breaking him down along with his form.

• 48:24Rich Roll?

  Exactly. Right. So was that a fitness thing or is that like a heavy foot form technique?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  It was both. It was both. But it was, it was, I think precipitated by the form is that he, he did not have the efficiency to run easy. And that's where we really dove into. And, and I think too, the third part was, most importantly, in that visit, that initial visit was me.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Really giving him the confidence that there was a solution. And I think, you know, that's just my own, Chris can give his own.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  Right. Just, just the idea that there possibly could be a solution.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Is and was revelatory because there was this idea, and you talk about it in Born to Run 2, like, like, don't teach people technique when it comes to running. Like, everyone's an N of one, and there is no right or wrong way. And we all know how to run, so you just go out and run and like, don't mess around with that. Which is insane when you deconstruct that. Like, you use the example of like, the basketball player. Like, you don't just throw the ball up in the air and hope for the best. Like, it's a skill just like anything else. And there is a right way and a wrong way. And so much about our, you know, modern lifestyles, and we can get into all of that, drive us into situations where we're compelled to do it improperly. And that leads to all of these, you know, injuries and persistent, you know, problems

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  that sideline people unnecessarily.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  When you, you asked how I kind of developed all this is, one of my personal experiences, I was living at Colorado at the time and doing a ton of running, doing a ton of bike racing, and decided to go the triathlon route and had no swim background. So here I am, I think, the week before I'd won a bike race. So fit, and I decided to start swimming. Well, I had to go like, the last hour of the rec center hours that they were open and swim the width because I had a hard time getting just from one end to the other. And I'm like, this isn't a fitness thing, this is an efficiency thing that can translate to any, any activity.

• 50:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure. I mean, that's, that's like a refrain. I'm always banging this drum because I come from a swimming background. And so I learned proper technique very early. And, you know, being a triathlete and training with other triathletes who learned swimming later in life, I just watched them fighting the water. Their technique is terrible, but they're, they're time crunched. And their main concern is the fitness part of it, right? Like, I gotta get this much distance in and this much time. It doesn't matter, I'll do the technique later. And I'm like, bro, you should just forget about the whole thing and start at the beginning. So why wouldn't that apply to running? It's the same thing.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, yep. And, you know, I tell a lot of beginning runners. Don't view starting running as a workout, or as a form of fitness, or a way to lose weight. Create the joy first, and everything else will follow. And that goes into learning to be efficient, not thinking it has to be hard. And that's, that's kind of what we really dove into with Chris, is that I worked kind of the real easy end, but also, he did a lot of hill sprints, and a lot of other higher effort training to develop that efficiency and economy that was revelatory. He was, in a matter of a couple of weeks, doing so much more than he had ever done, just by changing things up.

• 51:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and so Chris, from your perspective, what was that like, hooking up with Eric? I mean, it'd be one thing, like, maybe when you first met him, you're like, "Oh, well, we'll do this one thing together", but you guys have gone on this lifetime adventure together. So obviously, like, this guy's been central to, you know, everything that you care about in this world.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  You can see why, just from that answer. It's so smart, and so easy to appreciate and absorb. Yeah, so I'm super grateful, on a personal note, because he gave me something that has changed everything. Not from a career standpoint, but just from a physical standpoint. Imagine being told, "You can't run", believing it, stopping it. And then 15 years later, realize, "I can walk out the door and run as far as I want, in any direction." The whole thing we were talking about with Kabayo, that freedom, that joy. I mean, someone's giving you just an incalculable present, so... You know, I just owe you a ton.

• 52:42Rich Roll?

  Right, so, so here we go. We got Born to Run 2, and this really is, it is the how. It's like this manual that walks you through these, essentially like, these seven principles, these like, pillars for lifelong athleticism that all conveniently start with the letter F, right? I don't know that we need to go Seri Adam through the whole thing, but, you know, let's like, let's hone in on the, on the, on the form piece for a little bit. I think with Born to Run, it became a little bit reductive in the sense that everyone just thought it was about minimalism and barefoot running, and that is a piece in there, for sure, right? But, that's really kind of evidence of a broader, you know, concept around form, technique...

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  And lifestyle. So I don't, that's not really a question, but like, maybe we can launch into how you guys are thinking about that. I mean, born to run, huge in ushering in this minimalism sensibility with running. And it's been interesting to kind of watch the pendulum swing both ways. Like, it was all about Vibram's for a while. And then I remember I was helping to crew Dean Karnaz's at Badwater, you know, some handful of years after that. And every single person was wearing Hoka's with the giant marshmallow, you know, soles. And I still have yet to see elites running in minimal footwear for the most part. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions and you guys probably know these guys, but it's not like everyone's toeing the line in sandals at Leadville or anything.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Oh, but the elites do. No one's lined up for a marathon in a pair of Hoka's, you know, they're wearing the most, I mean, the more cushioned ones. If you're running an elite marathon, you have the thinnest.

• 54:21Rich Roll?

  It's a minimal shoe, right?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Racing fly as possible.

• 54:23Rich Roll?

  Nike, whatever it's called and all of that, all the high tech kind of stuff. I'm sure you have lots of opinions about all that kind of stuff, you know, but, you know, it is weird. Like, the shoe companies still prevail for the most part. Like, they've taken a note from the work that you've done, but I don't know. Like, what's your sense of where all of that is right now?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Chris is more of a purist than, from that standpoint, from me as a coach and myself, you know, I live in Jackson Hole, running the Tetons. So for me, my number one kind of decision making process as far as shoe choice is what's going to give me the most protection that day, based on where I'm running. So I need rock protection. So I'm trying to go as minimal as possible, but still allow me to have that protection I need to, you know, rocks hurt. And based on the performance that I want that day. So, but one step back is that I think the further we get away from the ground in a

• 55:21Speaker 02

  shoe, the more we are getting away from allowing our feet to work in a natural environment. And I think what people really need to understand is that how we use our feet really dictate how we stabilize. You know, our first line of defense as runners is with our big toe and our arch. That's our stabilizer. And that really dictates how well we use our glutes. So how we use our feet directly relate to how we've kind of hear the important stability, strength we need to be healthy, strong, performance or longevity based runners. And that comes to our feet. So pick and choose, you know, I use shoes as a tool.

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there is this idea in the book like it's, it's not that running barefoot or bare, you know, minimal shoes are this panacea. Like you say, you could, you could just strap those on, but if your form is terrible, you're still going to get injured, right? Like we have to even step further back and really evaluate like, how do you hold your body? And what are the activities that you're, you know, inured to on a daily basis that are leading you astray? And you have all of these cool, like really simple, you know, drills to kind of get a meter on like where you're at, like the, the rock lobster thing, that kind of stuff is great.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  It's amazing how effective that is. It's crazy how, how well that works. But here's, here's, here's my take on this, Rich, is I come from a perspective of like, I am the guy that's always like one cushion shoe away from backsliding. We were at a great store in North Carolina.

• 57:00Rich Roll?

  Relapse.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. Well, I was going to be very cautious about that word, you know, but we're in a running shoe store and I've always been curious to try the ultra Escalante racer. It's actually the shoe we recommend in the book. If you are transitioning, if you're trying to get your form dialed in, I've been very scrupulous to never, even during the Veever five finger phase, I never recommended a shoe. I said, I'm just not authoritative enough to recommend a shoe. I wear them myself. Make your own choice. But in Born to Run 2, we recommend a shoe because we can't just be agnostic saying, hey, you should pick a shoe, but it's up to you. But I'd never actually tried them on myself. I was arguing in favor of a more minimal shoe. So I'm in this running shoe store and they bring out a pair of the ultra Escalante racer. I put it on, I'm like, that's too much shoe. Rip out the insole, still too much shoe.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  And Eric's like, this is a super stripped down minimal shoe for everybody else. But for me, I always feel like, man, if it's too comfortable, I'm gonna fall apart. My form is gonna go to hell. And to me, that's what it's all about. If you learn any other craft, if you're learning a martial art, they're not like padding you up and stuff. They are letting you learn how to move and you, you master the craft over time. And to me, running should be no different. And I can only really feel like I'm in control of form if I'm actually feeling what my feet are doing on the ground.

• 58:23Rich Roll?

  Are you guys familiar with Tony Riddle? Do you know who this guy is? British guy, had him on the podcast.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  He's, he's a, he goes by the Natural Lifestyle on Instagram. He's got a pretty big following and, you know, he got rid of the chairs in his house.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Is that the Wilding running?

• 58:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know how he's branded it or whatever. Yeah, maybe he's rewilding running. He's done a couple of adventures. He did this thing, one man, two feet, three peaks and made a documentary about it where he did the three peaks challenge in the UK, running on vivos, like on the roads in between the peaks, but then scaling, or, yeah, and then scaling the, the peaks, which are very rocky and rugged, like barefoot.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08Rich Roll?

  He came out here and we went on a run in Malibu Creek State Park and he went barefoot. And there's like, there's so many loose little, you know, I, I put on Vibrams just in good spirit and I'm not super experienced with that. And that was a lot for me and I could not believe how balletic, like how graceful he was running over like very rough terrain. He's been doing it for a long time. I have a gravel driveway and he could like run on it and do drills on it. I can't walk on it barefoot without it hurting my feet. Yeah. Clearly, you know, there's something profound going on here. But I think for me, and I probably am a stand in for the audience, like there's an aspiration to be. More like that, but it does require like a long-term commitment to get there.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Let's look at it differently.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's look at it differently. Your feet are sources of sensual pleasure. You know, one reason why we like running shoes, one reason why we like the Hoka's is they feel good. The reason why we have more than one pair of running shoes is we like that sensual pleasure of trying something new on our feet. Same reason why we like to vary our meals. Well, this tasted great for breakfast. I want something different for lunch. And that's why, yeah, I was in a place and actually that same ultra running company said, hey, try these shoes. I'm like, oh, these feel fantastic. Can I have them? I don't need them, but I like them. And so there is that sensual joy of comforting your feet with something. To me, rather than say, well, you have to commit to learning form, what if you decide, I'm going to really relish the sensual pleasure of freeing up my feet of actually experimenting

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  on that gravel driveway because over time it's going to feel really good. You don't have to make it punishment. You don't have to say, okay, I'm going to walk up and down this gravel driveway like it's a bed of hot coals. I'm saying, I'm going to try a little bit. I'm going to sense it and see what it feels like. My wife, who was not a runner, she was a dancer and she got sort of dragooned into this whole thing when we started to run with our rescue donkeys. But her genius technique was to learn barefoot running. She would just set out barefoot on an asphalt road with her shoes in her hand. And the second it was at all uncomfortable, she put her shoes on and then finished the run. But over time, she went from 50 feet to 1,000 feet to a mile. And that was it. As soon as it's no longer pleasurable, switch it up.

• 1:01:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting. And what is the, what is your sense of like how long making that full transition takes to do it responsibly?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  See, I, I, I think that's the wrong way to approach it. This is, should be something that's different for everybody and seen as a tool and a training tool. And for me, using my athletes as an example, you know, I just had someone finish a 100 miler and we, we have him in minimal shoes some of the time. We have him doing foot core exercises. We have him doing a lot of different types of training, but then he's picking the job or the tool for the job for the race.

• 1:01:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  And so I don't think it has to be this, this. Either or, and I think that's where people start to see it's, it's, I'm either a minimal runner or I'm not. See, see this as a tool and in training, just like you do your, your intervals and your, your threshold runs and, and that is because it's, it is training. Every step can be a form of, of strength training.

• 1:02:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, this book has come at a really opportune moment for me because I've been suffering from some pretty chronic lower back issues and sciatic pain. I've got some numbness in my foot and, you know, that's very concerning and has benched me from running and sent me on a bit of a world tour of, you know, meeting with, you know, all manner of specialists, all of whom seem to have, you know, versions of the same advice, but also very different at times, which can be paralyzing and confusing. But one thing has become abundantly clear, which is the lack of my, my brain to connect with certain muscle groups. So it's not even that they're weak, like they don't work. My brain says move that muscle and nothing

• 1:03:06Rich Roll?

  moves, right? My glutes don't fire, et cetera. I've got tight hips and all these sorts of, you know, knots that I'm trying to untangle with a lot of the, you know, the drills and some of the advice that, that you give in the book and I watch some of your videos as well. It's been slow going for me and so I am going to make this about me and say, maybe you can like, you know, we can go out there afterwards. You can like look at me a little bit. I'm not going to let you leave without taking advantage of that opportunity.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  I will, I will. Let's go.

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Cool. So, you know, using me as a proxy for the typical middle aged person who kind of maybe had a history of running, but has banged up a little bit and, you know, I, like I'm reading this and I'm feeling a sense of hope. Like I really want to be able to run pain free, fall in love with this thing that I care so deeply about. And it's been really, you know, frustrating to not be able to move my body the way that I would like to.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think you said one thing that really resonates with my experience in my cans, clinics, coaches, people I hear from, that the neuromuscular strength component, where you're lacking that activity from a neuromuscular standpoint. And I think that's a really big key where people and athletes focus so much on developing strength and getting stronger.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  And core exercises are a great example. You may have the strongest core in the world, but unless you're using it in a functional manner,

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  it doesn't matter. And so having that neuromuscular connection is the type of strength I see most runners needing and lacking the most. And, you know, just as a general statement, a lot of that starts with the feet. You can't train the glute activity properly unless you engage the feet. And I think that's, that would be the first thing we would, we would look at.

• 1:05:05Rich Roll?

  Have you had success working with, because there's a section in there where you go through kind of common ailments that people have. I didn't see one for lower back pain, but I'm, I'm sure you've had to contend with that.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, you know, again, just general observation with what you're saying is that my sense is that the back pain is just a symptom. Is that more times than not where you're feeling it is just a symptom of, of another culprit. And that's what I would explore is like, okay, let's maybe not look to treat the back. Is there something else that we can look at? Maybe hip flexors so as, you know, I'm sure you've heard all that. But, um, so I, I, that's, that would be my approach is that, okay, if the back, if it's truly not a back injury, what, what's maybe causing the back to let you know something's going on and we look in that direction?

• 1:05:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, that's a hundred percent what it is. Cause I, I have, you know, I have a little bit of spondy, but it's not like I have a slipped disc or there isn't, I've had an MRI. Like there's nothing too great. Like it's not perfect, but it's not like, oh man, you need surgery. So I know that it doesn't necessarily just live in that local spot that it's a, it's a manifestation of a, you know,

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. My, my sense with the, the whole sciatic, maybe we look at TFL, kind of what's going on inside of the hip.

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The hips, the hips start to hurt.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep.

• 1:06:27Rich Roll?

  The top of the hamstring start to hurt. Then my, my feet will, will hurt. Like I'm like, this is not right.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  So it literally travels right down the chain? You feel like one place, then another, then another?

• 1:06:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, those are kind of where I feel it. Yeah. Like if like, I could go out and run now, fine. But like, um, after a certain number of miles, I'll feel it in my hips. And then I'll just be a little bit more sore than I should be the next day. And my feet will hurt when I put weight on them. And I'm like, that's not right.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  That was exactly the idea of this book. So when we started to talk about it, The idea was, well, we want a universal book. We wanted this to be literally the ultimate training guide. But where is the cross-section between veteran runners and beginners or people in the middle? And what we came up with, and this was a shock to us, we did a photo shoot in Colton, California, and Lewis had gathered this great, wonderful, diverse group of people for photos. And we were just running them through some skills, just for the photographic purposes. And then Eric was pouring stuff out, like, oh, my God, like, I'm shocked at what I'm seeing. Jenna Crawford, who won the Rose Bowl Half Marathon, fantastically trained runner, but watching her glutes shake like a paint mixer. And Eric's like, see,

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  her glutes, they're switching on. They were dormant, switching on now. And we realized, even people who are at peak fitness have these, what we call wobbles, little wobble in your mechanism, that can then, and it sounds like exactly what's happening with you, Rich, is you're in a run, and that little wobble is taking its toll. So by mile five, it's catching up. So we wanted a book where we could tell people, you can go back to a factory reset. You can go back to first principles, rewire yourself. So even if you're a beginner, or you're a veteran, you can both arrive at the same place of feeling like your running is really dialed in.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  One of the really counterintuitive and fascinating aspects of getting started on this adventure was this idea of starting with going fast, right? You just think like, well, you start slow, and you build up your fitness, and then you get faster. But the best way to evaluate where you are and what you need to work on is to get somebody to sprint first, or run, you know, run really hard, because you can't hide from your form in that regard. And then you kind of build into your slower form from what you learn about what you observe when somebody's running very quickly.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, with that specifically, you know, I like to change.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  The athlete's perspective of how they gain speed. There's two ways to gain speed. Cadence or frequency of how often we strike the ground. And secondly, our distance per stride. And when you put someone in a sprinting environment, I can then see are they, do they reach for their speed through the leg reaching out in front of them or overstriding?

• 1:09:12Rich Roll?

  Overstride, yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Versus switching their mindset to the other leg and pushing into the ground to propel themselves forward. And changing their mindset. So for me, it's seeing, seeing what they do in a speed environment and then using that, that, that information to, to kind of go from there.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and ideally it should always settle around 180, right?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  That, that's, that's the magic goal, right? You know?

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  So talk a little bit about why that is and what that means.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, coaches through time have analyzed elite athletes, elite runners, and kind of that's become the, the magical number that those elite athletes tend to have, that I think that's where that number came from. So I, I see it as an aspirational number for a lot of people. Use Chris as an example, you know, with his height, he's maybe always going to gravitate to utilizing his distance per stride just a little bit more than I would, or I might kind of focus on the cadence a little bit more. But for me and my athletes and people that I want to kind of affect is that that 180 number is just something that we look to get better and better at.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  180 steps a minute.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  90 each leg. And to me, the light bulb, Rich, was when Eric was explaining this to me and he put it in terms of you watch a boxer skipping rope. I'm going to leave the mic now for a second, but.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  They're not doing this, right?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  They're doing this.

• 1:10:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  And they're bouncing.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  Light on their feet, bouncing.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  And they're using all that elastic recoil. They're turning their body into a gigantic spring. And when Eric explains 180 in that contest, like, I get it. You're not using muscular force to leap, stop, leap, stop. You're using elastic recoil spring strength to just bounce, bounce, bounce. And you can translate that into running.

• 1:11:02Rich Roll?

  And in terms of figuring out the optimal way to translate that, there's this idea of beginning with your back, like, pretty close up against the wall and jogging in place, essentially, right? Which is training you to really lift your knee and not get into that overstriding kind of, you know, traditional way that we, that most of us run when we're, you know, just doing it the way that we feel like we should be doing it.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  Right. And what we wanted to do is, and I've said this, is run form is not difficult. Learning it takes five minutes. You just described it. Running in place against the wall. You understand where you strike the ground. Now you put a little bit of music to it at 180 beats per minute. You have your cadence, okay? You can't kick back, so you can't overstride. That gives you the sense of how your relationship with the ground works as a runner. And so then, where the challenging part comes in is then having to develop that muscle memory.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  For it to take hold. And that's the piece that maybe people don't understand is that I see a lot of people, they think they've learned to run with good form. And then when that muscle memory starts to create some frustration, they think they need to learn more. And it continues that frustration where it's maybe throwing in some skills and drills and part of that neuromuscular strength that is really what needs to take place.

• 1:12:33Rich Roll?

  Like the human, the humans just hardwired to try to overcomplicate it.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:12:37Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:38Rich Roll?

  Where do I go behind the VIP rope? There's gotta be more than just this, like, run in place, you know, with my back to the wall thing.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Right. It was funny, Rich, we were with an athlete yesterday in Phoenix. Super skilled, very strong athlete and a dancer. And it was great watching Eric in action because she's a non-run, doesn't like it, has been conditioned to hate it. And she would ask Eric a question and he would say, okay, try this. And he gave her these different skills to do. And I watched in real time in five minutes how she progressed from being very awkward, pointing her foot. Kicking back, everything wrong. And then in five minutes, suddenly she and Eric are going side by side. She's relaxing loose. Then we stopped for a minute and Eric started to work with her husband. And then we started to run back. I had to call Eric over like, dude, she's doing it again. And I was watching her. It's like she was processing everything

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  that she thought she'd heard and was trying to then do it. Instead of just feeling it, she was thinking it and everything went to hell again.

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  And the the Rock Lobster song, the B52 song, playing that, there's a purpose to that, which is that the beat mimics the 180, you know, sort of strokes per minute that you're looking for. So there's this whole section in the book that's fascinating about music. Should you listen to music when you're running? Should you not listen to it? Should you find music that that has the beat, you know, that's that's going to train that neurochemistry to, you know, develop that type of cadence. And I love that this conversation transpires between, you know, Eminem, Flea, and like Rick Rubin, like, none of which are people you think about when you think about running.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and our friend Lady Southpaw.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  And my long postponed conversation with Rick Rubin, which was supposed to have happened here when I got dragged away to look for Mica, it finally took place 10 years later.

• 1:14:27Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So yeah, so talk about that a little bit. I think just that story is great.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  So the Rock Lobster thing in particular, so Eric and I are having this conversation, and Eric can really become sort of quantum physics-y about stuff. We're looking at the the fitness chapter, and he sent me over like 30 exercises. And I said, dude, I will speak on behalf of the American public. We are not doing 30 exercises.

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  You need to tell a story.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. But also, I got limited attention span. Give me three exercises, you gotta hope. Give me 30, it's a nonstarter. And with Rock Lobster, when we're discussing, you know, 180 per minute, you have to carry a metronome, how are we going to do this? And we had this conversation like, well, music has a rhythm. Wall's right there. And we can really simplify it. And then once Rock Lobster's in your brain, you cannot like pressure wash it out. It's there for life. So once you learn to run to that beat, you got it. And then for the whole music question, it was the same thing. I'm like, We're having this conversation back and forth, like we're purists, we do not wear our earbuds, we want to have our thoughts, but I'm like, you know what, I've never actually been in a race where someone starts playing Gloria Gaynor, that I don't run better.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  You know, as soon as the music on, I'm like, ready to go. I've never had a run that was worse with music. So how are we going to sort of navigate this? And that's when we just kind of put out the bat signal, like get some opinions about this. And you know, so Flea's on the record, adamant, no music. And then we reach out to this woman, Lady Southball, who's a punk musician, who has done an entire album of songs, punk songs, specifically to accompany her on her own New York City marathon. And she wrote all these songs and she plays them. And then, so we had this back and forth, you know, she's like pro music, Flea's like, no music. We reach out to Rick Rubin, who in all things, of course, is the grand master guru.

• 1:16:12Rich Roll?

  The Buddha.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Buddha stepped in and sort of enlightened us and the way to go. I loved, I loved his, his, um, his Salamnik wisdom on this one.

• 1:16:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What did he say? He said, uh, when, uh, he's, he's like, the question you need to ask is when do you want to be at the mercy of music, right? Like you can understand that Flea, like Flea is music. So when he goes running, he needs a break from that, right? But not everybody is a musician, so they can leverage it for certain purposes. I mean, I think there's beauty in both, but I do like this idea of programming a playlist of songs that all have that specific beat when you're in the process of trying to, you know, rewire your brain and your, and your form and your technique around that cadence.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  And with it, I think what's key is to, to feel the cadence, to feel the music, to feel the beat versus looking at the watch. We can, you know, we can have our watch tell us where we're at, but that doesn't create that feeling and understanding of what it feels like. It's just like feeling a good and bad stroke. You feel a bad one and you adjust while you're swimming. I want people to, while they're running, to feel good and bad so they can adjust.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  This is really the common idea of the entire book, is that understand the purpose of what you're doing. So we look at like food, for instance, our, our first chapter, your fork is not your coach. So many people get into running as a relationship with their food. They're either trying to lose weight or get in shape. And if you're on that hamster wheel, you will never be happy. You will never outrun a bad diet. And so, again, we're not going to be purists, but you know, Phil Maffetone has a thing called the two-week test, which to me is like the genius approach to food. Don't say, oh, I should be keto, I should be vegan, I should be this, that. Listen, let's just strip out all the high glycemic foods for two weeks, reboot your system, reintroduce them, see how you feel. Minimalist footwear, let's take your shoes off, see how you feel. If you want to put on a cushion shoe, have at it.

• 1:18:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  But if you want to understand the relationship between what you're using and what results you want to have, you need to get back to first principles. Music is the same way. Rather than just blasting something in your head to forget, to distract yourself, maybe there's a purpose. If you put on, like Lady Southpaw, Genius did, put on 180 beats per minute, she's getting the satisfaction of an uplifting melody, but at the same time, she's got 180 strides. And it's a tool that actually helps her as opposed to distancing herself from the experience.

• 1:18:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Rich Roll?

  You mentioned Phil Maffetone, the Maffetone Method. I mean, I love Phil Maffetone's teachings. It was transformational in my own, you know, endurance journey. Did Rick Rubin tell you that Phil Maffetone used to live with him? He like moved him in with him?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  What's funny is that-

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  That's a weird confluence of like two worlds that you would not predict.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Anything in the world of Phil Maffetone is cool and weird. He lives in a place called Oracle, Arizona. And of course you do, Phil Maffetone, where else would you live? He's got a place called Oracle. I met up with him once here in California. He's like, hey, let's go over and check out like Shangri-La. I mean, you mean like the place where Dylan hung out? He's like, oh yeah, I got the keys. I said, what? Oh yeah, you know, I'm buddies with Rick Rubin and he brought me in to deal with Johnny Cash. And I'm like, dude, every time you open your mouth-

• 1:19:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  It's a journey.

• 1:19:24Rich Roll?

  That's nuts. Yeah, you think he's a runner's geek kind of guy, like what is he doing, you know, meeting Rick and dealing with Johnny Cash?

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:32Rich Roll?

  It's wild.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Why are you even in this world? Why is Mike Pink calling you in the first place? You know, you're a chiropractor from Buffalo.

• 1:19:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  But that's it. That is the weird journey of Phil Maffetone.

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Well, he's really initiated this conversation that seems to be mushroom clouding, at least on the internet right now, around zone training. Like in my world, there's so much interest in zone two training and understanding what it means to, you know, be in that aerobic state. And there's super geeky podcasts, and we've certainly had many conversations here about that. Your whole section in this book, which is under the focus pillar, is really about zone training. And it could have been incredibly dry, like here's, you know, scientific with graphs and all kinds of stuff about like how you set your zones and why these zones are important and how to train at the polarities of them. Instead, it's about Caesar's Roman

• 1:20:24Rich Roll?

  army of runners and, you know, Laird talking about, you know, how to hold your breath and why that's so important. So that's just such a beautiful way to introduce what could be, you know, difficult topics for people to understand in a way that allows them to kind of resonate in your memory.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  For me, I'm not really interested in something that's a new revelation or a gadget. I get really curious when I start to see the same thing popping up again and again and again throughout history. If you look at Tadomata Warachis, those sandals, like, wow, you know what? Roman centurions wore them, Greek messengers wore them. The Tadomata could wear different footwear. They have the capability to put arch supports or cushions into those sandals. They chose not to. So to me, it makes sense when you have a timeline of a device that has reemerged. Cold plunges, okay, they've been doing it throughout history for a particular reason. And zoned training, the zone two training, if you look at the physiology, anytime we start to put ourselves into a state of oxygen distress, the second

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  we are out of that zone two, we're starting to approach our aerobic threshold, then your body has a physiological change. You know, your peripheral vision will kind of shrink down, your body posture will change. You're in a flight mode and your body reacts to that. And so to me-

• 1:21:44Rich Roll?

  The joy quotient starts to go down a little bit.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Completely. And actually, what your body is gonna, then what it's gonna, a stored memory is gonna be, hey, never put yourself in this position again because this is trouble. And so when you start to do zone two training and you realize, huh, there's a way where my back's open, my diaphragm's expanded, I'm actually enjoying what I see, I'm smelling and sensing things. Because just because of pure body chemistry, when your body is in distress mode, you're going to shut out sensory perception, only tunnel vision. And then you start to look back through time like, huh, let's look at the Romans and Saurians, what was their pace? Because what they were famous for was they were covering a ton of distance with packs in a record amount of time. That's what made them so formidable. And you start to look at, and people have done this, you know, the military historian, like uber scientists

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  had figured out strides per minute and miles per hour. And what you see is they're basically locking in at zone two.

• 1:22:38Rich Roll?

  Right. So 2000 years ago, they understood zone training and they had these, basically these three phases, right? Like it was, yeah, with the rucks and like with the heavy equipment, how far can they go in a single day? And they would set it at, like, what was it? It was something like, you know, 20 miles in five hours or something like that. And they had different, they had different distances and periods of time that were really basically setting their zones.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  And then mandating in the same way author Lydia, Lydia did, and the way drill sergeants do today, they do it by call and response, which again, I found fascinating.

• 1:23:15Rich Roll?

  Which is just a different version of rock lobster.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:23:19Rich Roll?

  Like you can sing a song. So it's singing a song in your aerobic zone. Call and response is like the zone would be zone three, right?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Right. Right. Yeah.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  And, and then, you know, obviously you're not doing anything when you're going all out.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so when you're looking at author Lydia, when he basically began modern jogging, he was working with cardiac patients in Auckland. And he had a mandate conversational pace. Do not run any faster than you can maintain a conversation. He mandated zone too, but he didn't say, hey, set your watches, this and that. He's like, if you can chat with your buddy, you're in the right zone. Moffadone does something similar. And then I think what you see today is in military training and boot camp, they want everybody in, they don't want somebody in a distressed mode. They want them to be able to go all night for unpredictable distance. And so they do, first they do chants, and then when you click over to another zone, you go call and response where you only have to have half of the conversation.

• 1:24:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's understanding that in those moments, if you're in Caesar's army, you're going to be called upon to suddenly sprint. But when you arrive at, you know, what you're sprinting towards, you have to fight. You can't be buckled over, right? So it's like, do you have the fitness to be able to do that? And do you have the conscious awareness to pace yourself to go as fast as you need to go to get there, but also be able to handle your sword when you arrive?

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  So, you know, when Joe V. Hill first saw the Taro Mara in Leadville, and this is something I, it took me years to unpack. And it's the reason why I got Born to Run 2 didn't happen a couple of years after Born to Run. I still did not really understand what I was seeing. And Joe V. Hill told a story, you know, he is America's preeminent cross-country coach, has worked with Olympic athletes. And he talked about the fact that I've seen it all, but what I've never seen is smiles. And these guys are at mile 60, scrambling up a hill, and they're having a good time. He told me that story. I related it. It was interesting to me. I didn't get it until years later. And V. Hill's point is, these guys have got their gears figured out. They're a mile 60, it's a 100 mile race, they're up a hill. If they can't dial it back, then they're toast. And they've learned

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  how to instinctively dial it back. And like, okay, if I'm at a point now where I'm having fun slipping up the hill, I'm in the right zone. He saw it and got it. And it took me years to understand what he saw.

• 1:25:40Rich Roll?

  Did you see that the other day, Killian Journe like published all his training data?

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  I did see that.

• 1:25:46Rich Roll?

  So the endurance, endurance Twitter is losing their mind, right? Like everyone's like geeking out on like, going deep into all his data. There's been some articles written about it. But what I thought was really fascinating and instructive about that is, over the course of something like 1,200 hours of training over the course of the year,

• 1:26:08Rich Roll?

  There were two really important things that jumped out and I'm interested in what you think about this. The first was, how much of it was at lower intensity? Eighty-eight percent was at zone one or zone two. Like zone one, fifty-six point nine percent, zone two, twenty point two. Zone five, like his all-out effort, only three point eight percent of his training, which goes to show you like he's in that like, let's have a laugh and sing a song, the majority of the time when he's out there of those twelve hundred hours. The second thing was, he's starting to question the validity of these long runs. Like, he kind of even tweeted the other day, like, I don't know if we need to be, like, it's more about frequency. And he was comparing that approach to what Camille Heron is doing

• 1:26:52Rich Roll?

  and the success that she's having. Like, she'll do two or three runs in a day, but she won't go out and do that super-long, you know, Saturday or Sunday run that the rest of us are doing.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Lots there.

• 1:27:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm glad you're bringing this up, because now I get to geek out.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is, let's go geek.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think Killian, one thing, you know, he's fast at pretty much every distance.

• 1:27:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  And if we look at his, everything you just mentioned, I think what listeners need to hear there is that he is fast enough to be able to go easy enough on that eighty-eight percent.

• 1:27:36Rich Roll?

  Right. His zone one is probably like a seven-minute pace.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:27:40Rich Roll?

  Which, you know, is our walking pace or whatever.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:27:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  And so, what, you know, since the popularity of ultra-running is that the development I see most needed with most athletes is that they need to get faster first, so they are able to run easy enough to even make cutoffs, or to be able to run in zone two, zone one, for a very long time. Lots of athletes, especially in mountain environments, don't have the ability that can be developed to be able to do what Killian does. But then they go try it. And now they're out for their five hour run because Killian does, but it's, you know,

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  50, 60% of it's in zone four and five, you know, so taking a step back and really developing your ability, your raw ability to get faster and then applying it to what Killian's talking about, I think is really, really what's missing for a lot of athletes.

• 1:28:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that's the reverse of kind of how I've always thought about it and practiced it.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:28:51Rich Roll?

  Like my whole thing was build from the, build from the ground up and create that massive endurance base and, you know, occasionally do some threshold work for speed because I'm not trying to run fast anyway. I do, you know, I know that gear needs a little bit of attention, but it's really not something I need to rely upon for.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  And I think there's a micro and macro way to look at that is that back when I was doing Ironman, there was only two Ironmans to do. It was Hawaii or Canada. And so to qualify, you kind of went through the ranks. You started with your sprint, your Olympic, worked your way up to a half. And so there was a development system built in place just because we didn't have the ability just to go sign up for an Ironman.

• 1:29:32Rich Roll?

  Well, it's still the case. I mean, the people that are killing it at Ironman are people that, you know, went, you know, were on that trajectory, right? Cause you can go from really fast to really long. You can't go from really long to really fast.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  Right, right. And look at just the development process for runners is that, you know, middle school, high school, it's, you know, 3K, 5Ks. And then you go to college and it's a little bit more and it's a little bit more. And all of a sudden now they get to their 30s and they, they're ready for the marathon. Whereas now the majority of age group athletes are just jumping into the longer runs or the longer races, which is fine. My point is that they need to understand that that speed development must really take place to really escalate their, their ability rather than just doing more.

• 1:30:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's super interesting. Start with the fast stuff.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  Get faster, improve your raw ability and then apply that to going longer. Now that longer effort's faster and you're having, you have that ability. You can't run a three hour marathon if you're, you know, if your mile pace isn't X.

• 1:30:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the famous Emil Zadopick story. When he trained for his first marathon, he trained by doing 100 meter sprints. People are like, "Amil, it's a 26 mile race." And he goes, "Yeah, I thought the point was to run fast. I already know how to run slow."

• 1:30:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, this is sort of jumping ahead to the, to the kind of community, family, fun section of the book. But the story around Billy Barnett and his wife, after having a baby and going from just, you know, endurance lunatics to doing very little and then having PRs when they kind of just had let go of any expectations of even attempting to try to do anything all that fast.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I keep harkening back to the eternal wisdom of Barefoot Ted. So one year I was pacing Ted at Leadville and I pick him up at mile 85. And this is no man's land and this is the valley of the lost. Mile 85 in Leadville, you know, the eight station tent is full of people who are ready to DNF and tap out.

• 1:31:38Rich Roll?

  It's after two hope passes, right?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's dark. It's like two or three o'clock in the morning when you're coming in. Ted comes through the tent like it's a surprise party just for Ted. Happy chatting. I'm on one side, Ted's on the other. I watched him just like socialize his way through the tent before he reaches me and he's like, "Let's go." I'm like, "Dude, what is up with you?" He does a sub 24 Leadville, which is very fast, in his own homemade sandals. And he's running by this one guy, we're passing him on the trail and some guy recognizes him. He's like, "Hey, Mike, I took this race and I turned it into a chat fest." And the guy's like, "I'm not surprised."

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  He sounds so much like him.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Right? And we're blah, blah, blah, blah, sub 24. I'm like, "Dude, your training had to be massive." He's like, "I'm doing 25 miles a week." I'm like, "How in the hell are you doing a sub 24 Leadville on five miles a day with two days off?" And he goes, "Mick Oso, I'm not interested in the limits of what's painful. I'm interested in the limits of what's pleasurable." And I'm just rolling my eyes back so far in my head, I'm spraying in my eyeballs. But I think about it, his five miles a day, I bet, were smoking fast. He probably did some yoga, you know, had an acai bowl, whatever the hell he eats, and then just blazed out. He's doing 25 very fast, very technical miles a week. And he was able to link that in. Matt Carpenter told me that one time too, the guy who holds the Leadville record.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  I went to the temple of Matt Carpenter to learn the secret of running the world's fastest Leadville. And he took me out to a park with his like five-year-old daughter. And he goes, "All right, walk to that tree and race back." So I raced the five-year-old. I will not tell you who won. And then he goes, all right, do it again. All right, do it again. And that was it. Walked to the tree, sprint, walk. He goes, you just gotta shorten the distances that you're walking and that's your, that's your training.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  Wow. To be fair with Barefoot Ted, though, he's sitting on years and years of like miles, right? So he has this vast reservoir of endurance capacity.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yes, there's a lot going on with Ted. I see a picture of Ted today. I'm like, how is this guy so freaking jacked? You know, like, I don't get it. He is like 3% body fat. I don't know. I cannot plumb the genius of Barefoot Ted, but I think he has a lot of things. I think he, like me, we have a kind of kinship because I think we're both like undiagnosed ADHD. I think his wheels are churning from the second his eyeballs open in the morning.

• 1:33:57Rich Roll?

  Right, right. One of the things that blew my mind in the book is this connection between the brain and the barefoot. And this study that showed that working memory improved 16% after a barefoot run, whereas there's no improvements with normal shoes. Like, this is insane. Like, the fact that like by going out and having your feet be in contact with nature while you're running, that like highway between what's going on up here between the ears and the proprioception, like the strategic intentional, you know, mindset that you have

• 1:34:41Rich Roll?

  to have about where you're placing your feet and all of that, that actually has this benefit on your cognition.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that to me says it all. I mean, and where it can, we all can do this in the way that we need to for our own selves. It's that

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  You might just start running on the dirt road or the gravel that you talked about, and someone else might be doing it all the time like Chris, but it all has a benefit in our own way. And finding, it doesn't have to be that all or nothing thing that maybe what's what's out there is that you don't have to just become a minimal runner. It's like, use it as a tool. And this is coming from a coach is that it's so powerful. It's how we use our feet is such an element of what athletes need to do. And it just, you know, it was my aha moment as a coach, and it's just so, so potent. And take it from there, Chris.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so you mentioned Billy Barnett, the fact that this guy aged 36 with a nine month old baby, had minimal training because he was the primary caregiver in the afternoon. His wife's working all day. When Billy came home from teaching school, he would be responsible for Cosmo. And if Cosmo wasn't up for it, then they weren't running that day. Nine months of this, he walks out and he podiums the Holland marathon. Right. He's like, he was just doing it on a flyer. He literally only signed up because he realized, oh, it sounds like there aren't that many people running this year. So I can just get jump in at the last minute. And the last minute jump in, he ends up blazing out of PR his fastest marathon ever. 225 or something like that? Yeah. Third place overall finish. And then, what's her name, Alix?

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Alex.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Alex. And then she like crushes the Hurt 100. The Hurt 100. Has her best ever Hurt 100. And she struggled with that race. But to me, that's what it's all about. This idea of the sensual pleasure. You know, we had these two chapters in the book about family and fun. It's a very antithetical notion to have in a training book, but it really gets back to physiological roots. Things that you enjoy, you'll be predisposed to repeat them and want to do them. Things where you're in a group, I mean, we think about in evolutionary terms, you would never run off into the wilderness by yourself. You would never come back. We evolved to run as hunting packs in concert with other people. And you feel it. You've never had a run with

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  a buddy that felt bad. You never came back and thought, wow, that was a bad idea. The bigger the group, the more fun it is. Unfortunately, we have turned running into this thing where if it feels good, we're probably doing it wrong. You know, it should feel bad. We should be by ourselves. We should be. Race in our Strava. And what we're finding again and again is if we actually embrace those Tadamata evolutionary roots, family and fun and incorporate into our workouts, the results are amazing.

• 1:37:37Rich Roll?

  Sure. And you're also creating sustainability for this thing that you enjoy doing. I think it is, you know, it's, it's part of just our whole Western mindset, right? Like if I'm going out for a run, like I've got this much time, I gotta extract the maximum amount of fitness out of this opportunity. So I'm going to go run as fast as I can for, you know, how long, you know, for that distance that I can maintain. And unless I, you know, butt up against that pain point, then it was a waste of time.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Right. We've, we've unfortunately associate fun with, with badness, you know, you know, if I eat a quart of Haagen Dazs, that's fun. I'm enjoying this. It's not so good for me.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  And that's what I wanted to really accomplish with the gears, getting back to the zones and the gears is that I wanted people to really see and make that correlation from, okay, if I'm, if I want to run X amount per pace mile, what does that correlate to as far as a time interval? So they're training and not straining and keeping it, we're talking about fun right now, but it's, it's that, you know, going from not straining to training to accomplish what you're looking to accomplish, to give them a correlation between time and speed.

• 1:38:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you have this set of tables in the back of the book. It's, it's an every man's way of establishing what those zones are without having to do a proper lactate test. You go out, you run a mile and based upon that, you can kind of establish how to go about that.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Right. And again, understanding what is an appropriate level of effort for what you're trying to achieve that day. So if they, if an athlete knows, hey, I'm going to the track to do two, two-minute repeats, I know what my speed should be to accomplish that versus going out too hard.

• 1:39:22Rich Roll?

  And it really, a lot of it is about the polarities, right? You want to be doing your zone one and your zone two. And then you choose your moments for your zone five. I mean, the way I've kind of been going about it is most of it is in that lower zone stuff and running the trails around here, but then I'll go to the track. And that's where I'll take my shoes off on grass or even on, you know, a kind of a padded track and do a lot of drills and, you know, try to develop that, that, that foot connection and the foot strength.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely. One thing Eric would do with me early on, this is in that first honeymoon period where he's training me, the first thing he did one time was he sent me a workout for a two hour run. I'm like, dude, there's no way, you know? I can barely run three miles, two hours. But what you find is when you have the mindset, oh man, I'm going to be out here for two hours no matter what. I loaded up a backpack like I was like, like trying to sum it to Himalayas. And I brought toilet paper with me. I thought, what do you do if you're out there for two hours? I'd never done anything like this. So I set off on this two hour journey into the unknown. And what you realize is after an hour, like you better just simmer down and take it easy. Otherwise you're not going to finish. But you relax into it. And that's when the sense of fun and joy came into it.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  And then for longer runs, again, we were training for the 50 mile in the Copper Canyon. On a long run, he would have me do hill repeats in the middle. Again, I thought this was like stupid. You're, you're taxing me out. You're burning me out in the middle of a run. But it taught me to wake up, get my form dialed in, got my heart rate up again, instead of this is slow, steady slog toward the finish line. So his way of incorporating those gear changes, you know, where you kind of rev the engine a little bit was just, to me, just brilliant.

• 1:41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, that's where you get into real fitness, right? In Ironman, it's all about like the slow locomotive. You kind of get up to speed and then you just hold it there all day. But you don't have that, you don't have a lot of gear change ability, you know, in that distance, if you're training for that specifically. And when you are doing those gear changes, you create that resilience. So you can attack a hill, but you're also, because you're doing so much. Aerobic work, you can bring that heart rate back down quickly. So you don't have to stop at the top of the hill and buckle, buckle over for a minute.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  But for me, even more so, it's what we're doing for the structural system is that a lot of what's in the book.

• 1:41:37Rich Roll?

  Waking up all those muscles and groupings.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  And using them in an appropriate manner of activating things. We were in Lawrence, Kansas, what, two days ago or whatever it was. And you know, kind of our MO for these events have been start out with some of our, our skills in the book and then go for a run. And we did some neuromuscular jumping and, and what we call leg stiffness. Leg stiffness is a crucial element for performance and longevity, for good health and running. And so we went through our leg stiffness exercises and then went for a trail run. And after the trail run, two, two gals came up to me and they, they said, those exercises

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  were transformed my running in a matter of 30 minutes because normally I would not be able to run that trail as a steady run. I felt like I could run forever. And that's, that's the connection that you're talking about and that how faster running for me is less about maybe the anaerobic or what we consider it from a cardiovascular standpoint, but what it's doing with our connection with the ground and our structural system.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  We were in Baltimore with a group called the Riot Squad, Running is Our Therapy. And there's a new runner there, Justine. And toward the end of the run, it's getting dark, she's laboring, struggling. And we had done rock lobster exercise beforehand and she kind of looks over and is like, what was that song again? You know, rock lobster. She gets on her phone, punches it up and like that, her running switch. Because she's the point where now she's just slogging it. She put the song on and all of a sudden she started to pitter patter and then brought the run in for a landing. But she did it out of a sense of desperation. Like everything else sucks, maybe this song will help. And it really did.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  What does that mean, leg stiffness?

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  It's essentially your ability to land and get off the ground as quickly as possible, helping your cadence. So I see cadence and leg stiffness go hand in hand for performance and for longevity, or you know, that real feel-good we want out of running where it takes away tightness. When we hear leg stiffness, that's a good thing. It doesn't mean lack of mobility or tightness. It's your ability to use and operate the springs and rubber bands in your body to land and snap and get off of it as quick as possible.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  I see. Yeah, cool. I think it would be cool to, maybe before we, you know, end the whole thing, to kind of share some of those drills so people could just start practicing them.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So leg stiffness, or just in general?

• 1:44:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, not right now, but remind me before we end. What's the most common thing that you come across? Like, you're doing all these things with all these running groups, right? You're seeing all shapes and sizes of runners. What is like the refrain? You know, what's the thing that people share with you the most? Or, you know, what is a common misconception about people's relationship to running that you'd like to disabuse people of?

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  Wow, that's... Let me think. You keep going, because you always can.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  I'm not a real runner. Invariably. There's never been an event where people don't say, "I'm not a real runner. I'm not good at this. I'm not as fast as you." Believe me, you're as fast as me, for starters. Yeah, that doubt, lack of self-confidence, and also lack of a sense that this is an art that you can master. And that's, to me, is it. And it's always like a real pleasant shock to them when we start to do these skills and they realize, "Oh, okay, I can do this." Yesterday, we're working this athlete in Arizona, and she's a dancer. So she's struggling to run, and Eric stops, he goes, "Hey, show us a couple dance steps." And she clicked. And he's like, she just started to bust out this

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  dance instantly, no hesitation. And Eric's like, "You're a runner." Like, that's it. Because her dancing was this nice rhythmic, bouncy things, like just move it forward, and you're a runner.

• 1:45:42Rich Roll?

  I would imagine some of those people who say, "I'm not a real runner," Are the people who are out pushing strollers with their little ones, right? And actually, you have this thing in the book about like, this is actually a tool like to improve your running form.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  We were just with one of Eric's clients, Ellen Ortiz, in Birmingham. She's fantastic, but what I love about her is that she is alpha dog, I'm gonna BQ or die kind of runner, but at the same time, when she had her baby, she decided, okay, now I'm gonna get really good at this. And we were just like watching, like drinking in tips and information and where she positions the dog stroller. But yeah, she's turned this into an amazing learning tool, using the dog stroller.

• 1:46:25Rich Roll?

  Talk about a little bit about the movement snacks. I mean, that's sort of drill oriented, but I like how you've encapsulated that and turned it into like a fun thing.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, the movement snacks are something that you can do anytime, anywhere for a variety of reasons, but how we strategically use them in the book is a lot of diving into the diagnostics of the injury chapter where maybe the movement snacks are a strategic way to begin to add more mobility or give you a sense of where you're lacking in movement while you're then implementing some of the remedies for that specific injury.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  These are developed by a friend of ours, Julie Angel, who comes from a parkour background. And so what Julie, Julie's actually a filmmaker who started to film parkour athletes. And as an observer, she realized, oh, they've got some really kind of cool, full natural movement skills that a lot of people could benefit from. So she extracted movement snacks from the isolated movements of parkour athletes, like precision jumping or quadruple feet on movement.

• 1:47:34Rich Roll?

  Right, crawling around on all fours.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but that kind of thing too, to balance on your left foot and your right hand at the same time and move forward. And then she realized, these are fun, they are non-threatening, and that if you do a little bit of bear crawl for like 30 seconds and you stand up, oh, like everything feels loosened. And so I think it's kind of a genius move by Julie to create movement snacks because you take that group of people, I'm not a runner, I don't want to do this, I don't do that, oh yeah. So the parkour community will form a big circle. As a way of saying hello and then they will bear crawl to the center and everyone will high five and then they'll reverse and bear crawl backwards back out. That's the warm up, but they've now extended their entire chain of motion, their arms, shoulders, backs are loosened and they're ready to go out and work out.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  So that's what we basically adopted all these things from Julie's and Movement Snacks.

• 1:48:24Rich Roll?

  Cool. Are you guys still in a formal coaching athlete relationship?

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  I've just spent two and a half weeks with this guy.

• 1:48:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm like curious, like what does Chris still need to work on? Like what is, like, what does that look like?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  I'll cover my ears.

• 1:48:40Rich Roll?

  I assume it's more than just like, here's your workout. Like it's not about that. It's more about like technique and form and strategy.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  No, when he mentioned when we were in Colton, California doing the photo shoot, he still had the best form there. And so he's.

• 1:48:56Rich Roll?

  Hear that Jenna Crawford?

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. Best form ever. Um, no, I think what's most important with what Chris does is he understands what he wants out of running. And he sticks to that mission is that what's most important for him is to do it properly. And that trumps everything. And you know, when, when we first started working together, his goal was to be able to run anywhere, anytime, any distance. And that's, that's kind of where we say, you know, begin the book of his, his transformation over 15 years. And so I, I think moving to Hawaii and living there full time now, I'm going to be really

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  interested to see how he gravitates to the trail systems there. And he's even got me interested in getting back into swimming because he's talking about some swim run challenges and, and just kind of creating adventures. So, um, it, you know, he, he's, he's inspired me a lot recently just to kind of maybe get back into swimming.

• 1:50:02Rich Roll?

  That's cool. Have you done any swim runs?

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I mean, on my own, I've kind of invented some like little roots of my own, but I gotta get back to what Eric says. I feel like I'm the. Guy that can't coast, you know, I didn't come into it with the natural abilities and I came in from it from a history of hating it and disdaining it and being hurt. And so that's why for me, form is like foremost on my mind. I feel like I barely got my arms around this. And so to me, it's a priority. I think stronger, better, faster athletes can get by for a while before they run into trouble. I'm starting from a position of trouble. But I also dig it because you know, it's like if you watch someone do something, even if you don't know the sport, but it's elegant and clean and powerful. I don't know

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  what a backhand is supposed to look like, but you watch, you know, Serena do it. Oh, I guess that was pretty darn good. And for me, that's what running feels like. I think people misunderstand that focusing on form is tedious. To me, it's really joyful. Because when you get that moment, oh, that felt good. Oh, that one felt good, too. How many strides can I string? But as far as swim run, dude, come on out. I got some fun routes. And I just did it on my own because you realize, huh, there's like canal that I can swim across about a half a mile.

• 1:51:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Where I can run this certain trail and it pops out on a series of beaches with rock jetty in between. So you can come off a trail, jump in the water, swim a quarter mile, land on the beach, run down, swim another quarter mile.

• 1:51:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  And just, you know, make your own swim runs.

• 1:51:29Rich Roll?

  I love it. Are you on Oahu?

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Are you like in the Honolulu area or like Kailua, like up north?

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Kailua, yeah.

• 1:51:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where my wife grew up.

• 1:51:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  Near by in Kaniohi, yeah.

• 1:51:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's very cool. No, I, I went down the swim run rabbit hole. I did Otillo in Sweden and, you know, it's, it's cool in Europe. Like, it's a whole thing, man. And these guys have it dialed. And it's a, it's a very specific skill set. We went in, me and my coach, Chris Al, we were, we were totally unprepared for what exactly we were getting into. But so fun. And I love when the environment dictates the adventure and the experience. It's not like, oh, it's an Ironman, has to be this distance. We just lay this, you know, tableau on top of the terrain. It's the other way around. And, you know, it's, it's all about like respect. Like, if you drop like a gel pack on the, you're disqualified if anybody sees you. Like, zero tolerance policy for that. It's

• 1:52:26Rich Roll?

  really all about like, The beauty and the immersion in these beautiful places. But I remember like, let me just share this one story, like in the days leading up to that race, we're in Stockholm and you know, a bunch of the athletes are there because it's in the archipelago off the coast. And, and, and so we're doing like just little fun, you know, last minute training sessions, literally running like down the city streets of Stockholm in wet suits and like jumping in the water and swimming across these little waterways. And, and there's people, you know, going to work and, and nobody like, they're all like, oh yeah, it's normal here. You know, like the weirdest thing to see like people running down a city street in a wet suit. That's really.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Is it enforced buddy system? Don't you have to be with your partner?

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  You have to do, yeah, you do it in, in, in teams of two and you have to stay within three meters of each other. Some, some of the teams actually tether themselves to each other with like a bungee cord type deal. And you can like use whatever you want. Like most people have hand paddles. And you swim in your tennis shoes and the whole thing and crazy.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  I love that partner aspect of it. To me, it's like harkening back to that.

• 1:53:30Rich Roll?

  That's a whole new kind of element of the whole thing, which is about fun and community, family, like all these things that you talk about in the book.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Was it brutally cold though?

• 1:53:41Rich Roll?

  We had the, I mean, it's a longer story, but yeah, we had like the worst weather ever. Terrible. Which made it epic, you know, I'm glad in retrospect, I mean, it was sideways rain and crazy wind and chop and swells and all kinds of stuff.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  Did it make it in retrospect, all the more satisfying or like, ah, I really wish it.

• 1:54:01Rich Roll?

  It was terrible on the day, but like, yeah, now looking back, I'm so glad it wasn't like a glassy day. Like we, we, you know, that's what we signed up for. Like I hate cold water, you know, it was like, I'm going to go do this thing that I'm kind of scared of.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:14Rich Roll?

  We did fine. Like we're, you know, I, I held my coach back, of course. As I should, right? But yeah, it was an experience I won't soon forget. And now you're seeing swim run competitions starting to pop up in the States and I think that's a really cool thing.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I hope the US versions actually maintain that buddy mandate. To me, it's a whole different kind of experience.

• 1:54:38Rich Roll?

  The Americans, yeah, they don't like that though. They're like, "I don't want to do the thing, I want to just do it myself," right? But that's kind of beside the point of the whole thing. Cool, well, let's end this with a couple drills, things that you can, I don't know if we can like, if it's possible to articulate it in a way where people can kind of understand, but like one or two things that people could start to practice where they can get a gauge on like, "Oh, this is why I feel this way because this thing is weak," or what have you.

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so maybe we can hit it from two sides. One, what we call the foot core, where we can train our feet. We've got muscles on the bottom of our feet and there's some simple but very, very potent ways to train your feet. And it's simply, you always kind of want to work barefoot, simply taking off your shoes and socks and balancing on your forefoot on one leg. And Chris is sick of me here and saying this, but you're going to feel it where you need it. The weakest link is going to show up. It might be for someone, hey, they start to feel it in the feet in the arch, or it might be the calves, or hey, they're strong down there, they bike or they do mountain running and so they're strong down below the knee, but they start to feel it in their glute.

• 1:55:49Speaker 02

  And that's how the feet really affect everything up through the leg. So again, simply barefoot, forefoot, balancing.

• 1:55:57Rich Roll?

  Right. I've noticed, and I don't know whether this is an age thing or a weakness thing or whatever, but my balance got really bad. Like, you know, when I stand on one leg or I'm putting my underwear on or whatever, I'm like... Why can't I just, you know, hold myself up in a stable way?

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  And I think too, in doing these simple foot core exercises, that you're going to start to see or feel a difference between right and left, and then you can start maybe making a correlation of, oh yeah, I'm kind of tighter on this side, and making a correlation of how poorly or how well you're using each foot, based on how you're feeling as an athlete.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  The genius of these exercises that Eric came up with is, I want everything to be something that I would personally do. And if I ain't gonna do it, I'm not gonna put it in the book. And things like the one foot balancing, if you're waiting for the coffee to brew, you got two minutes on your hands, you can do this. And that's what I really like about them. These are extraordinarily practical, but have a great residual effect as well.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  And that doesn't mean they're not potent. I mean, as you're listening right now, take off your shoes and socks and balance on your forefoot. It's not an easy thing. And you can see how challenging and difficult it is. And with that, in that position, regardless of good or bad form, we're asking ourselves to be in that position every step as we run. And you need to be stable there. And that's how we can really train the feet.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  And the self-correcting part of this is that Eric doesn't give you any instructions on how you, he goes, just move your arms, move your legs however you want to get that balance. What you find is, you self-correct, you realize, oh, if I just kind of tighten my core up a little bit, if I straighten my posture, if I do my arms like this. And so you do it for 30 seconds, and your body will find that balance that you were struggling for, just by putting itself in that position.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The tweak for me is embracing the fact that so much of that is about like creating those neural pathways. It's not about suffering. Like, you know, the athlete in me is like, I'm gonna do it until it hurts. Or how many of these lifts, you know, am I gonna do? Well, I'll just do it until it's burning like crazy. But it's not really about that. It's really about just developing the habit as a preset. And that's about like your mind connecting with that movement. It's not about like, you know, hitting anything hard.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  It's the best warm-up you can do, because now we're turning our electrical system on, before we go out and run. So, another one, leg stiffeners we talked about, is simply, there's three types of strength. We have concentric, eccentric, and isometric. And eccentric and isometric is very rarely talked about. And especially the isometric, where it's that, when we land as a runner, there's a moment in time

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  After our land and before we take off, that is really, really crucial for injuries. That isometric hold, okay? Lot of runners don't have that. So leg stiffener exercise would be simply standing on your right foot, barefoot, and just taking a short leap forward and sticking it like a ballerina, without a whole lot of leg movement. You want to stick it without movement. And just kind of progressively hop forward with that stick, two or three, five second stick to create more leg stiffness, to allow you to really get off the ground quicker.

• 1:59:13Rich Roll?

  Right, so that creates the ability to be resilient in that isometric position and avoid injury.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  And it's a great way for people who are training for a hilly race that might not live in that area. And now we're training that eccentric landing as well, that we get from downhills that maybe they don't have, so.

• 1:59:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:33Rich Roll?

  Can we go outside?

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Rich Roll?

  And you're gonna like, put me through the wringer?

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  We're gonna look at your...

• 1:59:37Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  What's cool about this is that people love these exercises. People go, "I'm not a runner." And you have them do these sticky hop lunges, and you just see that, like, they're having fun. It's a playful game.

• 1:59:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49Rich Roll?

  Cool, man.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:50Rich Roll?

  Well, thanks, you guys. I appreciate it. Born to Run 2, I'm so excited for this to be out in the world. Again, it's the how-to on Born to Run. I think it's gonna help a lot of people. This was, you know, a very worthy investment on your guys' time and like a gift to all of us runners out there in the world. So I appreciate it.

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:00:11Rich Roll?

  I imagine that there are a lot of people who are gonna come and ask like, oh, how, you know, they're gonna want you to coach them. Like, do you, is that what you do? Do you, is there someplace where people can learn more about you? Resources, et cetera?

• 2:00:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have my website and ericorton.com. And kind of, there's lots going on. I have my YouTube channel, which is kind of... The place to go see the how to tips in YouTube environment. But what I do kind of daily is I coach runners all over the world for marathon and ultra running, kind of the traditional type of coaching. But then I do camps and clinics and speaking and have people visit me in Jackson Hole to kind of dive into all this dysfunction that runners tend to have. That we kind of, so kind of hitting it from two, two different coaching environments.

• 2:01:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very cool. And if there's, you know, people on the tip of like community and finding a pack to run with, are there good online resources for people to go to who are living wherever, who want to see like what's available to them?

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Here in California, there's an amazing one called The Rundown by Iman Wilkerson. And she actually tipped us off to some of our favorite affinity group running clubs. There's a group in San Diego called the Santa Mujeres, Latina runners. So yeah, check out The Rundown in California and Points Beyond. But otherwise, you just kind of check your local community. There are these, we've been blown away. There's Run for Chinatown, Harlem Run, 86 Go, across the country. There's these incredible proliferation of small groups.

• 2:01:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:45Speaker 02

  And with that, one aspect we were kind of maybe hoping with the book was that now giving maybe some resources for people to start their own clubs and their own crews and, and having maybe a systematic way about going about it from, from a training perspective.

• 2:02:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:05Rich Roll?

  So. Awesome, man. Well, I'll link up all your socials and websites and all that kind of stuff. And obviously where to get the book and all of that. And, you know, you guys are probably coming to a city near the audience at some point. You're kind of on a tour. You're going to go home, but you're going to go back out around the book when this comes out. And I'm sure it's going to be a hit and it's been lovely talking to you guys. I appreciate it. I'm at your service, anything I can do to help you guys out in the mission.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  This is really fun, man. Thank you.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  Thanks, Rich.

• 2:02:32Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 2:02:33Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Rich Roll?

  And thanks for the pinola.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  Right, right. Those bites are tasty.

• 2:02:38Rich Roll?

  One thing I was going to ask you, we're still rolling, right? This is sort of a Mike a true thing, but you know, when you had to move the market on chia seeds when Born to Run came out, and I'm sure you get asked this all the time, like you could have started a chia seed company and completely, you know, dominated that market.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  It's kind of funny. I was trying to track how many companies went on Shark Tank based on something out of Born to Run. And my daughters are having acai bowls and they're putting chia on, but they hadn't soaked it. I go, you have to soak it. They go, no, you don't. You don't understand. I invented chia seeds.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Right. There's teenage disdain for you. I don't know, dude. It was kind of funny. I look back on it and you're not quite sure. Like, I'm happy to take all the chips and think, I'm, you know, the cause of everything, but I don't recall chia being around at all until after Born to Run came out. And then suddenly bam, it was off it went.

• 2:03:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. No, I don't remember hearing about it before that, but you know, I make damn sure I put those in my smoothie or on my cereal pretty much every day.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you soak them first or you put them on dry?

• 2:03:41Rich Roll?

  Depends on how much time. I, I, I, sometimes I don't. I know that I'm supposed to and I'm like, yeah, I should probably soak those, but like, I gotta go.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  You don't soak, you just have them ground up, right?

• 2:03:50Speaker 02

  I usually, I like them ground. Yeah.

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  Ground and dry?

• 2:03:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. To me, I soak them in, into those tadpole, you know, things. But yeah, it's kind of a funny thing. And then with Pinoli, I was getting blitzed by people saying, I want the top amount of superfood. Like where can I get it? I go, dude, Chihuahua. That's your only answer. And then this kid, Eddie, Eddie.

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  Sandoval.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Sandoval. I keep forgetting his name. In Kansas, Wichita, Kansas, created a company. And so again, we're not affiliated at all, but I'm just a fan of the fact that he took the ball on Pinoli and started running with it.

• 2:04:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very cool. All right, man. Thanks.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:25Rich Roll?

  Come back again sometime, share some more.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 2:04:28Rich Roll?

  Appreciate you guys.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thanks, your crew too. You guys make me feel really, really welcome.

• 2:04:32Rich Roll?

  Cool. Good stuff, man.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  We're gonna do some drills?

• 2:04:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:39Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting

• 2:05:24Rich Roll?

  the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis,

• 2:06:09Rich Roll?

  Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace.

• 2:06:27Rich Roll?

  Bonnats! Namaste!