Alex Hutchinson On Redefining The Limits of Human Performance

Let’s talk about limits. What is your true ceiling? How do you frame the outer edge of your capabilities? Are these checks and balances truth? or are they just beliefs you accept as fact? How you answer these questions have profound implications not only on your perception of potential, but on virtually every significant decision you make, the challenges you agree to tackle and ultimately how you view yourself and the world you inhabit. Today's conversation asks us to rethink such restrictions — both self-imposed and external — suggesting that we are all capable of so much more than we allow ourselves to believe. That, in a word, each and every one of us holds the power to transcend our sense of what is truly possible. Because according to this week's guest, limits are an illusion. Meet Alex Hutchinson. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, Alex began his career as a physicist, putting his University of Cambridge Ph. D to work as a researcher for the U. S. National Security Agency. A two-time finalist in the 1,500 meters at the Canadian Olympic Trials, Alex spent his free time during the NSA years training and competing as a middle- and long-distance runner for the Canadian national team. By this I mean he is a good runner. Very good. Alex subsequently received a masters in journalism from Columbia University and today he writes about the science of endurance for Runner’s World and Outside, while frequently contributing to little-known publications like the New York Times, The New Yorker and Toronto's Globe and Mail. FiveThirtyEight recently named him one of their “favorite running science geeks” and he was also one of only two reporters granted access to cover Breaking2 — Nike’s top secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier. I have been a fan and avid reader of Alex's writing over the last few years. But what inspired me to invite him on the podcast is his phenomenal new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance*. A page-turning must read, it blends cutting edge science and incredible storytelling in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell (who penned the foreword) to suggest the seemingly physical barriers we encounter when tackling a challenge are set as much by the brain as by the body. In other words, the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought. Indeed, the new frontier of endurance is not the body, but the mind. Borne from a decade of intensive research shadowing elite athletes and traveling to high-tech labs around the world, this conversation with Alex beckons us to better understand and ultimately more fully express express our innate abilities. And it's a roadmap laden with strategies, techniques and tools to manifest that untapped potential lurking within. Alex's examination of limits is not restricted to physical performance. Defined broadly as “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop,” Alex suggests that endurance is best understood as surprisingly universal, applicable to essentially every challenge we face, be it athletic, academic, professional or emotional. So even if you are not an athlete, my hope is that this conversation and the book that inspired it will leave you rethinking your limits, so that you may reach higher, push farther, and ultimately become better in whatever discipline you are devoted to mastering. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  If you take away the pain, you're not going to be able to pace yourself well. You need to have that pain in order to push to your limits, to be able to judge where the limits are. But you don't need to give up because it's painful. The essence of endurance is that you're fighting against your very well-justified instincts to stop doing whatever you're doing, and you're choosing to go against your natural inclination, and you're doing it over a prolonged period of time.

• 1:28Rich Roll?

  That's Alex Hutchinson, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:43Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Let's talk about limits. How do you frame potential, your capabilities? What holds you back? What is the true ceiling on what you are capable of achieving? How do you identify and define this outer perimeter for yourself? Are these checks, these controls, are they truths? Or are they merely beliefs that you accept as fact? And how does your internal sense of your limits impact the decisions you make, the challenges you decide to shoulder, really, how you view yourself and the world around you? Today, we're focusing on limits.

• 2:25Rich Roll?

  It's a conversation about the restrictions others impose upon us, and perhaps even more importantly, the self-imposed checks and balances that hold us back. But mostly, it's about the path we can all take to transcend our sense of what is truly possible. Because according to this week's guest, these limits are an illusion. My name is Rich Roll. I'm the host of this thing, this podcast, my podcast. And welcome to this week's deep dive with Alex Hutchinson. Alex is a National Magazine award-winning journalist who, and this is really fascinating,

• 3:07Rich Roll?

  began his career as a physicist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, doing post-doc research for the US National Security Agency, while also, at the very same time, competing as a middle and long-distance runner for the Canadian national team. He went on to get a master's in journalism from Columbia. And today, he writes about the science of endurance for Runner's World Magazine and Outside Magazine, and frequently contributes to a couple little-known publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker. On a personal note, I have followed Alex's writing for a number of years. Most recently, I tracked him as one of only two reporters who were granted access to

• 3:49Rich Roll?

  cover Nike's top-secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier. But what really drew me to inviting Alex on the podcast is this phenomenal new book that he wrote that just came out called Endure. It's a fascinating read. I highly recommend everybody check it out. And what it does is, it blends cutting-edge science and incredible storytelling, kind of in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the foreword to the book, to suggest the seemingly physical barriers that we encounter when tackling a challenge are really set as much by the brain as by the body. In other words, the mind is really the new frontier of endurance.

• 4:32Rich Roll?

  And it's this idea that the horizons of performance are much more elastic, more flexible than we once thought.

• 4:50Rich Roll?

  All right, Alex Hutchinson, The Boundaries of Endurance, The Illusion of Limits, Untapped Potential. This one is a great one, people. It's a conversation and lessons learned born out of basically a decade of research that Alex performed shadowing elite athletes and from traveling to high-tech labs all around the world. But even if you're not an athlete, there's so much to mine here because the lessons that Alex extracted from this experience are not just limited to athletic performance, they are surprisingly universal. Alex defines endurance as "the struggle to continue against a mounting desire

• 5:32Rich Roll?

  to stop." And this is something we all face in whatever challenges we tackle, be them physical, mental, or emotional. And his conclusion is that there are techniques and strategies that will facilitate our ability to reach higher, push a little farther, do more, and ultimately be better in whatever discipline we are devoted to mastering. So, let's get into it.

• 6:02Rich Roll?

  All right, well, let's do it. Alex, so nice to meet you. I'm delighted to be in this beautiful little conference room in downtown Manhattan to talk to you about subjects that I love and clearly you love as well because it's leaping off every page of your beautiful new book, which I think is magnificent. This is really a phenomenal effort that you put together. So, congratulations.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Well, thanks so much for the kind words, Rich, and thanks for bringing me on. I'm really looking forward to have a chance to get into one of these deep conversations about something we love.

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. I will say, as a prefatory remark, that I woke up at 3:00 a.m. in Los Angeles today, the day after daylight savings. So, it was actually like waking up at 2:00 and flew here, dropped my bags, and came here. So, if I just like nod off, or yawn, or my eyes glaze over, I'm putting all the pressure on you to like make this sing.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Well, I-

• 7:02Rich Roll?

  But I'm showing up, I'm here, I'm gonna do my best.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  And this is what endurance is all about. This is the point I make in the book, that whether you're running a marathon or whether you're on a cross-country flight after a night of sleep deprivation, it's fundamentally the same thing. So I have confidence in your ability to push through right to the end.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  I'm tapping into like all of my training to bring it forth here. But I think that speaks to, you know, maybe a kind of another prefatory comment about the book, which is, you know, don't be mistaken that this is a book only for athletes or for runners or for super hardcore people that like to geek out on like performance data. It really, it's about the human condition. It's about the human mind, body and spirit and how it functions. It's like this deep dive into what is actually going on here? What propels us? And, you know, how can we look at this from a different angle? And perhaps develop better strategies to figure out not only how to perform at the highest levels of athleticism, but in our own daily lives with whatever it is

• 8:01Rich Roll?

  we're aspiring to achieve.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you said that because, look, I mean, I'm a runner. I come from a running background and my interest in this topic definitely comes from my running experiences. And this probably started out, you know, a decade ago or whatever as a, you know, an exploration of why I couldn't run faster or, you know, a way of kind of exploring my own experiences as a runner. But as it went on, it just kept getting broader and broader. And I kept realizing that the, the sort of comparison between endurance and a marathon and like I was saying, endurance, you know, whatever, while studying for an exam or in a business meeting, it's not just metaphorical. It's actually the same thing. If you, if you come to, to believe, as I have, that the physical limits we experience

• 8:48Speaker 01

  are often mediated by the brain, then it really isn't a metaphor. It really is the, the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop in all these different contexts.

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  Right. But that being said, you, you kind of glossed over your running and said, oh, you were frustrated that you couldn't run faster. But like, let's be very clear about one thing. You're, you're an unbelievable runner. Like you're super fast. I competed at the Canadian Olympic Trials. You know, you were the highest level of performance in that 1500 meter range.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Well, let's be clear, there's always a higher level of performance.

• 9:22Rich Roll?

  Well, there always is, of course. There's always somebody who's faster.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there are a lot of people who are faster than me. I think I was ranked 236th in the world in my best year, something like that. But yeah, running was the most important thing in my life for a good decade. You know, I started in high school, I got serious about it. And I ran seriously throughout college. And I had some injury problems right after college, but basically until I was 28, even though I was doing other things in my life, you know, if there was ever any conflict between running and whatever it was, a relationship or a job or anything, you know, my day was, running fits into the day and everything else fits around it. And, you know, I had some great times. I traveled the world and I raced and I'm really happy and proud of what I did as a runner.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  But yeah, of course, I wish I accomplished more, as we kind of all do.

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  Every athlete does.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, like going back to, you know, where does this book come from? You know, the point where you walk away from a sport, often the question you ask yourself is, did I achieve everything I could have? And no one can ever answer that question. But with running, you kind of have the illusion that you could say, "Well, what were my physical limits? Did I run as fast as I could have with the tools I had?" And that just kind of leads to the question, "Well, how do you define your limits? What are your limits and how do you know if you've come close to them?" And that was kind of a question.

• 10:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a question that has propelled me and haunted me and fueled me in various ways. I mean, I walked away from swimming career in college knowing that I didn't come close to tapping into my potential. And I think that was a big reason why, you know, I felt like I had to revisit it later in life. And in your own kind of, you know, version of that, you do this beautiful job of opening the book with this experience that you have of trying to break the four-minute barrier in the 1500 meters. And I think that story, which I would love for you to share, kind of encapsulates all of the themes that you then dive deep and explore throughout the remainder of the book.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was, you know, the, first of all, the four minute fifteen hundred meters. It's fifteen hundred meters is a little bit shorter than a mile, so it's about seventeen or eighteen seconds. So it's a, it's the kind of level that a very good high school runner could reach. And, and I was a very good high school runner, at least initially, and I ran about four oh two when I was sixteen. And I figured four minutes was just, you know, around the corner, next week, next month. But I got stuck at the same level for about four years. And so it was by the time I was a, a third year, a junior in college, I'd been running four oh one or four oh two for four, four straight years. So I really had the sense that I was kind of

• 11:59Rich Roll?

  Plateaued.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Plateaued and, and, and reaching my physical limits. Like, I'd been training pretty hard. I tried different training plans. I thought, okay, you know, that's okay. Four minutes is not a bad time. And I know that if I, or at least I knew that if I could put all the pieces together, I could run three fifty nine. You know, once you've run four oh one, you know you can run three fifty nine. So that was kind of my mission by the end of university. I wanted to get under that. But I didn't figure there was a whole lot more in the tank. And, and what ended up happening is, is there was this really minor low-key meet, an indoor, an indoor track on the, one of the worst, slowest tracks in Canada. Meaningless meet, no competition. I was just gonna go jog the race, just kind of get it out of the way because we had to run it. But my teammate ran a really great race in the, in the women's fifteen hundred right before mine. And I just thought, okay, Alex,

• 12:45Speaker 01

  stop being such a, you know, a prima donna about this. Just, you're here to run a race. Go as hard as you can and see what happens. And when I went through the first lap, that, you know, the timekeeper calls out splits with each lap. And so you get a sense of how fast you're going. And the timekeeper called out twenty seven for the first two hundred, which is ludicrously fast. And I thought, okay.

• 13:02Rich Roll?

  What was the, what was the pace you were trying to maintain, or your sort of goal pace?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I, I, to break four, I needed to hit thirty twos. And the difference between twenty seven and thirty two is, is massive. Like, twenty seven is getting pretty close to as fast as I can run. And so I knew, like intellectually, okay, bad move, Alex, you gotta relax.

• 13:20Rich Roll?

  But your perceived effort was that you were chill?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, well, that's the easiest twenty seven I ever ran. And, and so I went through another lap and he called out fifty seven, which is still extremely fast. It's like world-class pace.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And I still felt pretty relaxed. And at this point, I started to think, oh, you know, it's something, something good is happening today. Alex, you, you know, your, your horoscope is aligned and you're going to have a, a really good one. Don't waste this opportunity. So I, I put my head down and you know, I paid attention to maybe one more split. And then I just, the splits were so far ahead of my four minute pace that I'd memorized. They didn't really tell me anything anymore. And I just thought, screw it, just go. And I ran like I've never run before, just trying to take advantage of this magical day. And I ended up running 352, which was a nine second personal best.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  This is like such an insane level of improvement.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  There, there are, there are good moments in your life that, that are, that you know, are going to be remembered as good moments for the rest of your life. And that was one of those moments. I crossed the line and it was just like, almost the first thing I thought was, you know, remember this feeling, Alex. Remember this feeling.

• 14:24Rich Roll?

  I mean, when was the last time you dropped eight or nine seconds off your 1500 meters? You must've been a little kid.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So from the moment, you know, I started running seriously, I had never had that kind of like, I, once I started running, I, I posted my initial times and then I'd come down a total of, you know, less than that. You know, in my first season, I ran 408 and then I'd gotten down to 401. So I'd improved seven seconds since I started running. And then I improved nine seconds in one race.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  So then the calculus turns to trying to do a forensic analysis on like, what, what conspired to allow this to happen? Like what's different about this experience versus other experiences? And it's something that Malcolm Gladwell touched, touched on in his foreword, like, go back and look at your training logs. What did I eat? What was I doing? And trying to kind of create this, like, very logical, rational roadmap that led to this dramatic occurrence.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, in that process started, started again with, you know, the second thing I thought was, how did I do this? And I, I went and, and, you know, chatted to some of my friends on the team. Um, you know, well, I say chatted really to go and like say, hey, look at me. I'm the, you know, the greatest thing since sliced bread. And, and I was like, and man, I went out in 20, 27 seconds. And one of my good friends on the team who had timed the race for me to, so I could have my splits during my training logs. He's like, no, you didn't. You, you were like 30, 31. I was like, oh, well, I was fifty seven at the four hundred. No, you were like sixty, sixty one. So to this day, I don't know exactly what happened, but either the the timekeeper started his watch three or four seconds late, or he, uh, this was in Quebec, maybe he was translating from French to English,

• 15:58Speaker 01

  had a little, you know, had to think in his head, you know, then said, uh, twenty seven. For whatever reason, he he tricked me, you know, not intentionally, into thinking that I was having the day of my life. And so I did. And so there was this, this kind of, he flicked a switch uh, in in my head. And and like, like, like you were saying, I I've spent a lot of time since then leafing through the training log and saying, well, there must have been some other hints that this was to come. And I knew I was ready to run under four minutes, but I I never even dared to dream that I was going to run three fifty two. And and the the real, what cemented this moment or this transformation in my head is that I never again struggled to break four minutes. Like I that that was, that era was over for me in in one second.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And in my next fifteen hundred, I ran three forty nine, and in the one after that, I ran three forty four. So and that's, you know, that qualified me for the Olympic trials that summer. And, you know, again, it was a great moment. I was, I was happy, but it was also like, from that moment on, I could never cross the line and trust that I that I had actually exhausted my physical limits because I knew, because over those previous years, I'd been crossing the line in four oh one, thinking, ah, that was everything I had. I was hurting so much. And then like three weeks later, I'm running three forty four. It's like something doesn't add up. There's something I'm in in my sort of analytical, you know, calculate my limits approach to to running that that that can't explain that kind of transformation.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  So I think that was, this was nineteen ninety six. This was more than twenty years ago. But I think that that sort of planted the seed in my mind that there had to be something more than the sort of the body is a machine kind of approach to endurance.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  Right, this idea that belief plays a role, but not belief in the sort of rubric of, you know, uh, you can do it kind of, you know, sort of pop psychology, but more in the sense of this inextricable connection between body and mind. And you kind of go through, you know, the history of how we've come to understand how athletes perform. And it's a history that kind of tracks the evolution of perspectives from. The body is a machine, to know it's all about the mind, to this more nuanced kind of conclusions that you're drawing, you know, based on science that's continuing

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  to emerge, that you can't separate these two things. And there's only so much that we really understand about each of these things individually, and even less about how they, the interplay between them. Is that a fair?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's absolutely it. And, you know, believe me, I was sad to come to that conclusion. I was hoping to have a really nice tidy message of, you know, mind overcoming matter that I could, you know, encapsulate in three sentences and plaster on the, you know, the dust jacket of the book. And I thought, for a while, I thought I was gonna have that. You know, I started, I started working on this book, or thinking about this book, in about 2009, and-

• 19:04Rich Roll?

  Wow, it's been like nine years.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been incubating. It's not like I've been working full-time, but I started telling people that I was interviewing, "Hey, this is for a book, you know, can I come and check out your lab and stuff?" And I thought it was gonna be all about, you know, a guy named Tim Noakes, in South Africa, who's, who was kind of the, in the 90s, one of the first guys to really start pushing the idea that the brain, rather than the body, is the kind of ultimate decision-maker about, about limits. And so, he, I thought it was gonna be a book about his research, and about how he had overturned the flawed view of the body in control, and that that would be a nice tidy message. And that's, that's a big part of the book, but the deep, you know, the deeper you dig, the often the murkier the picture gets.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And so, what I ended up, I just couldn't bring myself to sort of get to the end of the book and say, "Therefore, it's all in your head." It's, it's like you said, you can't separate these, these things. It's like the, you know, genetics versus environment debate. And, you know, I took a lot of inspiration from David Epstein's book, The Sports Gene, because I, I read that book, you know, I reviewed that book when it first came out. And, you know, it's a great book, but what I thought is, "Poor, poor David, he's written such a nice book, and it's gonna be an absolute dud, because he doesn't say, 'It's all genes,' or, 'It's all environment.'" It's, you know, he, he really-

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Made the point that in different contexts, these two factors come together in different ways. And I see a real direct analogy here that it's not all the body, it's not all the mind. They're both important and they come together in some very surprising ways. So it's not just that the answer is, we don't know. The answer is, hey, in this particular circumstance, whether it's extreme breath holding, or climbing Mount Everest, or running a marathon, the mind does this amazing thing. And in this other circumstance, the body does this amazing thing. And so it ends up being 300 pages instead of three sentences.

• 21:02Rich Roll?

  Right. And the truth is always more complicated than the jingoistic thing that sells books, right? You know, it's like, yeah, maybe he would have sold a lot more books if he came down hardline on one side or the other. And that's kind of what makes Tim Noakes a lightning rod, because he comes out with these opinions that are very counterintuitive or contradictory to whatever the current operating paradigm is, which draws a lot of attention to him. But I think what's cool about him, and I don't agree with everything, all of his perspectives, but I really appreciate and respect how he's trying to think outside the box and look at things from a different angle. And he's not afraid to challenge that conventional wisdom.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Tim Noakes is a fascinating, fascinating character. And he's had a tremendous impact on a bunch of different areas. For people who aren't familiar with this work, he's been one of the key guys in sort of rethinking how important dehydration is and that there's risks of overhydration. He's key in the brain's role, his central governor theory of human limits. These days, he's most well-known because he's really championing a ketogenic diet.

• 22:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  So there's all these things. And he's very controversial in his approach. He's willing to challenge and alienate people who are colleagues. And so it's one of those things where when I first started looking into his research, and I see the responses he provoked. And I think, don't these guys get it? Like, why can't they just understand that there's, you know, there's new science in town and everything's changed? And then when he starts to say things that I disagree with, I'm like, what is he doing? He's crazy. And then I think, okay, think, you know, wait, maybe my responses to what he says are colored by my own impressions and I need to kind of check my assumptions at the door that maybe he's, he's, now I sort of understand why some people push back against him, but I'm also trying to hold back, you know, I kind of disagree with some of the things

• 22:53Speaker 01

  he says about ketogenic diets, but I'm trying to be humble about the fact that, yeah, maybe I don't know what I don't know and we'll.

• 23:01Rich Roll?

  Right, but as somebody who just wrote this book, you know, you, you should appreciate the fact that despite your very methodical upbringing and being this, you know, physics PhD and, you know, that you're still a subjective animal, right? And you carry with, with you all of your psychology and experiences that come to bear, that create biases and the things that we all do.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we, you know, we all understand this intellectually, but it's easy to kind of, to kind of tamp that down and think that it's not really, yeah, I mean, of course, of course I have biases, but I'm suppressing them, I'm ignoring them and, and, you know, it's so seductive to think like that. And it was, you know, it was interesting reading Daniel Kahneman's book a few years ago, Thinking Fast and Slow.

• 23:44Rich Roll?

  I haven't read that one.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, it's a, it, basically, he, he is, um, his, his whole research, he ended up getting the Nobel Prize in Economics on this, was showing the bias, the, the unconscious biases that distort the way we think, things like hindsight bias and loss aversion and stuff like that. And what was sort of depressing but interesting about his book is that this is the guy who, along with his colleagues, did the studies, you know, wrote the book, it's been 40 years. And his advice on beating these cognitive biases is, you can't, you know, they're always going to be there. Be aware of them so you can try and. You know, structure your decision making in a way that you're not subject to these biases, but don't just think that you can say, oh, well, I'm not going to be loss averse because I know about loss aversion. It's like, that's how we're wired.

• 24:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we can't, we can't escape our own wiring when it comes to that kind of stuff. And I think on the, I want to kind of, you know, parse these, these differences between brain and body, but you know, on the, on the, on the brain side of things, you know, with respect to the work that, that, that Noakes has done, what's the term that he uses again? I keep forgetting it, like the limiter.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The central governor.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the central governor. Within that, I mean, the basic idea there, as I understand it is, is that the body has certain capabilities, but those capabilities exceed what the mind will allow it to do. And we are kind of genetically bred to have our brains shut us down before we become, before we imperil ourselves physically. But within that, there's conscious thought, and then there's, you know, the unconscious things that our brain is doing. So on the one hand, we have the psychology of how can you kind of train yourself so that you can tolerate pain better, or think more positively, or all of these things that are kind of part

• 25:34Rich Roll?

  and parcel of sports psychology. But then beyond that, there's things that our unconscious mind does just sort of physiologically to protect us.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so this is, when you think about your experiences in a, you know, in a race or something like that, you know that there's a battle going on in your mind. You know you can make decisions that, that, that you're going to regret later, you know, you can, you can lose the, the battle to push, push on, or you can, you can kind of temporarily win. But what was interesting to me was the, the evidence that there's things that go on kind of against your conscious will. It's not that you're weak when the mind takes control. It's that your mind is making calculations. And no one knows exactly how or why this happens, but you can, you can understand in broad strokes that.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You know, back on the savanna, it's it's no good to keep chasing that kudu until the point where you're you actually literally run out of fuel and you just fall over on your face 20 miles from the campfire because you're gonna die. So you've got these strong signals that are trying to both consciously and unconsciously say, you know what, the kudu's too good today, slow down, head back to the campfire and try again tomorrow. And so the conscious stuff, I was more interested initially in the unconscious stuff because I I sort of understood that, yeah, we all fight a battle in, you know, in a race, trying to, you know, resist pain and and find ways of of pushing ourselves. But what was what

• 27:06Speaker 01

  was interesting to me, so one of one of my experiences in racing was the, I always had a really good finishing kick, which is, it's good, like, it's nice to finish strong, but it always felt like, why am I sprinting so hard at the end of the race when I was, you know, limping along three quarters of the way through the race? Why couldn't I access some of this, you know, this energy that I obviously had earlier? Because it really felt, you know, three quarters of the way through the race, it would really feel like that guy's getting away from me, there's nothing I can do. I want to, I'm trying. So I would start trying to trick myself. I would say, you know, Alex, today, you're running a 5K, but it's officially a 5K, but you're running a 4K. Don't worry about if you have

• 27:50Speaker 01

  to jog the last K in. Today is just an experiment to see how fast you can run 4K. And so I was trying to trick myself to to push hard in the fourth K and not just save it all for the fifth K. And it was totally unsuccessful. I would I would tell myself this, and I would go, and sure enough, my fourth K would be my slowest. And then I would come high stepping down the finishing, you know, the last lap, you know, looking like a champion, 100 meters behind the guys I was running with at at 4K. And it's like, well, you know,

• 28:15Rich Roll?

  You can't trick yourself, you know, like that other part of your brain still has the awareness that there's another K.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I started reading Noakes's work suggesting that there's just like, you know, you know, one of the proposals was that when your brain senses danger, whether it's, you know, low fuel stores, or maybe your oxygen levels, or your your heart rate is getting too high, it actually just kind of down regulates the amount of muscle that it's recruiting. So you're trying just as hard, but your muscles are getting us a weaker signal to contract. So and I thought, well, that would explain these sort of, these experiences where You know, my conscious will, it wasn't that I was unwilling to suffer, at least as far as I could tell. I was pushing myself as hard as I could, but I was still getting slower. So that really kind of pulled me in as being consistent with my experience,

• 29:03Speaker 01

  that there was something unconscious as well as a conscious battle going on.

• 29:06Rich Roll?

  And as a result of, you know, the nine years of work that you've put into this book, what have you learned about the malleability of that? Like, you were not able to override that default setting, but do we have that capability innate within us? Or what are the limitations on how far we can, you know, push ourselves mentally before these mechanisms just are triggered and we're powerless?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  So I think where I end up coming down on that is that this is another one of those cases where the dichotomy between conscious and unconscious is useful to think about, but ends up it's not as neat as we'd like to think. So I think the most, in a way, the most powerful ways we have of changing those unconscious things may be through conscious strategies. So here's another example of something that kind of blew my mind when this experiment happened. This was a guy named Samwell Markora at the University of Canton, England. He did a study with subliminal or unconscious images. So he had cyclists pedaling to exhaustion in a room, and on the wall in front of them, he was flashing

• 30:15Speaker 01

  smiling faces or frowning faces. But he was doing it, it was about 16 milliseconds per image. So that's like a tenth the length of a blink. You're totally unaware that there's...

• 30:26Rich Roll?

  You're not even consciously aware, you don't even actually see it? You're not consciously aware that you've seen it?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  The cyclists didn't know there were images. They thought there was just a black cross on the wall.

• 30:34Rich Roll?

  I didn't get that part when I was reading it. I knew it was quick, but I didn't realize it wasn't registering.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Afterwards, the debrief afterwards, like, you know, what was on the wall? Nothing. They had no idea that there were even pictures on the wall. But so this kind of gets rid of the placebo problem, because when you do these brain experiments, you want to find out how the brain is learning. It's almost impossible to disentangle the question of expectation and, you know, self-belief, when you know you're getting some sort of intervention that's supposed to help. So in this case, they just thought they had a couple rides to exhaustion, but they were something like 12% faster when smiling faces had been flashed instead of frowning faces. So this is a good example of... Changing the unconscious in a way that's not really replicable outside the lab. You know, you're not going to have, well, we hope we're not going to have subliminal images on the wall.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  But it, it points the direction, or points an arrow towards ways you can change. You know, you can smile and that can, that can achieve some of the same ideas of, of creating this sense of ease in your brain that affects how your brain is interpreting the signals from the rest of your body.

• 31:38Rich Roll?

  And 12%, I mean, that's significant.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and, and you know, one interesting, one sort of methodological thing that's worth pointing out is that a lot of lab studies use time to exhaustion tests where they say, cycle at a certain power until you can't anymore. And the reason, one of the reasons they like those is it, it's, it takes out the, the role of pacing, so it's, it's more replicable, but it produces really big, the, the differences, if, if you do something that improves performance, the difference that you'll see is about 10 times, 10 to 15 times bigger in a time to exhaustion test than a time trial. So when you see 12% in a time to exhaustion test, that means probably a little less than 1% in a race, which is still massive when you think of.

• 32:19Rich Roll?

  Well, at the highest levels, that's determinative.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's winner versus, you know, off the podium.

• 32:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's also, you know, for a lot of people, that could be, you know, BQ versus, you know, Boston qualifier versus no Boston qualifier, or personal best versus not personal best.

• 32:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  You break this down, you kind of evaluate the various aspects of performance limitation, you know, by chapter, and you have pain, you have muscle, you have oxygen, heat, thirst, and fuel, right? So we're kind of talking about pain a little bit, so maybe we can dig into that a little bit deeper. You know, one of the things that I thought was really cool in your exploration of that. Was, you know, the obvious question is like, do some people have a higher pain threshold? Like, what is pain? Do people experience pain differently? What would happen if we could remove pain? And there's that amazing experiment that was done with fentanyl, where they're like, alright, we'll give them fentanyl, they won't feel anything.

• 33:27Rich Roll?

  But then they had no ability to gauge their own pace. And they ended up not being able to perform because they couldn't like sort of evaluate their output.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was a really interesting series of experiments. Again, like you said, with fentanyl. So the neat thing about fentanyl is it doesn't block the signals traveling from your brain to your muscles. So you can cycle like normal, but it blocks the signals from your muscles to your brain. And, and what the, what the researchers said is, you know, you give these guys fentanyl and ask them to cycle a 5K time trial. They just feel great for a couple K. They're like, they're pedaling as hard as they can and they're feeling no pain. And they're on pace for a great time. And about halfway is when things start to crater. They start to regress to their, you know, what their normal pace would be. And then they just keep getting worse and worse. And they get so slow by the end that they end up running, they end up cycling about the same time. They just, they can't pace themselves because they don't have that feedback

• 34:22Speaker 01

  that tells them how close they are to their, their muscular limits. And so without that, they, they actually hit muscular limits in their legs. It was pretty funny listening to the descriptions from the scientists saying, you know, these guys, they, they literally could not walk. That, you know, they'd finish, they'd be on the bikes and they, they'd try and help these guys off the bike. And they would just, the first one would like collapse down the floor. And after that, like, okay, we basically have to carry these guys over to the chair over there to, to, you know, let them sit down because their legs have, have totally maxed out.

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, which, which, you know, your brain will prevent you from doing that under normal circumstances, right? So there's these outlier examples that you kind of document in the book and reference, where, you know, somebody does die because they've pushed themselves past that point, whether it's a freediver or there's that.

• 35:12Rich Roll?

  You know, high school football player who dies of heat exhaustion after practice and the various expedition mountaineer people. And we kind of, you know, create a big story around these people. But what like Noke says is like, what's more interesting is that there aren't that many cases. Like, it really doesn't happen that often. These are outliers.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, that when you start talking about the brain's role and limits and how do we get around them, you know, the first, you know, a very good question is, well, maybe those lessons, you know, those limits are there for a reason and are, is it dangerous to remove the limits? And ultimately, maybe yes, but like you said, it, you know, we're so far from our limits that it's, it's very, very hard to push to a point like, no matter if I, if I headed out the door and just started sprinting and said, I'm going to run myself unconscious, I wouldn't be able to do it. Like, I would, I would get too tired before I could run myself unconscious. And so.

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, everybody at the Olympics would be dying. You know, because they're all doing is everything they possibly can to exert themselves to the absolute max.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And yeah, that's one of Tim Noke's favorite, like, at presentations, he'll put up a picture from 1996 where there was the winner of the marathon was South African and the, the him and the second place finisher from South Korea jogging around the track just after the marathon finished. And I'll say, look, look at that guy, look at the silver medalist. He, he just finished three seconds behind the Olympic gold medalist. You know, nobody is more motivated than if you enter the Olympic stadium three seconds short of, you know, immortality. He, he was trying as hard as he could, but you notice he's not dead? Like, so clearly.

• 36:52Rich Roll?

  And like, kind of jogging around the track.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he finished and he's like, hey, look at me, I'm still running.

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  He can still move his legs.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Like, so something, you know, his legs were clearly capable of moving. And so the, the sort of other way of putting it is like, man, if you, if you unleashed a bunch of, you know, lions at mile 20 of a big city marathon, you'd see that everyone can still run. They, they, they can still sprint. And so what's holding them back is not pure muscular limits.

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think that the word pain in and of itself is just, it's too vague. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, the pain that a freediver experiences trying to hold their breath, or while their lungs are being compressed, is very different from a distance runner, or, you know, Jens Voit trying to break the one hour, you know, the one hour world record. Like, we call all of it pain, but they're qualitatively different things.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, or like hitting your thumb with a hammer. It's like, it's different. But we'll call it all pain. So one of the really interesting things to me was this idea that pain and effort are not the same thing. You know, and if, you know, before starting this, looking into this, I would have said, yeah, running a 10K is hard because it hurts. You know, at 7K, you're trying to overcome the pain. But this is controversial, but what some researchers would argue is that, actually, yes, it's painful, but the pain isn't what limits you. If you're a motivated and well-trained athlete. You know, and they've done studies where they, first of all, they make sure everyone understands how to rate their own pain. So they make them dunk their hands in ice water and rate, you know, every minute, they say, how painful is this on a scale of 1 to 10? And when they get to 10, that's the maximum pain, and they pull their hands out.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  So then they know how to say, what is pain? And then they have them do a cycling test to exhaustion, where they say, okay, every minute, rate your pain, but also rate your effort, which is the feeling. So how much do your legs hurt? But also, how hard is it for your legs to keep maintaining this power that we're asking you to generate? Like, it's this, and the definition that they use is, you know, the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. How hard are you struggling? And when they reach exhaustion, what they say is, their effort is at 10 out of 10, but their pain may only be at 6 out of 10. So it does hurt. But, and, you know, we can all say this when we've had races or something that's important to us. You know, I'm willing to hurt. I still couldn't go faster. Like, I was willing, if you'd said,

• 39:14Speaker 01

  you know, Alex, you can run a PB, but if you'll allow me to stick this pin in your arm, I would have said, stick away, make me bleed. I'm willing to hurt, but I still wasn't able to go faster despite being willing to hurt.

• 39:25Rich Roll?

  So then what do you extract from that?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's... One thing is that effort is a concept that we have to think more carefully about. And so then you have to think about what goes into effort. What is it that determines how hard we think something is? And if you ask that question, then again, you start to see arrows pointing to the psychology.

• 39:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, to the belief.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That if you're telling yourself, "This is really hard. I hate this. This is so hard." That's not going to change your pain, but it's going to change your effort. And if effort is the limiting factor, then all of a sudden, yeah, we're dragged back towards the sports psychology aspect of it.

• 40:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, belief is so tricky. And it's weird how we attribute value to these arbitrary numbers and then kind of hoist them up as impossible standards. I mean, the four-minute mile, it's just a number. It's a round number. So as humans, we like it. And then we attach meaning to that. And then it takes on a life of its own. But it's just a story, right? And everybody knows, and you talk about this in the book too, like the story of Bannister breaking the four-minute mile and then kind of the truth versus the lore of kind of what happened in the wake of that. But either way, when he broke that barrier, then the belief system shifted.

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  That story was no longer, didn't hold the power anymore that it once held, in the same way that you breaking four minutes for the 1,500 meters. And this is a theme that kind of runs consistently through the book. You talk about it with the Everest expeditions and kind of the value of the people that were first to the top who were using oxygen, but how that allowed like a little seedling of belief that it could be done perhaps without it. But had somebody not gone up there first with oxygen, maybe it would have taken longer, right? And then kind of playing it forward into this breaking two, you know, story that kind

• 41:31Rich Roll?

  of provides the scaffold for the whole book, like this journey of you, you know, sort of being a witness to this Nike project of putting together this team of people to see if they could break two hours in a marathon.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, not to sort of leap immediately to the conclusion, but so since it's in the past, I'll say Elliot Kipchoge, the Olympic champion, he ends up running two hours, zero minutes, 25 seconds. So he doesn't run a two-hour marathon. But the sort of overwhelming feeling in my mind after watching that was that actually this does change everything. Like this, this changes how marathon times sound. Like if, you know, if you're an elite marathoner and you hear someone say, I'm gonna go through the halfway in 61 minutes. And, you know, until last year, you think that's just madness. You know, it's absolute madness. And, you know, leading up to this attempt that they

• 42:25Speaker 01

  had, it was, it was May 2017. I talked to any number of experts who were like, we know that if a human goes through halfway in about 60 minutes, they are just gonna be in a world of hurt. They like, we know, yes, they've got pacing, yes, they've got new shoes, yada, yada, yada. We just know that it's not possible. And I, you know, I, I wouldn't have predicted anything faster than 201 mid. So when he ran 2 flat 25, even though the, the conditions were sort of super, hyper optimized to a point that it's not an official world record, I feel like even without breaking the two-hour marathon barrier, he broke, he broke our conception

• 43:08Speaker 01

  that 202 57 is really about as fast as humans can go. And, and so I don't know if anyone's gonna run, you know, if I had to, if you, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say, you know, a couple of decades before someone runs a two-hour marathon in, in, you know, legitimate conditions. But I think that, that, that that performance of Kipchoge will alter the trajectory of the world record, that it will drop faster and sooner than it would otherwise, just because of the knowledge that a human did that.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. It certainly shatters the, the concept that a human body isn't physically capable of doing that. And it, it puts cracks in the veneer of the belief system that, that has been long held that, that, you know, it's not possible. And, and all the artifice that's kind of around it. You can poke holes in that and say, well, that was a bunch of bullshit because they did this and they did that. But ultimately, you can't escape the fact that that guy propelled his body, you know, under certain circumstances that are somewhat artificial, but nonetheless, he still was able to cover that distance at a time that people didn't think was possible.

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  And so that has to change our cultural kind of, you know, concept of what the human being is possible. And it's always that thing where it's like, well, now we've hit, you know, there's not going to be any more world records.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  The annual article on that.

• 44:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, right? And as somebody who grew up in swimming, I mean, there's no sport where world records fall with more regularity than swimming. It's just ridiculous. But they ran up against that with the technical suit era where they thought, well, these records are, you know, it's going to be impossible to break these. And I think every single one of them has fallen with, I don't know, maybe one or two still stands, but they're pretty much gone.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Which is crazy. Yeah, I was definitely another one of those people who would have said, well, you know, these records are going to stand for 40 years. You know, you've ruined the sport. And it's like, you know, five years later, so what? How did that happen? And, you know, a point to be made about that is, when you talk about swimming records, it's a classic example of like, people will say, well, the technology keeps changing. And that's true. And that has some effect on the records for sure, like undoubtedly. And that's going to keep happening. So people might say, well, no one's going to run a two-hour marathon unless we have changes in the condition, you know, some sort of cheating type, like, you know, carbon fiber plates in shoes, which is what Nike did. And that

• 45:40Speaker 01

  sort of ignores the fact that, well, look back in the past, that is sort of the status quo, is that the conditions are always changing. No athlete from one decade is running the same race as an athlete from the next decade. So it's kind of hard to tease out the sort of quote unquote intrinsic changes in endurance from the fact that we get better at optimizing the variables. And so maybe for all the things that Nike did in the Break 2 project, that we might not want to replicate, some of them, like, say, holding a marathon on a Formula One track, so that you have no sharp corners and no hills, maybe that's going to be something that becomes a thing.

• 46:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  You know?

• 46:21Rich Roll?

  Is there plans to do another one?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  So I haven't checked in with the Nike team in quite a while, but no one was willing to... I think people were like, "Oh, we came close." There were no plans to do one and no one would commit to doing one before. And I suspect if they were going to do another one, it might be oriented to a women's barrier of some degree, which for good reason. But I have a hard time believing that someone's not going to pick up that ball in some way before too long. Because, man, that all of the sudden, we're just aware of this fruit that's actually dangling and it's not as far out of reach as we maybe thought.

• 47:02Rich Roll?

  And you were there. It must have been exciting.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  It was way more exciting than I thought it would be.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  So we didn't even like, for somebody who's listening who doesn't even know what we're talking about, maybe just like the thumbnail of what this is breaking two thing was all about.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. So the idea of a two-hour marathon has been kind of bubbling in the air for maybe five or six years, people started to realize, "Well, maybe it's not totally out of the question." And I did a piece for Runners World in 2014, a big, long feature analyzing the possibility of it, and I said, "I think it can happen in probably 2075," which is, that's when I'll turn 100. So I was thinking like, "Maybe that'll be a nice 100th birthday." So it's been out there, but not deemed to be close. And so in late 2016, Nike announced that they were going to try and do it in a matter of months, and they'd actually been working on it for a couple of years in deep, top secret. And they picked three athletes and they decided to just throw, just, you know, truckloads of money at it and a lot of good scientists and try and figure out, "What are all the things we can optimize?"

• 48:00Speaker 01

  And what they ended up with was a race at a Formula One track in northern Italy with all the, sort of, just a perfectly smooth, nice, even course. They had six pacemakers who ran in front of the, to block the wind for the entire race. And so to do that, they had to have pacemakers dropping out and then fresh ones coming in. And that's what made it not eligible for a world record.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  And they had a new shoe, which was, I think it's fair to say that Nike claimed that it was made runners for 4% more efficient on average. And I think it's fair to say the data seems to support that. That doesn't seem to translate into 4% faster in the race, but they certainly had a new shoe that they felt could could bridge part of this gap. So they had all these things put together. They ran this race. Two of the three runners blew up and, you know, as everyone predicted they would. But Elliot Kipchoge, who's the best marathoner in the world right now, he he held on until maybe 22 miles or so and then drifted off just a little bit and couldn't quite hold it together and ran 225, which is the world record's just under 203. So it's two and a half minutes faster than the

• 49:07Speaker 01

  current world record. And really, to go back to what you were saying before, it was like for an event that, let's be honest, was, you know, 50% massive Nike marketing stunt, but was 50% kind of interesting, you know, scientific experiment into the limits of human endurance. So it had all the hallmarks of something that would feel very artificial and very, you know, forced. And somehow it just didn't feel that way. Like, you know, Elliot Kipchoge is a special human being. You talk to him and he has a, you know, just an aura. He's the kind of the Yoda of running. And, you know, I don't know why, like, I can't, I can't articulate why, but I was sitting there, it was like, people had tears

• 49:52Speaker 01

  in their eyes watching this. And I, you know, I'm not, I didn't have tears in my eyes, but I was like, this is a special moment. I'm, you know, by 21 miles, I was like, I'm so glad I sat on that horrible red eye, you know, flew here and then, you know, was up, have been up for 22 hours straight or whatever, to be here for this moment, because this is something I'm gonna remember for a long time.

• 50:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I remember going into it, just having that same kind of opinion of like, you know, what is this? This is a huge marketing campaign. Like, I was sort of cynical about it. But, you know, I logged in, I logged on, I didn't wake up in the middle of the night. But I was like, oh, yeah, that's happening today. Like, and I was like, I want to check that out. And I pulled up the live stream. And I was, you know, I wasn't brought to tears, but I was very moved by it. Like, there was something really beautiful and genuine and, and

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  And just like honest about the whole, I mean, honest in the sense that I felt like there was a collective aspiration to do something that had never been done before. And in talking to other people, I felt that other people had that same experience. They were kind of like, eh, and then they were like, oh, actually, this is kind of an amazing thing, you know, and everybody kind of left that with that. There's a, there's that, like, when you watch the Olympics and you have that uplifting sort of feel that you get from watching people striving to exceed the boundaries of what had ever been done before.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not something I would have predicted, but it was, and, you know, how much of that was just something unique about Elliot Kipchoge?

• 51:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Or, and how much of it was, because, so I had a chance to hang out with the scientists who were doing this for, over the course of quite a few months. And, you know, like, they were sincere about this, or at least to, you know, to the extent that I could gauge their, you know, the purity of their motivations. Like, for them, it was a passion project. And, you know, especially the external scientists who were brought in, there were quite a few who, who were working on the project, you know, they, they took more flak for that than they, than they got credit. But, but they were fascinated to have the opportunity. Like, a lot of these, you know, endurance scientists, they spend all this time thinking of these ideas of what could happen, but the resources to kind of actualize some of

• 52:05Speaker 01

  these far-fetched ideas, they, they almost never come along. This was a chance to, like, there've been journal articles about the prospects of a two-hour marathon, there've been conferences where, you know, I've been to conferences, you know, four or five years ago, where people are like, you know what, if they just really optimized the drafting. No one thinks about drafting in distance running because you think it's too slow. Cyclists know about drafting. No one thinks about, if they did it like this, they could save two minutes. And one of the guys who gave that talk, he ended up on the Nike Project, having a chance to actually put that into practice with the best runner in the world. So they, they were seriously, like, they were stoked about the possibility, or the opportunity to just kind of play with a very well-endowed sandbox and see what they could come up with.

• 52:47Rich Roll?

  But the kind of comedic lining to that is that Kipchoge is like the Yoda of running. Like, he's not, he's not like, an American would be like, living in Eugene, and just in the lab, and like, pricking blood, and like, here's a guy who had never been on treadmill before. And when you're trying to kind of probe what makes him tick, he's just, he's a very, he seems like a very simple, humble guy who works really hard. But what he did have was a belief.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, this is sort of, ties into kind of my personal evolution while writing the book is, you know, Elliot Kipchoge, his favorite books are like motivational self-help books. His favorite book is like, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. And it's like, you know, you could, maybe, hopefully, the audio is conveying that my old eyes are kind of rolling back in my head. This is stuff that I, I don't put a lot of stock into. But I was sort of forced to come to the conclusion that, that part of Kipchoge's magic is that, to him, this is not just a bunch of hokum, that he, this helps to, it helps him to fuel his own belief in himself, that he's, he's sincerely, and sort of diligently

• 53:58Speaker 01

  finding ways to make sure that when he steps to the line, you know, that on that day, he believed he was going to run two hours. And I can, you know, it's easy to say in hindsight, but you, even at the time, you had, you kind of had the sense that Kipchoge felt he was going to run two hours. The other two guys were scared out of their gourds, and just sort of hoping to, saying, you know, what does it say in the contract about how much we get if we, you know, make it halfway? Like, what do we, just, come on, let's just make this worthwhile. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm not being fair to them. But, but he, yeah, he's, he's got something really special in his belief. And, and in terms of, like, was this a triumph of technology and science showing how to run a fast marathon?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Or was this a triumph of a, like, once in a generation individual? Again, like, I answer all questions like, well, there's probably a bit of both. Like, certainly some of the, the stuff Nike did helped. But Kipchoge...

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he lives this Spartan life, you know, he's, he's living in this camp, you know, he's a multimillionaire, but he lives, you know, certainly all the, he stays away from his family throughout the week, living in this camp with other athletes where he shares a room and, you know, washes his own clothes by hand and cleans the toilet and then does everything that everyone else does, you know, chops the vegetables and lives this extremely simple life, but, and, and, you know, he did his own training with his own coach, you know, there was no like, you know, radical new.

• 55:26Rich Roll?

  Crazy training regimen, that was different from what he was used to.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, it was just, and so, and it was interesting, you know, again, trying to, trying to get into his head and say, you know, like I remember at the, you know, six months before the race, I was asking, well, come on, you just ran a 15, you know, you just ran a half marathon that was just under 60 minutes. So what do you think you have to do differently to be able to run twice that distance at the same pace? What are you going to change in your training? And he's like, the training is going to be the same. My mind is going to be different. And I thought, well, that's a stupid answer. But, but, you know, he, I'm the stupid one.

• 55:56Rich Roll?

  Coming from the guy who's writing the book about this.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, you have to change something, but no, he, he was sincere, he's changing his mind. And, and, and, and, you know, he gave all these wonderful quotes to people, asking him variations of the same question, which was, how the hell are you going to do this? And saying things like, you know, he'd say to the journalist, you believe it's impossible and I believe it's possible and that's the difference. Or someone asked him about like, so you went to Nike headquarters and you, you did all these days and days of physiological testing, and what was the conclusion from all that testing? And his answer was, the conclusion was that I'm ready to do something really remarkable using the power of my mind. And I was like, actually, I don't think that's what the lab data said, but that's what he took away from it.

• 56:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  They, they, and, you know, they, they communicated to him that, hey, you've, you've got the tools, you can, you, you can do this. And what he took away from that, that said, yeah, I, you know, he took away not that my VO2 max is this and my lactate threshold is that, and therefore if I'm able to optimize my running economy by this much, he took away from it, you can do this, just believe in yourself and do the training.

• 56:55Rich Roll?

  It's beautiful, the purity of that, you know, the simplicity of that. When we're trying to like, we're looking at it perhaps the wrong way. We're overcomplicating something that to him is very basic.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, simple and basic doesn't mean easy. And what he's, it's kind of, what I come away from this with is like, you know, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in the 300-some pages of my book, but none of that stuff is going to help Elliot Kipchoge get better, in my opinion. All that stuff is efforts to try and understand what makes Elliot Kipchoge so incredibly remarkable. And maybe to give us some pointers as to how we can become a little bit more like Elliot Kipchoge. But it's like, he's, what he's doing is not like, it's hard to describe. It's hard to understand. It's hard to know how much is like innate versus what he's built up over years. But he's clearly, he's not, he's not lackadaisical about it.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  He's, you know, he's reading the books that he believes will help him. He believes will help him, and he's thinking carefully about these things. And he's building his belief consciously and deliberately. He's not just waiting for it to happen.

• 58:02Rich Roll?

  So did you go back and reread Covey's book? You walk away from that like, maybe I need to reassess.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  I have not yet, but I, you know, it's like, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a highly skeptical guy. You can only push me so far in one year. So maybe in five years, I'll be, I'll be ready to read Power of Positive Thinking.

• 58:30Rich Roll?

  So the book is called Endure, and it's about endurance. But like, how do you define, what's your definition of endurance?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  So the, yeah, the definition that I settled on, which is, we were talking about earlier, effort and pain, and so one of the researchers defines effort as the struggle to continue against an mounting desire to stop. And I said to myself, you know, to me, that's my definition of endurance. That's the essence of endurance is that you're fighting against your instincts, your very well justified instincts to stop doing whatever you're doing. And you're choosing to go against your natural inclination and you're doing it over a prolonged period of time. It's not just, you know, like hit me in the face and I, you know, that's unpleasant, but it's not, it doesn't take endurance.

• 59:13Rich Roll?

  But, but, but the definition of prolonged is elastic. Like, one of the things that I, that you made me rethink a little bit was, you know, the context of endurance, you know, beyond quote unquote endurance sports. Like, you know, my coach always said to me, like, the key to being successful in endurance sports is learning how to slow down the least. Like, the prize goes to the guy who slows down the least. It's not about being fast. It's like, how do you prevent yourself from slowing down? And I always kind of just, you know, relegated that to the world that I'm in. But then you helped me realize and understand, like, even when Usain Bolt is running 200 meters or even 100 meters, he's reaching maximum velocity at, what, like 60 meters?

• 59:58Rich Roll?

  And then he's trying to maintain that and ultimately he's slowing down. So the limitation for him is in that last period, like, what if he didn't have to slow down? Or what if he could maintain that peak pace for 10 more meters, right? So in that context, he's, you know, his effort is to try to endure better.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was, it was sort of interesting to, I was trying to think, because I was trying to come up with a nice, you know, very clearly defined clinical definition of endurance. And that's, as I tried to think, what's the lower limit? And the lower I went, I was like, no, that still requires endurance. And that's why I ended up with a sort of, that's one of the things that pushed me to a broader definition of endurance. Because like, yeah, Usain Bolt, one of his traits is that he can maintain his top speed maybe a little bit longer than some of his competitors. You know, there's always the sense that Bolt will come storming past in the last 20 meters or something like that. And it's like, no, Bolt's hanging on a little better while the other guys start to slow down.

• 1:00:56Rich Roll?

  Right, they're just slowing down more than he's slowing down.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

  But he's also slowing down.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  And, and, yeah, and, and so, like, To what extent, I don't want to overplay that, that, you know, the 100 meters is a, is an endurance event, but there's an element of that being able to sustain it and, and the longer you get and, and it's, you know, it's true in, it's obviously true in, you know, field sports like soccer and football and things like that, that, that, and we kind of know in soccer, but you can, you know, and hockey, yes, but even in football, yeah.

• 1:01:26Rich Roll?

  Well, you, you tell the story of LeBron, like, you know, his, his endurance, you know, his endurance challenge was the season, right?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he kind of, he, he totally, he hit a wall that was not like he was out of breath. And, and this was, I guess it was the 2015 playoffs where he was just, he was sort of famously gassed out and, you know, even asked to be pulled out of the game and in overtime at one point in a playoff game, which is really unusual for, you know, a killer competitor like him. But yeah, it, the, the time scale can be, uh, you know, like it can be seconds or it can be years that things kind of build up. And of course, you know, we all hope we take care of ourselves enough that we're resetting once a year. But yeah, things, uh, it, it, and, and you know, when you think about the kind of events that you've done, these sort of day where you're, you're going to the limit day after day. And like if you're doing consecutive Ironman triathlons or something

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  like that, it's, it's, it's, it becomes just a, you know, if that, that's the struggle to continue against the emerging desire to stop where that aspect of it becomes 99.9% of it. It's almost nothing to do with your legs anymore.

• 1:02:31Rich Roll?

  No. I mean, I think the longer the event, the more mental, that, that, that spectrum, you know, shifts towards more to the mental.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so there, you know, there's one section in the book where I, I make, maybe this may be a little bit controversial and maybe a little bit over reading the research, but I, I argue that efforts of about two minutes is the kind of, uh, the dividing line between mostly physical and getting more predominantly mental. And if you can, you know, you can look at studies of, um, there are ways of, of, of measuring how much fatigue is in your central nervous system, like your brain and your spinal cord versus how much is in your muscles. You can, and you, you know, you can use electric twitches to see, you know, you do a race or something of, of some distance and you do, you, you make, use electricity to make your muscles twitch and then you use a magnetic stimulation of your brain to make the same muscles twitch. So you see what's the difference? How much

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  of the fatigue is, is, you know, from the brain on down and how much is just the muscles?

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  And what you find is. And it doesn't have any particular meaning, but right around two minutes is where you start to see the the the physical effects really predominating that there isn't there isn't you don't see a finishing kick in 800 meter races, whereas you do in miles.

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I think, well, I think it's sports specific, too, because I think two minutes in swimming is two minutes is different from two minutes in running.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  But but I would say that I think that's completely appropriate in the running context. Like, I think running the 800 meters is probably got to be the hardest thing to do because you have to basically be at max output the entire time. Like, you you you, yes, I guess there's some, I mean, you would know better than I, but but it's it's not so long that you're really pacing it, but it's not short enough that it's an all out sprint. It's kind of right in the middle in between those things where you're kind of, you have to be at critical output almost the entire way.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, Usain Bolt and I would probably disagree about the extent to which 800 is a is an endurance event.

• 1:04:27Rich Roll?

  And part of that is a fast switch, low switch thing.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so for me, endurance is exactly what you said, or 800 meters, rather, is exactly what you said. I know I raced 800 meters a little bit in my in my day. The gun went and I had to sprint as hard as I could the whole the whole time, essentially, or just feel like I was sprinting as hard as I could the whole time. And, you know, it was the most painful race of all for me.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  For for for more sprint sprinter types, it's painful for the opposite reason, in that they had to slow it a slow way down, but just keep going far longer than they thought they could.

• 1:04:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Two, two, two different ways of of suffering.

• 1:04:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting. And then and then kind of pro tracking that out, you you have Jens doing the one hour, trying to break the one hour record. And cycling is probably not two minutes in cycling, it's probably longer. I don't know what it is.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:05:14Rich Roll?

  But because your body weight is supported, you know, it's a different kind of mechanism. But that kind of brings us back to the pain thing a little bit, like, you know, Jens is, you know, the hard man of cycling forever, like, crowd favorite, everybody loves this guy because he just he can suffer more than anybody and he's willing to just lay it out like, you know, he's been doing it forever. And he's he was like, he was one of the oldest guys of the Tour de France, like.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  Really long career, beloved, you know, in the sport. But when you look at a guy like that, or you study him, or you kind of, you know, have done the research that you've done, do you come away from that thinking like, he's fundamentally physiologically different? Like, does he have a higher pain threshold than normal people? Or does he have? Some kind of psychological bent where he enjoys it more? Or he's getting something out of it more than the average person? Like, how does that break down in your mind?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a ton of interesting things to say about that. It's hard to know about how much of Jens Voit's sort of pain.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  Well, subjective. How can you know?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. How much of that is?

• 1:06:19Rich Roll?

  Is his experience of pain different than yours?

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And is it a self mythology? Like, it's a useful thing to, to, to tell yourself and to develop a reputation as a guy who's willing to suffer, because then you're willing to walk into that, to, to, to, to do that breakaway five kilometers into a 200 kilometer stage, because you're like, I, I know I like to suffer more than the rest of these guys. So maybe he experiences it the same way, but it's just his mental approach is different. And we can't answer that about, you know, with, you know, about Jens particularly, it's hard to know, but there's some interesting data about athletes versus non-athletes and how, how experiences of pain are similar and different. So, and there's some pretty good research on this, showing that athletes and non-athletes

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  feel pain on, by, you know, in a, on average, pretty much the same. So if you.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  How do they know that?

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  So they, so you can, you can, well, you can give people.

• 1:07:14Rich Roll?

  Unperceived effort.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Well, you can give people, let's say, you can use, there's a, you can use pressure or you can use heat, but, or cold, but let's say you use electric shocks. You just give people a gradually escalating series of electric shocks. And you say, tell me when it reaches the point that you would classify that as painful, that you would say ouch. And athletes and non-athletes, there's, there's obviously variation in that, but, but there's no difference between athletes and non-athletes, even like high-end athletes. There's no evidence that athletes have either been born with or developed less sensitivity to pain. So their pain sensitivity is the same. Where, where the differences consistently emerge is if you then keep ramping up the shocks and, and you go to the point where they say, okay, that's it, I'm out, I can't

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  handle it anymore.

• 1:08:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  And athletes are willing to handle it far longer. Now, they're, they're willing to tolerate far higher level, higher levels of pain. So it's possible that there's some. You know, because since pain is subjective, maybe there is some change in how their brains process pain. But what most researchers tend to think is it's psychi... Here we come back to the, you know, back to the mother topic, which is psychological strategies for coping with pain. Things like distracting yourself. And that's why the hour cycling record, it's one of the reasons it is so painful, is there are no distractions. You've got one bike, one gear, one lane around the track. There's nothing, it's very hard to take your mind off how painful it is.

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  I mean, they have all these rules about like, there can't be a clock.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't even know where you are. You're basically in a, like, one of those suspended animation tanks, you know, those immersion tanks, where you've, you've got nothing to think about except how painful it is. And I bet there's other, so distraction is one thing, but, but also just, you know, reframing pain and, you know, this, the, things like learning to, to, to think of pain as a, as a source of information rather than a something, learning to get rid of the emotional response to pain. And, and that, that seems to be, that's thought to be one of the things you get from training. You, you know, of course, your body gets stronger when you train, but you also, like, you think about someone who's exercising for the first time, let's say they want to

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  run a 5K in six months, they start running three times a week, of course, their body, you know, their heart gets stronger and, and their muscles get more efficient and yada, yada, yada. But they also learn that when they're really out of breath, when they're panting out there on their runs, it doesn't mean that they're out of oxygen, they're about to pass out and die. And when their legs feel that burn, if they sprint, it doesn't mean that their legs are about to fall off. And, you know, I'm, I'm sort of exaggerating, but there is this sense, we, we take those warning signs very seriously when we're not familiar with them. But if you've experienced them every day for, for 10 years, or five years, or whatever it is, you start to, you, you've had experiences where you've decided to push through that signal a little longer, and you're like, oh, so it just kept hurting, but I was able to keep going.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so that was, I can ignore that sign, and you start to push that back farther and farther until you realize, okay, the pain is, it's, it's, it's giving me real information. It's, like we said earlier, if you take away the pain, you're not going to be able to pace yourself well. You need to have that pain in order to push to your limits, to be able to judge where the limits are. But you don't need to give up because it's painful.

• 1:10:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, if, there's a, there's a, an acclimation.

• 1:10:37Rich Roll?

  That occurs as a result of the training, but there's also like, you know, there's a maturation of your relationship with pain as you become more experienced as an athlete, right? Like, that's beyond just like, okay, I know this isn't going to kill me, but like, you just become more comfortable with it. And you actually like it. Like, I like it, you know, but I know when I'm not that fit, or maybe if, even if I'm fit, but it's the beginning of a season, and it's like, okay, I've got a three-hour ride, you know, and I have to maintain a certain level of watts or whatever. That will be very challenging for me, even if I'm fit, because I'm not used to sitting on a bike for three hours because it's the off-season or what have you, even though I have years and years of

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  experience doing this. But four months later, when I've built up to this, then I could go out and ride six or seven hours at an even higher watt level and be even more uncomfortable, but it doesn't bother me. It's like, there's, like, you get used to it. Like, time bends on itself in some weird way.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and just to back up your subjective experience, you know, one of the classic studies on, which was with swimmers, with elite swimmers in Scotland, they found that pain tolerance in athletes waxed and waned with the season, that it was lowest in the off-season, then it was, got higher in mid-season, and right before a peak race, their pain tolerance to a completely different stimulus. I think it was a blood pressure cuff around their arm, cutting off circulation. So, yeah, it's something, it's a skill that even, you know, of course, you accumulate experience over time, but you also acquire it every year and through every training cycle. And, and one of the, you know, one of the, we can get speculative, one of the things I heard a scientist at a conference say is, maybe

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  one of the sort of key traits for successful endurance athletes is a sort of benign masochism, where you, you know, you don't love pain, but it makes you feel alive. And I'm sure, like, I don't love pain, but...

• 1:12:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe not, not always so benign either.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  I have many close friends and dare I say, family members who maybe sometimes love it a little too much.

• 1:12:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think to really properly evaluate it, it's a case by case thing. You have to look at somebody's, you know, what kind of, you know, trauma did this person experience in childhood? What are they trying to work out? You know, from whence does their competitive nature come? Like, if you look at Lance Armstrong, it's like, alright, well, there's a whole story that leads up to like, why he's so fiercely competitive. And that, of course, plays into his ability to tolerate pain, perhaps, maybe a little bit better than somebody else, who is coming from a different life experience. That extends beyond whatever your genetic framework is.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and you talk about, so why are East African runners so successful? And it's like, well, there's motivation that comes from coming from extreme poverty, but you know, a lot of these guys have been through intense, intensely difficult childhoods. And it's like, they maybe are able to conceptualize the discomfort of, you know, a two-hour run differently than from someone who comes from a very comfortable North American upbringing.

• 1:13:52Rich Roll?

  It's also the sense of control. You know, when I say maybe not so benign, it's like, it can function the same way like an eating disorder does. Like, if your life feels out of control, like, this is something you can control. It creates a predictable response, and you get a result out of it, and your universe makes sense, right? It's like, you look at, you know, like David Goggins famously said, like, you know, when you think you've tapped out, you've only, you know, you're only at forty, you got forty percent more, right? And, and, you know, there's, I think there's truth in that, and I think your work in your book, like, validates that, like, that we are capable of so much more than we allow

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  ourselves to believe, or that, or that, you know, perhaps we've been able to manifest in our own lives. And it becomes more dramatic in ultra endurance, because the distances are so great, and, you know, it's microscopic when you get down to the hundred meters, but the principle remains the same, right? So, then it becomes about like, alright, what are the, what are the strategies for tapping into that, you know, reservoir that's sitting there? And I'm almost done with your book, I didn't get to the, probably the most important part, which is the stuff at the end about the mind, you know? Because I'm sure that's where you're kind of laying bare these strategies, but, you know, in terms of like, Practicality, like reading this book, like what can we take away and implement into our own lives that could perhaps reframe our perspective on our own potential?

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let me start with the sort of zero with order strategy is to read the book. No, it's to, it's to, to understand, like, but seriously, to, to, to just understand what you're saying, that, that, that limits are, are, are, in most cases elastic, that there is, there is something more there. And it's important to kind of emphasize that knowing that this physical limit you're experiencing, this, this overwhelming desire to slow down, knowing that that's a, a product of your brain and not a statement that your arm, your legs can't continue, that doesn't mean it's easy, you can just say, oh, well, then maybe I'll decide to continue. Like, it, it's a real, your brain is part of your

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  body, and it's, it's a, it's a real limit that's being imposed. But it's not a physiological limit in the sense of, you know, the muscles aren't able to, to move anymore. And, and that becomes important in the way you, you respond to that sensation that you have to slow down. Because in a sense, like, in a, in a running race, every step you take is, is a micro decision where you're, am I speeding up? Am I maintaining my pace? Or am I slowing down? And so it's not just you, I, I, you know, you don't just decide, am I going to maintain this pace or not? You're, you're constantly reevaluating it. So if you're accepting that the feeling, the, the, the feeling of unpleasantness that you're, that you're feeling part with your race, if you're accepting that that represents that, oh,

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  I'm hitting my limits, that alters how you then respond to that feeling for the rest of the race.

• 1:16:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  You're feeling, oh, I, I'm brushing up against my limits, I need to back off. And if you, if you're, if you're instead believing that it's, you know, okay, this represents that I'm, I, I'm approaching my limits, but there, there is more. And so you're going to keep fighting to keep right up against that red line that your brain is imposing. And maybe you're not breaking through the red line, but you're making sure you don't back off prematurely. So that's a long-winded way of saying, I think, just understanding that, that, that, that, the sort of Goggins approach, that when you think you've hit your limits, you haven't. Understanding that's actually, uh, probably the most powerful thing you can do. Now, from there, what practical steps can you take to kind of capitalize on that?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  The number one thing I would, I would, you know, if I had a time machine and I could go back and try and, you know, make my running career go a little bit higher. And I've been writing about the science of endurance for, you know, well over a decade. And so I've, I've written about every ergogenic aid, every supplement, every training plan. None of that would be my top choice. It would definitely be to try systematically to work on motivational self-talk. So first, that means first of all, becoming aware of what's going on in your head during a race or during, you know, in whatever context you're thinking of, because I think this is something that is, is, you know, applicable in every sphere of life, you know, whether

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  it's business or social or academical. So just becoming aware of how you respond when you're in a race or in an exam or whatever. Are you telling yourself, oh, here we go again. You know, this sucks, you're gonna, you're, you know, you're gonna screw it up again. So first of all, you have to know what you're saying to yourself. Then you have to be honest with yourself and say, is that voice in my head right or wrong? Because if you're, if the, if the voice in your head is saying, oh, you idiot, you didn't do enough long runs, you're, you're gonna die. Well, if you didn't do enough long runs, then maybe the voice is right. So you, you can, maybe the voices in your head is telling you something about, you know, take your preparation more seriously, or there are things you can actually do. But most likely, there's going to be some, some aspects of that voice which are not rational

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  or which are unnecessarily negative, just telling you that it hurts, or just focusing on the pain, or dwelling on past failures. And then you want to work to be able to replace those with things that are, you know, encouraging and motivating, but, but real, not like, you know, come on, you know, you're gonna grow wings.

• 1:19:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, I think the, it's important to distinguish between jingoism and like the, the heavy lifting that would be required to change somebody's worldview or view of themselves so that they could arrive at a place of self-love, because that's really what it's about. Like, you have to really respect and love and appreciate yourself to have a positive outlook on your own personal capabilities, right? So you can walk around going, I'm awesome all day long, well, inside you're like, I fucking suck, right? Like, that's not gonna work. So it's more about what I'm getting, what I'm gathering, I don't want to project on you, but it like, it's about like, investing in. That internal work so that you can make sure that your wiring is as best as it could

• 1:20:05Rich Roll?

  be so that you can have that kind of outlook that will set you up for that success.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really crucial point because what I don't want to give the impression of is that motivational self talk is about deciding to say something motivating in the race because it's just deciding to say it is not going to work. You need to have gone through the process of making sure that you believe what you're going to say and then you need to actually practice it and make it second nature. So that's the, there is the sort of superficial layer of like picking something you're going to say and, and practicing it in, in training so that it becomes, you know, second nature and automatic in, in stressful times like a race. But that superficial layer has to come from something deeper that you have to be, be able to believe what it is you're, you're, you're saying. And so this

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  comes back to what you're saying that you, you have to actually have confidence in yourself and you have to, you have to go through a process that's going to be time consuming. And so you have to think about what can, what can I say to myself that's, that's true? What's good about myself? And you have to start to believe those things.

• 1:21:09Rich Roll?

  Did you feel like during your running career that you had some defeatist self-talk in there?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  I, you know, yeah. One of the reasons I say that motivational self-talk would be, would have been such a good thing for me is that I, on my good days, I, I raced far above what my training suggested. I was, I was able to, to, you know, leave myself in a place that I think most of my teammates could and I could, you know, they'd be ready to go party and I'd still be throwing up in the hotel room for, after the race. But what that ended up doing for me is, is it, I ended up creating this self mythology that I was, I was tougher than everyone else and that I was less talented, but that I was able to access a deeper place and I just was tougher and wanted it more. And so then I got to the point where I would come to races, you know, look around at the start line and say, okay, all these people are faster than me.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  All they have to do is run what they're capable of. In order to compete with them, I have to do something superhuman. And that's a really heavy load to put on yourself before each race to say, I'm the only one here who has to be superhuman. And so, once I started to have some bad races, then I stopped believing my own hype. And I thought, well, now I'm mentally and physically weak. And so, I became a total head case before races.

• 1:22:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's like an unsustainable energy source.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was great a few times.

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  It can be effective from time to time, but you can't show up and perform at a high level every time that way.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as you, you know, if it works, you know, the thing with running, as with almost everything else in life, as, you know, one of the great lessons of running is that there's always another level. You know, you realize, you know, and I certainly think about it all the time in journalism. You know that, you know, no matter how you achieve your goals, all that means is you get called up to the bigger league and you're playing against. So, if you were like, man, those guys in my conference at university were way more talented than me, but I was able to kind of trick them and beat them. Then it's like, okay, now I'm at the Olympic trials. These guys are all, you know, way better than I am. So, now I have to sort of expand my expectations of what my brain is capable of. And yeah, like you said, it's not something.

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  And also, it lays bare the fallacy of the narrative. Because you're at Olympic trials. It's like, what else do you have to do to feel like you, you know, you're in the mix of the company that you should be keeping?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, you know, yeah, feeling like you belong there. You know, like, look, everyone in the world has some degree of imposter syndrome, right? Or at least they should, you know, you should always, at least everyone I've met, has some doubt as to whether they're really as good at the things they're good at as they, as they, because other people think they are. But, you know, well, acknowledging that that's really common, you really need to be able to fight against that and convince yourself, you know, that you belong there, that I'm here because I'm as good as these people. And actually, I can beat. A lot of them and you know, maybe I'm more physically talented than some of them and more mentally talented than some others. And I just have to use my unique strengths and and see what I got.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I I think I felt prey to that same thing as a swimmer like I I never felt like I was talented enough or as talented as the people I was racing against and but I I was able to channel it as fuel in training. Like I would, I would just train, I I knew I was training way more than anyone else. And so my confidence derived from that, like I, when I got up on the blocks, I knew like these, there's no way these guys did like what I did. You know, and I would always have like, I would always be able to bring it home, you know, in a two hundred fly better than anyone else because of that, like not because of talent. But ultimately, you know, that story plays itself out as well, like, you know, you need a new story.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's the, it's the flip side of the equation where, and I think you've said that you you feel like you're pretty much overtrained throughout your.

• 1:24:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Your career and it's, it's, it's, it's a super powerful way of doing things until it's not. And I was at the opposite end of the spectrum. I was running three forty two for fifteen hundred meters on, you know, forty miles a week. And everyone I was racing against was running eighty miles a week and I was just super cautious and I knew, I knew I had to get up there. But that played into my narrative of, uh, you know, physically, I'm not a match for these guys. But mentally, I have to do it all and all with my, my mental skills and that's.

• 1:25:23Rich Roll?

  You're probably sharper too, you know, when you would show up to race.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's, it's interesting because later, in later years, I, I, so I ran some of my best times when I was twenty, twenty one. And then in later years, I was training with, uh, Matt Centrowitz, senior, the father of the Olympic fifteen hundred champ, who's a very, very accomplished and interesting and intuitive coach. And I, at that point, I got up to maybe eighty miles a week tops. And I was in the best physical shape of my life, but I didn't race any faster and you know, I have, you know, fifty eight different theories as to, to, to why not. But one of them is that I was super fit, but I never, I didn't race above my fitness anymore. Whereas when I was running forty miles a week, uh, like you said, I was fresh, I was sharp. I would show up to races just, just ready to, to, to pour it out on the track because I hadn't been doing it three times a week

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  for the last six months, you know, leaving it all out on the track.

• 1:26:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a lot to be said for that. I think there's still so much to be learned about. How to properly balance the world of beating yourself down as you kind of need to versus having a deepening respect for the recovery process.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:31Rich Roll?

  And being race specific throughout the season.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  It's definitely one of those areas where everyone is, there's so much science on things like heart rate recovery or heart rate variability, rather, and omega brainwaves and all sorts of ways of trying to get at exactly that question. How do we know when we've reached the right approach? And a friend of mine, Kristia Schwand, has a book on recovery coming out. I think it's probably next year. But she's been kind of exploring this question. And I don't want to put words into her mouth or give away the book. But my impression is, I think one of the themes will end up being that you have to feel it, right? So far, I

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  don't think science has the answer to tell you definitively when to go and when to go hard and when to go easy. Obviously, there are some useful insights to be gained from physiological monitoring. It can give you some hints as to when you're overtrained and when you're not. But I think great athletes who have long-term, sustainable careers have also a great ability to tune into when they're undercooked, when they're overcooked.

• 1:27:42Rich Roll?

  Without a doubt. I think that's a huge differentiator between the very best and the also-rans. When you were doing all this research, did you come across, I didn't see it in the book, but again, I still have those two chapters to go. Did you come across any studies or insights about the difference between somebody who's internally motivated, they want to be the best version of who they are, versus the person who's competitive? They're trying to beat the other guy. It's all about what somebody else is doing.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I don't really get into that in the book, but I read some stuff, I think it was in Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus's book, that there is some research on that. I think there's a sort of broad, there is a big field of research on internal growth versus external motivation. I think, I don't know that literature well, but I think internal motivation is the way to go, right? Again, one of those things where external motivation... It can be super powerful. It's just not sustainable. Like, and I know when I started running, I was very externally motivated. I wasn't like, I want to explore the limits of my mind. I was like, I want girls to think I'm cool. And, you know, and that was an extremely, extremely powerful motivator.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Like, I would have snapped off my arm if that would have helped.

• 1:29:07Rich Roll?

  But it's not like anger, or, you know what I mean? Like.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, but I think it's, yeah. So because anger is an internal motivator, right? Like, in a sense, well, it's.

• 1:29:19Rich Roll?

  I guess so, yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  It's because the problem with internal, with external motivations, even.

• 1:29:26Rich Roll?

  They always point back to an internal trigger or an internal origin.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's, and, you know, you can't go to that well over and over again. And then when you fail, it's like.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  So a good internal motivator, I think, motivational, or a good internal motivator, I would think, is, is one where even if you don't achieve your goal, if your, your sort of,

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  you know, obvious goal, you can still feel successful in some way. Like, if your, if your goals are to push your limits or whatever, then it's like, if you lose, that's okay. Whereas if the goal was purely to achieve some sort of external, you know, medal or whatever, then, then you, then when you lose, you really do lose. And the whole thing seemed pointless. But, but yeah, I mean, in terms of being fueled by, by, actually, I have a, in the book, I do mention, there's a famous thread on the Let's Run message boards on whether the best way to run an 800 is fueled by pure hate. And, and I get into that a little bit, that there's, there's, you know, the 800 of all events, we were talking about it earlier, how hard it is, that that's the event you have to run on pure hate.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  And there is some, like, there's some funny research on things, like, if you imagine yourself doing a, a good deed to someone, then you end up, you're able to hold a weight up longer, you enhance your endurance. But if you imagine yourself doing an evil deed, you actually get an even bigger boost of endurance.

• 1:30:52Rich Roll?

  Well, being in a heightened emotional state, right? As a, as a, as a conduit to superhuman capabilities, like the story you tell in the book about, you know, the guy who lifts the car, who, you know, to get the kid out from underneath who got run over and like, breaking that down, like, what's actually going on there? How did this person actually? You know, do this thing that was seemingly impossible. And how can we, what can we learn from that and apply to our own performances?

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  So after the book was published, I actually had a chance to chat to a guy named Tom McGee, who I mentioned in the book, he's the guy who has the heaviest verified deadlift on record. He's like something like 1,100 pounds of cheese in the 1983 World's Strongest Man Contest. And I was asking him about, you know, how did that work? And he was saying that from his perspective, the key was the mind endocrine link, which is basically his ability to voluntarily turn on this sort of fight or flight response, the flood of, you know, whether it's adrenaline or whatever, whatever other cascade of things that before doing those heavy lifts, he was able to kind of tap into that. Now, I don't know whether he was getting himself angry or whether he was just thinking about things he cared about.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Like there's a famous Jim Spivey, who was a great US 1500 meter runner. He, he always tells, I think it was his first Olympic trials, his coach told him, all right, you know, before, when you go on the line, you look around at all those guys and you imagine that they've broken into your house and they're stealing your television and they're running away, like they're taking away something that's yours. And he found that very sort of powerful way of tapping into like, you know, tapping to that. I don't know how sustainable those approaches are.

• 1:32:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. That kind of stuff never worked for me.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Well, and especially if like-

• 1:32:34Rich Roll?

  Maybe I was doing it wrong.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Maybe it works once, but it's like, you know, if, again, if you're going to have a sustainable career and you're going to enjoy this, like, oh, man, they're stealing my TV again for the like the 87th time, you don't get as excited about it. And either you have to escalate it and it's like, you know, now they're killing your parents and that doesn't seem very healthy, or you have to find some other way of tapping into it.

• 1:32:53Rich Roll?

  No, you know, it seems to me, and this is anecdotal, but the people that have, you know, incredible, long careers at the highest level are people who are really, they're, they're, they're in love with what they do, you know? They love it. They're trying to get the best out of themselves, but there's a camaraderie with their fellow competitors and there's a healthy relationship with the sport that allows it to be sustainable over the long haul.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, I think going back to the internal versus external things, things like money and medals and glory and fame, we all think that, you know, we all on some level would like that, but that gets old after a while if you're successful. And the guy, the athletes who are still, you know, Doing it in their 30s or whatever, depending on the sport, it's a different age range. But the ones who have long careers, they've obviously looked beyond that and they're not still there because the gold, you know, winning a medal still gives them the same thrill it did 10 years earlier.

• 1:33:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think age is another barrier. It's, you don't really get into that too much in the book, but I mean, there's, there's been massive seismic shifts in human capability based on ideas that we had in the 80s about what a body could do in their 30s, even late 20s. Like, you know, athletes weren't competing in the Olympics after age like 25, you know, and now we have like, it's incredible how many athletes in their 30s and even like some of their 40s are competing at an incredibly high level.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and yeah, I almost put a chapter in the book on, it's called age as a barrier, because I do think it's, it's, it's a fascinating example of what we've been talking about, the role that expectations and beliefs play that, that, and you know, this is a, getting away from the performance aspect of sport, this is a really crucial point in terms of health and, you know, living a healthy life through the full lifespan is that, you know, we have all these graphs of how VO2 max and other, and you know, muscle strength starts declining after, in your 20s and it's like, how do we calculate those graphs? We calculate those graphs by measuring the characteristics of people who played sports and so on, all through high school and maybe through university and then got an office

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  job and stopped and, you know, got serious and stopped doing exercise. And so our, our graphs of what normal aging is incorporate the idea that you stop exercising. And so if, you know, and, and, you know, thank goodness, people are reevaluating this and saying, well, let's look at people who have, the, the small subgroup of people who have, you know, like masters athletes who have chosen to keep pushing the envelope. And it's hard to find people who can do it for a long, long time, but, but, you know, their curves are totally different.

• 1:35:37Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, a lot of it is economic, you know, driving these things. I mean, you know, in the 80s, like the idea that you would swim past age 21, it was like, nobody did that. You couldn't because you couldn't make a living, so it wasn't, but, but baked into that was also this idea that you're already past your peak, which we clearly know is completely wrong now. So I think that's, you know, another area. It's, it's, it's always exciting to me when I see, you know, so like, even like, you know, when Shalane Flanagan, that was incredible.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I can say I am in my 40s now. She was 35 or something like that.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  So, yeah.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  You wouldn't expect like this, this, there was, you know, there was a 37 year old who won the Olympic marathon in 2008, I think, Konstantina Tomescu Dita or something. And that was, that was kind of shocking, but it seemed like a total anomaly, anomaly. But it's like, Flanagan is running as well as she ever has into her mid 30s. And, you know, there's lots of other examples of people who, if they, if they have the, the structure in place that allows them to keep training, then they can, they can perform at the best level. And for the rest of us, I think that, that says, you know, if when you were 25, you loved running enough that you found time in your life to, to train five hours a week or something like that, and you were, you loved it, you were, you were fit and you felt great and

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  you loved the competition and camaraderie, you can do the same thing in your 40s. If you're, if you carve out the time, and it's hard because there's career aspect, career things that, that, and, you know, family, getting kids and stuff, but, but there's no reason not to be out at the track, pushing your limits, you know, at whatever age and feeling the, the feeling that you only get when you have, you know, touched the, the outer perimeter of what you're capable of. It's like, what other aspect of life do we, do we get to kind of really explore our limits?

• 1:37:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's available to all of us, you know. Things are getting weird in sports. We're entering into this new phase of technology where, you know, not only, you know, is doping becoming more and more refined and scientific, we're on the horizon of things like CRISPR and genetic modifications. And, you know, this line between what is performance enhancing and what isn't, is going to be, you know, blurred to the 10th degree compared to what we're experiencing right now. So how does that, like, that's beyond the scope of your

• 1:38:09Rich Roll?

  book, but, you know, that's something I would imagine you've spent some time thinking about, like, where are we headed? And what is the future of clean sport? Or is that even going to be a thing?

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and there is actually an area of the book that has made me think a lot about that. And that is, that is the, the idea of electric brain stimulation, which is like, On one level, it's maybe the most direct, the coolest demonstration of the idea that limits are in your brain. If you can, if you can simply run a weak electric current, you put two electrodes on your head, run a weak electric current through it, you change the way your neuron, you change just how likely your neurons are to fire. You make them a little more, a little less sensitive. And it's, the research has been a little bit back and forth, but it does seem that, I'm pretty confident now in saying you can enhance people's endurance by doing that. And so that, I mean, if you wanted, is it

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  the brain or is it the body? Well, if you can just change the brain and do nothing below the neck, that shows that your brain is essentially controlling what those limits were. But that's, as fascinating as that is to, you know, from a scientific perspective, of course, athletes are interested in this. What? I need a nine volt battery and two electrodes, then I can enhance my endurance by a couple percent? Sign me up. And there were, there were athletes at the, at the Winter Olympics on the US team who were using that technique. And I have, you know, this has made me think really carefully. At first, I was writing kind of breathlessly about this topic. I was, I started, I think I wrote about it for the first time in 2013 for Runners World. You know, just about how

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  cool the idea was. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've gotten uncomfortable with, with the idea that this is the direction sports are moving in. And it's, you know, when you talk about what should be banned and what shouldn't, you know, inevitably what we come back to is, you know, in the world anti-dope and code, they have, one of the, one of the criteria they can use to restrict things is, does it violate the spirit of the sport, which is, you know, the ultimate kind of punt that doesn't answer the question. And, and so, and I don't think there's a bright line that, that's obvious. We just have to agree. Basically, it's going to be a collective societal decision of what

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  What should be allowed and what shouldn't? And I think if you drew the bell curve of where opinions would be, I'm probably on the more restrictive side. I'd like to keep.

• 1:40:41Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  You know, maybe it's a hopeless battle. Maybe it's like, you know, no, we should all be swimming in, you know, full body suits, not showing any ankle. I don't know, but I don't really like the idea of brain stimulation, much less CRISPR.

• 1:40:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And yet, this is, you know, this is what we do as humans. Like, you touched on it earlier. It's like, we're always progressing, we're always evolving, we're always searching for the next thing. Like, this is going to happen, right? And, you know, I don't know whether we need to be just talking about it more, or being more intellectually honest about what's actually happening. But we certainly know that, that kind of turning a blind eye to this, pretending it's not there, and erecting half-assed measures to control it has not proved, you know, such a great solution. So I think we need to, I think organizing bodies need to get together proactively, prophylactically,

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  and make these decisions now, rather than react to them once they're on the scene, you know? And I don't see a lot of that happening right now. And I don't, I don't, I don't have the answer. I don't know, you know, I don't even know that I've spent enough time thinking about it myself to know where that dividing line is. Like, why is it okay for Nike to put, you know, this wedge in their heel that has this 4% thing? And that's okay? Or maybe it's not, I don't know. Versus altering your genetic makeup, or putting, you know, putting electrodes on your head? Like, it's just, you know, it's getting weird, and I think it's just gonna get murkier and murkier.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm with you in the sense that I, I don't know what the answer is, but I think we need to talk about it. And I think I'm kind of, I'm one of the people who would say, on a societal perspective... It's almost impossible to to hold back, you know, there's seven billion people in the world and 6.9 billion could think that's a terrible idea to, you know, genetically manipulate humans, but that still leaves plenty of people who are gonna do it. And once you do it, then it's good, then once some people do it, it's gonna become harder for others to resist the temptation. So maybe, you know, I think from a societal perspective, it's coming. So sports has to decide, are we gonna try and remain a walled off garden where this kind of stuff

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  isn't allowed? Or, you know, are we gonna, or to what extent are we gonna try and slow this, slow this stuff down? I don't know, maybe, maybe that's a little bit, maybe humans are gonna decide that change, things are coming too fast. I, I don't know.

• 1:43:18Rich Roll?

  I know, it's hard to, it's hard, it's hard to, it's hard to know until it happens, but I just think that we can agree that it is going to happen.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  When, I don't know.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  I, I think you're right. And when I think about these, like, both the technology stuff and, and by extension, sort of performance enhancement more generally, there's different cultural expectations in different sports, you know, sort of like Formula One versus NASCAR. And I come from a running background, and the kind of the calling card of running is it is the simplest sport. You can be a great runner with no equipment at all. You can be bare naked in the savanna and be running. Shoes help a little bit, but, so, so it's, it's, it's easier for me to think of it as, as this sort of pure thing, which it of course isn't, that there's all this, all these other things that go into.

• 1:44:11Rich Roll?

  A little romantic.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So it's, of course, it's a fiction, but it makes it more easier to mentally justify trying to sustain some of that fiction to say.

• 1:44:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that. I understand that. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, there's, the purity of, of it is probably a big part of what made you fall in love with it, right? And so any, any assault on that will be met with some.

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  Resistance.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, it's theater, right? Like, when the Nike Breaking Two thing came out, everyone was making comparisons to the four-minute mile, and oh, Roger Bannister was this idealistic, noble, young man who, you know, trained on his lunch hour. And it's like, hey, I'm the biggest Roger Bannister fan there is. But, you know, it was a calculated, dedicated program with, you know, state-of-the-art training, where they tried using illegal pacemakers, you know, and even his use of pacemakers that dropped out was controversial at the time.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was very, he was kind of the guy who brought in this idea of having dedicated pacemakers to run a different time. It was officially illegal in the books. You had to, there was sort of an honest effort clause at the time. So, you know, it's always, it's always a bit of a fiction, but sometimes it's a convenient fiction, that sort of purity, to have at least as an ideal, that we're trying to be pure, even if we know that in reality, we never are.

• 1:45:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get it. All right, well, I don't want to let you go without, we've been going for a while. I want to touch on a little bit, do you have to go? You have time?

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:45:48Rich Roll?

  I can't let you go without diving into, there's so many other things I want to talk about, I want to talk about the cold stuff, body type, we don't have time. But I do want to talk about diet a little bit. And what I, what I enjoyed about your chapter on fuel, on nutrition, was that you took the opportunity to kind of explore more of Noakes's ideas about low carb, high fat. But you looked at it from a very objective point of view, from 10,000 feet, and you were able to kind of navigate what I see in my own work are very treacherous, emotionally

• 1:46:30Rich Roll?

  charged waters, with a level of kind of dispassionate, you know, scientific, you know, approach. So walk me through kind of what you learned about this world.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, as you know, this is

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  A highly controversial and highly emotional thing to write about. It's, you know, whatever, if you write anything about anything in diet, you have people who hate you. It's unbelievable. And yet, it's a really important part of, of, you know, endurance performance and of health. You know, we all have to eat, so it's, it's impossible to totally abdicate these decisions and say, "Well, I don't know the answer, so I'm just not going to eat until, you know, 2035, when we have better data."

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  So, you know, look, and I should, I should state that I don't eat low carb, high fat. I eat what I think of as a sort of pretty conventional, probably Mediterranean style, Michael Pollan, Whole Foods, mostly plants, that kind of thing.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  So I have to navigate the idea that I, and I, and I, you know, touch wood, I, I feel pretty healthy. I don't like, I don't have any problems that I'm trying to get rid of health-wise. So I just, I don't have the, the burning fire to like find some alternate approach to, to nutrition that, that someone who's been overweight for 20 years might, might have, where they're like, "Well, for some people, conventional diet just doesn't seem to be working." And so, you know, they're highly motivated to try the things. I'm like, "Yeah, it works fine to me. I don't know what you're talking about." So with that, with that said, so as we all know, the, the ketogenic approach to, to eating

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  has kind of caught on in the endurance world, maybe last five or six years. It sort of started in the ultra-running community, I think, and, and gained some adherence. And then people started to study it and started doing some science. And there's scientists, there's, there's pro and con scientists who produce results that they interpret quite, quite differently. But what I, the, the big thing that I would take, and like, as you're saying, 10,000 feet, what I would say is that 10 years ago, what I would have said, and I think it would have been backed up by most sports nutritionists, would have been that if you're eating basically no carbohydrates, if you're on a ketogenic diet, there is no way you're going to optimize your endurance performance.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  You need carbohydrates. You can't sustain endurance training on a low carb diet.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  I think that the debate has shifted. People now, there's been enough data to say, hey, if you eat a ketogenic diet, actually, you ramp up your fat burning so much that you can actually go and run ultra marathons. Maybe you're going to take some sweet potatoes before, you know, the night before and eat some form of carbohydrate during, just to give yourself some extra carbohydrate. But you can actually perform okay, reasonably well, on a ketogenic diet. Where I sort of, you know, put the brakes on though, and that's a big change. Like, that's a, I don't think we should underestimate the fact that there's been new knowledge here. There's a realization that we probably overstated how dependent we are in carbohydrates for

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  endurance performance. Does that mean that they're better for endurance performance, as people like Noakes have strongly argued? I don't see any evidence. And in fact, I don't see, when you get down to things like marathons, which seem long to me, but seem short to some people, you know, there's been, there's data showing that in trained marathoners, it's like, that's fast enough that you're burning 97% carbohydrate.

• 1:50:18Rich Roll?

  And you're anaerobic.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, this is not, so there's, so then you have to be context specific. Are you talking about someone trying to run a marathon? Or are you talking about someone who's doing, you know, a two-week hike into the backcountry that to then do climb some mountain, where they're carrying all their own food with them? And, you know, then it's like, actually being able to subsist on your fat stores and staying at a very low intensity relative to what a marathoner would do, that's a whole different question. So.

• 1:50:47Rich Roll?

  Did you come across any athletes at the very elite, you know, at the highest level of their sport, who are having success on a true ketogenic diet?

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  So I would say, if we talk about Olympic sports, which for the most part are Four hours or less in race walkers and marathoners, you know, down to two hours. I'm not aware of any Olympic athlete who follows a ketogenic diet. And I'm, I'm kind of quoting Trent Stellingworth, who's a, a, one of the, a nutritionist and physiologist and researcher who works with Olympic athletes in Canada, who, who has also kind of looked into this and published some data on it. And I'm not aware of anyone at the top level. And if you look at the all time top marathon list, it's all East African and they all eat like 60 to 70% carbohydrate.

• 1:51:39Rich Roll?

  They're almost on like an 80, 10, 10, a lot of them, like super high carb.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they, you know, it's like sugar, you know, is understandable. I'm not a fan of sugar. But if you look at their diet, like Kenyan, there've been studies of, of East African diets. Like Kenyans get like 20% of their calories from the sugar they put in their tea and their porridge. And, and, and, you know, that doesn't sound like, like a good thing, but, um, you know, and this is Kenyan runners I'm talking about. You know, so to me, that, that is another reminder that the sort of toxicity of diets is context specific. That's not how I'm advising anyone to eat, but, but they are neither, there's no evidence that they're like diabetic or, or fat.

• 1:52:24Rich Roll?

  There is some evidence to suggest that eating a ketogenic diet, low carb, high fat, enhances your body's ability to efficiently utilize fat as fuel. Right? Is that, that's the tenet of behind this?

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  There, there's no question that if you eat all fat, your body will, you will, you will shift your body's natural fuel balance. So you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll get better at burning fat for fuel and you will, uh, you know, when you're, when you're running, for example, you'll burn a higher percentage of fat rather than carbohydrate.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Another way to do that is to to to train.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  Is to train. Like I've I've become very fat adapted, but I've done it through basically aerobic training, like, you know, zone two training, which amplifies your body's ability to do the very same thing.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Rich Roll?

  But so I was interested, the question I was driving at is, is, has there, has, has there a study been conducted that compares these two methodologies as one different than the other qualitatively?

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Probably the best data was from Jeff Vollek, who's a prominent ketogenic advocate. He, he got, I think it was 20 ultra distance, mostly ultra runners and a few ultra long distance triathletes, 10 of whom were, were, were low carb to some description, I'm not sure, probably not ketogenic necessarily, but very low carb, and 10 of whom ate a standard diet. And so all of them had, you know, extensive training experience, training long distances. And the, the ketogenic group had a much higher rate of fat, fat oxidation. So, but either you have to get into this question of what is the relevant proxy data? If the goal is

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  to, you know, breathe out more carbon dioxide than oxygen as an indicator than of how much fat you're burning. If that's what the Olympic medal was going in, then yeah, ketogenic diet wins. But the question is, does that change your performance? And it's like, well, but that depends on a few things. One is, are you allowed to, to eat during the race? If so, then, you know, no, big deal that you're, you know, so burning, I mean, burning fat is important, but the, if that, it doesn't necessarily make you skinnier. Like, what you're relying on, it just changes. If you burn a bunch of fat, then that just affects,

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  like, the, the fuel mix in your body. If you burn carbohydrates, you'll, you'll just liberate fat later to replace those carbohydrates, or you'll be less likely to store the carbohydrates you're eating as fat. In the end, it doesn't necessarily, there's, there's a confusion between what you're using as fuel during exercise and like, just because you're burning fat, more fat during exercise doesn't mean your stomach is getting smaller. And it doesn't mean you're going to perform better.

• 1:55:21Rich Roll?

  It also doesn't mean that you're going to be healthier long term. You know, I think it's important to not conflate performance with long term health and longevity.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great point and one like I sort of studiously avoided the talking about long term health and diet there because

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very specific to performance.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:42Rich Roll?

  It's a whole different thing.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  And, and as we know, lots of athletes are willing to trade long term health for short term performance, which is, you know, it is what it is. But yeah, that, that whole debate, you know, put it this way, if, you know, my opinion is, is expressed as the way I choose to eat. And I have, and, and which, which, which also factors in, you know, things like pleasure. But I would be willing to, to give up some pleasure if I, if I felt like there was compelling evidence that it was going to enhance my long term health.

• 1:56:19Rich Roll?

  Well, I think also it's important to understand that your body's ability to burn fat as a fuel source is important and it's, it's certainly important the longer that you're going. But ultimately, if you want to be at the peak, at your peak performance in your discipline, you have to develop both your aerobic engine and your anaerobic engine and you have to become very adept at being able to switch gears. You gotta be able to ramp up, back off, and you're training at, you know, high intensity levels and you're training at those aerobic levels. And the best athlete is going to be able to, you know, maximize their capability in both. And from what I understand, and I've never, I've never been ketogenic, I don't, I want

• 1:57:04Rich Roll?

  to be careful to say that I'm not speaking from experience, but I know many high level athletes who have toyed around with it and they have said, I know you talked to Dave Zabriski and he's told me the same thing, like you can, you can go all day, but the minute you want to ramp it up and like throw down a threshold effort or, you know, attack or something like that, like there's no gear.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so this is, okay.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  Adherents of the diet today would say, no, no, I've tried it and I still have all, you know, the lab, you know, I've done my training data shows that I still have all the, you know, the top end gear that I used to have. But the actual studies that have looked at the question almost universally find that, yeah, you lose a gear. You, you, there was a study actually on which Tim Noakes is a co-author back in about 2005 where they did, can't remember, maybe 100 kilometer cycle, bike ride or something like that, interspersed with a series of like, short 1 kilometer sprints at, to sort of simulate what a, an actual grand tour cycling race is, is like you're going up a hill or there's a breakaway.

• 1:58:08Rich Roll?

  Or you're Jens Voight and you're in the Peloton and, you know, the team leader says, okay, time for you to ride off the front.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's what cycling is. It's a bunch of low intensity with, you know, interspersed with some sprints. And they found that, that the fat adapted group had lost, uh, lost some, you know, they were able to perform at the same level overall, but, but lost out on the sprints. And actually, that's the same finding you go, if you go back to the 1983 study that by, by Stephen Finney, which is cited as the sort of, the first proof of that, that you could go ketogenic. That's exactly what he concludes, that you lose anaerobic power. No one talks about that part of the study. There's, there's always ways of getting out of that saying, well, they only adapted for four weeks. It wasn't long enough. They were missing salt from their diet. You know, the, the phase

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  of the moon was, was incorrect. And, and maybe there are ways of doing a ketogenic diet in a way that, that does get around that problem. But there's pretty substantial evidence that for most people, they experience a loss in their, their anaerobic capabilities.

• 1:59:14Rich Roll?

  Well, I hope more research gets done. You know, I, you know, I just, people, I mean, I have my own, of course, I have my own experiences. It's like, we're talking about biases earlier and I'm sitting here thinking, well, what is the bias that I'm bringing to bear in this conversation? Of course I have that. But I would say that like, I, you know, I want all the research to be done. I want it to be as conflict free as possible because I'm fatigued by these, you know, these debates and these wars over that. Like, I really would like to see, you know, the truth appear, so.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, you know, I feel 100% the same as you. And I know my biases and I, I want to see more research. And I think there is more research coming because it's become, become a popular thing. But I also share the sense of fatigue. I've gotten tired writing about it, of writing about it. In a, you know, in part, I guess, one thing to remember is, look, if I write about something like this, I'll hear from people who, who love what I said, if it sounds like I agree with their view, and people who hate what I said, if it doesn't agree with their view. And so it's, it, it feels like such a polarized landscape that it's almost no point, like, I'm not changing any minds. And what I try and remind myself is, I'm hearing from the 5% on either end of the spectrum. And there's a lot, a lot of people out there like me who are like, I don't know the answer.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  And so, sharing the results of that, of, of the explorations that are going on, maybe can, can be useful to the people. They're not writing to me, they're, they don't feel, they, they don't care enough to, to write to me. But those are the people who are still open to, to whatever the data happens to show. So I hope there'll be more data.

• 2:00:45Rich Roll?

  On the subject of studies, and we're gonna wrap this up now. But I'm interested in, in, not necessarily with, with respect to nutrition or food, but just in general, when it comes to endurance, athletic performance, like, what is the study that you would like to see performed? Like, like, in canvassing all, you know, like, I don't know how many hundreds of studies you've read, where's the gaping hole? Like, where are you, where are you seeing, like, if they would just do this, we would learn so much?

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow, that, so, how many hours do we have?

• 2:01:19Rich Roll?

  We can go as long as you want.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  You know, it's...

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  So, I'll preface this by saying, one of the reasons I would have trouble coming up with the one study that I'm really fascinated with is because my, my sort of, one of the things I come away with is that every study I've looked at is 0.1% of the picture. And, and sometime, you know, especially, you know, is that when I first started doing this, there was always the temptation to see the next study as like, this explains everything about X. And you sort of gradually, you start to see, you zoom out and you see the bigger picture and you realize, there's no one study that would actually radically change things. But, one of the things I, from a personal perspective, I, I don't know how much it would change for people,

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  but I would love to see more studies on, so I'm, I'm a believer in interval training, not, like, like, I, maybe twice a week, and...

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Right now, to me, that is, that is just a black art of how you decide how many intervals you should do, how fast they should be, what the rest should be. And so it'd be really interesting to me to see some systematic attempts to understand, like, should you be, at the end of an interval workout, should you have emptied the tank? Or should you feel like you could do one more or two more? And, uh, cause you know, if I, if I think back to, or not just think back to my training days, but to think, think to like, I still get out with my friends and do, do workouts. That's, that's the thing that I enjoy. I, I run on my own lots of days, but when I do workouts, I, I make a big effort to try and get together with some friends because that's a great communal suffering experience.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  But it's like, people are always arguing about the details of the workout. What should we do? And then I've actually broke up some training groups that I was a part of. People were like, we need to be doing more of this or, or, you know, more, you know, the rest is too long, the rest is too short. It's like, dude, my, my sense was like, don't worry about it. It's, it's actually just, just work hard. Don't worry about the details, but. So I don't think that would, I don't think that'd be like a game changer for people, but I think I would love to see some more actual practical, like the coaching side of, of endurance. Cause, cause people have all these formulas and, and ideas, but let's test them.

• 2:03:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it seems very, um, uh, I want to say random, but that's not the word I, I really want. Like maybe haphazard, like it's like, oh, today we do, like there are certain sets, you know, and I know this from swimming. It's like, these are the sets that we do, you know, like once a week we do this. And when he's like, all right, well, who decided that? And like, is that just because of the, they were doing that 10 years ago? Like, where is the real thought and intention? And I think, I think, you know, my answer to your question is both. Like some days it is, you're not going all out and other days you do have to leave it all out on the track, right? And it's knowing. When those moments need to occur. And that's where the coach comes in, right?

• 2:04:19Rich Roll?

  Who knows you? Who, who, when you arrive at the track, he can look you in the eyes and he already knows how to gauge what kind of effort you're gonna need that day or, or, or to pull you back.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  And, and, and so of course, yeah, and that's like, what study could you do?

• 2:04:36Rich Roll?

  What's the science behind that?

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  I mean, what possible study could you do that would, that would get at that nuance? And, and so, I mean, maybe this is a wrapping up thought that one of the, so I felt very guilty at the end of my book that I've, you know, I've, I've made you read all these pages and I'm not going to leave you with the ultimate answer to endurance. And so one of the things I said is that, that's a good thing, that the mystery, the, the sort of unknowability of, of where our limits are, or of what the ideal workout is, is, you know, without that, what would, what would it, what would endurance mean? What would endurance sports be all about? If you could run one race and know that you had, you know, reached your limits and that's how fast you could run, it's like, why would you go out the next morning? If, if there wasn't any mystery, right?

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  So what I like is, is that we don't know, the, the, the recipe is always different. And on any given day, what, even if my physical capacity stays the same from week to week, if I run two 5Ks, they're not going to be in the same time. And so that's, that's kind of the challenge and, and I'm, I'm glad to have that. As much as I love the science and I love kind of picking apart at some of these mysteries, I'm glad that we're nowhere near the, the sort of the end of them.

• 2:05:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I share that. I, I would have been, I actually would have been bombed if you would like tied it up in a bow at the end because the whole book is about how it is complex and mysterious, but also beautiful. And there are things that we can, you know, extract and mine from what we have learned. But ultimately it's about appreciating the complexity and the nuance, you know, and, and to understand that, you know, it's not mind or body, it's both. And these things cannot be like how we opened this with, like they can't be removed from each other and they can't be studied in isolation. They can only be looked at as an interplay of how they relate to one another.

• 2:06:26Rich Roll?

  And I think you could spend your whole life, you know, trying to figure out what that means for you, you know? And I think that that's a cool thing.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Amen to that. But I bet I would have sold a lot more books if I'd had a three sentence answer.

• 2:06:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you know what? Let me tell you something. You might have sold more books in the first month, but I'm telling you, five years from now, 10 years from now, this book is gonna still be selling because you wrote an incredible book. It is an incredible book. And I have a lot of authors on this show. I talk to a lot of people who write books and some better than others, but I really enjoyed this tremendously. And the amount of passion and intention that went into that, I can't even imagine. Of course, it took you eight or nine years, like it shows, you know? And like I said at the outset, you should be super proud. And I encourage everybody who's listening to this, go out and get this book as soon as possible.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for that.

• 2:07:23Rich Roll?

  We can end it on that.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  That's a great place to end. And, you know, thanks for the kind words and thanks for the great conversation.

• 2:07:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, man, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Do we do okay? How do you feel?

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I finished my water glass and you're still awake.

• 2:07:35Rich Roll?

  My endurance is good right now?

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  You didn't even close your eyes once, so I'll take that as a victory.

• 2:07:40Rich Roll?

  It's like I didn't drink any water either, so I guess I'm fasting. We didn't even talk about that. We didn't talk about the deprivation. I was a million. All right. Well, will you come back and talk to me again sometime?

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  I would be delighted.

• 2:07:51Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. Thanks so much. So if you're digging on Alex, first and foremost, pick up his book, Endure. If you want to connect with him, you can find him at Sweat Science on Twitter, alexhutchinson.net, right? Anywhere else?

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Those are the two big ones, I'd say.

• 2:08:06Rich Roll?

  And are you doing any public talks or any of that kind of stuff?

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  I got a few things coming up in Canada, in Vancouver and Victoria, but in June, I may be in Santa Fe, maybe Austin, maybe San Antonio, but it's still, I'm still ironing things out. And if you check my Twitter, they'll be, I'll make sure to have a link to upcoming events.

• 2:08:25Rich Roll?

  You've been doing a lot of public speaking?

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Mostly small stuff so far, but I'm kind of trying to leverage any opportunity I get to go and talk to people.

• 2:08:35Rich Roll?

  And what's next? You know what the next book is?

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that's, I don't know what's next in my life. You know, when you write a book like this, that's kind of the apotheosis of 20 years of your life. You have to decide, do you keep in that same vein? Or do you like, maybe I'll take up gardening? I don't know.

• 2:08:51Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Peace. Thanks.

• 2:08:55Rich Roll?

  Good stuff, people. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope it helps you rethink the limits you impose upon yourself. I hope it helps you break the glass ceiling on whatever goal you seek to achieve. In the meantime, please pick up Alex's new book, Endure. It really is a must read, in my opinion. And give him a shout out on Twitter, at Sweat Science, and let him know what you thought of the exchange. As always, check out the show notes for links and resources related to today's conversation on the episode page at richroll.com, including the link to get tickets to my upcoming talk in New York City with the folks from On Running. That's April 18th at WeWork Times Square. Again, the brand new and revised edition of

• 2:09:37Rich Roll?

  Finding Ultra is now available in paperback, audiobook, ebook, Kindle. Pick it up wherever you buy books. If you can't find it in your region, your nation, your country, we are offering signed copies from my website and we do ship worldwide. Also, Plant Power Way Italia is coming out very soon, April 24th. It would mean the world to us if you would preorder your copy today. It really does help us out a lot. And if you enjoyed our first cookbook, The Plant Power Way, I really think you're going to freak out for this one. It is next level. If you're a woman, please make sure to check out the second most recent blog post on my site for a chance to win a free spot in our upcoming retreat to Tuscany,

• 2:10:16Rich Roll?

  May 19th through 26th, 2018. It's a $5,000 value. $5,000 value. Really excited about this. Contest is only open through April 24th, so jump on it right away. If you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast. It's a simple request. It only takes a minute and only takes a second. It's totally free, but it really does help us out a lot. It would mean a ton. You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. And I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, help with the WordPress page, Blake Curtis for graphics. There's no video this week. And theme music, as always,

• 2:10:57Rich Roll?

  by Anna Lima. Thanks for the love, you guys. We're going to be back here very soon. Actually, this is the only episode this week. But next week, I got a great conversation with my friend, Tom Scott, the founder of the Nantucket Project. I think you guys are gonna really dig it. It's definitely a gear shift from some of the recent episodes, and I'm pretty excited about that one. In the meantime, go forth into the world and prosper. Be of service, be kind to yourself, and I'll see you back here next week. Peace, plants. Amaste.