He Ran Across America — On Plants

Imagine running an ultramarathon. It’s a huge undertaking for anyone. And a bucket list dream for many. Now imagine running an ultramarathon every day. A minimum of 40 miles, 75 days in a row. Starting in Los Angeles. Finishing in New York. A 3,200 mile transcontinental run. This is the story of Robbie Balenger. Just 6 years ago, Robbie laced up his first pair of running shoes to alleviate the stress he was experiencing managing a restaurant. A small act, that first run set in motion a chain of events that led to a passion for running long distances, followed by a purpose-driven mission promote a message — the power of a plant-based diet to fuel athletic performance. Prevent and reverse certain lifestyle maladies. Ameliorate suffering. And redress climate change. What Robbie didn't expect? The many extraordinary ways running creates community. Unites people across the economic divide. And bridges the political differences that drive us apart. I was unfamiliar with Robbie until an e-mail hit my inbox courtesy of my friend and former podcast guest, Olympic cyclist Dotsie Bausch (RRP 355). Her non-profit Switch4Good was sponsoring Robbie's attempt to cross the United States by foot. Would I be interested in helping to support their efforts? I jumped at the opportunity. On March 16, I showed up at dawn in Huntington Beach to meet Robbie for the first time and help kick off his momentous attempt. Running the first several miles alongside Robbie and a small crew of supporters, I immediately took to his earnest yet humble disposition. His passion for promoting the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle. And his determination to reach New York a mere 75 days later. We struck up a friendship that day. I kept keen tabs on his progress over the following months. And made him a promise: Finish the run and you earn a seat at the podcast table. All heart, he indeed finished it. Today I honor that promise. And it’s a great story, well told. You can watch it all go down on YouTube. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange as much as I relished having it. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think it all came down to, like, I desperately wanted this. I wanted it for a lot of reasons. I wanted it, one, for the outreach, for the advocacy. It meant a lot to me to start being a force for positive change. And, two, I was lost. I'd come out of 15 years, more, in the restaurant industry, and it didn't feel like I wanted to do that anymore. I knew whatever I did next, I wanted it to be something that fed my soul. And moving my body does. And pushing the limits of what I can do physically. So I just kept doubling down that this is what I had to do. I had to get this together, and a lot of it was just faith that it would come together. And again, going back to that mantra that my mom instilled in me, you can do anything

• 1:51Speaker 01

  you set your mind to. And I think that's something important for people to understand, is just because something's hard in the beginning doesn't mean it's always going to be. It's amazing what we're capable of. And I think a lot of what you have to do is not get overwhelmed by the larger task at hand, whatever it is. And just start chopping away, little by little, at whatever you're trying to achieve. Nobody gets to something huge overnight. It's gonna take time.

• 2:15Rich Roll?

  That's Robbie Ballinger, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:29Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Imagine running an ultra marathon. It's a huge undertaking for anybody, a bucket list dream for so many people out there. Now I want you to imagine running an ultra marathon every single day, 40 miles a day, every day for 75 days in a row, starting in Los Angeles, finishing in New York. A 3,200 mile transcontinental run. This is the story of Robbie Ballinger. In many ways, an everyman, a guy who just six years ago laced up a pair of running shoes for the first time, simply to alleviate the job stress of being a restaurant manager.

• 3:12Rich Roll?

  And it's a path that led to a passion, not just for running, but the potential of running to promote a message. In Robbie's case, a message close to my heart, the power of a plant-based diet to fuel athletic performance, to heal and prevent chronic lifestyle disease, to alleviate suffering and climate change, and ultimately make the world a better place. Robbie is a friend. He's a great guy with a big heart, and his extraordinary yarn is coming up in a couple few, but first...

• 3:51Rich Roll?

  Okay, Robbie. So about a year ago, February of 2019, I get this email from my buddy Dotzy Bausch. You remember Dotzy, right? The Olympic cyclist from episode 355 from about two years ago. I think that episode went up in March of 2018. Well, Dotzy has this nonprofit organization called Switch for Good. It's a vegan advocacy group promoting plant-based diets for athletes and more. And she basically asked if I would be willing to help support this guy Robbie Ballinger, who Switch for Good was sponsoring in his attempt to run across America. I didn't know Robbie. I actually hadn't heard of him before, but I said, yeah, sure.

• 4:34Rich Roll?

  And on March 16 of this past year, I showed up at dawn in Huntington Beach to help kick off his attempt and run the first several miles with him. And I immediately took to this guy, his genuine, down-to-earth, humble disposition, his enthusiasm for running and the movement. We struck up a friendship that day. I keenly kept tabs on his transcontinental attempt over the next few months. And I made a promise to him that if he should finish this thing, when he should finish this thing, that he would come on the show and tell me all about it. Well, he did finish it. And it's a great story. So here we are. And here we go.

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  Robbie, good to have you here.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  I'm excited to talk to you about this epic adventure that you just completed. We've had, we had a conversation about it in Denver, about, what was that, like, six weeks ago, or something like that?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah, a couple of weeks to a month or so.

• 5:34Rich Roll?

  How are you feeling?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I'm feeling good. Yeah, when I saw you in Denver, I was still in the depths of understanding what I had just done. I guess I still am to some degree.

• 5:44Rich Roll?

  You'd barely gotten home.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I'd been home less than a week.

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd been, I was in New York for a week post-run, and then had been back in Denver, yeah, a week or so.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it looks like you're back running a little bit here and there.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I am, yeah. I went as far as to try to run the Leadville 50 a couple of weeks ago. I made it halfway.

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  Why? Why? What do you?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  That's, that's definitely what I'm asking myself now. I think I just wanted to see where my legs were and try to understand my fitness level. And definitely found a lot out. I think I have a level of fitness I did not before. In a lot of ways, the 75 day run was a training block.

• 6:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  But in other ways, it destroyed my legs. So I have this fitness, but my legs weren't ready for what my, my body could do, if that makes any sense.

• 6:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So I would imagine it's a weird thing where part of you is like, hey, man, I should probably lay low for a while. But also, like, I just, I just did this thing. Like, I'm crazy fit. Like, let me go show what I can do.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I mean, I'm new ish to running, and you know, pretty new ultra runner. I've only been running for six years. I ran two 50 Ks and two 50 milers before I made the decision to do this.

• 6:54Rich Roll?

  But you did those, like, right on top of each other.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Well, this, I mean, before I decided to do it, once I decided to do it, then I kept pushing. In a year, I did a lot. But, you know, so yeah, there's this newfound level of fitness that it's fun to explore, yet how far can I explore it right now?

• 7:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So when you decided to run across the country, you'd only done two or three?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, two 50 Ks and two 50 milers.

• 7:19Rich Roll?

  All right, well, let's paint the picture. You ran across the United States in 75 days, 3,175 miles. Is that correct?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  Averaging something like 45 miles a day?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  It was average 43, 45 after my, after day 23. We, we had to go there to make sure everything was going to be in line for my 75 day finish.

• 7:40Rich Roll?

  Right, all right, so why? Like, why do this?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's kind of a long to that.

• 7:49Rich Roll?

  We got, we got, that's what we do here.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  That's what this is for, right? I believe it all really started in 2016.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Right at the outcome of the presidential election. I kind of was in a place where I felt really lost. Didn't understand it, really. And through that, I also found that I had a lot of family members that saw things much differently than I did. And one of those, someone whom I love and who has supported me through so much of my life, but we just see the world through a different lens. My aunt, we got on the phone a couple of days afterwards and I was just spitting venom. I was pretty upset. And in that conversation, she posed a question to me and she said, what are you doing so great? That my opinion matters so much. And that really resonated with me. At the time, I was running some restaurants in Austin, Texas.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And from that point on, I was also very overworked and overstressed at my job, a lot of which I was putting on myself. I think due to a lack of confidence. I wasn't delegating. I was just taking it all in, taking it all in. And through that, her posing that question, it put me in some type of existential crisis. And that was what, November 2016? By September of 2017, I had left the restaurants.

• 9:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  Wow, so that's, that's a, you know, first of all, it demonstrates your ability to listen and hear, because you could have deflected that. So something that she said resonated with you, like she held a mirror up to you, like.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 9:21Rich Roll?

  You're such hot shit, man.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  And you were able to hear that and process it. And then, and then the second piece of that being that you actually did something about it.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in that question, it made me really start to look at myself and our. Our culture is a larger thing and see that we're all so many are armchair advocates, armchair pundits and that just didn't sit well with me as an individual. So that started, yeah, this longer process of figuring out what, what did I stand for and what was something I wanted to make an impact in and.

• 9:58Rich Roll?

  What was the process of trying to unpack that for yourself?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Well, over the next, again, eight months or so, it was 10 months was figuring out that I needed to leave my current, my current career. And on the heels of that, my fiancee decided she wanted to go to nursing school. So we were going to move to Denver and as we made that choice, I was going to take some time for myself and go travel Southeast Asia or South America. And at that time, there, the hurricanes hit down in the Caribbean and I lived on St. John in the US Virgin Islands in my early twenties and I still had a lot of friends and loved ones down there and didn't hear from them for a while and, you know, it scared me. And I decided

• 10:41Speaker 01

  instead of taking that, that aloof trip abroad, I would go down there and help. And when I got down there, one, I ended up feeling very powerless in helping, just being an individual. I think I was there for them emotionally and let them have someone that wasn't a part of it. There was a lot of trauma, but I also saw a couple of things. One, I saw, wow, like Mother Nature's pissed. This storm's filled, they just felt like they were entirely too big. And two, I saw hope and happiness in people who had lost everything, everything, all the things that we all worked for. And somewhere in that, when I came back, I knew I wanted to do something

• 11:22Speaker 01

  in environmentalism. And so then it was the thought of going into solar or possibly a little wildland firefighting. But I was, I, I'd been running prior to that a lot. I'd already done some ultras and I moved to Denver and I just kept running more and more. And it was just where I was processing and sifting through what I wanted to do. And in that, I ended up going down to the Caballo Blanco 50 down in the Copper Canyon in Mexico, made famous by Born to Run.

• 11:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And down there, I met a guy, Patrick Sweeney, who had ran across the country. And it just, I just was like, okay, this is a thing you can do. Here's a guy who has done it. And when I came back, we were at this time, my fiance and I, like, understanding our food choices to a bigger degree. We were both, at that point, vegetarian. And I had a gut check with myself about that. And I was like, here's an environmental stance that really matters that as individuals we can, we can do, all of us can have a part in, and that's to adopt a plant-based lifestyle. And also understood, due to the examples in front of me of Scott Detrick and you, like, it's really good for you performance-wise. So all these things started to just circle around on my first run back after going to the Copper Canyon.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And I just hit all these things. Let's do, what's the biggest thing you can do? Well, I can run across the country like that guy I just met. And why would I do it? And it's to promote a plant-based lifestyle with the initial reason being mainly just environmentalism. And so that kind of helped to align all of my passions and the things I understood. I understand food. I've been in food my whole life, and I loved running. And this environmental crisis scares the shit out of me.

• 13:03Rich Roll?

  Right. So at that point, though, you weren't 100% plant-based.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:09Rich Roll?

  Is that correct?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  But the guy who, Patrick is his name, who ran across the country, he was he?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  He is, yes.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right. So he had done it plant-based.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  He had, yeah.

• 13:17Rich Roll?

  So that example was there.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  That example was there. And another guy I found out later has done it plant-based. There's no, yeah.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  Prior to you, there were two dudes.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  There's no governing body over this, so it's kind of hard to say for sure, but...

• 13:26Rich Roll?

  There is like a website where they kind of keep track of everyone who does it, though.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  There's a Facebook group. That seems to be, have a lot on there. And yeah, there is a website that's kind of... Got most of it.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  Right, because every year, like, a couple of people make this attempt, right? How many people total have done it?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  I think approximately the 330. First person was in 1909, I believe.

• 13:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The history of it is crazy. Like, there was a period of time that doesn't get talked about or written about very much, where there was like this, people were running crazy distances in the early 1900s.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Twenty-eight, 1928, 1929. There were two races coined, the Great Bunyan Derbies. And they were to show off the beginning of Route 66. And, yeah, they were stage races, but they went all the way across the country.

• 14:12Rich Roll?

  And they were like tourism, like, they were like marketed, they were supposed to be like, to create awareness around this, this new highway, right?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  And which was nice, or interesting, that I ended up spending the first half of the run on Route 66. And here we are on the other side of Route 66. It was just starting, and now, there's not much left of it.

• 14:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  You know, there's parts of it where there's no funding, and bridges are washed out, and we saw all kinds of interesting stuff.

• 14:37Rich Roll?

  Isn't that like part of the, the narrative in that animated movie Cars? I think it take, you know, you know that Pixar movie?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  I think it takes place on Route 66, and it's about kind of what happens to that economy and culture when they build the superhighway?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Okay, yes. I mean, it makes all the sense. That movie, I vaguely remember it, but that makes all the sense in the world, yeah. I saw that, you know?

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's incredible that, that it dates back that far. So, you've kind of had this journeyman life for most of your adulthood, right? Kind of like this into the wild, you know, sort of sensibility about you.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Where does, where does that emanate from?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. Growing up, you know, my mom really, she liked to travel. We never, we traveled domestically, but we were always hopping around.

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  You're from Georgia, right?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  I grew up in Georgia. My mom's family was in Texas most of my childhood. So, I spent a lot of time going back and forth. My mom's father, he traveled a lot, and he'd take me on road trips and stuff. So, I think it started there, and then when I was, you know, it's funny, you said into the wild. When I was 22, I moved to Denali National Park, and they were actually filming that movie that summer.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  So yeah, that was kind of definitely part, you know, that helps to kind of sum it up. And then from there, I moved to the Virgin Islands for a couple of years, which I mentioned earlier. And then made my way to Austin and spent the majority of the last 10 years there.

• 16:00Rich Roll?

  But during that period of time of travel, like, did you have a sense of what, were you were just having an adventure? Like, that was, was the idea like, I'm just gonna do this as long as I can? Or do you have a sense of, you know, like, well, I'm gonna settle down and do X when I'm done with this?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 16:16Rich Roll?

  No?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  No, even I think when I moved to Austin, it was a jumping point. My mom had moved there and the rest of my family, my mom's family had moved kind of to the Austin area. But I got there and anyone that spent time in Austin knows, like, it's, it's beautiful, it's fun. Being in my early twenties, it was a great place to kind of settle for a while. And got really involved with the restaurant industry there and had a great time.

• 16:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so you were like part owner in a pizzeria?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started off just overseeing operations. There were six employees and we had one little spot. It's a beautiful little restaurant, Bufulina. And then from there, we grew into a second one. And when we opened the second, I became partner. I had some ownership in it, but was overseeing operations for the two restaurants. And yeah, that was kind of what I was doing. And I was using running as a stress reliever from all of the mounting stress of, of the job.

• 17:05Rich Roll?

  The job, right. So how does that, how does running enter the picture specifically?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  My fiance now, girlfriend at the time, she was also working at the restaurant. We started dating a couple of months after it opened. And I was living a lifestyle that's very, very much a part of, I think, all restaurant industries, not just the one in Austin, but it was work hard and party just a little bit harder.

• 17:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And

• 17:30Rich Roll?

  Of course, man, that's why you do it.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's readily available, everything, booze everywhere.

• 17:36Rich Roll?

  Do it at work.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so I was doing that, but I care, I really had worked hard and stuck to making sure that this restaurant opened. It meant a lot to me. It felt like it was a big step up for me, a big like career move. And as it opened, we were wildly busy right off of the bat. It's, it's still to this day, such a beautiful, successful restaurant. And the mounting stress of that wasn't working with the partying so much. And my fiance now, she, she had

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Ran one marathon. Her father was a marathoner and she asked me to go out on a run and we went two and a half miles and I got a cab home. We got a juice at Daily Juice downtown Austin and cab home. That was all I had in me, but it stuck. That was it. That was the way. It hit so many of the things that that party lifestyle hit. I like, I've talked about it in the past. It's, it's like, running is the inverse of a drug. Sometimes, especially when you're starting off or just getting back in shape, you feel like shit while you're doing it and then you feel great afterwards. What are drugs? You feel great while you're doing it and then you feel awful afterwards. So I really, I liked that. I liked that. For me, running taps into this primal

• 18:53Speaker 01

  thing and it just feels like everything aligns. It's like where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to be doing. It just feels so good. So that, again, it just stuck and it was two and a half miles, half marathon, couple of months later, Philly marathon the next year, 50 miler the next year. So it just, it kept being.

• 19:12Rich Roll?

  Basically a light switch got flicked and that was it.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there was another instance that really got me in it. I ran a marathon. I'd heard about ultras. I was clued in enough that I think I was following some guys on Instagram. And we took a weekend, long weekend vacation up to the San Juans in Colorado to Silverton. And it just so happened to be the weekend before Hard Rock. And went downtown Silverton and there was all the big boys. They were all there. And I grew up an only child, I grew up an only child, but also with just a single mother. My father passed away when I was really young. And I think I've always been wondering and searching for, what does it mean to be a

• 19:55Speaker 01

  man? Like, who am I in all of this? And for me, for so long, partying was that. There was a sense that that was a way to be like hardcore, to be, to be, you know, a man. And being up there and seeing these guys, it was just so quick. It's like, well, that's another example right there. And so that really resonated with me. And on the way home, I had Shelley look up.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  How do you qualify for Hard Rock? I was so naive to it that I thought I could just quickly work my way to Hard Rock.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  To like the hardest race, basically, in America.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, yeah, we found a 50 miler that was a qualifier. Or you did the 50 and then the following year I could do the 100 and that would qualify me. So I went and did one back where I grew up in Georgia.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  What was it about the ultra? Was it just seeing those guys and the access that you had? Because it's such a low-key, like, subculture. What was it about the ultra community that made you think, this is for me? As opposed to, oh, I ran a marathon and I saw these guys that won the marathon? Like, you could have keyed into that instead.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  I've always had a draw to trails and just being more in the wilderness. I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians and was always on or near the Appalachian Trail. So there's always been a love of that, living in Alaska. I mean, marathons are fun. I still enjoy a marathon. What's terrible about a marathon is you never take a break. You know, in 50 miles, you come to an aid station, at least you stop for a minute.

• 21:22Rich Roll?

  Well, you can. You can take a break in a marathon.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that, no. But then whereas, you know, ultras, it's just, yeah, it's, it takes so much. It's, and you get to be in the middle of, you can choose these races that puts you somewhere where you may never go. A lot of that, just the grit of it. I think grit would be the word.

• 21:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, that's a pretty quick trajectory from newbie runner into doing ultras.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was. It was only a couple of years. When I decided to do that 50 miler, I'd only ran the Philly Marathon. And then in the training block to get ready for it, I ran the Austin Marathon and Hell's Hills 50K in Smithville, Texas.

• 22:07Rich Roll?

  And during that period of time, what were you relying on in terms of how to structure your training?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Well, actually, who ended up being my crew chief for my run across the country? My fiance's sister, Jackie, she wrote a very basic plan for me. And I stuck to it, you know, it was just when to run and how far to run.

• 22:29Rich Roll?

  That was it?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That was it.

• 22:30Rich Roll?

  That's all you needed?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I stuck to it. I mean, almost every, I think, almost every workout I go.

• 22:35Rich Roll?

  Right. So I gather that with each one of these races that you you did, you became more emotionally engaged with this community and this world, and you had this thirst to go farther and do more.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Totally, absolutely. Yeah. And then moving to Denver, kind of upped that a little bit more, you know, I wasn't, I didn't personally know any of these elite runners that live in that area, but just being amongst them, being close to them, just made me just fiend for it even more.

• 23:05Rich Roll?

  Well, when we had dinner in Denver, you were like, I mean, you had just returned from your run, so you had moved to Denver, but then you really actually didn't really live there very much, right? And you were saying like, I still want, you don't like, know anybody there?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  No, yeah, very little community there, because when we got there, yeah, I got obsessed with this idea. I had a plan to build and I had a sponsor to find and, yeah, I had to get all those things in line.

• 23:30Rich Roll?

  So you'd done these couple ultras, you come back from the Copper Canyon, and you're like, I'm gonna do this. So walk me through, you know, the process of of going from audacious idea into actual reality. You know, with this, right? Like, what happens when you tell Shelley? Like, when you're like, okay, I'm gonna do this thing, like, how was that received? And, you know, I'm sure some people were like, slow down cowboy.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Shelley's always very supportive, and it was just a kind of a matter of fact, okay, all right, let's let's do it. You know, there was some questioning later on as I struggled. To get momentum in the way I needed to make it happen, but most, for the most part, everyone around me was very supportive. And in hindsight, I do think that's rare. That I didn't have, along the way, very few nice hairs. I had a lot of friends that kind of chuckled. That's just, you know, would give me kind of a look of, okay, you know, but some of them ended up being my crew as I did it. So there was a big, you know, like, yeah.

• 24:31Rich Roll?

  Now, being on the other side of it and appreciating the magnitude of the whole thing, do you think that you benefited from the naivete of like, not really fully grasping what it was that you were trying to tackle? Like, there's something about that innocence, like when you don't, like, if you had, like, let's say you'd been around ultras for five or 10 years. You know, it's like you, then you have a sense of like, how hard this is gonna be. And maybe like, yeah, I don't know if I want to do that. But like, the enthusiasm of being new and not really having all the experience that perhaps one might have suggested you need for something like this can work to your benefit, right? Cause you're just like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do it. Yeah, don't worry about it.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Well, most of us in our head anyways. So just like not having those blockers of what the status quo would be for something like this. Yeah, I think it was to my advantage.

• 25:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And then it was just a matter of how am I gonna do it? You know, there was the training that had to happen. And there was creating a plan so that I could shop that to sponsors or someone to help me along the way. And so with those two things, you know, the plan or the training plan was pretty rudimentary. I kind of broke it up into three parts. The first part I was, I wanted to make sure that I could run consistently every day. So I ran 10 miles a day, taking every 15th day off and did that for a couple of months, three months or so, maybe a little longer. And then the second part was continuing to run every day, but upped it to 100, 110 miles a week.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  And then by the third time, the third set, or the third block, I had. Obtained my sponsor, Nada Mu, dairy-free ice cream. And together, we went to a handful of races. And I wanted to make sure that I could, I wanted to normalize 50 miles. So the idea was get to race pace, do it every other week and do that for a while. And then if you can do it at race pace, well, then hopefully I can just do it a little bit slower. But for days on end.

• 26:31Rich Roll?

  So literally running an ultra every other weekend?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did back to like two, a weekend in between two of those, like two sets of those. Another 100K in there. And maybe a 50K too, I believe.

• 26:45Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So how much time between returning from the Copper Canyon and day one of the cross country?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  A year and one day.

• 26:53Rich Roll?

  Okay. So a year, a year to get ready. But not like you banked, you know, years of ultra races with, you know, everything that that kind of happens when your body acclimates to that kind of pounding over time, like the ligaments and the tendon, like these things take more time than your heart and your lungs to get in shape. Right? So that's a lot.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  It was, it was a lot.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  And no, no real room to get injured or for, you know, any margin of error.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  No, at one point, early on, I got a, like a neuroma on the bottom of my foot to an inflamed nerve. It feels like you're just stepping on a nail. And yeah, it was, it was, it was mortifying. I was so scared, you know, but you always can adjust. There's always, I feel like a way to adjust. I'm blessed with really good biomechanics. Unless I push, I've found when I get injured is when I try to run fast. And luckily for this, that wasn't really part of the equation.

• 27:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. But where did you come up with this training plan? Was that just your idea? Or did you start getting some insight from some people that now you're just?

• 28:01Rich Roll?

  I love that.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really feel, I mean, I again am blessed with good biomechanics. So I felt like it was all in my head and it was a matter of just gaining the confidence I needed, normalizing distances. And I thought with those things together, my willpower, my mom always, she always, I remember growing up, there was one mantra, it was you can do anything you set your mind to. And I've lived by that one. And that, in this, that was, this was like the ultimate test to that, you know, in a lot of ways.

• 28:31Rich Roll?

  This idea of going plant-based, though, I mean, that was, you're coming back again, I keep going back to the Copper Canyon, but this is like the genesis of all of this, right? The idea of doing this plant-based or becoming plant-based 100%, I mean, that was theoretical at that point. So you're on top of doing all this training, you're making this dietary shift at the same time, right? So how did that go? What did that look like?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  It wasn't overnight. It wasn't, you know, we were already vegetarian and at that point, there was no, so one little tidbit, when I went down to the Copper Canyon for that race, I didn't finish it. The first year, so when I made the plan to do this, and the reason was, is we were staying at a really small hotel, it felt more like just a host family and they offered up three meals a day and they were not vegetarian. And I didn't, I didn't want to be a difficult guest, so I was just eating what they put in front of me and I got food poisoning the night before the race and ended up scratching at mile 20 and it was some rancid chicken. That was the last time I've ever had meat, that's for sure. And then getting back, it was, it was over a couple of months to where I can put, before

• 29:37Speaker 01

  I was like, okay, I am 110% plant-based. And I think that was important, the process in order for me, as I set out across the country, to be able to talk to others about this. And I think something that really resonates with me is the idea of Not preaching like absolutism and allowing people to have space to make these decisions over time. I think it's so really daunting when we as advocates are just like, you need to be vegan right now. And instead, it's, I like the idea of we have three meals a day. How many can you make a positive change in? And then over time, you can cumulatively make more and more until hopefully at the end, you've ended up with something that's more absolute or not. And you're still just doing better than maybe you were before you were turned on to this idea.

• 30:23Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, I think that's really the only way to advocate, you know, I mean, this is, this is how everybody makes positive changes in their life. It's not linear and it's not perfect. And if you set up a structure or an expectation that that's how it has to go for people, you're creating a barrier and you're just alienated, alienating those people who would otherwise perhaps be interested.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you're making them destined to fail.

• 30:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  There's just.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  I mean, it is a problem in the, in the vegan community because there's a lot of, you know, I mean, no matter how vegan you are, there's somebody else who's more vegan and they're going to tell you about it. And there's nothing that, that upsets me more. Well, there are certain things that upset me more, but it is upsetting when you see somebody who's made a positive leap in the right direction or in this direction. And then somebody from the community tells them they're doing it wrong, or they're not doing enough, or why did, you know, and, and you gotta put wind in people's sails. Don't like, you know, snuff out that light when it's just been, you know, lit for the first time.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I agree. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Negativity and putting people down is not the way to get anyone to do anything.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  So I couldn't agree more with that. And going across the country, we met a lot of people, you know, dairy farmers, cattle farmers and everything in between. And I'll say that we didn't have a single naysayer about what I was out there to talk about. And I think a lot of that came from that outlook and coming to people with positivity and.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Not from a point of higher than mighty. It was just, you know.

• 32:02Rich Roll?

  You're not going to tell the dairy farmer that he's got to change, you know, his business.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:07Rich Roll?

  Or his practices.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I mean, when he would ask me.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  It's gone back for generations.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. When he'd ask me what I was doing, I'd just get a grin. I was like, I'm running across the country to create conversations about better food choices. I'm, I'm, I'm vegan. And we would both just kind of grin. We knew what we were, you know?

• 32:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  But I'm sure to a degree, it resonated to some degree with him, you know, I was, when I was 19 or 20, I saw Super Size Me. It was about when that came out and it was the beginning of this catalyst for change. And it took another 15 years for me to end up with what I just did.

• 32:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And I like to think of that when I was out there of just being, maybe it's just putting something in someone's ear. And maybe that dairy farmer ends up having some health issues 10 years down the road. And maybe he remembers back to meeting me and that helps him to make a change that will better impact his life.

• 32:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Who's that Forrest Gump dude with the beard that ran through the year 10 years ago? How did it go with acclimating to the dietary shift with, with training and recovery and the like?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Uh, it was all positive. You know, I didn't have any issues. I had a lot of affirmations that it was the right thing to do. Um, with everything, the closer I got to completely plant-based, the less and less recovery I needed between runs. Uh, another one that really got me was phlegm. Like just not getting out on runs and feeling clear. Like I could, I could breathe really well. Um, yeah, there was, there was no negative side for me. I didn't, I didn't feel as though that there was some like detox, like transition time that was needed. I think. If you start tomorrow, you're you're gonna feel it within two or three days.

• 33:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, you you had to get off all that pizza cheese.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was hard.

• 33:54Rich Roll?

  Flimes coming from.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, yeah, mozzarella all day.

• 33:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so a year to prepare and you're ramping up this training pretty quickly. I mean, that's a lot of miles to suddenly be putting on your legs and all these races and all of that. Meanwhile, just trying to corral A, the resources, so you're trying to line up these sponsors. And then, you know, second to that, the logistics of trying to pull this thing off. I mean, you know, that it's a it's a tall order to try to figure out how you're gonna get all the way, you know, 3,000 miles across the country in one piece with people that are, because you can't do it alone, you gotta get people to help you and support you and all of that. And it's a it's no small undertaking and financially, it's gotta be daunting as well.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, so those two parts needed to come together. And I started by making sure I had the support around me. I'd figure out the logistics later. And so I started by driving back down to Austin and sitting down with my fiancee Shelley's parents. They're, you know, recently retired, they had the time and are both really smart people. And we sat down together and over four days created an initial outline of what I wanted to do. And from there, I started shopping that around to organizations and brands. And, you know, a couple of doors shut in my face and really had to look at those as just

• 35:22Speaker 01

  an an opportunity to see that those were not the right fit. That wasn't the right person to bring on as my team instead of getting defeated by it. And then I approached Nada Mu Dairy Free Ice Cream out of Austin. The CEO, Daniel Nicholson, is a Old friend acquaintance from Austin and I'd seen through social media that his coconut milk based ice cream company was making some plant-based advocacy stances on social media and I contacted him through Instagram and said, hey, can we have a conversation? And 30 minutes turned into an hour and a half and the synergy was just right. It felt like this was who I wanted to do it with. And he really seemed to be, he put the advocacy in front. It was, it was more than, I had, you know, a lot of why brands will come on

• 36:06Speaker 01

  board with athletes these days is your social media, you know, exposure. I think I had 800 followers. So it wasn't that. You know, I wasn't doing much for him.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  You're not gonna boost their game.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  No, no. But he believed in what I wanted to do. And I, and that, you know, that was something as, as I set out on the run that also motivated me throughout is that belief that he had in me. You know, at that point, by the time I started, he had put a lot of resources into this. The company had a lot of people had put a lot of time, a lot of money. And I don't take someone's confidence in me lightly. So that was a motivating factor as well. Once we decided to do this together. And then with it being an ice cream company, I thought it was a good fit. It was playful. I thought that was really important. When I went to these races, building up to it, we took ice cream with us. And I realized really quick how big of a bridge this was.

• 36:55Rich Roll?

  Everybody likes ice cream. If you're coming, if you're leading with ice cream, the doors are open. Coconut or whatever it's made out of.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it, it provides a good example of where we need to head. You know, we're not going to get rid of ice cream. I don't want to see you rid of ice cream. Ice cream's great. It's iconic. It's American. And it was, it's just, it's a good example of a way that we can move forward without using animal products. And so I really liked that about the product.

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  And without, and, and it, it short circuits the divisiveness around the conversation because we can all agree that we all like ice cream.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that little peace offering, you know, we gave them push cart. So as I went across the country. The way we created conversations, my crew did a really good job. They took care of talking to a lot of the people along the way and being advocates. And the way that we did that was my, I had a camper that was being pulled by a van and we had wrapped those with my sponsors. So the van was wrapped with Nautamu and then Switch for Good, Dotzy Bosch's.

• 37:55Rich Roll?

  Right. Which is how we first connected.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. She, she came on late in the game and helped a lot as well. And so she wrapped the camper. And this was really cool. You know, it made us look like a NASCAR team going across the country, but it also, it provided a focal point for people to come talk to us. And then as people would come up and at gas stations in rural Oklahoma and ask what we were doing, my crew could, you know, they could hand them two things and they would hand them a pint of ice cream and a push card that said who I was, what I was doing, and it provided five or six recipes that they could go online to find. And so that was how we created this conversation. And then a lot of the time they would wait on me to come in, whoever was who we had engaged with, and I'd get to talk to them for a moment and then be on my way again. So that was kind of how we made this happen.

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  How many pints of ice cream did you guys give away?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I don't know. That's a good question. You know, we were, our size was limited, but we kept re-upping. We, all we had was a mini fridge and a mini freezer in the camper.

• 38:50Rich Roll?

  Were you getting like FedEx shipments of more ice cream though? Because you're

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 38:54Rich Roll?

  Along the way?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Luckily, Nautamu only recently went national. So we were able to find it.

• 38:59Rich Roll?

  I've seen it around now. Like, it's funny, because when we, I was, I was familiar with the brand, like I knew of the brand when we ran on that first day. But I hadn't seen it around, but now I'm seeing it everywhere I go.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're growing. And it's a good product, has really low, low sugar compared to other brand or other ice creams. And yeah, it wasn't as hard to find as I, I had even anticipated. Luckily, as I was getting ready for this, they were also ramping up their distribution.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You're a good ambassador.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  One thing that I gather from this is that like, I'm interested in, in the audacity of like chasing an outrageous goal, right? And, and kind of the mindset that's required to do that. And, you know, my belief and my sense is that you would agree with this is that you have to, first of all, you have to have the confidence that you can accomplish something like this, like deep, deep down. And then you have to just, or even if you're, you have some insecurities, you still have to act as if, you have to proceed accordingly. And with so many moving pieces, money, crew, like all these things that have to come together in order for you to pull this off, you can't wait until all that's figured out because the clock's ticking and you've set this date. Like you have to just presume that this is

• 40:21Rich Roll?

  happening, right? And just say, it's going to get worked out. You know, you're doing the footwork, the legwork, like literally in your training and whatever you're doing on the phone to like pull these things, elements together. But that, that belief, like you have to be the lighthouse because if you don't believe it and have that confidence, how can you expect the CEO of Not Amu and all these crew people who are going to sacrifice their personal time to support you in this? Like they have to, they have to, they get that from you, right? So you have to carry that vibration.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think it all came down to like, I desperately wanted this. I wanted it for a lot of reasons. I wanted it, one, for the outreach, for the advocacy. It meant a lot to me to, to start being a force for positive change. And two, I was lost. I'd come out of 15 years, more in the restaurant industry and it didn't feel like I wanted to do that anymore. And as much as I enjoyed that time in my life and I was good at what I did, it doesn't give you a lot of skillsets outside of it. And I knew whatever I did next, I wanted it to be something that fed my soul. And moving my body does. And pushing

• 41:33Speaker 01

  the limits of what I can do physically. So I just kept doubling down that this is what I had to do. I had to get this together. And a lot of it was just... Faith that it would come together. And again, going back to that mantra that my mom instilled in me, you can do anything you set your mind to. And it, you know, it's easy to sit here and say that it just was that easy, but there was a lot of discouragement. There were a lot of times that I have, I probably wasn't too pleasant to be around at home. And, you know, my fiance was really, she's an amazing human to put up with me through a lot of that. Cause there were, there was a lot of times where I was scared, you know, how was I going to get this together? And, and then there was that moment, you know, going back to the, the plan of, once I did get

• 42:17Speaker 01

  everything on board, I still didn't have the logistics together. And then that all came to a head over Christmas. You know, I left again, March 15th, and over Christmas, we were back in Austin. And I was having a pretty big freak out. I didn't have a route. I didn't have a crew vehicle. I didn't have a crew chief. I didn't even really have my nutrition plan yet. And luckily, the support of my in-laws and my fiance and her sister, we all sat down around a table and we started figuring it all out and just checking those things off. And it was the first time where I realized how much a team mattered. Again, going back to my career in the restaurants,

• 42:58Speaker 01

  I had, I was a good leader, but I wasn't a really great delegator. And I wasn't really good at trusting in others. A fiercely independent person, just have been my whole adult life, if not even in childhood. And that was my first place where I felt overwhelmed and I had, I needed help. And they all came together so selflessly and without me having to beg for it. They did, they sensed it that I needed it. And we sat down and we broke off chunks for everybody to take care of. And within a week span, most things were in order. And then had I continued to try to do everything by myself.

• 43:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  You know, March 15th.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  A little bit of a control freak.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's, yeah, I guess it's control freak. It's not that I don't believe other people are capable of things. I just have a hard time asking.

• 43:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  I think is more where it comes from. And I don't know if that's just, again, only child, just like really independent. I don't know where that really comes from, but I'm glad to say that through this process, I'm much less that way.

• 44:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the route part of it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to figure out because so many people have done, you know, 300 people have done this and they share their routes, right? Aren't there like, there are like specific routes where they're like this, if you're gonna do it, like this is what, this is the way you do it.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the official route is from San Francisco, I want to say it's from San Francisco City Hall to Tavern on the Green in Central Park.

• 44:26Rich Roll?

  Central Park, yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  I, when we sat down again at this table at Christmas, I really wasn't sure what my route was gonna be. I was looking at everything. Part of me at one time really wanted to do it through the deep south, being from Georgia. I felt like it's a place that I could talk to people in a way maybe others couldn't. And we started looking, but then someone put in, in Google Maps, you know, LA to New York City. And just seeing it on the map, I was like, well, that, nobody denies that you ran across the country if you do that. It's definitely the longest route. And at that point, it's like, that's what I want to do. I know it's longer, you know, you go other spots, you can go 2,600 miles, where this one was just under 3,200. And we found that there was a race in 2011 that some Frenchmen

• 45:14Speaker 01

  put on. And it went, it was called Lanny, LA to New York. And we found some PDFs that they had left online of a route. And so we took that and we started laying that down on Strava Maps and built out my, my route. Cause my, the biggest thing I was worried about was sometimes it's really hard to judge what is the safest route. Where's the shoulders? Where, where's the most optimal road to run on the side? I mean, I'm on the side of the road every day for 12 hours. That's a lot of time for some, something to go wrong. And so that was, yeah, that was how we found the route. It ended up being something that was weighing on me, but once we found that, it alleviated that. And then Chris, Shelley's father, he took the time to put it all into Strava maps and then also double

• 45:59Speaker 01

  check it with Google Earth and stuff of that nature to just make sure it looked right.

• 46:04Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I never really thought of it in that much detail. Like, it's not necessarily, like, the best route isn't necessarily the most direct route. Obviously, you want to stay off the busy roads where there's lots of traffic and it's dangerous. But if a busier road has a broader shoulder than a country road where you're going to be running in uneven gravel and there is no shoulder, then how, you know, like, you might want to go with the busier road.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  I prefer the shoulder.

• 46:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Interesting. All right. And how do you begin to put the nutrition plan together to figure out like, how you're going to eat and like, how much you're going to eat and what your, your stomach's going to be able to tolerate? I mean, I know you have like, an iron gut and all of that, but still, that's, that's got to be a tricky equation to sort out.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  It was, and I'm not a nutritionist. You know, I, I love food. I understand food. I understand food on a higher level in restaurants and such, but what it's going to take to fuel me exerting that much was, was not my specialty. But luckily, in my corner was Jackie, Shelley's sister, and she, just the year before, had done the Appalachian Trail, plant-based. And so coming into it, and she also had gained some plant-based nutrition certification in that time, and is someone who aspires to get into more plant-based nutrition. And she put it together, and she's a spreadsheet whiz. And the idea was high fat, high carbohydrate.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  We figured I would need, we thought we'd start with about 5,000 calories a day and ramp it up to about 10. When we got out there, we ended up just like, day one, it was 7,000, and then 8,000, pretty much another month in, and it stayed there. So between 7,000, 8,000 calories. But yeah, that was, I left that on her, and I just had faith that she could, she could pull it together. And I mean, it didn't, I didn't have to have faith. She's a very capable human. I knew she would. And yeah, she devised the meal plan, and a lot of it was made up in smoothies. A thousand calorie smoothies that I had four times a day.

• 48:05Rich Roll?

  Like, a lot of coconut oil, like, high fat?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, coconut milk, chia seeds, bananas, carrots, kale.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Powdered peanut butter and soy lant. We used some soy lant meal replacement there. It just really rounded things out and made sure we got the calories where we needed it.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  And what kind of real food were you chewing on?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  In the mornings, I'd start off with a bowl of oatmeal and with maple syrup and chia seeds and bananas. A big bowl of that, a cup of coffee. And then I stopped every five miles.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  So if I, the first five, I'd have that first smoothie. Second one, a big bowl of fruit. Third one, smoothie, and then like more, more carb, starchy cold pasta. We went through a lot of things for the things I would eat during the middle of the day. Started off, I'd come up with this kind of vegan bon me. And it was just sliced bread with tofu, hummus, cilantro, and like cucumbers or something like that. And quickly I did not want bread. Bread was not working for me. I think it was more because I were pre-making the sandwiches and it got soggy. And I just couldn't do the soggy bread. So we ended up doing every rendition of that possible. It was within, it was in tortillas. It was just loose in a bowl.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And then we moved on to cold pasta and vegan quesadillas and mac and cheese, or vegan mac and cheese a little bit. And then, um, yeah, just stuff like that, starchy, carby.

• 49:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Things. And then at the end of the day, I would have, like a camping meal, outdoor herbivore. And I would have a double portion of that cooked down with coconut milk. So the coconut milk went a long ways and peanut butter.

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  No gels or any of the kind of, well, you, one of the things you said was, you didn't drink, you really didn't drink any water, right? Like you were, it was all electrolyte drinks.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was scratch. I used scratch the whole way. Through some reading, we had found some people in the past who had said they didn't drink much water. There were two things that Jackie recommended that I was like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna need to do that. And one was that I wouldn't drink water. And two was that I would need, that I would need. Eight every five miles. I thought I could make it 15, 20 miles every day without eight. And those two things, she was completely right on.

• 50:22Rich Roll?

  But I, I get the, the eight thing, I think, the no water thing, like, I don't understand that.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  It was calories. Each, each of my water bottles that I carried on me, most of the time I carried a hydration vest with two water bottles and each one had 60 calories in it. And you just, when you're doing something like this, you need to get those calories whenever you can, wherever you can. And it was replacing the salts. So I just stuck with it. We just found that, at the end of the day, when we would tally up how many calories I was getting, we kept a pretty good log of that. Had I not been drinking scratch all the time, we would have been in a deficit. We're with it, it was just allowing everything to flow. I mean, day one, we started that and we just kept going with it.

• 51:03Rich Roll?

  So when you're depleting yourself of salts at that kind of a rapid rate, it's like too easy to get hyponutremia, is that the idea?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I sweat a lot. So it was a fear. And I, you know, in races, I've always been one that I take salt tabs about every hour. I didn't out there. The scratch was taking care of it. So we just stuck to the scratch. It did the job. And it was one of those things, if it's not broke, don't fix it. And it, it held up the whole time.

• 51:31Rich Roll?

  So this whole thing comes together. You get the funding, you get the sponsors, you get the crew, you get the van wrapped, you got Dotzy, you know, everybody is, is on board. And I joined you for that first day in Huntington, it was Huntington, right? Yeah, we ran from the pier. And it was cool. Like, there was a whole scene of people, like, there was, it was, there was a lot of, you know, structure and formality to this whole thing. Like, I was like, wow, this guy's got his shit together. This is really happening. And it was really fun, because we hadn't met to, to get to know you a little bit that morning.

• 52:10Rich Roll?

  And then at some point, I was like, all right, dude, I'm out like I gotta turn around and go home. And you just, I just watched you like run off into the distance. And I just thought, man, that guy, like, what an adventure lies ahead for you. Like, you know, there was, it was so exciting that morning, but how long before that wears off? And the, you know, the reality starts to dawn on you?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Uh, morning waking up day two.

• 52:32Rich Roll?

  You didn't waste any time.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that, the most daunting part of the whole experience was the mornings. Right when I wake up, it was just like, are you kidding me? Again? You know, again? 12, 15 hours today? Uh, so it was quick that, you know, I, coming into this, I'd spoke to a couple of people who had done this or something similar. And there were two, two things that they told me. And one's if you can make it through the first two weeks without a show stopping injury, your body would hold up. And the second was after the first month, it would get a little bit easier. And those two things really rang true. Um, day three was extremely hard. Uh, day three, I hallucinated. It was first time from running have I ever hallucinated? And it was a wild ride.

• 53:16Rich Roll?

  What happened?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  It was early on in the day, um, every, there was this, this, in retrospect, it feels as though there were two days that felt like this, where everything almost had like an Instagram filter on it, like kind of dark, like the Tokyo filter on you. And it was just dark and spooky, kind of. And that was kind of the visual of it. And I had a unfounded fear of a dog coming out of nowhere and biting me. And also, I, my senses were in overload. When cars would come by, I would, I would just cower. Um, and, and at one point, I had to go into a diner to use the restroom. And at that point, coming out, I was mortified

• 53:59Speaker 01

  that I was going to come in contact with someone that scared me, or that was sketchy, or for whatever, whatever it was. And I just battled with that for the majority of that day. And, um,

• 54:12Rich Roll?

  Like weird paranoia?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Weird paranoia. Weird. And I think a lot of that was a hormonal thing. I think everything was realigning. A lot of this is about adaptation. It's about applying a pressure over time. And eventually, your body and your mind adapts. And this was my mind, where the part where my mind started to say, no, no, we don't, we don't do this. And I had to continue to just say, yes, we do. Yes, we do. And so that, that kind of started it off with that. That was one of the weirder days.

• 54:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this weird war that you're waging with your body and your mind. You would think that it would be a more linear thing where you start off fresh and you just kind of progressively get more and more tired and hopefully you make it to the other side. But I've never done anything near like what you've done, but in my limited experience, it is a strange thing where it's like you start off great, then it gets hard and then suddenly it's really hard and you're like, I'm done. This is, and then there's a, if you can stick with it, there's a weird breakthrough where it's almost as if your body, and I wrote about this in my book, like your body goes, okay, like now I get it, like I misunderstood, you know, I thought you were trying to kill me, now that I know that you're not, like now we can get on the same page, you know?

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  And then suddenly there's almost like this rejuvenation period that happens where you then enter kind of like a flow with the whole thing.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And isn't the same true with other choices in life? Wanting to quit something or start something new? It kind of goes like that. And I think that's something for, important for people to understand is just because something's hard in the beginning, doesn't mean it's always going to be. There's always an arc to it.

• 55:49Rich Roll?

  And if you break through, it doesn't mean that then it's going to be easy after that either.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but I think there is a tipping point where, you know, it does get a little bit easier and then it's maintenance. I didn't, once it got easier, it didn't mean I didn't have to run every day.

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  But it did become a little more just who I was and what I did. So yeah, it was mind and then body. The body had two main, main moments where it almost broke and it was early day seven, I think I got shin splints in my, I believe it was my right shin. And anyone that's had shin splints, I mean, that's, that's awful. And it's one of those things where in normal day, what would you do if you got shin splints? You would rest, elevate, ice, rest. I didn't have a lot of time to elevate or ice and I definitely didn't have any time to rest. So it was a lot of, luckily with my crew, we just started troubleshooting and we figured out some things. We changed shoes I was wearing. That was a big thing.

• 56:49Rich Roll?

  You were wearing, initially you were wearing like a zero drop shoe.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  I was, yeah. Zero drop shoe, which had really worked for me in the past. It was something that I had been running in in the last years, a couple of years before. Just for this application, it was not right. And really found out quick that the right answer was the Hoka Bandai sixes. They're the most cushioned shoe they have. They've got a good drop in them. So you're always just kind of helping to push your leg, your feet along. And that was a huge step in the right direction. And then the other one was interesting. I didn't have to stick to it the whole time, but in order to overcome this, I needed to put on ankle socks. There was something about the mobility of my ankle that allowed, once I allowed it to be free to move as it wanted to, that I could tell that instantaneously. And then we put a compression sleeve on the leg as well.

• 57:36Rich Roll?

  So prior to that, you were wearing a sock that covered your ankle?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, like a crew sock more, you know? And not a ton of compression there, but it was just enough. I mean, it's just, you know, as you get longer distances, ultras and like all the things you've done, it, the little things add up over time. It's just these little tweaks and these little things. It's like a little pebble in your shoe can destroy everything.

• 57:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's the crazy thing, right? And no matter how much you try to control for every single variable, and there's innumerable variables in what you're trying to do, it's, it's this weird like thing you'd ever thought of that's so tiny that makes or breaks you.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of them. It was, it was overcoming those things and putting those three things, changing those three things, compression sock or compression sleeve, giving the mobility to the ankle, different shoe, back, back on track.

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  That's crazy because shin splints don't go away overnight.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  They went over, they went away over five nights. And, you know,

• 58:33Rich Roll?

  So you just, you just ran through it and it just slowly dissipated?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, through that, we were every five miles for a couple of days, at least every other five, I was taking more time on my stops. I was elevating and icing in order to overcome it. I found throughout the thing, if I ever got where there was immense pain starting in my feet or in my legs, elevating went a long ways, just getting all the blood back to where it should be. Yeah, so that, that was how we overcame that one. And then day 19, it was tendonitis in the other ankle.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  That one came compiled with a mental break as well. Emotionally, mentally, physically on day 19, the wheels fell off. Everything just came, came crashing down. Um, I had the night before realized that I was having this pain in my ankle. Woke up the next day and again, this was the second day where I got that, that weird Instagram filter and everything got really dark. I called my fiance and I, I just lost it emotionally. I, the best way I've been able to describe it is I was crying so hard like snot was coming out of my nose. Just, just done, just so broke, broken. And when I came into my 15 mile stop,

• 59:46Speaker 01

  I was dragging my leg, um, literally dragging it and my crew insisted that I take a two hour nap. Um, and so I did. And when I woke up, there was, I didn't, I had the inability to even step on my foot. I couldn't walk, much less, much less, uh, run. And so we decided to take the rest of the day off. They wanted me to sleep in the following day. And when I woke up, we could get in whatever miles I could do. And I woke up the next day and again, I could not, I couldn't step on my, on my leg at all. So they talked me into just taking the whole day off, which was interesting. It really took a lot that day. It was, there was a lot for me to process and a lot for me to let go of. Um, what I realized in that

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  was up until that point, I had been, it had been brute force. I had just been forcing this with everything in me. And actually something that got me through it was Jackie, uh, my crew chief was not out there at the time, but she sent me a voice memo and she had somehow managed to record your audiobook in the part where you're floating in the water. Uh huh. Uh, uh, day two or three, I think of your thing. And talking about succumbing to the task at hand and how it's really not in your control. And that was one of the things that helped me to let go of this brute force. I couldn't do that. I had too many days ahead of me and I had to go with the flow. And I had to, to listen to my body and, and succumb to something bigger. And I, you know, I don't know exactly what that was, but I definitely

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  from that day on.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Was able to just have more again faith that I was going to get through this and it was going to be something that I was going to do and it couldn't all just be up to brute force.

• 1:01:25Rich Roll?

  That's really beautiful because I, I believe in my heart of hearts that the greatest accomplishments occur or the breakthroughs occur when you can get to that place where you can let go, where you can surrender and avail yourself to a higher power of whatever that looks like for you. And I think as somebody who is, you know, certainly you've got to be a competitive person to even, you know, have, have the, the dream of trying to do something like this. There's that scent, there's, there's a willfulness with that, right? And your rugged independence and like, you know, being a single child and all that kind of stuff informs this worldview where you have to take care of your own shit. And

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  like, yeah, you need help, but like fundamentally it's about you, right? And, and ultimately what I think, one of the amazing things about the ultra world is it forces you to confront the limitations of that. And, and the people that really succeed and maintain success over periods of time are the people who can let go and, and hold on to those dreams and those goals a little bit more loosely. To ask for help and allow help to come in and, and tap into something more fundamental that ultimately is a more sustainable source of power.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And that was, it was a profound day. I, I know without a doubt that day will stand with me more than most on this trip and it will be one that stays with me for a long time. And I think now that I've finished and I'm understanding the new me that's come out the other end, it's definitely a big part of that is, you know, anxiety is something I've battled in my life a lot and a lot of it is done, I don't know where it's coming from a lot of times. And I think it was.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  A fear of it all falling apart, whatever that thing is. And that lesson that day made me realize that there's a flow and there's, there is something that hopefully will keep you going and you don't have to be so forceful.

• 1:03:30Rich Roll?

  And that idea that something is going to fall apart require, basically behind that is in order for it to not fall apart, like it's on you, right? Like you're the one who's going to have to make sure that everything is firing on all cylinders so that this thing that wants to fall apart, won't fall apart.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  And, and that's how you flame out.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  Right? So that's like a huge, that's, it is a, it's a, it's a physical breakthrough, but it's more, it's more, it's predominantly like a spiritual breakthrough.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  And I knew going into this, there was a, a hope and a desire that those kinds of things would happen. I think setting out on something like this.

• 1:04:11Rich Roll?

  That's the allure.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you'd be naive to think things like that are not over 75 days of pushing yourself. And, and yeah, that day was profound. It, it, it put a lot of things in perspective and allowed me to move forward in a much more sustainable way after that. Again, up until then, I think I was treating it as an ultra, like as I had in the past, which was just brute force, just give it. I mean, I, I was calculated. I wasn't pushing at race pace. I, I knew when certain things started to ache to slow down, but something did fundamentally change that day.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Acceptance. Accepting what is, right? Rather than fighting it. But still, how do you go from not being able to put weight on your leg to, to running again? That doesn't just disappear.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  No, it didn't. I did, I took the day off, day 20. Day 21, I got up and everything felt pretty good. And we decided I was going to walk that day. I was going to walk 40 miles. So up until that day, we had broken up the segments in different distances. So for the entirety of the 75 days, it was going to be anywhere from 28, 28 miles a day to 60. That was wreaking havoc on me emotionally. And you know, big days, having a 52 mile day, I couldn't think more than a day or two ahead. And I would ask midday, well, how much do I have tomorrow? And just seeing one of the crew members just look at me with like, they didn't even want to have to tell me. And they'd be like, it's 50, you know? It's like, God.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  So anyway, so that day, we got off of the track of what it had to be, and it was what it could be. And I was gonna walk forty, I made it three miles and the pain came right back. And I was scared. I knew going into this that if anything was gonna stop me, it was going to be an injury. That was the only thing that was gonna stop me. And I was worried that this is it. This is that injury. But then, right away, it was okay, let's start tweaking things. What can we tweak? And the first thing that came to mind, I knew we had packed some ace bandages. And I asked the pilot car that was with me to go back to the camper, grab an ace bandage, and I was gonna try something. And they did, and they came back, and I wrapped my ankle quite tightly. And it was essentially the

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  opposite was needed, as was needed for the shin splints. The lowering mobility decreased the pain significantly, and I was able to start walking. So I made it ten miles, just under, just under ten miles, again, stopping every five. And up on the horizon, I saw some people running towards me. And my first thought was, okay, this is some people, random people from the area that wanna run with me. And as much as that was what I was out there for, this was not the day. I wasn't sure how I was gonna cope with it. As I got closer, I realized it was three friends from Denver, who had just, that was the day they had picked a long time before, and they surprised me and showed up. And it was the

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  best thing that could have happened to me, on so many levels. It gave me company that, I mean, it was perfect. Again, that was a higher power, maybe, at work. And they proceeded to walk out thirty miles with me for the rest of the day. Took fifteen and a half hours, and we walked out forty miles. And then, the following day, they left that night, and I still owe them all so much. It was such a good day. That's beautiful. What could have been one of the worst days, ended up being one of the best.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  And then the following day, I ran walk forty miles, maybe one more day after that. And then we settled on forty-five from that day out. And that would give me, that would get me to New York in my seventy-five days and also provide a cushion in case something else happened.

• 1:07:44Rich Roll?

  Why was seventy-five days so important? I mean, ultimately, does anyone care whether it would take you seventy-five or ninety or a hundred or eighty? The ultimate goal is to complete it.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Rich Roll?

  Right? And not imperil, you know, that larger goal because you're on some unrealistic timeframe goal.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  It was arbitrary, but it was a goal I set. And once I did it, it was part of the narrative and therefore I wanted it to, I wanted to do it. That, for me, personally, was a sign of success. Had I taken longer, fine. And I would have still been very happy with my accomplishment, but I think you need a metric to hold to, and I wanted to hold to it the best I could. I wasn't going to be devastated and quit had I not been able to, but I wanted to try everything in me to make sure I did it in that time. And also, seventy-five days is a long time.

• 1:08:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  You know, as much as it's, oh, you could have taken longer, less mileage, that's more days out there, you know? There's some other folks who have completed it this year and they've taken a little bit longer, and for me, it sounds worse.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  They're still doing it?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Like, I enjoyed this. I did in a lot of ways, but it's that type-two fun that also has the side of it, that it's somewhat miserable and you're away from your family and your friends and your life. And seventy-five days meant, wrap it up, get it done.

• 1:09:05Rich Roll?

  What's the fastest that anybody's done this?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Peter Kolschnick, he just did it in the last couple of years. It's incredible, like forty-five or something. It's somewhere right around there.

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, every route's different.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was a little lower mileage. He did the, again, the official San Francisco to New York. And I'm not, I want to say it's like twenty-eight hundred, twenty-six, twenty-eight. But he's moving. I mean, seventy miles a day or something like that. He's incredible.

• 1:09:30Rich Roll?

  That's incredible.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  He went from Key Nai Peninsula to Key West in a hundred days solo.

• 1:09:35Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've not met this guy, but I want to shake his hand because...

• 1:09:39Rich Roll?

  Is he American?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:09:49Rich Roll?

  So as you're progressing through this, you're sharing these daily updates on Instagram, little videos, and you're quite transparent about like what's going on. And it was really cool to follow that. How often were people dropping in on you like out of the blue, like to just run along? Did that like build in steam as you went along?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  It did. Yeah. More and more as we hit the East Coast, I think a lot of that's just population density. There were more people that were engaged with this.

• 1:10:17Rich Roll?

  You're in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Oklahoma, there were a few people. Yeah, so it did grow as we went across and it was heartwarming and amazing. And you know, there were a couple instances, people I did not know at all, who now I consider good friends. There's something about that. I mean, you have this time with each other. When you're running and you're running that distance and people are spending half a day with you running, there's nothing to distract us. You get good conversations. And whether that be random people that are now friends of mine due to this experience, or friends and family that came out that I got to reconnect with in a way. I grew up, I had a cousin who we were like brothers growing up. And then adulthood hit and life happens. And our lives went in a little bit different ways. He has

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  kids and a family and I don't. He lives in Georgia. I have left a long time ago. And I've always, he's been dear to me, but we've had little, very little time as adults together. And he came out and on the first day, he went from his longest run was 13 miles to a marathon and ran with me all day. And we were able to, I know him on such a deeper level than I did before that. And I'd run across the country just for that experience, you know? So those, those kinds of things meant a lot. It was really amazing to have that time again with people that I did know, and then with others that now are friends, you know, that we keep up with each other, whether it just be on social media or texts, but there's a couple of them.

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  And where does the advocacy aspect of this begin to creep up? Like, I would imagine you're running, you know, through farms and people are coming out. And we talked when we had dinner, you were talking about, was it the Navajo Nation that you're running through? Like, what that experience was like? So I want to hear about that. But, you know, walk me through how that kind of worked.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Again, it was the focal point being the camper in the van, being wrapped as they were. They're very colorful, all blues and whites. And through rural America, they just don't see stuff like this, you know? It's different if you're here in LA or in Austin, Texas, or wherever.

• 1:12:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Somebody else doing something crazy.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That doesn't happen, again, in rural Oklahoma. So people were just coming out. They were stopping on the side of the road. They were at gas stations, Walmart parking lots, you name it. Coming out, asking what we were up to. And then it just created conversations. And some of my crew were also plant-based and advocates, you know, want to spread the message. And others are not, but they understood how important it was to me. So they played the part. And, you know, those that are in that situation that are not, I know in talking with them in retrospect, it definitely impacted them as well. And they make different choices with food now.

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  So it was just all along the way, grassroots as it could be. Just meeting people as much as we could. And some of the crew members were really assertive in that. And they would make the point and they would go out and say, hey, guess what this guy's doing? You know, and others would wait for them to come to them.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  Right. No meat, no dairy. What are you doing? What?

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, going into this, that was something I, you know, I said about supersize me and this epiphany it gave to me. I didn't understand how bad fast food had been, was for me. It was a catalyst for change. A lot's changed in 15 years. And I wasn't aware of that, but I'd say that no one was just caught off guard. Everyone understood what plant-based was. They knew what vegan was.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  And I found that I don't know, I don't know exactly the riddle or how to, how to crack this yet, but rural America is ready. They want to talk about this too. And we focus so much in the plant-based food industry and as advocates, I feel like a lot of that emphasis is placed on urban areas and, and people with whom we're closely, more closely identified with. But there's a whole swath of America out there that needs to hear it and wants to hear it.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  Well, what's, what's mind-boggling is the extent to which the breadbasket of America is actually a food desert. Like, they don't, they don't even eat the food that they're producing. It gets shipped elsewhere. It's used for, you know, feed for, for cattle, et cetera. And in a lot of those places, there just aren't the healthy options that you would imagine would proliferate because that's where they're growing it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  It's true. And I think a lot of times that's kind of thrown out there as a reason why we don't go to those places. But

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  desire creates demand. And then if people are asking for it, hopefully somebody shows up with it. And I think that we have to talk about it. And then as we talk about it over time, hopefully we find mechanisms to get that food to people.

• 1:15:09Rich Roll?

  What was the most surprising encounter that you had along the way?

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Individual encounter.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Navajo Nation, just some really more interesting playful conversations. One guy in particular who stopped on the side of the road, he whipped his car around his truck and he got out and he was taking pictures of me as I came up. And as I got closer to him, I, he said, hey, my wife told me if I saw the tall bearded white man running through our nation, I had to stop and get a photo. And that realization that this whole community was, was embracing me. Uh, one person had stopped Davis before and got a photo and they'd made it onto these Facebook groups that they had in their community. And little did I know, after that, every car that passed me, I had the feeling that they knew what I was doing and they were supportive. So that was a really profound experience.

• 1:16:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if you, if you handled that inelegantly, it could have gone in a very different direction, right? There's protocol, like you, you can't just roll out, roll onto the nation and expect to be welcomed, right? Did you, did you do some legwork ahead of time and let everybody know this is what you were gonna do or how did that go down?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  No, there was a lot of naivety. We, I, I don't think anyone realized how big it was.

• 1:16:27Rich Roll?

  Huge.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  It's the size of West Virginia. It took eight days to run through. And it tested me. The first full day in the nation, I had blisters on top of blisters on top of blisters. It was awful. It, I felt as though I was running with just raw feet. And I was concerned about being there and being on, and then it's another nation. It's someone else's. It's not mine. And, uh, it just overwhelming sense of, of welcomeness though. And I don't, I, I, I do know that my crew all along the way, and especially those that were with me at that time are open-hearted, kind, kind people.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  And I had no anxieties that we were gonna instigate anything negative. But I think a lot of it comes from the pride those people, they hold in stewardship of their land. And the pride, they, they felt pride that I chose to go through there. And I think a lot of that came from maybe that a lot of people try to skate around it for those same anxieties and fears that I was feeling. And instead, we just pushed forward and they were extremely welcoming and comforting and responsive to us being there. Yeah, it was, it was really an amazing space to date. It, it was my favorite part of the trip.

• 1:17:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And what was their receptivity to the whole vegan thing?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Uh, more like per capita, probably the most, like no, no naysayers anywhere throughout the whole experience, but in there, I, I felt as though they were listening on a deep level. And a lot of the people we were coming and meeting were what they would even consider like the elders, like there were some generations below them. And they had a lot to say about how they had seen their communities get fatter and become less healthy. And Wendell, the guy I was talking about earlier, he, he went as far as to say, you know, when I was a kid, I remember my dad and his, his friends being built more like you. And they ran, you know, I mean, indigenous cultures are known for

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  running, you know, it's not just the Taramana. Navajo have their own history there. And they, they were, again, receptive. And I just hope that, I, I can't see what the repercussions were for my actions. I only know what I saw and hope that that catalyst was there and maybe there was some change that happened.

• 1:18:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  But they talk about food deserts.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  Oh.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  That's, that's to a level even further than anywhere else we saw. They're grocery shopping at gas stations. It's not fair.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And obesity, diabetes, like the rates are crazy.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  You know, in, in these reservations. Wow. What an amazing experience.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that was a really great area, just unexpected and beautiful.

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What was the, the hardest part terrain wise?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  Late in the game, the Appalachians.

• 1:19:23Rich Roll?

  Appalachians.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  God, they were relentless. I mean.

• 1:19:27Rich Roll?

  Cause they're up, down, up, down, up, down.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Up, down. They don't understand what switchbacks are. Everything's straight up, straight down. And I grew up in the Appalachians. There was something interesting about that. I, you know, as an adult, have always gravitated further west and really enjoy the western scape. And having gone back east into the Appalachians much, other than that first initial 50 miler I did, I felt a sense of being at home there, which was really interesting that I definitely want, definitely want to explore more. But coming into it, my splits were getting faster. Again, I was doing 45 miles a day from day 22 on. So we had this good metric. We had this way to, to see how I was doing. And I was cruising every day. It was just a little bit shorter, a little bit shorter. And then we hit somewhere in West Virginia and it was literally hit a wall. And that wall continued to be up for three miles and down for three

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  miles for six days, six, seven days. And it tested me. I had got to where those 45 miles were taking me 11 hours. I was back to 16 hours. It's a lot of extra time on your feet.

• 1:20:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  And what it also does is when you're on your feet that long, it allows less time to come down at the end of the day. Instead of getting to feel human for a minute and sit with my crew and talk and laugh, it was straight to bed.

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Get up and do it again. And everything just starts becoming so much more. Just this linear mess of running.

• 1:20:45Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Uh, so the Appalachians, they, they tore me up. It was also humid. It was getting warm. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:20:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  That was.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  What, what, what was the recovery protocol when you would finish each day?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Uh, it was definitely the weakest spot in my plan. I hadn't planned really well for recovery. I had this sense that if I ran so much every day, I'd just be tired and I'd pass out.

• 1:21:11Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  And it didn't work that way. I dealt with the immense, the robbing pain in my glutes and quads. Down even felt like the bones. Um, in the first couple of weeks, I didn't get a lot of sleep. I think the first week I'd say I got cumulative 10 hours of sleep.

• 1:21:29Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:21:30Rich Roll?

  10 hours cumulative for the first week? Cause you would think, yeah, you're exhausted. You'll just sleep through the night.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. No, the pain was too much. I couldn't. I, I was, I would wake up with my feet where my head should be and my head where my feet should be. And then I'd wake, I'd get up and I'd walk around the camper. I'd do whatever I could to just try to alleviate this pain. We built, we got some of those, uh, like swimming pool noodles from a Walmart and we bound them together. So I could have a, something to put my legs up. So I would elevate my legs while I slept in the bed. And it just, it didn't work. Nothing was really working. Um, and then it ended up being a, like a concoction of some cayenne pepper supplements, pills, uh, like two Tylenol, uh, CBD to get me to sleep.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  And it was a company called Pure Power. They reached out and sent out this like supplement thing they have. And one of them was Power Down and that Power Down was a sleeping aid, like a herbal sleeping aid. And melatonin. And it really, I don't know that it was that the pain went away or I just slept through it. It did over time. Again, it was adaptation.

• 1:22:38Rich Roll?

  Crazy to think that you would need all this assistance going to sleep.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, there are gun, you know, I slept, I slept with a gun by my bed. There are gun.

• 1:22:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there are gun. But no like norma tech boots and ice baths and masseuses, nothing like you didn't even like ahead like, oh, hey, we're coming in, do an urban era area. Can we see if we can get somebody to come out here and do some deep tissue massage or anything like that?

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  No, I should have.

• 1:23:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you should have, right?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, none of that. You know, I put on my first pair of norma tech boots afterwards.

• 1:23:10Rich Roll?

  Was that when you were at Recover?

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Recover in New York. Yeah, they hooked me up with all, John Joseph sent me there.

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  I should have had these the whole time.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. But no, I did not. The only time we almost seeked help, I can't remember what day it was. It was midway through and all of a sudden I realized I was dragging big time. I couldn't figure it out. Every day I'd wake up and I had less energy than I did the day before. I couldn't get going. And we were concerned that something was off as far as nutrients, you know, was it low in iron, this and that? And we were at that time

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  scheduling for me to go get some blood work to try to figure out what it was. And I one morning just realized I was like, I feel like I just haven't had coffee. And we'd been using instant coffee just for convenience for the crew. And I came into the next aid stop and I said, can I see the bottle of instant coffee we're using? And they had picked it up at a convenience store and it was expired. So there was no caffeine in it. So this deficiency I was having was caffeine.

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  You had a caffeine deficiency?

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that was, that was, that was the only time.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  So then when you hit that first cup of real coffee?

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  First cup of joe, we were good to go.

• 1:24:25Rich Roll?

  Lights go back on. Oh, my God. Did you do any blood pulls along the way so that you could, you know, register the, the iron levels and all that kind of stuff?

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  No, I, one of my biggest regrets from the whole experience was going into it, I got blood work done before I left and everything was, was spot on. Vitamin D was a tiny bit off, but it was middle of the winter in Denver, which Denver is usually sunny. It was off a little bit. Everything else was spot on. I haven't had a blood work since. I really wish I would have.

• 1:24:54Rich Roll?

  You were at Recover. They, did they pull blood there? They could have done that.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know. I didn't see anybody getting that done, but I should have. It's definitely a regret. Yeah.

• 1:25:03Rich Roll?

  But you feel good now?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  I feel great. You know, even coming out of it. Even as I finished, again, we talked about earlier, like if you would just progressively get more tired along the way, I had this assumption that I would just crawl through the finish in New York. I finished strong. I went for a run three days later.

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  I, you know, I went out around New York with John Joseph and some folks on, what, International Running Day.

• 1:25:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  And if, you know, there, yeah, there were some aches, but it was overall well.

• 1:25:31Rich Roll?

  Amazing what the human body is capable of. Like I went and joined the Iron Cowboy on the last day of his 50 consecutive Ironmans and ran the final marathon with him and he was throwing down a serious pace, like the last 10K, like he was running sub seven minute miles.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  I was playing around with that along the way. I had one consistent crew member who was with me the whole time, Elliot. There's a whole story there. I met him two weeks before we started the run and I would just play with him, like in the last couple of weeks and I dropped down to sub seven minute mile, just, just to see him react and I could do it though. Yeah, that was what was interesting is I, I was getting stronger as I went.

• 1:26:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  And I do give a lot of that to the plant-based diet. You're putting body, you know, stuff in your body that's building it up instead of tearing it down. And with that diet too, I don't understand how somebody could consume 8,000 calories a day if it wasn't plant-based. I just, I just don't, you know, but I, I do think that that had a lot to do with my ability to feel strong throughout.

• 1:26:33Rich Roll?

  No cheeseburgers.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  No cheeseburgers.

• 1:26:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Talk to me about how you, like the process, what it feels like and the process of, of walking through, like confronting obstacles, like when you're out there and you're just like, I can't even go one more step. Like, how do you break that down and work your way through it? Cause I think like whether, for a lot of people, like they're gonna, they're gonna hear this and they're like, I can't even relate to this, right? But if we, if we drill down to the essence of what it is, which is like confronting yourself in the most fundamental way and strategies for quelling the resistance.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  I found early on that every single day was different. That helped a lot. There were whole days that sucked really bad. But I quickly understood that one bad day had no correlation to the next whatsoever. I could be on top of the world and the next day crash down, but vice versa. So in those hard days, it was a matter of, on the bigger scale, just get through today and tomorrow's going to be different. There's a good chance it'll be better. And then I broke this up. I ran across the country in five mile segments. Every, every, we stopped five miles for me to eat and, and re, and get rehydrate. And a lot of it was just, just not looking too far ahead.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Like having amnesia for what had happened and just blindly going into the next thing. Just keeping it compartmentalizing, compartmentalizing, having small, small goals that cumulatively over time would equal a greater goal.

• 1:28:20Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Yeah, it's a, it was an interval workout. Six hundred times five miles, right?

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Uh, so that, you know, that did a lot for me was in that. It's amazing what we're capable of. And I think a lot of what you have to do is not get overwhelmed by the larger task at hand, whatever it is, and just start chopping away little by little at whatever you're trying to achieve. Nobody gets to something huge overnight. It's going to take time.

• 1:28:50Rich Roll?

  So the, the original kind of, um, uh, activist aspect of this began from mostly an environmental perspective, right? But my sense is that that's kind of evolved since then.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Definitely has. Uh, environmental is still a very big part of it for me, no doubt. I've talked to others about this and how becoming plant-based, when you make that switch, there's a level of compassion and empathy that just happens. Uh, and I don't, I don't understand it completely, but it definitely happened for me. And the way.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  I, I, I sleep easier at night and I have this, this, this overwhelming sense of that it's the right move, just based on the fact that I, I'm not creating suffering for any other beings. And that aspect of it has definitely come to the forefront for me. And as I was running across the country, there were a lot of livestock that I came in contact with. I, I saw way more cows than people and understood a, a much, I grew up, my grandfather had cattle. When I was young, you know, you're not really thinking too deep about much. But, um, one thing that I

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  definitely, a thing I gained along the way was just how aware these, these animals were and how much, they were, they were curious beings. They, cars go by all day. They know what a car is. They don't know what a guy running is. They want to come see what it is and they're playful.

• 1:30:27Rich Roll?

  They all come to the fence when you're running by.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  Come to the fence and run with you at times. Um, there was a day where it was, it was one of the few days it snowed. I woke up and there was snow all over the ground and I started my daily miles and there had been a calf who had been separated from its mother and somehow gotten out of the fence. So it was on the roadside with me, very desolate road in the middle of Oklahoma, I believe. And I had for the better part of an hour, had to hear this calf cry for its mother and its mother get separated from the pack and keep looking between, do I go with the pack? How do I want to stay with my child? And it was gut wrenching. It, it was no different than seeing that in a human. And eventually, luckily, the calf found a spot to get back through and it made

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  its way to its mother and they trotted off. But that, that part matters, that part of the advocacy matters more to me now than ever. Um, and those two right there, and I mean, just overall health and wellbeing, you know, we live in a, in a society with a lot of problems and a lot of good things, but you look at a lot of the problems in front of us. And I, and that was when I got into this. I felt there was this like, this naive epiphany that.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  A plant-based lifestyle was like a silver bullet. It could take care of so many of the problems in front of us. It could take, we, we, we have all these talks and all of this debate about healthcare and how to, how to approach healthcare in America. What if people just weren't sick? You know, uh, the environmental crisis is huge. It's looming and animals production, animal production equates for, you know, it's set over 50% of the degradation of our environment. Silver bullet.

• 1:32:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Just eat plants. And so that, that it, it means, it does mean a lot to me and it has evolved a lot over time. And it's just, there's three pillars to it. To me, there's environmentalism, ethical and health. And those three still stand true. It's like what matters and why it is such an important topic, one important enough to run across the country for.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It checks all of those boxes. If we avoid animal products in our diet, uh, we can avoid chronic lifestyle illnesses. We can sidestep the environmental wreckage that this industry provokes and produces. And we get to spare the lives of these sentient beings and we need not raise so many of them only to lead them to, you know, a, a most unpleasant demise.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  So it seems like really elementary to me, uh, but I think the role of the athlete, what's so important about the athlete is people might intellectually be able to kind of understand that, but then they still think, yeah, but I'm going to be deficient or I'm not going to feel good or I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do in my life. So you can go and get in front of a microphone and say the things that you just said, but ultimately the power in your message is the fact that you got across the country in 75 days on two feet, uh, which is undeniable and can't be debated.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  And that there, so that was one of the reasons I got into this too, was as we were making all these changes in our life and we were talking about plant-based and we had gone vegetarian. I was expressing this to friends and family and they knew that I liked to run a lot and there was that thing of, well, you can't do this Robbie, like you, you really, you're gonna need, you need that meat for strength so you can run. And it was just one of those things of like, well, what's a way to prove that, you know, and that, that was definitely circling around in this too.

• 1:34:10Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And going into this, I wasn't really aware of plant-based advocacy, you know? I didn't understand that there were so many others out there that were working towards this and some, you know, that was an interesting thing to realize that there was a whole fraternity of others that were involved, which has really been awesome to understand and see. And I do, I think athletes, we, we do poison, we, we stand poised in a very interesting position because it's, if it's good for us, why is it good, not good for everyone else? You know, yeah, again, if we can perform at this, well, then everybody in their normal lives and weekend warriors, it's good for them too.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  Right. The human mind though, is pretty good at, at denial and dissonance. So it's, you know, they'll look at, what, what, what happens unfortunately is the more extreme and audacious the athletic feat, like in the case of yourself, running across the country, it then becomes unrelatable and then you just become an outlier who's easily dismissed as like a freak. Like, yeah, he could do it, but like, he's, he's like, you know, he's not like me.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  So then the challenge becomes, you have to bring it back and make it relatable again. And that's why I think it's important for you to talk about the fact that you haven't been a runner your whole, like, that's why I wanted to hear like that part of the story too, because I think people can see themselves in that, that you're not some crazy superhuman, Superman guy. I mean, you clearly have talent and ability and all of that and a work ethic. But it's not like, oh, you were, you were an NC2A track, you know, track and field superstar.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:45Rich Roll?

  Coming into this.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  No, not at all. You know, I've never ran a Boston qualifying.

• 1:35:49Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Yeah. Did you play sports when you were a kid?

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I played team sports growing up. You know, I played football in high school. I was, I was a good football player. I wasn't great. I didn't, I didn't play in college or anything. And then after that, I was, I was not an athlete for a while. I rode bikes, fixed gear bikes around Austin, just being like a young little thug and spent a lot of time in the bars and was much more in favor of that lifestyle and wasn't taking care of myself or my body. And you know, when I moved to Alaska, I think I was up to about 230 pounds. You know, I'm at 170 now and I've fluctuated a lot. No, I've not always been in touch with my body on like an athletic level and only in the last two years have I to a high performing level. It's a great place

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  to be now, though, and I do know that, you know, I've just the tip of the iceberg. Like I want to continue to push and I have like a sense of, I feel legit now.

• 1:36:44Rich Roll?

  You feel, dude, you're legit. We can just end that part of that right there. What, what else did you learn about yourself? Like, this is a journey of self-discovery. It's mental and emotional and spiritual. I would argue even more than it was a physical feat. Like, you had to confront yourself in profound ways. Like, what did you learn?

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  On the surface level, devices, our phones are distracting us from a lot of things that really matter. Being forced to not be around my phone for so long was so amazing and allowed me to ponder life and also be open to people when I did come in contact with them. That was a really big thing. You know, I think we put up a lot of walls and we have a lot of labels for different types of people and different people in regions of the country and stuff. And we get all of that, those, these assumptions about each other based on updates on our phone. And having to put that down and interact with others, I found that people were extremely

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  beautiful and awe inspiring and just interesting. Just the random, like, guy in overalls in Missouri, just blow your mind with the stuff that they have to say. That was a big thing.

• 1:38:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, just to extrapolate on that a little bit, sorry to interrupt. If you're on Twitter, it's very easy to fall into a state of despair, thinking that we're at each other's throats and that we live in a country that's very much divided ideologically, politically. And there's a lot of vitriol and downright hatred out there. And there is. But there's something about the tactile experience of boots on the ground at that slow of a pace that gives you a very different lens. Like, I have a friend who every year takes a train. He's not, you know, he's not an ultra distance runner, but he takes a train cross country every

• 1:38:48Rich Roll?

  year and he gets off at every stop and spends time and connects with people in a real way. And, you know, he will say, and I'm sure you will echo this, you know, what I, what my, my real life experience of going to all these places is very different than what you would imagine based upon the narrative that's being propagated by social media and, and even, you know, news and newspapers and the like.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're giving up a lot of our power and a lot of our ability to connect to these devices and these few powers that be that run them. Or it's not even that. I don't think that there's some like body orchestrating it from behind. I think it's just what's happened. It's just the way we're receiving information. It's through a filter that's not reality. And there's just a lot more beauty out there. And we have a lot more in common than we have. We have these key issues that are stupid and, well, they're not something, they're not stupid, but there's, there's a lot more to a human and to individuals than what we're, what we're getting through these updates and through what we see on social media. That one was very big. That was profound for me. I definitely

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  put a lot of those walls up for myself.

• 1:40:04Rich Roll?

  And then the other one. And also, sorry, doing it again, but going back to truly the original catalyst for this whole thing was an ideological difference with your aunt.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, that was a struggle, a struggle I went through and a lot of people went through was this, just immense love for someone or multiple people in your life that you see something so, so polarly opposite from. And it helps to. Come back and heal those things or have a better understanding of that those small differences don't equate to enough to feel separate from those that you love that might see things differently, or even a random person on the street.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  How are you and your aunt now?

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  Oh, we're great.

• 1:40:49Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are? Oh, that's good.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  We have always been. She was someone that, I mean, I love her to no end and, you know, she's been there for me and is still there for me at times and right now in such a profound way. And that's what made it so, that's what makes it so painful. And we get into these like political debates. Like, it's such a minute part of who we are as individuals is those things. So, yeah, that was, there was a lot of self-discovery in that, for sure.

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Also, I would imagine having, you know, accomplished this, that you must have an expanded sense of your own personal capabilities, you know, outside of just running. Like, if I could tackle this and achieve this, like, what else am I capable of? Like, where else can I apply whatever skill set I developed as a result of this endeavor to other areas?

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. You know, once you chase your dreams and you get them, you know, maybe it makes it a little easier to go for them the next time, or like, you have to, because you know it's possible.

• 1:41:50Rich Roll?

  Well, that, but it's a two-edged sword, though, right? Because, you know, there's an existential crisis with having achieved something like that. Like, okay, do I have to top this? And what am I going to do now? There's a vacuum.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. For sure. I don't know that you can top this as far as like an endurance feat, but I definitely want to do more things.

• 1:42:07Rich Roll?

  You played your man card. You don't have to do that.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  But I mean, I do want to do more, you know? I want to keep pushing myself physically in endurance endeavors. You know, a conversation I had recently kind of resonated, it resonated with me with Dotzy, our mutual friend Dotzy Bosch. And we were talking about plant-powered athletes and, you know,

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  there's still not enough examples of us. And we're all just individuals. So it kind of made me want to double down. It was like, well, I can't be more than just me, but I can continue to do things. And of course, that's like the most

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  virtuous reason I would want to do this. But also, you know, it's fun. It's like what I love. I want to continue to push the envelope, but also outside of it on a more, you know, interpersonal level and in other parts of life. You're right.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  I definitely, I mentioned earlier, can have anxiety and battle anxiety. And I find now that it's way more manageable because I feel as though everything is overcomable. I have that, that, that strength in myself and an understanding that I can get through it. Most things are overcomable and you can get through it. There's been, since I finished, there's, it is, it's open ended. What, who am I? What am I doing next? I, I worked on this. Like, what is my mechanism to move forward in so many different ways? As an athlete, as a person, financially, all of these things. And they could bury me. I could be buried by these things and anxieties, but instead I'm keeping my head above water. You know? There was a, there was a really dark month, I'd say, right? Right about the time I saw you in Denver.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I got that sense. Like, you're like, okay, like, the, the excitement of the whole, like, being in New York is exciting, but you'd just gotten back from that and that was just on the heels of completing it. So I think the reality was just beginning to set in on you.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was, you know, going back to profound things I learned.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  You, you touched on this recently with Zach Bush, I think it was, or some, some form of this. But what, one thing I realized out there, in retrospect, and once it was over, when it finished, I felt a big sense of loss of a lot of things that I wanted around me weren't. And the realization that there's a couple of things that make me feel full. And one is direction, the other's community and feeling heard. And when I was on this run, I had clear direction, northeast all the time. I had a crew around me that was there to support me and they were community. And I was always heard. Whatever I said, they wanted to hear and they wanted to, you know, understand and react accordingly.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  And taking that now, I just want to make sure to keep those things present in my life. Like, it doesn't have to be a goal of running across the country. But I think everyone should always have some type of a goal, whether it's to just...

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  Re-understand your morning routine so that you can have a better, more fulfilled day, or run a marathon, or whatever it is. You should have a goal.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  Well, there's something about being deeply engaged with an activity that you love, and also a group of human beings as well. Like, yes, you're being heard, but you're also part of this clan. Like, you know, I would imagine for the rest of your life, there's gonna be like an intimacy with those people because of what you guys collectively endured. But if you were proceeding on the belief that like, this is gonna fix me, or like, you know, when I'm done with this, then I'm gonna be good, you know, that's the, that's, that's the really alluring delusion in the whole thing, right? Because then you finish it, and you're like, you're still you. You did this amazing thing. You were, you were

• 1:45:50Rich Roll?

  in your peak state and all of that, but fundamentally, life goes on.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that was something. That was real. You know, that was something I think I was feeling. There was a moment when I, or somewhere in this, when I was setting out on it, is that it would, it would, it would, I would just get done, and birds would be chirping, and the sun would shine forever.

• 1:46:07Rich Roll?

  And all these doors are gonna swing open, and like, the rest of your life is gonna get taken care of.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And, and that's not the case. And then you really look at it, and you wouldn't want that to be the case anyways. You know, it's all about the journey, and, and just looking to, you know, what can, what can I do next? And I'm not talking about upping myself, or making, you know, it's just to keep moving forward. Forward momentum is important in life. And keeping people around you you love, and people that you, that support you, and you wanna support, and trusting in that, trusting in those relationships. So that was a really big part of it for me, for sure.

• 1:46:40Rich Roll?

  What was it like when you finally got into Central Park and completed the whole thing?

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  It was a major sense of relief initially, you know, just like, I get to wake up tomorrow, and I don't have to run. Instead, I woke up, and Shelley made me, we got a cup, a cup of coffee, and then we were straight to the barber. That was the first act of business, was to clean up a little bit. So that was, that was the move of the day. But, um, yeah, a sense of relief, and overwhelming sense of accomplishment, and pride. I definitely...

• 1:47:12Rich Roll?

  A real shower.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Oh, a real shower, yeah. A bed that wasn't in the back of a van. Uh, in New York City, it was a wild place to be coming out of this. There was a lot to grapple with.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  While I was out there, I had the ability to, everybody I talked to outside of my crew was hitting me while I was running, or right when I got done running. So, left brain, right brain are just like, they're connecting, they're jiving really well. And you get done and you're not doing that anymore. And all of a sudden, conversations were really hard. I felt like I couldn't keep up with conversation, some social anxiety. I had a hard time navigating really simple technology, like the metro, putting money on a metro card. Not easy for me. It's the most simple, like, interface made.

• 1:47:57Rich Roll?

  And you had to go and like, speak at that, there was the plant-based nutrition conference, right? That was going on at the same time.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why I stayed around New York, was that was 10 days after I finished. And the plan was just a lot of downtime. And just take it easy, do that event, zip on home. But I ended up having lunch with our mutual friend, John Joseph. And he just opened the doors of New York. And all of a sudden, there was engagement.

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  What are you doing? Why are you doing that? You gotta call me before you do. I got a guy for that.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:48:28Rich Roll?

  Why are you eating there? You've got the organic grill, Vlad's gonna hook you up.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  And he did, and Vlad was amazing. You know, that, and yeah, the recovery center, and just all these different engagements. But it goes back to like, one of the things I learned from this was perseverance. And although I had all this social anxiety and I didn't fill up to these social engagements, I knew the only way through it was to do it. And I, every day, woke up and I put on a face and I went and I engaged with people. I had a massive amount of imposter syndrome.

• 1:48:58Rich Roll?

  So hilarious, because you're, you just ran across the United States.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I- But I ran across the United States. I had normalized it. I had to, to do it. And so all of a sudden, you know, I'm at the, at the recovery center and I get out of this infrared sauna and there were a couple of people that waited to say hey to me. They wanted to meet me. And that's never happened in my life. And I was like, but why? And it's taken a lot of time to start understanding that and to give gravity to what I did, so that I can- To a degree process it on the same level everyone else does so that I can, move forward and know what I have in front of me and this accomplishment that I've had, what it means to me and what it can, what it means to others so that I can use it to my advantage and to the advantage of the advocacy.

• 1:49:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you have, you, I mean, my advice to you would be to own it like, it's charming that you have a healthy sense of humility around the whole thing and I think that's great, but at some point you have to say, okay, well, this is what I set out to do. There's a reason that I accomplished it and this can be leveraged for good. And in order to really do that, you have to step into the power of it, right? And just, and, and, and own it and it doesn't make you like a crazy egomaniac to do that if you do it in a healthy way. And you see people do this in different ways, like a lot of people do it with alter egos. Like I had the guy who wrote the alter ego book on here and you see what James Lawrence

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  does, he creates the iron cowboy because it doesn't feel right to James as James to be that superhero guy for whatever reason, but he knows when he's, yes, I'm the iron cowboy, he can talk about these things in a different way.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and that's something I'm definitely still grappling with and figuring out. You know, on the way here, I was a little nervous about this podcast and I definitely like said to myself in like the mirror of the car, I was like, you ran across the country.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  So that helped, you know?

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  I'd be nervous talking to you, you know? No, it is, it is, it is amazing and, and I think, I think it's important that you not rush this next phase that you're in and allow yourself that time and that space to really figure it, figure out like what you want it to mean for yourself and what you want your life to look like, like you're going to have opportunities.

• 1:51:26Rich Roll?

  But because perhaps you feel that vacuum, there, there might be like a sense that you gotta rush in and do something because an opportunity might pass or whatever. And I think it's okay to like not quite know right now.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and I am, I'm settling into that and you know, I think initially when I heard. Things like that, and actually from you at dinner in Denver, it made me feel like, okay, well, I'm not supposed to move my body. I'm not supposed to to exercise like in in that I know is like it's in I'm incapable of that. It's what I it's one of those things that I really need and want. But as far as a larger, larger goal, yeah, I'm kind of resting in right now, just enjoying the moment, enjoying the space I'm in. And, you know, I like reaping the benefits of what I've done and and feeling accomplished for a while instead of, yeah, striving for that next thing. But I'm already finding new passions in ways. I'll never I'll never quit running. Running is primal. It's what it's the most

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  perfect exercise. But I'm enjoying I'm getting on the bike now. That's new. I'm really enjoying that. A good friend of mine in Austin, he's a Red Bull cyclist, really big in gravel road racing, Colin Strickland, and he he described like cycling to me in a really, I don't know, profound way the other day. And it was that he's so taken back by what I did. And his thing is, he's like, Look, when you run, you're the motor and the drivetrain. And you look at a car, what goes out first, the drivetrain. He's like, Get on a bike, then you just get to be the motor. And with all the pains and the stuff I've felt in my legs and trying to to recover, that really resonated that, you know, getting on a bike is such a like, lower impact way to move, and you move fast. It's amazing how many

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  miles you can you can just like, it's in no time.

• 1:53:14Rich Roll?

  I could have gone across country a lot faster if I was riding a bike. What was I doing?

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm enjoying that. I think that's something I want to I want to pursue to some degree is getting on the bike. I like the long distance stuff. The gravel road stuff really seems interesting. 200 mile races.

• 1:53:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  It's wild.

• 1:53:28Rich Roll?

  The Kwanzaa.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Rich Roll?

  Kansas.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33Rich Roll?

  I think it's good. And I think, yeah, it you can distract yourself with another audacious goal. And and I think there are other audacious goals that are appropriate for you to chase and do that. But I my only thing was just like, you know, allow yourself to it's okay to be also.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:51Rich Roll?

  You know, to just be.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  And I think that is important. You know, we can, we can use these athletic endeavors in a way to hide.

• 1:53:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  And I don't, I don't want to do that. Like that's, I, I worked too hard for self-discovery to go hide.

• 1:54:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  By doing another one.

• 1:54:05Rich Roll?

  And you see that, you know, I think there are a lot of people that do that. And, and it's effective because everybody praises you for it. But actually, it's a big mask for some trauma or, you know, psychological thing that you just are too afraid to look at.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Well, you need the quiet space and time to let those things you do to sink in and absorb them and like absorb the lessons. You know, I'm only two, a little over two months out from doing this and there's still so much more, I think, that's, that's yet to come out and for me to understand. And if I, if I was pushing really hard already for something else, I might not make it to those things.

• 1:54:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  So I think it's good to hold back a little bit.

• 1:54:47Rich Roll?

  Are you do, are you doing a little bit of speaking? Have some schools and places like that asked you to come and share your message?

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  You know, a little bit. There was a lot in New York and then getting back to Denver as, you know, there's just, I don't have a lot of community there. I don't think anyone in Denver knows what I did.

• 1:55:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And it is such a wild community.

• 1:55:03Rich Roll?

  Denver, I know you're listening to the show. Reach out to Robbie, man. He needs people to hang out with.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  And then I was just in Austin prior to coming up here and, you know, I did a podcast there. And hung out with the rogue running people.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  And they're great. And that community has embraced me a lot. Spending time, there's a new group forming there that's a running group based around the restaurant industry that a friend of mine started. The Commodore Run Club. And I really like, me and the chef from the restaurant, Philip Spear, had talked about this before my run. It's something that we were both really interested in pursuing. He's a recovered addict and he just wants to help those that are going through that in the industry and help to. Get to some before they have to get, has to get that pad.

• 1:55:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  And it's, you can feel the energy. It just started about a month ago, but people are showing up, more and more people every day. And I want to be back and be there as much as I can to run with them and help in that pursuit. And also virtually be with them, just helping them with social media and stuff. But stuff like that, yeah, I want to, and I'd, I'm, I'd want to engage with as many people about what I did as possible. And put my, my hands in other things that are important, like that Run Club.

• 1:56:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Were you filming a doc on the run?

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  There was some filming done. We got, there was, before I started, we put together a couple minute teaser that is already out there about my intentions. And there's another piece in the work. It's nothing long, but it's just going to be a little, a little overview of my experience.

• 1:56:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And are you still doing stuff with Switch for Good with Dotzy?

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Uh, me and Dotzy are always talking. She's kind of turned into a mentor slash, if you got Dotzy on your side, you just feel like you can do anything?

• 1:56:54Rich Roll?

  She's so powerful.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  I mean, just a force. So we, we chat a lot and I, I would like to get more involved with her outreach in the months to come. Still just kind of getting back to understanding what's what. I want to continue to work with Nattamu and continue to perpetuate our, we coined this the plant powered mission. And I want to continue to do things that will perpetuate that message. And they're a great partner and we'll just see where it goes. I want to help other athletes do things too.

• 1:57:26Rich Roll?

  Well, let's, uh, let's land this plane with, uh, final thoughts on, on what it is that, that you want people to take away from this experience in terms of how they can better empower themselves.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Uh, don't get overwhelmed by the larger task and goals at hand and chop things up into little pieces. And eventually if you do that,

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  Small things become big things. I think that, and as we talked about earlier, kind of the arc of starting something new or giving something up, understanding that whatever it is, it's going to get easier over time. And it won't ever mean it won't require maintenance and diligence, but stick with it. Stick with whatever it is. There were many a days I could have stopped and given up because it sucked, but I chose not to. And now I get to forever have this, this massive thing that I did and get to, get to celebrate. And everybody has that ability and whatever, to whatever degree they want.

• 1:58:28Rich Roll?

  Stick to it. Stick to itiveness, but also holding loosely, allowing that universal energy to flow through you, breaking things down into little chunks, dreaming big. You know, a lot of it boils down to these stupid adages that are so true, though. Like I just saw a platitude the other day, you know, if you started today, imagine what it would look like in a year. You know, it's like those things that are like annoying, you know, but they're so true, right? It's like, you know, now look what you get to do. You get to go around and share this experience that you've had for the benefit of other people. And it's, it's a gift, man. So, great to talk to you.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:59:13Rich Roll?

  Super inspiring what you've accomplished. And I can't wait to see what you're going to do next. Keep spreading the message. Maybe consider writing a book. Get out there and talk. And Denver, holler at your boy, right? If people want to connect with you, what's the best place for them to do that? Instagram?

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  I'm pretty active on Instagram. Yeah, it's my name, Robbie Ballenger.

• 1:59:34Rich Roll?

  B A L E N G E R.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Robbie, R O B B I E. And then also, we have a website, plantpoweredmission.com, that I'm going to get active on blogging again soon.

• 1:59:45Rich Roll?

  Cool. And go get your Not a Move, right?

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:59:48Rich Roll?

  Dude, you gotta plug it. You gotta plug your sponsor.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Not a move.

• 1:59:51Rich Roll?

  Um, cool, man. Well, come back and talk to me sometime again, man. Awesome. All right. Peace.

• 1:59:57Rich Roll?

  Vegan ice cream.

• 2:00:01Rich Roll?

  Good kid, that Robbie Ballinger, impressive feat. Hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about it. For even more on Robbie, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Let him know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly on Twitter or Instagram @robbieballinger, B-A-L-E-N-G-E-R. And while you're at it, check out Dotzy's organization, Switch for Good, switchforgood.org. And if you're gonna eat ice cream, why don't you make it not a moo. It's organic, it's non-dairy, it's pretty awesome. And this is not a paid plug, it's just a gracious shout out to those guys for their incredible support that they gave Robbie to make his run possible. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the program

• 2:00:46Rich Roll?

  on Apple Podcasts, that really helps with discovery. Tell your friends about your favorite episodes, share the show on social media, subscribe to my YouTube channel, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello for audio engineering production and show notes. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ali Rogers for portraits, DK for advertiser relationships, and theme music by Anna Leva. Thanks for the love, you guys. I appreciate all of you, and I will see you back here in a couple days with the great Guru Singh, returning for another episode of Guru Multiverse. This one's all about awareness. Here's a clip.

• 2:01:31Rich Roll?

  Until then, peace, plants, namaste.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  Well, when I say in a world of ignorance, I'm not discrediting the world, I'm witnessing the world. Because the word ignorance simply means to ignore. And that's a little bit what's happening in the world. The people have gotten so used to the world the way it is, that they're ignoring the implications of the way it is. And I think that what we're looking at in a world of awareness, dealing with ignorance, is that the onus is upon the awareness, not the ignorance. We're all saying that they're the ones that are destroying the world. Well, the world is being destroyed, whatever's causing it, we're the ones that are gonna save it. And I'll tell you, if we get enough people

• 2:02:22Speaker 02

  to be successful in their life, in their health, living longer, living healthier because of plant-based diet, if we get enough people who are more intuitive because of their mindful and meditative practices, that's how we outflag the problem.