Matthew Futterman On The Secrets of Speed & Endurance

What is the secret to running impossibly fast? Or distances longer than previously imagined? Beginning in the 1960's, an unknown farm boy turned coach named Bob Larsen launched a decades-long quest to find the ‘secret sauce' of speed and endurance that would eventually revolutionize the sport and catapult American running onto the national stage. This is the story of how Larsen took turned a rag-tag group of also-ran junior college athletes called the Jamul Toads into cult-favorite national champions. Later, he would apply his secret training regimen to athletes like Meb Keflezighi and Deena Kastor to create victories at the New York and Boston Marathons as well as the Olympics. To unpack this incredible yarn, today I sit down with New York Times Deputy Sports Editor Matthew Futterman. A graduate of Union College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Matthew has previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, where he was a part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2005. An avid marathoner, Matthew became obsessed with the history of American distance running and the training innovations that create champions. The result of this quest is his new book, Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed. Part Bob Larsen biography and part autobiography, it's a fascinating account of how one maverick coach discovered and developed the unorthodox paradigm that would launch American runners to unprecedented breakthroughs and ultimately inform the protocols of some of today’s most fleet of foot. From Bob Bowerman and Steve Prefontaine to the quest to break the 2-hour marathon, today's exploration focuses on the science behind running performance. The ongoing quest to find the secret sauce of speed and endurance. And the evolving crusade to run faster and farther than ever before. It’s about what can be learned from Bob Larsen's example, and the methods he pioneered that led to his stature as one of the greatest running coaches of all time. And it’s about our shared love for the sport of running. Even if running isn't your thing, I think you will find this conversation compelling. The stories are legend. And the life lessons applicable across disciplines. The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/matthewfutterman455 (please subscribe!) I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  Where you're born, and how you're born, and how you grew up, is not your destiny. You can change your destiny. If you do the work, if you do the right things, and work as hard as anyone, you can be better tomorrow than you were yesterday. And that's the thing about running, though, is like, there's no shortcuts. It's largely about the work. It's largely about patience. It's largely about being committed. And it's the same thing with writing, too. It doesn't come quickly or easily. It can be very painful. It takes a lot of being honest with yourself.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And I say, running and writing are sort of the two lenses through which I approach life. I just never feel more alive than when I'm running.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  That's Matthew Futterman, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? It's me, Rich Roll, your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. My guest today is Matthew Futterman. Matthew is a graduate of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for The Wall Street Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and he's currently the Deputy Sports Editor of The New York Times. He's also the author of a new book. It's called Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed. And it's this fascinating account of this visionary American running coach called Bob Larsen and the journey that

• 2:55Rich Roll?

  he goes on, this quest, really, to discover the unorthodox training secrets that would lead American runners to unprecedented breakthroughs and ultimately inform the protocols of some of today's most fleet of foot. So, running is our subject today. Matthew is our agent, our instrument, our vehicle, and it's all coming up shortly. But first...

• 3:27Rich Roll?

  Okay, Matthew Futterman. So, today's exploration is about the science behind running performance, the ongoing quest to find the secret sauce of speed meets endurance, the crusade to run faster and run farther. And it's about this character. We're seeing this. We're exploring this terrain through this amazing, unique personality that is Bob Larsen and the unorthodox training methods that this legendary coach pioneered that ultimately led to his stature as one of the all-time great running coaches. Matthew talks about Larson's

• 4:06Rich Roll?

  legacy, the athletes he spawned from this ragtag group of San Diego high school runners, which is a really fun story, all the way up to Olympic medalists like Meb Koflezky and Deanna Castor. And it's about our shared love for this sport, this sport of running. I really enjoyed this conversation, so let's have it. This is me and Matthew Futterman.

• 4:33Rich Roll?

  All right, Matthew, thanks for doing the podcast.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 4:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's nice to see you again. We have, we've crossed paths a couple of times over the years. I went to college with your lovely wife.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:49Rich Roll?

  And I think, I think I said this to you in an email, but Amy, I have this, it's weird how memory is bizarrely selective, but I have this very vivid memory of being in a class with her freshman year. And there was an assignment to do something creative, and I made this photo exhibit. I went downtown into San Francisco and photographed all these homeless people, and I blew up these photographs and mounted them. And it was really the first thing, first time I'd ever done anything like creative. Like, I was always very much like a bookish person. And I just remember her being so kind and, and considerate, like she had all these nice things to say about it. And it stuck out.

• 5:31Rich Roll?

  I think it still is in my memory because it was really the first time that anybody had, had like, put wind in my sails for anything creative that I've done. And it's always stayed with me. It's bizarre.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Well, I had a similar conversation with a, one of my first writing teachers in college recently. And because I had, I have like a, you know, there's not one specific memory, except for the fact that I was in a creative writing class in college at a little school in upstate New York. And I was like, trying to do this thing and writing like, bad short stories. And I'm sure he knew they were bad, but he, he was nice enough to be like, you know, these aren't all bad. There's something kind of good here. And he said it in such a way that it was sort of like, he was giving me permission to...

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Pursue something that I really liked and gave me pleasure. And I think, and that really like stuck out in my mind.

• 6:34Rich Roll?

  There's like an ant on the mic or something. A spider, uh oh, flick it.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  But we love spiders because they get rid of the mosquitoes. So we do not.

• 6:39Rich Roll?

  That's a first for the podcast.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  A spider on the mic?

• 6:42Rich Roll?

  Spider crawling on the microphone.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they know, they probably know that, that I'm a huge Charlotte's Web fan. So they know that they're in safe hands around me.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  So you won't get bit.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Right, but the, but that idea that someone like gives you permission to do the thing that you really like, I think that's, that really stays with you. And it's important. And I think as you go through life and as you sort of mature in your career, if you pass that on to a younger person who you see sort of fighting with something and trying to do something and just trying to, and working really hard at it, I think it's a really like valuable thing that you can do.

• 7:21Rich Roll?

  And they're really small gestures that to the person giving it might not seem like anything, but can make all the difference in a young person's life.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And people come back to you like years later and they say like, I remember when you said to me, and you'll get, you'll have no recollection.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure Amy has no recollection of saying that to me.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  You have no recollection of this, but you know, things stick with you. That when they sound right and when you want to hear them, there's sort of these moments.

• 7:49Rich Roll?

  We should probably point out, I mean, Amy, you know, is this uber successful publishing executive.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's done pretty well. Amy Einhorn.

• 7:59Rich Roll?

  It's really amazing what she's created. And I, I remember her as being like really smart and intellectual and savvy. She had this like, like New York cool about her kind of intellectual prowess.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Girl from New Jersey. You're telling her she had New York cool. But it was, but it was very. She's gonna love that.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  Sophisticated, you know what I mean? And, and so it's no surprise to me what she's been able to create and do. And I guess she's probably most well known for discovering Big Little Lies and The Help, right? Like she published both of those books.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are two big ones on the fiction side. Last year she did Jim Comey's book, which was an experience. I will say that.

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  And she, like she created her own imprint at a very young age, right? Which was like highly unusual thing.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yes, it was, there was a time when. You know, there's, there's certain directions you can go in the publishing business. And that was one thing she wanted to try. And I believe it was Putnam was the company that sort of gave her own imprint. So, yeah, on the spine of many books, it says Amy Einhorn Books. That's crazy. Pretty cool. Yeah, she since has moved to another company. Flatiron now, right? Yeah, Flatiron Books now. Uh huh. And has done a lot of great stuff there. So does she, do you go to her to review your work? Absolutely. Like, how does that work? You know, being married to somebody who's an editor. It's great. Well, it's great for me. I mean, I mean, she's not the publisher of my books,

• 9:27Speaker 01

  obviously. But, you know, every, it's funny, a lot of people ask me, and they ask it in the context of, oh, that must be really hard, you know, sharing your writing with her and her going over that. And, I mean, I've written two books now, both times did the exact same thing, which is before I turned in the manuscript, you know, like she got the first draft. Uh huh. And, you know, tore it apart. Right. In her way. And people said, oh, is that really difficult? And my reaction was, why would it be difficult? Like, here's the person who loves you and wants nothing but what's best for you. Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And she's actually really good at this thing. She gets paid to do it. And here she is, like, I mean, who else's hands would you rather be in? Yeah, of course. In that situation. So you just sort of go, I mean, you go and you let yourself be vulnerable. You know, it's okay. Like, you need help. Like, we all need help. This is a, you know, both running and writing, people see as very sort of solitary activities. But they're both, I think, can be very collaborative arts. And at least when they're done well, it takes a team. And having your wife on your team, helping you along the way and saying,

• 10:53Speaker 01

  you totally lost me during these 20 pages. I have no idea what you're talking about. You know, that's something you should take to heart and maybe say, okay, why? Well, here's what I was trying to get out there. And she's like, well, you failed in that spot. It didn't work. And she's like, okay, great, let's try it again.

• 11:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You just have to have a healthy ego and, you know, check yourself a little bit, I would imagine. But nobody's gonna put the amount of care into it, you know, than her. Like, there's this idea that, that when you publish a book, you're gonna be having these midnight, three-hour conversations with your editor over philosophy and life. And it just doesn't work that way. I mean, I don't know what your relationship was or has been with your editor of this book. But editors are busy. And with the consolidation of all these publishing companies, they're like project managers. They're handling so many books. And no matter how much they care about your book, they're, they're distracted by all the other things they have to do.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're one of, you're one of a bunch of authors. And you're one of a bunch of books that's being published. And, you know, I think it's always been that way. Where, you know, people turn to, turn to other writers and say, you know, can you look at this for me? Does this make sense? Does this work? And, and then, once it's sort of ready to go out the door, you feel like it's in a, it's in a, it's in the kind of shape to go out the door. Then you let it go out the door. I mean, I know Amy would never have let me put a manuscript out into the world if it just wasn't up to the right standards. If it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. And I'm pretty hard on myself, too.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I have this massive fear of boring readers. It's, it's a big ask, I think, these days, with so many distractions, to get people to, you know, read your thousand-word stories, much less read your 100,000-word book. So you gotta put every effort into keeping the story moving, keeping it going, keeping them turning pages. And... I feel like I'm a pretty good judge of my own work at this point on when I'm falling short. I don't know if I'm my biggest critic, but I'm up there.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I had Kelly Corrigan in here yesterday, who's written a slew of New York Times bestsellers. And she said something almost exactly the same, what you said, like, if you're going to ask people to read your book, like, you better have shown up for the page 110%, because it is a big ask in this distracted age to ask somebody to sit down and spend that kind of quiet, undistracted time with something that you poured your heart and soul into.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  It takes a while. And I'm kind of a slow reader, so it takes me a while to read books. And it's just, it's hard to get people's attention these days.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  Well, you did a great job. I love the book. It's definitely not boring. It's a page turner.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  I'm not done with it yet, but I'm well into it, and I really enjoyed it. And that's what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about running. We're going to talk about this book. And I'm interested, maybe the launching point is just to ask you, like, why, like, first of all, why, what drew you to writing a book about running to begin with? And how and why did you laser in on this character, Bob Larsen, as a protagonist to tell the story you wanted to tell?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Well, I'll deal with the first question, which is, what drew me to want to write about this? And that's really, I think, the question that's been sort of battering my head the last, I don't know, five, 10 years or something like that. I mean, I've been a runner for, let me do the math, 35 years or something like that. But the question that I've sort of been going back and forth is, I've always wanted to get at the idea of, you know, why do we run? Of all the activities we could do? Why do we still do this thing? We haven't had to run for our food for a long time now, since we became an agricultural culture.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And yet, we still do it. And people have sort of never stopped doing it. Obviously, they do it in much larger numbers now and wear fancy clothes when they're doing it and fancy shoes. But what's going on with us when we go spend three miles, or five miles, or eight miles, or 250 miles running at a time? What are we running to? What are we running from? Runners spend a lot of time alone, often, and we have a lot of time to think. And I think that's one of the reasons why running sort of lends itself to some pretty good writing at times.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  And so, there was... I always wanted to write a running book about some of these things. But I didn't... I didn't really want to write it about myself.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I didn't think there was anything particularly outstanding about my life as a runner. I mean, it's outstanding to me, but I didn't know how to... I didn't think my... How to wed your own personal experience to a broader narrative. I didn't think I could, you know, my... I didn't think I could carry a whole book in my ruminations about running. And so, I was always looking around for the right running story that hadn't really been told yet. And I also have always been fascinated by the early days of long-distance running. And when I say early days, it really wasn't very long ago. Right. When we talk about it. You know, the first running boom was like in the 70s.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And the running culture back then, the sort of roots of running, a lot of it was very sort of rebellious, very countercultural. I mean, the first sort of poster boy of running was Steve Freefontaine, who had the mustache and the long hair. And that's what everyone wanted to be like. That was... That was what running was. It wasn't this mainstream activity.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  That was on the cover of magazines and it was it was really sort of very niche and very fringe and there were few things more rebellious that you could do than wake up on a Saturday morning and go out and run 20 miles.

• 17:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  You'd be the freak on the side of the road.

• 17:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's it's crazy to think about that because it wasn't so long ago and now to reflect on the fact that running is like the most popular participation sport with, you know, hundreds of thousands of people doing marathons in some city every single weekend. But I have a very like romantic notion of the pre Fontaine and pre pre Fontaine era of these bearded guys with mustaches in the early days of Nike with the waffle shoe and no GPS watches and just ragtag, you know, dudes who are essentially hippies like out there doing something on the fringe like there's something to super punk rock and cool about that.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  It's great and it really, I mean, you say, I mean, I'm sure it was a little different in some ways because you also had like Billy Mills who came out of the Marines and, you know, they did some running in the, you know, in the military. So you had sort of that wing of it, but a lot of what you just described, that's kind of what it was.

• 18:27Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  You had these, it was, it was very fringe. And so I've always sort of liked that idea. And then I've always known, I've known Bob Larsen, who's the main character in the book for a while because he, I knew him as Mep Koflesky's coach.

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Which was how most people knew him, or maybe some people out here knew him as a long time UCLA track coach. But I never really knew his backstory until one, I got invited to a documentary about him that was made by one of his former runners. And it told this story, it sort of had this mention of his origins, which was with this group of, like we said, these kind of hippie runners in late 1960s, early 70s San Diego, called themselves the Humble Toads and this group of runners who sort of come out of nowhere to win the 1976 National Cross Country Championship, back when that was just about the biggest

• 19:27Speaker 01

  race other than the Boston Marathon.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And

• 19:32Speaker 01

  These were his lab rats, like, these were the guys that, that he used to come up with his theories of how to run far, fast. He had done a lot of thinking about it, but it was gonna take experimentation, and he came along with these guys, and he was working with them for years, in terms of sort of figuring out his methods.

• 19:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And so, and I just really loved that story, and I, and then I saw, and I saw a picture of these guys, too. And there's a picture on like,

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right in the book, right.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Because that was the picture when, I just remember sitting and watching this documentary. And I saw that picture, and I thought, oh, who the hell are those guys?

• 20:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I gotta, I gotta find out who those guys are. And I thought, if they're interesting, that might be a good story. Because you need good characters.

• 20:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And I started calling them. The maker of the film, this guy, Robert Lucitania, was incredibly generous. He said, "That would be great if you wrote a book about this. Here's all my friends' phone numbers."

• 20:36Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And so, I called them, and, you know, each one had just a great story. I started asking them, you know, "Why do you, why did you run?

• 20:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think he said something like, if they had a really boring answer to that first question, you would think, well, maybe there's not a book.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  But let's just see how they respond to that.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Right. And not one of them said, "I don't know. It's just something I was kind of good at, and I just sort of did." They all, like, had thought really hard about what they were doing out there. And they all had really, sort of visceral emotions about how it made them feel, why they were doing it, what they had been trying to accomplish, and where it had sort of brought them in life.

• 21:20Rich Roll?

  And I think, yeah, each one of those had, you know, some reason, something that they were, like, to go back to a point you made a minute ago, they were all running from something and running towards something.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Right? It's, the answer to that question is a combination of both of those things, I think, with most people.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Most people, I would think. If you're the kind of person who's... I don't know if you, you know, I guess the glass, glass half, half empty person, if you're, if you're neurotic, or if you're, you know, self-conscious and self-aware and you like to think about these things, then yes, there's often an interesting answer to those things.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  Right. So at this moment in time, the US was certainly not known as any kind of big running power, right?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Well, in the sixties and seventies?

• 22:07Rich Roll?

  Well, no, like at the, at the, at the beginning of like this journey, there wasn't a lot of science and understanding about how to train.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Nobody knew, nobody knew anything. People had ideas, but it was one of those things that it was all, it was all, well, he did that and he won a gold medal, so we should do that.

• 22:26Rich Roll?

  Right, but no real thought or science.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  There was very little science behind it, very little experimentation, and that was the thing that really sort of separated Bob Larsen out early on from everybody else because he, he ended up at San Diego State, you know, grew up in San Diego for the most part, started in Minnesota on a farm with no running water, no electricity, family moved to San Diego when he was 11 years old. And so he grows up in San Diego, ends up at San Diego and runs in high school, ends up at San Diego State and is running at San Diego State and is really interested in physical education and what we now call kinesiology, and ends up getting to know this professor

• 23:10Speaker 01

  named Fred Cash, who is doing some of the first studies on hu- human cardio health.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Because at the time, and we talk about running not being something people did, people just didn't exercise, I mean, the, as adults. So the idea, it was thought that if you strained your heart after the age of about 35, that was like a very dangerous thing to do.

• 23:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  That was to sort of risk massive cardiac catastrophic event.

• 23:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  And so nobody, I mean, you just think about that, and this was not very long ago, this is like a little more than 50 years ago, maybe 50 years ago, and at that time... You know, we're sending rockets to the, you know, we're sending people to the moon where the Russians actually have a cellphone at this point. You know, they have, they have invented a phone that can fit in your pocket. So it was sort of like the first cellphone. I mean, the modern map of Europe was kind of laid out, like modernity had happened. And yet, when it comes to like cardiac health, we are in the complete dark ages. I mean, to me, it's completely baffling. And so then there's this guy Fred Cash is doing these studies and he's having these adults in San Diego come a few evenings a

• 24:29Speaker 01

  week to San Diego State. And he's telling them to run and he's taking their, and he's measuring their heart rates. And what he's finding is that the more they run, uh, the more their heart rates are going down, that they're become, that their hearts are becoming more efficient.

• 24:48Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And Bob, at the time, is a college runner and he's training in summers. And in summers, he does this really radical thing, which is he, he goes and he runs on trails and he runs on roads because he's not running around the track all the time. And he does that. And then he's working with Fred Cash and looking at this lab and he has like this aha moment where he thinks, yeah, that's actually what I'm feeling. I feel like the more I run, the longer I run, the more efficient I feel, the better it is.

• 25:21Rich Roll?

  It's so hilarious because it's so self-evident and obvious now to think that that was not something that people were aware of at that time, not so long ago.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I mean, like, Salk had invented the polio vaccine and yet people didn't realize the heart was a muscle like any other muscle. Like, you know, do bicep curls, your biceps get bigger. But work out your heart. It might die.

• 25:46Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Like it doesn't make, it doesn't make sense, but that, that was the idea. No, the heart is just a muscle like any other muscle. Exercise it and it will become stronger and it will become more efficient.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  So conventional wisdom at this time, pre, you know, this epiphany was for, for track and field athletes were, or cross country athletes, just go to the track and do, I mean, how were they training at that time?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  You basically had two sort of, I mean, I'll call them schools, but one of the schools was really like very much in its infancy. That would be the, the Lydyard School. Lydyard was this coach from New Zealand who, um, Bob Bowerman at, uh, at, at Oregon.

• 26:29Rich Roll?

  Oregon.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Had gone to visit and had come back with, with, or Lydyard has the first sort of jogging group um, in New Zealand. But, and his idea was, uh, volume, you know, run, you gotta run more than a hundred miles a week. But he wasn't really focused on intensity. He was mainly focused on the volume and his mantra was train on strain. So then you, so you had that school on the one side. And then on the other side, you had the sort of traditional Europeans. Um, Emil Zadapek was their hero because he's the only guy that won the 5,000, the 10,000, the marathon, the Olympics. And Zadapek and all the sort of Zadapek disciples were obsessed with intervals.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  So that was go to the track and do half mile intervals or quarter mile intervals or, you know, at the most three quarters, maybe every once in a while you do some mile repeats. Um, but it was largely, you know, Zadapek would do these, these crazy quarter mile training sessions where he would do like 60 or 65 quarter miles, all of them in like 65 seconds with, with, you know, a minute rest in between. And so Bob comes along and his idea, what he eventually happens upon is a sort of middle ground. His two questions were, why do the long runs have to be so slow?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And why do the intervals have to be so short? What if we try to go hard for a long period of time? What if you go to what he starts talking about as your threshold, your edge? Go to that spot right before you're going to become exhausted if you go at that pace for too long a time and try and stay there. Stay there for a mile today, stay there for a mile and a half tomorrow and slowly build up and that becomes known what we all call today as tempo runs.

• 28:34Rich Roll?

  Right, sort of lactate threshold training. That moment, that place where if you go any harder, it's unsustainable. But if you go just a little bit easier, it's just a little bit too comfortable. Like finding that edge and training at, you know, at that for as long as possible and trying to expand your ability to maintain that pace.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Right, and it's uncomfortable. I mean, the idea is-

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  It's the worst.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Right, you're at a, you're at a place, you're at a place where you're not comfortable. But the idea is to teach your body and teach your mind really how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and, and that that's okay.

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  It's okay if you're afraid-

• 29:19Rich Roll?

  You're not gonna die.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  You're not gonna die. It's okay if you're afraid of it, um, because we're all probably afraid of it. It's not, you know, it's a learned behavior to go to the place that makes you uncomfortable and to stay there and to think, don't slow down, actually try and go a little bit faster. See if there's one more click I can get to. And that was really, that's sort of the central revelation of what he had his runners doing. And it was all measured. I mean, he would take in their pulse rates. It wasn't, he would have groups of runners. He would, he would do, you know, he had a control group and then he had the experimental group and he- Take their pulses, you know, in the middle of their runs, you would see how much, how much

• 30:03Speaker 01

  they were straining, how much these guys were straining, and they would look at the results and who was getting better.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  And that's what he came upon.

• 30:10Rich Roll?

  So his, his methodology, he was seeing, he was seeing bigger gains in more compressed periods of time than control groups or people that were training in accordance with these other methodologies.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Definitely, yeah.

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  It's interesting because all three of those modalities, there's wisdom to all of them. I mean, the sort of initial, you know, volume, you know, concept, I mean, that's sort of, the legacy of that is kind of the Mafetone method. Like that's, I train with that like all the time, like building, building that efficiency from the ground up as opposed to the top down, which is what happens when you're threshold training. And the interval training, like now, I feel like in modern times, the best, you know, approach, I mean, depending upon distance and, you know, what level you're at, is some combination of all of those.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's the thing, you have to do, I mean, and now, everybody says, you know, you gotta have three elements to your training, you gotta, you know, you have to have, you gotta have volume, you gotta have, you know, those threshold runs, or I'm sure if you're cycling, same thing, or if you're swimming, the same thing, threshold swims. And then you have to do, you know, some of those short intervals, the workouts and stuff, you know, you have to build, build it from all three. But while you're doing that, if you're interested in distance running, if that's your thing, the intervals probably shouldn't be too short.

• 31:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  And the, and the long runs shouldn't be too slow. If you have, I mean, if, if your goal is just to finish, then, you know, go as slow as you want.

• 31:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Who cares? Yeah, I mean, but if you're really focused on, or even slightly focused on improvement and getting faster, and I've, and I will say, I've never met, I've never met someone who ran a race and then didn't say...

• 32:09Speaker 01

  I wonder if I could do it fast.

• 32:10Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  That's just like a very, I just feel like that's a

• 32:13Rich Roll?

  It's a very human thing.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  It's a very human thing.

• 32:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  And so, so if you ever have that, that thought, I mean, that's the kind of thing I'm speaking to here.

• 32:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  That drive that we have.

• 32:33Rich Roll?

  Well, the other, the other radical thing is that he, that Larson did is he took them off the track, which at the time was anathema, right? Like every day you're supposed to go to the track and try to be better than you were the day before, just hammering these repeats on the clock. And I know just from my history of being a swimmer, like that, that it, there's a huge mental toll that comes with that because you know, you're in a swimming pool, it's a fixed distance, there's a pace clock. And if you're not hitting these repeats at times, you know, that are better than you were the week before, or even the day before, you start to think like, am I making any progress? Like, it's very hard to, you, you, you just can't go hard every day.

• 33:15Rich Roll?

  And there was a period of time where that was the philosophy, just go in and just like, go as hard as you can every single day. And for him to take these athletes off the track, get onto the trails, you know, you, you don't really, there's no GPS watches, they don't know exactly what pace they're running and just to learn how to go on feel and practice these surges and being at that, you know, that edge had to be some mental reprieve.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Well, the track and the pool probably is really, really good for one person and that's the coach.

• 33:48Rich Roll?

  Cause they can monitor everything perfectly.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Cause the coach can stay, can stand in the middle of the track or can stand on the pool deck and can have the watch and they can monitor everything and, you know, he or she is not the one going around in circles like a hamster all afternoon or going back and forth in the water all, all day and, you know, driving them, you know, good, going, going, slowly going mad.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  But when you get off the track or you get out of the pool, it's just, I mean, for obvious reasons, it's liberating.

• 34:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  You feel free. You can go, you're going from point A to point B. And the good thing about Bob is that he started coaching when he was really young. So, you know, this first team of runners he coached at Montavista High School in San Diego, you know, they show up for cross-country practice on the first day. And they're looking around for the coach and the windbreaker. And now he's actually the guy wearing shorts and a T-shirt and running shoes. And he says, let's go. And they run together. And he was running with his runners,

• 34:58Speaker 01

  you know, until he couldn't keep up anymore.

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Or even, and even, even when, you know, he was in his 30s and certainly slower than the people that he was training, you know, he would run the first, he would run the warm-up with them. He would run the five, the first five, six miles with them and then let them go.

• 35:17Rich Roll?

  He was like a 420 miler.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. At one point he was a 420 miler. Um, and a twen- and a 24-second 200 runner. I mean, he's, he's had some wheels. But, you know, he, so he would sort of build that trust equation that way. And, you know, he, he's still, he's 80 years old. He still runs. He lives on, you know, he lives on, on top of one of the Brentwood Hills. And it's, it's about two miles up the hill to get up to his house. And I was sitting on his deck with him last night, having a beer. And he said, and he says, yeah, it's a hell of a workout. I did it a couple of weeks ago. And I sort of said, you ran up the hill a couple of weeks ago? And he's like, oh, yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  That's awesome.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Like, he still run, you know, he still runs most days. Usually drives his car down to the bottom of the hill and runs on the flats. But, uh, I mean, it's that idea that he runs, you know, straight up. Tiger Tail Road or whatever it is.

• 36:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. It's steep.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  It's pretty darn steep, yeah. When he was coaching UCLA, he would, on Sunday mornings, he would tell his runners, you know, run up to my house and, you know, there'll be pancakes waiting for you. And he did it sort of as bonding, but also it was good hill.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  What does he, what does he think of the book? Like, he has to be thrilled.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Uh, he, it took, it took some getting used to for him. He is, you know, he has these, he has these, um, Minnesota roots. And, uh, when I was, I was working on this book and I, you know, from the beginning, and you've got to sort of figure out what the book is about and you have to sort of figure out, uh, you know, sometimes we call it the mule, you know, who's going to carry the book? Who's the character who's going to carry the story? And that wasn't immediately apparent to me in terms of how it was going to be structured. You know, I thought maybe it would be about all these different characters and it is about

• 37:23Speaker 01

  all these different characters. But, um, at some point, it became clear to me, you know what? This story needs to stay as close to Bob Larsen as possible. It's really his story. He's the only guy in America who was present at the birth of the running boom, the collapse of American distance running and the person who brought it back.

• 37:49Rich Roll?

  Resuscitated.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And resuscitated it. And, you know, that's really like an incredible story. And that's what sort of the book was about. But in the same way, um, you know, he, I don't have any business relationship with him. I was just interviewing him along the way and I wasn't sharing drafts of it with him. Um, so, I mean, Billy Bean, the Oakland A's president.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  He didn't know Moneyball was really about him. Until he got sent, you know, a galley, an advanced copy of it. And

• 38:26Rich Roll?

  A little shell shock.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  He was a little shell shocked that he was the main character. And so then when I sent it to Bob, uh, once it was sort of in book form, I, I sent it to him to have a look. And also I needed, I needed him to fact check it.

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Uh, make sure I wasn't getting stuff wrong. Uh, it took a little, he was sort of a little surprised and he was a little, he was just sort of take, he was just, he's just not, he's a very humble person.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  The reason nobody has heard about him is because even though he would have had every right to 25 years ago, or however many years ago, when he's producing like gold medalist after gold medalist, to have written a book and called it The Larson Way, or something like that, and gone on any number of talk shows, or, you know, gone on the circuit and become a franchise into himself. He's never thought of, he's not the kind of person who would ever think of doing something like that. So, uh, it was my great good fortune that he's sort of this unknown guru of American news and running. And so he was a little, so he loves the book now, um, but it took him a little while to get used to it.

• 39:36Rich Roll?

  Right. Is he doing like events with you? Will he come out and speak about this time?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  He was with me, uh, last week, we did an event with New York Roadrunners and, um, uh, we're, while I'm in LA, we're doing something with the LA Running Club.

• 39:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And South Bay runners at, uh, one of the schools in Santa Monica during their weekly workout.

• 39:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I think he's having a pretty good time with this. It's a, it's a bit of a kick for him.

• 40:02Rich Roll?

  My, my favorite part of the book is, is just the, the kind of Bad News Bears story of these toads. Right? This ragtag group of, of young runners who, you know, don't sort of cut the claw, uh, cut this, you know, image of elite athletes and how he shapes these young minds and, and athletes into, into champions. And the story of them going to the AAU championships without any money. And, you know, they show up, they don't really have uniforms or, you know, they're just fish out of water kind of thing. I mean, how can you not like root for these guys?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  That, yeah, that's what it was. I mean, they have no, they had been, they had been turned down. By the early version of Nike, Bob knew Jeff Hollister and had said, I got a pretty good team here. Can you give me some money to get him to Philadelphia? And he said, who's on the team? And he's basically said, eh, not really impressed. I've never really heard of those guys. Um, sorry, not into it.

• 41:03Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, they were a bunch of, they, these were not like the elite of the elite. Um, look, they were fast. They were some good, they were great natural runners and they had good careers. Uh, you know, Ed Mendoza ran a two 10 marathon in Boston on a really hot day and he was on the Olympic team in 1976. So there were some good runners there, but they weren't sort of the blue blood.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Runner in terms of they weren't the sort of chosen, the chosen ones who, I'm sure you grew up with those guys in swimming, you know, they're, they want the, the guys who are always good as teenagers and some of them go on to be very good as adults.

• 41:49Rich Roll?

  And also just the, these, there are these programs that you know, like, oh, well, the good people come out of these programs, like in, you know, in running, it's Oregon or, you know, what, what have you. There's certainly, you know, that exists in swimming. And here you have, you know, Larson with this, with this group, they're unknown, they're not, there's no legacy.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  No, he was a, he was at Grossmont Junior College.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  That's where they are. That's basically where most of them started. Grossmont, Grossmont Junior College in, you know, in San Diego, he was only allowed to, you know, the community college system, you aren't allowed to recruit. You, you, it's like a public high school. Your, your district is drawn and he could draw kids from eight schools and eight high schools in the region. And of course, once he had some success, some people start like moving into the region so they can go and run and run for him. But it was basically whoever shows up on day one.

• 42:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  And of course he would look in the local high schools. But his recruiting amounted to, he would have a barbecue at his house and buy a keg of beer and invite the local track coaches over once a year and say like, so who do you got? Who's coming in? Who should I keep my eye on?

• 43:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  That was it. And they came to him, but they worked differently and they worked harder. And so. He would show up to these invitational meets with all the big four-year schools and he was better, they were better than them.

• 43:22Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  They were beating, they were beating all of them because they were just, because they had happened on to the, the sort of secret sauce. You talk about them as a team. Um, and I think we mentioned before that people think of this as a very sort of solitary activity and individual sport, but you know, we talked about Larson's first principle of going to your edge. The second one was you gotta train, you cannot train alone. Like you are, you are part of a team. The group is more powerful than the individual. You know, lean on your teammates. They will pick you up on the days when you are slacking off, when you're falling out of the pack. You're gonna try and run harder to keep up with the pack. And you know, tomorrow, you're gonna be the one that's leading the pack and someone else is gonna be falling off and they're gonna try and keep up with you.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Um, it's a, you know, it's like the, I think I've mentioned it, it's like the Peloton in cycling. You know, you're just, that, that big clump, it's really powerful. I mean, there's aerodynamic reasons in cycling why it's really powerful, but psychologically it's really powerful too. The last thing you wanna do is get chewed up and spit out and left behind. So there was that idea. And then the third idea was just that where you're born and how you're born and how you grew up is not your destiny. You can change your destiny if you do the work, if you do the right things and work as hard as anyone, you can be better tomorrow than you were yesterday.

• 44:51Rich Roll?

  I love that because it would be easy to say that his philosophy is lactate threshold training, but in truth, his philosophy is a philosophy of life. It's applicable to running and being excellent in running, but those are principles and rules to live by, no matter what it is that you do or seek.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's honestly, like, that's really the main thing that sort of drew me to this story. You know, I wanted to write a running book that was, yeah, it was about running, but you know, running is sort of the lens, I'd say running and writing are sort of the two lenses through which.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I approach life and I don't have been a sports writer for about 20 years. I've been a journalist for 25 years. I don't think I would do this if, and I wouldn't have sort of gravitated towards sports, if I didn't think it had a lot of stories that would convey sort of these lessons and not morals. And I say that, it sounds sort of preachy and stuff, but I'm very drawn to stories that can speak to things beyond the playing field and beyond the field of competition. Because these are the stories that sort of help me get through my day and have, provide

• 46:15Speaker 01

  me with, like I said, that that sort of lens of which of which I can sort of have some revelations and epiphanies about what's important and how to approach things. And so in when I'm doing my job right, you know, readers are getting that benefit as well.

• 46:32Rich Roll?

  It's very Murakami.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's sort of that's, that's the hope is to sort of convey that and hope that people, you know, if this book makes you love running and be faster, terrific. But if it makes you think it's okay to be uncomfortable, I actually really want to push myself to a kind of threshold, whether it's in relation, in my relationships or in my job or even just, you know, I want to start painting. I've never painted before and I'd really like to try that, even though I know I'm going to be terrible at it, then great. And that's, then that would be the, the greatest thing.

• 47:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, having the courage to approach that edge and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is where you meet yourself and where the growth occurs.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where the magic, I mean, that was the whole idea with, with Bob when he, because where you're, when you feel like you're going to collapse and you don't, that's where the magic is. Like that's where you find truth about yourself. That's where you, that's where you can take that moment into.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  A race and know that when you're really hurting, you can think back to, no, no, no, I've been, I've actually been here before. I can do this. I can, I can keep at this for another mile or two and I can keep up with this guy.

• 48:08Rich Roll?

  And it spills over into everything that you do. You know, you develop this resiliency and this willingness to confront that edge in other areas of your life. And, and as a result, your life expands.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Hopefully.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Hopefully.

• 48:24Rich Roll?

  It definitely does. And, and you know, you just can't, you know, whether you're a runner or not, whether it's running or swimming or whatever it is that you do where you can kind of find that flow state sense. You return from that more complete, like with clarity that you didn't have beforehand. Like, I'm sure you've never come back from a run and said, I wish I hadn't done that. Or, you know, some problem that you were wrestling with by allowing it to kind of exist in your subconscious. While you're running, you come back with a solution to it. And I don't know how that works or why that works, but it works.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  No, I definitely do a lot of my best writing while I'm running. There's no question about that. I can tell you exactly where I was when I figured out the subtitle of the book, which was, which is, you know, A Band of Misfits and The Guru unlocked the secrets of speed. I was having a really hard time with like that verb, like searching for the secrets of speed or searching. And then like, you know, I was in Central Park and I was just about on the North End, like at 102nd Street and all of a sudden, and I'd been thinking about it for like an hour as I was an hour into my run.

• 49:39Rich Roll?

  Right before the hill back up to the west side.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And all of a sudden it was like unlocked, came for me and I was like, yes, unlocked. And it was there and. You know, everybody, you know, my family at this point is quite used to me, the image of me like coming back into the apartment from a run and sort of grabbing the closest pen and paper and scribbling things down before I forget them.

• 50:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Things that I've thought of, things I want to pursue, lines and stories that I want to use, just.

• 50:09Rich Roll?

  Do you ever have to stop in the middle of the run to like, record a voice memo or something?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want them on my phone because I hate carrying things and, you know, I run to get away from stuff.

• 50:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Especially my phone. And so I got nothing, I got nothing to record on. I don't, I don't have a Apple Watch.

• 50:31Rich Roll?

  I've had that thing though, where I'll have some idea mid-run.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  And it's like, please don't let me forget this.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:37Rich Roll?

  Sometimes I do, you know?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  Because I don't want to stop and make a note or something like that.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I'm sure, I'm sure I lose some of it, but I feel like your mind can be a pretty good filter. And if it's really, if it is important, you'll remember it.

• 50:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Or if you really, or if you play a game and you think about ways to remember it, you will.

• 51:00Rich Roll?

  One of the things you do in the book is you also weave in your own personal relationship with running. And I, and I like that. I mean, I think it, it allows the reader to, you know, connect with why you're writing the book and, you know, identify some aspect of themselves in, in yourself because you're relatable in your relationship to running. So the, the question that I have is that you ask all of these other people is why do you run? Like, how do you answer that for yourself?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the, this sort of funny, well, it's funny to me at least, answer is, I, I've run 23 marathons at this point. And I'm grown like kind of obsessed with trying to complete that distance as quickly as possible. And to see how far, see where I can get to. And, you know, within the confines of a full-time job and raising children and reading books and writing books. And so.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And the reason I have come upon as to why I'm focused on my time is because I guess I kind of feel like if I can keep getting faster, then I'm not really getting older.

• 52:12Rich Roll?

  Right, or you're not gonna die.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Or I'm not gonna die, right. Which is ridiculous, of course, but you know, but it's a fun little game to distract me from. It makes you feel good, makes you get out of bed in the morning. So there's that reason, it's a little sort of existential game. You know, but a few other reasons why I run, I just never feel more alive than when I'm running. I never feel, I never, my thoughts never feel as sort of ordered. There's a sense of peace that I'm getting, even when, you know, doing half mile intervals.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  You know, and that dreaded eight by eight hundred workout that everybody has to do at some point when you're trying to go faster.

• 53:03Rich Roll?

  Michigan eight hundreds.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's an editor at Runner's World, I think it's in Bart Yasso.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, the Yasso eight hundreds.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really work. I mean, it's torture. I don't know, I was curious, what's the swimming equivalent of the eight, of like the eight hundred? Is it two hundreds?

• 53:24Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think it depends on what, what discipline, like what stroke you swim, what your event is. I mean, I would do these crazy sets of like 10 times 200 fly. That probably would be the most similar version of that on some level.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  That's, it's funny you say that because my 800 time in running is about, I think, my 200 time in swimming. So I'm sort of curious, and when I'm swimming, I sometimes do sets of 200 because I can't run every day.

• 53:54Rich Roll?

  Right, it's the same amount of time.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's a similar amount of time you're pushing yourself. But, so even when I'm like pushing myself like that, I'm very conscious of like there is a kind of peace to this. There's a quiet that happens.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  And I think it's sort of. Getting to that quiet and getting to that, you know, it's just, it's, it's just very elemental. Uh, you know, it's just you and your shoes and the road. And, uh, maybe sometimes there's 10,000 people surrounding you.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  But it just, it just feels right. It's like, it feels, I don't want to say I'm like, I am my best self when I'm running because that would be, that just doesn't sound right, but it's one of those.

• 54:42Rich Roll?

  There's truth to that.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  It's one of those, it's one of those, it's a, it's a, it's a thing that I do where I feel really comfortable with who I am.

• 54:50Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  And, uh, it's, it's, other people have other things that they do, uh, where they, where they feel that way. And that's a, that's a spot where I'm just, I'm, I'm just in a good, I'm in a good place.

• 55:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I had an opportunity many years ago, uh, my family, we were in Santa Fe, just for a couple of days to get away. And it was during a period of time when Ryan Hall and Sarah Hall were living there. And Ryan's like, hey, we're going to be down at the track, like doing a workout, like, why don't you come down? And I, and I got to watch him do Yasso 800s while I was like on the outer lane plotting, doing my eight minute miles around the track. And I've just never seen anything like that. Like, I was just, you know, marveling at what a specimen he was.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  It's pretty amazing.

• 55:42Rich Roll?

  At that period of time, running around the track.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:43Rich Roll?

  It was unbelievable.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  And his pulse probably went not going higher than about 150 or something like that.

• 55:48Rich Roll?

  It didn't seem like any big deal.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  155 or something. Yeah. It's a, it's an amazing thing, but having said that, did you talk to him after? And was he like talking about your running also?

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  Well, he's a very generous, curious person.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  But, but runner's.

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  Incredibly humble.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Well, runner's, well, yes, he is. All those, all those things.

• 56:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Terrific person.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  But one of the things I love about running is in the DNA of the sport is there's this, there's, there's a not much of a gulf between the elites and the, you know, workaday runners in terms of talking to each other about what they do. There's this understanding that we're all sort of doing the same thing in a way that if you went to try, if you were a golfer and you went to try and talk to Phil Mickelson and you started talking about like, you know, the match you were playing at your club the other day, he would laugh at you. He would

• 56:55Speaker 01

  like make some joke about, you know, your drive or your putter or something like that. Whereas I've honestly never met an elite runner who wasn't interested about how you were training, wanted to, was interested in hearing, you know, how you felt or how somebody else felt during, you know, Boston in 2014 when it was kind of hot or, or in 2018, like what was your experiencing of it when it was, you know, 37 degrees and pouring rain? It's, that's just part of the culture. Abdi Abdi Rahman said to me like last year

• 57:40Speaker 01

  when I said like, Abdi, I'm not comparing what I do to what you do. And he said, he said, what do you mean, man? We, we all experience the same pain. We just experienced it at different times.

• 57:49Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. There's this scene in the book where, where you get a text from Meb the night before. Was it Boston?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  It was for New York.

• 57:56Rich Roll?

  For New York, yeah. And he's like, you know, suffering on the horizon tomorrow or something like that.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Pain is in the forecast for all of us. Right.

• 58:04Rich Roll?

  And I just thought like, how cool is that? Like, here's a guy who's lining up, you know, for the race of his life.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  He's trying to win.

• 58:10Rich Roll?

  And, and he had the, the mindset to like, check in with you.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  And see how you were doing.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like, and they, and that's just not me and Meb because I was a reporter. I mean, there's, there's, you could find all kinds of people who the night before the marathon are, you know, trading Instagram messages with.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  You know, you fill in the elite runner. You know, they're passing time, everybody's nervous about the race.

• 58:40Rich Roll?

  And you're all running the same course at essentially the same time, which makes it really beautifully unique.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Right. So there's a camaraderie there. We all, it may be somewhat rooted in a sort of common affection for it. Because being a long distance runner, being an elite marathoner is a very intentional career choice. Being any kind of elite athlete is obviously going to take a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. But being an elite marathoner, I mean, that is a lot of time, a lot of time alone, a lot of really hard workouts, a lot of pain, and you only get two cracks at it a year

• 59:27Speaker 01

  if you're a marathoner, because you can't really, your body can't really perform well more than twice a year in a marathon. Maybe three times in like 14 months or something, but not more than that. So the payoff, who knows if it's going to pay off?

• 59:45Rich Roll?

  Stakes are high.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, stakes are pretty high. So to do it, you really better love it. It's a thing that you're going to be passionate about.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  So Larson helps usher in this new era of running and contributes to the boom that we see occur in the 70s with this kind of embrace of long distance running and the kind of Jim Fix era and Prefontaine and all of that. There's this explosion in popularity with running. But it's not long after that the United States like takes this dip, right? And we kind of disappear.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  I think it's like a death spiral.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like what? Explain what happened and then how it was resuscitated. Because we're in this amazing period right now where we're seeing the resurgence of the Americans on the world stage in a way that we haven't seen since that era.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it's hard to say exactly what happened, but here's two things that definitely.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Did ha- I mean, it's hard to draw the exact cause and effect relationship. But two things that definitely did happen. One is Alberto Salazar, who, you know, is just about the greatest American distance runner ever. You know, won New York three times, won Boston, and is just absolutely flying in his career in the early 1980s. And everybody expects he's gonna win the gold medal in the 84 Olympics, and that'll be sort of a crowning achievement for him. And on the way to the 84 Olympics, he essentially just hits a wall. He cannot run fast anymore.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  He's just, he's, he's not getting slower, he's not getting faster, he's getting slower. And he should be at the prime of his career, he's like 26 years old. And, I mean, only later would you find out that, you know, he was dealing poorly with some nagging injuries and not getting the right treatment. He was also suffering from depression, so that was a problem. But the lesson that everybody took from Salazar, and nobody trained harder than Salazar, and Larson didn't train Salazar, he was on the other side of the country, but Salazar was definitely from the Larson school of threshold running.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I mean, he went beyond the threshold, he nearly died in the Falmouth Race in Cape Cod. He, you know, he, the, the Boston Marathon, the one that's known as the duel in the sun between him and Dick Beardsley, is sort of this just epic race on an incredibly hot day. And, you know, he was just completely fearless. And then, like I said, he ran into a wall. And the false lesson that everyone took from that was, he probably was training too hard. He overtrained, outran himself, you know, maybe we only get a certain number of steps in life before our bodies start to break down.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  So don't use up too many of your steps in training, or else you're gonna be done at 26.

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  Is this when people are starting to realize for the very first time that overtraining could be a thing?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  I mean, probably. That's, that's, yeah, overtraining becomes a big topic of discussion at that point. But-

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  In the long distance community, the idea is don't overtrain. How about we only run like 90 miles a week? Uh huh. And we go back to that train don't strain idea. And And that just craters the whole Craters the whole thing. I mean, I think, I mean, the numbers of people, I mean, there were dozens, I think, scores of Americans who could, who could run a marathon faster than 215 in the 70s and early 80s. And by the 90s, there was like one. Uh huh. 215 is not that fast. I mean, it's crazy fast for you and me. But nowadays, 215, you're three miles behind Elliot Kupchogi. Right.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  In the Berlin Marathon. So, to give you an idea, like, you're not, you're certainly not world class at 215. So, Bob Larsen is sitting there, at this point, he's coaching UCLA. And as a college coach, he is focused on recruiting, you know, the way you win national championships in college, which is what your, your, your mission is as a college coach, is you get these very versatile quarter milers, essentially. These just absolute specimens who can run quarter miles, they can run 200s, they can run relays, they're so fast that

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  they can, if you need them to do a long jump or a triple jump, they can get points in those events as well. So he's very focused on, on those folks and winning national championships. And he's winning a bunch of them, doing quite well, and producing lots of Olympic gold medalists. And he's not so focused on long distance running. Hmm. And it's, it's his original love, it's his original passion, but he's not paying that much attention to it. And then he happens upon this high school senior named Mepka Flesky. And he has this incredible story, you know, his family moved here from Eritrea when he was in seventh grade. And his father, you know, was a refugee and escaped the civil

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  war there. So, the war with Ethiopia. And, you know, so he's this immigrant kid, and Larson gives him a full scholarship to UCLA and brings him there. And Meb becomes, you know, his vehicle for this project that's gonna, that basically takes up, you know, his post-retirement life from UCLA, which is to resuscitate American long-distance running. You know, Meb's gonna be the guy that he, he has the tools, he has the discipline, he has the willingness, where he thinks he can, and he has the talent, where he thinks he can take him and turn him into a champion. It's gonna take some

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  time, but what it's mainly gonna take, is it's mainly gonna take doing the workouts that he was doing with the Humble Toads back in the 1970s.

• 1:06:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  With one extra wrinkle, which is elevation. And that's, because that has become all the rage. And that's what the Kenyans and Ethiopians are doing.

• 1:06:36Rich Roll?

  Right. Did he have a conscious sense that he was trying to resuscitate American running?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:43Rich Roll?

  Or did you just see, so it wasn't just Meb, he's like, we need to bring this whole thing back, and Meb is gonna be my cipher?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was horrified by it. I mean, the 2000 Olympics, he had already been named, I think, the distance coach of the 2004 Olympics. In the 2000 Olympics, the Americans could only qualify one man for, for that race in the marathon. And it was, you know, instead of three spots, which used to be, it had been, in the 70s, it had been like a real battle to get one of those three spots in the Olympics. And now, we couldn't even meet the qualifying standard to get, to get more than one person. And just to get back to the earlier question, because I said there was two things that happened. The other thing that happened in the 80s was Sebastian Coe became like the biggest

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  figure in run, in track and field. And his father wrote this book. And a lot of what Coe, what his father focused on with, you know, training Sebastian and raising him was...

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Interval, you know, interval training and not so much volume and not so much threshold running, even though Ko had been doing a lot of that training, but just with like a a small group that his father wasn't really involved with. And so that didn't get a lot of attention. So people were very focused in the same way that you'd be very focused now on, um, you know, how Roger Federer, you know, develops his tennis game.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  People became very focused on how Sebastian Ko had become a good player.

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  Right, which was antithetical to Larson's whole trip.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So in the late 90s, when he's trying to revive this, you know, his idea is, no, and this is also what's going on at this time is the East Africans are starting to dominate everything. And so there's these people who are sort of doing these studies and putting out these theories about, you know, well, they've evolved from the Serengeti to have longer Achilles tendons, or their, their muscle fibers are different, and that was it.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  Their lung capacity is larger, they're, and because they're so thin, they're able to cool themselves.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Right, there's all kinds of theories that are out there. And Larson's idea is, no, they're just working really hard.

• 1:08:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  And they're living in the Rift Valley at 7,000 feet, and they're training in groups, and they're doing, and like, you know, he traveled and got their note, took notes on what their training regimens were, and he said, this is what we were doing. They're doing what we were, they're doing what we were doing.

• 1:09:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  You know, there's no.

• 1:09:18Rich Roll?

  They're out, like, I had, you, you must know Knox Robinson. Do you know Knox?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  I don't know Knox.

• 1:09:23Rich Roll?

  Um, Black Roses, NYC, Running Club.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, okay.

• 1:09:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so I had him on the podcast, and he spent a lot of time in Africa, like, hanging out with those guys and training with them, and he tells crazy, amazing stories. But when you were recounting, you know, the philosophy of Larson, I was thinking like, yeah, that's exactly what those guys are doing. They run in a group, there, there's a lot of joy, there's a lot of camaraderie. They do put in a lot of easy, slow miles that they're running together, and then when they, they choose their moments on the track, and when they hit the track, it's like, full on, full on. But they're living this lifestyle at altitude, um, where there's no distractions. And this is just, it's a lifestyle.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Rich Roll?

  It's not like what they do when they're not doing other things.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  And that's not, and, and. The American distance runners at the time were training off on their own, mostly at sea level, and they just weren't, and weren't putting in the, and weren't putting in the hard work. And so Larson creates this group called the Mammoth Track Club, mainly so that Meb has a group to train with. And they go up to Mammoth Lakes and they camp out there at 8,000 feet. And four years later, there's six marathon medals that are given out every Olympics.

• 1:10:40Rich Roll?

  Everyone's going up to Mammoth, like, training in the snow.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Right, but six years, four years later, you know, when there's six marathon medals given out, this little group at Mammoth gets two of them. Meb gets the silver and Deana Castor gets the bronze. And that's a pretty good ratio for when you had, when you weren't even close to having any four years before, then you create this little group. And over that period of time, these groups start to pop up. And, you know, Brooks Hansen runners, Nike has the Oregon Project, and also Schumacher's group. Now, you would just never become a professional runner in America without choosing a sponsor and moving to a place where other people are training.

• 1:11:25Rich Roll?

  And they're like these little fiefdoms, these little cults, almost.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, cult makes it sound, I don't know.

• 1:11:31Rich Roll?

  Without the pejorative kind of connotation of that.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Right, without the pejorative, but it's like, it's, it's the training group, it's the gang. And they work together. They're pretty inspiring, you know, Hoka has a group in Flagstaff. There's, you know, there's a couple, there's a few people still up at Mammoth, Deana Castor still lives at Mammoth, Lexi Pappas went up there to train with her. And so there's a, there's a group, there are some runners that are still up there. But there, you know, Alberto has his Oregon Project group, and Shaleen Flanagan has a group, another group of runners in Portland, and they do altitude camp, they go for altitude camps. I think you're probably better off if you go live at altitude. I'm sort of a big believer in that live high, train low philosophy. Seems to, seems to work pretty

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  well for the people who do it. I understand why you wouldn't want to live at altitude just because there's not a lot of civilization in America at 8,000 feet. You have to, it's a lifestyle. Like you said, there's some sacrifice involved.

• 1:12:31Rich Roll?

  So Larson takes Meb up to Mammoth and at the time, he's like, what is he like 39th in the world at the 10K or something like that. Like he's not, it's not like he's on everyone's radar as the next great thing.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  When he gets on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in 2004, he has the 39th best marathon time in the field.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  You know, there's 80 runners in the field, there's something like that. But he's done some pretty hard work the last year in terms of getting ready for that race. You know, Larson had done, Larson and Joe V. Hill, who he had recruited up to Mammoth. Joe V. Hill was sort of, running readers might know him because he's a character in Born to Run

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  in the study. He had done a lot of study of the ultra marathoners and he had led this team at North Adams State to, you know, an ungodly number of championships. But he's really sort of the nation's foremost authority on elevation training. And Bob recruits him to run the Mammoth Track Club with him. And they had, you know, they knew that Athens Marathon course backwards and forwards. They knew the weather. They had had Meb and Deena training, you know, in the middle of summer in black tights and turtlenecks and hats to make them uncomfortable, make them understand

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  like just how ungodly hot it was going to be during the Olympic marathon.

• 1:14:08Rich Roll?

  And then the, the search for the ultimate ice vest and how to cool them and like both Deena and Meb showing up at the starting line with ice vests until the very last moment.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Right. It's a game, you know, his whole theory was this is a game to keep your core as cool as possible for as long as possible.

• 1:14:27Rich Roll?

  That's the, that's the ultimate limiter at the highest level.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  I think it is. Yeah, there's been studies on that.

• 1:14:35Rich Roll?

  The people that are able to, you know, avoid that boiling over point, or who are more efficient or effective at maintaining a lower core temperature, are able to maintain the efficiency and the high level output for a longer period of time. But once you kind of tip the scale and you start overheating and you can't regulate that anymore, that's when performance declines, right? So the longer you can kind of keep that at base level, it's been shown to be a huge factor in performance.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  I can imagine, because I mean, just for,

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm the furthest thing from an elite runner, but I mean, I melt in the heat. Like it's heat and humidity is just absolute kryptonite.

• 1:15:21Rich Roll?

  And it affects different people in different ways.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I imagine it affects, and I know especially when it affects me, which is I keep getting bad luck, or I've had several, you know, moments of bad luck where I train all winter for the Boston Marathon and then I show up at the start line. And, you know, I'm training in 30 degree weather in New York and then it ends up being the first beautiful spring day in Boston. And like today, I mean, this year it was 70 degrees and humid.

• 1:15:53Rich Roll?

  But not the year before.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  The year before, I ran that one really well. That was my best race, the 20 mile an hour headwind and 37 degrees freezing rain. That was absolute heaven. But, uh, but, you know, I was in as good shape as I've ever been this year and I've never felt more sick in a race. And it just, I guess, I knew four miles in, I was just so out of breath on this tiny little incline. And it was just, uh, it's 20 miles later, I was limping, you know, basically. And I was so sunburned and I was like, it looked like the rest of the week that I had, like that first day you go to the beach in the spring, like when you're pale as a ghost and then you come home and you're like, you're just fried.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  That's what I looked like the day after the Boston Marathon. So, uh, but yeah, it's, it's getting back to what we're talking about. I mean, If you can stay cool, it's a great thing. And he had these vests at the Athens Olympics that Meb and Dina were wearing, those ice vests, until the very last minute.

• 1:17:00Rich Roll?

  And now it's ubiquitous. You see Tour de France riders wearing them when they're warming up before the time trials. Like, you see this happening, you know, across many disciplines of sport now.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  It's got to start somewhere.

• 1:17:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's amazing when you look back on it, though, because all of these things are very elemental and simple. Like, hey, let's seclude you, let's put you at altitude, no distractions, we're going to get a hardcore group of people, and I'm going to be a bit of a dictator, and you're going to do what I say, and you're going to trust me, and you guys are going to get through this together, and I'm going to push you harder than you've ever been pushed before, but you're going to be ready. And the proof is in the pudding. I mean, that's kind of what he did, right?

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not that...

• 1:17:43Rich Roll?

  It's not like he had some super crazy philosophy about training that, you know, I mean, maybe it was at the time, but it doesn't feel like it.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  And that's the thing about running, though, is like, there's no shortcuts, you know, there's no, there's, it's largely about the work, it's largely about patience, it's largely about being committed. And that's, you know, a lot of this is, it's the same thing with writing, too, you know, it doesn't come quickly or easily, it takes a lot, it can be very painful.

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  It takes a lot of being honest with yourself, and...

• 1:18:26Rich Roll?

  It's true of trying to do anything well.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I would think so. I only do two things, I only really try hard at two things, which is running and writing. So, but I imagine, you know, electrical engineering is probably that way, too. I've never, I mean, I do, I do think, you know, getting back to that thing we talked about earlier about pushing yourself and doing the thing that's uncomfortable, I have never met the, you know, really kind of like happy person.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Peaceful person, successful person, either financially or just has done something really well, uh, who has said, you know, it was, you know, it was the key for me, the key for me was planet safe and not taking the risk, not taking any risks.

• 1:19:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  I just never, you know, like you never hear that.

• 1:19:21Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Um, it's almost always, you know, there was this thing I did and I wasn't really sure, but I kind of rolled the dice and it was uncomfortable and struggled for a while at it, but it kind of worked out.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  I know. So why is it so hard for us to take risks then, knowing that?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Because the default, because it's uncomfortable, because, because we like want, because you want to be at equilibrium.

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  You know, right? You want to, you want to be comfortable. You don't, it's, you know, it's this, it's, why is it hard to, when you're in a new environment, to go up to a stranger and talk to them and introduce yourself? It's a learned behavior because that's uncomfortable, that's risky, that's weird, you know, that's, and, but if you do that, you might make a buddy, you know, and we know that intellectually and we know that if we never do that, we'll never make another friend.

• 1:20:22Rich Roll?

  It's a, it's a practice in the same way that they discovered the heart is a muscle that can be trained to be stronger, discipline and your willingness to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions is a practice as well. You start with small things, you acclimate and then you have to always be kind of increasing the, the temperature or the volume on that. Um, and it, it doesn't mean that it necessarily gets easier, but it kind of does get easier.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Or it just gets, or, or it just.

• 1:20:53Rich Roll?

  You're used to it.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  You get used to it.

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  It becomes your norm.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you sort of understand it and I love that. I mean, the thing I love about, I'm kind of a hot yoga addict and a thing I love about that is that, and I guess this is true for all yoga, whether it's hotter, whatever temperature you're doing it at, is that it's always referred to as, as your practice and. You know, there's no, I just love that idea that it's just

• 1:21:21Rich Roll?

  There's no end.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  There's no end.

• 1:21:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  It's just practice, it's just your practice. You know, it was practice for what? Well, for tomorrow's practice.

• 1:21:28Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  And I feel like if we, it's a good, it's a, it's a good idea. You know, no one gets out of here alive, right?

• 1:21:37Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  So like, what are we, what are we doing? We're just practicing.

• 1:21:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  You know, we're just, we're just seeing if we can, seeing if we can figure it out a little better, a little easier, um, a little smarter and not make the same mistakes. Cause lord knows we've all made a lot of them.

• 1:21:54Rich Roll?

  Well, let me know if you discover the secret.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Which one?

• 1:21:57Rich Roll?

  I don't know, wherever this is all heading. All right. Well, to what do you attribute this incredible resurgence in, um, in women's long distance running that we're seeing now? Like, we're in this golden age right now where we're just seeing performances that we, we haven't seen in, in kind of the history of long distance running on the women's front in terms of American performers. I mean, do you track that to Larson as well? I mean, there has to be other factors in this.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Well, I, I track, I track it not so much to Larson, but I track it to someone that he coached, although he wasn't her main coach.

• 1:22:33Rich Roll?

  Dina?

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Dina, yeah. I mean, it, it helps when you see someone doing, when someone breaks through and does something well. It's sort of like where our conversation started with, it's almost like she gave fast, young, American women permission to pursue this thing and showed them that if you can, if you pursue it the right way, you can be as fast as anyone. You can win Chicago, you can win London, you can be on the medal stand. And that really helps.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  I imagine there's a lot more kids in China trying to make the NBA after Yao Ming.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Um, that really helps. So, but you know, and that was, you know, we're going back now to her, the heyday of her success was 15 years ago. But you know what? Like, Shailene Flanagan wins New York in her mid 30s. Dez finally wins Boston in her mid 30s. You know, they had been close before.

• 1:23:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  But if you think about how old were they when Dina was having her success? That's a, you know, that's an influential moment. That's an influential time. Having said that, there is an infrastructure that has been built for women.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  To develop and support them.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  To develop and support them now are the people who are...

• 1:24:07Rich Roll?

  Unless they get pregnant.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:10Rich Roll?

  Which I want to talk about, but go ahead.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Great series of stories by my friend, my friend and colleague Lindsay Kraus.

• 1:24:16Rich Roll?

  Lindsay Kraus, right. She's doing, can I just say, she's done an incredible job.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  She does great stuff.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  She does amazing reporting and it's so refreshing and great to see interesting, in-depth stories about running in the New York Times.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I mean, I had, I didn't have anything, I didn't have anything to do with the pregnancy stuff.

• 1:24:37Rich Roll?

  Right. But she broke that story.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  But I did, right, but I did, when I got to the Times in November of 2017, I'd sort of read her stuff for a while and she's in a different department. She's not in the sports department. So she, you know, to lose the, use the loose term, she kind of freelances with us. You know, one of the first things I did when I was there is I, you know, reached out to her and grabbed her for a cup of coffee and I said, you know, you're, you have a really good voice and I'm going to do everything I can to try and turn the New York Times sports section into runner's world. So...

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  You've done a pretty good job. There's a lot of running stories.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  There's a lot of running stories.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  I'm very happy about that.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:21Rich Roll?

  So I was going to ask you, like, how much of that is your doing? Pretty much.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Pretty much me, yeah.

• 1:25:27Rich Roll?

  And also, expanding that, that, that lends a little bit more, just to adventure stories in general, like, we're going off on a tangent right now, but like, Adam Skolnich's reporting on Colin O'Brady's Antarctica attempt was, was astounding.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Astounding.

• 1:25:40Rich Roll?

  And the, the amount of, of, of geography that you, that you gave for telling that story in real time and in-depth and, and the kind of multimedia, you know, layout, at least digitally, as well as in print, I mean, it was fantastic.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we take, and we... We take a lot of crap from sort of traditionalists, readers, fans of stick and ball sports. When we do stories like that.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  Like the Bill Simmons crowd.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we take and we, you know, we take it seriously. You know, like we, we don't want to turn off readers. We want as many readers and subscribers as we can, as we can get. You know, having said that, you know, if there was a cooler story out there than two guys ski racing across Antarctica in December, like, I want you to show it. I want to show it to me, like, come on, like, what was going on in the NBA? That was so fascinating, what like, I don't know. There was, there were two guys ski racing across Antarctica.

• 1:26:43Rich Roll?

  I've never heard it described that way, but that's what it was.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  That's what it was.

• 1:26:46Rich Roll?

  It was a ski race.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  It was a ski race between these two guys across Antarctica. And I mean, I'm a huge Nordic skiing fan as well. Um, but we generally are only able to cover that during the Olympics. And we do occasional story about that, but they're just not a huge readership for it.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  But that's what, so he had this race. So, yeah, so whenever we're in, whenever these stories come across our desk that are, or we have these possibilities of writing about, you know, big themes, big moments, epic battles, life and death, uh, it's just stories that sort of raise all the big questions. That's where I want us to be.

• 1:27:26Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  And, and Lindsay was someone that, yeah, I sort of, I really liked her writing.

• 1:27:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  She's, am I allowed to curse on this?

• 1:27:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  She is fucking fast.

• 1:27:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she's a really fast runner.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  She ran a 257 marathon in, at C I M in December. And she's, she's trying to qualify for the Olympic trials, um, which is a pretty huge endeavor to go from 257 down to 245. But she's, she's working at it.

• 1:27:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, good for her.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  So, um, and yeah, she's, uh, super talented.

• 1:28:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so she broke this story for people that are listening that aren't familiar, um, about how, I mean, you could say it better than I can, but essentially how Nike, um, was not, uh, providing paid essentially leave for their athletes on their roster who became pregnant.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  It was, it's, it's almost kind of worse than that, um, because.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's common in the shoe industry, unfortunately, to have these reduction clauses. And what they would tell you is, uh, well, we need them because if we don't have incentives for runners to keep running, then they're just gonna sign these contracts and we're gonna have to pay them and then they're gonna get injured and then they're not gonna wanna come back and they're just gonna collect our money. So we need, we need them to keep performing at a certain standard and a certain level in the same way that, you know, if you played for, excuse me, if you played for the New York Yankees and, you know, if you weren't playing well, you'd get cut. Now, you'd probably, you'd have a guaranteed contract, uh, if you're in baseball, but in

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  football, there's no guaranteed contracts. You get cut, you start getting paid anymore. So they're saying, you know, it's, they would say it's not different from that. However, those contracts, they really, even at the highest level, you know, like even Meb, after he won the 2009 New York Marathon, if he had gotten hurt and had to sit out for nine months, they would, you know, cut his pay drastically. Um, and to get back to talking about the women, pregnancy was sort of seen, put in the same bucket as injury. Right.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Or disability. I mean, and actually even in our healthcare system today, I think when you go on maternity leave after your pregnancy, you go on disability, which is a strange categorization for it, but that's, that's the way. Antiquated. Right, but that's sort of, that's how the healthcare system actually deals with it. Um, or at least it was when my wife was having her maternity leaves. Uh, and so they were equate, like I said, they were equating pregnancy with injury, uh, which is about as big a disincentive as you can get. And it's really unfortunate. It's a real challenge for female athletes who, a lot of them are sort of, you know,

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  reaching their athletic primes as their biological clocks are ticking pretty loudly. You know, it's not a great, plenty of people have children and flourishing families after the age of, let's say, 35, which is when you see a lot of women retire from professional athletes. I don't think you would find a lot of OBGYNs to say, "That's a great time to think about starting to have a family."

• 1:31:08Rich Roll?

  My sense, just from a 10,000-foot view on this story, is that, well, first of all, there's so many, there's been so many developments in terms of nutrition and training technology and money being funneled into the sport that is promoting the longevity of these careers, allowing athletes, females and males, to compete at the highest level later and later and later. So, there was a time, not too long ago, where the idea that you would be, you know, world-class after age 25 just seemed impossible, but we now know that's no longer the case. So, I had this thought, like, well, this contractual provision in these Nike contracts

• 1:31:52Rich Roll?

  or in probably other apparel contracts or whatever, sorry, go ahead.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, those contracts also had non-disclosure agreements in them.

• 1:32:01Rich Roll?

  Okay, so, right.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  So, not only were they in there, but the runners, Nike had protected itself because the runners weren't allowed to talk about them.

• 1:32:09Rich Roll?

  Aren't supposed to talk about it.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Because if they talked about it publicly, then, I don't know, you're the lawyer.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  What's the, you know, if you sign a contract and you're not supposed to talk about it and you talk about it publicly...

• 1:32:18Rich Roll?

  Well, you're open to damages. Yeah, it's not good.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Right, it's not a good thing.

• 1:32:22Rich Roll?

  You're not gonna do that.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  So, it took, so, you know, I'm sorry I interrupted you, but that was the thing when Lindsay had gotten these women to talk about it.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, which I can't imagine how she was able to, you know, get them comfortable enough to take that risk.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  It's being a reporter, it's being a good, being a really good journalist.

• 1:32:40Rich Roll?

  But back to my thought, I mean, I had this sense that this is probably antiquated language that's been in these contracts for a very long time. They were drafted initially when things were very different. And it's just one of those things where, well, this is the way we do it. And the general counsel's office or whoever drafted that just never really went back and looked at, like, should we really still be doing this? Until it finally got called out. And from a revenue perspective, had Nike or whoever else was doing this gotten out in front of it before any of this happened and said, why are we doing this? This is crazy.

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  We need to support our women during pregnancy. We believe in them for the long haul. From a revenue perspective, it's really not that much money. And the storytelling and the goodwill that they could engender by demonstrating that kind of support for the athletes on their roster would have benefited them in such a dramatic way. But now they can't do it. Like now, it will seem opportunistic.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Well, they did it.

• 1:33:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they have to do it.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  They did it.

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  But it's not going to make anyone feel good about them.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  Right. They did it. They announced it on a Friday afternoon at 5 o'clock. It was sort of, I mean, so in that sense, it's great that it's different, but nobody's patting them on the back for doing that. But you know, this is

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  And they're taking a huge hit.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is the, right. And the amazing thing is the revenue perspective, because, I mean, we could

• 1:34:13Rich Roll?

  It's nothing.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  With three keystrokes, we could see what Nike's annual revenues were last year. Many, many billions of dollars. And what they spend on women's running and the handful of women's running is like, is a tiny fraction of LeBron James's contract. So we're not talking about a lot of money there. But you know, this is sort of the history. Of sports, of, of, of sports and sports business. And that was my, my first.

• 1:34:48Rich Roll?

  That's the subject of your other book.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Right, my first book was how sports became a business. It was, it was because, it was athletes. It was not a bunch of, you know, white guys in suits, you know, coming up with great revelations about free agency and free markets and competition and things like that. It was a bunch of athletes rising up and saying, we're not going to be exploited anymore. And you know what? You want to exploit professional athletes? Fine, go find them. We're not going to play.

• 1:35:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  And then, you know, owners, commissioners, general councils, whatever, they realize very quickly that, ooh, you know, if we don't have the best in the world playing for us, we don't really have a business anymore. And nobody's buying, nobody's buying tickets to the Yankees to see George Steinbrenner play. They're buying tickets to the Yankees to see Aaron Judge or Derek Jeter play. So this is what it takes. It takes, you know, basically these athletes rising up and saying, no, we're not going to do it. We're not going to deal with this anymore. And embarrassing them and shaming people into not exploiting their labor.

• 1:35:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I think we're at another event horizon with this right now. That we're, it, it seems like, you know, in the NBA and the NFL with players getting together and, and in a way that, you know, is pretty powerful, I think. I think we're going to see some more changes.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and certainly from the, uh, from the social standpoint, the political social standpoint, I think it's, it's very clear that, um, yeah, they, they, athletes have voices and they have.

• 1:36:30Rich Roll?

  Now more than ever.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  Right, and they have to be allowed to, uh, express those voices. Um, it's, you know, it's, it's. Really important and when they try and suppress them, it does not go well.

• 1:36:45Rich Roll?

  Right. Also, was it the New York Times that broke this story about the NBA players who are experiencing depression because of social media and all the pressures that come with trying to, you know, basically have that voice?

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Rich Roll?

  You're familiar with this story, right?

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  I can't remember who reported that.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  I don't know who reported it first. It's been, when you talk about, I mean, this whole idea of athletes and depression, and there's multiple causes for it. I don't think it's just necessarily the social media and having a voice. But I do know that at Stanford, for instance, they recently, I think they recently hired a psychologist for just the athletic department.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  From the counseling center and I had heard that that person was like immediately completely overrun with.

• 1:37:54Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  You know, just did not have enough time in her day to, or his day, I'm not sure who it was.

• 1:38:01Rich Roll?

  To treat all of these athletes.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  To treat all of these athletes. And it's a tremendous amount of pressure at the high level. And I would put Stanford Athletics at a pretty high level of performance in addition to the academic pressures that are there. But, and these, you know, it sounds cheesy to say, like, they're people just like us, but the frailties, you know, the human frailties are not exclusive to, you know, journalists and lawyers and teachers and things like that.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Women who play on the women's national soccer team, they suffer from imposter syndrome. They're worried when they step onto the practice field that the coach is going to figure out that they're a farce, that they've been faking it all along, and this is the day they're going to be exposed as not being good enough, not being fast enough. I mean, that's as common at the highest levels of sport as it is in any other walk of life.

• 1:39:03Rich Roll?

  And then imagine a top draft pick for the NBA, some young kid who comes into a ridiculous amount of money, is put into the spotlight in a way that's hard to comprehend, and has the added pressure not only of having to perform week after week to keep the job and maintain his position on the roster, but also develop his like quote unquote "brand" via social media, because now everybody has to be their own brand, and the responsibility that comes with that on top of just being an athlete, and it's not surprising that we're seeing all kinds of psychological crises that we're having to confront with.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  And by the way, shoot 43% from three-point land.

• 1:39:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Or else, you know, or else you're done.

• 1:39:54Rich Roll?

  Night after night after night.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Night after night, you know, hit nothing but net from 25 feet with the clock running out. Yeah, it's not easy. I had a girlfriend from college who, and things did not end so well. A few years ago, I was in contact with her and I sort of apologized for acting like an idiot, and she said, "Oh, please, if we were all held responsible for our 20-year-old selves, we'd be completely screwed." And it was honestly like one of the most generous things somebody has ever said.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's a nice way to think about like your acquaintances and things like that, or people who were jerks at one point. You get older, things are not that big a deal. But at the same time, you know, as a sports writer who has spent a lot of time with elite athletes in their 20s who have, you know, maybe not behaved great.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  I just imagine what it must be like. We are holding them responsible for their 20-year-old selves.

• 1:41:09Rich Roll?

  I think we're, we're holding almost everybody responsible now for their behavior all the time. And if you're a 20-something, everything is now filmed and documented and shared. And we're in a culture that's hypersensitive, that is holding people to account for things they did, you know, long in the past. And that concerns me, you know? I think we need to be able to be forgiving of people and allow them the place to, the space to grow and evolve. And when we can't do that, I think we're, you know, creating a, a culture of fear that is making people, you know, afraid to connect with other human beings, among other things.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  I'm just glad I'm not, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just glad I wasn't on film when I was 24 years old.

• 1:41:59Rich Roll?

  Trust me.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Preaching to the converted, yeah.

• 1:42:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, um, what, uh, one thing I want to talk to you about is your thoughts on the, the sub-two-hour Kipchoge thing, like how, what do you think about that whole, um, that Nike project where, you know, at Monza, they tried to go under two hours and how close he's now be, you know, getting to that point? And, you know, how long do you think it's going to be before that actually happens?

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I absolutely worship Kipchoge, of course.

• 1:42:30Rich Roll?

  Did you go to Monza? Were you there?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  I did not go to Monza, no.

• 1:42:35Rich Roll?

  But Ed Caesar gave you a blurb for the book.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I had read his, right. I have, I have, I've known Ed for a while and, um, I loved his book, Two Hours, which was really, you know, had a lot of foresight because he, he wrote the book a couple of years before,

• 1:42:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  before the Kipchoge made that attempt. And, um, so I, I will, I will say that going into that first...

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Event, I was sort of dismissive of it. But then it just looked so cool. And it was so great, the way you had all these other elite marathoners supporting it and trying to make it happen. Uh, you know, forming the cone around him to try and break the wind and it was, it's completely, kind of fascinating and, you know, he's gonna, he has another, the British Chemical Company is sponsoring him to try and do it, try, make another go at it. And, you know, if he does it, it won't go in the record books because it's not an official race.

• 1:43:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  But it's still a completely unbelievable thing.

• 1:43:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  For him to pull off. Uh, it's just absolutely incredible. And what's even more amazing is probably the fact that he's got the world record down to two oh, two oh one thirty in a regular, in a, in a regular race in Berlin. Uh, and I don't, I don't really know how much longer it's gonna be. I mean, can he, can he get there? You know, right course, right day, right training block? I'm not gonna say no, even though, you know, if you do the math and he still has to go ninety seconds faster and, you know, ninety seconds over twenty-six miles, you say, oh,

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  it's just, you know, four seconds a mile or a little less than four seconds a mile.

• 1:44:28Rich Roll?

  When you're talking about like running at the edge.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  Right, but when you're already running at the edge, another four seconds every mile. But he's running four forty, he's running four forty miles, you're telling, and now he's gotta run four thirty-sixes? I mean, it's, it's completely insane, so.

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  Everybody's seen those videos of the treadmill that they set up at the, at the, at the run expos where you have to jump on and run his pace.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Rich Roll?

  People can't do it for more than five seconds.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Right, it's completely impossible.

• 1:44:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Right, it's a good way, it's a good way to break your neck.

• 1:44:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  By getting on one of those treadmills. So, uh, but I love anything that gets people fascinated with running, movement, activity.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  It's, it's, like I said, it's, it's like the most elemental of sports in some ways.

• 1:45:13Rich Roll?

  I wanted to be, I was, I wanted to be cynical and snarky about that whole thing. And then I started watching it and I was like captivated. I was like, I, similar to what you said, I was like, oh no, this is actually really cool. Like, yeah, it's a stunt and all of that and it's a branding thing and, but at the same time, I couldn't help but just be riveted and amazed. And I think he's gonna do it. I think he will.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  It's, I'm not gonna say he won't, but I mean, it's, what does he run, he's won, I think, 10 of his 11 marathons that he's run.

• 1:45:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  That, that's probably more amazing than even breaking two hours. I mean, you just, that just doesn't happen. And marathons are like golf tournaments, you know, Tiger Woods, at his, at his best, I think, was winning one out of three that he entered, which was an unheard of rate of success. And marathons, you know, if you win three or four in your entire career, you're in the Hall of Fame. And this guy's won 10 out of 11 of the fastest marathons. He's winning Berlin and London every year.

• 1:46:23Rich Roll?

  He seems like such a gentleman, too.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  And he's a gentleman, yeah, and he's kinda like a zen, he's kind of like very zen about things. He's really supportive. He's never, there's never been a whiff of, of, of drug stuff around him.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:46:41Rich Roll?

  So when you.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Completely superhuman.

• 1:46:43Rich Roll?

  When you look at him, how do you account for why he's so great or so much better? Or perhaps why does, why would, have you asked Larson? What, what he, why he thinks Kipchoge is the best?

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think most people, I mean, you start with how he lives and how he works, which is.

• 1:47:05Rich Roll?

  He adheres to the three.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  He adheres to those.

• 1:47:07Rich Roll?

  Principles.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  Three principles and he, you know, lives in the Rift Valley and trains with his group and trains as hard as anybody. So there's that. And, you know, he's blessed with this unbelievably efficient motor. Some people are born, you know, some people are born with this unbelievable motor and. Clearly, he's the complete outlier. He's the outlier of outliers.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  He's, you know, he seems to have the perfect body type.

• 1:47:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  It's one of those things that you could analyze his stride and say, see, it's the perfect stride. But it's also the perfect stride for the body that he has. I'm not sure, you know, you and I could do everything. We could, we could spend hours looking at tape and imitating his stride.

• 1:47:59Rich Roll?

  It's not gonna matter.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  We're not gonna run. We're not gonna break five minutes in a mile. I'm not gonna break six minutes in a mile if I do that. So, but yeah, I don't, I don't, and that's one of the, that's one of the really cool things about running is people don't, in some ways, people still don't really know exactly what creates a superhuman like that.

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Is it, it was.

• 1:48:24Rich Roll?

  But that's what makes sports magical.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  It can. In the best, yeah, in the best of circumstances, absolutely.

• 1:48:32Rich Roll?

  So, in the process of researching and writing this book, how has it affected your own relationship with running? Like, has it changed how you train or think about your relationship to the sport?

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Well, I definitely PR'd while I was running, while I was writing it, 2017, which was great.

• 1:48:51Rich Roll?

  You run with a group?

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  I wish I ran with a group more. I do occasionally run with it. I do, I, it's one of the things like I really have to get with because, you know, sometimes, New York Times has a little running team that I run with sometimes.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Sometimes I run, I'll run with a friend and, you know, but busy schedules, stuff like that.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Children, schools, dinners, things like that. Sometimes, you know, I can't always, I can't necessarily.

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  Is there a shower at your office? Can you duck out and?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  There is no shower at my office. I belong to a gym not far away. So, I could, but I'm, I'm an early morning runner. Yeah, I go early morning. So, it's the start of my day. So, that's, that's not a problem. But it's just the, but although a lot of running groups actually in the city meet in the evenings.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  And that's just like, doesn't work so much for me. But there are early morning running groups that I could get with. The nice thing about running is if you run, you meet one other person and you run with them, like, that's your group.

• 1:49:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You should run with Lindsay.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Yes, I would love, I, I, well, she's on the team that we run together sometimes in races. So that's pretty cool.

• 1:50:02Rich Roll?

  And do you, do you work with a coach at all? Or you create your own training program?

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  You know, I interview so many coaches. I'm sort of constantly trying other things. Pick it, picking up stuff. That's one of the things I love about my job is I'll do a story and, you know, I'll be in Flagstaff for a couple of days, hanging out with, you know, the Hoco runners and I'll do one of the, you know, and they'll come back with, you know, a notebook filled with Ben Rosario's workouts.

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  So I'll do those for a month or so. Or, you know, I'll, I'll have one of my, you know, endless conversation, a series of endless conversations with Bob and he'll say, oh, here's one you could try. How about doing this? And so I'll do that.

• 1:50:47Rich Roll?

  Just have him coach you.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  Right. Well, he basically does. He just doesn't realize it.

• 1:50:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  So, um, so yeah, so it's in that sense, it's fun make, bringing myself open to, it's made me, it's made me aware of all kinds of different training. So that's part of it. Uh, I will, it has recently, I feel like it's brought a certain, a little more pressure than I would like to my running. You know, I came up with this running book and all of a sudden.

• 1:51:16Rich Roll?

  Eyes on you.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, now it's sort of, I sort of almost feel like there's this pressure to be, for me to be like this running guy.

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We could, we could, I can relate to that.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  You can relate to that, right. Yeah. And I'm not even on the cover of my book. So, so it's, so there is that, there is a little bit of sense of.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Is this a job? Is this not a job that I do? Or am I still doing it for my right reasons? And I am still doing it because I love to do it. But it's a weird thought process that I've never had because I've never written a running book before.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  How do you account for this explosion in interest in ultra, ultra running and ultra endurance sports that we're seeing?

• 1:52:03Rich Roll?

  Like this, this was, you know, talk about another fringe movement that has really kind of tipped into the mainstream. It's interesting to see these races go from, you know, a dozen people in tents, you know, the night before a race to selling out and creating all this kind of, you know, interest.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's, it seems completely natural to me that, I don't know that it's necessarily people wanting to one up each other as much as they want to sort of one up themselves.

• 1:52:35Rich Roll?

  What's the next thing?

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's the next thing I can do? And then they hear about something and yeah, I'd like to try that.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Also, I think part of it has to do with, you know, the, we're talking about a somewhat rarefied socioeconomic set when we're, when you're in that group.

• 1:52:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  There's a fair amount of disposable income available to people.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  And that seems like a cool way to, a cool way to do it. I think social media has some element of it. You know, now, now there's the, you know, there's the ultra you did,

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  but it doesn't actually exist until you post about it.

• 1:53:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  And then you're, and then it exists.

• 1:53:28Rich Roll?

  And it happened.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think people want to, you know, people, people are really into, into that part, that self-promotion aspect to it. And, you know, there is a certain group of people for whom...

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  There's a limit to how much enjoyment they can get from their mobile device or their computer and, you know, who just wanna get out and push themselves and do things that are different and, you know, the picture and who wouldn't wanna, to me, it's like, who wouldn't wanna, I haven't done it yet.

• 1:54:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm curious as to why you haven't, I mean, you've done 23 marathons, but like, why no 50K or 50 mile or a trail, you know, something else?

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  I think it's because, for some reason, I've fallen into this, I've fallen down this rabbit hole of like, of numbers and speed and distance. At first it was like qualifying for Boston, then wow, let's see if I can still get.

• 1:54:35Rich Roll?

  But here's the thing, see, this is from a very Bob Larsen perspective, this is why you need to, you need to shake it up. Like, you need to get off, like, what he would call the track. Like, if you get off that, you're so wed to these numbers and holding yourself to account for these performance goals, you might actually be able to crash through this plateau by, by, you know, doing something completely different, that's longer, where it's not about numbers, and then return to the marathon in a year or two, or whatever, with a refreshed perspective on it. And I would, I would venture to bet that you would see a big performance gain.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  I think you're right. And I'd like to try it. And I just, and it's like, it's one of the, it's probably the thing that lately, and a bunch of like friends that I know who do them, keep asking me about it as well. It's lately become the thing that...

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  A, I'm afraid of. B, I'm starting to think about a little too much. C, when I'm afraid of something and I'm thinking about it a lot, I know I'm gonna have to try it.

• 1:55:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  At some point.

• 1:55:55Rich Roll?

  So you're gonna have to get, you're gonna have to get comfortable with that discomfort.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna be, so it's, there is, and is 50K, you think, a good distance to start out?

• 1:56:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would, I would, I would urge you to go, like, find a trail race, you know? Just do something totally different.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  Well, if I really wanna do a trail marathon.

• 1:56:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  There's one outside Chicago.

• 1:56:13Rich Roll?

  But to, forget about the marathon. Like, do something where you can't, it's just so apples and oranges.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:18Rich Roll?

  That it gets you out of that paradigm that you're in.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, let's do it.

• 1:56:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all right, I'm gonna make you commit.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  I'm ready for it.

• 1:56:27Rich Roll?

  You're committing right here.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  I gotta, I'll do it, all right, that's fine.

• 1:56:30Rich Roll?

  It's on the record.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  It's on the record, I'm fine. I'll do, I'll do a, I'll do a trail run.

• 1:56:34Rich Roll?

  Have you, have you ever, um, covered the 3100? Do you know this Rishi Noy run in Queens?

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Uh, I know about it, but I have not.

• 1:56:43Rich Roll?

  I think it's about to start. I think it starts in June. It might have, might have already started. I don't know.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Right. I know, I've seen pictures of them doing it, so no, I've never, I've never covered that.

• 1:56:52Rich Roll?

  You should just, just go out there and check it out. I had Sanjay Raval on, who made a documentary called 3100 Run and Become, that I think you would enjoy. And it follows a couple different people. Um, but in particular, one guy who's like, I think he's from Finland? I can't remember, but he's like a mailman, and he does this race every year. And they literally run around this one mile block in Queens until they've reached 3100. It's like, the course is open from 6:00 AM to midnight every day. They run as much as they can every day. They go to sleep, they come back the next day.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:22Rich Roll?

  And they just keep doing it. And there's just something so bananas and fascinating and beautiful and insane about the whole thing.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  Yes, that is the ultra that I definitely will not be doing.

• 1:57:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think I'm gonna do that either. But maybe just take a subway ride out there and watch for an afternoon.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:38Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's what I would like to do.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  That would be a good story for the New York Times, too. If you guys haven't, I'm sure you've covered that race in the past, the, the paper.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Yes, we definitely have.

• 1:57:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  I will say the one thing about trail running that does make me nervous is that it, a

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  One of your college classmates, Peter Graff.

• 1:57:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Last year, I mean, it was 2017. I was out in Boulder and I'd never been on the Mesa Trail and I wanted to run on the Mesa Trail. And Peter's kind of an insane trail runner.

• 1:58:10Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  I was like, yeah, I gotta, I gotta, you know, an interview at 10:00. So I'm, you know, 10:30, I'll meet you, I'll come by your house. He's like, sure, come by in the morning, we'll go.

• 1:58:22Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  And like two hours and 15 minutes later, you know, where I'm stumbling down the Mesa Trail with Peter. And he's, I was, I mean, I was tired, yes, but the main thing I was afraid of was losing my front teeth.

• 1:58:36Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  Uh, so that's part of the fear of the trail run is the tripping over the roots and the rocks.

• 1:58:43Rich Roll?

  But you're working different muscles. It's a different discipline. You're shaking it up and it's making you stronger in areas that don't get worked, just running the loop in Central Park.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:58:52Rich Roll?

  And you're not looking at your garment worried about your pace because it doesn't matter.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  Right. It's completely, it's completely separate from it. No, I totally, I, I, I'm totally with it intellectually. The one thing I don't want to do is I don't want to carry my water.

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  I don't want to, I don't like that whole self-supporting idea and the backpack. I have no interest.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  Why? From an aesthetic point of view or?

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  Uh, just honestly, from a, a sort of flow point of view. Like I'm part of the reason I love running is I love the sort of feeling of being liberated and unencumbered. And the idea of having a pack on my back and running seems unpleasant.

• 1:59:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you could just do the little waist strap with the one bottle or something like that. You'll get used to it.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:59:36Rich Roll?

  You're going to acclimate to it.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:59:38Rich Roll?

  Um, cool. Well, I want to close this down with one, one final thing, which is, um, your thoughts on running culture. Like the book is about the rebelliousness, the kind of rock and roll, you know, sensibility that accompanied this, you know, burst, this, um,

• 1:59:58Rich Roll?

  This, you know, new kind of revelation that took place as a result of Larson's work. How do you think about running culture now? Like, is it still, you know, Knox Robinson said, you know, running is an act of rebellion. I've heard you say something similar. Like, is that still the case? Like, how do we connect with that rebelliousness now when it is such a mainstream, you know, Lululemon type of activity?

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  I think the biggest evolution that running has undergone, certainly in the last 15, 20 years, is that it has really gone from being a solitary activity to a group of, a group activity. When I'm running in Central Park, there were plenty of runners in the 90s in Central Park, but now there are just these clumps. You just, everybody is running seemingly with a group. And, not everybody, but a lot of people. And you just keep passing these clumps and everybody's talking to each other. And it's, it's a really social thing. And I think that's terrific, because I know the performance benefits of it. And I know

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  that if you're making plans to run Thursday, you're a lot more likely to skip it if you don't have to meet someone on the corner of 81st and 3rd at 6:00 in the morning. So, so that's the sort of, that, that is sort of where running culture is right now. And yes, it's mainstream, but I do continue to think that even though there's hundreds of thousands of people who line up on the start lines of marathons every year, that's still a pretty small fraction of the population. And most people, when you say to them, "Yeah,

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  I'm running New York next Saturday," or "I'm running Boston in a month," most people say, "Wow, that's amazing. You're crazy." And

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  That's a real kick for me, I know it is. And I think it's a real kick for a lot of people that that that that idea that this is still, yes, it's mainstream, but it's to a lot of people, it's still a little, it's a little nuts. And it still feels a little rebellious. It still feels like you're sort of, I don't know, cheating is the wrong word, but you're doing something, you're doing something different. That's one of the reasons the Boston Marathon is so great because it takes place on a Monday. And the entire rest of the world is at work.

• 2:02:45Rich Roll?

  Working, I know.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  And this is Monday morning and all of Boston is is off for the day. Essentially, you know, yes, it's Patriots Day, but what is Patriots Day even? Essentially, it's Marathon Day.

• 2:02:57Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  And it just feels like you're playing hooky from life. And dialing into that sort of playing hooky from life thing on a daily run is something that's still possible and still certainly brings me a great deal of joy. And I think brings a lot of people a lot of joy.

• 2:03:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it's freedom. It's sort of railing against the gestalt of time and gravity. There's something about it that is uniquely liberating that I don't feel when I'm riding a bike. I mean, riding a bike is amazing for different reasons and swimming as well. But there's something specific about running that I don't get or find in either other endurance pursuits that I can't quite put my finger on. But it does feel nonetheless like an act of rebellion for some strange reason, even though everyone's doing it, or not everyone, but a lot of people.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  And not having the answer is probably the best thing.

• 2:04:00Rich Roll?

  Right. I think if you if you are too articulate about the answer, you haven't thought deeply enough about it, maybe.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  Right, and then you'll end up stopping.

• 2:04:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Because the search will be over.

• 2:04:10Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  And who wants that?

• 2:04:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, nobody wants that. I want to run as long as I possibly can.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  Basically.

• 2:04:18Rich Roll?

  So, thank you. That was fantastic.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:04:23Rich Roll?

  Running to the Edge is the book. Congratulations. You were named by Time Magazine, like one of the reads you gotta read this summer.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  One of the 32 must reads for this summer.

• 2:04:34Rich Roll?

  Who reads 32 books for the summer?

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:04:38Rich Roll?

  As I recall, though, as I was scrolling through it, I think it was pretty high in the list. I don't know if they ranked them in any particular order, but it showed up pretty soon.

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not supposed to mention this. I should say, like, it comes out at the beginning of the summer and it was like by release date and alphabetical. So that's what I think put me ahead of Elizabeth Gilbert. But I think I was fourth on the list and Amy was very pleased with that.

• 2:05:03Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. So what did we learn here? A couple of things. One, you're gonna sign up for some Trail 50K. I need to run with groups more. I'm such a solo guy. So that's actually a change that I'm gonna make as a result of talking to you and reading this book. And third, next time I'm in New York, let's go running.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:05:23Rich Roll?

  Deal?

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I'm gonna keep up all this running and adventure coverage in the New York Times and keep pleasing people like you.

• 2:05:30Rich Roll?

  Please, please continue to expand that. It's been great to be able to read more and more about these more obscure athletes and the fact that you're introducing them, you know, in the grandest way possible to the world is a really cool thing. So I commend you for that.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:05:46Rich Roll?

  All right, man.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me here.

• 2:05:48Rich Roll?

  All right, Matthew. Peace.

• 2:05:53Rich Roll?

  So that was it. That was me and Matthew. Hope you guys enjoyed that. I liked that dude. I thought that was a really cool, interesting conversation. Do me a favor, pick up a copy of his new book, Running to the Edge. You won't regret it. It's a great read. And let Matthew know what you thought of today's conversation. You can hit him up on Twitter at Matt Futterman and at Matt Futt, F-U-T-T-one on Instagram. And please check out the show notes to do a deeper dive on Matthew's work, his life, and all the kind of running personalities that we explored today. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about your favorite episode.

• 2:06:33Rich Roll?

  Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts. Share your favorite episode, or whatever you're listening to, on social media. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you can support the show and the work we do here on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing and editing the show. Jessica Miranda for her graphics wizardry. Ally Rogers for portraits, photographs that we take after every episode. DK for advertiser relationships. Chris Swan for assistance at large. And theme music, as always, by Analemma. Appreciate

• 2:07:18Rich Roll?

  you, guys. I don't take your attention for granted. It means all the world to me that you tune in week after week. And I will see you back here in a couple days with a hotly, highly anticipated round number three with the great Zach Bush. Zach Bush is back. This one was recorded live at our retreat in Italy. It's a bit of a mind blower, and you're not going to want to miss it. Until then, get out there, go outside, go running. Why not, right? Peace. Plas. Amaste.