Born To Run Free (For a Lifetime) with Christopher

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software ends in July 2023. And it's only valid through my link. Go to drimklmnt.com slash rich roll today. Eat yourself up, beat down your body, but to really create and relish, then you start to get on the cabbio path. And you know, I tell a lot of beginning runners, don't view starting running as a workout, or as a form of fitness, or a way to lose

weight. Create the joy first. And everything else will follow. And that goes into learning to be efficient, not thinking it has to be hard. The rich roll podcast. Back in 2011, just before the start of this podcast, a hugely influential book was released that greatly inspired me both as a writer and as an athlete, and made the entire running world seem to stop and pay attention.

That book, of course, was called born to run. And it's about this hidden tribe of super athletes, called the tar homara, and the secrets behind their ability to run insane distances. And now, over a decade later, I finally had the honor and the privilege to sit down with the author of that mega best seller, Christopher McDougall, as well as the co-author of its sequel, Eric Orton.

Yes, you heard me right. Born to run too is here. In this conversation, we dive deep into the world and stories of born to run, as well as talk with Eric about the practice born or run too. Along with race-ready recipes and shoe recommendations, born to run two, focuses on training regimens, training regimens to help get you in shape, corrective drills to perfect your form. And

how to find a local running community. These were some of the concrete guides that were actually missing from born to run, all of which solidifies this new book as a must read for every runner out there. In addition to being the born to run to co-author, Eric is also Christopher's running coach. He was a character in the first book. And before he left the podcast studio,

Eric actually ran me literally through a handful of drills and PT positions to help me work through my chronic back pain. And I have to say it helped me tremendously. So thank you for that, Eric. In any event, it's all coming up in a sec, but first. Okay, waste of moment longer, we will not. It is now my great pleasure to present you my conversation with

Christopher McDurall and Eric Orden. Well, welcome, gentlemen. I'm so excited to talk to both of you today. This is real treat for me personally. And I think it's going to be for the audience. And my intention going into this is twofold. On the one hand, obviously, we have Christopher McDurall here. I want to hear all his amazing stories from his journeys emanating from born to run

a book that we all fell in love with several years ago. And then also to have it be kind of part tutorial practical tools for running and lifelong pain free fitness with you, Eric. So I think together, we're going to create a really cool unique experience. And to kick it off, I mean, I just have to say that, you know, Christopher, like I just, you know,

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

this. That is really super heartwarming. Thank you. Thank you. I remember when born around came out, it came out in March of 2011, right? Originally 2009, the hard times 2009. Actually, Rich, come here. You know, you always start to think of yourself. We brought you a little gift. This is a hand woven title model running bracelets. Oh, wow. And Eric and I are both wearing them.

Brought you one. Just because, you know, it's a little ritual that it thought I'm out of the do before they do like a multi day event. We're on the same team. We're going to, you know, it's like, if you feel pretty, you run pretty. So I just want to give it a shot. Alright, man. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate that. I'm just letting it on right now.

Right? This was this made by Taro Mata. Taro Mata. Yeah. That's pretty sad. Exactly. I was unclear on how to exactly pronounce that. We have a friend who has a contact in one of the villages and will, you know, buy these hands. And we'll embrace it soon. We sort of like to have them to give out to people. I had one experience running with, uh, with

a Taro Mata. I did a running event for runners, World Magazine in Mexico City several years ago. And one of the guys came up and I was able to, it was at a track, like, out of university, but I was able to kind of run right, tuck in right behind them and run behind them on a track. And I've never seen anything like it. It's smart.

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

and fun. It was really remarkable. It really stayed with me. What gave you the idea to tuck in rather than run next to him and try and do well. I was, I was like, I need to, I want to learn. I can get in lock step with him. And I know Eric, this is a, you know, a lot of, a lot of your tools and your

drills are kind of similar in that regard. I mean, it was just instinctual. I think at that moment. But most people don't do that. And it was an education to me the first time someone say, get a right type behind me. I always thought you were next to somebody. Right. I mean, like I did with you initially, right? Get his clothes behind. I don't know if

I was that close to him, but, right. You know, I was trying to kind of track him. And it was a really cool experience. And, you know, I remember when I was wrapping my head around like the experience that we're going to have today, I was recalling attending a book event. It must have been, I think, Borene to Run had been out a little bit. So

maybe it was 2010. It was a book suit in West Hollywood. And you weren't there. It was a Borene to Run event. But Scott was a Scott Jurick was kind of hosting it. And he was telling stories from the book and from his, you know, career and experience. And I just remember it was my first time meeting with him. Meeting Scott in person. And we were

both like in the midst of writing our own books at the same time. And I'm just coveting this like massive, you know, sort of imposter syndrome, right? Because I had this opportunity to write this book. Here's Scott. He's the greatest ultra runner ever. Also vegan. I'm like, well, you know, why is anyone going to read my book? And then I'm reading Borene to Run. And I'm

hearing these stories. And I'm like, what am I even doing? Right. I sure remember. And I also remember Peter Sarsgard was there. And I was actually there that day. I was. Do you remember this? I don't think I don't remember meeting you then. We had done a run earlier in the day up in Griffith Park. And then had that event afterwards. But because Peter and Scott

was there, I was trying to give them all the mic time. And I kind of had a feeling, you know what? I think we've all heard enough talking. So I think I came on and said, thanks everybody. And that was like, almost the only thing I said. I mean, it's a vague memory. But my recollection is that Peter was there because at that time, there was

an effort to turn the book into a movie. And Jake Gyllenhaal was involved. I know he showed up at Leadville. And there was a lot of energy around that. And then like, what my first thing is like, what happened? Yeah. I fell apart or what transpired? That's an episode in itself. Right. Well, it's kind of cool. So let's look at the rose of your glass half

full part, which was it was a really fun experience. What happened was Peter. Peter was on the set of Green Lantern. And he had all his massive prosthetic makeup there putting on his like a four hour process. So he was reading, born around, someone like slapped into his hands. When he's in the makeup, Jerry's reading this book. And then at one point, he said, I got

out of the chair and called my manager and said, I really want to be involved in this film. And at that point, producers had it, but they didn't have a director or screenwriter. That screener, I've been on director. So Peter calls up. And he said, I would love to direct this film. I'm an aspiring kind of baby runner myself. So Peter, I'm going to be a

director. I got involved. And I first got winded this when I got a phone called home from one of the producers, one of the producers saying, Hey, we know that let it all race. It's on a couple of weeks. Would you be interested in going and camping out there with Jake Jones, Holland Peter Sarsgard? And I'm like, yeah, I could probably clear out my schedule to

go camping with Jake Jones. And so then Eric and I, I blazed on out there, but these guys were going to like, you know, Bushwack and be up on the mountain. And like a pup tent. And I'm like, you know, dude, I did enough of that stuff. No thanks. So we were, we rented cabins down by a twin lake. These little rusty cabins. And the first

night these guys arrived, like a freaking monsoon blew in. And the next day, we go, a little knock on the doors, Peter and Jake, like drenched to the bone, like, Hey, can we come in and dry off? Yeah. So that to me was a lifelong memory was Jake Jones, all occupying my little bathroom, taking a hot shower. And coming out, I just remember the aroma, like,

oh, you know, a Roma of Jake is really good. Like whatever product he uses, like you could look to see. So we spent a nice weekend there. Jake is a fantastic athlete and a fun dude. Good guy to hang out with Peter, likewise. And what happened basically to cut to the end of it was that it became so mired in what the story was. And this

was a particular challenge for me writing the book. I wrote an entire draft. We can get a lot of things. We get into some right earlyness. I would entire draft of the book and turned it in. And my editor called me a week later. And he goes, Yeah, you should think about starting over. Like literally trash 100,000 words. And I knew he was right. It's a

hard story to tell because there's a lot of chainsaws juggling at the same time. And I think what happened with that SARS-Garde Gyllenhaal attempt was they just got stuck in the quicksand of what story is it. And they just kind of choked and turned in the mud for years trying to get a screenplay together and didn't work. You never, never, never, never, never. Yeah. To me,

I mean, on the surface, it appears to be a very difficult book to translate into a cinematic narrative. But my sense was always that the story lies with Cabo Blanca. Like it's Mike a true story. So you have to show, you have to go on that journey through his point of view, not yours. And the stuff that you know you talk about in the book, can

come in, but the arc really is Micah. And if you tell that story, then you can with Tanshens tell, talk about all the other things. That was the direction of it. But it wasn't unfortunately. But that was the revelation that I had was, you know, I first tried to write this strike, come from a magazine writing background, which is like, you got to smack people in

the face quick and get their attention and keep their attention. And so to me, the most dramatic moment in the story is when you get these two hard party and surfers and suddenly they're lost in the heal up in the, in the, in the Joava backcountry. And this could be yet for them. So I kept trying to open the book with Jen and Billy going off

on a run and then vanishing. But there's way too much backstory to be then folded in. And then after turning in a draft, with that starting point, and my editor said, you know, once you shred it and start over, I had to take the step back. And I realized the same thing. This is Cabo, you know, story. The beginning, middle and end is all Micah. And

the story has got to track him. And that's when I understood how to tell the story. Yeah. And the conclusion to the Micah true, AKA Cabo Blanco story had yet to be fully written when the book came out. It has since been written. And there's something interesting about where we are right now. We're in a gore hills, right? So can you talk a little bit about

how that chapter finally concluded after the book? Yeah, it's funny because Eric and I were talking about this in the way over it. It might have been like 10 years, almost. Within a few months, 10 years to the moment of where we are now, when this all happened. Wow. I was here and it's eerily familiar to me because I was here at the gore hills library.

They had asked me to come in to do a book event. And at the time, I was researching my next book, Natural Born Heroes. And through a very tenuous series of connections, I had arranged to have a breakfast with Rick Rubin, you know, Ace Music producer Rick Rubin for that research on that book. And all this is happening. I'm trying to arrange this breakfast with Rick

Rubin and my phone dies on the way here. And I arrive at the library and get out of the car. And there's someone very anxious looking at the door and sees me and just starts bustling over to me. Very concerned. And they get up to me and they go, thank God you're here. I go, I'm going to, I think I'm going to time right? No, it's

not that. Maria is trying to reach you. I don't think I know any Maria's. And he hand me the phone and I return the call to whoever I want. And I'm like, whatever it is, it's Maria. And it turns out it was Camille's girlfriend. Maria Walton. And she said, oh, thank God I reached you. Micah's missing. And like, well, that's kind of what the dude does.

You know, he was always missing. And maybe just explain a little bit about who this guy is. If, you know, for the people who have not read more in Iran, it's kind of contextualized that a little bit. So Micah True has always lived in my mind as sort of half man, half ghost. Just a guy that is always there, but not there. And I was in

Mexico City on the sign of the New York Times magazine. I was supposed to be tracking down no associates of a woman in Gloria Trevi, who is a hugely famous Mexican pop singer. And she was accused of secretly running this brainwashing sex cult and then going on the lamb. So you think a story like that is going to occupy your attention. But when I traveled from

Mexico City into Chihuahua, I kept noticing these pictures of people in a room. Running posture, wearing like dresses and sandals. And in my hotel, there was a little magazine. And they explained that this group wore the Thadomada. And they can run hundreds of miles in their thinnest of sandals. And they're doing it deep in the whole day. At the time, I was a discouraged, had long

given up on running. I was a big dude, like 260 pounds and have been told by doctors that running is bad for every human body, particularly bodies like yours. And so I'm looking at this magazine. And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way this crap is true. There's nobody running a hundred miles. I'd never heard of an ultra marathon. The marathon was the ultimate challenge. Fidipity's

died. They're saying this guy ran four marathons in flip flops in a dress and he's 72 years old. No way. But I kept seeing these images on the license plates. You go into a little taco shop and there's a picture on the wall. So I started to ask around. And they say, oh, those are the Thadomada. And they're down in the copper canyon. And they're hard

to find, but they're amazing runners. So I think, well, this is cool. I can double dip on my assignments as a freelancer. I'll just get a story from runners world out of this in and out. Couple interviews, you know, double pay. Find a guy takes me down to the copper canyon. We actually, after a week of searching, locate a Thadomada village and discover that the way

you remain a reclusive tribe is like not talking to strangers, but they did tell me about a guy. They got a call, come on, go the white horse. They say, you should go talk to that guy. And 50% of my mind is like, great. And the other 50% is like, they're just trying to get me out of town. So when I finally tracked this guy down,

Micah, true. It was just like they described. He was a big tall dude who had come down to the copper canyons from Netherlands, Colorado. In search of the same thing I was looking for. But when he found that he never left, he'd been down there from us 15 years at that point, running with the Thadomada and sort of mimicking not just their running, but their lifestyle.

Like he felt that he had discovered something very powerful and life changing. And at the point where he never wanted to leave. And he was running upwards of 170 miles a week or something like that, right? Just like unbelievable mileage. Here's the thing about it. So Lewis Eskibar, our friend who came down with us later, he would say that Caballo's range was unlimited. And that's what

really stuck in my brain was it wasn't like he was doing X number of miles per day is that the world was his playground. Whenever he felt like doing he had the range to go do it. Wow. So this guy becomes the central figure, the protagonist and born to run and all the stories are kind of through his lived experience. And what can be gleaned about

the nature of running the human body, etc. And all the stuff that you talk about with minimalism. But true to his word Micah, true, right. He's living this very off the grid lifestyle for a very long period of time. And in the wake of the book coming out at some point goes missing when you're out here in a Gory Hills. So one of the to me,

one of the happiest accomplishments of the book born to run is the Caballo got a girlfriend. And he got a killer girl from Maria Walton, right? Yeah. There she is. A dream, just loving, tough smart and like everything he needed. Like he got an email out of the blue from some of the woman say, hey, I went train for a race. I like the book. And

he's grumble grumble grumble. And so he gave her some kind of a, like, a Kurt Rude response. And she was not to be dissuaded. And they became, you know, they became boyfriend and girlfriend. So she was the one who reached out to me and said, Hey, he's missing. And I went, well, you know, what do you expect? Yeah. But then she said something that really caught

my attention. She said, I he left Wada Huko tied up. And overnight is like wolf dog. It is the only way to describe Wada Huko. And that really caught my eye because this, I was in Boulder once. And Caballo was back in the States. And he shows up at this, like, very Tony boutiquey brew pub. And he walks in with this frigging wolf on a chain.

And it's in a cast because this dog had never been out of the copper can. He literally had like a drop that a federal creature and made it, you know, his partner. And so he shows up in Boulder. And the first day, this dog, like, walks in front of a bar. And he goes, he's like, he's going to get a bus and gets hit. And so

there's a cast on his leg. And so Caballo is like carrying this thing around. Bring it to our table. And his dog is like snapping at people's food and other tables. And Caballo is just like, no problem. But, uh, so he was inseparable from Wada Huko. He would never, ever leave that dog tied up. And so Maria tells me this. I'm like, again, walking into an

event, speaking event. There's an audience there. And I got this phone call. My phone's dead. And I said, well, wow, okay. Um, have you talked on Lewis? Lewis Eskabar. And Lewis is a character under himself. Because he's the one guy. I wish there was more of him born to run. But there's just so many big personalities. Lewis almost got a little bit sideline. But he's, he's

kind of like, he's the uncle. You know, he is the steady uncle that's life at a party. But the same time in a pinch, you're in jail. You call uncle Lou. So I said, Maria, have you called Lewis? And she said, Oh, yeah. He's on his way. So then I bought a guy's film called Lewis. And Lewis is typical driving out of Santa Barbara. He's texting

people driving with his knees. And he's on his way down to the healer wilderness in New Mexico, where Caballo is last seen. So I, so I do. I got this talk. I'll be done. I'll drop off my rental, pick me up at LAX. And that's what happened. Right. So you go down there and the ultra running community kind of turns up for this man hot, right?

Scott juric shows up. I think to Tim Yolson show up as well. A bunch of people. Skags brought up others and turned up. Oh, what's his name? The guy from Canada slipping my mind and killing me because. Man, a bunch of people though. Yes. Except for one notable character, Barefoot Ted. Because he had a different perspective on what might have been happening. So we're, so Lewis

picks me up at LAX. And I jump into his truck and he already had like two other people. And we're bombing down the highway. We're just swinging over to pull up Pat Swini jumps in. A lot of people I'd never met. But it was the kind of weird orbit that had developed around Micah, which is that within a year or two of the book coming out.

Suddenly, people who are fellow spirits had connected with him and loved him. And so I'm like in his truck with like, I know Lewis. Like, who does everybody else? Then I race into the rescue. So we're bombing down the highway. Oh, I think people are a Venmoan money to Lewis. Like, I'll pay for your gas. You guys are going to need Taco Bell. So his phone's

ding. We had to shove in the back seat because you cannot be driving anymore. And on the way, I get a message from Ted, which is the most infuriating but loving thing about Ted, which is he says stuff that just makes you want to just rip his head off. But in retrospect, it's true. So he sends a message like he's an acquired taste. He's exactly right.

I feel like the closer I get to Ted, the more anxious I get. The further away I get, the more I love him. So there's like a magnetic polarization. And so he sent me this message. Like, he's like, why are you going down there? He predicted this. And he said that someday, man, I'm just going to walk off in the wilderness like Geronimo and lie down

and that will be my end. I'm like, Ted, shut up, man. You know, we're trying to help this dude. Like, why are you saying he's dead? But I was at Ted. I think if Ted, Ted is a super loving guy. There's never a no that comes out of his mouth. As much as he drives me crazy, you ask Ted a favor, he'll double it. But in

this instance, he's like, not over, which was infuriating. But yeah, he was right. So, you know, eventually the body is found. Wasn't he sort of at a creek bed with his feet or his legs in the water? And it was unclear like they did an autopsy. There's a lot of uncertainty about how and why he died. The conventional, isn't the conventional wisdom that it was some

kind of Fidipity's cardio myopathy. But you have a different view on that, don't you? So it was a weird scene. We get down there. It's sun up. Search and rescue is super well equipped to deal with this. They know the HeLa. And then Lewis Eskabar gets right up in the face of the head searcher. And he goes, he knows something. You got some of the greatest

ultra runners in the world. Stand in front of you. You should cut them loose. And this guy, his credit, because this could have turned into a disaster. Something you have 15 people missing. And he's like, okay, quadrant it off. You know, go to town and then just launched, you know, Kyle Skag, Scott Jorik, everyone just pouring off in every direction to run through the mountains. And

what's weird is to a scientific fact, they knew he had to be north of the eights of the park station. Because he'd last been seen running right up the highway that the times figured out he had to be north of there. So for three days, we're searching this every crevice, like not a sign of the guy. And a couple of guys who had known Micah for

a long time, go, well, if he absolutely has be north, he's self. And they just turned around with the opposite direction. And then very quickly, they found him. Yeah, his, his corpse lying by the side of a creek. And in some eerily irritatingly barefoot-ted way, it was the most beautiful final resting place. You can imagine. So they didn't all topsy. They thought it was cardiomyopathy, but

other endurance athletes with a science background said, every endurance athlete has got an oversized heart. Like that's nothing. They just haven't dissected enough endurance athletes. Their estimate, which seems to me the one that has the most fruit, is that he had a parasitic invader in his body. Because he had, he'd had these fainting spells on occasion where he just dropped over. And he had contact. He

thought he had West Nile for a while. For my three months, he was just flat on his back. And this was not too much prior to the incident. And so I had to believe that he would have had an undiagnosed, you know, sort of a tropical parasite that was probably, you know, carving away at his heart. Mythic figure who lived, you know, the way he wanted

to live and, you know, died in a, in a manner befitting, you know, who he was. You know, it's kind of an incredible story. Yeah. Yeah. I hate to mythicize him. I'd like to acknowledge it too much, but, you know, he talked about this old West figure that just wanted to head out into the hinterlands and carve his own little lifestyle and to find like-minded souls

among the Taroamada. Yeah, he was at home. Yeah. How do you think about balancing, you know, that kind of fidelity to principle with like being, you know, somebody who lives in the world and, you know, has a family, et cetera. Like there's so much to be learned from that type of courage. But also, you know, you have a different mission, right? So how do you like

wed those two things to try to, you know, create the life that on some level, you know, takes the best of what he had to teach us? You know, it's a fundamental question that I've asked myself a lot because not only do I ask you how he lived this way, but when I look back on that whole adventure of born or run, I'm like, what's everybody

doing here? Like why Scott Jorick here of all places? Why isn't it bottom of my mind? It was a canyon with some race by some dude who he doesn't even know. Why are Jen and Billy? Why is Eric Orton here? Eric has a very successful coaching business in Jackson Hole. Why is he now pass over getting on a Greyhound bus? And over the time I realize

that I think all those people involved in that adventure, we're looking for the same thing. They're trying to find a way where they can turn the thing they love into a lifestyle, not just recreation, not just the 45 minutes you carve out, you know, when you're on the track, like the moon the afternoon. And I think the answer in the end comes down to that, this

idea of, I think too many of us start to stray into the world of exercise as punishments, as a test of our inner worth. And I think every person down there, and you can look at Scott, as a very particular example, is exercise is a sense of like joyfulness of creativity of artistry. And artistry can take any kind of form, but if you believe that your

ability to create not just to destroy, not to beat somebody else, beat yourself up, beat down your body, but to really create and relish, then you start to get on the caballo path. That's really the secret sauce of born to run success. Right. I've heard you talk about this quite a bit. Like when people ask you like, why did this book break out and become such

a massive hit like in retrospect looking back, this idea being that running, it wasn't a narrative about running as, you know, a suffering vehicle for personal growth, which is kind of like what my book's about, right? But it was about finding the joy in the community, right? That this should be a joyous, expansive experience that's fun. And it's your journey towards discovering that for yourself. Oh,

but I would, I would counter. I would, I would rebut your point because you were on a path to a lot of unhappiness. Happiness and pain and destruction. And you found something that sort of her glow. Yeah. But I'm curious. So you're writing a process. What was that like for you? So it was a long period of sort of dark nights at a soul. Like, am

I ever going to finish this? You're trying to flip it on me, right? Well, this is about you. But yeah, I mean, it was, look, it was my first book. And I don't have a, you know, a history or a career of being a journalist. So it was definitely, yeah, a lot of, you know, dark nights of the soul and panicking. And like I said, in

posture syndrome, in the like, like I just was delighted that I had a book deal. I couldn't even believe that like somebody was like, Really? So, you know, I was determined to, you know, write the most, you know, authentic version of this story that I possibly could, because, as I mentioned earlier, and I've said this before, I knew Scott was writing a book. And I was

like, well, my book can't be anything like that. And it shouldn't be anything like that. Like, what do I have that's unique to me that could be helpful to other people. And I realized that, that the value of what I had to say was going to be deeply wed to the extent to which I was willing to be honest and vulnerable about like my own pain

and my own foibles and failures, because that would be the emotional, like, connective tissue that could hopefully speak to a broader audience beyond just like the running community, right? Like I, my goal was to write a book that wouldn't just live within running circles, but connect and speak to, you know, a broader audience of people, which you did so beautifully and successfully. You know, mine wasn't

nearly as successful as yours, but, you know, I'm proud of what I was able to do. You're doing okay, Rich. Well, the different thing here, but anyway, that was it. That was it. You were writing a book about athletes for people who may not be athletes. And that was my total orientation for born to run was that the sports movies I love the most. Our sports,

I don't give a crap about, you know, like Bulldoorm. Yeah, right. A tin cup. I don't think I've ever hit a golf ball. I will die a happy man. If I never do hit a golf ball, but I will watch the crap out of tin cup bulldoorm. I don't play baseball. Don't watch baseball. Love the movie. And that was my thought. It's like, if I can

take this activity, every thinks it's one thing. And if I can show them another side of it. And I think you had the same orientation. Like if I can take my story and just not really about hammering my butt in triathlons, but it's really about letting yourself explore and discover. And I think the other is a freedom, which I think we probably both had, which is

that you're not quite sure if anyone's ever going to read this. Yeah. And at the time I wrote, born to run, the running bookshelf was pretty thin. It was Ultramarathon man, which was a great adventure. And then a bunch of stuff about how not to get chased in life shorts. Really practical type books and regurgitate the same stuff from the origami. You know, although I tell

you that was right around. I'm not sure if that was before or after born to run almost at the same time. But even then I was willing to say I'm in a different category. I'm a different age group because, you know, he's like super successful novelist. And I'm some jiboni magazine writer. So, but I think that was it that you and I had a common experience

of feeling like we could say what we wanted and it be as open and exposed because there's a good chance no one's going to read this. Yeah. Eric, I promise we're going to get to. No, you're fine. You're fine. You can see I'm a lucky man. I've been two and a half weeks with this guy here and all these stories. Yeah. He's a very good story.

So you know, we're good. We're good. Cabaios spirit animal for Eric was Alagavila on the hall. Yeah. I just watched. I'm watching. Yeah. Yeah. And then dropping the talent. Yeah. We're good. Two observations on what you just said. The first being that, you know, on this on this kind of. spectrum of suffering to joy in terms of our relationship to fitness and running in particular. You

know, my I would still submit that like my book was about like how suffering can be a tool on the teacher for personal expansion and growth. But I also think it's a it's an unsustainable fuel source. Like now, you know, we're about the same age, maybe almost exactly the same age like now my relationship to it is so much different like the joy finding the joy

of the joy and doing it for the joy as opposed to a performance goal or, you know, some kind of self-flatulation is much more appealing, exciting, and ultimately more expansive. Right. And that's what, you know, we're going to get into the the new book. But that's a huge message of of this new book like Banda Rund being kind of the why and Banda Rund to being

the how. Is it a funny that fun is like a dirty word? In endurance sports? Fun. I enjoyed it. I had a good time. I know, dude, you're not serious. It's got to be, you know, run yourself into the ER. You didn't leave it all on the table. And to me, like that's the gap in our human evolution as athletes. We start off that way as

kids. And it's been funny. We've been we were at a group run in Chinatown, New York, run for Chinatown. And as we were talking to Leland, you as he's describing his own immersion to running these little kids. Or just ripping around back and forth in a playground. And I feel like why are we talking to you? Do we should be talking to these kids? Because what

they figured out is it. But what happens is we sort of take kids. We sort of pen them up in their desks. And over the time, by the time you're ready to get back out and move again, you've lost that fun component. But it's and get essentially it's so important. Yeah. Banda Rund was not an instant New York Times of SLR. I think that would surprise

a lot of people. Oh, yeah. Like it's kind of amazing. The grassroots work, heavy lifting and campaign that you devoted yourself to to get this book out there. And the difference between kind of how people perceive that book now versus what you were actually doing when it came out. I still don't know. No, really know what happened. I don't know when the electricity started to spread.

But the book came out in mate of 2009. And the first I kick off events that my publisher had arranged for me was to have a talk in a running issue store in New York. This is a book which says that running shoes are the cause of all evil in the known world. And they put me into a running shoe store. And there's about three people

there. And I sort of talk to them and don't know what I'm doing. They left. And that was the end of that event. And I did a couple others go to bookstore. I talked to four or five basically friends. That was it. So after a week, book tours over book is not reviewed at all. Runners will go over views at all. To this day, Runners World

has never written an article about born or run. Get out. We'll not touch it. Because it's too offensive to its advertiser base. I don't know. I can take guesses. But I think sold, I mean, four million. How many how many copies of this book? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that range. So early on it's May 2009. This book is going out like a flickering candle. And I'm

thinking I'm not I'm not done yet. You know, I got more to do. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, every day there are people getting together. Run. I just got to go to where they are rather than telling them to come to me. So I was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So I went to my local bookstore. So hey, can I buy 100 copies of books

from you? And I bought them cash on my pocket. And then I'd resell them. So if there was a five K race, I'd rock up, open the back of the truck, have a box of books there and say, guys, give me two seconds before you run. Got this book. May really dig it. If you have some guy on the cover, Billy Barnett, every that kind of

stuff. And you know, at a race, people have got other things on their mind and buying a thing that they now have to carry around. But bit by bit, it started to gather. And then I would start to show up at races. And people had already heard about the book and we're kind of curious by getting a copy. They'd only have one or two copies and

a Barnes and Noble of time. So they're selling out fast. And then I would show up with 30 books in my truck. And I was it May, June, July, just kind of, you know, hucking it, hucking it. And then out of the blue, I get a phone call. It was August. I remember this because I was supposed to go back to Portugal. I used to work

as a foreign correspondent and visit friends for a birthday. And you got a call. Say, hey, John Stewart, like to have you on the daily show, like the week after next, you got a little opening right before they go on hiatus. And you know, it's actually not not a really good time. Can we reschedule it? And they know, no, we can't. Idiot. And something, all right,

fine. I'll go on the John Stewart show. And so his producer, his husband was a big fan of the book. John Stewart had producer, his producer's husband was a member of the Central Park Track Club. And the husband was just like on his wife and John, you got to get this book on whatever. So I get an unlearned the backstory of how it actually happened. But

then lo and behold, like seven days later, I'm walking on the daily show. And that's when, you know, right, that was the big inflection point. And then did you end up hitting the New York Times list after that? It might have been on just before that. I don't recall. But that was to me, the surprise, when I, when I snuck onto the best seller list, there's

the list. And there's the extended list and all of a sudden, whoa, there's like the 15 and there's the extended list. And they'll say, hey, boy, look at that. It might even just before that. And then it just built from there. And it continues to sell. Like if you go on Amazon, it's always the number one book in the running category and probably in, you know,

the broader sports category as well. To you, I mean, crazy man, you and me, man, gold and silver back and forth. Yeah. I'm way, you know, it's like, dude, you're a huge gap there, brother. I don't think so. That's all right. Yeah. I mean, that's really inspiring to, you know, see the power that grass, you know, grass movements like that, you know, still hold to get

a message out there. That's worthy of being heard. And, you know, the power of just sharing one to one to one. Like people just saying, this is a great book. Check it out. It's very cool. But I'm sure a lot of people told you not to write a follow up, born to run to a sequel. I think you compare it to Vin Diesel. Yeah. Yeah. Authors

don't come out fast and furious. Seven, you know, touch that. So here's what happened. Here's an untold part of the story that you don't know, Rich. I was actually contracted to write another book. I was writing a book called King of the Weekend Warriors. And the idea was that there are extremely high performing endurance athletes out there that most people have never heard of because they

don't care about podiums or anything. And I got a buddy in New York. He's got seven different Guinness World records. He gets intrigued by an idea. For instance, he wanted to be the person to do the fastest traverse of the entire New York City subway system. At the time, he was working for a bank. And he hacked into the mainframe computer of the bank and started

running the millions of computations to figure out. The best traverse of the New York City subway system. It's an extremely complicated mathematical equation. And he figured it out. He came up with a plan and then he trained for it. Because it's a real physical challenge. You got to sprint between stations and you got to map things out. You got to go out on one station, down

to another, running in the tunnels or... No, you're actually taking the trains. You're taking the trains. But it's tricky. So you have to hit every single stop faster than anybody else. And a number of people have done this over the years. This is one of those underground records where people like it because it's a math mathematical like tri-level chess problem that also has a physical component.

So my buddy figures this out. He has a plan. And he goes off and does it. And he breaks the world record. He has the world record for the highest ascent in 12 hours. So the most... Vertical feed gained in 12 hours. And the way he did it was he had his wife standing at the top of a skyscraper of a building that he had an

office in. And she held the elevator for 12 hours. So he would run at the stairs. Run at the elevator. He hit down. He came off the elevator. He hit 75. Whenever the top floor was. He'd run at the stairs and did this for 12 hours. Up and down. Up and down. His poor wife, hold the door. But I was fascinated by this guy. Because I

would say to him, Hey, you know, how about this? You should jump in one of the backyard challenges. He's like, Dude, I would never do that. And he explained his logic. That's you against other people. Right. I'm against me. Say, I wonder right this book. But I'll tell you why. And this is going to come across as offensive tips on people. It's like, dude, sort of

mean it that way. To me, where I realized halfway through the book was, I'm not writing a story for the right reasons. I'm writing this to wave a finger at David Goggins and say, I'm sure because I feel like I know something and I'm going to argue with this guy and just sourd on me. And thinking to myself, that's the wrong reason. So what is the

right reason? At the time, I get a lot of messages all the time from people asking me for training advice. And I'm like, you can do better. Don't ask me. I'm not that guy. And then like that day, I'm opening up my inbox and there's like 10 messages. Hey, I got a plan of actually, what should I do? What should I buy? And it's just clicked.

The book you should be writing is the book that people have been asking for. But I never felt I was in a position to do it. I just didn't know enough. And then I thought, but I know someone who does. We really need to take everything that was not in born to run and putting a born to run too. Sure. So that brings us up to

you, Eric. Why don't we start at the at the beginning here? Like, how did you first meet Christopher? And what was the process of getting him ready for that first 50 K race that he wanted to run? I mean, the whole thing with born to run is about how you didn't see yourself as a runner. You thought those days were in the past and, you know,

I'm a big guy and knees and etc. and all that kind of junk. And you really rewired his thinking and created an approach that, you know, basically allowed this guy to blossom and become, you know, an ambassador of the sport in the broadest sense of the word. Yeah. So we first met in O five. We were doing a magazine article on my training in Jackson Hole.

And it was right when he came back from the copper candy in his first time. And I'm like, you just did what? Because I moved to Colorado in 91. And it's right when the Taramara who had raised led the 100. So they just came on my radar. I'm like, Oh, man, this is, this is, this is legit. And men, that was back when there was no

internet. You know, the mythology of what they're doing was proliferated because you couldn't find any information about them. So here I am, like, walking into meeting this guy who just spent time with them. And we just kind of hit it off. And so we were, we were supposed to do a two day kind of, I was like the flavor of the month for this magazine article.

And you know, it was like the America's greatest workout or something, something crazy like that. And so he, we met day one. I kind of went through what I had scripted. And then it came really, really obvious to me. Here's a guy who really, really wants to run. Can't, doesn't think he can, been told he can't. And I ripped up my script for day two and

we went to work. And at that point of time, I think, you know, how we kind of explore this is super important. Because I think a lot of people watching and listening see themselves in that way. And I'm kind of going through something right now, you know, that has forced me to reframe like how I think about my, my running. And I'm curious to explore that

with you. Well, but at that time, were you, would you consider yourself to be kind of a traditional running coach? Did your approach change as a result of your exposure to this new way? Or had you already kind of cotton down to this more minimal naturalistic approach to training and. It's just been a lifelong, you know, I was an athlete growing up. So I've always looked

back and all these little points in my life that have really just accumulated. So at that time, when I met Chris, I, I just kind of have a feel for what an athlete needs. And it's, it's, it's a combination of research, school knowledge, my awareness of my own body, my awareness of seeing athletes good and bad. You know, and sometimes seeing bad is really, really helpful.

And, and then knowing the psyche of the athlete, you know, the. What was most important for this is what was most important to me is that is my friend who was Spanish and I understand that. I mean, what I remember we were about. And I was important with Chris and I was for me to see his desire to run and being so frustrated that he can't.

And knowing a lot more about Chris now is that that, that was the rebel on him. He really wanted to run because everyone's told him he can't. And so it's then just, I mean, I can't, it's just a feeling of, from a coach of what, what an individual athlete needs. Right. So in crit in the case of Chris, though, he comes back to me. He comes

to you and you have this keen observational ability to kind of look at someone, their posture, how they walk, et cetera, and immediately hone in and identify like, oh, here's what's up. And here's what we need to work on. So what is that process like? So for Chris, it was, it was two things. It was one just kind of dialing into the form. You know, and

for me, that that's, that's an easy part. But it was also starting to see that really specifically, what he was doing that was causing some of the trouble that he was encountering is that he, he didn't have the ability to run easy. You know, we go out for our nice long conversational zone to run. He really didn't have that ability. So every time he went out,

it was kind of morphed into this moderate effort that was breaking him down along with his form. Exactly. Right. So was that a fitness thing or is that like a heavy foot form technique? It was both. It was both. But it was, it was, I think, as a gambit, that he's trying to set a good, because that was really bouncing over the those kinds of advices

I thought it kind of caught me. Was it just analogous? Ingressive because life is not embarrassing. But, where, I don't know, it's OK. It really could be a solution. It isn't wasn't revelatory because there was this idea and you talk about it in corner two. Don't teach people technique when it comes to running. Everyone's in N of 1 and there is no right or wrong way.

And we all know how to run. So you just got run and don't mess around with that, which is insane when you deconstruct that. You use the example of the basketball player. You don't just throw the ball up in the air and hope for the best. It's a skill just like anything else. And there is a right way and a wrong way. And so much about

our modern lifestyles and we can get into all of that, drive us into situations where we're compelled to do it improperly. And that leads to all of these injuries and persistent problems that sideline people unnecessarily. When you asked how I kind of developed all this is one of my personal experiences. I was living at Colorado. At the time and doing a ton of running, doing a

ton of bike racing and decided to go to the troughlon route and had no swim background. So here I am. I think the week before I'd want a bike race. So fit. And I decided to start swimming. Well, I had to go like the last hour of the rec center hours that they were open and swim the width because I had a hard time getting just

from one end to the other. And I'm like, this is an affitness thing. This is an efficiency thing that can translate to any activity. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's, yeah. That's like a, a refrain. I'm always banging this drum because I come from a swimming background. So I learned proper technique very early. And, you know, being a triathlete and training with other triathletes who learn swimming

later in life. I just watched them fighting the water. Their technique is terrible, but they are, they're time crunched. And their main concern is the fitness part of it, right? Like I got to get this much distance in and this much distance. So I think it's a great time. It doesn't matter. I'll do the technique later. And I'm like, bro, you should just forget about the

whole thing and start at the beginning. So why wouldn't that apply to running? It's the same thing. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And you know, I tell a lot of beginning runners. Don't view starting running as a workout or as a form of fitness or a way to lose weight. Create the joy first and everything else will follow. And that goes into learning to be efficient. Not thinking

it has to be hard. And that's, that's kind of what we really dove into with Chris is that I worked kind of the real easy and, but also he did a lot of hill sprints and a lot of other higher effort training to develop that efficiency and economy that was, you know, revelatory. He was in a matter of a couple weeks doing so much more than

he had ever done just by changing things up. Yeah. And so Chris, from your perspective, what was that like? Hooking up with the era, I can be one thing like maybe when you first met him, you're like, oh, well, we'll do this one thing together. But you guys have gone on this like lifetime adventure together. So obviously, like this guy's been central to, you know, everything

that you care about in this world. You can see why just from that answer. Yeah. It's so smart and so easy to appreciate and absorb. Yeah. So I'm super grateful on a personal note because he gave me something that has changed everything. Not from a career standpoint, just from a physical standpoint, imagining told you can't run, believing it, stopping it. Then 15 years, years later, realized,

I can walk out the door and run as far as I want in any direction. The whole thing we were talking about with Kabaia, that freedom, that joy. I mean, someone's giving you just an incalculable presence. So, you know, I just owe you a ton. Right. So, so here we go. We got born to run to, and this really is, it is the how it's like

this manual that walks you through these, essentially, like these seven principles, these, like, you know, you know, I don't know what that's all about. Like pillars for lifelong athleticism that all conveniently start with the letter F, right? I don't know that we need to go serious through the whole thing. But, you know, let's like, let's hone in on the, on the, on the form piece for

a little bit. I think with born to run, it became a little bit reductive in the sense that everyone just thought it was about minimalism and barefoot running. And that is a piece in there for sure. Right. But that's really kind of evidence of a broader, you know, concept around form technique and lifestyle. So I don't, that's not really a question. But like, maybe we can

launch into how you guys are thinking about that. I mean, born to run huge and ushering in this minimalism sensibility with running. And it's been interesting to kind of watch the pendulum swing both ways, like, it was all about vibrums for a while. And then I remember I, I was helping to crew Dean Karnas is at bad waters, you know, some handful of years after that.

Every single person was wearing hokas with the giant marshmallow, you know, souls. And I still have yet to see elites running in minimal footwear for the must for. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions. And you guys probably know these guys. But it's not like everyone's towing the line in sandals at Leadville learning. Oh, but the elites do. You know, is line up for a marathon and

a pair of hokas. You know, they're wearing the most, I mean, the more cushion ones. If you're running on a neat marathon, you have to finish. It's a minimal shoe. Right. Well, the Nike, whatever it's called. And all of that, all the high tech stuff, I'm sure you have lots of opinions about all that kind of stuff. Yeah. You know, but, you know, it is weird.

Like it had, you know, the shoe company still prevail for the most part. Like, they've taken a note from the work that you've done. But I don't know, like, what's your sense of where all of that is right now? Chris is more of a purist than from that standpoint. From me as a coach and myself, you know, I live in Jackson Hole running the tea tons.

So for me, my number one kind of decision making process as far as shoe choice is what's going to give me the most protection that day based on where I'm running. So I need rock protection. So I'm trying to go as minimal as possible, but still allow me to have that protection. I need to, you know, rock shirt and in based on the performance that I

want that day. So, but one step back is that I think the further we get away from the ground in a shoe, the more we are getting away from the ground, the more we are getting away from the ground. So, that's the way from allowing our feet to work in a natural environment. And I think what people really need to understand is that how we use

our feet really dictate how we stabilize. You know, our first line of defense as runners is with our big toe and our arch. That's our stabilizer. And that really dictates how well we use our glutes. So, how we use our feet directly relate to how we've kind of hear the important stability strength we need. To be healthy, strong, performance or longevity based runners. And that comes

to our feet. So, pick and choose, you know, I use shoes at the tool. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there is this idea in the book. Like it's, it's not that running barefoot or bare minimal shoes are this panacea. Like you say, you could, you could just strap those on. But if your form is terrible, you're still going to get injured,

right? Like we have to even step further back. Right. Really evaluate like, how do you hold your body and what are the activities that you're, you know, a Nord two on a daily basis that are leading you astray. And you have all of these cool, like really simple, you know, drills to kind of get a meter on like where you're at. Like the rock lobsters thing.

You know, that kind of stuff. It's great. It's amazing. How effective that is. It's crazy. How, how well that works. But here's my take on this, Rich. Is it, I come from a perspective of like, I am the guy that's always like one cushion shoe away from backsliding. Uh-huh. We were at a great store in North Carolina. Relapse. Total. Yeah. Well, it would be very cautious

about that word, you know. But we're going to run a shoe store. And I've always been curious to try the ultra escalante racer. It's actually the shoe. We recommend in the book. If you are transitioning, if you're trying to get your form dialed in, I've been very scrupulous to never even during the V even five finger phase. I never recommended a shoe. I said, I'm just

not authoritative enough to recommend a shoe. I wear it myself. Make your own choice. But in born and run to, we recommend a shoe because we can't just be agnostic. Say, hey, you should pick a shoe, but it's up to you. But I never actually tried them on myself. Uh, I was arguing in favor of a more minimal shoe. So I'm in this running shoe store

and they bring out a pair of the ultra escalante racer. I put it on. I was too much shoe. Rip out the insult. Still too much shoe. And I was like, this is a super stripped down minimal shoe for everybody else. But for me, I always feel like, man, if it's too comfortable, I'm going to fall apart. My form is going to go down. I'm going

to go down a few steps and I'm going to make. I'm a respiratory machine doctor. I'm going to move my hands. I'll just take out my opinion. I'm going to get that happened. I didn't get it the answer. I've been taking him because of Blake that he didn't want me to actually do that. That's how you're doing. You'll be fine. Um, but that's what I'm doing.

Tony Riddell, you know, this guy is British guy. How do I'm on the podcast? Yeah. He's, he's a, he goes by the natural lifestyle list on Instagram. He's got a pretty big following. And, you know, he got rid of the chairs in his house. Like the wilding running. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how he's branded it or whatever. Yeah, maybe he's could. Yeah, rewilding running.

He's done a couple adventures. He did this thing. One man, two feet, three peaks and made a documentary about it where he did the three peaks challenge in the UK. Running on Vivo's, like on the roads in between the peaks, but then scaling or, yeah, and then scaling the peaks, which are very rocky and rugged, like barefoot. Yeah. He came out here and we went on

a run in Malbu Creek State Park and he went barefoot. And there's like, there's so many loose little, you know, I put on vibrums just in good spirit. And I'm not super experienced with that. And that was a lot for me. And I could not believe how belletic, like how graceful he was running over, like, very rough. I mean, he's been doing it for a long

time. I have a gravel driveway and he could like run on it and do drills on it. I can't walk on a barefoot without it hurting my feet. Yeah. Clearly, you know, there's something profound going on here. But I think for me, and I probably am a stand in for the audience, like, there's an aspiration to be more like that. But it does require like a

long term commitment to get there. Let's look at it a different way. Your feet are sources of sensual pleasure. You know, one reason why we like running shoes, one reason why we like the Hokka's is they feel good. The reason why we have more than one pair of running shoes is we like that sensual pleasure of trying something new on our feet. Same reason why we

like to vary our meals. It just tastes great for breakfast. I want something different for lunch. And that's why yeah, I was in a place and actually that same ultra running company to hey try these shoes. Oh, he's still fantastic. Can I have him? I don't need him, but I like them. And so there is that sensual joy of comforting your feet with something. To me,

rather than say, well, you have to commit to learning form. What if you decide? I'm going to really relish the sensual pleasure of freeing up my feet. I've actually experimented on that gravel driveway because over time, it's going to feel really good. You don't have to make a punishment. You don't have to say, I'm going to walk up and down the gravel driveway like it's a

better hot cold. I'm going to try a little bit. And with sense it, I'm going to try it. And see what it feels like. My wife, who was not a runner, she was a dancer. And she got sort of drag gooned into this whole thing. When we started to run with our rescue donkeys. But her genius technique was to learn barefoot running. She would just set

out barefoot on an asphalt road with her shoes in her hand. And the second it was at all uncomfortable. She put her shoes on and then finished the run. But every time she went from 50 feet to 1000 feet to a mile. And that was it. As soon as it's no longer pleasurable, switch it up. Yeah, it's interesting. And what is your sense of how long

making that full transition takes to do it responsibly? See, I think that's the wrong way to approach it. This should be something that's different for everybody. And seen as a tool and a training tool. And for me, using my athletes as an example, I just had someone finish a hundred mileer. And we have him in minimal shoes some of the time. We have him doing foot

core exercises. We have him doing a lot of different types of training. But then he's picking the job or the tool for the job for the race. Right. And so I don't think it has to be this, this either or. And I think that's where people start to see it. It's, I'm either a minimal runner or I'm not. See, see this as a tool and in

training, just like you do your, your intervals and your threshold runs and that is because it is training. Every step can be a form of training. Yeah. Well, this book has come at a really opportune moment for me because I've been suffering from some pretty chronic lower back issues. It's a sciatic pain. I've got some numbness in my foot. And you know, that's very concerning. And

it has benched me from running and sent me on a bit of a world tour of, you know, meeting with, you know, all manner of specialists, all of whom seem to have, you know, versions of the same advice, but also very different at times. Which can be paralyzing and confusing. But one thing has become abundantly clear, which is the lack of my, my brain to connect

with certain muscle groups. So it's not even that they're weak. Like they don't work. My brain says moves out muscle and nothing moves. Right. My glutes don't fire, et cetera. I've got tight hips and all these sorts of, you know, knots that I'm trying to untangle with a lot of the, you know, the drills and some of the advice that that you give in the book.

And I watch some of your videos as well. It's been slow going for me. And so I am going to make this about me and say, yeah, maybe you can like, you know, we can go out there afterwards. You can like look at me a little bit. I'm not going to let you leave without taking advantage of that opportunity. Yeah. Alright, cool. So, you know, using

me as a proxy for the typical middle aged person who kind of maybe had a history of running, but is banged up a little bit. And, you know, I'm going to be able to do that. Like I'm reading this and I'm feeling a sense of hope. Like I really want to be able to run pain free, fall in love with this thing that I care so

deeply about. And it's been really, you know, frustrating to not be able to move my body the way that I would like to. Yeah. And I think you said one thing that really resonates with my experience in my cans, clinics, coaches, people out here from that the neuromuscular strength component where you're lacking that activity from a neuromuscular standpoint. And I think that's a really big key

where people and athletes focus so much on developing strength and getting stronger. And core exercises are great example. You may have the strongest core in the world, but unless you're using it in a functional manner, it doesn't matter. And so having that neuromuscular connection is the type of strength I see most runners needing and lacking the most. And, you know, just as a general statement, a

lot of that starts at the feet. You can't train the glue activity properly unless you engage the feet. And I think that's that would be the first thing we would we would look at. Have you had success working with because you get there's a section in there where you go through kind of common ailments that people have. I didn't see one for lower back pain. But

I'm sure you've had to contend with that with the. Yeah. You know, again, just general observation with what you're saying is that my sense is that the back pain is just a symptom is that more times than not where you're feeling it is just a symptom of another culprit. And that's what I would explore is like, okay. Let's maybe not look to treat the back. Is

there something else that we can look at? Maybe hip flexors. So as, you know, I'm sure you've heard all that. But so that's that would be my approach is that, okay. So back, if it's truly not a back injury, what's maybe causing the back to let you know something's going on and we look in that direction? Yeah. I mean, that's 100% what it is. Because I

have, you know, I have a little bit of Spondy, but it's not like I have a slipped disc or there isn't. I've had an MRI. Like there's nothing to create. Like it's not perfect. But it's not like, oh man, you need surgery. So I know that it doesn't necessarily just live in that local spot that it's a manifestation of a, you know, my my sense with

the whole side. I think maybe we look at TFL kind of what's going on inside of the hip. Yeah. The hips, the hips start to hurt. Yep. The top of the hamstrings start to hurt. Then my feet will hurt. Like and I'm like, this is not right. So literally travels right down the chain. You feel like one place than another than another. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

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

right. That was exactly the idea of this book. So when we started to talk about it, the idea was, well, we want a universal book. We wanted this to be literally the ultimate training guide. But where is the cross section between veteran runners and beginners or people in the middle? And what we came up with, and this was a shock to us. We did a photoshoot

in Colton, California. And Lewis had gathered this great, wonderful, diverse, great, group of people for photos. And we were just running them through some skills just for the photographic purposes. And then Erick is pointing stuff out. Oh my God. Like I'm shocked at what I'm seeing. Jenna Crawford, who won the Rose Bowl, half marathon, fantastically trained runner. But watching her glutes shake like a paint mixer.

And Erick's like, see, her glutes, they're switching on. They were dormant switching on now. And we realized even people who are at peak fitness had these what we call wobbles, little wobble. Yeah. In your mechanism, they can. And then it sounds like exactly what's happening with you, Rich, is you're in a run. And that little wobble is taking its tolls by mile five. It's catching up.

So we wanted a book where we could tell people, you can go back to a factory reset. You can go back to first principles, rewire yourself. So even if you're a beginner or you're a veteran, you can both arrive at the same place of feeling like you're running is really dialed in. One of the really counterintuitive and fascinating aspects of, you know, getting started on this.

And then the next adventure was this idea of starting with going fast, right? You just think like, well, you start slow and you build up your fitness and then you get faster. But the best way to evaluate where you are and what you need to work on is to get somebody to sprint first or run, you know, run really hard because you can't hide from your

form in that regard. And then you kind of build into your slower form from what you learn about what you observe when somebody's running very quickly. Yeah. With that specifically, you know, I love it. I like to change the athlete's perspective of how they gain speed. There's two ways of gain speed. Caden's or frequency of how often we strike the ground. And secondly, our distance per

stride. And when you put someone in a sprinting environment, I can then see, are they do they reach for their speed through the, the leg reaching out in front of them are over striding versus switching their mindset to the other leg. And then you're changing the ground to the ground to propel themselves forward and changing their mindset. So for me, it's seen what they do in

a speed environment and then using that information to kind of go from there. Right. And ideally, it should always settle around 180. Right. That's the magic goal. Right. You know, and talk a little bit about why that is and what that means. Yeah. So I mean, coaches through time have analyzed elite athletes. Elite runners and kind of that's been come them. The magical number that those

elite athletes tend to have that I think that's where that number came from. So I see as an aspirational number for a lot of people. Use Chris as an example, you know, with his height, he's maybe always going to gravitate to utilizing his distance per stride just a little bit more than I would. Where I might kind of focus on the cadence a little bit more.

But for me and my athletes and people, I think that's what I'm going to do. I know that I want to kind of affect is that that 180 number is just something that we look to get better and better at. Because it's going to be steps of matter. Exactly. 90 each leg. And to me, the late ball, Rich, was when Eric was explaining us to me.

And he put in terms of you watch a box box or skipping rope. I'm going to leave the mic now for a second. But not doing this. Right. Right. And we're right on their feet bouncing and they're using all that elastic recoil. They're turning their bodies with gigantic spring. And when Eric explains 180 in that context, like I get it. You're not using muscular force to

leap stop, leap stop. You're using elastic recoil spring strength. It's bounce, bounce, bounce. And you can translate that into running. And in terms of figuring out the optimal way to translate that. There's this idea of of beginning with your back. Pretty close up against the wall and jogging in place essentially, right, which is training you to really lift your knee and not get into that over

striding kind of traditional way that we that most of us run when we're just doing it the way that we feel like we should be doing it. Right. And what we wanted to do is and I've said this is run form is not difficult. Learning it takes five minutes. You just described it. Running in place against the wall. You understand where you strike the ground. Now

you put a little bit of music to it at 180 beats per minute. You have your cadence. Okay. You can't kick back. So you can't over stride. That gives you the sense of how your relationship with the ground works as a runner. And so then where the challenging part comes in is then having to develop that muscle memory. Right. For it to take hold. And that's

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

what needs to take place. Like the human. The humans just hardwired to try to over complicate right. Exactly. Where do I go behind the VIP rope? There's got to be more. And just like running in place like, you know, with my back to the wall thing. Right. It was funny. Rich, we were with an athlete yesterday in Phoenix. Super skill. Very strong athlete. And a dancer.

And it was great watching Eric in action. Because she's a non-run. Doesn't like it. Has been conditioned to hate it. And she would ask her question. And he was, okay, try this and he gave her these different skills to do. And I watched in real time in five minutes how she progressed from a very awkward, pointing her foot. Kicking back everything wrong. And then in five

minutes suddenly she and Eric are going side by side. She's relaxed and loose. And we stopped for a minute and Eric started to work with her husband. And then we started to run back. I had to call Eric over like, dude, she's doing it again. And I was watching her. Like she was processing everything that she thought she'd heard and was trying to do it. Instead

of just feeling it, she was thinking it and everything went to hell again. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. And the the rock lobster song, the B 52 song playing that there's a purpose. To that, which is that the beat mimics the 180 strokes per minute that you're looking for. So there's this whole section in the book that's fascinating about music. Should you listen to music when you're

running? Should you not listen to it? Should you find music that has the beat? That's going to train that neurochemistry to develop that type of cadence. And I love that this conversation transpires between M&M flea and Rick Ruins. Like none of which are people you think about when you think about running. Yeah. Yeah. Our friend, Lady South Paul. Yeah. Right. And my long post-bone conversation with

Rick Rubin, which was supposed to have happened here when I got dragged away to look for Micah. It finally took place 10 years later. So yeah. So talk about that a little bit. I think just that story is great. So the wrong lobster thing in particular. So Eric and I are having this conversation. And Eric can really become sort of quantum physics. About stuff. We're looking

at the fitness chapter. And he sent me over like 30 exercises. And I said, dude, I will speak on behalf of the American public. We are not doing 30 exercises. You need to tell a story. Yeah. That is true. But also I got limited attention span. Give me three exercises. You got to hope. Give me 30. It's a non starter. And with rock lobster, when we're

discussing 180 per minute, you got to carry a metronome. How are we going to do this? And we had this conversation like, well, music has a rhythm. Walls right there. And we can really simplify it. And then once you've got rock lobsters in your brain, you cannot like pressure wash it out. It's there for life. So once you learn to run to that beat, you got

it. And then for the whole music question, it was the same thing. I'm like, we were having this conversation back and forth. Like we're purists. We do not wear our earbuds. We want to have our thoughts. But I'm like, you know what? I've never actually been in a race when someone starts playing glory again. I don't run better. You know, as soon as the music on,

I'm like, ready to go. I've never had a run that was worse with music. So how are we going to sort of navigate this? And that's what we just kind of pulled out the the bad signal, like get some opinions about this. And then it's a flea. It's on the record. Adam it. No music. And then we reached out to this woman, Lady Southball, who's a

punk musician, who has done an entire album of songs, punk songs, specifically to accompany her on her own New York City Marathon. And she wrote all these songs and she plays them. And then so we had this back and forth. You know, she's like pro music, flea's like no music. We reach out to Rick Rubin, who is in all things of course is the grandmaster guru.

Yeah. Buddha stepped in and sort of enlightened us and the way to go. I loved his, his, his salamnick wisdom on this one. Yeah. What did he say? He said, uh, when, uh, his, he's like the question you need to ask is when do you want to be at the mercy of music? Right? Like you can understand that flea, like flea is music. So when he

goes running, he needs a break from that, right? But not everybody is a musician. So they can leverage it for certain purpose. I mean, I think there's beauty in both, but I do like this idea of programming a playlist of songs that all have that specific beat when you're in the process of trying to, you know, rewire your brain and your, and your form and your

technique around that cadence. And with that, I think what's key is to, to feel the cadence, to feel the music, to feel the beat versus looking at the watch. We can, you know, we can have our watch tell us where we're at. But that doesn't create that feeling and understanding. And what it feels like, it's just like feeling a good and bad stroke. You feel a

bad one and you adjust while you're swimming. I want people to, while they're running to feel good and bad so they can adjust. Right. This is really the common idea of the entire book is that understand the purpose of what you're doing. So we look at like food for its, is our, our first chapter, you know, your fork is not your coach. So many people get

into running as a relationship with their food. They're either trying to lose weight or get in shape. And if you're on that hamster wheel, you will never be happy. You will never outrun a bad diet. And so again, we're not going to be purest, but you know, film off its own has a thing called a two week test, which to me is like the genius approach

to food. Don't say, oh, I should be key to I should be vegan. I should be this is that listen, let's just strip out all the high glycemic foods for two weeks, reboot your system, reintroduce them, see how you feel. Minimals footwear, let's take your shoes off, see how you feel. If you want to put on a cushion shoe, have at it. Right. But if you

want to understand the relationship between what you're using and what results you want to have, you need to get back to first principles. Music is the same way. Rather than his blast something in your head to forget to distract yourself. Maybe there's a purpose. If you put on like Lady Southball, genius did put on 180 beats per minute. She's getting the satisfaction of an uplifting, uplifting

melody, but at the same time, she's got 180 strides. And it's a tool that actually helps her as opposed to distancing herself from the experience. Yeah. You mentioned Phil Maffatone, the Maffatone method. I mean, I love Phil Maffatone's teachings. It was transformational in my own endurance journey. Did Rick Rubin tell you that Phil Maffatone used to live with him? He like moved him in with him.

What's funny is that that's a weird confluence of like two worlds that you would not predict. Anything in the world of Phil Maffatone is cool and weird. He lives in a place called Oracle, Arizona. And of course you do, Phil Maffatone. Where else would you live? He's a place called Oracle. I met with him once here in California. He's like, hey, let's go over and check

out like Shangra La. You mean the place for Dylan? Oh, yeah, I got the keys. What? Oh, yeah. I'm buddies with Rick Rubin and he brought me in to deal with Johnny Cash. And like, dude, every time you open your mouth. It's a journey. Yeah. You think he's a runner's geek kind of guy. Like what is he doing? You know, meeting Rick and he's dealing with

Johnny Cash. Right. That's wild. Why are you even in this world? And why is Mike pick calling you in the first place? You know, you're a chiropractor from Buffalo. Yeah. But that's it. That is the weird journey of Phil Maffatone. Well, he's really initiated this conversation that seems to be mushroom clouding, at least on the internet right now around zone training, like in my world. There's

so much interest in zone two training and understanding what it means to be in that aerobic state. And they're super geeky podcasts. And we certainly had many conversations here about that. Your whole section in this book, which is under the focus, pillar is really about zone training. And it could have been an incredibly dry. Like here's, you know, scientific with graphs and all kinds of stuff

about like how you set your zones and why these zones are important and how to train at the polarities of them. Instead, it's about Caesar's Roman army of runners and, you know, layered talking about, you know, how to hold your breath and why that's so important. So that's just such a beautiful way to introduce what could be, you know, difficult topics for people to understand in

a way that allows them to kind of resonate in your memory. For me, I'm not really interested in something that's a new revelation or a gadget. I get really curious when I start to see the same thing popping up again and again, again, throughout history. If you look at Tadamata, what a cheese, those sandals, like, well, you know what? The insurance worm, reg messengers wore them.

The Tadamata could wear different footwear. They have the capability to put art supports or cushions into those sandals. They chose not to. So to me, it makes sense when you have a timeline of a device that has reemerged cold plunges. Okay. They've been doing it throughout history for a particular reason. And zoned training, the zone to training. If you look at the physiology, anytime we start

to put ourselves into a state of origin distress, the second we are out of that zone too, and we're starting to approach our aerobic threshold, then your body has a physiological change. You know, your peripheral vision will kind of shrink down. Your body posture will change. You're in a, you're in a flight mode. And your body reacts to that. And so to me, joy quotient starts

to go down a little bit. Completely. And actually, what your body is going to, then what it's going to, a story memory is going to be, hey, never put yourself in this position again because this is trouble. And so when you start to do zone two, training and you realize, huh, there's a way where my back's open, my diaphragm is expanded. I'm actually enjoying what I

see. I'm smelling and sensing things because just because of pure body chemistry. When your body is in distress mode, you're going to shut out sensory perception, only tunnel vision. And then you start to look back through time. Like, huh, let's look at the Romans and shurions. What was their pace? Because what they were famous for was they were covering a ton of distance with packs in

a record amount of time. That's what made them so formidable. And you start to look out and people have done this, you know, the military historian, like Uber scientists had figured out, just drives per minute and miles per hour. And what you see is they're basically locking in at zone two. Right. So 2000 years ago, they understood zone training. And they had these, basically these three

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

And then mandating in the same way author Lydia, Lydia did. And the way drill sergeants do today, they do it by calling response, right? Which again, I found fascinating, which is just a different version of rock lobster. Right? Yeah. Like you can sing a song. So it's singing a song in your aerobic zone. Call in response is like the zone would be zone three. Right. Right.

Yeah. And then, you know, obviously you're not doing anything when you're going all out. Yeah. And so when you're looking at author Lydia, when he basically began modern jogging, he was working with cardiac patients in Auckland. And he had a mandate, conversational pace, do not run any faster than you can maintain a conversation. He mandated zone two, but he didn't say, hey, say your watch is

this is an isolate. If you can chat with your buddy, you're in the right zone. Maffatone does something similar. And then I think what you see today is in military training and bootcamp, they want everybody in, they don't want somebody in a distress mode. They want them to be able to go all night for an unpredictable distance. And so they do first, they do chance. And

then when you click over to another zone, you go call in response, where you only have to have half of the conversation. Right. And it's understanding that in those moments, if you're in Caesar's army, you're going to be called upon to suddenly sprint. But when you arrive at, you know, what you're sprinting towards, you have to find out what you're doing. You're just fighting. You can't

be buckled over. Right. So it's like, do you have the fitness to be able to do that? And do you have the conscious awareness to pace yourself to go as fast as you need to go to get there, but also be able to handle your sword when you arrive. So you know, when Joe Veehill first saw the Thadalamata in Leadville. And this is something I took

me years to unpack. And it's the reason why I got born and run to didn't happen a couple years after born and run. I still did not really understand what I was seeing. Joe Veehill told a story. He is America's preeminent cross country coaches worked with Olympic athletes. And he talked about the fact that I've seen it all, but what I've never seen is smiles. And

these guys are a mile 60 scrambling up a hill and they're having a good time. He told me that story. I related it. It was interesting to me. I didn't get it until years later. And Veehill's point is these guys have got their gears figured out. They're a mile 60. It's a hundred mile race. They're up a hill. If they can't dial it back, then they're

toast. And they've learned how to instinctively dial it back. I'm like, okay, if I'm going to point now or I'm having fun slipping up the hill, I'm in the right zone. He saw it and got it. And it took me years to understand what he saw. Did you see that the other day, killing in Jornet, like published all his training data? I did see that. The

endurance, endurance Twitter is losing their mind. Right? Everyone's like geeking out on like going deep into all his data. There's been some articles written about it. But what I thought was really fascinating and instructive about that is over the course of something like 1200 hours of training over the course of the year. There were two really important things that jumped out. And I'm interested in what

you think about this. The first was how much of it was at lower intensity. 88% was at zone one or zone two. Like zone one, 56.9% zone two, 20.2. Zone five. Like his all out effort, only 3.8% of his training, which goes to show you like he's in that, like let's have a laugh and sing a song. The majority of the time when he's out there

of those 1200 hours. The second thing was he's starting to question the validity of these long runs. Like he kind of even tweeted the other day, like I don't know if we need to be like it's more about frequency. And he was comparing that approach to what Camille Heron is doing. And the six months ago, it was a success that she's having. Like she'll do two

or three runs in a day, but she won't go out and do that super long, you know, Saturday or Sunday run. The rest of us are doing lots there. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm glad you bringing this up because now we get the cookie. Yeah. This is good. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Kilian, one thing, you know, he's fasted pretty much every distance. Yeah. And if we

look at his everything you just mentioned, I think what? Listeners need to hear there is that he is fast enough to be able to go easy enough on that 88%. Right. His zone one is probably like a seven minute pace. Right. Right. Which, you know, is our walking pace or whatever. Exactly. Right. And so what, you know, since the popularity of all to running is the

development. I see most needed with most athletes is that they need to get faster first. So they are able to run easy enough to even make cutoffs or to be able to run in zone two, zone one for a very long time. Lots of athletes, especially in mountain environments. Don't have the ability that can be developed to be able to do what Kilian does. But then

they go try it. And now they're out for their five hour run because Kilian does, but it's, you know, 50, 60% of it's in zone four and five. You know, so taking a step back and really developing your ability, your raw ability to get faster and then applying it to what Kilian's talking about. I think is really, really what's missing for a lot of athletes. Yeah.

That's interesting. I mean, that's the reverse of how I've always thought about it and practiced it. Yeah. Like my whole thing was build from the build from the ground up and create that massive endurance base and, you know, occasionally do some threshold work for speed. Because I'm not trying to run fast anyway. I do, you know, I know that gear needs a little bit of attention.

But it's really not something I need to rely upon. Well, I think there's a micro and macro way to look at that is that back when I was doing Ironman, there was only two Ironmans to do is Hawaii or Canada. And so to qualify, you kind of went through the ranks. You started with your sprint, your Olympic worked your way up to a half. And so

there was a development system built in place just because we didn't have the ability just to go Sign Up for an Ironman. Well, it's still the case. I mean the people that are killing it at Ironman are people that, you know, went, you know, we're on that. Right. Right. Right. Because you can go from really fast to really long. You can't go from really long to

really fast. Right. Right. And look at just the development process for runners is that, you know, middle school he school, it's, you know, three K five case and then you go to college and it's a little bit more. And it's a little bit more. And all of a sudden now they get to their 30s and they're ready for the marathon. Whereas now the majority of age

group athletes are just jumping into the longer runs or the wrong races, which is fine. My point is that they need to understand that that speed development must really take place to really escalate their their ability rather than just doing more. Yeah. That's super interesting. Yeah. Start with the fast stuff. Get faster, improve your raw ability, and then apply that to going longer. Now that longer

efforts faster. And you're have, you have that ability. You can't run a three hour marathon. If you're, you know, you from all paces and X. Right. You know, so yeah, it's a famous ameo's epic story when he trained for his first marathon. He trained by doing 100 meter sprints. People like, I mean, it's a 26 mile race. He goes, yeah, I thought the point was to

run fast. I already had a little slow. Yeah. Well, this is sort of jumping ahead to the, to the kind of community, family, fun section of the book. But the story around Billy Burnett and his wife, after having a baby and going from just, you know, endurance lunatics to doing very little and then having PRs when they kind of just let go of any expectations of

even attempting to try to do anything all that fast. Yeah, we know, keep harkening back to the eternal wisdom of barefoot head. So one year, I was pacing Ted at leadville and I pick him up at mile 85. And this is no man's lamb. And this is the value of the lost mile 85 in ledville. You know, the, the A station tennis full of people who

are ready to dnf and tap out. It's after two hope passes. Right. Yes. And it's dark. It's like two or three o'clock in the morning when you coming in. Take them through the tent like it's a surprise party just for Ted happy chatting. I'm on one side of ten. He's on the other. I watched him just like socialize his way through the tent before he reaches

main. He's like, let's go. I'm like, dude, what is up with you? He does a sub 24 leadville, which is very fast in his own homemade sandals. And he's run about. It's one guy. We're passing him on the trail and some guy you recognize. He's like, Hey, Mike, I took this race and I turned it into a chat fest. And the guy is like, I'm not

surprised. So much lake him. Right. And we're blah, blah, blah, blah. Sub 24. I'm like, dude, your training had to be massive. He's like, I'm doing 25 miles a week. I'll make how in the head. How are you doing a sub 24 leadville on five miles a day with two days off? And he goes, mico, so I'm not interested in the limits of what's painful. I'm

interested in the limits of what's pleasurable. And I'm just rolling my eyes back so far in my head. I'm spraying my eyeballs. But I think about it. His five miles a day, I bet we're smoking fast. He probably did some yoga, you know, hiding a side bowl or everything. He'll eat and then just blaze down. He's doing 25 very fast, very technical miles a week. And

he was able to link that in. Matt Carpenter told me that one time too. The guy who holds the leadville record. I went to the temple of Matt Carpenter to learn the secret of running the world's fastest leadville. And he took me up to a park, which is like five year old daughter. And he goes, all right, walk to that tree and race back. So I

raised a five year old. I will not tell you who won. And then he goes, all right, do it again. All right, do it again. And that was it. Walk to the tree, sprint. Walk and he goes, you just got to shorten the distances that you're walking. And that's your, that's your training. Wow. To be fair with Barefoot Ted, though, he's sitting on years and years

of like miles. Right. So he has this fast reservoir of endurance capacity. Yes. There's a lot going on with Ted. I see a picture of Ted today. I'm like, how is this guy so freaking jacked? You know, like I don't get it. He is like 3% body fat. I don't know. I cannot plum the genius of Barefoot Ted. But I think he has a lot of

things. I think he like me. We have a kind of kinship because I think we're both like undiagnosed ADHD. I think his wheels are churning from the second his eyeballs open in the morning. Right. Right. One of the things that blew my mind in the book is this connection between the brain and the Barefoot. And this study that showed that working memory improved 16% after a

Barefoot run, whereas there's no improvements with normal shoes. Like this is insane. Like the fact that like by going out and having your feet being contact with nature while you're running. That that that like highway between what's going on up here between the years. And the proprioception like the strategic intentional. You know mindset that you have to have about where you're placing your foot. And all

of that that actually has this benefit on your cognition. Yeah. I mean. That to me says it all. I mean it in and where it can. We all can do this. In the way that we need to for our own cells is that. You might just start running on the dirt road or the gravel that you talked about. And someone else might be doing it all

the time. Like Chris, but it all has a benefit in our own way and finding it doesn't have to be that all or nothing. Thing that maybe what's what's out there is that you don't have to just become a minimal runner. It's like use it as a tool. And this is coming from a coach is that it's so powerful. It's how we use our feet is

such an element of what athletes need to do. And it just you know it was my aha moment as a coach. And it just. So so potent and take it from there Chris. Yeah. So you mentioned Billy Barnett. The fact that this guy each 36 with a nine month old baby had minimal training because he was the primary caregiver in the afternoon. His wife's working all

day when Billy came home from teaching school. He would be responsible for Cosmo. And if Cosmo wasn't up for it, then they weren't running that day. Nine months of this. He walks out and he podiums the home of the marathon. He's like he was just doing it on a flyer. He literally always signed up because he was over the same. And he was like, they don't

think people run in this year. So I can just get jump in at the last minute. And the last minute jump in. He ends up blazing out of PR. His fastest marathon ever. 225 or something like that. Yeah. Third place overall finish. And then what's her name? A leeks Alex Alex Alex. And then she like crushes the hurt 100. The hurt 100 has her best ever

hurt one and she struggled with that race. But to me, that's what's all about this idea of the sensual pleasure. You know, we had these two chapters in the book about family and fun. It's a very antithetical notion to have in a training book. But it really gets back to physiological roots. It felt bad. You never came back a little out. That was a bad idea.

The bigger the group, the more fun it is. Unfortunately, we have turned running into this thing. If it feels good, we're probably doing it wrong. You know, it should feel bad. We should be by ourselves. We should be racing our Strava. And what we're finding again and again is if we actually embrace that was Tata Mata evolutionary roots, family and fun and incorporate into our workouts,

the results are amazing. Sure. And you're also creating sustainability for this thing that you enjoy doing. I think it is, you know, it's part of just our whole Western mindset. Right? Like if I'm going out for a run, like I've got this much time, I got to extract the maximum amount of fitness out of this opportunity. So I'm going to go run as fast as I

can for, you know, how long I, you know, for that distance that I can maintain. And unless I, you know, butt up against that pain point, then it was a waste of time. Right. We've, we've unfortunately associated with the C8 fun with, with badness, you know, you know, if I eat a quarter hog and that's fun, I'm enjoying this. And it's not so good for me.

And that's what I wanted to really accomplish with the gears, getting back to the zones and the gears that I wanted people to really see and make that correlation from, okay, if I want to run X amount per pace, mile, what does that correlate to as far as a time interval? So they're training and not straining and keeping it. We're going to do that. We're talking

about fun right now, but it's, it's that, you know, going from not straining to training to accomplish what you're looking to accomplish to give them a correlation between time and speed. Yeah. And you have this set of tables in the back of the book. It's an every man's way of establishing what those zones are without having to do a proper lactate test. You go out, you

run a mile and based upon that, you can kind of establish how to go about that. Right. And again, understanding what is an appropriate level of effort. So if you're trying to achieve that day, so if an athlete knows, hey, I'm going to the track to do two minute repeats. I know what my speed should be to accomplish that versus going out too hard. So. And

it really, a lot of it is about the polarities, right? You want to be doing your zone one and your zone two. And then you choose your moments for your zone five. I mean, the way I've kind of been going about it is most of it is in that lower zone stuff and running the trails around here. But then I'll go to the track and that's

where I'll take my shoes off on grass or even on, you know, a kind of a padded track and do a lot of drills and, you know, try to develop that, that, that foot connection and foot strength. Right. Absolutely. One thing Eric would do with me early on, this is in that first honeymoon period where he's training me. The first thing he did one time was

he sent me a workout for a two hour run. I just do just no way. You know, I can barely run three months, two hours. But what you find is when you have the mind, say, oh man, I'm going to be out here for two hours no matter what. I looted up a backpack like I was like, like, trying to summit the Himalayas. You know, I

brought toilet paper with me. I thought, what do you do if you're out there for two hours? I've never done anything like this. So I set off on this two hour journey into the unknown. And what you realize after an hour, like you better just simmer down and take it easy. Otherwise, you're not going to finish, but you relax into it. And that's when the sense

of fun and joy came into it. And then for longer runs, again, we're training for the 50 mile into Compreh Canyon on a low run. He would have me do hill repeats in the middle. Again, I thought this was like stupid. You're, you're taxing me out. You're burning me out in the middle of a run. But it taught me to wake up, get my form dialed

in, got my heart rate up again instead of this is slow steady slot toward the finish line. So his way of incorporating those gear changes, you know, we kind of read the engine a little bit was just to me just brilliant. Yeah. I mean, that's where you get into real fitness, right? And Iron Man, it's all about like, slow locomotive, you kind of get up to

speed and then you just hold it there all day, but you don't have that, you don't have a lot of gear change ability, you know, in that distance, if you're training for that specifically. And when you are doing those gear changes, you create that resilience. So you can attack a hill, but you're also because you're doing so much aerobic work, you can bring that heart rate

back down quickly. So you don't have to stop at the top of the hill and buckle, you know, buckle over for a minute. But for me, even more so, it's, it's what we're doing for the structural system is that a lot of what it's in the book, waking up all those muscles and using an appropriate matter, activating things. We were in Lawrence, Kansas, what, two days

ago, whatever it was. And you know, kind of our MO for these events have been started out with some of our our skills in the book and then go for a run. And we did some neuromuscular jumping and what we call leg stiffness, leg stiffness is a crucial element for performance and longevity. For good health and running. And so we went through our leg stiffness exercises

and then went for a trail run. And after the trail run, two two gals came up to me and they said, those exercises were transformed my running in a matter of 30 minutes, because normally I would not be able to run that trail. It as a steady run. I felt like I could run forever. And that's that connection that I'm going to do is we're going

to perform the training. And we're just going to perform the training. That's the connection that you're talking about and that how fast you're running for me is less about maybe the anaerobic or what we consider it from a cardiovascular standpoint, but what it's doing with our connection with the ground and our structural system. We were in Baltimore with a group called the Riot Squad running as

our therapy. And there's a new runner there, justine. And toward the end of the run, it's getting dark. She's laboring, struggling. And we had done rock-lops, stretch-or-size beforehand. And then she kind of looks over and is like, what was that song again? You know, rock-lops, she gets on her phone, punches it up. And like that, her running switch. Because she's the point where now she's just

slogging it. She put the song on all of a sudden she started to pit her pattern and then brought the run in for landing. But she did it out of sense of desperation. Everything else sucks. Maybe the song will help. And it really did. What does that mean leg stiffness? It's essentially your ability to land and get off the ground as quickly as possible. Helping your

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

get off of it as quickly as possible. I see. Yeah, cool. So I think it would be cool to maybe before we end the whole thing to kind of share some of those drills so people could just start practicing them. Yeah. So leg stiffness or just in general. I mean, now right now, but remind me before we hand. What's the most common thing that you come

across? Like you're doing all these things with all these running groups, right? You're seeing all shapes and sizes of runners. What is like the refrain? That's the thing that people share with you the most. Or what is a common misconception about people's relationship to running that you'd like to disabuse people of? Wow. Let me think. You keep going because you always can. I'm not a real

runner invariably. There's never been an event where people don't say, I'm not a real runner. I'm not good at this. I'm not as fast as you believe me. You're as fast as me for starters. Yeah. That doubt, lack of self-confidence and also lack of a sense that this is an art that you can master. And that's to me is it. And it's always like a real

pleasant shock to them when we start to do these skills. And they realize, Oh, okay, I can do this. Yesterday we're working as athlete in Arizona. And she's a dancer. So she's struggling to run in the air stops. He goes, Hey, show us a couple of dance steps. And she clicked. And he's like, she just started to bust out this dance instantly. No hesitation. And Eric's

like, you're a runner. Like, that's it. Her dancing was his nice rhythmic bouncy things. Like just move it forward and you're a runner. I would imagine some of those people who say, I'm not a real runner are the people who are out pushing strollers with their little ones. Right. And actually, you have this thing in the book about like, this is actually a tool like to

improve your running form. We were just with one of Eric's clients, Ellen Ortiz in Birmingham. She's fantastic. But I love about her. And I think that's what it is that she is alpha dog. I'm going to be cute or die kind of runner. But at the same time when she had her baby, she decided, okay, now I'm going to get really good at this. And we're

just like watching, like drinking in tips and information. And where she positions the jog stroller. But yeah, she's turned this into an amazing learning tool using the jog stroller. Talk about a little bit about the movement snacks. I mean, that's sort of drill oriented. But I like how you've encapsulated that and and turned it into like a fun thing. Yeah, the movement snacks are something that

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

These are these are developed by a friend of ours, Julie Angel, who comes from a park or background. And so what Julie, Julie, that's your filmmaker who started to film park or athletes. And as an observer, she realized, oh, they've got some really kind of cool full natural movement skills that a lot of people could benefit from. So she extract the movement snacks from the isolated

movements of park or athletes, like precision jumping or quadrupedal movement. Right. Yeah. But that kind of thing too, to balance on your left foot and your right hand at the same time and move forward. And then she realized, these are fun. They are non-threatening. And that if you do a little bit of barricroll for like 30 seconds and you stand up, everything feels loosened. And so

I think it's kind of a genius move by Julie to create movement snacks because you take that group of people. I'm not a runner. I don't want to do that. I don't do that. Oh, yeah. So the park or community will form a big circle. There's a way of saying hello. And then they will barricroll to the center and everyone will high five. And then they'll

reverse and barricroll backwards back out. That's the warmup. But they've now extended their entire chain of motion. Their arms shoulders backs are loosened. And they're ready to go out and work out. So that's what we basically adopted all these things from from Julie's movements. Next. Cool. Are you guys still in a formal coaching athlete relationship? I've just spent two and a half weeks with this guy.

Yeah. I'm like, I'm curious, what does Chris still need to work on? Like, what does that look like? I'll cover my ears. Yeah. I assume it's more than just like, here's your workout. Like, it's not about that. It's more about like technique and form and strategy. No, he mentioned when we were in Colton, California, doing the photo shoot. He still had the best form there. And

so he's here that get a cropper. All right. That's for me. That's for me. No, I think what's most important with what Chris does is he understands what he wants out of running. And he sticks to that mission is that what's most important for him is to do it properly. And that trumps everything. And you know, when we first started working together, his goal was to

be able to run anywhere anytime, any distance. And that's that's kind of where we say, you know, begin the book of his, his transformation or 15 years. And so I, I think moving to California to Hawaii and living there full time now, I'm going to be really interested to see how he gravitates the trail systems there. And he's even got me. Interesting. Getting back into swimming

because he's talking about some swim run challenges and just kind of create an adventure. So it, you know, he's, he's inspired me a lot recently just to kind of maybe get back into swimming. So that's cool. Yeah. I would say he don't any swim. Oh, yeah. I mean, all my own. I've kind of invented some little roots of my own, but I got to get back

to what Eric says. I feel like I'm the guy that can't coast. You know, I didn't come into it with the natural abilities. And I came in from it, from a history of hating it and distaining it and being hurt. And so that's why for me, form is like foremost on my mind. I feel like I barely got my arms around this. And so to me,

it's a priority. I think stronger, better, faster athletes can get by for a while before they run into trouble. I'm starting from a position of trouble. But I also dig it because you know, it's like if you watch someone do something, even if you don't know the sport, but it's elegant and clean and powerful. I don't know what a backhand is supposed to look like, but

you watch, you know, Serena do it. Oh, I guess that was pretty darn good. And for me, that's what running feels like I think people misunderstand that focusing on form is tedious to me. It's really joyful because when you get that moment, oh, that felt good. Oh, that would felt good too. How many strides can I string? I'm not saying, but as far as swim run,

dude, come on out. I got some fun roots. And I just did it on my own because you realize, huh, there's like canal, like a swim across about a half a mile, right? Or I can run this certain trail and it pops out on a series of beaches with rock jetty in between. So you can come off a trail, jump into water, swim a quarter mile,

land on the beach, run down, swim another quarter mile. And just, you know, make your own swim. Yeah. I love it. Are you on a waho? Yeah. Yeah. Are you like in the Honolulu area? Yeah. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go

to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I are like Kailua. Like up north. Kailua. Yeah. Yeah. It's where my wife grew up. Yeah. I'm near Bionkaneo. Hey. Yeah. That's that's very cool. No. I went down the swim run rabbit hole. I did Otello and Sweden and you know, it's cool

in Europe. Like, it's a whole thing. And these guys have it dialed. And it's a it's a very specific skill set. We went in, me and my coach, Chris Alwy, we we're we were totally unprepared for. You know, what exactly we were getting into. But so fun. And I love when the environment dictates the adventure and the experience. It's not like, oh, it's an Ironman has

to be this distance. We just lay this, you know, tablo on top of the terrain. It's the other way around. And you know, it's all it's all about like respect. Like if you drop like a gel pack on the your disqualified if anybody sees you like zero tolerance policy for that. It's really all about like the beauty and the immersion in these beautiful places. And I

remember like, let me I'll just show this one story. Like in the days leading up to that race. We're in Stockholm. And you know, a bunch of the athletes are there because it's in the archipelago off the coast. And and and so we're doing like just a little fun, you know, last minute training sessions. Literally running like down the city streets of Stockholm in wetsuits and

like jumping in the water and swimming across these little waterways. And there's people, you know, going to work and I know nobody like they're like, oh, yeah, it's normal here. You know, like the weirdest thing to see like people running down a city street. And what's it? It's really it enforce body system. Don't you have to be with your partner? Yeah, you do it in in

teams of two and you have to stay within three meters of each other. Some some of the teams actually tether themselves to each other with like a bungee cord type deal. And you can like use whatever you want. Like most people have hand paddles. And you swim in your tennis shoes and the whole thing and crazy. I love that partner aspect of it. To me, it's

very harcening. That's a whole new kind of element of the whole thing, which is about fun and community family, like all these things that you talk about in the book. Yeah. Yeah. Was it brutally cold? Oh, we had the, I mean, it's a longer story, but yeah, we have like the worst weather ever. Which made it epic. You know, I'm glad in retrospect. I mean, it

was sideways rain and crazy wind and chop and swells and all kinds of stuff. Did it make it in retrospect all the more satisfying or like, I really wish it was terrible on the day. Yeah. But like, yeah, now looking back, I'm so glad it wasn't like a glassy day. Like we, you know, that's what we signed up for. Like I hate cold water. You know,

it's like, I'm going to go do this thing that I'm kind of scared of. Right. We had fine. Like we're, you know, I held my coach back, of course, as I'm as I should, right. But yeah, I was an experience I won't soon forget. And now you're seeing swim run competitions starting to pop up in the States. And I think that's a really cool thing. Yeah.

And I hope the, the US versions actually maintain that, that buddy mandate to me. It's just, it's a whole different kind of experience. Yeah. They don't like that. They're like, I don't want to do the thing with, I want to just do it myself. Right. But that's kind of beside the point. Yeah. The whole thing. Cool. Well, let's, let's, let's end this with a couple drills

things that you can, I don't know if we can like, if it's possible to articulate it in a way where people don't understand, but like one or two things that people could start to practice where they can get a gauge on like, Oh, this is why I feel this way because this thing is weak or what have you. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we can hit it

from two sides. One, what we call the foot core, where we can train our feet. We've got muscles on bottom of our feet. And there's some simple but very, very potent ways to train your feet. And it's a simply, you always kind of want to work barefoot and simply taking off your shoes and socks and balancing on your forefoot on one leg. And Chris is sick

of me here and saying this, but you know, you're going to feel it where you need it. You're going to, the weakest link is going to show up. It might be for someone. Hey, they start to feel it in the feet in the arch or it might be the calves or, hey, they're strong down there. They, they bike or they do mountain running. And so they're

strong down below the knee, but they start to feel it in a glue. And that's, that's how the feet really affect everything up through the leg. So again, simply barefoot, forefoot. Balancing, right? I've noticed, and I don't know whether this is an age thing or a weakness thing or whatever, but my balance got really bad. Like, you know, when I stand on one leg or I'm

putting my underwear on or whatever, I'm like, why can't I just, you know, hold myself up in a stable way? And I think too, and doing these simple foot core exercises that you're going to start to see or feel a difference between right and left. And then you can start maybe making a correlation of, oh, yeah. I'm kind of tighter on this side and, and making

a correlation of how poorly or how well you're using each foot based on how you're feeling as an athlete. The genius of these exercises that Eric came up with is, I wanted everything to be something I would personally do. And if I ain't going to do it, I'm like, I put it in the book. And things like the one foot balancing, if you're waiting for the

coffee to brew, you got two minutes on your hands, you can do this. And that's what I really like about. And these are extraordinarily practical, but have a great residual effect as well. And that doesn't, you know, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going

to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I don't mean they're not potent. I mean, right. As you're listening right now, take off your shoes and socks and balance on your forefoot. It's, it's not an easy thing. And you can see how challenging and difficult it is. And with that, in that position,

regardless of good or bad form, we're asking ourselves to be in that position every step as we run. And you need to be stable there. And that's how we can really train the feet. And he has these self correcting part of this is that Eric doesn't give you any instructions on how he goes. Just move your arms. And you move your legs however you want to

get that balance. What you find is you self correct. You realize, oh, if I just kind of tighten my corp a little bit, if I straighten my posture, if I do my arms like this, as he do it for 30 seconds, and your body will find that balance that you were struggling for just by putting it self in that position. Yeah. The tweak for me is

embracing the fact that so much of that is about like creating those neural pathways. It's not about suffering. Like, you know, the athlete in me is like, I'm going to do it until it hurts. So how many of these lifts you know, am I going to do I'll just do it until it's burning like crazy, but it's not really about that. It's really about just developing

the habit as a preset. And that's about like your mind connecting with that movement. It's not about like, you know, hitting anything hard. It's the best warm up you can do because now we're turning out electrical system on before we go out and run. Yeah. So another one leg stiffeners we talked about is simply there's three types of strength. We have concentric, eccentric and isometric. And

the eccentric and isometric is very really talked about. And especially the isometric words that when we land as a runner, there's a moment in time. After our land and before we take off that is really, really crucial for injuries, that isometric hold. Okay. A lot of runners don't have that. So legs stiffener exercise would be simply standing on your right foot barefoot. And just taking a

short leap forward. And sticking it like a ballerina without a whole lot of leg movement. You want to stick it without movement. And just kind of progressively hop forward with that stick to three five second stick to create more leg stiffness to allow you to really get off the ground. Right. So that creates the ability to be resilient in that. Absolutely. And avoid injury. And it's

a great way for people who are training for a hilly race that might not live in that area. And now we're training at the eccentric landing as well that we get from down hills that maybe they don't have. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can we go outside? Yeah. And you're going to like put me through the ringer. We're going to look at your. It's cool about

this is that people love these exercises. People go, I'm not a runner and you haven't do the sticky hop lunges. And you just see that like they're having fun. It's a playful game. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Well, thanks you guys. I appreciate it. Born to run to I'm so excited for this to be out in the world. Again, it's the it's the how to on born

to run. I think it's going to help a lot of people. This was a, you know, a very worthy investment on your drive's time and like a gift to all of us runners out there in the world. So I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. I imagine that there are a lot of people who are going to come and ask like, oh, how, you know, they're

going to want you to coach them. Like do you, is that what you do? Do you, is there some place where people can learn more about you resources, et cetera? Yeah. So I have my website. And Eric Orton.com. And kind of there's a lot of lots going on. I have my YouTube channel, which is kind of the place to go see the how to tips in

YouTube environment. But what I do, kind of daily is I coach runners all over the world for marathon and ultra running, kind of the traditional type of coaching. But then I do camps and clinics and speaking and have people visit me in Jackson Hole to kind of dive into all all this stuff. Just dysfunction that runners tend to have that we kind of, so kind of

hitting it from two, two different coaching environments. Yeah, very cool. And if there's, you know, people on the tip of like community and finding a pack to run with. Are there good online resources for people to go to who are living wherever who want to see like what's available to them here in California. There's an amazing one called the run down by Eman Wilkerson. And she

actually tipped us off to some of our favorite affinity group running clubs. There's a group in San Diego called the Santa Mojeres Latina runners. So yeah, if you got the run down in California and points behind. But otherwise, you just kind of check your local community. There are these. We can blow it away. There's run for Chinatown, Harlem, run, 86 go across the country. There are

these incredible proliferation of small groups. Yeah. And with that, one aspect we were kind of maybe hoping with the book was that now giving maybe some resources for people to start their own clubs and their own crews and and having maybe a systematic way of going about it from from a training perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So awesome. Well, I'll link up all your socials and websites

and all that kind of stuff and obviously where to get the book and all that and you know, you guys are probably coming to a city near the audience at some point. You're kind of on a tour. You're going to go home. But you're going to go back out around the book when this comes out. And I'm sure it's going to be a hit. And it's

been like, I'm sure it's been a bit more lovely talking to you guys. I appreciate it. I'm at your service. Anything I can do to help you guys out in the mission. This is really fun. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Peace. Yeah. Plants. And thanks for the Pinola. Right. Yeah. Those bites are tasty. One thing I was going to ask you. We're still

rolling right. This is sort of a mic a true thing. But you know, when you had to move the market on chia seeds when born to run came out. And I'm sure you could ask this all the time. Like you could have started a chia seed company and completely, you know, dominated that market. It's kind of funny. I was trying to track how many companies went

on shark tank based on something out of born to run. Right. And my daughters are having a side bowls and they're putting chia on, but they hadn't soaked it. You have to soak it. They go, no, you don't understand. I invented cheesy. Yeah. Right. There's teenage disdain for you. I don't know. Dude, I was kind of funny. I look back on it. And you're not quite

sure. Like I'm happy to take all the chips and thing. I'm, you know, the cause of everything. But I don't recall chia being around at all until after born to run came out. There's suddenly a bam. It was off it went. Yeah. No. I don't remember hearing about it before that. But, you know, I make damn sure I put those in my smoothie or on my

cereal pretty much every day. Yeah. Do you soak them first? You put them on dry. Depends on how much time I, I sometimes I don't. I know that I'm supposed to. And I'm like, yeah, I should probably suck those, but like I got to go. You don't. So you just have them ground up, right? I like them ground. Yeah. Ground and dry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

To me, you got to soak them in the dough's tadpole, you know, things. But yeah, it's kind of funny thing. And then with Pinoli, I was getting blitzed by people saying, I want the thought. I'm out of super food. Like where can I get? I go, dude, Chihuahua. That's your only answer. And then this kid, uh, Eddie, Eddie. Centival. Centival. I keep forgetting his name in

Kansas. Which at all. Kansas created a company. And so again, we're not affiliated at all. Uh, but I'm just a fan of the fact that he took the ball on Pinoli. He started to run with it. Yeah. It's very cool. All right, man. Thanks. Yeah. Come back again sometime. Share some more right on. Appreciate you guys. Yeah. Thanks. You're crew, too. Yeah. Thanks. You're welcome. Cool.

Good stuff now. We're going to do some drills. Yeah. Yeah. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com. Where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, finding ultra, voicing change, and the plant

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you back here soon. Peace, plants. Namaste. Peace.