Running For Self-Transcendence | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] so she pronounces it Jaya the Sanskrit and North Indian pronunciation is Jaya right yeah we got by Jaya with our daughter nice and we've got a friend who's got a child named Jaya as well oh cool so it seems to be in the in the air and my name is Sanjay which means a whiff victory oh I didn't know that the same route Jay Jaya oh that's cool in Sanskrit my name is Sanjaya uh-huh and Jaya that the loose translation of Jaya is is victory yeah Jaya is a Sanskrit word for victory right so where where are your parents from my dad's from Gujarat which is on the border of Pakistan West northwestern India mom is from Madras got a southeastern tip of India and when did they immigrate they met each other in their first jobs in Nigeria which is where I was born oh you were born in Nigeria in a while and then they moved to Colorado pretty quickly to teach my dad had gone to the school at Conda School in the States mm-hmm and worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Africa collecting indigenous seeds so that's where the human rights genetic material kicks in for you I think so I ran away from it for as long as I could yeah and the funny thing is like my dad was a geneticist and after kicking and screaming I ended up working with him on like a tomato genetics company uh-huh you like all the tomatoes that you get at Whole Foods the ones that are in the clam shells from Baja are all his right well so I kicked and screamed every way possible and wasn't wrote back and like the most brutally harsh way yeah what do you mean brutally harsh I I wouldn't if somebody had told me that I would be following in my father's footsteps when I was like 18 or 17 because everything inside of you was to do something different did to like I forged my own path uh-huh and it's like you know we followed the foot we followed up footsteps of those who walk before us right as much as you know we don't think we do of course man so you grew up in Colorado then Colorado and California Oakland and then we went to Cal and met a student of Sri Chinmoy at Cal and as soon as I graduated I wanted to get as far away from like academic rigor and like materialism as possible moved to New York where Sri Chinmoy was based but you know I was at 400 or 500 dollars per month mm-hmm in terms of my own budget but the original impetus to move to New York City was really to be a devotee of sri shen more yeah that's exactly it Wow what did your parents think of that they freaked out did they say about that PhD they're like you're supposed to be a professor and all my relatives are like why are you in America if you want to follow a girl to follow Indian girls instead you go to Queens I go to Jamaica Queens and for people for if I don't know if you've been to Queens but or been to Jamaica other than like on your way to JFK but it's like bottom-of-the-barrel in New York City mm-hmm so uh it's very diverse yeah and treated moist thing was like don't hide from the world and so like most gurus like live in kawaii Malibu haha right he's in Queens in Queens so like you know I learned fast it's a trip I mean what was it about Sri Chinmoy that connected with you why did you feel this pole in high school I was in a really conservative community a suburb of Oakland a weirdly conservative community in my senior year friends of mine started getting into just it to kind of rebel into the Dalai Lama and like you know Jonathan Livingston Seagull and those types of books and when I went to college it was Berkeley I could you can't you can no you can't avoid it and so started meditating and started trying to find a spiritual path in most places I went what was what was the driver behind that though you know because my parents were so academically minded they had made me do everything I did like from sports to music - like overachieving it was I did exactly what they wanted and when I got to school I realized I was still doing exactly what they wanted and I needed to find my own way you're being a good Indian song I was the oldest you have siblings I don't know if I was being the average Indians ha ha yeah just doing what you were expected to do yeah and so you you what you had you experienced some kind of void and trying to figure out what it was that made you you I realize like I was so deep on a path that wasn't of my own choosing and I needed to find a way to choose my own path and I realized quickly that couldn't be through academics like I had to go on an inner search and you know the writings of sri ramakrishna really really inspired me mm-hmm and that's when I realized like I've got professors you know like why can't I have like a teacher for what I want to do in terms of self-realization right well that's that's also going back to your Indian heritage it is but it was almost like osmosis because my parents generation moved to the u.s. to get away from that it was the first time that Indians in the modern era could like you know have material aspirations and so they were all about the material life now they're not but they were then uh-huh and they're trying to acclimate you to become American so to speak a big time it was like Kraft macaroni and cheese and hamburgers right you know like now I love curry like oh I can't believe like I didn't eat any of that stuff when I was growing up and so when you start meditating and going on this path and and yeah your parents must have been well I would imagine it must be somewhat mixed like on the one hand like okay he's verging from this trajectory that we've sort of established for him but at the same time there's something you know beautiful about you connecting with what you know could be characterized as you know you're sort of inherent Native traditions it's true the one thing that everybody has a difficult time with especially in the West is how much obedience you need to follow a teacher whether the teachers a Zen practitioner or whether the teacher is is your martial arts teacher or whether it's an Indian guru and so like I literally put myself at the feet of Sri Chinmoy and I asked him you know my parents really want me to go to grad school and want me to be a doctor you know from an inner standpoint you know what's your belief answer each in my meditate and said in an almost otherworldly tone your soul does not want you to be a doctor your soul wants you to strengthen your heart and so first thing I did is I went to my parents it was like a stretch in my what I what I should do and he said your soul doesn't want you to be a doctor and they're like what what is that even mean like no you know like you are becoming a doctor and then Sri Chinmoy told me cryptically you know that I still had to please my parents so it's like it was almost like a Cohen like right don't please your parents don't please your parents and what does strengthen your heart actually mean I had a hard time understanding that because I think as as as men or boys in this country we're not really in at least when I grew up in the 80s and 90s we weren't really encouraged to find those qualities of the heart like love and sympathy and generosity and you know academic life obviously strengthens your mind much more than your heart and I realize like I needed to develop qualities of love of sympathy of joy not for anybody else but for myself and that would actually give me the strength to like be confident with my convictions and what was the process of exploring that for you it was totally detaching myself from that Western tract I mean I went from like 4.0 at Cal to working at a community health food store in Queens at 100 dollars per week living in a house with 15 other dudes uh-huh and going out devotees they all were and we all had our own little rooms you know rent was $200 per month and you know going to morning and evening meditations and that was it that was that was it and a lot of service like we gave a lot of free meditation classes and there were like athletic races that weirdly enough you know this Indian teacher really wanted us to participate in and I traveled with them and I did that pretty much non-stop until a point when he said you know he didn't say this explicitly but he was like you know you're ready to do more and that's when he kind of pushed me into the sphere of human rights mm-hmm we were chatting the other week when we when we first met and I was sharing with you that my only real awareness of Sri Chinmoy was when I was living in New York City right after college and I would see people running you know in Central Park or all over the city wearing Sri Chinmoy t-shirts and I was like who is this Sri Chinmoy is he like a coach to a running club but there seemed to be this almost cultish conglomeration of people everywhere I looked who were running all over Manhattan wearing paraphernalia that was advertising Sri Chinmoy and I thought he must be some kind of cult guru or something like that and I didn't really explore it any further than that at that point but I've since come to learn and what your film which we're going to talk about in a minute so beautiful he explores is like who this man who this man was what he stood for and and the impact that he's had not just on you spiritually but on you know a vast community of people and how that sort of intertwines very beautifully and naturally with the running community in New York City you know it's it's hard to believe that marathon running at one point in the 60s and even mid 70s was absolutely counterculture I mean if you read the early New York City marathons what you were just you know five or six laps around Central Park the people that did those were thought to be crazy and when Fred Lebow decided to do the 1976 you know big five boroughs marathon in honor of the Bicentennial I think that's the first time that marathoning kind of reached the mainstream and Sri Chinmoy was in New York at that point and you know was very very supportive of this flourishing of people's aspirations to try to do something that was seemingly impossible I mean now like from year five ultra standout the 50 ultras and 50 days that bar has been pushed right but in 1976 1977 like 26.2 miles was like the edge of the envelope and you know it's New York City in the 70s so before the 1977 and 1978 New York City marathons the day before Fred Lee bone the New York City Road runners would have Sri Chinmoy lead tations he had an indian grew in a dhoti in Central Park with runners meditating it's crazy yeah and just just to kind of provide a little exposition on this I mean for those that don't know Fred Lebow is a legendary character who really can be credited with contributing to the explosion of interest and distance running by virtue of the work that he did with a was he the president of the New York Road Runners Club he was he really did he want he founded it - I actually Ted Corbett oh I don't know about Ted Corvette Ted Corbett african-american 1952 Olympic marathoner for the US and Helsinki Ted is known as the Motta's as the father of modern ultramarathon just by accident he lived in the Bronx and his training weeks were sometimes 200 300 miles low in New York City because he would even fifties in the 50s and 60s he would leave his home at 7 or 8 in the morning and he would run and he would come back and he'd do these you know 12 14 hour runs every Saturday and Sunday just for fun and Fred was the founder I mean Ted was the founder of the New York Road Runners Club and Fred ended up launching it into what it is today right so Fred pioneers this craze of marathoning and I you know I remember as a 10 11 year-old 12 whatever there was this period of time in which marathon and running kind of exploded into mainstream awareness and you had guys like Jim Fixx who were writing books about it and people were discovering this for the very first time and and Manhattan and specifically the New York Road rowing club and the work that Fred was doing was kind of the that was like the mecca for everything that was occurring at that time it really was and and I think Fred's imagination was unbounded he had heard that in the late 1800s there was this phenomenon of pedestrianism six-day races held in Madison Square Garden where people bet on the the man or woman who would do the most miles in six days and fed wanted to revive that in the 80s so with the help of Sri Chinmoy and his marathon team they started a six-day race in Flushing Meadow Park and that brought out the people that had the feeling and that knew that they had the capacity for more than 26 miles like the great Stu Mittleman and all these characters that wanted to go well beyond the 26 mile limit and well beyond the hundred or 200 mile limit so these races in Madison Square Garden like when was that going on they were hugely popular late 1800s to really nineteen times extraordinarily popular and if you look back even before the first Olympics in 19 in 1896 people were doing like cross UK walks you know these epic walks in in in the United States too and they were races where people would race almost Tour de France style trying to get from point A to point B in the fastest time taking help from villagers or town folks etc that's like lost history though because I've never read anything about that and it's the foundation of what was known as multi-day running I mean these days ultra running is more is more popular than ever and the multi-day ID has kind of been lost but you know in the 80s and 90s it seemed much easier to do larger events around half mile or one-mile loops whether the situation was controlled of course now like you know but the Leadville and hardrock hundred and western states the idea of mountain running and point-to-point hundreds have really really exploded but it's it's it's so fascinating that you know in the 70s when when marathoning really came of age that was considered like the ultimate distance that a human being could run and it completely belies the the true history of these crazy races that preceded it which get no ink and sadly the marathon was considered to be the greatest distance a man could run it wasn't until the 1984 Olympics that there was a 10k for the woman hour a marathon for the women when did it was 84 the first time there was a women's marathon yeah in 1980 in the in the Russian Olympics there was an exhibition 10k and it wasn't until 84 where a woman had been running professionally for 8 to 10 years of course there have been women that it's a Katherine Schweitzer that sneaked into the Boston Marathon you know 15 years or so before 12 years before the 1984 Olympics but it wasn't until I think the in my opinion until the multi-day race circuits happened that people realized that the capacity the difference between men and women really wasn't that great you know there's longer it gets the the narrower the cop is it's true there's almost no running distance under actually there are no running distances under 26 miles where the top 10 men you know where the top woman is in the top 10 men but when you got to 24 hours and 48 and 72 and then six-day races you know it wasn't unusual for a woman to actually win the entire event and now you have people like Cortney doe Walter who's just crushing the dudes it's in these super long races it's unreal you know and and that goes to the heart of I think why Sri Chinmoy was really into these races it's a concept of self transcendence you know going beyond what people tell you your limitations are what you think your limitations are digging deep into your heart and trying to pull out an energy that transcends male or female and for a little bit more exposition it's it's it's worth kind of exploring the history of Sri Chinmoy because for him running wasn't something that was tagged on top of his spiritual perspective like he himself was a champion runner he ran 100 meters ran his whole life was running races essentially up until you know the day he died and and running very much as a part of his perspective when it comes to this idea of self transcendence he grew up in an ashram in South India that was run by Sri Aurobindo surrender was one of the original revolutionaries in India and he had a spiritual revelation and you know basically renounced his revolutionary ways and moved to then French India which was Pondicherry to escape the British and started an ashram and a lot of the revolutionaries that followed his in his essence like semi terroristic ways you know ended up renouncing themselves and moving to follow the spiritual life but after India's independence a lot of Europeans came to the ashram and you know brought this dynamism into Indian spirituality which had been absent a few hundred years answer er Binda really encouraged track-and-field he really encouraged the development of the physical body to be a true vessel of the spiritual energies that people were aspiring to and so Sri Chinmoy was a disciple he was a disciple though and he competed in the hundred meter dash and the decathlon there and then when he moved to America in 1964 I think there was a gap of six or seven years where he was so focused on being a spiritual teacher and serving people's needs spiritually that the athletic side was absent I don't think it was until the early 70s when running really began to to revitalize especially long-distance that he saw the corollary between long-distance running and spirituality and the metaphor of us running towards a spiritual goal and using outer running as as a way to practice that - right so he starts as a sprinter later realizes the the potential of long-distance running to serve a spiritual and or goal or pursuit or journey and he moves to the United States I mean this is also an interesting period of time where there's a there's sort of a group of spiritual leaders who are arriving in the United States from India you have Krishnamurti Yogananda who comes much earlier and what so what is the you know what was the rationale behind him leaving India to come to the United States the way Sri Chinmoy tells that is that he would have been content to stay in India and meditate you know 12 to 18 hours a day as he'd been doing but he hadn't experienced like a lot of these teachers did of the Supreme of the Divine you know basically instructing him that his destiny lay in the West to be of service to sincere seekers so he just got on a plane like no real visa other than a tourist visa there are students have CR been those that lived in New York that were her sponsors but he just came based on his own inner obedience and it was Greenwich Village in 1964 and you know it was pretty quick that he began to address kind of ideas that he's talking about right and so by 1970 he began leading twice-a-week meditations at the UN and there was a rapid rapid acceptance of his philosophy because it dovetailed so much with I think what Western seekers were looking for but at the same time he didn't require a complete out of renunciation like nobody wore robes and nobody had to move into caves right so you're not walking around like a hearty Krishna no not necessarily hopefully we're all we all have the same spirit within but you know he didn't he didn't pay much attention to the same type of outer signs or outer decorum that Indian spirituality traditionally required like the robes and you know the the the markings and the beads and things like that and did he I assume he must have run the New York Marathon himself many times he did he ran the New York City Marathon a few times but then you know he started a forty seven mile race in honor of his 47th birthday which I believe was in 1978 and that was the first time his students began running ultras and he enjoyed it and then he began pushing that in doing 100-mile races 200 mile races and when Fred Lebow came to him in the mid-80s and said let's do a six-day race I mean Sri Chinmoy and what became his marathon team was ready mm-hmm and so where does the 3100 come into play like how is that birthed you know I think spiritual teachers develop vessels for consciousness in the sense that I think if he tried to start obviously if you tried to start a 3,000 100 mile race in 1976 when the marathon I loved it you know you battled out but it wouldn't like somebody would have checked him into some type of facility but after the six-day race it became a ten day race after the ten day race it became a seven hundred thousand and thirteen hundred mile race and people were doing really really well at that and by 1996 he decided to almost double the 1300 and make it 2700 and people did it you know there was a one woman and three men that did it and then in 1997 he said okay this is the distance I'm not gonna go beyond it it's 30 100 right 3100 miles this race has taken place every year since 90 what is it 1997 97 and this is a race that entails running 30 100 miles within a period of 50 52 52 days which means each runner is gonna have to complete on average about 60 miles a day the kicker is the course is essentially a half mile loop around high school in Queens on sidewalk in the summer yeah it's ridiculous it is absolutely insane and I'd heard whispers of this race over the years and I think I just filed it away in my brain as apocryphal like I thought well this can't actually be occurring in New York City because you don't really hear about it it doesn't get any press and what was so amazing about seeing it in your movie is that this occurs without really any fanfare whatsoever there's how many there were 12 people that that did it and that that were documented what was it last year that that you followed these individuals yeah 2016 there were 12 participants and they just spend their summer running around in a circle they alternate the direction every other day or something like that there's a couple buses and campers parked out on the sidewalk and you know some volunteers there to hand out food and and write down there how many laps they've done every day the course is open from 6:00 a.m. to midnight and it just goes on until it's done and when it's finished they're like okay you did it and then it's essentially that's it it's mind boggling you know I lived in that area since 1997 and I've frankly was frightened of that race I'd run by it it's unlike my one-mile point on my mind wouldn't even talk about the fact that you're a runner like you came from a competitive running background but that distance just frightened every single pore of my body you know I didn't understand how or why anybody would want to do that and after you know I guess a career in human rights and when I started getting into film I started wondering why a film hadn't been made on that race of course it would be the most boring film in the world if any film was just about people going in circles but I was encouraged to do a six-day race you know to try to feel what people might possibly get out of a 30 100 miles that when you were kind of contemplating the idea of trying to find a way in and make a movie about this this event you know it was even more Elementary than that I I need before trying to make a movie I needed to understand like why to make a movie you know what could possibly appeal to a non 30 100 mile run er about this race like why would anybody want to do might want to watch a movie about something that's so beyond what we might even want to consider doing and so I did a six-day race on the same course that Fred Lebow had started in 1986 and I didn't really train much the interesting thing about ultras is that you know you see people from 18 to 70 years old doing ultras and particularly since a lot of older people do ultras I went in without much training thinking like if a 70 year old could do it like why couldn't I you know I did about 50 miles the first six hours then I got injured it's like I felt my hamstring 20 to 50 miles in 6 hours that's pretty good you know I think I didn't know what to do I didn't know I didn't know how to approach it but then I felt my hamstring twinge and as it twinged a few 75 year old ladies walked by me and asked me how I was doing and that's what I realized I can't cook it you know it's like if these women are doing this race and also the nature of how you approach and conquer an event like that is very different than the mindset you know of the typical runner or whatever your background in and running experience was and so that the next four days actually the next four and a half days I was out on the course 18 hours and I was barely doing 32 miles I had a pulled hamstring mm-hmm and all I could do in those four and a half days was pray pray that I would get to run again in the race you know I was never more conscious of like my my frailty then having 75 year old men and women chatting with you and then apologizing saying you're slowing me down and then moving beyond but I would say almost miraculously and without hyperbole what the day left my hamstrings felt normal that just in an instant felt it felt normal and then I took off it's like I channeled I'd held like five almost five full days of Prayer in my heart and when that prayer had been answered I took off and for the next about twenty-one hours I was honestly in the highest meditation I've ever been in and you know it's like we all say that like people sometimes they like it when I chop onions it's meditative and I don't mean like repetitive I don't mean that my mind was turned off I mean that every single spiritual pore of my being felt like it was about to have the biggest awakening my imagination felt like reality you know I was like feeling Hanuman I was feeling like every Indian mythological story I'd ever read I was feeling the presence of those beings on that course and no matter what I did whether I stopped to eat I stopped to fix my shoes as soon as I start running again those experiences came to the fore you were having a transcendent experience I was so what do you make of that you know when I talked to runners after that who did the 3100 they said this is why we do it and I said does it does that experience happen in minute one they said no but after four or five or six days regardless of injuries like I had in the six-day race after four or five or six days they find that their mind shuts off finally surrenders to the inevitable fact that they would have to be running for the next you know 52 days and the heart comes to the fore in some cases the soul comes to the fore and they get experiences that are extremely challenging to get through silent meditation mm-hmm yeah you hear stories from people who are who are quite expert in meditation that it takes a very long time perhaps years to of consistent diligent practice to get to a place where you can have that kind of experience but once you have it you develop the acuity to drop into it a little bit with with more facility right and I would imagine for some of these runners maybe they they can if they're experienced in this sort of thing they can drop into that state perhaps sooner without having it to be you know on on day six of the six day run so do you think you have to reach a certain level of suffering and pain to arrive at that place or what is the what's the trigger I thought I did I thought that I thought that was the trigger after the Six Day race I realized that there was a movie to be made if I could capture that spiritual essence of ultra distance running it you know it might it might be of some service I wanted to explore traditional practices of running and of course people who've read Born to Run know about the Roar Amaury the taro mara Indians that are connected culturally to the Indians in the southwest of the United States so I went to Santa Fe to meet a friend who ran an organization called the wings of America which really focuses on Native American running culture and revitalizing that I met one of the board members who is an ultra distance runner on the Navajo Nation and when I went on a morning run with him I realized that his attitude towards running was totally different than mine I started my watch you know it's looking for the GPS signal is like this is gonna be a great Strava run through the canyon and it was a canyon that people who weren't natives weren't allowed to run in but we had permission to run in it it sounds like I'm gonna get some course records all this stupid stuff that like you know technology and my competition you know kind of you know for me to believe but he was running for different reasons the Navajo run towards the east in the morning because that's where the Rising Sun is and I could tell that this fellow Shawn Martin who's a athletic director in Chile High School in Arizona he was receptive to the idea that this run this regular morning run would make him a better person it could also give him an exceptionally spiritual experience and that was his attitude for running and that had been baked in through 32 years of cultural training on how to run and so that's when I realized like most spiritual teachers say like suffering isn't the only path to enlightenment and I think it's the same in running it's like suffering isn't the only path to the ultimate running experience Carl Lewis used to say the same thing he used to be so against that the the idiom no pain no gain you know there's different attitude to approach sports and I saw it in Sean Martin that day through the movie you explore the culture of the Navajo Nation you travel to Japan and spend time with the running monks of mount GI is that how you say it yeah yeah I write I would say that you pronounce it as perfectly good right which is fascinating and I want to dive into that more in a minute and then also the the Botswana and try to the the Kalahari right and there the culture of kind of persistent hunting and and how running plays into that and in your you're kind of learning process your discovery process of trying to understand these cultures and how running and spirituality form essentially who they are like what is it that you have discovered about this relationship between spirituality transcendence running and and and and really you know the title of your movie which is running to become like what does that mean you know to practice at all colonization has been a really bad thing for running cultures you know from the British colonization of India you the black Botswana government's colonization of the Kalahari to Anglo European colonization of the United States there haven't been many cultures that have been able to keep this connection to running in the past 500 or 600 years or maybe in the past 10,000 since we've been agrarian societies but in the last few hundred the remaining running cultures have been forcibly separated from that tradition and first and foremost that's been really sad to see and it's it's not just you know white Western Europeans again the Botswana government is black African and the Chinese for example destroyed a culture in Tibet of long gone pot running which we tried to explore and this almost sounds like like woowoo but people were sequestered into caves for two or three years at a time and they sat in lotus position and using the prana they would gradually try to burst upwards and at the end of two or three years they were able to in lotus position burst up three feet and that gave them the kind of pranic that the metaphysical approach to a different style of running there was a German priest and a German nun in the 30s and 50s respectively who witnessed runners running across boulder fields in tibet going at what they estimated was you know equivalent of now six-minute per mile pace what these runners would fixate on a star at 8 p.m. and run towards it till 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning and that's a 12-hour run where they're going six-minute pace through this long gone pot running Wow and when the Chinese took over Tibet they didn't destroy the monastery but they killed all the monks in that monastery so as we explored these ancestral traditions of running we found that there were very very few Native American running culture was extent until really about 150 years ago now they didn't have horses you know in a modern sense until about 1680 1700 before that they relied on runners to run 100 200 300 mile you know trading and spiritual routes so that was you know it kind of an exhilarating discovery especially when we saw that alive and well in Botswana hmm well the sort of most well-known of these cultures is probably the Tarahumara in Mexico and and I would imagine that a big reason why it serves as such a test case a case study is because the Copper Canyon has done such an amazing job of protecting them from the outside world preventing that kind of pollution that's occurred that's sort of undermined these other these other tribes and has sort of allowed them to continue their their ancestral habits which prioritize running as essentially a lifestyle I don't know what the spiritual connection is with the Tarahumara but I did have one experience where I ran with one when I was in Mexico City and it was amazing it was a it was an event that was sponsored by runner's world and it was on a track in Mexico City and it was like kind of a Expo type situation so I had the opportunity to run around a track with this guy and he's in his traditional garb with the sandals and like the whole thing and I almost felt it was almost like he was efficient in an aquarium you know I was like I wasn't even sure that he really understood what was happening like he'd been flown out there almost put on display but I could tell in running with him it was so natural it was so pure like you said there's no none of the trappings of our modern culture of running there's no GPS watch or anything like that and his gait was so effortless and beautiful and you could tell that this is just an extension of a lineage lineage that goes back you know many many many generations I mean that's the great thing about running you know my colonization rent aside running unites us you know at one point every single culture on earth relied on running again we weren't agricultural no one was agricultural until 10,000 years ago which meant that we were all hunters and gatherers and the fastest stronger strongest runners were the ones that were more adept at hunting so it's literally baked into our DNA and it's baked into our culture if we can rediscover that mm-hmm so when someone says to you we were born to run like what does that mean to you you know I the book was really really inspiring but I think there was there were some parts of the book that might have been misunderstood there's a fascination with these traditional ancestral called an ancient running cultures like the Terra mara like the Navajo like the Hopi like the Bushmen that they have some deep genetic advantage that they're super human or theirs they have special DNA or that it's their food they're chia seeds that make them like the Panola yeah that make them better runners but they're better runners because they work harder than at it and they feel it's more important I mean for someone who wants to run to lose weight a run to win a race those are really you know strong and powerful motivations but if you feel that running is a form of Prayer you have a different attitude and our Navajo character who actually is the race director of the Tara Mars Copper Canyon race he told me he said running is a prayer you know when you're running your feet are praying to mother earth you're breathing in father sky running is a celebration of life it's like when you run you appreciate everything around you and running as a teacher you know teaches you about who you are it helps you to get through hardships my high school running coach never said anything like that to me you might have gotten fired if he did yeah it was like a run to win and that was it and if you were a second even if you PR that was just like that's three point that's better five points yeah it's super interesting I heard you tell a story about one of the participants in in the most recent iteration of the thirty one hundred who I think was a semi-pro runner from Israel Camille's real right right who kind of showed up guns blazing laid down a torrid pace for the first thousand miles or whatever it was and then had a little bit of a reckoning that led to an epiphany that kind of speaks to what you just said Koby oren and i was in one race with him and in that race he wasn't ultimately successful but he was trying to break a tenday record of 901 miles like that's the level that he's on he was you know he's on pace to do 90 miles a day in that race until the last couple of days so he's insane he's a really good runner and like all Israeli citizens he has a military background so he came in to the 3100 race this last summer 2018 with a plan it was just like operation control everything tactical that you could need you know he had it and in the first thousand miles of his 30 100-mile race that thousand mile split set an Israeli national record for a thousand miles and he was racing he was racing this fellow from Russia named Basu but then something softened in Kobe and not softened in a weak way Kobe later recounted that there was a point in the race when he realized that he could race he could race the race and you know he could be just pushing his physical limits but he would have missed the point entirely and he felt that if he'd done that maybe he would have won the race but he wouldn't have remembered anything significant about him he had the Epiphany that that thirty one hundred mile race wasn't a journey from point A to point B or zero miles to 3100 miles he said the race is a pilgrimage and that separated himself from even the kind of like micro focus of like lap by lap by lap when you're on a pilgrimage everything that you do is a ritual and he realized that each one of his steps was a ritual his motions his attitude were rituals and that reminded me explicitly of the marathon monks of Monte I the running monks a Mountie I you know they choose one aspirant every seven years to do a thousand days of running split up into ten hundred day chunks each hundred day cycle we'll have a set mileage the first one is 11 miles a day the last one is 56 miles a day and all of their cycles occur on a mountain that's about 3,000 feet in net elevation so they're going up and down the mountain at least once towards the end they're going up and down two or three times and they're so precise in their footsteps that every single day every single step is in the exact same place I mean that's next level it's like wow that's how much they're just focusing on the moments so Japanese it's so Japanese you know but I love that idea of running as ritual you know and and and and I think it was somebody in the movie said you know I'm just trying to be the best person that I can be with each stride right this ritualization running as ritual as prayer as this act of of you know as this act on the journey toward self transcendence and and I think that the example of these running monks is the most powerful and demonstrative I mean a thousand days of doing this 10 100 day cycles and the penalty for failure is suicide right you just say that again the penalty for failure on this quest to literally for a thousand days go out and do anywhere between like 11 miles and fifty something miles right if they fail suicide is the penalty and correct me if I'm wrong but there's they select one person at a time to attempt this correct and their selection process has become so rigorous that in the last hundred fifty years of this now 1500 year tradition no one has had to take their own life but plenty have and they said and this is the interesting thing they said that when they start this quest no one is thinking of suicide it's like they're thinking of bliss they feel that because the penalty is so great they've been able to keep this practice absolutely uncompromised for the last 2015 hundred years it's been going on that long yeah that's the interesting thing to me it's like the stakes are so high that the only people that are gonna do it are ones who are going to basically establish the deepest commitment to that goal where they're willing to sacrifice their life yeah and you have to be so dialed in mentally emotionally and spiritually to come from a place of joy and gratitude and bliss rather than fear I mean the American the Western perspective on that would be to just be terrified the entire time I mean it's absolutely insane the the ridiculous thing to I mean from a Western standpoint is that there's no aid there's no aid stations there's no helpers the aspirant starts in the morning usually without even as much as a cup of miso soup just some liquid and after about two-thirds of the way through sometimes thirty miles has an aide stop take sanity and then continues to the end and then has to make his own meals at the end of this 56 mile day and they're not really running though I mean they're essentially hiking they are it's like it's it's a very steep mountain and the aspirants are all wearing sandals mmm we're the Sam Botta fall costume with this amazing hat I don't know what you call that but it's incredible it looks like Star Wars ya know it really does and so they're in this garb where you know without getting too crass I think it would be really hard to disrobe if you did have to go to the bathroom so they're they're very light at the same time you know we were up there with the aspirant and no one had been allowed to film up there since 1984 is that when they made that really grainy documentary that I saw yeah actually a lot of things wrong in that documentary because I used it as a research and when I presented those facts to the monks they were like where did you get that from mmm and I said from this movie they're like no no no that's like what was incorrect in the movie there was a lot of numbers that were wrong daily mileage you know and and I think that movie established them as what the moniker of marathon monks and like you said they don't run and they hate even though I caught up the marathon amongst they hated that that label but when we were up there the aspirant on flats is doing about 1111 1/2 minute mile pace so it's like he's walking but you can say he's walking with an incredible amount of purpose you know we could we we didn't even attempt to keep up with him we had to spend two days to be able to kind of cover his one circuit just because it was impossible even in a car to get to places before he would mm-hmm and if you were to ask these people what is the purpose of this what is their reply this is the interesting thing you know in order to get permission to do this I met the head monk three times and this head monk had actually done this quest he was the last finisher everything I asked from a Western standpoint he didn't answer in a Western wife so when I said what is the purpose I actually asked him that he said I don't understand the question hmm he said we do this because we feel that but that we are the go-between the intermediaries between the Buddha and humanity and that our prayers actually have an effect on the prayers of sincere aspirants worldwide he basically intimated that the purity of the request raised the bar for every practitioner of Buddhism whether or not they were aware that this quest was existing mm-hmm this is it's almost an ascetic practice of purification that somehow penetrates consciousness Sri Chinmoy said something similar he said that faith is collective that your faith is my faith is everyone's faith and that power of faith essentially is like a bank that we all from different cultures draw upon and I think that's what this marathon Montes met this monk of Monte I intimated that they were basically depositing large sums through their quest into a vault that aspirants were drawing from around the world right I mean it's part and parcel of the kind of core perspective of Buddhism being that the best way to better the world or improve the world is to improve yourself and this is a prop like it like the ultimate process of purification like their version of that you know the the interesting similarity that I found between these monks and the main character in the movie Ashbury Hahnel was that they have no lethargy I mean I can imagine what lethargy means it means comfort it means sitting you mean one might say that like we're in a very comfortable position right now sitting these monks they don't sit like they'll sit to pray but they'll sit and pray with intensity and that when that's done they'll move on to the next activity and the monk that we were interviewing with the last aspirant to have completed it he's physically active from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep like every minute is accounted for he's not wasting a single second the word comfort relaxation is not in his vocabulary at all and the people that do the 3100 the one similarity is that at least in that period when they're doing those 52 days there's not an ounce of lethargy it's like they're looking at every moment as though it counts yeah if they're resting they're resting there's no cell phones there's no music there's nothing but they'll find that they can get enough rest from a 10 or 15 minute nap to get back out on the course and do 20 or 30 more miles whereas the normal human being would extend that 10-minute rest into a five six hours yeah well this aspirant this Japanese monk did you feel like you could like connect with him I mean does he just such a foreign creature that you almost feel like he's a different species like does he have a humanity to him that you can relate to at all you know not to to even mildly toot my own horn but you know like my life even though we don't dress as pronunce yet it's it's very much an aesthetic life like I've never married you know we're celibate don't eat meat don't drink don't smoke so when I went up to Mount II I I had a daunting task you know a lot of people I mean right I think every week they filled media requests and they turned down nearly all of them except for some photography requests of people wanting to see the monk coming or going from from his domicile but a nun in Kyoto made the introduction between me and one of the head monks and you know as a triathlete it's like when you're with other triathletes you can speak a certain language and as I don't know how many triathlons or what what your approach has been just by the language and and the verbiage you use and you the reference to certain races and certain courses and so I immediately began speaking with the head monk you know on that purely spiritual level and it was unusual I think for him to have a media request from somebody that wasn't your like prototypical right this isn't the BBC rolling in no and my question to him wasn't whether he would give me permission to do what I wanted to do I asked him I guess in a very Japanese way if he would give me permission to do a film that he essentially would direct and then he was a little taken aback and he said I've never thought of this in this way and I said well you know if if you were with with humility if you were to make a film about this how would you do it and then for the next hour and a half he lay it out exactly how he would do it and then at the end of that I said I promise you I would do exactly that and so it was that kind of like spiritual recognition that I think got us in the door and when I saw the monk I understand was doing the the the quest I understood how serious his commitment was not that I could relate to it it was on a on a level that I'd never experienced but I could recognize that he had a tremendous amount of purity a tremendous amount of honor and a tremendous amount of heart you know you're in a state where you're praying that to the divine and the Buddhist wouldn't but this wouldn't use the word divine that used the word light or soul but you're praying to the highest you're praying to the Buddha with all your hearts devotion and you know in in the purely Indian sense like devotions a beautiful fluid thing that's full of love and I recognize that in him it's like his commitment was serious like he did not want to be messed with he did not want to be disturbed because he was communicating with his beloved he was communicating with the divine and it's like if you weren't going to be exactly a part of that then he had nothing to do with you or if you had the inability to appreciate a really understand that that's what was happening exactly and we couldn't have done it without his permission so in his offseason the winter they don't do the quest in his offseason he consulted with the head monk as to what we wanted to do and what the head monk thought would be possible and gave his explicit permission and then made his own requests so in essence even though we weren't communicating with him verbally when we were up there you know he would recognize when we were doing something that you know we that he had already given approval to and there was a few things that it was embarrassing that he did twice because he recognized that we didn't exactly get it the first time there was one spot where he would sit and he would pray and he did a second take especially for us without us even communicating that we needed for him to do it a second time because he realized you didn't quite get it or something like that it's like imagine being the star of a narrative film like let's do your Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie when you you you do your take and you realize that there's a little bit of chaos I didn't tell ya or that the DP and the crew didn't nail it like you did your best part and they kind of screwed it up you could either just go like that's it I'm not doing this scene again or you could go like okay I know you guys didn't really get that right and you're not saying it so like let me do it again uh-huh so he was very worried that he was a focus and we had you know like I wouldn't say like non-spiritual crew but we had crude that you know this was their first experience but someone like him and at the very end these were like young ACS and you know assistant camera people at the end of our shoot we hustle to like this point in the forest where we knew that he would stop for a minute if devotees came to ask for his blessings so there was a road Japanese ladies and then there was a row of us and like you know 20-something hipster Brooklynites and they're like you know jean shorts on their knees but their hands folded and he came by and he said prayers over us and then he looked at us obviously knowing that we speak English and he said thank you and for these like assistant cameraman like these 22 23 year olds from Williamsburg like they were blown away because after a few days with them they recognized that he was on a higher level than any of us and when he recognized their work and said thank you they just became like putty they couldn't stop talking about it that's so wild how long were you up there for the shoot we had to spend two weeks on location planning every shot the head monk and his assistant stipulated that everything we did was planned effectively with the same meticulous nature as everything they do on that mountain so from Wright pans to zooms to you know cables and dollies went through it Wow and we rehearsed it because we knew that number one as you know from from our movie 3101 him to come there's no interviews there's no talking heads at the same time like watching running is really boring if people passing by a camera and the question was like how do we put people into the spiritual mindset of this aspirant if we don't even get to talk to him so our shots were planned with great detail as you saw in the movie we shot a lot at night that the monk carries around at night a single Lantern with a single candle to light the five feet in front of him and it's mystical it's beautiful and we didn't want to miss the opportunities that we had yeah where do you stay do you have to hike up the mountain every day like you weren't staying in the monastery were you you know a lot of these big mountain monasteries they have hotels but the hotels are run run by monks and Japanese temple cuisine is an absolute delicacy because you can't find that in any city in any restaurant you have to go to these temples and people make reservations months in advance to go and eat effectively Japanese vegan cuisine and dinner will be 26 to 28 items I mean they'll be like an udon soup preparation that's literally - slurps in a little tiny bowl on a little clay pot lit by a single candle and you'll have 25 26 things like that so it's cool that reminds me of that beautiful Korean monk chef woman who was the subject of chef's table who's on a monastery I believe it's somewhere in South Korea who prepares just the most exquisite cuisine it is an art form to her and there was a there was an amazing New York Times profile about her it this is in that tradition although the the quality is probably not at her exceptional level you know when we were on the mountain we were immersed and that definitely helped us in our own mindset for shooting yeah amazing what a gift I mean the first you're really the first people to be able to go up there and observe and document them in decades it's shrouded in so much mystery I mean I know there's that I've watched clips from that grainy documentary and I know I've seen the book what's it called the marathon monks of Mount Hiei but that's really it right in terms of documenting this incredible culture that's it you know that there's a there's been a couple of short pieces like to actually even be initiated into the monastery people have to do a hundred days times eleven miles everybody does and they don't get the whole uniform they don't get the big bamboo hat and the staff they have to do eleven miles a day for those hundred days if they don't complete a single day they don't have to kill themselves but they don't get to be a part of the monastery so there have been films about that which look visually similar but there haven't been people that have been allowed up on the mountain while an aspirant is in this thousand day quest right you want to hear something that's even wackier yeah I say wacky and the most spiritual sense at the end of the sixth cycle the aspirant has to do an eight and a half day fast used to be a ten day fast but too many aspirants died during it used to be in the summer but too many aspirants rotted from the inside out because it's not just no food it's no food no sleep the aspirant has to sit up lotus position 24 hours a day there are monks by him chanting with them to keep him awake but the third caveat and why it's so dangerous is no water no food no water no sleep for eight days eight and a half day how is that possible I don't know I don't know that traditionally the aspirants have said that number one on the most human level they can smell what you've eaten the last three meals number two they can smell any food that's being cooked on the mountain number three and this is where it's actually spiritual they're so close to the verge of death that their sensors are hyper attenuated they can actually hear they say the ash falling off of incense and so after you've crossed that threshold or you've you know straddle throughout that threshold for a period of days and you come down I don't think anything makes you afraid of death anymore that is wild and and I would imagine some the purpose of that is to even heighten that level of attainment you know it's an it's an interesting thing because the monks are doing something exceptionally physical in this quest and this you know that the mileage is just mind-boggling but they're told over and over and over that the mileage is it important the main monk that spoke to us refused to talk to us about the mileage he refused to put anything you know in any numbers on camera because he said it's only about the prayers it's only about the prayers but there's recognition that the body is as vital to this quest as the heart as the mind as the soul as the center of prana the father you know five major centers but to hammer that point home you know after you've had six and a half or you know six years effectively of this deeply spiritual physical practice I think they want to kind of send you off on your last four hundred days with a little bit of a higher recognition that like nothing can stop you if you made it past that fast it doesn't matter you know what comes your way that is so wild it's crazy and there's one last thing that have to do it gets crazier they say this is harder although it doesn't sound as hard at the end of their tenth cycle they had to sit for ten days for 12 to 14 hours a day in front of a big bonfire and drop in bamboo sticks that are that have priors of individual devotees of the monastery so they have like a million bamboo sticks which they basically have to I believe read and throw into the fire for 12 to 14 hours a day and the monk that we spoke to who had done this if that was more difficult for him because he said that you need not allowed to drink water during those 12 to 14 hours he said he got more dehydrated every single day and felt so felt closer to the end every single day than he did through him and towards the end of that eight and a half day fast and once you complete this then what they say you're a living Buddha they say that you've you've now crossed the threshold and your life is only to be of service to aspirins so the month that that was the previous previous finisher who was our guide you know all he does as he administers to devotees you know 20 21 hours a day all he's doing is serving his disciples and it's exceptional because it's like there's not a single minute in his day that he doesn't use and it's really just one person essentially every generation more or less you know that I think that every once in a while by the weird math of years as a cross over where there's two people that are doing it at the same time but no one's ever really on the course at the same time yeah that's while what it what a gift to be able to experience that and and I think another thing that's interesting about that quest as being you know very very Buddhist and very Japanese that kind of distinguishes it from a Hindu pursuit is the idea that the body is essential right a Hindu perspective would be more along the lines of work trying to transcend the body the body is just this you know bag of bones that's here to carry our consciousness but there isn't attention to it in this very specific way I mean in my own humble way India's downfall in the last few hundred years was disregarding the physical but if you go back to the Bhagavad Gita the physical is absolutely essential it's a warrior text yeah the greatest spiritual figures had understood the power of their body you know they might have gone to the forest like some of the great sages and meditated for 10 15 20 years at a time and practiced great austerities but a lot of those austerities came through physical practice and nobody ever disregarded the physical it was an essential part of our spiritual being it's just been in the last 300 400 500 years that there's kind of been an infection in Hinduism this idea that the body is Maya and that we should disregard it and I think that's led to a lot of ill in India including being colonized we weren't strong enough to like fight off this tiny little eyelid for goodness doing enough yoga it's like on it's like we're the land of Krishna or the land of Arts and on when these like pasty guys came off of boats you know we surrendered yeah that's crazy well let's get back to the 3100 just this is so fascinating this crazy race and then and one of the things that really struck me that's just undeniable when you watch the movie is when you take a gander at these 12 competitors that show up to do this you may be thinking these people are going to be serious athletes are about to tackle like the craziest thing you can possibly imagine and then you look at them and they just look like it's not that they don't look it's not that they look uh Natick but they don't strike you as examples of the athlete you might be imagining they just they're like everyday people it's shocking like and and to put it in the most kind of like derogatory or discriminatory language you know one of the best runners is a plumber and it's like if somebody told you he was a plumber you'd go like yep I see it but if somebody told you that like you know he can run 30 100 miles I'd agree but I'll say like nope I can't see it little stocky missing a few teeth 48 years old right and you're right it's like people aren't ripped they look like weekend warriors they do you know and the true protagonist of the movie is this guy Oshkosh brother Josh praha all yeah exactly oh no who is he's a paperboy from Helsinki right is he like 45 or something 44 years old before but you know The Paperboy aspect kind of belies this incredible focus on a Spartan ask lifestyle he's chosen to be a paperboy because he can train for 12 hours a day you know he's pushing a little cart through the streets of Helsinki going up and down stairs delivering mail and for him it's the ideal lifestyle like he's he's on his feet 12 hours a day at the same time he lives in a little tiny cabin you know like a teenager he eats ramen chocolate and soda all day long and his sixth day mark she's ten day mark is 833 miles which means he run 83 miles a day for 10 days he's ranked on all-time rankings of these of races but it's like like you said it's like the question is like how does somebody who does not look like the prototypical ultra runner achieve things that the prototypically built ultra runner probably couldn't even dream of well it's because I don't really these it's because all of these people are first and foremost devotees and secondarily runners not necessarily devotees of sri Chinmoy but they're they're devotees of on this path towards higher consciousness and the athletic aspect is really just a vehicle for that that that's exactly right there there was a gentleman from Germany named Wolfgang work who has the second best 24 hour race time of all time I believe around a hundred and eighty miles done in 24 hours and he came to do the race in 2004 and averaged 76 miles a day and he looked like an ultra runner world champion in a number of different races tall lean athletically built but for a German he had actually taken up the name mud lupron an Indian name and he was following another Eastern spiritual teacher so he had an attitude that was beyond competition even though he was a globally ranked ultra distance runner mm-hmm have you thought about what you think might happen if suddenly you know Rob car like the the current crop of like elite ultra endurance runner showed up to tackle this race what might happen well you know we did a pre-screening of 3,100 runner to come in Denver and Clara Gallagher was there and Chrissie mol and Mike Wardian had just finished I believed the Hard Rock and he lives on the East Coast and kids had wanted to see ant-man and so he goes into this random theater in Denver what we're doing this pre-screening and he sees Chrissy and Claire and he goes like what are you doing here they're like aren't you here for the running movie he's like no I'm here to see ant-man and they're like come see the running movie he's like absolutely pushed his kids into ant-man and after the movie he said you know we all have known that this race existed but it's not on social media you know there's no real way to learn about it you know it's like when people climbed Everest there isn't like documentation in the New York Times once a decade the New York Times writes a story on the 3100 but that's it and he said afterwards I've always been curious about this race and now I'm a lot more curious and you know he's vegan he meditates and I think he also was once kind of sponsored by Carnival Cruise Lines to run some crazy distance around the deck of a ship so you know he's got everything you need he's got the inner attitude he's also got this like mindset where you can run in a circle for countless hours and you can see the movie sparks something in him Camille Heron who I think has a fifty-mile world record for females won the comrades marathon she emailed me that she's always been interested in the self-transcendence race I think there's so much mystery around it and I'm hoping that the film will unlock some of that mystery and show that's like a ship Rehan all he doesn't care about nutrition he doesn't care about anything other than the meditative aspects of the race other people are much more regimented but they all like you said had that same type of inner attitude where they're expecting to become better people through this race and that hope and belief and reality is what helps them make it through the miles yeah I mean he repeats time and time again that this is his meditation that's why he's doing it right and then the race each day starts with a one-minute meditation and he you know you could see his head is bowed and his eyes are closed and and he kind of begins that run with his sort of offhanded shuffle that he does you know it's like you see him going and you're like look at that form how is that guy possibly gonna run 30 100 miles you know do you previous question I think people like Rob Timothy Olsen tamasam yeah you know people like that Clara Gallagher there's a whole crop of people that have popped up scott jurek i'm obviously you know incredible runner who've done these like epic races but this like like otherworldly focus you know if they use that determination and also they probably have it but built the patience understanding that this is a 52 day race or 45 day race if you're going really fast I think they'd have exceptional experiences you know and then do exceptionally well you know our Navajo character Sean Martin's dad Alan Martin who's in the movie as a medicine man and the Navajo hadn't ever allowed people to film the running prayers and for some reason he wanted to open it up to us and got permission from other elders and so he was asking me who were the keepers of the land of the 3100 and yeah he's a very normal very deep and beautiful man and I'm not trying to make this sound like he's some like mean like shaman up in the hills but he said like who are the keepers at the land of the 3100 and I'm thinking like this is a sidewalk around Thomas Edison High School bordering the Grand Central in Queens and so I said well the Lenni Lenape tribe used to be there but they left in the 1600 1700s and he said they've kept this land sacred and I said does that mean that they they knew that the 3100 was gonna be there he said of course not but it's like any time and this is what he said he said any time there is a sacred race held on a particular piece of land that piece of land was destined for that race for the Navajo and a lot of Native Americans it's like places have consciousness to a greater degree than than they do for you know any of us in the West it's not just the beautiful mountains that have consciousness or that deserve prayer and worship it's everything it's the rock faces it's the rock walls it's the pathways it's the plants it's it's the the consciousness of the dirt you know and so he basically said that this course has been consecrated for time immemorial even though it's crazy to think that like sidewalks have consciousness you can either say that runners have attributed the consciousness to it or they've drawn drawn out the consciousness that course has this exceptionally deep peace for the location that it's in right it's so ironic and bizarre though because you just it it defies any notion of what you think that course should look like and back to Coby Oren it's like here's a guy who's so set on competition and so good at it and you know so expectant of being able to set records that he even realized that the race is dictated by the course and the course dictates that you look at this as a pilgrimage and a lot of people have done the Transcontinental like from San Cisco to New York and the logistics of going up the Sierras the Wasatch the Rockies and then the flats in the rolling hills of Nebraska are exceptionally challenging and it's very difficult from seeing people who've done that race you know to disassociate your mind from the trucks whizzing by you know the lack of aid every half a mile but this course allows the type of flow yeah it's almost you know the simplicity of it the fact that it is so banal contributes to the ultimate goal which is to kind of you know transcend physical place and and and and reach some kind of higher state of consciousness and the repetitiveness of it it's almost like repeating a mantra you know or using a you know a mala or a prayer be it's a it's a it's ritualized in its own way the repetitive nature the fact that it's only a half-mile and not a two-mile course the fact that you're constantly passing the same thing there's something about that that almost creates that trance-like State or allows that to you know percolate to the surface perhaps with a little bit more facility I mean there's two outcomes for discipline right there's there's austerity which is suffering but with a lot of determination and there's joy I'm sure people have had the experience of austerity in that race in fact I know from mantras that you know oftentimes the first six to ten days are filled with exceptional suffering where the body the mind the heart are getting used to the pounding to the repetitiveness to the monotony but at some point in that race like for Sean Martin when he leaves his door in the Navajo Nation his discipline is translating to join in the 3,100 those of us with the Western mindset find that or see that it takes six to ten days for the runners to overcome suffering and channel that focus and that discipline into joy but even the craziest most sociopathic psychotic loony insane person on earth could not complete 30 100 miles so the question is like why are they doing it it's not because they're crazy it's not considered like a padlet as a path of austerity or suffering compounding into more suffering it's because there's a legitimate feeling of joy and there I say bliss that these runners feel and you end up seeing it in their faces if someone wants to go there you know the race is usually from mid-june to August yeah it's it's not like there's a big crowd of people there you could design walk right up and be right there and all the runners will come up and greet you they want to talk to you they don't want to they want to offer their joy not just because they're lonely out to here but because it's like they're feeling these like deep deep emotions and feelings and it's it's like the Japanese say it's like when you're feeling that it's like you want to be an emissary between in the Japanese sense the Buddha and humanity or here between your soul and humanity you're feeling something that you feel that other people are looking for and you can offer it and so these runners they're like little vessels going around in a circle how come it doesn't get more attention you'd think like okay here it goes again it's been going on forever you're in New York City you know media capital of the planet why aren't why aren't people writing about this and talking about it more you know and this is why I wanted to do this movie ESPN and a few other filmmakers that tried to do a movie on the 3100 and the only way to approach it I found is through the spirituality and if you're looking at making a movie something has to be inherently visual that 30-100 isn't visual but that's why we have the Kalahari Bushmen the Japanese monks the Navajo people that have come to write about 3100 have either just focused on the mind-numbing that like like foot splitting realities of the mileage and is only so often that you can write about that but the deepest articles have been about the spirituality and that really relies on the writers that relies on the editors to recognize that this isn't a one-day assignment and we were out there for 52 days this is a fifty-two day assignment because drama happens in moments and you have to be there when someone has kind of like a flowering of a spiritual experience does it make you want to do it it does you know filmmaking is really a really hard lifestyle for me because we're always traveling and you know I've been told that my body type is like of a bird meeting and and the practitioner told me this was like what does a bird need and I said worms he said no a bird need the nest so it's like you aren't meant to be traveling but I'm always traveling so I still do 45 or 50 miles a week but the train for this race apparently the way to do it is you know five or six mile runs Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday 45 or 50 Sunday 35 or 40 that's what everyone says that's the way to go it's like stacking it's like you want time on your feet and even then it's like you don't need to worry about pace like I did it was one of the best training runs of my life I did a run with more than 30 100 mile run errs or we started in Queens I had my my MasterCard we ran eight miles to a donut shop because you have to train and eat yeah we ate Donuts that's the thing about running in New York there's always someplace to go I know Chuck didn't eat you're never too far away and so we ended up doing a 30-mile training run that was just going from like smoothie bar to Ron shop and that's the way they train you know they run 4050 miles on my Ted Corbett on one day and they try to repeat that to get their body used to the idea of like maximum mileage was your arrest well entrepreneur all he sort of said he doesn't really he didn't even really train right he just lives an active lifestyle where he's kind of moving all the time and he didn't really put too much thought into some kind of race specific program so I I asked him and again he'd done the race thirteen times before and he's gone how many times eight times eight times right so I asked him like what's the most important thing and I think every ultra runner knows this in their heart your ability to finish a race is directly proportional to your ability to overcome problems and to realize that most problems aren't actual problems and so Ashby Hinault tries to change activities every chance he gets to during the daytime to keep his mind nimble and to realize that it's like you can have a problem and you can push past that problem by changing the way you approach it changing your activity changing your mindset this parts not in the film but we ended up going with OSH Brunel to Japan where he was climbing Mount Fuji as a way to train for the 3,100 that's amazing it's so counterintuitive because you would think the best way to train for this is to run as much as possible and to really connect with what it feels like to stay in it in that same repetitive motion for as long as possible irrespective of the level of discomfort that you're experiencing and that would mean just doing the same thing as long as possible I think there's two reasons why he tried to climb Fuji number one he wanted to do it in the winter with no preparation so by the time it got up the mountain his feet his shins were covered with blisters and he knew he couldn't he would never have worse blisters than he did on that trip and the physical challenge was so enormous again he knew that he'd never faced anything like that in the 3,100 at the same time like when you are going around the block you are relying on your power to visualize and being in those exceptionally beautiful areas gave him the imagination you know to be able to like just transport mind off right well there was that other guy who had horrible blisters Vasu Vasu had a booster horrific yeah we honestly the size of like a lemon yeah you know I never see blisters like that in my life and he did 700-mile kept going with those that with that like I can't believe he didn't quit Vasu is also like the sweetest most sincere person on that course we're like he's just overflowing with gratitude I mean like that's the combination of spirituality right trying to be grateful to everything and you see him he's just like just this like mush ball of gratitude and he's pounding out 70 to 75 miles a day and you'd expect to see these athletes throw temper tantrums once in a while with their crew and you don't see any of that you know as people will see in the movie one of the r8 and one of the first time participants a woman named Xiaomi two Achenbach Koenig who's a professional cellist you know thousand mile ten-day specialist she decided to bring her husband as her handler and for people who've done you know stage racers or 50 miles 100 100 miles with crew I think they had all agreed that like your worst handler as your spouse yeah that's what they say so he was her handler and you can't lose them like if you're on a hundred mile er and you lose them for 10 20 miles and then you see them again you know every half a mile he was there with you know pure love but also pure concern hmm for her he kept telling her like you got to drop out you know and people will see this in the movie but in 1996 she did an ultra in Vienna a hundred K race where you know she was hot it was 80 85 degrees she overheated and she was in a coma for two days and the 30 180 day 80 degree day is cool you know a couple summers ago even this summer it was 95 98 degrees for 6 8 days in a row and that's not even heat index s just like air temperature and how many people dropped out last year there was there's a very few Americans have done this race there's been one woman named super Bob Becker from DC who did 13 years in a row and finished it the first finisher was a man named Kelly there was another American man that did it to last summer an african-american woman 60 years old named Yolanda holder finished with 15 minutes to spare and she was a race Walker so there's only a certain pace that you can keep up so she had a couple bad days and she couldn't make it up by doing a 70 75 mile day she had to do like one lap extra you know every day she came back as 61 to do it this summer but unlike most summers the first two weeks of this year's race the temperatures were already hot yeah and she had blisters the size of aa CIO's like the size of like half lemons after 12 days ulcers in fact and nobody's young no well the youngest finisher was 29 really was that recent or that was about 10 years ago yeah I mean they all look like they're in their 50s and 60s and I think that speaks to the kind of spiritual strength that you need it's not brute physicality because unless you can tap into a deeper energy you're not gonna get joy out of it yeah let's talk about the Navajo a little bit I I didn't realize that there was this rich running culture that you know infused the Navajo Nation Native Americans didn't have any other modes of transportation other than their feet until the Spanish brought horses and even even then even though the Spanish came in the 1500s it wasn't until you know really the late 1500s in some parts the late 1600s that Native Americans indigenous people had access to horses what they did for thousands of years as they ran they were exceptional runners there's a story of a man named Louis Tawana me who was into anima who was a Hopi runner and represented the Olympic the USA in the Olympics in 1912 and he went back to the Hopi nation to do an exhibition 10k race and he and another kind of anglicized westernized there's other reasons why they were anglicized they appeared in their singlets and a couple of elders said you know you're gonna dress like that to do a race up here on the Mesa and this was a person who actually third place in the Olympics lowest wanama and the elder said I'll beat you and apparently the two elders who were right who jumped in the race were so far ahead of the two kind of modern participants after three or four miles that one of them the the bronze medalist in the 1912 Olympics dropped out that's a true running wasn't just a way of life running was a way to connect with Mother Earth and with father sky it gave men and women you know such a deep sense of place in a deep sense of power in a lot of southwestern traditions the Navajo in particular running is still used as a coming-of-age ceremony the equivalent of a bat mitzvah is practiced and young girls as one of the last rites of passage have to go on long runs it wasn't just exercise it's like if you look at one of the most spiritual practices the coming-of-age ceremonies and realize that like long-distance running is a part of that you can get a glimpse into how important it was that's amazing what do you I mean this is a little bit of scans but how do you think about that relationship between running and it being this this this really primal transcendent experience like why running why not something else like what is it about running that triggers that in the human body and mind you know when we were with the Kalahari Bushmen and they had been living in an unbroken lineage in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and northern South Africa for more than 125,000 years and evolutionary biologists say that we might not have all descended only from the San Bushmen of the Kalahari but each one of us has DNA markers that are only found or only exhibited by the San Bushmen so it's like we flowed through those people when we were with them I asked them I said like you know and they they they run to survive they go on long persistence hunts and what that means is that you know when we were beasts on the Savannah we didn't have a physical advantage over any of the creatures from the large elk to obviously the the big you know the big cats what we could do was run for quite long distances we'd sweat through every pore of our body at the same time you know when we took steps those steps were decoupled from our breathing apparatus a horse or a dog when they extend fully their forelegs that rib cage expands take a breath when they push off all four legs come together and the breath is pushed out there are anaerobic you know machines we're aerobic machines at the same time we learned how to carry water we could carry water in gourds or in skins and we learned to chase big beasts away from watering holes and they'd run 3040 miles you know in a in a gallop and we'd track them and we'd scare them away from the watering holes that we knew were in that area until after two or three days they were quivering masses and like dehydrated flesh and it was easy to approach them with a poison arrow and and shoot them so that's how we survived on the Savannah at the same time there's a deep cosmology among the San Bushmen around running and the practice of hunting they say when they run and hunt they're able to access the power of their ancestors they're able to access the power of the earth to overcome the the feebleness and the weaknesses of the human body and so my question posed to one of their one of their hunters was you know what came first did you build a I mean not that he would he's an anthropologist but do you know was was there was the cosmology around running built because of the physical reality that running was our weapon right that necessity drove it and he said no he said that we hunted because we understood the power of running like running was our spiritual practice and we challenged that we channeled that into an ability to survive running was the first religion one would also say but running and motion motion on mother earth and using the human body that channel non human are superhuman energies that was man and a woman's first religion that's baked into us as mammals mm-hmm that's amazing you know I I'm not sure I totally got that from the movie because when you when we explore the Kalahari it's it's more about the threat to their way of life because of hunting bands and and how they're kind of trying to figure out how to preserve this culture of running and their way of life in the wake of you know changes in the modern world that have now basically told them they can't do what they've always done but I didn't I didn't understand the spiritual depth of how deeply that runs you know there was a in in this type of a movie where we're trying to combine the 3100 the color it's trying to show all these different stories and trying to make them all work together there were only certain ways that they would all work together you know and some things had to be left on there of course cutting room floor nature of it at the same time it's like as you saw in the movie when you see people still running after animals it forces us to pose that question where we try to dive into the cosmology into the spiritual power that running might be you're able to afford somebody and that's kind of the impetus of the movie yeah I mean what I got out of that is you know just for people that are listening a ban has been placed on hunting and the kalahari are in this position of saying okay do we defy the ban or do we adhere to the law and ultimately a great peril of themselves they say we're gonna do it anyway and you can look at that a number of different ways you can say well they're just they're not law-abiding citizens or you can say frankly maybe they don't have a choice this is so deeply bred into who they are that they just have to do it no matter what in 1997 the I'm using the color because it's important in this case the black Botswana in government found copper underneath the Kalahari Desert which is the size of Massachusetts and it was considered an uninhabitable mass and the Kalahari Bushmen were allowed to to live there unmolested even though they'd only been discovered less than a hundred years before but once copper and other resources were found this anti indigenous colonial mindset kicked in and the entire population of the San Bushmen were relocated much like almost every single native population in the United States North America was relocated so we actually took one of our associate producers who's the executive director of wings of America the native running organization with us on that trip and his face was even so he's a dark-skinned fellow but his face was ashen white most the time because he recognized that what happened to his ancestors on the Navajo Nation in 1868 you know when four years prior that they were forced marched off their nation because a civil war general thought that there was gold there that could finance the entire Civil War proved to be untrue he was seeing that happen to the Kalahari he was seeing an entire generation that was forcibly separated from the culture and our main hunting character was forced off the Kalahari and like you said for the movie chose to sneak back onto their ancestral home site penalty of death and penalty of imprisonment if he was caught hunting but the hunting ban was placed as an excuse saying that the the San Bushmen you know shouldn't be allowed to hunt animals because we have a lot of tourists coming in to look at animals and we don't want them to kill them the San Bushmen said no animal species have been you know extinct in the or you know wiped out by us in the last hundred twenty-five thousand years so there's a complex set of rationale it's complicated but the main thing is that the government is forcibly trying to strip these ancient runners of their ability to run and hunt yeah and that dovetails into Shawn's story on the Navajo Nation this this hundred mile run that he embarks upon that you Chronicle is really his way of connecting with his ancestry by traveling from the school that his father there was correct me if I'm wrong the school that his father was the sort of Governments quality with his father was forced to attend that taught you know the traditional historical record that is at odds with this person you know this tribes experience traveling all the way to the his father's ancestral homeland accurate its absolutely accurate it was legal in the United States to forcibly remove a Native American boy or girl from his or her parents until 1977 and what that really led from was this notion that by stripping Indian kids away from their cultures they could the phrase was kill the Indian save the man if you killed the cultural part of the Indian you would save his or her soul indoctrinating them into a historical record that basically you know tells the conventional wisdom of America and friend and forbidding them from speaking their own language and forbidding them from their ancient practices so our Navajo character Sean Martin his dad Alan was forcibly removed from their property in northwestern Arizona to a government boarding school near Flagstaff and as a six year old boy he was so traumatized that annually he began sneaking out of the school and running at night a hundred and ten miles back home a number of kids tried that the father did or Shonda the father did a number of kids around the country that were that were forcibly schooled tried that and many many died and this was a trauma that young Shawn Shawn Martin the the modern-day Runner lived with he knew that his father had a terrible childhood at the same time he knew that running saved his father he and his brothers became exceptional runners but they ran to the point of absolute physical suffering because they knew of the suffering that their dad experienced was a way to connect with that yeah so in the film we look at four aspects we look at running to transcend like the 3100 mile race running to survive like the Kalahari Bushmen running for enlightenment like the monks and then running to heel you know either your own trauma or this historical trauma of your people and Sean's run from loop outside of Flagstaff up to his ancestral home site was about a hundred and ten miles and I don't know if I've seen anybody who was shouldering so much responsibility Sean's a teacher and then a very popular person on the on the Navajo Nation and a lot of people knew that he was running in honor of his father and because they all had relatives that had been forcibly schooled they all felt that he was running for their relatives so Sean carried not just his own historical trauma on this run but the expectations and the trauma of hundreds of other people yeah I didn't realize that that's a that's a heavy burden to bear it was heavy it's hard enough as people know like running an ultra but when you're running an ultra to challenge pain and we're overcoming that pain means success and if you don't overcome that pain the Run was for naught and so that's what he was doing he was trying to use this run as almost like a last-ditch effort to address the trauma of his dad's childhood and Sean's son who lives a very wonderful and I would say sheltered life on the Navajo Reservation compared to this young boy's grandfather Sean's father was accompanying Sean in the car and Sean's dad was too and so it was just a beautiful experience to watch this family not just come to terms not just heal their trauma but expose it and address it for a lot of people that couldn't run the same way that Sean was running and a lot of people whose ancestors died unlike Sean's dad hmm yeah he's running across the most beautiful landscape I mean there's no eight stations here he's not running on highways or Road it's like he is in the middle of nowhere and the most beautiful landscape you can imagine and I think anyone who has been to Monument Valley which is on the Navajo Nation or to other kind of exceptionally beautiful landmarks in Indian country realize that when Native Americans say that mother earth is the equivalent of the divine you see it you know it's like if the Grand Canyon isn't like something that that transports your mind and heart into other planes of consciousness you know nothing ever will yeah what has the process of making this movie taught you or how has it changed you I guess with respect of running of course but also in terms of how you think about an approach your life at one point I fancied myself as a quasi competitive runner I mean even in high school in a state the state of California with 30 million people I was you know one of the top right middle distance runners burned out by mid college really didn't know why I was running in my 20s I was still racing a little bit marathons and stuff 30s also didn't really have a purpose for running it wasn't until I met Sean and Sean said again that running is a prayer for the Navajo it's a celebration of life it's not punishment it's a teacher it's like if you're going through hardships you know don't just sleep on it you know don't go eat like a tub of ice cream or a bar of chocolate address it and address it the way humanity used to address it by connecting to your breath and to your feet mm-hmm that totally changed my attitude towards running at the same time you know again I I'm I'm I guess these days I'm a person of color but I reject those types of labels and I think running is a safe way to show that there are actually things that unites people like you know when you're on a trailer or you're in a race there's no red there's no blue there's no elections you're not you when you're running especially when you're competing you only have yourself and if you're in a relay your teammates but ultimately you have your feet and your and your heart it's elemental and that's given me a lot of solace it's like I know that we've been running for millions of years and it's an activity that we're gonna continue doing for hundreds of thousands more regardless of what the political state of humanity is we can go back to that state I think we'll all realize that there are things that unite us that are much stronger than the things that we think divide us yeah this this ritualization of human behavior and I like the characterization of running as a vehicle to connect with your breath and the power of breath right when you think of it in those terms it starts to sound a lot more like a meditation practice than an athletic endeavor at the same time I think the question is here's a question for you like how do you balance your spiritual life and the aspect of competitive racing yeah that's a tricky thing right I mean I think my personal perspective on competition has always been in Word facing like I'm not that concerned with what anyone else is doing I'm trying to be the best version of myself and if I can walk away from an event satisfied that I had that I had done that then that's a win irrespective of whatever the leaderboard says right and I think that's echoed in the movie with these runners in the 3100 as much as you know opera opera ha nul I don't know how to say that that's exactly right is I don't want to spoil it I was about to I was about to spoil that but I'm not going to he he he sort of iterates throughout the movie that it's not a it's not it is a competition but that it's really not about that and I think the more these competitors or anybody for that matter can can get to a place of being able to let go of that externality ultimately the better they perform anyway we began our theatrical run on Friday in Santa Fe and as you know the film is going to be rolling out around the country from the southwest to the Pacific Northwest California Colorado but we were really lucky that an opening night Billy Mills the Oglala Lakota 10 meter champion from the 1964 Olympics was our was the host of the advance goal and I got to ask him that very same question I said from a traditional native standpoint you've told us about the importance of the spirituality of running at the same time it's like you made your mark as a competitive runner winning a race that nobody but you thought you were gonna win I mean nobody thought that Billy Rose was going to win that ten thousand meter race and if anybody needs a pick-me-up just on YouTube type in Billy Mills Olympics greatest last lap I think in any modern race and he said exactly what you did he said I never raced to compete he said even when I won I was racing against myself I was in racing against my pain I was racing against my limitation I was racing against what my body was telling me it couldn't do and I pushed it beyond and just so happened that I won the 1964 Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 meters but like that's not how I defined my races yeah that was the external manifestation of of a mindset that allowed him to do that but it wasn't that goal no and that's the interesting thing because I think like once I realized that I could run for spiritual reasons that became a better competitor you know it's like I was much less dissatisfied with the second or third even in a local race than I ever would have been it's like I look a lot more - preparation I look a lot more - the ritual of practice and I know that if I show up with the starting line and I've done all the right things I'm gonna have a good experience you sound like you're ready to toe the line at next year's 3100 I would love to yeah I love lock day if not next year than the year after have have you shown to the Moot shown the movie to any of the protagonists yet I did we did a little screening for the stars of the movie you came out yeah how are you know we haven't generated them yet we gotta show it well they probably don't have Wi-Fi up there you can't send them a link III wanna I want to be there and watch someone they see it but we showed it to a lot of our Navajo characters in Sedona at a film festival which was our official world premiere in June and we decided to start our theatrical launch not in New York or LA where everybody wanted us to our distributor in particular because it's such a Southwestern story and it's like we wanted to bring it to the southwestern native populations so we launched in Santa Fe then Albuquerque and then Phoenix and Sedona and then go up to the mountain cities like and I'd say Mountain like outdoor cities like Portland and Seattle and Boulder and Denver before hitting all the big ones yeah that's that's great that's that's very smart guerilla marketing as well did you know to hit the hot beds of running where people are gonna be really interested in this and and create that kind of good word of mouth at our premiere in Santa Fe Henry Roanoke came Henry was one of the first Kenyans to come to the United States for schooling in the 70s around Philly I think University of Washington went to Washington State but in 1978 he set for World Records from the the 3,000 meters to the 10,000 meters I think even including the the the 3,000 meter steeplechase in the matter of just a few months and this is like in the 70s and so Henry told me he said when I grew up in Kenya it's like I never practiced running we hunted in the 60s like this isn't like ancient history like the ancient Bushmen he said in the 60s yeah we all hunted and that's how I ran I would run 20 30 miles 40 miles for play you know and for work and that's how we trained it's like we didn't separate this is the interesting thing for me we didn't separate running from our way of life we didn't put on new gear to go running we didn't take off our old gear to go inside he said everything was done in the same stuff because it was all a part of our life yeah you still see that I think with some of the cultures in Ethiopia and Kenya with you know these great marathon runners Kip choked and and the rest oh yeah it really emanates from from a way of life this summer Jim Wamsley who won the the western states you know he trained up at altitude and lived basically in a tent the last six weeks and preparation for the UTMB and you look at that and you go like that seems so elemental the idea of just living to run and running to live yeah all right we got to wrap this up but I think we can close it down with a final question which is what is it that you want people to take away from this movie that's a great question I think a lot of people have come in contact with running some people haven't enjoyed it because they weren't taught the real purpose of running think a lot of us that do enjoy running might not have the words to expand our enjoyment of running and I'm not saying that I know anything more than anybody else but the characters in the 3100 bring these perspectives which I hesitate to say aren't mainstream but they're so core and identifiable that I'm hoping that when people see the movie they'll have a newfound appreciation not just for running but for physical activity and our place in the world yeah I would imagine you come across people who will say this is great but like I hate running yeah right yeah it's like if you hate running that's okay but it's like do you like walking do you like hawk hiking is there a way is there an activity where you can go outside and put your feet on Mother Earth and understand that your breath is your connection to the heavens do that like that's the attitude that we all used to have back before we were encumbered by cars and shoes and Strava and GPS and all so when you see the runners in in the 3100 and you see what they're actually doing it might change how you define running for yourself it's definitely a lot not what you think no and it's a lot harder for me to like cop out of doing a daily workout now that I know that you know on any of my weekdays of three five six seven miles somebody out there could have been doing 50 or 60 miles yeah yeah well awesome I love the movie 31 run and become very emotionally impacted by you did a beautiful job it's a it's it's really just a fascinating exploration of this relationship this nexus between running and spirituality and self-improvement and how this really is part of what makes us human and thank you for making the movie I'm really grateful for the chance to have shown you the movie you obviously an inspiration to me into a lot of people and I hope that you know we can all just follow in the footsteps of your work and the other great guests that you have on No thank you if people want to see the movie where should they go to find the schedule they can go to WWE 1 0-0 3100 film.com we're playing all over the country four to five shows a day rolling out city by city yeah excellent man awesome and I'm gonna see you later this week right you're coming to the running for good screening super exciting very good man we're gonna do a live podcast it's the premiere of that movie super excited to have you thank you for sharing today thanks so much right is there anywhere else where people can connect with you there's an Instagram account for the movie at three one zero zero film mom at 3100 film and then on Facebook facebook.com forward slash 3100 film you can message that and I'm the one answering mother message or the guy the guy hit me up let me know if you're coming out your screening and yeah well I'll say hi all right cool we did it thank you you've how do you feel I feel great this is one of the most inspiring conversations I've had like a year and a half good well come back again we'll do it again thank you all right thanks Sanjay peace plants running [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 55,306

Keywords: rich roll, vegan, health, fitness, diet, nutrition, athlete, podcast, inspiration, motivation, plant-based, wellness, spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, self-help, self-realization, transcendence, enlightenment, running, run, 3100, 3100 run and become, film, documentary, sanjay rawal, marathon monks, mt. hiei, kalahari, navajo, native american, ultramarathon, ultrarunning, sri chinmoy, self-transcendence, buddhism, hinduism, persistence hunting, human rights, japan, queens, africa, navajo nation

Id: 7glPtSxhXNY

Length: 115min 13sec (6913 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 02 2018