The Secrets of Speed & Endurance: Matthew Futterman | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] all right now to you thanks for doing the podcast great to be here yeah it's nice to see you again we have we've crossed paths a couple times over the years I went to college with your lovely wife yes and I think I think I said this to you in an email but Amy I have this it's weird how memory is bizarrely selective but I have this very vivid memory of being in a class with her freshman year and there was an assignment to do something creative and I made this photo exhibit I went downtown into San Francisco and photographed all these homeless people and I blew up these photographs and mounted them and was really the first thing first time I'd ever done anything like creative like I was always very much like a bookish person and I just remember her being so kind and and considerate like she had all these nice things to say about it and it stuck out I think it still is in my memory because it was really the first time that anybody had had like put wind in my sails for anything creative that I've done and it's always stayed with me it's bizarre well I had a similar conversation with a one of my first writing teachers in college recently and because I had I have like a a you know there's not one specific memory except for the fact that I was in a creative writing class in college at little school in upstate New York huh and I was like trying to do this thing and writing like bad short stories and I'm sure he knew they were bad but he he was nice enough to be like you know these aren't all bad there's something kind of good here and he said it in such a way that it was sort of like he was giving me permission to pursue something that I really liked and gave me pleasure and I think and that really like stuck out well my mom's like an aunt is it Mike Weiss writer of what he loves that's a first what are the podcast I spy finder modeling on the microphone yeah well they know I probably know that that I'm a huge Charlotte's Web a fan so they know that they're in safe hands all right now you won't get bit right but I the but that idea that someone like gives you permission to do the thing right that you really like I think that's that really stays with you and it's important and I think as you go through life and as you sort of mature in your career if you pass that on to a younger person who you see sort of fighting with something and trying to do something and just trying to and working really hard at it I think it's a really like valuable yeah that you can do and they're really small gestures that to the person giving it might not seem like anything but can make all the difference and person's life and people come back to you like years later and they say like I remember when you said to me and you get you know yeah I'm sure Amyas know right recollection right have no recollection of this but you know things stick with you um that when they sound right and when you want to hear them there's sort of these yeah helmets we should probably point out I mean Amy you know is this uber successful publishing executive she's done pretty well I mean I know it's generally amazing what she's created and I remember her as being like really smart and intellectual and savvy she had this like like New York cool about her kind of intellectual girl from New Jersey telling her she had New York cool sophisticated you know what I mean and and so it's no surprise to me what she's been able to create and do and I guess she's probably most well known for discovering big little lies and the help right like she published both of those yeah those are two big ones on the fiction side last year she did Jim Comey's book which was an experience yeah I will say that and she like she created her own imprint at a very young age right which was like highly unusual yes it was there was a time when you know there's there's certain directions you can go and publishing business and that was one thing she wanted to try and I believe it was Putnam less the company that said it gave her her own imprint so yeah on the spine of many books says Amy Einhorn books it's pretty cool yeah she since his move to another company yeah Flatiron books now and has done a lot of great stuff there so does she do you go to her to review your work like being married to somebody who's in who's an editor it's great well it's great for me I mean I mean she's not the publisher of my books obviously but you know every it's funny a lot of people asked me and they asked it in the context of oh that must be really hard you know sharing your writing with her and her going over that and I mean I've written two books now both times did the exact same thing which is before I turned in the manuscript you know like she got the first draft uh-huh and you know tore it apart right in her way and people said I was that really difficult and my reaction was why would it be difficult like here's the person who loves you and once nothing but what's best for you yeah and she's actually really good at this thing she gets paid to do it and here she is like and who else's hands would you rather yeah yeah of course situation so you just sort of go I mean you go and you let yourself be vulnerable you know that's okay like you need help but we all need help this is a but you're both running and writing people see as very sort of solitary activities but they're both I think can be very collaborative arts and at least when they're done well it takes a team and having your wife on your team helping you along the way and saying you totally lost me during these 20 pages I have no idea what you're talking about you know that's something right I take to heart and gonna be say okay why well here's what I was trying get out there and she's avoiding you know well you failed in that spot it didn't work it didn't work and you say like okay great let's try it again yeah you just have to have a healthy ego and you know check yourself a little bit I would imagine but nobody's gonna put the amount of care into it you know than her like there's this idea that that when you publish a book you're gonna be having these midnight three-hour conversations with your editor over philosophy in life and it just doesn't work that way I mean I don't know what your relationship was or has been with your editor of this book but editors are busy and with the consolidation of all these publishing companies they're like project managers they're handling so many books and no matter how much they care about your book they're they're distracted by all the other things they have to do yeah you're one of the you're one of a bunch of authors and you're one of a bunch of books that's being published and you know I think it's always been that way where you know people turn to read to turn to other writers and said you know can you look at this for me does this make sense is this work and and then once it's sort of ready to go out the door you feel like it's gonna put it's enough it's in the kind of shape to go out the door then you'll let it go out the door I mean I know Amy would never have let me put a manuscript out into the world if it just wasn't up to the right standards if it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do and I'm pretty hard on myself too I have this massive fear of boring readers it's it's a big ask I think these days with so many distractions to get people to read you're a thousand word stories much less read you're a hundred thousand word book so you got to put every effort into keeping the story moving keeping it going keeping them turning pages and I feel like I'm a pretty good judge of my own work at this point on when I'm falling short I don't know if I'm my biggest critic but I'm up there mm-hmm yeah I had a Kelly Corrigan in here yesterday who's written a slew of New York Times bestsellers and she said something almost exactly the same what you said like if you're going to ask people to read your book like you better have shown up for the page 110 percent because it is a big ask in this distracted age to ask somebody to sit down and and spend that kind of quiet undistracted time with something that you poured your heart and soul into it takes a little while and I'm kind of a slow reader so it takes me a while to read books and it's just it's hard to get people's attention you know these days well you did a great job I love the book it's definitely not boring it's a page today I'm not done with it yet but I'm well into it and I really enjoyed it and that's what we're here to talk about today we're gonna talk about running we're gonna talk about this book and I'm interested maybe that the launching point is just to ask you like why you're like first of all why what drew you to writing a book about running to begin with and how and why did you laser in on this character Bob Larson as a protagonist to tell the story you wanted to tell well I'll deal with the first question which is what drew me to one write about this and that's really I think the question that's been sort of battering my head the last I don't know 5 10 years or something like that I mean I've been a runner for let me do the math 35 years or something like that but the question that I've sort of been going back and forth is I've always wanted to get at the idea of you know why do we run you know what of all the activities we could do why do we still do this thing and we haven't had to run for our food for a long time now since we became an agricultural culture and yet we still do it and people have sort of never stopped doing it obviously they do it in much larger numbers now and wear fancy clothes when they're doing it in fancy shoes but what's going on with us when we go spend three miles or five miles there eight miles or 250 miles running at a time what are we running to what are we running from runners spend a lot of time alone often and we have a lot of time to think and I think that's one of the reasons why running sort of lends itself to some pretty good writing at times and so there was I always wanted to write a running book about some of these things but I didn't I didn't really want to write it about myself I didn't think there was anything particularly outstanding about my life as a runner and it's outstanding to me but I didn't know how to I didn't think Mike I had your own person yeah I didn't think I didn't think I could you know my I didn't think I could carry a whole book and all my ruminations about running and so I was always looking around for the right running story that hadn't really been told yet and I also have always been fascinated by the early days of long-distance running and when I say early days it really wasn't very long ago right when we talked about it you know the first running boom was like in the 70s and the running culture back then the sort of roots of running a lot of it was very sort of rebellious very countercultural I mean the first sort of poster boy of running was D free Fontaine who had the moustache in the long run err and that's what everyone wanted to be like that was that was what running was it wasn't this mainstream activity that was on the cover of magazines and it was it was really sort of very niche and very fringe and there were a few things more rebellious that you could do than wake up on a Saturday morning and go and run 20 miles yeah you'd be the freak on the side of the road yeah it's it's crazy to think about that because it wasn't so long ago and now to reflect on the fact that running is like the most popular participation sport with you know hundreds of thousands of people doing Mareth in some city every single weekend but I have a very like romantic notion of Prefontaine and pre Prefontaine era of these bearded guys with mustaches in the early days of Nike with the waffle shoe and no GPS watches and just ragtag you know dudes who are essentially hippies like out there doing something on the fringe like there's something just super punk rock and cool about that it's great if any really I mean you say I mean I'm sure it was a little different in some ways because you also had like Billy Mills who came out of the Marines and you know they did some running in the you know in the military so you had sort of that wing of it but a lot of what you just described that's kind of what it was you had these it was it was very fringe and so I've always sort of liked that idea and then I've always known I've known Bob Larson his main character in the book for a while because he I knew him as Meb Keflezighi coach right was how most people know him or maybe some people out here knew him as the longtime UCLA track coach but I never really knew his backstory into one I got invited to a documentary about him that was made by one of his former runners and it told this story I sort of had this mention of his origins which was with this group of like we said these kind of hippie runners in late 1960s early 70s San Diego called themselves the Hamal toads and this group of runners who sort of come out of nowhere to win the 1976 national cross-country championship back when that was just about the biggest race other than the Boston Marathon uh-huh and these were his lab rats like these were the guys that that he used to come up with his theories of how to run far fast he had done a lot of thinking about it but it was gonna take experimentation and he came along these guys and he was working with them for years in terms of sort of figuring out his right and so I and I just really loved that story and I and then I saw and I saw a picture of these guys too and there's a picture unlike yeah was three of the book right because that was the picture when I just remember sitting and watching this documentary and I saw that picture and I thought oh who the hell are those guys yeah I got it I gotta find out who those guys are and I thought if they're interesting that might be a good story cuz you need good characters right and I started calling them the maker of the film this guy Robert Lusitania was incredibly generous he said that would be great if you wrote a book about this here's all my friend's phone numbers uh-huh and so I called them and you know each one had just a great story I started asking them know why do you why did you run something like if they had a really boring answer to that first question you would think well maybe there's not a book right let's to see how they respond to that right and not one of them said I don't know it's just something I was kind of good at and I just sort of did they all like had thought really hard about what they were doing out there and they all had really sort of visceral emotions about how it made them feel why they were doing it what they would been trying to accomplish and where it had sort of brought them in life and I think each one of those had you know some reason something that they were like to go back to a point you made a minute ago they were all running from something and running towards something yeah right it's the answer to that question is a combination of both of those things I think with most people most people I would think if you're the kind of person who's I don't know if you you know I guess the glass glass half-empty person if you you're neurotic or if you are you know self-conscious and self-aware and you like to think about these things then yes there's often an interesting answer right so at this moment in time the US was certainly not known as any kind of big running power right and 170 well no like it that the at the beginning of like this journey there wasn't a lot of science and understanding about how to train nobody nobody knew I don't think people had ideas but it was one of those things that it was all it was all well he did that and he won a gold medal so we should do that right but no real thought it was very little science behind it very little experimentation and that was the thing that really sort of separated Bob Larson early on from everybody else because he he ended up at San Diego State University and iego for the most part started in Minnesota on a farm with no running water and no electricity family moves to San Diego when he was 11 years old and so he grows up in San Diego ends up at San Diego and runs in high school ends up at San Diego State and it's running at San Diego State and is really interested in physical physical education and what we now call kinesiology and ends up getting to know this professor named Fred cash who is doing some of the first studies on human cardio health because at the time when we talk about running not being something people did he was just didn't exercise I mean the ideas adults so the idea it was thought that if you strained your heart after the age of about 35 that was like a very dangerous thing for you that was the sort of risk massive cardiac catastrophic events ha ha and so nobody I mean you think about that and this was not very long ago there's just like a little more than 50 years ago maybe 50 years ago and at that time you know we're sending rockets to them you know we're sending people to the moon where the Russians actually have a cellphone at this point you're they have it they have invented a phone that can fit in your pocket so it was sort of like the first cell phone I mean the modern map of Europe was kind of laid out like modernity had happened and yet when it comes to a cardiac health we are in the complete dark ages I think to me it's completely baffling and so then there's this guy Fred cash is doing this studies and he's having these adults in San Diego come a few evenings a week to San Diego State and he's telling them to run and he's taking there and he's measuring their heart rates and what he's finding is that the more they run the more their heart rates are going down that they're become that their hearts are becoming more efficient and Bob at the time is a college runner and he's training in summers and in summer as he does this really radical thing which is he goes and he runs on trails and he runs on roads cuz he's not running around the track all the time and he does that and he then he's working with Fred cash and looking at this lab and he has like this aha moment where he thinks yeah that's actually what I'm feeling I feel like the more I run the longer I run the more efficient I feel the better it is it's so hilarious because it's so self-evident and obvious now to think that that was not something that people were aware of at that time I mean like Salk had invented the polio vaccine and yet people didn't realize the heart was a muscle like any other muscle like you know do bicep curls your biceps get bigger but work out your heart it might die I think it doesn't it doesn't make sense but that was the idea no the heart is just a muscle like any other muscle exercise it and it will become stronger and it will become more efficient so conventional wisdom at this time pre you know this epiphany was for track and field athletes well or cross-country athletes just go to the track and do what I mean how are they training at that time you basically had two sort of amino call them schools but one of the schools was really like very much in its infancy that would be the the Lydiard school lyddiard was this coach from New Zealand who Bob Bowerman at at Oregon we're going to visit and had come back with with or Lydiard has the first sort of job grupe mom in New Zealand put and his idea was volume you know run you gotta run more than a hundred miles a week but it wasn't really focused on intensity he was mainly focused on the volume and well his mantra was trained on strain so then he had that school on the one side and then on the other side you had the sort of traditional europeans emil Zatopek was their hero because he's the only guy the one the 5000 the $10,000 marathon in the Olympics and Zatopek and all the sort of Zatopek disciples were obsessed with intervals so that was go to the track and do half mile intervals or quarter mile intervals or you know at the most three quarters maybe everyone smile you'd do some mile repeats but it was largely you know Zatopek would do these these crazy quarter mile training sessions where he would do like 60 or 65 quarter miles all of them in like 65 seconds with with you know a minute rest right in between and so Bob comes along and his idea what he eventually happens a bond is a sort of middle ground his two questions were why do the long runs have to be so slow and why do the intervals have to be so short what if we try to go hard for a long period of time what if you go to what he starts talking about as your threshold your edge go to that spot right before you're gonna become exhausted if you go at that pace for too long time and try and stay there stay there for a mile today stay there for a mile and a half tomorrow and slowly build up and that becomes known what we all call today is tempo runs right sort of lactate threshold training that moment that place where if you go any harder it's unsustainable but if you go just a little bit easier it's just a little bit too comfortable like finding that edge and training at you know at that for as long as possible I'm trying to expand your ability to maintain that pace right and it's uncomfortable I mean the idea is worst right you're at if you're at a place you're at a place where you're not comfortable but the idea is to teach your body and teach your mind really how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and and that that's okay right it's okay if you're afraid you're not gonna die it's okay if you're afraid of it because we're all probably afraid of it it's not you know it's a learned behavior to go to the place that makes you uncomfortable and to stay there and to think don't slow down actually try and go a little bit faster see if there's one more click I can get to and that was really that's sort of the central revelation of what he had his runners doing and it was all measured I mean he would taking their pulse rates it wasn't he would have groups of runners he would he would do you know he had a control group and then he had the experimental group and he take their pulses ahead you know in the middle of their runs he would see how much how much they were straining how much these guys were straining and they would look at the results and who was getting better uh-huh and that's what he came upon so his his methodology he was seeing he was seeing bigger gains and more compressed periods of time than control groups or people that were training in accordance with these other methodologies definitely yeah it's interesting because all three of those modalities there's wisdom to all of them I mean the sort of initial you know volume you know concept I mean that's sort of the legacy of that is kind of the math atone method like that's I trained with that like all the time like building building that efficiency from the ground up as opposed to the top down which is what happens when your threshold training and the interval training like now I feel like in modern times the best you know approach I mean depending upon distance and you know what level you're at is some combination of all of those yes and that's the thing you have to do I mean now everybody says you you gotta have three elements to your training you gotta you know you have to have you got to have volume you got to have you know those threshold runs or I'm sure if you're cycling same thing or if you're swimming the same main threshold swims and then you have to do you know some of those short intervals the workouts and stuff you don't have to build build it from all three but while you're doing that if you're interested in distance running if that's your thing the intervals probably shouldn't be too short yeah and the and the long runs shouldn't be too slow if you have go I mean if your goal is just to finish then you know close you want who cares I mean but if you are really focused on or even slightly focused on improvement and getting faster and I'm and I will say I've never met I've never met someone who ran a race and then didn't say I wonder if I could do it fast uh-huh that's just like a very I just feel like that's a human it's a very human thing and so is so if you ever have that that thought I mean that's the kind of thing I'm speaking to here right that drive that we have well the other the other radical thing is that he did that Larson did is he took them off the track which at the time was an athame right like every day you're supposed to go to the track and try to be better than you were the day before just hammering these repeats on the clock and I know just from my history of being a swimmer like that that it there's a huge mental toll that comes with that because you know you're in a swimming pool it's a fixed distance there's a pace clock and if you're not hitting these repeats at times you know that are better than you were the week before or even the day before you start to think like am I making any progress like it's very hard to you you just can't go hard every day and there was a period of time where that was the philosophy just go in and just like go as hard as you can every single day and for him to take these athletes off the track get onto the trails you know you don't really there's no GPS washes they don't know exactly what pace they're running and just to learn how to go on feel and practice these surges and being at that you know that edge had to be some mental reprieve well the track and the pool probably is really really good for one person and that's the coach because lockers can stay we can stand in the middle of the track or it can stand on the pool deck and can have the watch and they can monitor everything and you know he or she is not the one going around in circles like a hamster all afternoon or going back and forth in the water all day and driving those hey you know good going going slowly going mad but when you get off the track or you get out of the pool it's just I mean for obvious reasons it's liberating yeah you feel free you can go you're going from point A to point B and the good thing about Bob is that he started coaching when he was really young so you know this first team of runners he coached at mana Vista High School in San Diego you know they show up for cross-country practice on the first day and they're looking around for the coach and the windbreaker and know he's actually the guy wearing shorts and a t-shirt running shoes and he says let's go and they run together and he was running with his runners you know until he couldn't keep up anymore right or even and even even when you know he was in his 30s and certainly slower than the people that he was training you know he would run the first he would run the warm-up with him they would run the fight at first five six miles with them and then let them go he was like a 420 miler yeah right at one point it was a 420 miler and a twenty and a 24-second 200 runner and he's had some wheels but you know he so he would sort of build that trust equation that way and you know he's still he's eight years all these store runs he lives on you know he lives on on top of one of the Brentwood Hills and it's it's about two miles up the hill to get up to his house and I was sitting on his deck with him last night having a beer and he said and he says yeah it's however workout I did it a couple weeks ago uh-huh and I sort of said you ran up the helical East guys like oh yeah it's pretty cool that's awesome like he's still run and he still runs most days usually drives his car down to the bottom of the hill and runs on the flats but I mean it's that idea that he runs you know straight up Tigertail Road or yeah I know that deep it's pretty darn steep yeah and when he was coaching UCLA he would on Sunday mornings he would tell his runners you know run up to my house and you know they'll be pancakes waiting for you and did it sort of as bonding but also it was good he'll what does he what does he think of a book like he has to be thrilled uh he it took it took some getting used to for him he is you know he has these he has these um Minnesota roots and when I was where I was working on this book and I you know from the beginning and you got to sort of figure out what the book is about and you have to sort of figure out you know we sometimes we call it the mule you know who's gonna carry the book huh who's the character is gonna carry the story and that wasn't immediately apparent to me in terms of how it was gonna be structured you know I thought maybe it would be about all these different characters and it is about all these different characters but at some point it became clear to me you know what this story needs to stay as close to Bob Larson as possible his story he's the only guy in America who was present at the birth of the running boom the collapse of American distance running and the person who brought it back herself cetera and resuscitated it and you know that's really like an incredible story and that's what sort of the book was about but in the same way you know he I don't have any business relationship with him I was just interviewing him along the way and I wasn't sharing drafts of it with him so I mean Billy being the Oakland A's president yeah if he didn't know Moneyball was really about him until he got sent you know a galley an advance copy of it and it all shocked he was a little shocked that he was the main character and so then when I sent it to Bob once it was sort of in book form I sent it to him to have a look and also I needed I needed him to fact check to make sure I wasn't getting stuff wrong I it took a little he was sort of a little surprise and he was a little he was just sort of take he was just he's just not he's a very humble person the reason nobody has heard about him is because even though he would have had every right to 25 years ago or however many years ago when he's producing like gold medalist after gold medalists to have written a book and called it the Larson way or something like that and gone on any number of talk shows or you know gone on the circuit and become a franchise into himself he's never thought of he's not the kind of person who would ever think of doing something like that so it was my great good fortune that he's sort of this unknown guru of American songwriting and twos little so he loves the book now but it took him a while to get used to it right is he doing like events with you will he come out and yak about this time he was with me last week we did an event with New York Road Runners and I were while I'm in LA we're doing something with la running club and south bay runners at one of the schools in Santa Monica during their weekly workout uh-huh and so yeah I think he's having a pretty good time with this it's a bit of a kick for him my my favorite part of the book is is just the the kind of Bad News Bears story of these toads right this ragtag group of young runners who you know don't sort of cut the cloth cut this you know image of elite athletes and how he shapes these young minds and athletes into into Champions and the story of them going to the au Championships without any money and you know they show up they don't really have uniforms or indeed only this shot of water kind of thing I mean how can you not like reap for these guys that yeah that's what it was when they have no they had been they had been turned down by the early version of Nike Bob knew Jeff Hollister and it said I got a pretty good team here can give me some money to get him to Philadelphia and he said who's on the team and he's basically said yeah not really impressed I've never really heard of those guys sorry not into it uh-huh and yeah they were a bunch of they these were not like the elite of the elite look they were fast there were some good they were great natural runners and they had good careers you know ed Mendoza ran at 210 marathon in Boston on a really hot day and he was on the Olympic team in 1976 so there were some good runners there but they weren't sort of the blue blood mm-hmm runner in terms of they weren't the sort of chosen the chosen ones who I'm sure you grew up with those guys in swimming you know they're really the guys who are always good as teenagers and some of them go on to be very good as adults and also just the these they're these programs that you know like oh well the good people come out of these programs like in you know and running it's Oregon or what have you there's certainly you know that exists in swimming and here you have you know Larson with this with this group their unknown they're not there's no legacy now he was it was at Grossmont junior college right that's where they are that's basically where most of them started Grossmont Grossmont junior college in you know and san diego he was only allowed to you know the community college system you aren't allowed to recruit you you it's like a public high school your district is drawn and he could draw kids from eight schools and eight high schools in the region and of course once he had some success and people start like moving into the region so they can go and run and run for him but it was basically whoever shows up on day one right and of course he would look in the local high school scene but his recruiting amounted to he would have a barbecue at his house and buy a keg of beer and invite the local track coaches over once a year and say like so who do you got who's coming in who should I keep my eye on yeah that was it and they came to him but they worked differently and they worked harder and so he would show up to these Invitational meets with all the big four-year schools and he was back they were better than that they were beating they were beating all of them because they were just because they had happened on to that the sort of secret sauce and talked about them as a team I think we mentioned before and that people think of this as a very sort of solitary activity and individual sport but you know we talked about Larsen's first principle of going to your eggs the second one was you got a train you cannot train alone like you are you are part of a team the group is more powerful than the individual you lean on your teammates they will pick you up on the days when you are slacking off when you're falling out of the pack you're gonna try and run harder to keep up with the pack and you know tomorrow you're gonna be the one that's leading the pack and someone else is gonna be falling off and they're gonna try and keep up with you it's a you know it's like they I've mentioned that it's like the peloton in cycling you know you're just that big clump it's really powerful I mean there's aerodynamic reasons and cycling lights really powerful but psychologically it's really powerful - the last thing you want to do is get chewed up and spit out and ride behind so there was that idea and then the third idea was just that where you're born and how you're born and how you grew up is not your destiny you can change your destiny if you do the work if you do the right things and work as hard as anyone you can be better tomorrow than you were yesterday I love that because it would be easy to say that his philosophy is lactate threshold training but in truth his philosophy is a philosophy of life it's applicable to running and being excellent in running but those are principles and rules to live by no matter what it is that you do or seek yeah that's I mean that's that's honestly like that's really the main thing that sort of drew me to this story you know I wanted to write a running book that was yeah it was about running but you know running is sort of the lens as a running and writing are sort of the two lenses through which I approach life and I don't have been a sports writer for about 20 years I've been journalist for 25 years I don't think I would do this if and I wouldn't have sort of gravitated towards sports if I didn't think it had a lot of stories that would convey sort of these lessons and not morals and I say that it's ounce or tough preachy and stuff but I'm very drawn to stories that can speak to things beyond the playing field and beyond the field of competition because these are the stories that sort of help me get through my day and I have provide me with like I said that that sort of lens of which of which I can sort of have some revelations and epiphanies about what's important and how to approach things and so in when I'm doing my job right you know readers are getting that benefit as well and very Murakami yeah that's sort of that that's that's the hope um is to sort of convey that and hope that people you know if this book makes you love running and be faster terrific but if it makes you think it's okay to be uncomfortable I actually really want to push myself to a kind of threshold um whether it's in relation in my relationships or in my job or even just you know I want to start painting I've never painted before and I'd really like to try that even though I know I'm gonna be terrible at it then great and that's that then that would be the the greatest thing yeah having the courage to approach that edge and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is where you meet yourself and where the growth occurs that's where the man I mean that was the whole idea with wood Bob when he because where you're when you feel like you're gonna collapse and you don't that's where the magic is like that's where you find truth about yourself yeah that's where you that's where you can take that moment into a race and know that when you're really hurting you can think back to no not I've been here I've actually been here before I can do this I can I can keep at this for another mile or two and I can keep up with this guy and it spills over into everything that you do you know you develop this resiliency and this willingness to confront that edge in other areas of your life and and as a result your life expands hopefully yeah hopefully it definitely does and and you know you just can't you know whether you're a runner or not whether it's running or swimming or whatever it is that you do where you can kind of find that flow state sense you return from that more complete like with clarity that you didn't have beforehand like you I'm sure you've never come back from Iran and said I wish I hadn't done that or you know some problem that you were wrestling with by allowing it to kind of exist in your subconscious while you're running you come back with a solution to it and I don't know how that works or why that works but it works no I definitely do a lot of my best writing while I'm running there's no question about that I can tell you exactly where I was when I figured out the subtitle of the book which was it which is you know a band of misfits and the Guru will unlocked the secrets of speed I was having really hard time with like that verb like searching for the secrets of speed or searching and then like you know I was in Central Park and I was just about on the north end I got a hundred and second Street and all of a sudden and I've been thinking about it for like an hour as I was an hour into my run right before the hill back up - yeah right exactly and all of a sudden it was like unlocked came from me and I was like yes unlocked and it was there and you know everybody you know my family at this point is quite used to me the image of me like coming back into the apartment from a run instead of grabbing the closest pen and paper and scribbling things down before I forget them yeah things that I've thought of things I want to pursue lines and stories that I want to use just if you ever have to stop in the middle of the run to like record a voice memo or something well I don't want my phone because I hate carrying things and you know I run to get away from stuff yeah especially my phone um and so I got nothing i got nothing to record on I don't I don't have a Apple watch I've had that thing go where I'll have some idea mid-run yeah and it's like please don't let me forget this right sometimes I do you know yes I don't want to stop and make a note or something like that I'm sure I'm sure I lose some of it but I feel like your mind can be a pretty good filter and if it's really if it is important you'll remember if you really or if you play a game and you think about ways to remember it you will one of the things you do in the book is you also weave in your own personal relationship with running and I and I like that I mean I think it it it allows the reader to you know connect with why you're writing the book and you know identify some aspect of themselves in in yourself because you're relatable in your relationship to running so the question that I have is that you ask all of these other people is why do you run like how do you answer that for yourself well I mean the this sort of funny it's funny to me at least answer is I got 123 marathons at this point and I'm grown like kind of obsessed with trying to complete that distance as quickly as possible and see how far see where I can get to and you know within the confines of a full-time job and raising children and reading books and writing books and so be cut and the reason I thought of have come upon as to why I'm focused on my time is because I guess I kind of feel like if I can keep getting faster then I'm not really getting older right or you're not gonna die I'm not gonna die okay just ridiculous but you know but it's a fun little game to distract me from it and it makes us you know it makes you feel good makes you get out of bed in the morning so there's there's that reason it's a little sort of existential game you know but it's you know a few other reasons why I run I just never feel more alive than when I'm running I never feel I never my thoughts never feel as sort of ordered there's a sense of peace that I'm getting even when you know doing half mile intervals you know and that dreaded eight by eight hundred workout right everybody has to do at some point when you're trying to work so fast Michigan 800 yeah they're there cause there's a there's an editor runner's world he said Bart Yasso oh yeah actually hundreds yeah they really work I mean it's it's torture hey I don't know it's curious what what's the swimming equivalent of the eight of like the eight hundred is it 100 I mean I think it depends on what what discipline like what stroke you swam what your event is I mean I would do these crazy sets of like 10 times 200 fly that probably would be the most similar version of that on some level that's a it's funny he said cuz it because my 800 time and running he's about I think my 200 time in swimming uh-huh so I sort of get curious and when I'm swimming I'd sometimes two sets of 200 because I can't run every day right it's the same on my crotch Jay it's a similar amount of time you're pushing yourself but so even when I'm like pushing myself like that I'm very conscious of like there is a kind of piece to this um there's a quiet that happens and and I think it's sort of getting to that quiet and getting to that it's just it's it's just very elemental you know just you and your shoes in the road and maybe sometimes there's 10,000 people surrounding you but it just it just feels right it's like it feels I don't want to say I'm like I am my best self when I'm running because that would be it just doesn't sound right but it's one of those it's one of those times it's one of those it's a it's a it's a thing that I do where I feel really comfortable with who I am and it's other people have other things that they do where they where they feel that way and that's a that's a spot where I'm just I'm just in a good I'm in a good place yeah I had an opportunity many years ago my family we were in Santa Fe just for a couple days to get away and it was during period of time when Ryan Hall and Sarah Hall were living there and Ryan's like hey we're gonna be down at the track like doing it work out like once you come down and I got to watch him do you also ate hundreds while I was like on the outer Lane plotting doing my eight-minute miles or track and I just never seen anything like that like I was just you know marveling at what a specimen he was running around the track yeah unbelievable and his pulse probably what not gone high yeah yeah it's it it's an amazing thing but having said that did you talk to him after and was he like talking about your running also well he's a very generous curious person but you know what an incredibly humble well one is oh well yes he is all those all those things terrific person but one of the things I loved about running is in the DNA of the sport is there's this there's there's a not much of a gulf between the elites and the you know workaday runners in terms of talking to each other about what they do there's this understanding that we're all sort of doing the same thing in a way that if you went to try if you were a golfer and you went to try and talk to Phil Mickelson and you started talking about like you know the match you were playing at your club the other day yeah he would laugh at you you would like make some joke about you know your drive or your putter or something like that whereas I've been honestly never met an elite runner who wasn't interested about how you were training wanted to was interested in hearing you know how you felt or how somebody else felt during you know Boston in 2014 when it was kind of hot or or in 2018 like what was your experiencing of it when it was you know 37 degrees and pouring rain it's that's just part of the culture Adib Raman said to me like last year when I said like I'll be I'm not comparing what I do to what you do and he said I said what do you mean then we all experienced the same pain we just experienced it at different times that's amazing there's the scene in the book where where you get a text from meb the night before Boston your eyes for Neal in New York yeah and he's like you know suffering on the horizon tomorrow or something like anything the pain is in the forecast for all of us right and I just thought like how cool is that like the here's the guy who's lining up you know for the race of his life trying to win and and he had the the mindset to like check in with you yeah and see how you were doing yeah that's like and they and that's just not me and mad because I was a reporter I mean there's there's you could find all kinds of people who the night before the marathon are you know trading Instagram messages with you know you fill in the elite runner you know this is you know they're passing time everybody's nervous about the race and you're said essentially that same time which makes it really beautifully unique right it's so there's a there's a camaraderie there we all it make it may be somewhat rooted in a sort of common affection for it because being being a long-distance runner and being an elite marathoner is a very you know intentional career choice being any kind of elite athlete is obviously you're gonna take a lot of pain and a lot of suffering but being an elite marathoner I mean that is a lot of time a lot of time alone a lot of really hard workouts a lot of pain and you only get two cracks at it a year if you don't marathoner because you can't really your body can't really perform well more than twice a year in a marathon maybe three times in like 14 months or something but not more than that so the payoff you know if it's yeah stakes are pretty high so to do it you really better love it no you you you got it's a it's a thing that it's a thing that you're gonna be passionate about it so Larson helps uh sure in this new era of running and contributes to the boom that we see occur in the 70s with this kind of embrace of long-distance running and the kind of Jim Fixx era Prefontaine and all of that there's this explosion in popularity with running but it's not long after that the United States like takes this dip right and we kind of disappear no it's like a dance buyer like what explain what happened and then how it was resuscitated because we're in this amazing period right now where we're seeing the resurgence of the Americans on the world stage in a way that we haven't seen since that era so I mean it's hard to say exactly what happened but here's two things that definitely did have is I mean it's hard to draw the exact cause and effect relationship but two things that definitely did happen one is Alberto Salazar who you know it's just about the greatest American distance runner ever you know one New York three times one Boston and it's just absolutely flying in his career in the early 1980s and everybody expects he's gonna win the gold medal in the 84 Olympics and that'll be sort of a crowning achievement for him and on the way to the 84 Olympics he essentially just hits a wall he cannot run fast anymore he's just he's he's not getting slower he's not getting faster he's getting slower and he should be at the prime of his career he's like 26 years old and I mean only later would you find out that you know he was dealing poorly with some nagging injuries and not getting the right treatment he was also suffering from depression so that was a problem but the lesson that everybody took from Salazar and nobody trained harder than Salazar and Larson didn't train sows I was on the other side of the country but Salazar was definitely from the Larson school of threshold running and he went beyond the threshold he nearly died in the Falmouth race and Cape Cod he you know the the Boston Marathon the one that's known as the duel in the Sun between him and dick Beardsley in sort of this just epic race on an incredibly hot day and you know he was just completely fearless and then like I said he ran into a wall and the Faust lesson that everyone took from that was he probably was training too hard he over trained outran himself you know maybe we only get a certain number of steps in life before our bodies start to break down so don't use up too many of your steps in training or else you're gonna be done at 26 is this when people are starting to realize for the very first time that overtraining could be a thing I mean probably that's that's yet overtraining becomes a big topic of discussion at that point but in the long-distance community the idea is don't overtrain how about we only run like 90 miles a week uh-huh and we go back to that train don't strain idea and I'm not just crazy those operators the whole thing I mean I think I mean the numbers of people I mean there were dozens scores of American who could who could run a marathon faster than 215 in the 70s and early 80s and by the 90s there was like one 215 it's not that fast miss crazy fast for you and me but nowadays 215 years three miles behind Elliot coupe chogi right in the Berlin Marathon so to give you an idea I kid you're not it's certainly not world-class 215 so Bob Larson is sitting there at this point he's coaching UCLA and as a college coach he is focused on recruiting you know the way you win national championships in college which is what your your your mission is as a college coach is you get these very versatile quarter-mile or essentially these just absolute specimens who can run quarter miles they can run 200s they can run relays they're so fast that they can if you need them to do a long jump or a triple jump they can get points and those events as well so he's very focused on on those folks and winning national championships and he's winning a bunch of them doing quite well and producing lots of Olympic gold medalists and he's not so focused on long-distance running hmm and it's a it's his original love it's his original passion but he's not paying that much attention to it and then he happens upon this high school senior named Meb Keflezighi and he has this incredible story family moved here from Eritrea when he was in seventh grade and his father you know was a refugee and escaped the civil war there so the war with Ethiopia and it was he's this immigrant kid and and Larson gives him a full scholarship to UCLA and brings him there and Neb becomes you know his vehicle for this project that's gonna that basically takes up you know his post-retirement life from UCLA which is to resuscitate American long distance running your meb's gonna be the guy that he he has the tools he has the discipline he has the willingness where he thinks he can he has the talent where he thinks he can take him and turn him into a champion it's gonna take some time but what it's mainly gonna take is it's mainly gonna take doing the workouts that he was doing with the Hummel toads back in the nineteen seventies with one extra wrinkle which is elevation and that's because that has become all the rage and that's what the canyons in Ethiopians are doing right did he have a conscious sense that he was trying to resuscitate American running obviously see so it wasn't just map he's like we need to bring this whole thing back and map is gonna be my cypher yeah he was horrified by it I mean the 2000 Olympics he had already been named I think the distance coach to the 2004 Olympics and the 2000 Olympics the Americans could only qualify one man for for that race in the marathon and it was you know instead of three spots which used to be no you it had been in the 70s that had been like a real battle to get one of those three spots in the Olympics and now we couldn't even meet the qualifying surrender to get to get more than one person and just to get back to the earlier question because I said there was two things that happened the other thing that happened the eighties was Sebastian Coe became like the biggest favorite in run in track and field and his father wrote this book and a lot of what Cove what his father focused on with you know training Sebastian and raising him was interval you know interval training and not so much volume and not so much threshold running even though Coe had been doing a lot of that training but just with like a small group that his father wasn't really involved with and so that didn't get a lot of attention so people were very focused in the same way that you'd be very focused now on you know how Roger Federer you know develops his tennis game right people became very focused on how Sebastian Coe had become right which was antithetical to Larson's whole truck right exactly so in the late 90s when he's trying to revive this you know his idea is no and this is also what's going on at this time is the East Africans are starting to dominate everything and so there's these people who are sort of doing these studies and putting out these theories about you know well they've evolved from the Serengeti to have longer Achilles tendons or they're muscle fibers are different and that losing capacity is larger there and and because they're so thin they're able to cool themselves right there's all kinds of theories that are out there and Larsen's ideas know they're just working really hard and they're living in the Rift Valley at 7,000 feet and they're training in groups and they're doing and like you know he traveled and got there know took notes on what their training regimens were and he said this is what we were doing they're doing it they're doing what we were doing though they're out like I had you you must know Knox Robinson you know not his own onyx black roses NYC running club oh yeah okay so I had him on the podcast and he spent a lot of time in Africa like hanging out with those guys and training with them and he tells crazy amazing stories but when you were recounting you know the philosophy of Larson I was thinking like yeah that's exactly what those guys are doing they run in a group there there's a lot of joy there's a lot of camaraderie they do put in a lot of easy slow miles that they're running together and then when they they choose their moments on the track and when they hit the track it's like full-on full-on but they're living this lifestyle at altitude where there's no distractions and this is just it's a lifestyle it's not like what they do when they're not doing other things and that's not and and the American distance runners at the time were training off on their own mostly at sea level and they just weren't and weren't putting in the work and weren't putting in the hard work and so Larson creates this group called the mammoth Track Club mainly so that meb has a group to train with and they go up to Mammoth Lakes and a camp out there at 8,000 feet and four years later there's six marathon medals that are given out every one they don't have to Mammoth right treating in the snow right but six years four years later you don't when there's six marathon medals given out this little group at Mammoth gets two of them that gets the silver and Deena Kaster he gets the bronze and that's a pretty good ratio for when you had when you weren't even close to having any for years before then you create this little group and over that period of time these groups start to pop up and you know Brooks Hansen runners Nike has the Oregon project and also Schumacher's group now you would just never become a professional runner in America without choosing a sponsor and moving to a place like where other people are training when they're like these little fiefdoms these little cults almost yeah coalface it sound I don't know it without their Jordan right without a dejar but it's like it's it's the training group it's the gang and they work together they're pretty inspiring you know Hoka has a group in flagstaff there's you know there's a couple there's a few people still up in Mammoth Deena Kaster still lives at man with Lexi Pappas went up there to train with her and so there's this group there are some runners that are still up there but they're you know Alberto has his Oregon project group and Helene Flanagan has a group of another group of runners in Portland and they do altitude can't they go for altitude cams I think you're probably better off if you go live at altitude I'm sort of a big believer in that right I train low philosophy seems to seems to work pretty well for the people who do it I understand why you wouldn't want to live at altitude just because there's not a lot of civilization in America at 8000 feet you have to yeah you have to it's a lifestyle like you said there's some sacrifice involved so Larson takes map up to Mammoth and at the time he's like what is he like 39th in the world at the 10k or something like that like he's not it's not like he's on everyone's radar is the next great thing when he gets on the starting line of the Olympic marathon in 2004 he has the 39th best marathon time in the field uh-huh you know there's 80 runners in the field there's something like that but he's done some pretty hard work the last year in terms of getting ready for that race you know Larson had done large diamond jovi Hill he had recruited up to Mammoth the Jovi Hill was sort of running readers might know him because he's a character and born to run mm-hmm in in the study that he had done a lot of study of the ultra marathoners and he had led this team at north adams state to you know an ungodly number of championships but he's really sort of the nation's foremost authority on elevation training uh-huh and bob recruits him to run the mountain Track Club with him and they had you know they knew that that Athens marathon course backwards and forwards they knew the weather they had had meb and dena training you know in the middle of summer in black tights and turtlenecks and hats to make them uncomfortable make them understand like just how ungodly hot it was gonna be during the Olympic marathon and then the the search for the ultimate ice vest and how to cool them both Deena and map showing up at the starting line with ice fest yeah at the very last moment right it's a gate you know the his whole theory was this is a game to keep your core as cool as possible for as long as posit limiter at the highest level is it I think it is yeah there's been Studies on that the the people that are able to you know avoid that boiling over point or who are more efficient or effective at maintaining a lower core temperature are able to maintain the efficiency and the high level output for a longer period of time but once you kind of tip the scale and you start overheating and you can't regulate that anymore that's when performance declines right so the longer you can kind of keep that at base level it's been shown to be a huge factor in performance I can imagine exactly just fur I mean I'm the furthest thing from an elite runner but I mean I melt in the heat like it's good heat and humidity it's just absolute kryptonite affects different people in different ways yeah I imagine it affects and I know especially when it affects me which is I keep getting bad luck or I've had several your moments of bad luck where I train all winter for the Boston Marathon and then I show up at the start line and you know I'm training in 30-degree weather in New York and then it ends up being the first beautiful spring day in Boston and like today and this year it was 70 degrees in humid and not a year before the year before right I ran that one really was my best racer like 20 mile an hour had 137 degrees freezing rain that was absolute heaven but but you know I was in his good shape as I've ever been this year and I've never felt more sick in a race and I just I guess I knew four miles in I was just so out of breath on this tiny little incline and it was just it's 20 miles later I was limping you know basically and I was so sunburned and I was like a it looked like the rest of the week that I had like that first day you go to the beach in the spring like when you're pale as a ghost and you come home and you're like there's fried that's what I looked like good day after the Boston Marathon so but yeah it's it the it's getting back to what we're talking about I mean if you can stay cool it's a great thing and he had these vests at the Athens Olympics that Mebane Deena were wearing those item ice vests until the very last minute and now he's it's ubiquitous you see that you see Tour de France riders wearing them when they're warming up before the time trials like you see this happening you know across many disciplines of sport now it's got to start somewhere yeah but it's amazing when you look back on it though because all of these things are very elemental and simple like hey let's let's seclude you let's put you at altitude no distractions we're gonna a hardcore group of people and I'm gonna be a bit of a dictator and you're gonna do what I say and you're gonna trust me and you guys are gonna get through this together and I'm going to push you harder than you've ever been pushed before but you're gonna be ready and the proof is in the pudding I mean that's kind of what he did right yeah it's not that it's not like he had some super crazy philosophy about training that you know I mean maybe it was at the time but it doesn't feel like it and that's the thing about running though is like there's no shortcuts you know there's no there's it's it's largely about the work it's largely about patience it's largely about being committed and that's you know a lot of this is it's the same thing with writing too you know it doesn't come quickly or easily it takes a lot it's it can be very painful right um it takes a lot of being honest with yourself and true of trying to do anything well I would think so I only do two things I only to really try hard at two things which is running and right so but I imagine you know electrical engineering is probably that way too I've never I do I do think you know get getting back to that thing we talked about earlier about pushing yourself and doing the thing that's uncomfortable I have never met the you know really kind of like happy person peaceful person you know successful person either financially or just has done something really well who has said you know it was no it was the key for me the key for me was playing it safe I'm not taking the rest not taking any risks right I just never you know like you never hear that mm-hmm it's almost always you know there was this thing I did and I wasn't really sure but I kind of rolled the dice and it was uncomfortable and struggled for a while at it but it kind of worked out I know so why is it so hard for us to take risk then knowing that because the default because it's uncomfortable because they because we like want because you want to be at equilibrium you know right you wanna I you want to be comfortable you don't it's you know it's this it's why is it hard to when you're in a new environment to go up to a stranger and talk to them and introduce yourself it's a learned behavior because that's uncomfortable that's risk you know it's weird you know that's and but with you do that you might make a buddy you know and we know that intellectually and we know that if we never do that we'll never make another friend it's like dude some practice in the same way that they discovered the heart is a muscle that can be trained to be stronger discipline and your willingness to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions is a practice as well you start with small things you acclimate and then you have to always be kind of increasing the the temperature or the volume on that and it doesn't mean that it necessarily gets easier but it kind of does get easier or it just gets or you just you just used to it you get used it comes of your nose yeah you sort of understand it and I love that I mean the thing I love about I'm kind of a hot yoga addict and a thing I love about that is that everything and I guess this is true for all yoga whether it's hotter it whatever temperature you're doing that is that it's always referred to as as your practice and you know there's no I just love that idea that it's just end there's no end it's just practice it's just your practice you know it was practice for what well for tomorrow's practice right right and I feel like if we it's a good it's a it's a good idea you're no one gets out of here alive right also like what are we what are we doing we're just practicing right you know we're just just seeing if we can see if we can figure it out a little better a little easier a little smarter and not make the same mistakes because God knows we've all made a lot of them well let me know if you discover the secret which one I don't know wherever this is all heading all right well to what do you attribute this incredible resurgence in in women's long distance running that we're seeing now like we're in this golden age right now where we're just seeing performances that we we haven't seen in kind of the history of long distance running on the women's front in terms of American performers I mean do you track that to Larsson as well I mean there has to be other well I track I track it not so much to Larson but I track it to someone that he coached although he wasn't her main coach Dena yeah I mean it it helps when you see someone doing right someone breaks through and does something well it's sort of like where our conversation started with it's almost like she gave fast young American women permission to pursue this thing and showed them that if you can if you pursue it the right way you can be as fast as anyone you can win Chicago you can win London you can be on the medal stand and that really helps imagine there's a lot more kids in China trying to make the NBA after Yao Ming right that really helps so but you know and that was you were going back now to her the heyday of her success was 15 years ago but you know what like Shane Flanagan wins New York in her mid 30s des finally wins Boston in her mid-thirties you know they had been close before but if you think about how old were they when Dena was having her success that's a you know that's an influential moment that's an influential time having said that there is an infrastructure that has been built for women to develop and support them to develop and support them now or the people who are get pregnant right which I want to talk about great series of stories but my friend like a friend and colleague yes doing can I just say she's done an incredible job she does great staff amazing reporting and it's so refreshing and great to see interesting in-depth stories about running in the New York Times wow that's I mean I had I didn't have anything I didn't need to do with the pregnancy stuff right but she broke doubts to what I did right but I did when I got the times in November of 2017 I sort of read her stuff for a while and she's in a different department she's not in the sports department so she you know to lose the use of the loose term she kind of freelances with us uh-huh you know one of the first things they did when I was there is I you know reached out her and grabbed it for a cup of coffee and I said you know you're you have a really good voice and I'm gonna do everything I can to try and turn the New York Times sports section into a runner's world so you've got a pretty good record there's a lot of there's a lot of running stories very happy right I said so it's gonna ask you like how much of that is you're doing I pretty much pretty much me yeah and also expanding that that that lends a little bit more just to adventure stories in general like we're going off on a tangent right now but like Adam Skolnick reporting on : Oh Brady's Antarctica attempt was was astounding it's done and the the amount of of geography that you that you gave for telling that story in real time and in depth and and the kind of multimedia you know layout at least digitally as well as in print I mean it was fantastic yeah I mean we take and we we take a lot of crap from sort of traditionalists readers fans of stick-and-ball sports when we do stories like that like the page woman's crowd yeah yeah and we take and we you know we take it seriously you know like we we don't want to turn off for readers we want as many readers and subscribers as we can as we can get you know having said that you know if there was a cooler story out there than two guys ski racing across Antarctica in December like I want you to show it I want to show it to me like come on like what was going on in the NBA that was so fascinating well like brick I don't know if there was there were two guys ski racing across an article but that's what it was that's what it was it was it was a ski race between these two guys across Antarctica and I mean I'm a huge Nordic skiing fan as well but we generally are only able to cover that during the Olympics like we do occasional story about that but they're just not a huge readership for it but that's so he had this race so yeah so whenever were in whenever these stories come across our desk that are or we have these possibilities of writing about you know big themes big moments epic battles life and death it's just stories that sort of raise all the big questions yeah that's where I want us to be that's cool and you and Lindsay was someone that yeah I sort of I really liked her writing yeah she's and I'll have to curse on this - yeah she it's [ __ ] fast she she ran a 257 marathon and at sea I am in December and she's she's trying to qualify for the Olympic Trials which is a pretty huge endeavor to go from 257 to 245 but she's she's working at it so and yeah she's super talented yeah so she broke this story for people that are listening that aren't familiar about how I mean you could say it better than I can but essentially how Nike was not providing paid essentially leave for their athletes on the roster who became pregnant it was it's almost kind of worse than that because you know it's common in the shoe industry unfortunately to have these reduction classes and what they would tell you is well we need them because if we don't have incentives for runners to keep running then they're just gonna sign these contracts and we're gonna have to pay them and then they're gonna get injured then they're not gonna want to come back and they're just gonna collect our money so we need weed them to keep performing at a certain standard and a certain level in the same way that you know if you played for excuse me if you play for the New York Yankees and you know if you weren't playing well you'd get cut now you probably you'd have a guaranteed contract if you're in baseball but in football there's no guaranteed contracts you get cut you start getting paid anymore so they're saying you know isn't it what they would say it's not different from that however those contracts they really even at the highest level you know like even meb after he won the 2009 New York Marathon if he had gotten hurt and had to sit out for nine months they would you know cut his pay drastically and to get back to talking about the women pregnancy was sort of seen put in the same bucket as injury right or disability I mean and actually even in our health care system today I think when you go on maternity leave after your pregnancy you go on disability which is a strange categorization for it but that's that's the way right but that's sort of though that's how the health care system actually deals with it or at least it was when my wife was having her maternity leaves and so they were a quite like I said they were equate impregnable which is about as big a disincentive as you can get and it's really unfortunate it's a real challenge for female athletes who a lot of them are sort of you know reaching their their athletic primes as their biological clocks are ticking pretty loudly you know it's it's it's not a great int of people have children and flourishing families after the age of let's say 35 which is when you see a lot of women retire from professional athletes I don't think you would find a lot of OBGYNs to say that's a great time to think about starting to have your family my sense just from a 10,000 foot view on this story is that well first of all there's so many developments in terms of nutrition and training technology and money being funneled into the sport that is promoting the longevity of these careers allowing athletes females and males to compete at the highest level later and later and later so there was a time not too long ago where the idea that you would be you know world class after age 25 just seemed impossible but we now know that's no longer the case so I had this thought like well this contractual provision in these Nike contracts or in prom value ladies the other you know apparel contracts or whatever sorry go ahead these but those contracts also had non-disclosure agreements okay so not only were they in there but the runners Nike vid protected itself because the runners weren't allowed to talk about them because if they talked about it publicly then I don't know you're the lawyer right what's the time you know if you sign a contract and you're not supposed to talk about it and you talk about a public publicly well you're open to damages so he took so you know I'm sorry I interrupted you but that was the thing room right when he had gotten she wouldn't talk about yeah wish I could I can't imagine how she was able to you know get them comfortable enough to take that risk it's being reported being a good being a really good journalist but back to my thought I mean I had this sense that this is probably antiquated language that's been in these contracts for a very long time they were drafted initially when things were very different and it's just one of those things where well this is the way we do it and the general counsel's office or whoever drafted that just never really went back and looked at like should we really still be doing this until it finally got called out and from a revenue perspective had Nike or whoever else was doing this gotten out in front of it before any of this happened and said why are we doing this this is crazy we need to support our women during pregnancy we believe in the you know in them for the long haul from a revenue perspective it's really not that much money and the storytelling and the goodwill that they could engender by demonstrating that kind of support for the athletes on their roster would have benefited them in such a dramatic way but now they can't do it like now it just it will seem well they did it yeah they have today they did it and it's not gonna make anyone feel good about right they did it you know they announced it on a Friday I sort of you know I mean so in that sense it's great that it's different but nobody's patting them on the back of course they're doing that but you know this is and they're taking a huge hit yeah but this is the right and and the amazing thing it's a revenue perspective because I mean we could it's nothing with three keystrokes we could you know see what Nikes annual revenues were last year you know many many billions of dollars and detracted what they what they spend on women's running and the handful of women's runner he's like yeah Afra is that a tiny fraction of LeBron James's contract so we're not talking about a lot a lot of money there but you know this is sort of the history of sports of sports and sports business and that was my story stroller right my first book was how sports became a business it was it was because it was athletes it was not a bunch of you know white guys in suits you know coming up with great revelations about free agency and free markets and competition and things like that it was a bunch of athletes rising up and saying we're not gonna be exploited anymore and you know what you want to exploit professional athletes fine go find them we're not gonna play right and then you know owners commissioners General Counsel's whatever they realized very quickly that ooh you know if we don't have the best in the world playing for us we don't really have a business anymore and nobody's buying nobody's buying tickets to the Yankees to see George Steinbrenner play they're fine tickets to the Yankees to Ciaran judge or Derek Jeter play so this is what it takes it takes you know basically these athletes rising up and saying no we're not gonna do it we're not gonna deal with this anymore and embarrassing them and shaming people into not exploiting their labor yeah well I think we're at another event horizon with this right now that which it seems like it you know in the NBA and the NFL with players getting together and and in a way that you know is pretty powerful I think I think we're gonna see some more changes yeah and certainly from the from the social standpoint a political social standpoint I think it's it's very clear that yeah they assets have voices and they have now more than ever right and they have to be allowed to express those voices it's you know it's it's really important and when they when they try and suppress them it does not go well right also was it the New York Times that that that broke this story about the NBA players who are experiencing depression because of social media and all the pressures that come with trying to you know basically have that voice yeah the story right I can't remember who reported that I don't know who reported it first it's it's been you know when you talk about um this whole idea of athletes and depression and there's multiple causes for it I don't think it's just necessarily the social media and having a voice but I do know that at Stanford for instance they recently I think they recently hired a psychologist for just the athletic department uh-huh home from the Counseling Center and I had heard that that person was like immediately completely overrun with Wow you know just did not have enough time in her day to or his day I'm not sure who worries all of his retreat all of these athletes and it's just it's a tremendous amount of pressure at the high level and I'll put Stanford athletics at a pretty high level of performance in addition to you know the academic pressures that are there but and these you know it sounds cheesy to say like they're they're people just like us but the frailties and you know the human frailties are not exclusive to you know journalists and lawyers and teachers and things like that the women who play on the women's national soccer team they suffer from imposter syndrome they're worried when they step onto the practice field that the coach is gonna figure out that they're a farce that they've been faking it all along and this is the day they're gonna be exposed as not as not being good enough not being fast enough I mean that's that's as common at the highest level sport as it is in any other walk of life and then imagine a top draft pick for the NBA some young kid who comes into a ridiculous amount of money is put into the spotlight you know in a in a you know in a way that's hard to comprehend and has the added pressure not only of having to perform week after week to keep the job and maintain his position on the roster but also develop his like quote-unquote brand via social media because now everybody has to be their own brand and the responsibility that comes with that on top of just being an athlete and it's not surprising that we're seeing all kinds of psychological crises that you know we're having to confront with and by the way shoot shoot 43% from three-point land right or else right now or else here or else here night after night after night night after night you know you hit nothing but net from 25 feet with the clock running and yeah it's not easy I had a a girlfriend from college who then things did not end so well I refuse I go I was in contact with her and I said I sort of apologized for acting like an idiot and and she said oh please if we were all held responsible for our 20 our 20 year old selves we'd be completely screwed and it was honestly like one of the most generous things somebody yeah has ever said and you know it's a nice it's a nice way it's an it's a nice way to think about like your acquaintances and things like that or people who were you know jerks at one point yeah you get older things are not that big deal but at the same time you know as a sports writer who has spent a lot of time with elite athletes in their 20s who have you know maybe not behaved great I just imagine what it must be like we are holding them responsible for their 20 year old selves I think we're we're holding almost everybody responsible now for their behavior all the time and if you're 20-something everything is now filmed and documented and shared and we're in a culture that's hypersensitive that is holding people to account for things they did you know long in the past and that concerns me you know I think we need to be able to be forgiving of people and allow them the place to the space to grow and evolve and when we can't do that I think we're you know creating a culture of fear that is making people you know afraid to connect with other human beings among other things I'm just glad I'm no I'm just I'm just glad I wasn't on film when I was 24 years old yes I'm preaching to the converted to talk to you about is your thoughts on the sub to our cap chogi thing like how do you what do you think about that hole that prot that Nike project where you know at monza they tried to go under two hours and how close he's now become you know getting to that point and you know how long do you think it's gonna be before that actually happens well I mean I absolutely worship kept Jogi quite scary it's did you go to mom I did not go to mondo no but at Cesar gave you a blurb for the book yeah right I think I have known it for a while and I loved his book two hours which was really you know had a lot of foresight because he he brought the book a couple years before right before the kept oh he made that attempt and so yeah I will I will say that going into that first event I was sort of dismissive of it but then it just looked so cool and it was so great the way you had all these other elite marathoners supporting it and trying to make it happen you know forming the cone around him to try and break the wind and it it was completely kind of fascinating and you know he's gonna be as another the British chemical company is sponsoring him to try and do it try it make another go at it and you know if he does it I won't go in the record books cuz it's not an official race right but it's still a completely unbelievable thing yeah for him to pull off it's just absolutely incredible and what's even more amazing is probably the fact that he's got the world record down to 200 201 30 and a regular you know in a regular race in Berlin and I don't I don't really know how much longer it's gonna be I mean can he can he get there you know right course right day right training block I'm not gonna say no even though you know if you do the math and he's the last to go 90 seconds faster and you know 90 seconds over 26 miles you say oh it's just you know 4 seconds a mile or a little less than 46 I'm on your about like what you ending at the end but when you read already running it for science but he's running for 40 he's running for 40 miles you tie and now he's got around four thirty Six's I mean that's it's completely insane so everybody's seen those videos of the treadmill that they set up at the the run expose where you have to jump on and run his pace yeah it's people can't do it for more than five seconds right it's completely not possible right it's a good way it's a good way to break your neck yeah getting one of those treadmills so but I love anything that gets people fascinated with running movement activity it's it's like I said it's it's like the most elemental of sports in some ways I want it to be I was I wanted to be cynical and snarky about that whole thing and then I started watching it and I was like captivated I was like I similar to what you said I was like oh no this is actually really cool like yeah it's a stunt and all of that and it's a branding thing and but at the same time I couldn't help but just be riveted and amazed and I think he's gonna do it I think he will it's I'm not gonna say he won't but I mean it's what does he want he's won I think ten of his eleven marathon said he's run right that that's probably more amazing than even breaking two hours I mean you just that just doesn't happen and marathons are like golf tournaments no Tiger Woods it is at his best I think was winning one out of three that he entered which was an unheard-of rate of success and marathons you know if you win three or four in your entire career you're right in the Hall of Fame and this guy's won 10 out of 11 of the fastest marathons he's winning Berlin and London every year he seems like such a gentleman too and he's a gentleman yeah and he's kind of like a Zen he's kind of like very zen about things he's really supportive he's never they've never been a whiff of of drug stuff around him so so when you lately superhuman when you look at him how do you account for why he's so great or so much better or perhaps why does why wouldn't have you asked Larson what what he thinks Kip Jogi is the best well I think most people for me start with how he lives and how he works which is here's to the three he had here's to those of all three principals and he you know lives in the Rift Valley and trains with his group and trains as hard as anybody so there's that and you know he's blessed with this unbelievably efficient motor some people are born you know some people are born with this unbelievable motor and you know clearly he's the complete outlaw he's the outlier of outliers he's you know he seems to have the perfect body type right it's one of those things that you could analyze his stride and say see it's the perfect stride but it's also the perfect stride for the body that he has I'm not sure you know you and I could do everything we could we could spend hours looking at tape and imitating his stride which no matter we're not gonna run we're not gonna break five minutes in a while I'm not gonna break six minutes in a mile if I do that so but mm-hmm yeah I don't and that's one of the that's one of the really cool things about running is people don't in some ways people still don't really know exactly what creates a superhuman like that yeah is it was it but that's what makes sports magical it Canada in the best yeah and the best of circumstances absolutely so in the process of researching and writing this book how has it affected your own relationship with running like has it changed how you train or think about your relationship to the sport like definitely PR while I was right out well I was writing in 2017 which is great you run with a group I wish I ran with a group more I do occasionally run with I do yeah it's one of the things like I really have to get with because you know sometimes in New York Times as well running team that I run with sometimes sometimes I run I'll run with a friend and you know put busy schedule stuff like that children schools dinner it's things like that sometimes yeah I can't always yeah I can't miss or shower at your office can you duck out and there is no shower at my office I belong to a gym not far away so I could but I'm me I'm an early morning your honor yeah I go early morning so it's the start of my day so that's that's not a problem is but it's just the but although a lot of running groups actually in the city meet in the evenings and that's just like doesn't work so much for me but there are early morning running groups that I could get with the nice thing about running is if you run you meet one other person you run within like that's your group yeah should run with Lindsay yes I would love well she's on the team that we run together sometimes and races so that's pretty cool and if you do you work with a coach at all or you create your own training program you know I interview so many coaches some sort of constantly trying other things pick up picking up stuff that's one of the things I love about my job is I'll do a story and you know I'll be in Flagstaff for a couple days hanging out with the HoCo runners and I'll do one of the you know and they'll come back with you know a notebook filled with Ben Rosario's workouts yeah unless I'll do those for a month or so or you know hope they have one of my you know endless conversate with endless conversations with Bob and he'll say oh here's one you could try how about doing this and so I'll do that just coach you right well he basically does doesn't realize it yeah so so yeah so it's in that sense it's fun make bringing myself open to it's made me it's made me aware of all kinds of different training so that's part of it I will it has recently I feel like it's brought a certain a little more pressure than I would like to my running you know I came out with this running book and all the said once I was on you yeah well now it's a I sort of almost feel like there's this pressure to be for me to be like this running guy yeah a we could we could I can relate you can relate yeah I'm not even on the cover of my book so so it's so there is that there is a little bit of sense of is this a job am i is this not a job that I do or am I still doing it for my right reasons or and I am still doing it because I love to do it but there are it's a we it's a weird thought process that I've never had because I've never written a running book before I how do you account for this explosion in interest in ultra ultra running and ultra endurance sports that we're seeing like this this was you know talk about another fringe movement that has really kind of tipped into the mainstream it's interesting to see these races go from you know a dozen people intense you know the night before a race to selling out and creating all this kind of you know interest I think it's I think it's it seems completely natural to me that I don't know that it's necessarily people wanting to one-up each other as much as they want to sort of one-up themselves what's the next thing yeah what's the next thing I can do and then they hear about something and yeah I'd like to try that also I think part of it has to do with you know the country we're talking about us somewhat rarefied socio-economic set when we're when you're in that group yeah there's a fair amount of disposable income available to people and that seems like a cool way to a cool way to do it I think social media has some element of it you know now now there's the you know there's the ultra you did but it doesn't actually exist until you post about it right and then your and then it exists yeah so I think people want to you know people people are really into into that part that self promotion aspect you know to it and you know there is a certain group of people for whom there's a limit to how much enjoyment they can get from their mobile device or their computer and you know who just want to get out and push themselves and do things that are different and you know the picture and and who wouldn't wanna and to me it's like who wouldn't wanna I haven't done it yeah I'm curious haven't anyway you've got 23 whatever thoughts but like one why no 50 K or 50 mile or or a trail you know something else I think it's because for some reason I'd fallen into this phone down this rabbit hole of like of numbers and speed and right it's at first it was like qualified for boss and then Wow let's see if I can still get but here's the thing see this is from a very Bob Larson perspective this is why you need to you need to shake it up like you need to get off like what he would call the track like yeah if you get off that you're so wed to these numbers and holding yourself to account for these performance goals you might actually be able to crash through this Plateau by by you know doing something completely different that's longer where it's not about numbers and then return to the marathon in a year or two or whatever with a refreshed perspective on it and I would I would venture to bet that you would see a big it's game I think you're right and I'd like to try it and I just and it's like it's then it's one of those it's probably the thing that lately and a bunch of like friends that I know who do them and keep asking me about it as well it's lately become the thing that a I'm afraid of be I'm starting to think about a little too much see what I'm afraid of something and I'm thinking about a lot I know I'm gonna have to try it at some point so you're gonna have to get comfortable without desire I'm gonna be so it's there is an is 50 K he think a good distance to start out I would I would I would but I would urge you to go like find a trail race you know just do something totally I really want to do a trail marathon yeah there's one outside Chicago but to forget about the marathon do like do something where you can't it's just so apples and oranges yeah but it gets you out of that paradigm that you're in okay let's do it yeah all right I'm ready commit I'm ready you're committing right I got a ratty all right it's on the record it's on the record I'm fine I'll do I'll juice five to a trail run have you have you ever covered the 3,100 do you know the Sri Chinmoy run and Queens I I know about it but I start I think it starts in June it might have might have already started I don't know right I know about seen pictures of them doing it so no I've never I've never could just that it just go out there and check it out I had Sanjay Rawal on who made a documentary called 30 100 run and become I think you would enjoy it follows a couple different people but in particular one guy who's like I think he's from Finland I can't remember but he's like a mailman and he does this race every year and they literally run around this one-mile Block in Queens until they've reached 31 is open from 6:00 a.m. to midnight every day they run as much as they can every day they go to sleep they come back the next day I just keep doing it and there's just something so bananas and fascinating and beautiful and insane about the whole thing that is the ultra that I definitely will not be but maybe just take a subway ride out there and watch for an afternoon right yeah yeah that's that's that's that's what I was worried in New York Times today you guys haven't I'm sure you've covered that race in the past the paper yes we definitely have I will say the one thing about trail running that does make me nervous is a one of your college classmates Peter Graff laughter last year he was 2017 I was out in Boulder and I'd never been on the Mesa trail and I wanted to run on the Mesa Trail and Peter's kind of an insane trail runner no I didn't know that I was like yeah I got a uh I got him you know an interview at 10:00 so I'm your 10:30 I'll meet you I'll come by your house it he's like sure come by in the morning we'll go uh-huh and like two hours and 15 minutes later gonna work I'm stumbling down a mesa trail with butyrate he's I was I mean I was tired yes but the main thing I was afraid of was losing my front teeth so that's part of the fear of the trail run is the tripping over the roots and the rock but you're working like different muscles that's a different discipline you're shaking it up and it's making you stronger in areas that don't get worked just running the loop in Central Park absolutely and you're not looking at your Garmin worried about your pace because it doesn't matter right it's completely it's completely separate from it no I totally I am totally with it intellectually the one thing I don't want to do is I don't want to carry my water uh-huh I don't want it I don't like that whole self-supporting idea on the bat and the backpack I have no I just from an aesthetic point of view or just honestly from a sort of flow point of view like I mean part of the reason I love running is I love this sort of feeling of being liberated and unencumbered and the idea of having a pack on my back and running seems unpleasant but you could just do the little waist drop with a one bottle or something like that you'll get used to it yeah okay you're gonna acclimate to it all right cool well I want to close this down with one one final thing which your thoughts on running culture like the book is about the rebellious Ness the kind of rock and roll you know sensibility that accompanied this you know burst this this you know new kind of revelation that took place as a result of Larson's work how do you think about running culture now like is it still you know Knox Robinson said you know running is an act of rebellion and I've heard you say something similar like is that still the case like how do we connect with that rebellious 'no snow when it is such a mainstream you know Lululemon type of activity I think the biggest evolution that running has undergone certainly in the last 15-20 years is that it has really gone from being a solitary activity to a group of a group activity when I'm running in Central Park there were plenty of runners in the 90s in Central Park but now there are just these clumps you just everybody is running seemingly with a group and not everybody but a lot of people and you just keep passing these clumps and everybody's talking to each other and it's it's a really social thing and I think that's terrific because I know the performance benefits of it and I know that if you're making plans to run Thursday you're a lot more likely to skip it if you don't have to meet someone on the corner of 81st and 3rd at 6:00 in the morning so so that's the sort of that that is sort of where running culture is right now and yes it's mainstream but I do continue to think that even though there's hundreds of thousands of people who line up on the start line of marathons every year that's still a pretty small fraction of the population and most people when you say to them yeah I'm running next Saturday or run in Boston in a month most people say wow that's amazing you're crazy and that's a real kick for me I know it is and I think it's a real kick for a lot of people that you that that that idea that this is still yes it's mainstream but it's to a lot of people it's still a little it's a little nuts and it still feels a little rebellious it still feels like you're sort of cheating is the wrong word but you're doing something you're doing something different that's one of the reasons the Boston Marathon is so great because it takes place on a Monday and the entire rest of the world is at work working and this is Monday morning and all of Boston is is off for the day essentially you know yes it's Patriots day but what is Patriots Day even essentially it's a marathon day uh-huh and it just feels like you're playing hooky from life and dialing into that sort of playing hooky from life thing on a daily run is something that's still possible and still certainly brings me a great deal of joy and I think brings a lot of people Elijah white yeah I think it's freedom it's sort of railing against the gestalt of time and gravity there's something about it that is uniquely liberating that I don't feel when I'm riding a bike I mean riding bike is amazing for different reasons and swimming as well but there's something specific about running that I don't get or find in either other endurance pursuits that I can't quite put my finger on but it does feel nonetheless like an act of rebellion for some strange reason even though everyone's doing it or not everyone but a lot of people and not having the answer is probably the best thing right I think if you if you are to articulate about the answer you haven't thought deeply enough about it maybe right and then you'll of stopping right because the search will be over that's right and who wants that yeah nobody wants that I want to run as long as I possibly can basically so thank you that's fantastic thanks so much for having any running to the edge is the book congratulations you were named by Time magazine like one of the reads you got to read this summer one of the 32 must reads for this stuff exactly recall those I'm scrolling through it I think it was pretty high in the list I don't know if they ranked them in a particular order but showed up pretty soon yeah I'm not supposed to mention this I should say like it comes out at the beginning of the summer and in with it was like by release date and alphabetical so that's what I think put me ahead of Elizabeth no break right it's okay but I think I was fourth on the list and amy was very pleased with that all right cool so what did we learn here a couple things one you're gonna sign up for some Trail 50k I need to run with groups more I'm such a solo guy so that's actually a change that I'm gonna make as a result of talking you in reading this book and third next time I'm in New York let's go running absolutely deal absolutely and I'm gonna keep up all this running and adventure coverage in the New York Times yeah keep please please continue to expand that it's been great to be able to read more and more about these more obscure athletes and the fact that you're introducing them you know in the grandest way possible to the world is a really cool thing so I commend you for that Thanks all right man thanks so much for having me all right Matthew peace [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 55,450

Rating: 4.837709 out of 5

Keywords: Bob Larsen, coaching, cross country, Matthew Futterman, Running To The Edge, Jamul Toads, rich roll podcast, rich roll, Meb Keflezighi, deena kastor, bob bowerman, steve prefontaine, running podcasts, marathon podcasts, running for speed, running for endurance, running to the edge, fitness podcasts, mindset podcasts, sports podcasts, self-help podcasts, track & field podcasts, olympic running, new york marathon podcast, breaking2

Id: i-0-yYSnRqg

Length: 121min 42sec (7302 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019