Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #79 How Running Can Transform Your Life with Sanjay Rawal

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

CAUTION ADVISED: this podcast contains mild swearing. When we think about running, most of us think of it as a form of physical exercise – something that we do to lose weight, look better or stay healthy. Some of us like to measure how far and how quickly we can run. But running can be so much more than that. What if someone told you that running could be a tool to transform your life? This week, film-maker and inspirational human being, Sanjay Rawal, is here to do just that.   Whilst making his latest film (3100: Run and Become), Sanjay followed the most elite multi-day race in the world - the 3,100 mile race, which takes place on the streets of Queens, New York City each summer. He also followed the Kalahari Bushman and a group of Japanese Monks. What was common amongst all three groups of people was that they performed superhuman feats with the sole goal of spiritual growth. Sanjay talks about their individual journeys and what we can all learn from them.   Through physical exertion, Sanjay believes that we can all understand who we are and connect to something bigger than ourselves. We discuss how modern life presents many obstacles for us, but Sanjay explains how we can all achieve self-expansion, whether we are running or simply walking down the road. This is an incredible conversation – I think you will really enjoy it.  Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/79 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Look at this life as something precious, to understand that life is essentially an incredible gift and what you get out of it is up to you. Like what are your goals? Do you have long-term goals? Do you have goals that aren't just directed towards outer success or making other people happy? Do you have a sense of achieving happiness yourself? Life can be a distraction. And do we want to realize too late that we no longer have the capacity, the physical capacities,

the mental capacities, even the financial capacities to achieve a sense of our dreams? Or do people want to begin achieving those dreams right now? Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter and author of the best selling books, The Stress Solution and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do. But getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more.

Hello and welcome back to episode 79 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Now, before we start, as I mentioned last week, I am looking to expand my team at the moment. As this podcast becomes more popular and demands more and more of my time, it is clear that I need to recruit one or two people to help me. And in particular, I'm looking for someone who has expertise in social media and copywriting. They need to be based in the UK, ideally in the northwest of England, although this is not essential. I'm really looking for someone who is passionate, hardworking, creative, and really wants to get behind my mission and help

me spread positive messages around health to as many people as possible. If you feel that may be you, please do send an email to info at drchastity.com, outlining your expertise, experience, and why you think you would be a good fit. Really look forward to hearing from you. Now, today's episode is all about running, but possibly not in the way that you currently think about it. When we think about running, most of us think of it as a form of physical exercise, something that we need to do to lose weight, look better, or stay healthy. Some of us like to measure how far and how quickly we can run,

but running can be so much more than that. What if someone told you that running could be a tool to transform your life? This week, filmmaker and inspirational human being Sanjay Rawal is here to do just that. Whilst making his latest film, 3100 Run and Become, Sanjay followed the most elite multi-day race in the world, the 3,100 mile race, which takes place on the streets of Queens, New York City, every summer. He also followed the Kalahari Bushmen and a group of Japanese monks.

And what was common amongst all three groups of people was that they performed superhuman feats with the sole goal of spiritual growth. Sanjay talks about their individual journeys and what we can all learn from them. Although centered around running, talks about their individual journeys and what we can all learn from them. Although centred around running, the salient points of this conversation apply to all forms of movement, even simple walking. Sanjay believes that through physical exertion, we can all understand who we are and connect to something bigger than ourselves. This is an incredible conversation. I think you are really, really going to enjoy it. Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a quick shout out

to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. The minimalist shoe brand Vivo Barefoot are supporters of today's podcast. I am a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes and I have been wearing them exclusively for many years now, as have my wife and my children. I wear them for running, for walking, for work, and basically for whatever I need to wear shoes. Not only do I use them myself, I've found them extremely beneficial for many of my patients, particularly to do with things like hip pain, knee pain, back pain. These shoes are thin, wide and flexible and Vivo Barefoot makes shoes for every occasion for both adults and kids. For listeners of my show, they have come up with a great deal. They are offering 20% off to all

new customers in the UK, USA, Australia, and selected EU countries. If you have thoughts about giving them a go, this is a great incentive to start. They even offer a 100-day free trial for new customers. So if you are not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. Many of you have contacted me since Vivo started sponsoring this podcast and are delighted that you took advantage of this offer and have been expressing to me the benefits that you now feel. I think it's an amazing offer. If you have been sitting on the fence about trying minimalist shoes, do consider taking advantage. You can get your 20% off for new customers by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. That's vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. So Sanjay, welcome to the Feel Better Live More

podcast. Doctor, it's an absolute privilege to be here and to see you in LA. It's great. It's a privilege. It's good to be here. Please, less of the dots. Rangan is absolutely fine. It is pretty incredible being here in LA. It is a Sunday. It is sunny and warm outside. We are literally four blocks from the ocean but I'm sitting inside a room uh chatting to you which no doubt will be a great conversation but you know the the Brit inside me is like itching to get out on the beach I'm gonna be drinking a lot of water for those of the podcast uh listeners who are gonna watch online because I did a two-hour run and just came in here wiped all the sweat off my face,

and I'm ready to go. I've got the adrenaline going. I've got the ketosis happening. It's like energy levels are high. So you've just done a two-hour run? Yeah. Okay, great. Well, you look fresh despite having done a two-hour run, which I think is quite telling. Took a quick shower, so I wouldn't be totally unpresentable. Yeah. Well, you look very presentable but I guess that's probably a good starting off uh point for this conversation I became aware of you and your work when the film 3100 came out and on the face of it it's a film about running. But actually, as I watched the film and got deep into it, right at the end, I actually started to feel that this is not actually about running.

It's about something much deeper than that. And I really want to unpack that with you today, because I think there's something we can all learn from the film, even though what is in it might seem completely unrelatable to someone in terms of what they might want to do in their daily life. are relevant for each and every single one of us. So I wonder if you could start off by explaining, you know, what is 3100? Why did you make it? And what is it about? I'll answer it in two parts. The film 3100 Run and Become is about the world's longest running race, which is 3,100 miles. It's taken place the last 23 years in the summer. And it's held entirely around a half mile loop in Queens, New York City. So people have to run at least 59.8 miles a day in the 52 day window to complete the 3,100 miles. That's basically doing 5,600 laps of this half mile, slightly more than a half mile course around a high school. 12 to 14 people come from around the world to try

to attempt it, about 60% finish. But this movie is not about ultra distance running per se. It's not just about this crazy, wacky event. We went to traditional running cultures, to Native Americans in the Southwest, to the Navajo, and specifically, we went and lived and hunted with the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana and spent time with an esoteric clan of monks in the highland of Kyoto. Essentially, the movie is about the discrepancy in modern day life, the disconnect between the spirit and the body. We're both from India, and we both know that India's greatest epic, the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna explains to Arjuna the secrets of life, the idea of dharma,

the idea of acting, the idea of becoming an instrument, that took place on the precipice of a massive battle. Krishna and Arjuna were both warriors. The greatest spiritualists in India didn't eschew the body in that era. In this day and age, we seem to think that the body can't be a tool to spiritual progress. In running, looking at traditional running, we might be able to even suggest that running was mankind and womankind's first religion, that we prayed with our feet. When we ran, we breathed in Father Sky, as a Navajo would say. We prayed to earth with the pitter-patter of our feet. We derived energy from the environment to expand our consciousness through this act of bipedal running, which is completely unique on an evolutionary or species standpoint to human beings. No other animal can run the way

we do on two feet for the distances we do. Yeah. I mean, so much to dive into there. I think this idea of running as a religion, running as humanity's first religion, is a really interesting one to explore. What do you mean by that? And why do you think that's the case? This race, the 3,100 mile race in particular, it's so brutal physically and on the surface. The temperature might average 92 degrees Fahrenheit, 31, 32 degrees Celsius. Runners have to take in 10,000 calories a day, drink anywhere from 20 to 25 liters of water a day. They're running on a sidewalk. It seems like it's completely bonkers. And if you've approached it as mind over matter, your mind would be

crushed. You can't push through this like a sufferfest. You have to go deep within and generate energy from other centers of our being, not just from the mind, which is willpower, but from the heart, which is determination, which is love, which is peace, which is enjoyment. You have to be able to literally enjoy this activity. Now, the corollary in terms of human religion is pilgrimage. Before we had cars, before we had trains or planes, we had to walk for days, for weeks, for months to get to holy sites. And once a year or once a lifetime, people undertook these pilgrimages where they would go for a month, they would go for two months, and it wasn't so much about reaching the end destination. It was about learning who you were through the journey. That's a religious

experience and it requires our feet. It was praying through our feet. It was an act of consecration, breaking down the mind through physical exertion. Literally, as Hopi elders have said, finding joy through exertion. That's the formula for spiritual experience. What's really striking about this race is that it's done in the heart of New York. It is, what is it, a half mile block? People say like, why is it held on a half mile block? For people listening who've not seen the film, it's a half mile block and you literally go around the same block over and over again. You don't have beautiful scenery to keep you occupied. There's a certain monotony to it.

It's not pretty. And it's not that you're doing it for one day. I mean, how many times are they going around it in one day on average? About 109 to 120 because it's 0.55 miles. Right, so 109 to 120 times you're going around this in one day. You're doing that for maybe 50 plus days. It is simply remarkable. It is such an alien concept, I think, to the way that most people who are engaging in, for want of a better term, exercise or running in the West or anywhere around the world these days, what is common these days, I should say, it seems so far removed from that.

Yet I think there's something we can all learn from that. So three things. If and when people watch the movie, our main Navajo character's name is Sean Martin. His dad, Alan Martin, is in the movie. He's a Navajo medicine man. Number one, he told me, Mother Earth is under the sidewalk too. We are beings of nature. And if we can't feel that when our feet are on the ground, when we're breathing in air,

then we're disconnected from who we are. The experience of nature shouldn't just come when you're standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Anytime your feet run Mother Earth, anytime you're breathing in the sky, you are connected to the planet. That's number one. Number two, logistically, people have run, there's something called a transcontinental race, which is essentially from City Hall, San Francisco, on the west coast of the US to City Hall, New York City. It's about 3,100 miles. People average between 55 and 68, 70 miles a day. That's a logistical nightmare.

In the US, you have to cross three mountain ranges, the Sierras in California, the Wasatch in Utah, the Rockies in Colorado. You're worried about cars, but more importantly, you can't get aid when you need it. When you're expending that amount of energy and that type of aerobic output, you want to be able to have aid every half a mile. And when you're pushing those limits, it's not so much about outer beauty. You know, you're not, if you're left to derive inspiration from something external that you can't control, you're doomed. Because if you're wrecked, it doesn't matter if you're in the most beautiful place.

You might get a burst of energy, but the training for this type of race is done well in advance of the course, such that the course doesn't scare the runners. The logistics don't scare the runners. The logistics don't scare the runners. In essence, the run becomes a freeing experience because you don't have to worry about getting external inspiration. You don't have to worry about where your food is, where your water is, where your resting point is. You get to enter what, as you know, scientists these days call flow states. And the last point, this is the fourth point I said, I'd say three things. When people do fasts, as we know, you know, anecdotally, after two or three days, people

get a burst of energy and they're able to sustain that fast for a much longer period than they might have understood. Now, biochemically, and this is your expertise, you know, we know that there's another metabolic cycle that people enter into when they've got a calorie depletion state. And people will kind of associate that with our prehistoric necessity of living through famines. But I've seen with multi-day races, races that are three, four, five, six, 10, 52 days long. People enter into a different mental and metabolic cycle so that the mind essentially melts and the energies of the heart, the energies of the spirit become free flowing and take people beyond the kind of idea of monotony. It's monotonous from

your eyes, but with the flow of emotion, the flow of inspiration, there's constant newness. newness from your eyes but with the flow of emotion the flow of inspiration there's constant newness yeah so powerful sanjay um running many people say you engage in long distance running which which i don't although i'm working towards it i'm you know i i think i really feel a strong pull to getting into this i'm looking at it in a different way i'm looking i'm looking at it as part of my own growth my own personal growth I feel it would really assist that. But people who do run long distances, they often talk about it, don't they, as a form of meditation, as a form of connection. They start to process stuff in their life that actually they're unable to process in other in other in other aspects of their life it's it's incredible that they i've spoken to so many runners on this podcast uh

a radio presenter in the uk called vasos alexander he shared his story i spoke to do you know killian jaune of course legend absolute legend yeah i i was, very lucky to do a pretty long conversation with Killian a few months ago. And it's one of the most enjoyable conversations I've had because this is a guy who runs in mountain ranges. He's probably the fastest mountain runner in the world right now. For sure. He has achieved things that nobody else has achieved. Running up and down from Everest twice in one week. He does it once. It's insane. And then he has, he's still, he's not due to leave for another four days or six days. So why don't I just do this

again? I mean, it was just incredible to hear his story, but what I took from Chancel Killian, But what I took from Chancel Killian, first of all, he was one of the humblest people I've come across. And I often wonder if that is because he exists in an environment where he could die at any moment. He, you know, he sees the power of, you know, Mother Earth, of nature. He sees how small he is relative to everything else in the world. And I feel when I speak to people who do these sort of activities in nature at the extremes of what we think is possible,

I find them all incredibly humble and modest because I think on one level it might be because they see actually they are literally nothing in the context of the universe and the worlds. And I think, I don't know, what do you think? Is that something you've found within the people you've spoken to? I mean, I would like to close that gap for a second and kind of suggest, and I know this is your intention too, that when we speak about running, we're also including people who walk. Just the idea of moving with your feet, because if anybody has seen some of these mountain races or even ultra distance races,

it's a mixture of walking and running. People are walking sections, people are jogging sections, people are hammering through sections. So it's the idea of meditating and praying through your feet. I would suggest to people who look at running as painful, who look at running as something that causes injury, to approach running in a totally different way. Instead of looking at running for performance, running for miles, running for body shape, running for burning calories, looking at running as a pathway to transformation. I mean, running will get you any of those previous examples that I mentioned. It's like, if you want to lose weight, running will do that for you. If you want to look better and feel better, running will do that for you. But if you want to get closer to God, running will do that for you. The question is like, how many of us look at running

as that kind of tool, as a way to get into our innermost self. And although I've never met Killian, I would imagine that he is more oriented towards the latter, running as a way to get to his innermost self and performance as a way to achieve self-transcendence, the idea of going beyond your personal limitations. So if you happen to win a race, great. But if you happen to become a better person to learn about yourself, even better. And so the prescription for running as an act of transformation requires being soft between your ears, learning how to connect with your heartbeat, learning how to connect with your spiritual heart, and letting those energies drive your run rather than your GPS watch, rather than thinking about what you're going to eat or what you're going to

do afterwards, rather than even listening to music and having some external source pump you up for three, four minutes at a time. If you strip away what's between your ears, you end up having a naturally beautiful experience because running or walking or moving with our feet when done with the right intention is one of the most natural things out there. Yeah, so powerful. So has such potential to be transformative if we reframe the narrative around running, around walking, around exercise. I'm putting that in inverted commas, this whole idea of exercise. Actually, in many ways, even that term, you know, by using that term, we've sort of lost the essence of what it is really. I've just spoken to Brian McKenzie for an hour and a half, maybe two hours we even

went for, on breathing and the power of the breath. And as, as you know, that connection to your breath is a necessary tool in self-transformation and you can make the same case for running, for walking, for all sorts of different, different kinds of movement, for sure. Um, you know, for people, you, you mentioned this way of getting closer to God. I just want to expand that out for people who might be listening to this who don't feel a pull towards a religion, let's say, which is many people. I think I want to broaden this out beyond the sort of religious aspect to, for me, it's about connection to yourself. It's about finding out who you are. So from the Eastern standpoint, that is religion. It's like religion is the quest for self-discovery. And, you know, in the West or through structures like Judaism, through Christianity, through Islam, through Buddhism, there is a, even in Hinduism, there's a lot of ritual, but the ultimate side of things is that spiritual

pursuit of identity. So even if I'm, I've been using the wrong terminology, but we can separate the idea of spirituality from religion. Running, we can say is a spiritual practice. It can be used in a religious context, but it is that pathway of self-discovery or part of that pathway of self-discovery. When you use the term spirituality, what do you mean? So I understand that some of these things are bad words for people that have come through organized religion, particularly in a Western sense. organized religion, particularly in a Western sense, but from a Hindu sense, from an Eastern sense, God is the supreme. God is anything you choose to look at as the highest possible potential. God, we feel, is not just some external force, but it's an internal force. Through the process of self-discovery, you realize

that you are part of what we call the supreme. You're part of an entire universe, an entire cosmos. There's a million ways to go about it. So I would, you know, to actually answer your question, spirituality is trying to harness an inner urge to achieve something better in your life. And that goal doesn't have to be defined as self-discovery. Spirituality comes from the act of aspiration. It comes from an inner cry of just wanting to be a better person, wanting to achieve something in your life, wanting to pull a power that you feel is beyond you,

that isn't in your particular range of skills and crying from within for that power to come out. That is spirituality to me. I love it. I really like it. Um, one of the things I think that it's slightly off kilter, off track in modern society is that everything is external. You know, we are looking to external noise to help us feel whole. We, as you say, we can't run without music, without podcasts. We can't sit and just be alone with our thoughts. Every minute of downtime is being usurped by

technology where we are constantly getting external inputs and putting them into our brains and responding to them. And I actually think it's a bigger problem than a lot of people realize because by not having that time, by not having solitude, I actually think it's a bigger problem than a lot of people realize because by not having that time, by not having solitude, I actually think it's impossible to be truly healthy. Because I think solitude, being alone with your thoughts and actually being able to sit with your thoughts is a critical life skill. It is a critical component of self-discovery. It is a critical component to find out what your meaning is, what your purpose is in life. And you cannot do that, in my view, if from the minute you wake up, you look at your smartphone and you are constantly responding to emails, to social media, to news bulletins, constantly

responding to everyone around you, constantly doing things for other people and never having a bit of time, even if it's just a five minutes for self-reflection, I actually would go as far as saying, I don't think it's possible to be healthy and truly happy without that internal, you know, without looking at yourself inside. I'm totally with you. And I was an extreme pessimist until recently about that. We spoke about spirituality being aspiration. On the surface, people's tendency for distraction is a constant hunger for inspiration. It's like you're looking for little bursts of things

to keep your mind open and free and excited. I think the disconnect is that we don't channel that inspiration inwardly. That idea of going out and using technology to suck in different forms of inspiration or different forms of entertainment isn't inherently bad if we have a platform underneath, if we're beginning to direct that outer search of technology towards things that truly add to our aspiration. And I'll break it down. It's like, if we're just talking about running, it's like watching all the races that are happening right now from the Berlin Marathon, which happened today, the day that we're podcasting to the Track World Championships, it's like you watch, I'd say, two hours of videos. And you're listening to playlists that are getting you hyped for running.

If you don't, thereafter, go running. None of that inspiration is going to lead to progress. And so I think that's the heart of your concern. It's like, in terms of this world of inspiration and distraction, how much of those activities lead to progress? None of them do if you actually don't take action in the spirit of that inspiration. And actually, if we take something like Instagram, for example, you know, we see the inspirational memes and we get excited. Hey, I do this as well. And you want to comment and you want to share and go, yeah,

yeah, I love this. But we often feel by doing that, that we've actually taken action. But so often we haven't, all we've done is press like and commented. That's not action. We've, you know, what is going to, what is it going to take for us to use that inspiration and then convert it into action in our lives? And we can flip it. We can say like, what are you aspiring towards? Like whether it's in your career, whether it's physical, whether it's spiritual, and you have those goals that you're seeking, The inspiration that you need should be handpicked to achieve those goals. Like very often before I go for a run to psych myself up, I watch some of the greatest track performances ever. I might watch, on a particularly bad day, I might watch like a

full 10,000 meter race on YouTube, like 26, 27, 28 minutes. And I'll screw around and stretch and get warmed up. But afterwards, it's like, I've got the inspiration. I've seen these people punish themselves for 26 minutes, 28 minutes. I can take that and put that into my hour and a half effort, but I'm choosing my inspiration. I'm choosing my distraction because I see that it can possibly be a tool towards my own aspiration. And so what you're saying, I think is entirely correct, that if we don't have those moments of solitude, we don't actually know what to pick and choose in the world. And we end up getting this jumble of mishmashed distraction. You know, as you were saying that, Sanjay, I started to think about my own relationship

with football. And so in the UK, football, or what you might call here soccer, I'd call it football, is huge. It's the national sports. And I spent a large part of my life being obsessed with football. Like every day, I'd check all the transfer news, the results, what's the speculation. I'd watch the games. I'd get upset if my team hadn't won. I would travel around Europe watching my team play. And over the last few years, as I've tried to understand myself better, I think there's a couple of things to say about that, which I think is relevant to our conversation. Because for the last few years, I am completely disinterested. Like in a way that my friends find it very hard to understand, given how in that world I was. But for maybe longer even, maybe seven, eight, nine years, I'm just not that interested anymore. I can't, you know, I've even

tried to pretend to be interested, but I'm just not in the way. I can't, you know, I've even tried to pretend to be interested, but I'm just not in the way that I was. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. A, I think it was part of my identity, you know, as an immigrant growing up in the UK, you know, my parents from India come to the UK trying to create a better life for them, for their family. You know, you have that conflict where at home you're being brought up a certain way with an Indian background. And then at school, your buddies have got a Western upbringing and there's a culture clash. And so I wouldn't say this is unique to an immigrant necessarily, but I think everyone's trying to

fit in. But I think for me, my way of fitting in, one of the many ways I used to try and fit in was to make football a big part of my identity. And so, you know, as you go down this kind of, as you do the inner work and try and figure yourself out more, you realize that that's just a story I've created. And actually, do I still need that story anymore? Actually, no, I don't. What is my life like without that story? That's one aspect. There's many facets to this. But the other one is, to go back to what we've just been talking about, is this whole idea that many people spend all their free time watching football, enjoying the beauty within the game, celebrating a goal whilst sitting on a sofa, drinking a beer, yet don't do any physical

activity, yet don't go and play football. And just to be super clear, I am not criticizing people who do that. I am really not a sort of very judgmental kind of person. It's kind of like, that is fine. I have done that before, right? So I'm not, I'm absolutely not criticizing it. But it's interesting for me that when we talk about inspiration leading to action, well, I've got very limited free time these days. I'm very, very busy. I love my work, but I also value heavily above my work. I value my relationship with my wife and my children. And if I have free time now, I don't want to watch something inspiring. I want to do something inspiring, whether it's for myself, by myself, or with my

family. And I think that's been a big shift in my life in terms of, you know, use inspiration, watch an amazing goal by Lionel Messi, let's say. But I would say, use that to go out now and play with your kids in the park, play with the football, try and recreate that on the pitch with your son or your daughter. You know, I don't quite know where I'm going with this. I'm sort of processing the thought as we're having this conversation. But I don't know, what do you think of that? Is there something in that related to what we're talking about? Absolutely. I mean, you're from Bengal. And the founder of the 3100 mile race was a man named Sri Chinmoy, who came from Bengal to New York City in 1964 and spent the last 30 some odd years

of his life there. Passed away in 2007. So he's Bengali? Bengali. I had no idea. Yeah. I'm even more, I love the film even more now, now that I know that fact. So he was an Indian spiritual master. And on the outer surface, he was very close friends with Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu. He committed his life to creating pathways for people to transform inspiration into aspiration. He wrote a ton of music, wrote many, many books, a lot of poetry, painted a lot of photos, started a lot of physical, basically physical activities like races, like the 3100 and other multi-day races, to try to encourage people to use inspiration to unlock their potential. It wasn't just inspiration as distraction or inspiration as release. And obviously there's a benefit to

innocent entertainment, but trying ultimately to find ways for people to look at this life as something precious, to understand that life is essentially an incredible gift and what you get out of it is up to you. Like, what are your goals? Do you have long-term goals? Do you have goals that aren't just directed towards outer success or making other people happy? Do you have a sense of achieving happiness yourself? And so he dedicated his life to that. At the same time, you know, he thought that the physical part of life was an essential component to that process. He didn't feel like we needed to separate or that we should separate ourselves entirely from the world and live in a cave or live in an ashram per se. He actually has started

or inspired a series of running stores called Run and Become, which are in the UK. And we kind of lifted the second part of our title of the movie from that. So the movie's title is 3100 Run and Become. But I say this just to kind of echo your statement that life can be a distraction. And we want to realize too late that we no longer have the capacity, the physical capacities, the mental capacities, even the financial capacities to achieve a sense of our dreams? Or do people want to begin achieving those dreams right now? You went for a two-hour run this morning. What did you get out of it? The Kenyans have a saying called run dumb.

And this morning, Kenanisa Bekele, who's an Ethiopian runner, who's got the world record in the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters, he ran, I believe, 201.43 in the Berlin Marathon, missed Elliot Kipchoge's record by two seconds. Kipchoge ran 201. two seconds. Kipchoge ran 2.01.41, I believe, last year in Berlin. Who's just won 2.01.43? Kenanisa Bekele.

When was that? Just a couple hours ago. Are you kidding me? Yeah, so people thought Kipchoge's record was going to be unassailable. Yeah, I'm literally in shock at the moment because I was about to ask you if you knew whether Kipchoge was going to go for that sub- Yeah, I'm literally in shock at the moment because I was about to ask you if you knew where the Kipchoge was going to go

for that sub two hour point this October in London. Well, he is. Well, he's not in London anymore. It's, and by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have probably known what happened, but they set up a course for him in Vienna. Ken Onisa-Bakele is also a Nike athlete, but I'm guessing that he wasn't really part of that mission

because this was a PR for him by more than 80 seconds. He ran low 203s just a few seconds off the then world record a few years back at Berlin. But many people thought that Kipchoge's record last year was going to be untouchable. And today, Michkele pulled out a near world record out of absolutely nothing. So, you know, folks at that level, and I should add that Bekele had a serious hamstring problem, I believe around kilometer 35, and he dropped back off the two leaders. and he dropped back off the two leaders. And somehow he self-healed. This is the question, like how in these activities, when you feel like you're going to have an injury,

do you quote, run through them? Physiologically, the wall in a marathon can be a complex like cascade of biochemical processes that are screaming at your mind and your body to stop the activity lest you die. So the action of pushing through the wall is very much harnessing a deeper sense of purpose, perhaps, but definitely a deeper source of energy to literally wash out the factors in your bloodstream that are basically telling you, you've got to stop. So this is just a long way to say that that's not possible if you're worried, if you're concerned, if you're fearful, if you're doubting, if you misunderstand those signals, if you don't feel like you can control those signals and that body reaction.

So like when I run, I just try to be happy. And I find that the looser I am between my ears, the looser my neck is, the looser my shoulders are, the looser my body is, and the less I get injured. A lot of the listeners, you know, who might not have had a good experience with running would probably say like running makes my knees hurt. Running gives me injuries. Running makes me feel terrible. And I would say that's a function consciously or not of mindset. And that by changing one's mindset, I think one can get a lot more out of running. Yeah, that's very powerful. You know, we're living in a world where many of us are chronically stressed. The World Health Organization calls stress the health epidemic of the 21st century at the moment.

And I think there's good reason for that. And I guess stress changes our physiology. Stress changes, I mean, it changes everything. It changes our breathing. It changes our muscle tension. It changes what's going on in our blood. All sorts of things change in our body when we feel essentially that we're under attack, which is many of us are living in worlds where we constantly feel as though we're under attack, even though there actually is no genuine physical threat there for most of us, for many of us, I should say. And of course, if you then bring, if you think about it, I'm trying to think about what you just said. If I'm incredibly stressed out and my body is tight, and then I take that form to running, you can make a,

I guess, again, I'm falling into the trap of making a physical argument to injuries, which you're trying to move me away from, I guess. I guess what I'm trying to say is you could be really tight when you run. So of course it's going to hurt your back or your hip or your knee or your feet because you're tight. Whereas in some ways, maybe you want to de-stress before you run, or you could take your approach, which is run loose and use it as a way to train yourself to be loose, to be fluid, to be free, to not have tension in your body. Because ultimately it's tension in our bodies, whether physical tension, emotional tension, psychological tension, this is ultimately where that dis-ease within us comes from.

You just made the best argument for a practice of meditation and a practice for contemplation. The 3,100 mile race, for example, is so physically, mentally, emotionally brutal that if you don't have the wherewithal to run from your heart from mile one, it's going to be an exhausting, a horrendous experience, and you're not going to finish and you might even drop out. A similar analogy is like, you know, if you start a run and you're incredibly tight mentally, if you're incredibly tight emotionally, you're not going to have a good experience. And for both of these, for the extreme races, like the 3100, all the way down to a simple two to three mile, two to three mile jog, what you said holds true that before starting these activities,

if you're mentally loose, you're going to have a better experience in the physical. And that's a corollary to life. If you're mentally loose in any part of your day-to-day activities, you're going to have a less stressful experience. And so it comes down to the idea of centering oneself first thing in the morning before the stresses and the cavalcade of responsibilities descend on our shoulders, taking five, 10, 12 minutes and practicing contemplation. Practice consciously slowing down your mind, consciously bringing forth the qualities of your heart. And you begin your day from a point of balance.

And at other points during your day, you understand where your balance is or was and how to return to those stages. So whether it's having a super stressful job or having a super stressful experience running, stress is self-created. as you said in the extreme examples of actual stimuli that totally change your brain chemistry like someone physically attacking you or physically threatening you but those examples not notwithstanding stress is self-created and i'm not discounting people's own experiences of stress i'm just saying that it's like, with the contemplative practice, whether it takes you six months, a year, two years, you can live entirely stress-free. I'll say not from a bragging standpoint and admitting that I have a long way to go. Very few things stress me out because I ultimately realized, like you said, Killian

Jornet, that I'm not important. Like nothing I do in life is going to change this world. And so why am I stressed about my own kind of perception of where I sit in the world? Like why am I allowing these external things to stress me out? If I feel like I'm no bigger than a grain of sand, all these forces like wind will just push past me. There is an incredible sense of calm around you. That's for sure. When I went down to let you in to the building today, talking to you, I had no idea you'd just done a two hour run. You just can't tell from your demeanor. Not that there is a way one should be after a two hour run. Sweaty. Yeah. But yeah. And look, I get it. You've had a shower and that kind of stuff, but still there is a real sense of calm around you. And it's very inspiring because I know exactly what you mean. I feel over the last few years, I don't get triggered by the

things that I used to get triggered by. And you feel, you know, you feel you're coming into your power. You feel actually now life is happening for me rather than life is happening to me. And it feels great. And again, I'm not bragging either. It's taken a lot of hard work. It's taken a lot of friction. It's taken a lot of quite significant life experiences like losing my dad for me to start confronting these issues. But I think it is the best journey you're ever going to take. I think this is the point of life, really, is ultimately to discover who you are, not who you think you are right now, but who you are without all the experiences that you have experienced throughout your life, all the,

you know, without picking up the tendencies of your parents, of your friends, of the kids you went to school with, of your work colleagues. Actually, who am I without all of that? I've just come back from two days at Santa Rosa where I spoke to arguably the world's leading researcher in human behavior, BJ Fogg. I spent an incredible two days with him. But one of the attendees on this bootcamp that he runs, there's only a few of us there, we were chatting. And I can't remember where he grew up. I think he grew up in Houston and we were just talking about, you know, our journeys over the last few years. And he said, it wasn't until I left Houston for work and went to a different city that I started to realize what I thought was me, what I used to think were the things that I liked to do

was merely a product of the environment in which I was in. As soon as I moved to a different city where people weren't doing the same behaviors, I just realized actually that is me. I look back to the behaviors that I used to do. I thought, why was I doing that? I was just doing it to fit in with everyone around me, but it wasn't who I truly am. And coming back to running and your film, I guess we can all,

on whatever level we choose, because very few people, if any, listening to this are going to say, you know what? Yeah, I get it. You guys, right. I'm going to sign up for the 3100 next year. Right. There may be someone, maybe we'll inspire someone who does it in the future, you know, but nonetheless, there is something about the process of movement, the process of putting your feet on the ground, whether it's running or simply walking that can start connecting you to yourself. If I think back to the film and I'm super excited that actually there's going to be a few screenings in the UK, which is fantastic. So hopefully I'll try and put this podcast out before then and actually announce the dates and the outros to people who actually are like, you know, I want to watch this film. They will know where they can go and see it. But the people competing in this race

did not look like athletes, right? And I don't mean that in any derogatory way. They don't look what our current modern perception is of what an athlete looks like. They didn't have the super fancy athletic gear on. I didn't see a whole load of tracking devices for them to measure heart rate and all kinds of other things. Maybe that was

going on. I certainly didn't see that. And they don't look super, super toned and fit. Yet these guys were able to run 50 plus miles a day for 50 plus days around a half mile monotonous block of concrete. It is incredible. And so what is going on there? What, you know, is our perception now of what an athlete is, what an athlete looks like, what an athlete wears? Have we lost our way somewhere? Are we missing part of the big picture? You know, the 3,100 mile runners and and just to defend them for a second they they they're like english channel swimmers where you start an english just i'm saying i'm explaining because that's like the winner of of the race a few years ago uh definitely

does not look like a prototypical ultra distance runner um but people people who swim the channel, they don't look like athletes either. It's like they have to go in 25 to 35 pounds overweight in order to insulate themselves against the cold of the channel. And so you see people who are just ripped having to pound down pints of Ben and Jerry's every night before they go to sleep. And when they show up in their Speedos or in their one-piece swimsuits, standing on the edge at Dover, there's a lot of body fat. And the people that have swam the channel one, two, three times consecutively, they don't look like athletes at all, but they've got a very specific set of incredible skills. And so in the 3100, all the runners come in 10 to 12 pounds heavier, because in the first three to four weeks, you're burning fat. The next two to three weeks, you're burning basically the

calories you're taking in. The last two weeks, you're burning muscle. So people will drop anywhere between 10 and 15 to 20% of their body weight across the 3,100-mile journey. But they know that shoes don't matter. Tights don't matter. Compression doesn't matter. Tracking doesn't matter. Even diet doesn't matter. Digestion matters.

So most of the people running, if not all in that period, are eating a completely vegetarian diet, some vegan. But that's all to say that it's reduced to the most elemental state. Calories in, calories out. Can you connect with your breath? Can you draw energy in from your feet? Are you running happy? If you're running happy in that race, you don't have physical problems.

The winner of most, the kind of most laureled or lauded runner in that race is a star of the movie 3100. What's Ash? Ash Prihanal. He took an Indian name from Sriri chinmoy which means aspiration fire inside the heart so we spoke about inspiration and aspiration but this fire of aspiration burning in his heart is essentially the kind of like soul's name that sri chinmoy gave him but he's actually from scandinavia he's from finland and he's a paper boy. And he doesn't look on the surface like an athlete,

although he's probably 3% to 5% body fat, doesn't dress in the gear that, quote, athletes dress in. But 100 years ago, athletes didn't dress in that gear. In India, they dressed in loincloths and they had sandals. In Native America and the Southwest, they had moccasins and they might have had some type of covering. But what makes an athlete? Yeah, what makes an athlete? But even in the film, where it's not just the 3100 race, you also deal with this tribe, which I want to go into.

But you also deal with this devotional race in Japan. Yeah. They're in robes. they're in robes they're in robes so in fact let's go to that because this is super fascinating for me um so this was the best part of the whole process for me like no we we got we got access to the navajo and their spirituality that nobody had before we were in the kalahari hunting with Bushmen in a way that I don't think, I mean, it has been filmed, but I don't think it's ever going to be filmed again for reasons we can get into. But some of that footage is beautiful. And I really would encourage people to watch it if you've been with that tribe and seeing what hunting is for them. But in Japan, like you said, there's an esoteric sect of monks outside Kyoto. They were

actually the first to bring Buddhism to the island of Japan about 1500 years ago. But for some reason, the original founder of that sect had this like spark of inspiration to start a thousand day trek. This was started in 556 BC and listeners will have to put their math hats on for a second. The thousand days is split into 10 hundred day cycles. You have to complete those 10 cycles in seven or eight years. So some years it's one cycle, some years it's two cycles. Each cycle has a set daily allotment of miles. They live on a mountain. And so the miles require going up and down the mountain one or two times. So the first few cycles are 11.2, 11.4 miles. And that's up and down the mountain once. The mountain's about a thousand meters up and down. Now they walk, but they walk at a pace that most runners couldn't do,

especially up the hills. People can go to our Instagram at 3100film and look at pictures of them. They're dressed head to toe in robes, wearing bamboo sandals with this like four pound Star Wars looking like hat on carrying this like massive staff. And in the right hand, they have a string of beads and they're praying every single step. Now the catch is, by the time they get to the sixth, seventh, eighth cycle, they're at 35 miles per day, then 56 miles per day. They're walking, aren't they? Or hiking. They're moving. They're moving. They're moving with the mind of meditation. And they're moving fast and they're moving on single track trails, in the mud, in the rain,

sometimes in the snow. But if they don't complete their daily allotment, their daily mileage, they have to take their own lives. So it's the most sheer commitment one could imagine. Now, the trick is, it's not about suffering. If it's about suffering, you wouldn't last a day and you'd have to kill yourself. suffering, you wouldn't last a day and you'd have to kill yourself. You've prepared yourself to walk, to move in bliss. So that idea of the ultimate consequence isn't even in your consciousness. You have no fear. You have no insecurity. You have no doubt. No one has actually taken their life in more than 150 years, I think because the preparation is so much more strenuous. I think because the preparation is so much more strenuous. That said, they say because that consequence has been untouched since the very first attempt, they haven't lessened the severity of the consequence. Therefore, they haven't shortened the duration of the austerity.

You know, let's say, Rangan, you did it and everybody likes you. Let's say at day 350, you stubbed your toe and you were like, uh, you know, I might have to kill myself. If there was any sense of compromise, we would all say like, let's just make this a 350-day trek. Forget about the other 1,000, other 650 days. There'd be a sense of compromise. But because they've never waived on that ultimate commitment, that ultimate consequence, the activities remain completely pure.

The footage of watching them in the film is incredible. And I just want to reiterate that for people listening, that it is a 1,000-day mission. for people listening that it is a 1,000-day mission. I'm going to interrupt you and throw in one more thing that's not in the movie because we couldn't film it. And it's also, with all due respect, it's completely bonkers. So after the sixth cycle, they have to do an eight-and-a-half-day fast. The eight-and-a-half-day fast used to be a 10-day fast. Let's just clarify this. After the

sixth cycle of 100 days, so this is after 600 days of covering insane distances in mountains. Yeah. So I'm not even at the heat of what this fast is yet. But this is after all of that, then they have to do this fast. Yeah. So it's an eight and a half day fast. It used to be in August, but it's too hot in August. And it used to be 10 days and people would die. Now it's in October and it's lessened by a day and a half. And people go like, why would I die after 10 days? I would drink enough water. I would have enough juice.

I would be able to take my whatever pills. I take energy pills and all that stuff that we do when we fast. But their fast is crazy. I love it. It's no food, big deal. We're in Santa Monica. Everybody here would yawn. There's probably people here who haven't eaten anything solid in five years, for those who know LA. But number two, no water. Now you're getting serious. Eight and a half days of no water. Technically, you get like an ounce of water to rinse in your mouth so your cheeks don't get permanently stuck to your teeth, but you've got to spit out that water. And then to add punishment or add insult to injury,

the aspirant has to leave the seat of their fast once a day to go collect water for the deity who resides in the temple that they're fasting in. So they have to see water, basically. Yeah, and it's like a 100-meter long walk, and it gets slower and slower and slower each day. Wait, wait, this slower and slower and slower. I noticed. Wait, wait. This last part.

No sleep. No sleep. You're there chanting for eight and a half days with people besides them kind of like propping them up and chanting with them. So no food, no water, no sleep for eight and a half days. After 600 days of heavy juicy yeah so when it when the last few years get to 35 56 miles a day the aspirin most likely is thinking like this is nothing yeah they're at that point where that where what to me and to most people in this city most people listening to this podcast what seems like an unsurmountable obstacle, actually at that point is relatively okay in the context of everything else that has gone before it.

They say they can hear the ash falling off of incense around the sixth or seventh day. And for better or for worse, they can smell food being cooked on the mountain that's being cooked like miles away. And they can tell you what the monks around them have eaten in their last meals. That heightened sensory perception is supernatural. I mean, what a privilege to be able to go and see this with your eyes and film it. That's one thing that is springing to mind. We were so lucky. I mean, the process of making this movie

was absolutely preordained, or I would say completely lucky. Like I had access to the 3,100 mile race because I know the folks that run it. And I was a student of Sri Chinmoy, the founder as well. But then when I went to try to approach the Navajo, I met a small organization in Santa Fe that was actually founded or co-founded by one of Sri Chinmoy students in the 80s. And they're mostly native and they gave me access to this incredible runner on the Navajo Nation. When we went to Japan, I showed the monks a photo of Sri Chinmoy and a young monk from that monastery

30 years before. They didn't recognize him until they realized that that monk had since gained a couple of hundred pounds, but was now the head monk of the entire mountain. When we were in Botswana, we had a Bushman guide completely randomly selected for us by UK NGO, Survival International. And I was peppering him with questions because I'd heard that a decade earlier, there was a group of five Bushmen that had actually visited a small canyon on the Navajo Nation where our main character was from and lived and ran. And they randomly showed

up there with a friend who took them there while they were on a kind of barnstorming fundraising tour in the US. The Bushman guide of ours said that he was one of those. So if I have all the Bushmen in all the places in all the world, I met the right one. And we kind of bombed into Botswana secretly because as people will know from watching the movie, the Kalahari Bushmen who have lived in the Kalahari desert and hunted for 125,000 years in the last 19 years have been severely restricted in their practices of hunting as a way to exterminate them as a tactic of genocide from a largely Western educated new government. So hunting has been banned. And we wanted to try to get them to go hunting, fully conscious of the penalties, because we knew that the hunters down

there were activists as well, and would look at the movie and had understood the movie to be a vehicle for them to get their message out to the greater world. And so that hunt in Botswana, while there have been many hunts that have been filmed previously, I'm afraid to say this might be the last one because the government has completely shut down that practice at the penalty of death. Yeah. And let's go into the Navajo tribe because there were three different kinds of running, uh, experiences that you covered in this film. And I think they, they each tell their own story in their own way. This really struck me when we saw this tribe and how hunting was a way of life for them had been for, I think it was 125,000 years.

Each generation has done that. They say that while the Bushmen aren't the root tribe of Homo sapiens, that they were one of the more kind of nomadic ones and that every single human being on earth has markers in their DNA that are specific to the Bushmen. So we all have a little bit of Kalahari Bushmen in us, as wild as that might seem. I think it's very humbling, actually. It's very humbling to hear that. And they've almost been entirely exterminated.

And so just to be clear, because a lot of people listen to this, at least not as of yet would have watched this film. There's a big movement at the moment in the world for, um, to save the planet. Well, I don't think it's actually about saving the planet. I think the planet is going to be fine, but, uh, saving humanity on this planet in the way we know it, let's put it like that. Um, and there's a lot of debates going on regarding the best way to do that. But there is a growing vegan movement around the world with the aim for many, many people choosing to go vegan are doing it for the environment. Now, I want to at some point explore that on my podcast in terms of getting the different points of view in terms of what is

the best thing that we can do for the environment. I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as it's made out to be but the relevance here is the government haven't stopped them from hunting for environmental reasons from my understanding and is there a case I know my own view on this I know what you're likely to say, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. They have been banned from hunting, which is something that they have done as a way of life for a hundred thousand plus years. It isn't a hobby they choose to partake in. It is how they get food. It is how they probably connect to the earth and to nature. You know, why have they been banned? And what would they say, do you think, about the perceived environmental argument that they should not

be hunting? That's a great question. So the government on the surface says what's politically expedient, that this tribe, the Kalahari Bushmen, should no longer be allowed to hunt because they are harming biodiversity. So they make the environmental argument. The Bushmen will say in 125,000 years of existence, not a single species has gone extinct under their watch. They're very conscious of how they hunt, when they hunt, so that they basically support the growth and the health of different species of animals. When the colonizers came to the United States, to North America, they saw wilderness. Just because Native Americans weren't practicing the same type of domestication of animals, but they had a very, very intricate scheme of husbandry where they would literally support the buffalo,

support deer herds, support elk herds by calling them at specific numbers, not killing females in the wrong time of the year, helping to reseed meadows, things like that. It was a very intricate system of balance. And so the Kalahari Bushmen aren't sitting in a savanna watching food running by them and just killing everything in sight. They are the apex predator, but they've got the apex responsibility of maintaining the health of their ecosystem. That notwithstanding, the government realized, despite having given the Kalahari Bushmen basically ancestral rights for 50, 60 years of the history of Botswana, a company discovered a mountain of copper under the Kalahari Desert. And so that's the value proposition. It's like,

get the Kalahari off the land, get those resources. It's the same playbook that took place in Australia, the same insidious playbook that took place in the United States, everywhere where there's a quote, non-Western indigenous population in India as well, the quote, like hill people, the people living in forests, in areas where there's resources that can be extracted and value added and sold for a profit for few. It's always the same, destroy wisdom, destroy people so that a handful of people can become rich. So, you know, heart-wrenching and tragic to hear this about all these different ways of life i think it's really striking isn't it what you say about them that no species has gone extinct

under their watch in 125 000 years they live in harmony with the natural environment they know that the environment is going to provide for them so they have to live, you know, in sync with it. A lot of the giant environmental NGOs only recently began to recognize the role that people play in the environment. And for decades, the large environmental organizations pushed for conservation areas, pushed for people not to live in those conservation areas without understanding the role that conscious, responsible people have played in conservation for hundreds of thousands of years. So it's very much an entirely Western mindset. And I'm not saying that we should all become indigenous or Kalahari Bushmen or copy them, but it's like, why can't we just let people be? Yeah. But it's not about copying them i think it's about understanding them it's about putting

the way we live now in its evolutionary sort of perspective it's about taking this kind of long-term perspective on how humans have lived and managed to live on earth and i think it it's it's really helpful because the conversation around the climate and the way we all live and consume is growing at pace. And I think it should be growing at this pace. And I think it is something we all need to confront, but it's also quite humbling to hear how they used to live. There was a book, again, the name leaves me at the moment, but it's about the Saturn tribe and about how there was this, this, this moment in the book where they described that they would never over consume, even if there was, you know, a bounty out there, even if nature was providing more than what they needed, they wouldn't take more. They would take only just what they needed. And they had full

faith that nature would also provide when they needed it again. And, you know, I remember sitting there and just thinking about that for minutes, hours, just reflecting on that, thinking, wow, how different it is that we now live our lives, this consumerist culture of chronic consumption, the marketing, the adverts, of chronic consumption, the marketing, the adverts, everything around is designed for us to keep consuming and take more than what the earth can actually provide. I mean, not to go off topic, but we're in California right now. And California was considered the most linguistically rich place in the entire world. There were dozens and dozens of languages, completely independent languages spoken here. And that's because food systems were so consolidated. We're just a few blocks away from the coast. And before settlers, before the Americans, the Russians, the Spanish came here,

people could literally walk outside their door 10, 20 meters and have a bounty of harvest from mussels to root vegetables to berries to fish. It's better than a Whole Foods. It was better than a supermarket. And that's why these language groups remained distinct because people didn't need to travel. They understood how to harvest food from their immediate climb and how to sustain that environment, not just for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of their families and clans. And the more the world pushes towards this idea of regenerative or sustainable agriculture, the more we realize that the entire world, with the exception of some largely taxed areas of the world, was for the most part sustainable and regenerative for a few hundred thousand years not just in the 10 000 years that we were we were farming but in the many years before that when we were hunting

and gathering yeah so that said like when the 3100 mile runners run in the race it's completely the opposite where they're operating at such a high threshold that it's literally calories in, energy out. And so they're at this space metabolically where they're not even worried about what they're eating. You know, their bodies are at such a high vibrational level where it's like they can eat pizza and chocolate and ice cream, take a couple of vitamins to make up their antioxidants and their minerals, and they're just humming along. So it just shows that the human body is an incredibly beautiful, powerful thing. Just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's

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For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Do we know what happens to them afterwards? So when, you know, obviously not everyone completes

the race, which is completely understandable, but when they do complete, you know, are they crushed afterwards? Do they, are they fatigued? Do they come down with illness afterwards? I mean, what happens? Do you know that? Is that a story you've followed? So the majority of the runners that, that participate in the race each year are men, probably 75% of the field in any one year are men. The men have a completion rate of about 50%. in any one year are men. The men have a completion rate of about 50%. The women actually have a completion rate of about 75%. That said, after the race, it can take people months, if not close to a year to feel the same as they did before they started. For those listeners who've competed in any kind of

like endurance event, whether it's a half marathon, marathon, half Ironman, Ironman, or long bike race, you know that there's a period of recovery where your body just feels trashed until it doesn't. And that might take a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to feel like you're yourself again. But the 3,100 mile runners, it can take a year. I guess for many reasons, I imagine it doesn't matter. What they must discover about themselves during those 50 odd, 60 days, however long it is, I'm sure that is enough to get them through the months, the year before they feel physically the same. It is. I mean, the wild thing about the 3100 is that the majority of people who run the race each year have done it before.

And one would say, like, why are you doing this over and over and over? There are very few people, going back to the Killian Jornet example, that would try to summit Everest twice in their life. I mean, much less twice in a week. I mean, it's a spiritual experience, I would imagine for him. It's not about getting to the summit and back, because he's already done that. It's about the idea of discovering who you are through that process. And for Ash Prihano, the Finnish paper boy, who in 2016, when we filmed, was in his 14th attempt, he came back last summer, summer of 2019, and finished the race for an unprecedented 15th time. Wow.

That means he's run about 46,500 miles around a singular half-mile block on a street in Queens, New York City. He's either the craziest person that ever existed, but I would argue that you couldn't actually be that crazy to run 46,000 miles without just completely exploding. He's arguably one of the happiest people that I know. He finds that experience to be so transformative that he focuses during the year on healing, on healing, on healing so that he can come back. Yeah. You know, Sanjay, what has just sprung into my mind is, you know, he's doing that. He's not got headphones in. He's not got a tracker on his wrist.

He's not wearing headphones in, he's not got a tracker on his wrist, he's not wearing all the fancy gear. Yet many of us struggle to go on a treadmill in our local gym for more than a few minutes without distracting ourselves, whether it's with the TV screens, whether it's with music, whether it's with the podcast. And again, I'm not saying there's necessarily anything inherently wrong with it. I know many people listen to this podcast while going out for a long walk or out for a long run. So again, you know, it's definitely not a judgment, but it's an observation that many of us, we cannot do the smallest amount of movement without needing to be distracted from that movement.

I think it goes back to what our goals are. And I would say that the distraction is an important element if one is just seeking performance. You know, sometimes it's like if the weather is bad outside and you're trying to break four hours or three hours or 2.30 in a marathon, you've got a hammer on the treadmill. And it's so brutal to just be there and so unnatural that you need to plug in. Or if running or walking is your way to completely separate yourself from yourself, you know, from other thoughts that might be. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but other thoughts that might be more negative and you've got to listen to a podcast when you walk, that's fine. But if you want to approach running or walking as a pilgrimage, where every time you

go running and walking, whether you're walking to a sacred mountain or a sacred church or walking, you know, through a sacred canyon, if you want to approach walking and running on a day-to-day basis as a pilgrimage, you need to approach it with different tactics. It's like you can't have the distractions. You have to force yourself to be with yourself. You have to force yourself to understand how to bring your heart out,

bring those inner qualities out in your run. It's the same thing with meditation. If you were going to sit down and meditate in front of a TV, the TV is a distraction and you're not going to be able to meditate. So if we look at running as a form of meditation versus classic meditation, if you're running in front of a TV or running with music on, unless it's completely conducive to a meditative experience, you're not going to have a meditative experience. So like, look at that metaphor in another way. If you're sitting down

in silent contemplation, and you're thinking about your day, and you're thinking about your breakfast, you're thinking about your partner, all the responsibilities you have, you're not going to have a meditative experience. And so why, when we run, can we expect a meditative experience if we don't have the same meditative focus? So if we want to have a meditative experience, let's make it easy on ourselves. Let's unplug, let's do exercises before to get ourselves in a calm mind and let's approach that run as though it was a pilgrimage. Yeah, it's a great way of looking at it. And I guess it comes back to what is the intention behind what you are doing? Because if let's say Monday to Friday for some people, life is

stressful, it's busy, there's all these inputs going in, they want to get a quick 20 minute run in that they're in that stress state the whole time. So actually they maybe do want that distraction of music or a podcast for those 20 minutes to, you know, it helps them deal with their week, but it could be that maybe once on a Sunday they think, Hey, you know what? It didn't work yesterday. I've got a chilled out day today. Maybe today is the day where I go for a long walk without my music or without my podcast. I'm just proposing it. Again, I'm not trying to prescribe anything. I think this is all individual. I want people to hear this conversation and the bits that resonate with them might cause them to reflect on a few things. It may not. that is also fine you know i'm genuinely not trying to prescribe to people what they should be doing i'm just simply observing and and i guess in many ways reflecting on my own life and reflecting on what i might be able to do

with a movement practice on a day where i'm not working so on this podcast and i think in in when i talk about this stuff in general it might might come across that I've believed or practiced this stuff since I was six months old. But I didn't. I ran competitively in high school, a little bit in college and thereafter. But it wasn't until I started making this movie in 2015 and went for a run with our Navajo character, Sean Martin, that I realized I was missing something from running. Even though I'd studied with Sri Chinmoy who recommended this type of running, it's like, I just never sunk in. So what, what we threw that you went out for a run.

Yeah. So we're, we're, we're, we're leaving his, his front doorstep. And first of all, he tells me like, we start running in the morning towards the East to greet the rising sun. And I was like, I've never started a run with that type of intention or that type of relationship with nature. Even when I run at the Grand Canyon, it's like, how fast can I get to the bottom and come back up? It's like, no, it's like we start running to the east to greet the rising sun. I was waiting for my GPS watch to go. And I realized like this guy who's like a top ranked ultra marathoner doesn't even have a watch on. And so I take off after him and I realized as

he's running and as he's breathing, he's got a different look in his eyes. And I realized afterwards what that look was, that he understood that this particular run could be transformative. Not like the heavens would open up and like all the angels would come down. But like, if you go into a morning meditation, thinking that it's a good thing, and that if you achieve a small sense or small moment of silence, your day is going to be better. You open yourself up to having that small moment of silence, your day is going to be better. You open yourself up to having that small moment of silence. If in a morning contemplative practice, like you're literally just like thinking about breakfast, you know that nothing's going to happen and that it's not going to be a transformative experience. So it's like he started this run with a loose and

soft mind. And it was evident in the way he was moving. He wasn't worried about time. He wasn't worried about distance. He was just worried about his breath. And he later told me there are three reasons why Navajo run. Number one, running is a celebration of life. It's kind of easy to feel when you're running in a canyon. Maybe not so easy when you're running on a street, but point taken. Number two, running as a teacher. Like you said, like if you have a hard time, if you're going through a really difficult patch,

we all know that if you've got the inspiration to go for a walk or go for a run, the problem doesn't necessarily get solved, but it becomes less intense. There's no reason to analyze why, but it just does. Go for a long walk, go for a long run. You're going to feel better about what's going on in your life. But number three, he said running is a prayer. When you run, your feet are praying to Mother Earth. You're breathing in Father Sky. You're not only asking them for their blessings, you're showing them that you're willing to work for those blessings. And that's running as aspiration. That's running as a cry saying that I'm an insignificant human being. understand that there's greater forces around me that can feed me in my journey to achieve something beyond me, something deeper, something more significant than what I can conjure on my own. And I saw that with Sean when he ran. And when he finished, it wasn't like he was stopping

his GPS watch, looking through his stats, unplugging his iPod or iPhone, he had a sense of calm that I never really achieved in running. And it wasn't like he started with that calm, but I could see that he achieved something through that run. And I was step for step with him. I didn't have a phone. My GPS watch wasn't working. But after the run, I realized he got more out of that than I did. Like, why? We ran the same pathway. It was maybe even more exotic for me because it was the first time running in the Sacred Canyon. I should be feeling better than him. I should just be totally blown away. Like, what did I not do? And then afterwards, when he was explaining to me the Navajo philosophy of running, I realized it was simple.

I didn't recognize that this run could change my perception of myself. I wasn't, I just didn't know, like no harm, no foul, but I just didn't know. And now I know that if I want running to make me a better person and not just a faster person, it can do that because it always has. It just always has. Since we went from four limbs on the ground to two limbs on the ground, running has been a way, not the only way, but a way to self-discovery. I just find that so inspiring the way you just described what they get out of running in fact in many ways calling what they do running and what we the collectors sort of we in the west do as running almost feels as though this should be a different term because yes you're moving your feet and your legs quickly, quicker than walking on the earth.

But it feels like a completely different experience to the point where we probably need a different word for it. I mean, it's just happened in the last few hundred years, even in Chris McDougall's last book, where he talked about kind of traditional running on the Greek islands, you realize that there's been a long, rich tradition. traditional running on the Greek islands, you realize that there's been a long, rich tradition. All indigenous cultures in the world that are still traditional, even in India, they run. People didn't or couldn't use horses to run up and down canyon walls. People ran and understood that you could go longer distances by channeling different types of energies. Sri Chinmoy from India, we don't associate Indian spirituality with running at all, but he was deeply devoted

to running. And he saw not only a modern practice of running being potential or being beneficial, but the fact that running was something that people have done since time immemorial and that it had always been linked to spiritual progress, but maybe not so much in the last few hundred years. If we move over to the Kenyan runners who have been dominating the competitive aspects of long distance running for a long period of time, you mentioned earlier to Kipchoge before and how literally a couple of hours ago, someone was two seconds off his world record, which I am still amazed to hear

because I genuinely thought, like many other people, no one's going to touch that. And the only question for me was, will Elliot break two hours later on this year? But it's incredible. And the person who did it in the Berlin marathon is. Kenanisa Bekele from Ethiopia.

Okay. So another African runner. And I don't know if you have met this runner before or, or, or Elliot Kipchoge, but from what you know, cause I know you, you are very well connected with the running worlds. Um, you know, how did they see running? What did they do you know does elliott kipchoge who is regarded as one of the best marathon runners of all time certainly to my limited knowledge i'm i'm not a big big runner but it's something i very much enjoy and i'm getting more and more into you know how does he see running you know have you do you, do you, do you know how he sees running?

I couldn't answer that specifically other than through friends that have run with them and that have come back realizing that running and faith for him and for other top runners that I've known that have had world records in the past on the female side and the male side in the marathon, the past on the female side and the male side in the marathon, they're people of faith. Whether it's Christian faith or whether it's Eastern faith, it's this idea that if I put in the work, not only can I do it, it's not only just like self-faith, but if I prove myself to the energies out there, to the Supreme, to Oraz andohos say, to the holy people, and I show that I'm willing to work, then I will get their blessings. If I work hard and if I believe in the power of Mother Earth, she will give me that power, whether I'm running on a beach, running on a trail, or running on asphalt. whether I'm running on a beach, running on a trail, or running on asphalt.

We are beings of nature. If our feet are on something, if we're breathing in air, or I guess if we're swimming, we are experiencing the planet. And it's those energies that you see giving runners quasi-mystical or full-on mystical experiences and giving them a sense of energy and purpose in their run that is literally otherworldly. You mentioned swimming, open water swimming is something I've very newly got into. And it is one of the things that I can't stop thinking about. Oh, it's so liberating.

It's unbelievable. It really is. And it's not about swimming, actually, I realize. It's not about the physical action of doing it. How fit are you? How far can you swim? No, it's actually, it's about that connection, that connection to nature, being in the water,

realizing how small, how tiny you are. And in an instant, something could happen potentially and you could be gone. But actually there's something really powerful about that. There's a sport, which I'm not sure, I don't know if you're aware of course, swim run, which is when I did my first open water swim. It's running and swimming. Swim run events are always put on in harmony with the local environments. They are all about nature. They are something that I think is going to be a huge part of my 40s because I'm really feeling a deep connection to it. And there's something about it that it's, it is about that connection. It's not about your time or how fast you run. Of course,

I'm sure some people are competing and are looking at their times, but for most people, it's simply about connection to nature. And I guess that the recurring theme for me that I'm getting, that whether we talk about the 3100 race or the Japanese monks or the Kalamhari Bushmen. It's, I don't know, it's about connection to something bigger than yourself. For a religious person, that might be God. For a spiritual person, that might be your spirits. For someone who doesn't feel that those terms speak to them, I don't think it matters.

It's simply, and I've seen this, and I often think about the patients in my career who have made those full recoveries. The ones who've really managed to get on top of their well-being. their well-being but i've noticed that whether it's getting rid of the illness that leads them to that or actually the illness teaches them about themselves i think there is something powerful when any human being connects to something greater than themselves i think that's where growth happens that's where evolution happens that's where growth happens. That's where evolution happens. That's where, you know, that's where I think the gold is. And some people, as I say, do that with religion. Some don't.

I don't think it matters. But I do think one of the big problems in society is we become so individually focused. So what have I got? What do I want? Even the term self-care, it's like, it's all so focused. I mean, I'm not saying some of these practices aren't beneficial, but without this idea of expansion of self, we don't actually find happiness. Every single spiritual tradition from indigenous traditions to Eastern traditions have a similar metaphor to this one. In the East, we say that we are all individual drops.

But when that drop hits the ocean, it doesn't lose its shape or form, but it can now identify with the entire ocean. It's like this idea of self-discovery is intimately linked with expansion and trying to spread ourselves into other people, through relationships, through love, into the community, into the world, into the greater world. I grew up surfing and I've done a little bit of ocean swimming. And that feeling that you get in open water swimming is literally you know akin to that metaphor of a drop being in the ocean it's like all of a sudden it's like you feel like this magnetic energy this consciousness like spreading out getting into and when you get out of the ocean or a lake or even a river you've got this like buzz and you feel like your consciousness is way further out than just me sitting in an office

on my desk at that moment. And so it's that idea of like, is self-care really self-care or is self-care self-giving? It's like for me, like real self-care is is like give myself, expand myself, either give myself to nature, give myself to a run, surrender myself to an experience, surrender myself to a relationship, to a set of friendships. That's where it's like you get this rejuvenation. You get this washing feeling through your consciousness that's deeper. And even though I do these things, that's deeper than a mineral bath. That's deeper. And even though I do these things, that's deeper than like a mineral bath, that's deeper than lighting candles, that's deeper than just like taking a moment and letting my physical

calm down. Without that real self-expansion, there's really no such thing as self-care. I think you make a, I think it's a really interesting perspective. I think for someone who is disconnected from themselves, whose lives are super stressful and they don't know which way to turn and they're trying to start that journey of caring for themselves. I think lighting a candle and having a bath can be an utterly transformative experience. Absolutely. Because it's not about what that act is. It's about what it symbolizes and it's what it then leads to when done consistently. Then build on it.

Like for me, self-care is ice cream. It's the best thing in the world. It's like I can, everything melts away and I have that experience of sheer joy. But it's like, I know that no matter how, this is literally true. Like no matter how many scoops of ice cream I eat, I'm not going to become a better person.

So it's like the idea of like that release that you would get with lighting candles and getting into a bath. That's like, it's a great thing. But then like, how do you build on that? Like having the most baths of anybody on earth isn't going to make you the wisest or the happiest or the smartest. So like, where do you go from that? Where do you like channel that energy inward and let that

inner energy come out? So when you need it, you don't, and you don't have access to all your self-care tools. You can still have self-care. Yeah, for sure. And I'm a huge fan with, with my patients, but also in the books that I write about helping to inspire people to make these small changes consistently, because it's the small things that are very achievable when done consistently, I think that leads to that progression, that leads to that growth, that leads to starting to take on those big things. And I think, you know, I think those big things, what you have so beautifully shot in your film demonstrates what those big things might be, what big things humans, normal everyday humans are fully capable of once they start on that journey.

And I'll go back to, that's beautifully said. Thank you. I'll go back to what a Hopi elder told me when I was running with some kids in Arizona a few years back. He said, find joy through exertion. To me, I realized that's the formula for self-transcendence. And the 3,100 mile race is called the self-transcendence 3,100 mile race. Going beyond your sense of self, going beyond your limitations limitations going beyond your capacities and achieving a sense of deep bliss that's self-transcendence so when this Hopi elder said find joy through exertion I realized I don't do that in my life it's like when I exert I try to grunt through it and I try to get to the end like when I race I'm trying to get to the end. Like when I race, I'm trying to get to the end. I'm trying to get to a specific time, but maybe my experience isn't as lofty as it could be because I'm not actually trying to find joy in that moment. And the 3,100 mile runners, that's what they're doing. That's

what the Japanese monk is doing. That's what Sean Martin is doing. You exert, but you're not afraid of it. You exert and you try to consciously find happiness, pull out happiness in that moment. And that becomes transformative. I'm going to sit with that thought for a long time. Find joy through exertion. It's my mantra when I run. It's like, number one, everything's exertion. Like you get off the chair, you get off the chair. I'm not saying- Everything's exertion. Like you get off the chair, you get off the chair. I'm not saying- Everything's exertion.

It's not just when you're in the pool, putting in the lens. Yeah, I'm not saying like someone's got to run a four minute mile. It's like when you put your shoes on, when you put your swimsuit on, your goggles on, and you hop into something that's other than your bed, you're exerting yourself. And when your physical is being pushed, if you can find a way to be happy and understand that people do feel happy, so it's not a mythical goal. But if you can find a way to feel happy, like Sean Martin did on that run that I joined him on, he was happy and he was running and pushing and pulling and going slow and going fast, but he was happy. he was happy. And I wasn't. I was just trying to get it over with. But I realized I could have a better experience in that run and in life if I learned how to find joy in what I normally would perceive as difficult. Then the idea of stress would just melt away. Yeah. Find joy through exertion is effectively because movement is life. Essentially it's saying find joy in life. Find joy in everything. Find joy in your walk to the

bus stop. Find joy when you're taking out the rubbish for the bin men to come. Find joy in everything. It's there. It's all there. It's like, it's not just when you're in the most beautiful places in the world. It's, it's there. What advice would you give to, you know, there's a lot of parents who listen to this podcast. Um, I'm asking this question also because one of the funnest things I do is run with my son. We run regularly together because he likes it. I like it. I like it even more when I'm running with him. And I've changed the way I go into those runs with him.

You know, at the start, I was quite time focused. I was, you know, let's try and do this. I was trying to subtly nudge him to certain things, which really is my own issues that I'm trying to sort of, you know, I'm trying to put my own issues onto my son without realizing it. And these days, hey, I am not perfect, but I'm trying just to go out and having fun with him. Oh, that's so brilliant.

not perfect, but I'm trying just to go out and having fun with them. That's so brilliant. I mean, Sri Chinmoy used to say, try to feel like you're a seven-year-old boy or a seven-year-old girl. At the start of the 3,100 mile race in 2016, it's in the movie, the race organizer says, you know, run with a childlike consciousness and your mind won't bother you. We're not asking people to become childish or to regress, but it's like when you're with your son, when you're with a young child, and you see how free they are, how everything gives them a sense of joy,

that's a lesson. And that, I think, is what Sri Chinmoy meant when he said, feel like you're a seven-year-old boy or a seven-year-old girl and cultivate that joy through that idea of being spontaneous, of everything being new, of everything being fresh. I mean, I think that's a brilliant thing that you're explaining and it's a brilliant attitude that people could have towards hard situations or situations where exertion might be overwhelming? Yeah, it's, you know, there's something called park run. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's certainly a UK phenomenon and it's going around the world. It's basically this big community movement where every Saturday at not most local parks, but many, many local parks around the country, there are timed runs there. And the Saturday one for adults is a 5K run.

So around the whole UK at your local park at 9am on a Saturday is likely to be, you know, several hundred people congregating together going for a run. Everyone gets a barcode, you get it timed, but it's very fun. There's a real huge community aspect. It's really growing very, very fast. Sean Martin said running is a celebration of life. Yeah. And I always think about why is Parkrun exploding? I think there's multiple components to it. But I have interviewed the CEO of Parkrun on this podcast in the past. And he said, and I think you'd find this interesting, especially because you're not familiar with Parkrun. He says, Parkrun is a social intervention

masquerading as a running event. And I think that's one of the, at that time, I thought it was such a profound thing to say. Everyone thinks it's about the running. No, I love it. Because it's like, again, Sean would say, for the Navajo, that running is a celebration of life. And when I would go to, quote, races on the Navajo Res, there's 80-year-olds in jeans and boots doing the race. There's little kids in flip-flops doing the race. And afterwards, there's just a sense of-flops doing the race and afterwards there's

just just sense of like we all achieve something together we're going to celebrate the winners but we're going to celebrate the fact that we're all out here and it's like running is that channel for really feeling that life can be a celebration yeah i love it i love it it's beautiful i'll send it to you you should listen to that once i think that one. I think the whole idea of parkrun is something, given how much you are a fan of running, given how much you make films about running, I think you should listen to it a bit and actually hear about parkrun.

Yeah, I can't wait. I'll listen to it on my way back home. It is a global phenomena, parkrun, and it's helping so many people in the UK. You know, I was going to wrap this up, but it's just one final thought that pops into my mind. And that's, you know, these kids are running in their regular clothes. You know, they might be wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And I also thought about this when you were talking about the Japanese monks who are wearing this outfit and

wearing something on their head and are doing such extreme levels of physical activity or what we would consider extreme levels, they're doing it and they're not wearing the right running gear. They're not wearing the right workout gear. And so for me, this is something I felt for a long period of time that we have actually, you know, we turn exercise and physical activity into a commodity. It's a commodity that you have to do it a certain way. You have to wear certain clothes. And you know what? I have never resonated with that. Sure, I've fallen. I've been susceptible to some of the marketing from time to time at various points in my life and got the right stuff because I can't run without the

right gear. But you know, like when I'm not seeing patients, I'm often at my mum's house. My mum lives five minutes away from me. And, you know, now that my dad's not there, mum lives in this house by herself. I go often in a downstairs room there to write. So, you know, to write or to think or to work on a project, I'll often just go in downstairs, sit there, lock myself away. And there's a really nice park near there. And recently, oh, I forgot to bring my running stuff with me. And I thought, what a stupid concept. I need running stuff. I want to go for a run. I'm just going to go in what I'm wearing. And I went for a 30 minute run in just what I was wearing, which was not running gear. And you know what?

It didn't make a difference at all. And I think there's something so powerful about that. I routinely with my patients, give them workouts to do that they are designed to be done in the house without buying any equipment and without needing to get changed. Because it's about saying physical activity is our birthright. It is something that we have made way more complicated than it needs to be. And I think that whole idea ties beautifully into the ideas that you expressed through the film and that you don't need running gear to be a runner. I love it. I have a lot of Native American friends and we reflect on this idea that it's only in ultra modern Western society that we separate ourselves from nature. It's like, why do I need to change clothes to step outside? Like,

why do I need to change clothes to like go hiking? If you're a being of nature, why do I need indoor clothes and outdoor clothes? I've seen, you know, people camping, laying on the ground on mattresses that they brought from home and pillows that they brought from home and threw into their flatbed truck. They're probably getting more out of that camping experience than I am in my like downfill sleeping bag in my ultra high tech lightweight tent. Like they're just sleeping outside. You know, they're sleeping on the dirt, they're sleeping under the stars. Like what's more natural than that? And the corollary in running is like, oh man, anytime I see anybody out just running, I'm so happy for them. It's like we have this body shaming, running gear shaming,

you're too poor to run. Until you start going to places like Kenya or even Ethiopia, especially Ethiopia or to like the Navajo Nation or the Hopi Nation and getting your butt kicked, just your rear end handed to you by people running in the worst looking, tattered, junky gear. That's when you realize like none of the stuff I'm wearing is making me a better runner. It really isn't. It's definitely not making me a better person, but it's like I suck at running compared to people who've got nothing. That's humbling. And it's exactly what you said. Like that industry side of things is kind of ridiculous.

On the flip side, I will say that some people find it inspiring to have their running outfit. I do too. I like my gear, but I don't judge others on their gear, like you mentioned. And I don't judge myself on it. No, we shouldn't. And if we like-

Yeah, I don't hold myself back because I don't have a particular piece of gear. And just to be clear, I do have running gear. So I will, you know, when I'm at home, when I've got it, I will put that on for my run. It's more that whole idea of how far we have come from what it meant to run. And I'd circle back to what you said right at the start of this conversation, that running may well have been the first religion of humans or something to that effect, which is so powerful.

And when we were in the Kalahari with the Bushmen, because they're no longer allowed to dress in traditional clothes, I mean, it's wicked and brutal. They're wearing hand-me-down humanitarian service clothes, jeans, and crappy shirts. And we went hunting for hours in the desert, tracking an animal. And my whole team, we were all in like performance tights and performance gear with our glasses and our hats and our water bottles and our bladders. And these guys were in flip flops, crappy old jeans, crappy polo shirts. And you could tell like, oh my God, they're operating on a much higher plane than we are both with their interaction with nature and their ability to run so yeah it shouldn't hold anybody back that just says it

all doesn't it so i need to finish off um look there are so many lessons from this film i really hope everyone goes and watch it when you're doing it i think it's gonna be a mini tour in the uk yeah and then we're gonna be on amazon prime prime. So people can look. Oh, fantastic. So we'll link up to everything in the show notes. When I record the outro, if you have those dates for the UK, I'll definitely put them in. So people who feel that they actually want to go and watch this may be able to go to a local theater and go and do that, which I think will be incredible. I'd love to help, you know, get the word out for your film. Cause I think it very much looks like a labor of love that you've been through. It was, it was, you know, like no one, even though this race has gone on for 23 years and

everyone from the BBC to the New York times has written about it. No one's heard about it. And there's no big sponsors. There's no like famous runners, famous runners like Killian or like Jim Walmsley or people like that. And so we didn't have three things which are kind of essential to making a documentary in this day and age. A brand sponsor, a recognizable topic or event, and somebody famous. At the same time, we put our heart and soul into it. We shot it so it looked like a narrative movie it didn't feel like a shaky cam amateur production the access that we got you can't really tell how difficult it was to get it because we tried to make the location seem as natural and

as beautiful as possible and it took a few years but i I feel like this is just me, but with a little bit, a modicum of humility, we're visual beings. We haven't had as humans, the option to share spirituality through film, except in the last few decades. In the past, when you wanted to offer something inspiring, you wrote a beautiful poem. You might've composed a song. And when you wrote that song or that poem, the world didn't hear about it overnight. It took years or decades or centuries or millennia even for that to have the impact that you had hoped it would have. And I feel the same thing with this movie. It's like, even though the rollout has been slow and steady, it's very much something that I hope I can offer to the world for the next

few hundred years. When people want to take a look at these cultures that still exist now, that might not in a few hundred years, that give us a link to how our feet connected to our hearts and our souls, hopefully this movie will be an example. That is beautiful. The film is a gift. It does help shine a light on a different aspect to movement, on a different aspect to running. I myself am a huge fan of Barefoot Shoes for a number of reasons. Yes, it started off with when I connected to my feet, my 10 years of back pain got better and now has gone. Um, but it wasn't really about feet. It was, that was the start on my journey to connect actually to the earth because I've realized that barefoot, barefoot

shoes. And I was chatting to the guys at at vivo barefoot about this recently who have become really good friends i like those guys a lot yeah they're just incredible they're such the family behind it are lovely what their their ideas behind it what they want to try and do in terms of the world and humanity is phenomenal and very very inspiring but i said to them after this race actually the first swimrun race i did with them, I said, you know, these shoes are not just about barefoot living, actually. They're the start of a connection to the earth, of a connection to yourself. Once you start connecting to yourself through your feet, then you start connecting to the things around you. And I feel going running in nature with my barefoot shoes on keeps me closer to the earth. I've actually, I think you'd enjoy the conversation

I had with Tony Riddle a few months ago, who is literally at the moment, I think on the final day or the penultimate day of running around the UK completely barefoot. So not with barefoot shoes on, completely barefoot. He's probably done at least a marathon a day for the last 29 days. I kind of run in everything. I love Vivo. I love zero drop shoes, but it starts in your heart. And it's like, sometimes the shoes are a tool to get there. But at the end of the day, it's like we have to be able to like find that place within ourselves where the connection becomes meaningful, where the connection becomes deep.

And we're really conscious of who we are as human beings and where running can take us. Equipment notwithstanding, if you go back to like how we took our first steps, none of us were wearing shoes. And for the most part, we were naked. If you go back to how we took our first steps, none of us were wearing shoes. And for the most part, we were naked. I'm not saying that we should all go back to that, but it goes back to that idea of finding freedom, finding consciousness, finding lightness through your run, using your run as a method of transformation, and not being linked or not being pressured by any external

force who tells you how you should run or how you should not run in terms of the industry side of things. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, again, as you have already made clear, it's not necessarily just about running. It could be walking. It could be swimming. It could be anything. And I think that's a good point to close this conversation off, Sanjay. It could be anything.

And I think that's a good point to close this conversation off, Sanjay. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. I think what you are illustrating with your film is exactly that. It completely epitomizes that. So I wonder, I always like to

leave the listener with some tips right at the end, something that hopefully is going to inspire them and something that they can start putting into practice into their own life immediately to improve the way that they feel. And so I wonder if you could share some of your top tips on that from your own life, from making the film. And also I'd love you to have in mind when you're doing this, that person who might be listening to this podcast, who thinks, you know, I would love to get more out to it, but I don't, I don't do anything. I find it a struggle to get off the sofa. You know, I love hearing these stories. It's inspiring, but I don't know how to take that first step. That's a great and kind of pressure filled way to end. But no, number one, it's like,

and you've had and have experts on the show talking about breathing. The most beautiful song that we can have vibrating through our body is kind of a conscious awareness of our breath. So whether you're walking, whether you're running, whether you're swimming or cycling, unplug from distractions and focus on your breath. You'll see that the breath itself can bring you energy, both a peaceful energy, both a dynamic energy. Try to imagine when you're breathing that you are not just breathing in air, but you're breathing in peace. And that peace is filling your being.

And you can do this in moments of exertion. You can do this in moments of stress. It's like that conscious connection from our breath to our body to our psychic consciousness can give you a deeper sense of calm and a deeper sense of power. Number two, if it comes to trying to motivate yourself to get out the door, literally start small. Don't have a prescribed goal in mind. And that's the idea of running soft,

moving soft. If you have a struggle getting out the door, it's like, walk down the block, do one lap of your block, you know, once or twice a day for five days. And you'll build on that, not based on your own desire for doing more distance, but your desire to have a deeper and more freeing experience. I think that's where it always starts. It's not so much hammering through suffering to get to a certain amount of miles or a certain number of hours each week, but it's like you increase your capacity based on how much you're enjoying an activity. So if you can focus on the enjoyment first and rather than the destination or the goal of walking or running 5k or 10K or 20 minutes

or 50 minutes, that's the best start ever. And so it's breathing and it's intention. You know, understand that anything you do in life can make you a tremendously better person if you want it to be that way. And if you put the time into it, we'll close with exertion is immaterial if you can't find joy through it. Finding joy through exertion is a secret in human life. It's a secret both in the physical life and in the spiritual life. Finding joy in those very, very difficult moments takes practice, but it's not something that's unachievable. People have achieved it and

have enjoyed it for hundreds of thousands of years. And I think we all can share in that experience. Sanjay, very, very inspiring. You're an incredible human being. What you have done in making this film is incredible. I can't wait. We're all incredible human beings. For sure. Keep on doing the great work that you're doing. Thank you for sticking around for an extra couple of days in LA to have this conversation with me. And I look forward to following this up at some point in the future.

I mean, I wouldn't have missed this for the world. Thank you. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. So what did you think? Has that conversation caused you to look at movement in a different light? I have to say for me, it made me really reflect on this very simple idea. Have we got movement all wrong? Have we thought about it simply in terms of physical health and frankly in a very reductionist way sanjay and i would love to hear your thoughts on today's conversation so do get in touch on social media you can find sanjay on instagram at mr sanjay r or at 3100 film please do let us know what you thought if you can remember please do use the hashtag FBLM so that

I can easily find your comments. For those of you interested in watching this film, there is going to be a very special screening in Manchester on Friday, November the 1st. You can see all the details by going to the show notes page, drchastity.com forward slash 79 after the screening there will be a question and answer with the producer of the film who is coming over for the screening from new york so if this appeals to you i would highly encourage you to take a look it also looks like this film will be available globally on amazon prime from november the 15th so do check it out. It is well worth a watch. And it also looks as though there's going to be some theatre screenings around the UK, possibly in January. I myself am going to try my best to get down to the Manchester screen. So if

you can make it along, hopefully I will see you there. There is also a link on the show notes page to the official website for the film, 3100film.com or simply link on the show notes page to the official website for the film, 3100film.com, or simply go to the show notes page where you can access all the relevant links. At the core of today's conversation was meaning and purpose and how we go about finding that in our lives. And in my most recent book, The Stress Illusion, I explain why not having meaning and purpose in our lives can be a huge source of stress for so many of us and have knock-on consequences for our health. Many people find the idea of meaning and purpose quite intimidating. And for that reason, I created a very simple framework called the live framework to help people start finding their purpose in a very practical and non-intimidating way many of you have fed back to me that this was your favorite

part of my book so if you feel that this section would benefit yourself or someone close to you do consider picking up a copy the stress solution is available in all the usual places all over the world in paperback, ebook, and as an audio book, which I am narrating. Don't forget that almost all of my podcasts are now being recorded on video. So do go to my YouTube channel to check them out. If you have friends and family who are not huge fans of listening to podcasts in an audio form, perhaps send them to my YouTube channel where they can watch these same conversations in video. I know many of you have already done that. So thank you. The easiest way to find them is to go to drchatty.com forward slash YouTube. Please do press subscribe. There are loads of short snippets

of the best bits of all my previous podcasts on there. So please do also share these videos with your friends and family. I know we spoke a lot about running today on the podcast. Don't forget that Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist shoe brand, are giving a fabulous 20% off to my podcast listeners. You can check that out at vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. you can check that out at vivobethel.com forward slash live more if you do enjoy my weekly shows the best way that you can show your support is by leaving a review on apple podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on those reviews really do make a huge difference in terms of visibility of the podcast you can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now

and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels, or simply just tell your friends and family about the show. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chastji for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest episode. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle

changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time. Thank you.