Modern Wisdom - #116 - Sanjay Rawal - 3100 Miles: The Longest Race On Earth

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

Sanjay Rawal is an award-winning filmmaker. Today we learn about the longest race on earth which takes place in the middle of New York around a square block in the city - 3100 miles over 52 days. Extra Stuff: 3100: Run & Become Trailer - https://youtu.be/t1e399N_wB0 Follow Sanjay on Twitter - https://twitter.com/MrSanjayR Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Sanjay Raoal. He is the filmmaker behind 3,100 Run and Become. This is documentary about the longest race on earth. You might think it was across the United States or on the plains of Africa perhaps. But no, this is a square block in the middle of New York City, in the middle of summer, 52 days, 3100 miles. 3,100. That would take you literally across coast coast of the United States and it's just the modest experience I've ever

heard. Sanjay talks us through the history of distance running, why we are built to run anthropologically, biomechanically. Recently we had Elliott Kipchog as sub-two-hour marathon performance, but in comparison with the 3,100 race, that marathon seems quite a lot like a sprint, so yeah, get ready for this one. Please welcome Sanjay Rawhal. Oh, yeah, PS. Upcoming guests include Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale, Aubrey Marcus and Brian Callan. The, Sanjay, welcome to the show. Chris, it's great to be on your show.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely pleasure to have you on. Before we get started, even for the listeners at home, behind Sanjay in where every's filming is a series of like mannequins, slightly sullen, sad looking mannequins, and a really epic, is that a painting of some falconry? Like, where are you? What's that backdrop? I'm in my edit studio in New York City, and I have a garden right outside, and a friend of mine made a series of sculptures,

which aren't finished yet. And they were all sitting in my backyard, but the weather is turned here, and I had to bring them all inside. So I don't know if people are familiar with the terracotta warriors of GM, a farmer discovered in his field, thousands of clay statues appointed in the right direction.

I kind of feel like that's where I'm sitting right now. I've got these replica statues of the Indian meditation teachers, three chinmoin meditating. And it feels like I've been a temple. It's pretty epic. It's a pretty cool watch. As backdrops go, man, that's not bad. So, for the listeners who don't know who you are, how would you describe yourself and give us a bit

of background to you? So number one, if there is a listener who knows who I am, oh my god, I wanna meet them. I'm nobody, I'm a Jack of all trades, master of none, but I make a lot of movies, but my most recent one was called 3,100 Run and Become. It's out on Amazon, it's going to be out on Amazon Prime in the UK in a couple of weeks. It's about the world's longest running race.

I would say that my expertise has just been leaned by spending a lot of time with people who don't just look at running as performance, or look at running as fitness, but look at running the way that humanity did thousands of years ago, that running is in fact a pathway to self-transformation, to self-realization, and if you believe in something higher, to the divine. Why running? Well, this is interesting because there's a famous book by a good friend of mine, Chris McDougal, born to run, and he explored the anthropological connection between human evolution and running.

And evolutionary biologists suggest that the advantage, the only advantage that early men and women had on the savannah amongst massive predators, amongst massive herbivores, was the fact that we could move on two feet. Now physiologically, that means that when we walk, our breath is not coupled to our gate. If you can imagine a quadruped, you know, when they extend out, they're longs inflate. Is that how their breathing cadence works? No way.

I never knew that. When their forelegs collapse, their entire torso collapses and the air is expelled. And so they are not good aerobic runners because they have to, they can't regulate their breathing. We can breathe a lot more. We can breathe two or three or four times per step if we need to. They can't. So even if they're going slow, they can't breathe a couple of times. So they're not good slow runners.

So we were great slow runners. And in 3, run and become we actually went to the Kalahari Desert to live and hunt with the San Bushmen who have been around for 125,000 years and you and I don't look like San Bushmen but and not to say that they're the root tribe of everyone but they were perhaps the most eager tribe because every single human being has markers in their DNA distinguished only by the connection to San Bushman. Like we all have a piece of their DNA in us. So they've been around for a long time and people have gone and studied them and Chris McDougall looked at them and born to run and said, well, we were born to run because our evolutionary advantage on the savannah was our

ability to chase animals down for 24, 48 hours, totally exhaust them. With rudimentary weapons and no weaponry at all, we could approach dehydrated animals, kill them, take them home. But the reality was far more interesting. You know, when we When we presented these outside Western theories to the Bushmen, they looked at us with just... They were incredulous. They say that humanity evolves because of consciousness, not because of form. They said that their ability to track and catch large game was not due to the fact that they were endurance maniacs. It was due to the fact that human beings can pray. They can pray a lot more deeply than lesser evolved primates. They said that they

understood prayer. They understood how they could gather energy from the earth. And that is what carried them to catch animals. And so they say the cosmology developed before the actual practice developed. They got the energy, they realized what they could do with it. And so from the very, very beginning, running and human spirituality went hand in hand. So in that sense, running was the first religion of humanity. That's a lovely, very transcendent, very, for something that for a lot of people, I suppose, running would be a function of your lactate threshold times by your V or 2 max

plus your running efficiency, et cetera, et cetera. To hear something that's a lot more spiritually guided is quite interesting and quite meaningful. You know, people can get what they want to out of physical activity. But if you want to look really good, physical fitness, we'll get you there. If you want to become really healthy, physical fitness, running or anything, we'll get you there. It's all a matter of intention. With running, if you want to transform your life, and if you go into running with that intention, it will get you there.

I mean, you can see with Elliot Kipchogay's run last weekend, over and over and over in all of his interviews, he touches on the idea of faith. He touches on the idea that humanity has no limits. That's not just philosophy for him. It's an idea that he's seen, he lived, he's got faith in it. It's like his faith in the transcendent capacity of human beings gave him the vision and one would argue gave them the capacity or helped in its capacity to reach that two hour run. If that's not

the combination of running in spirituality, I don't know what is. In our movie 3100 Run and to come, we focus on the world's longest running race, which is a 3,100 mile race that takes place solely around a half mile loop on a block in New York City. It's been going on every year for the last 23 years, 10 to 15 people attempted every year, and they have to average almost 100K, 59.8 miles per day for 52 straight days. And some people, the course record for the men is 77 miles per day for 52 straight days. And some people, the course record for the men is 77 miles per day. So nearly three marathons a day.

For, in that case, 40 days. There's two questions. Like, why would anybody do that? Number one. Number two, how is it possible? I mean, the more interesting one is like, why would anybody do it? And this is the heart of running.

It's like, if you run for an hour or two hours or a day, you're running with suffering, you're running with pain, you're pushing. But once you start entering races that are two days, three days, six days, like looking at the example of a Bushman hunt, which might take two, three, four days of constant, slow,

aerobic threshold running. That you don't have a lot of aerobic output. You're not generating lactic acid. It's very calm. It's very meditative. When you're in that type of running, the mind shuts down. The mind turns off. And you begin to naturally experience

a lot of the emotion, a lot of the flow that you can experience in silent contemplative practices like meditation. So the running actually becomes an experience of bliss and what becomes immaterial are your surroundings. The only things that you need are water food, 10,000 calories a day is what they take. Water food, shelter, and having all those things

around a half mile loop takes away a lot of those issues as opposed to running across the United States, for example. Well, that's one of the primary drivers behind some Tibetan Buddhist practices, right? That you do something which allows the front of the mind to be occupied like cleaning or washing up or tending to a garden, which frees up the remainder of the mind to be liberated into a space which gives it more freedom to think.

I mean, that's the training. And you can see that Kipchugg is a master of it. In fact, the Kenyan say that if you want to run well, you have to run dumb, the UMB. It's like you have to be totally soft between your ears if you think you're screwed. Number one, it's not that thinking is bad, but once you stop thinking,

the actual power of the spiritual heart, the actual power of the body moves unimpeded. And it's not a question of like mind over matter. It's getting rid of your mind. Like when Gippchoggi says, human beings are unlimited. He's not talking about the mind. The mind is incredibly limited.

It's always telling us what we can do and what we can't do. It's always measuring. It's saying that two hours is impossible. You can't use that kind of a tool. You have to get it out of the way. And so Kenyan's regularly trained and the Ethiopians and great marathoners will train to be in the mind of meditation,

to completely have a silent experience within yourself, to look at breathing as the song, your heartbeat as a song, and learning to recognize the cues that your body is ready and willing to push harder than you could imagine. There's a number of athletes that I know in the CrossFit community as a good example of this, one where your ability to deal with discomfort sometimes for prolonged periods of time, longer workouts, so you know up to half an hour to maybe even an hour. And I have to say that most of the best athletes that I know are not massively cerebral with their approach.

Matt Fraser, for example, fit his man on the planet, probably greatest crossfit he was ever lived so far, he's not massively cerebral. He has strict rules that he sticks to and holds himself to a ruthlessly high standard. But I think that once he's done his preparation, he then allows his performance to simply be the stage upon which all of this preparation gets to present itself. And I totally get the analogy as well with Kip Chilge for people who are listening that don't know about him. He lives this like monastic lifestyle.

He sees running as his sort of the highest form of what it is that he can present to the world. So yeah, it's very interesting how all of these different things piece together. So I mean, the first question, apart from why does someone want to do it before that, my question before why does someone want to do the 3100 races, why New York?

You know, the race was started by an Indian spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoi. And Sri Chinmoi came from India to New York in the 60s. And he was really at the heart of the running boom in the 70s. I mean, if you can imagine New York in the 70s, the 1977 and 1978 New York City marathons were actually begun with street chin more doing a meditation. In front of thousands and thousands of runners the day before they held a meditation in central park. He was at the heart of that running movement and as people began to desire more distance

than just 26 miles, he became one of the prime sponsors of 24 hour races, 48 hour races, six day races, 10 day races, and by the mid 90s, people were clamoring for those experiences of self-transcendence. And it was pushed to 3,100 miles. The logistics are quite complex. And it's one of those things that for those of your listeners who've been to New York City, they'll understand that there's really no other place in the world where this is possible. So, I mean, that's primarily it. It's like even though you're running you know, on a city street, on a sidewalk around a school for, you know, 18 hours a day, the energy of the city and the vibration of the city is actually conducive to helping you when you're in your most exhausted state.

But you know, speaking about monastic traditions in 3,100 runner become, we actually spend time with a very elusive sect of runners in central Japan outside a city called Kyoto. And their group were the first that brought Buddhism from China to Japan. And in that first year that they brought Buddhism to Japan, they started something called the Thousand Day Trek. Now, people can go to our Instagram account at 3,100 Film and see that these monks look like they're out of Star Wars. They're draped head to toe and white, bamboo sandal staff, like long cylindrical hat. Like that. white bamboo sandal staff like long cylindrical hat. So they pick one aspirant every seven

years. People have to put their math hats on. One aspirant every seven years to do a thousand days of trekking. Those thousand days are split into ten hundred day chunks. The first, so you've got seven years to do it. So some years you're doing one cycle of 100 days, some years you're doing two cycles. But each cycle has a set daily mileage. Now they're on a mountain. So it's like the first couple of years, first couple of cycles, they have to do about 11.6 miles per day, which involves going up and down a thousand meter mountain once. going up and down a thousand meter mountain once. They're not running, but their pace going up that mountain is faster than most people could run it. But by the time they get to the seventh and eighth cycle, they're at 35 miles per day, the ninth and tenth cycle, they're at 56 miles per day. Now, they go into it with the idea that this is going to be an experience of bliss, an experience of prayer, an experience of meditation.

That's what they train for. That's what their minds and their hearts are prepared for. But here's the kicker. If they don't finish any single day's mileage, they have to take their lives. Like no one's had to take their life in about 150 years, but that's the ultimate price.

That's the sacrifice of this hardship. And one would say, like, with that kind of consequence hanging over your head, how could you not but move in fear? But it's the opposite. It's like, you know, there's that consequence, but that keeps your intent pure. That makes you realize that this is a sacred opportunity. I can only do this if I remain in the mind and heart of meditation. So in the movie, it's like we explore these root cultures that Navajo, I'm in other south, southwestern Native American tribes in the United States, the San Bushmen, these monks

in Japan to really show how and why extreme physical fitness or extreme achievement through the body is not only possible, it's more than most natural things that human beings can do. It's really epic. Hearing about it, it's, you know, conjuring up these images of these monks going up and down this mountain in service of, you know, their higher, their higher sense of self-searching for self-transcendence and using it as this meditative practice. It does, it makes things like the Olympics feel quite impure weirdly.

Actually, it feels quite glitzy and sort of glamorous in a way that this doesn't. Well, so the experience that I had, I used to be a semi-competitive runner, but never feels quite glitzy and sort of glamorous in a way that this doesn't. Well, so the experience that I had, I used to be a semi competitive runner, but never really put one and one together until I started spending time with these cultures that have run and looked at the spirituality of sports for thousands of years. We all experience these things, you know, in a workout or maybe in a race. The beauty of connecting with these cultures and what we tried to show in 3100 and run and become is we tried to give people the language to understand their own experiences, to deepen their own experiences, and to understand that physical fitness can actually be a spiritual

path. I mean, if you look at the Spartans, if you look at like the roots of the Olympics, the idea of faster, higher, stronger, that's self-transcendence. You know, we met a Hopi elder in Arizona who said on morning one that we were doing, he said the translation was, find joy through exertion,

a man named Rex Taliam Tewa, find joy through exertion. That means like in your most quote, unquote painful moments when we're thinking that all we're experiencing is suffering, you know, he exhorted us to flip that experience, to deny the strength of that suffering, and to realize that there's a deep joy in that idea of exertion. We have to go beyond the concept of pain defining exertion and let joy be the overflowing emotion that we feel in exertion. You can't achieve that in a race. You can't hope that once you get to the performance level in a CrossFit competition or in a running race that you're magically going to be able to experience that. It's something that needs to be done not just in training but it needs to be your

mindset. And you can see that if your goal is self-transcendence and you focus your entire training around that, it can't but be a spiritual path. It's a very beautiful way of putting it. I wonder how many people that are listening, understand what we mean when we say about the pain into joy sensation. I think if you're not massively familiar with a meditative practice or doing things similar to that, it might sound a little bit alien, but there's a quote from Sam Harris that I always remember when we talk about

long-seated meditation postures. I did a meditation retreat with my friend in between Christmas and New Year, a Tibetan temple, not far from here. And as a part of that, we did a seated meditation for 90 minutes, which isn't that long. It was part of a much longer meditation for the whole day,

but being sat cross-legged on the floor for 90 minutes, I got like the tightest hips in the world, it's ruthless. And there's this quote from Sam Harris, where he talks about when he was doing it. And he said, after a while, he couldn't work out whether the pain in his hip was absolute agony or complete ecstasy. And when you spend sufficient time around a sensation and you begin to imagine it and break it apart into its component pieces, you actually realize that the difference between a lot of pain and a lot of ecstasy,

the line becomes incredibly blurred, doesn't it? I agree. I think that we experience things as pain when fear is involved. When fear is not involved, it's an entirely different sensation. And that's the difference between the mind and the heart. When you're in the mind, when you're thinking, you're rationalizing, you're measuring, you're contemplating, like how many of us in our routines are in the moment? Like, I'm looking at my GPS watch and I'm running. I'm thinking about what I'm going to do afterwards. I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat, what the rest of my day is like, the splits. I'm trying to achieve the time I'm trying to achieve in the run.

I'm not focusing on my breath. My mind is in the way. The question for listeners is, how do you. My mind is in the way. The question for listeners is how do you get the mind out of the way? You have to enter into the heart, into the spiritual heart, into the area that we point to, as you know, when we say, like, I'm Chris or I'm Sanjay. And that's done through practice, through seated meditation or really through understanding simple breathing techniques, understanding how to breathe in peace, how to release anxiety, how to imagine that the breath isn't just coming in through our

nose or through our mouth, but it's actually coming into our hearts. When you start feeling the breathing sensation happening here and the energy flow happening here, it becomes easier to practice that while you're competing while you're training. And so it's like, we have to get out of the minds. Once we get out of the minds it into the heart. Fear isn't there. What's in the heart? Loves in the heart. Joy's in the heart. Peace is in the heart. And I'm not to say that the mind's not going to come back every second or every minute to be to remind us that it's there, but the more we can get into our heart, the more we can slow down our breathing, the more

we can relax, the less actual physical pain enters into us, but when it comes, we learn to breathe it out. We learn to collect that anxiety, to breathe it out, that nervous tension which causes pain to breathe it out. That comes from practice and that comes from looking at the intention behind it. It's like if we want to be in the heart, then we have to practice being in the heart. Another Sam Harris isn't my fillet. I'm quoting him directly today. I'm beaming Sam Harris straight into my brain at the moment. Another thing that he says to the listeners

who might be thinking, well, it's all well and good, but I've been in some real, real amounts of discomfort and pain. You can't tell me that that's not just pure pain in itself. Perfect example that he uses is the way that you feel when you're in the middle of a workout. You don't feel pain in the middle of a workout because you know why it's happening. And because the direction that you are moving in is something that's satisfying. However, if you were just laid in bed and woke up in the middle of the night, sweating with your heart racing at the same pace as it would, imagine that you took that physiological state that you had in training and moved it into your body when you were asleep. You'd think, what is going on? Like, I'm having a heart attack. Is this an anxiety attack?

Am I having a breakdown? Is this a stroke? What's going on? And you're totally right. The difference between how we interpret the sensations that we have going on in our body determines a lot about what we can do with those sensations. So one of the things that you mentioned there

was taking a focus outside of the brain, outside of the mind, into the heart and into the task that's in hand. Do you think that the short route, which will inevitably become very repetitive, if it's a half mile, you're going to be doing it 6,200 laps or so, during this particular race, is that helping, is that contributing to it? The fact that there is, there's no novelty or intensity that's going past with regards to the surrounding you're just focused on the task at hand. That's a great question. So, you know, a lot of scientists and a lot of people that have been on your show have talked about the idea of flow. Like, flow is in static, right?

Like, flow is an experience of momentum. And when you're focused on the task at hand, it seems like the first step is concentration. And it is. But the second step is generating this dynamic flow of energy from your heart. And when you get into that state, everything is new around you. Like each moment is new. It's not like one step, two step, three step, four step, because people have to take more than a million steps across the 3,100 miles, and that would drive you mad. So it's the idea of generating a certain type of energy from the heart that makes you spontaneously and naturally happy. Like, you know, in anything in life, when you're naturally happy, like the minutes,

the measurement, the hours, the miles, they fly by. When you're in a calm, relaxed state of mind, you can have intensity in the heart, and you can be pushing, and you can be flowing, and it's great. It's an incredible sensation, and you want to push harder to get more of it. That's what I'm talking about and what I'm suggesting. When we spent time with one of our characters, Sean Martin, who's a Navajo Ultramarathoner, Sean was the first person to totally flip the switch in my mind. We went out for a morning run. I was waiting for my GPS watch to connect in between these canyons of balls. We're in this epic canyon that's completely

new to me. He runs it every day. And so keep that in mind. But once we set out for the morning run, I realized he was enjoying it more than me. And he was getting more out of it than I ever could. He was relaxed. He was calm. He was open. And when I asked him afterwards, why he looked like he was enjoying it more than me, he said, look, number one, for the Navajo and for a lot of indigenous tribes, running is a celebration of life. It's like you feel the energy of nature, whether you're running on a sidewalk or in a canyon, if your feet are on the, whether you're running on a sidewalk or in a canyon, if your feet are on the ground, you're running on Mother Earth.

You're surrounded by sky. Even if you're in a gym, it's like air is sky. You're surrounded by those same energies. Running is a celebration of those energies. Number two, running is a teacher. It's like, you don't go to your teacher and say, like, these are all my problems. I'm gonna talk to you for two hours. You have't go to your teacher and say like these are all my problems. I'm going to talk to you for two hours.

You have to listen to your teacher. So running allows you to listen. It really gives you the perspective on your own problems, on your own joys, on your own sufferings. But this is what got me number three. He said running is a prayer. When your feet are running on Mother Earth, they're praying. When you're breathing, you're breathing in Father Sky. So when you run, your feet are praying to Mother Earth, you're breathing in Father Sky, you show what you're praying to them for their blessings and you're showing them through the act of running that you're willing to work for those blessings. You're asking and you're receiving compassion from all the divinity that surrounds you.

And he said, take it or leave it. That's the reality. It's like, if somebody tells, if I take a spartane my whole life and someone says sugar is better, I'm gonna say, I've never tried sugar. There's no way it can be better, right? But it's like once you've tasted sugar, you know it's the reality.

And so he's like, take it or leave it, but this is the reality. It's not a matter of belief. And the more we went back into traditional culture, is the more we realized that was the root of the human experience. It's like when you dance on the earth, when you move on the earth, when you walk, when you run, when you lift, it's like you can channel those energies just by the humility of recognizing that your feet are on this gigantic being, that you're breathing in this entity, and you become larger than life. You hit that realm of where you understand that you're not as limited

as you think you are. And so going back to Kipchoghe, it's like what he says about breaking the two-hour barrier that no human is unlimited. That's echoed in traditional cultures all over the world. You can certainly see people who are living in synchronicity with their surroundings, with their higher purpose. You know, Kip Cholge, to me, you see him and he's just a man that is living in alignment with everything that he needs to do. It's like when he walks, when you see him at the start of the race,

perfect example, if anyone wants to go and have a look at the start of the in-earth 159 challenge, and you see him, and he's sort of, he's behind the guys and he walks through the parting in the barriers behind. He takes this little step through and it feels like watching it, it feels like the universe just parts around him and he just moves through it like a fish through water, he moves through the universe and the universe moves around him. He's just, I love watching him. I find him fascinating human to watch. So getting onto the actual 3100 race, take us through it. So you've said, it's in, it's in New York around, around a block, where, when, and why? Let's, let's, let's

hit it. So it's in Queens, New York City. It happens during the most brutal time of the year. It happens in June, July and part of August. It's a 52-day race, so nearly eight-week period. New York City is a big city. A lot of people, you have to get permits to do things like this. You can't get a permit in a park for 52 days. So this happens to take place around a high school on a relatively flat loop, although when you're doing that many miles, all the ups and downs add up, people have to be at the course at 6am for the start. The course every day.

The course is open for 18 hours a day. They can stay till midnight or they can leave. There are V's set up on the course for people to take breaks. Most people will take about 30 to 45 minutes of breaks across those 18 hours. There's an aid station set up at the start and finish of the half mile loop that is just filled with stuff. There's meals cooked all day long because each runner needs to take between 10 and 14,000 calories per day. Now, 10,000 calories is the equivalent of about 180 eggs. It's a lot of food.

How do they do that if they're only taking 30 minutes to 45 minutes of a break within an 18 hour period? Do they eat the noodles? Oh, they're eating constantly. Yeah. So it's like the thing about ultra distance running is that pace at any one moment is determined by the course. It's like, if you're going downhill on a mountain, you're flying. If you're going uphill, you know, up a big mountain, you're walking. So this course is a rectangle and people can

imagine that there's a slight downhill going one way, a slight uphill going the other way. They can switch directions every day. That's the only variation. So people tend to run the downhill probably at 8 to 10 minutes per mile pace, they'll walk all the corners, they'll walk the uphills. So it might take someone anywhere between 7 and or anywhere between 6 and 8 minutes to do a full lap. And along the way they might be eating, they might be drinking, people have to take about 20 liters of water, 5 gallons or so of water a day. Across the day they're trying to do about 60 miles. And that puts you just on the edge. People are generally trying to do 62, 65. Some are doing 70, 75.

So it's not like they're pushing it all day long. In this type of a race, you can't push it all day long. You have to be at a state where you can do 70 miles and then believe it or not, recover overnight on four or five hours of sleep and then get up the next morning and do 70 more miles for 45 days or so. So that's about, is that four miles an hour? Ish. Ish, it's like four miles an hour with your brakes will get you 60 miles a day. But you know, four miles an hour is a fast walk. So do a fast walk for an hour.

You go, okay, that was a fast walk. Try doing it for 15 or 16 hours. So most people will jog and then shuffle and then jog and then shuffle. They're not breaking any speed barriers, but the best any speed barriers, but the best people who run the best times have all achieved pretty fast marathons, pretty fast 50 and 100 mile races apart from the 3100. So they're competent across a range of distances then? Yeah, but they tend to get better as the distance gets longer. It was interesting I was watching an analysis of Kipchoga's performance last week. And they were talking about the fact that I think he was at the Olympics. Is he was he in the 5,000 meters?

Yeah. Yeah, but he performed like, okay, but they didn't even get selected for Kenya at 2012 and then 2016. He wasn't even in the Olympic squad and he found or something like that and he found that his longer distances were really where he came into his own and then when he transitioned to road running. He was an incredible 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 meter runner. Like he wasn't at the, he wasn't the all-time best like Kenanisa Vikele. He wasn't the all-time best like Kenanisa Vikele, but he moved pretty effortlessly to the marathon. There's some people that have, that have been great 10k runners that haven't moved that

effortlessly. Yeah, I get it. So getting onto the race itself, it starts with a one minute meditation. Yeah, every morning at 6am, there's a short meditation. Yeah, every morning at 6 a.m. there's a short meditation. And I can't say how focused people are because if you if you watch the movie and you see how they look at 6 a.m. They look like it looks like a war zone. It generally takes about an hour for people to warm up. Everyone for the most part will pound like Starbucks double shot cans of coffee to just get everything going. Between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m. the temperature is pretty tolerable. In Fahrenheit, it'll be between 60 and 68 Fahrenheit, I guess, in like 13 Celsius or so. But between 11 and 6 p.m. it can climb to 32 C, 34 C, 36 C. So you're talking 96 98 100 degrees. That's brutal. So in terms of pacing, after the first hour of warm up, people are trying to get their miles in before 10 or 11. And then from 10 and 10 or 11 until 6 p.m. or so,

they're just moving. They don't care whether they're walking or they're jogging, they're moving. It's survival mode. And then from 6 p.m. to midnight, you're trying to really push towards your daily mile goals. Who are the superstars of this particular sport, then, of this particular race. So the star of our movie, 3100 Run and Become is a diminutive finish paper boy, probably the best paper boy in the world. What is selection of characteristics? And his name is Ash Brihanel Alto, but he loves being a postal and paper boy postal and paper deliverer because he's on his feet 10, 12 hours a day.

So it's incredible training. He has run the race 15 times. That means he's done 46 and a half thousand miles around this half mile loop. Like most people haven't run 46 and a half thousand miles in their life. I mean, run 46 and a half thousand miles in their life. I mean, doing 46 and a half thousand miles is basically like running a hundred miles a week every week of the year for like eight and a half years.

Isn't the circumference of the globe's 32,000, right? Yeah. This guy's circumnavigated the globe one and a half times. Yeah, actually, yeah, more or less. But he's incredible. It's like, you realize. What makes him so good then? Why is he so good? No, there's a physiological advantages. Like he's small, he's really light.

But he likes running more than almost anyone on Earth. I can have to. It has to be your most favorite thing in the world to do that over and over and over and over and over. So it's like, look at folks that, this is not the best analogy, but folks who love playing video games, who just love them.

I can know judgment. They're playing video games 16 hours a day. They become professionals and they're playing seven days a week, 16 hours a day for like a year. They love it. They absolutely love it and they can do it. They can find variety. They can find interest. It's a whole world of stimulation and experience. Now the difference between us and Ashbehanal is that most of us there's a lot of video game players But most of us haven't had that kind of experience when we run for many people. It's pain. It's exertion But I learned a lot by watching him You know, it's like he has learned to You know, it's like he has learned to minimize all the problems that we think are problems when you run.

I kill get horrific blisters. There's, you know, heat effects, there's chafing, there's sweating, there's indigestion, but he's learned to minimize those problems consciously. You know, it's like he's realized that those aren't actually problems of a great magnitude if you don't want them to be. You take care of it, but problems in life shouldn't diminish your potential for achieving happiness. I mean, what sort of a state, even the best guys are paper boy, I finish paper boy that we're talking about here, what sort of a state are their bodies in after 3,100 miles?

Yeah, so, you know, the rule of thumb, right, is like when you race a marathon, for example, 26.2 miles, they say anecdotally, you need about 26 days before your body feels normal. You need like one day per mile. With a 3,100 mile race, for the most part, the average person doesn't start feeling normal again until about six months. You know, some people don't feel normal for a year. Some people take two or three years to recover. You know, you're not in a hyper-taxed aerobic state, but your endocrine system, your glands,

your adrenals are working over time. Because there's some stress, like you're trying to hit a certain number of miles per day, you realize you have to keep your mind soft to do that. But you're also pounding your GI track with 10,000 calories a day when your body is already suffering from inflammation. Your kidneys are attacked trying to process the toxins and the water equivalent to five gallons, 20 liters. You're not getting much sleep. You might stop even at 11, 11, 30 at night.

But then at home, you're taking care of all your foot problems, all your blisters. You're getting everything ready for the next day. You might not go to sleep until 12 30 or 1 a.m. and then you're up at 5 30. So you're doing 60 to 75 miles a day and you're sleeping four and a half hours at night. But I haven't done the 3100, but I've done six day races and my experience in those is that when you lay down, no matter what side of your body you're laying on, it feels like you're sleeping on broken glass. And the recovery happens when you run. So it's a weird mindset where you're resting, but it's like you're, it's not real rest at all. And even your 15, 20 minute breaks during the day are all kind of just to calm your mind down

like you're not really gonna like heal during that. So you're destroying your body for 52 days and then You're spending the rest of the time recovering. Yeah, but there are odd exceptions like there was a guy who did it this last summer who's done it a number of times before He finished it in about 51 days, 50 days or so. Three weeks later, he ran a 310 marathon, 36 hours after that 310 marathon, and his marathon's faster than that, his normal marathon, but he ran the 310 marathon 36 hours later He ran a 47 mile race and actually in between the marathon and that 47 mile race

He ran a hard two mile cross-country race so It all depends on the person some people are beasts some guys Like this just was surrounded by people. I'm really enjoying this resurgence that endurance events are having, you know, Ross Ejli, who's a good friend of mine, recently swam around the UK. He did. Bymodal sleeping, six hours on, six hours of sleep, six hours on, six hours of sleep, and just did that for six months and that's that's what gets you around the UK or I was watching I in cowboy documentary on Amazon Prime

I think on Netflix maybe about a guy who did 50 Iron Man's back to back 50 days across 50 states in the United States. Yeah, I mean that that that's a different thing. It's like the 50 Ironman is, it's, I would say that net effort. It's not as taxing as doing 52 days of running because you're, you're only want, you're only running 26 miles a day. And the rest of it's not as stressful, but the logistics of that are crazy. So it's not even something that can be compared on a physical level.

The idea of the stress on your body from day to day is mind-boggling. I don't know. I almost don't care if somebody did a hundred Iron Men across a hundred days in the same spot. It's nowhere comparable to that. You're totally right. Watching the documentary, the thing that I get the sense of, I run events. That's my job. That's exactly what I do.

I could feel the tension coming from how are we going to get? He starts in Hawaii. Just getting from Hawaii to mainland. That's a long journey on its own, that's a task to do by itself. It took me a full day to get there from LA. And yeah, watching that, the tension and that sort of the logistical problems, I imagine that doing that kind of a project, you know, we're talking, we began this discussion talking about taking ourselves out of the cerebral, you know, we're talking, we began this discussion talking about taking ourselves out of the cerebral, taking ourselves out of the mind and into the heart. Like, when your planes got delayed and your kit isn't there, like that's the opposite. That is, you need

to tap into that cerebral side, right? You can't use that as no one's ever been stuck in a traffic jam and thought, this is a lovely meditative practice for me right here. Or it's like when you start your performance you have to be able to dissociate from the mind entirely. Like obviously the mind has some use. You can't go through the logistics if you don't really use your mind. But so much of the stress during the right, during racing comes from the nervous system. So many of the cramp reflexes come from the nervous system. So it's like being able to turn off the mind, like on cue is an absolute, you know, gift of an ability. Looking at these distance challenges,

taking it from Kipchalge's recent breaking of the two, our marathon barrier, right up to the event that we're talking about at the moment. To me, there seems to be two broad schools of approach to it. One of them is the Formula One car approach, which it would appear that Nike used with Breaking Two and then the Inius 159 Challenge used as well, which is very, very specific amounts of hydration that are tailored to the

particular athlete, a shoe which is incredibly honed and everything just fine-tuned down to its most component parts. They were taking, giving Kipchulge water, letting him take as much as he wanted, then taking it back, measuring how much he drank, and then working out how much more he needed to compensate. So that's one side, the formula one side. Then the other side is what I would call the David Goggins approach, which is kind of just the ramen noodles, spitten, sawdust that taped my knees back together and get after it approach. Your mailman from Helsinki, where does he fall on that spectrum?

So it's a great question. You know, even with Kip Chogui, it's like, we see them in the performance being highly regulated because they're trying to achieve a very specific, potentially unreachable goal. But as you'd referenced in his training camp in Kenya, it's a Spartan lifestyle. They're not measuring calories. They're not measuring calories. They're eating a lot. They're actually getting a lot of joy from their food. They're eating a lot of traditional foods, unprocessed foods, but they drink a ton of very sugary milk tea.

And they eat a ton of bread and toast. So it's not a highly regulated, raw vegan... Yeah. ...pont-based you know, plant-based. Plant-based. They're getting joy from their food and they're using their food as fuel. Ashbehanol lives in a little shack in the woods in Finland and I swear to God he doesn't drink water. He said, water is boring, like why drink water when you can drink soda?

He probably drinks about two to three liters of soda a day. He always has like bars of chocolate everywhere. He eats ramen two or three times a day. He just loves it. He just loves food. He loves eating what he likes to eat. And so he gets this tremendous amount of joy from what he does.

I mean, it's the example of looking at guys like the comedian George Burns, guys who live to like 100 drinking three or four glasses of whiskey a day, three or four cigars, lots of steak, but living with this joyful exuberance, living with this like childlike quality. In the case of Kipchoghe and Ashbehanal, it's far more Spartan, it's far more simple. Their needs are extraordinarily minimal, but they get joy out of what they get joy out of. It's just not the same type of comfort that I might seek. So do the guys who are doing this particular event, the 3,100 race. Are they using a recovery protocol,

if they got the foam roller out in between, are they eating, I mean, is our male man still just living on ramen and chocolate and and and coke while he's doing this event? Well, when he said that the the course record in 2015 where he averaged almost 77 miles a day for 40 days, almost 77 miles a day for 40 days. People said that he did so well because his handler refused to give him Coke as much as he wanted. They kept him off the sweets. They've weened him off, right? Yeah, but it's like if it was up to him, he'd eat pizza and cheesecake all day long. But in terms of recovery protocol, you know, people do take it very, very seriously. He's an exception where he just takes a multivitamin and he eats and drinks as he sees fit. A lot of other people eat a very particular vegetarian diet during the race. They're very careful about

their sugar intake, their inflammatory response, they're taking lots of herbs, lots of vitamins, there's lots and lots and lots of massage in night. Some people have misuses or misurs, massage them for the first hour of their sleep, like between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. like there's a significant side on the crew and handling side as well. But not for everybody. How many people under the race typically? Yeah. They get between 10 and 15 a year. The overall completion rate for the last 24 years now has been about 62%.

That said, you know, if there, if in any year, there's 10 runners, there'll be seven men, three women, more or less in terms of the split. Pretty much all the women complete the race. I would say maybe 75 to 80% of the women complete the race who enter, probably 50% of the men complete the race. So fewer women enter the race, but there's a higher percentage of finishers there. So fewer women enter the race, but there's a higher percentage of finishers there. Do you think that that is because the men who enter the race are less prepared? Their eyes are too big for their stride, perhaps, or do you think that there is more volatility

with the physiology of men than there is with women when it comes to distance running? That's a good question. I'm not sure I can answer that specifically, but I can answer a corollary. The best times in the race, like the 25, 30 best times are all men. Like, the women aren't close to the best times there yet. That said, it's like, in my own opinion,

seeing this race and seeing ultra-distance running across the last 24, 24, 25 years, women are just beginning to realize their potential. It's like numbers aside, participation aside, there's lots of social issues there in terms of encouraging women, but it's like the women that get into it, I think naturally you measure yourself against the people around you. So you measure yourself against the men

and some people think that, oh, they're gonna ultimately be faster than we ever could be. But you see there's a handful of women, like there's a woman in Courtney Dalwater, who's, she's not as fast as the best ultra runners, male ultra runners in the world, but it's like you get her into a race with, you know, maybe not the best males, but still

elite males. And there's a very good chance that she could beat them. Didn't it. Didn't Courtney do alter? Didn't didn't something crazy happen to her vision recently in a race? Yeah, I mean, everybody has bonkers experiences, but she was blind for God knows how many minutes are hours of race. But like, there's people like Camille Heron who set the US women's 24 hour record of 163 miles

and 24 hours on a track. The male record for, you know, 20 years ago ago 30 years ago in the US was 163. Now I think it's like 173 or maybe a little bit more, but she actually feels like she can hit that. So like you know my I guess moderately controversial take on it is that you'll see over the next four or five years that women's times are going to just get better and better and better. I mean, we saw in the Chicago marathon, the the Kenya woman, Bridget Koskaye, she ran 2-14. She broke the world record by a minute in the women's side, but she was running because the race is set up this way. She was actually running with the elite men, or not too far behind them through the first 5K.

It's like, I can't speak for her, but it's like, there's very little difference in her mind between the way she can run and the way elite men can run. So I think more and more women that kind of get into races, the more we'll see that even though there is a gap and many pro-altral women runners will say, like the gap is always gonna be there just because of physiology, the gap is gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller. I think the specifics with regards to men

and women, men and women's physiology as well, it does lend itself to these real long distances evening out some of those physiological differences because it is going to be so much more dependent on what your mindset can do, right? So Alex Hutchinson, who's actually going to be on tomorrow, we're going to be discussing in detail Kipchow, who gave his most recent performance and the implications of the shoe and all sorts of this other stuff, but in endurance his book he uses the the descriptor of endurance as the will to continue against amounting desire to stop. If that's what hit that so that's not a function of you VO2 max, you lactate threshold, you're running gate economics, whatever it might be, none of that.

It's your will to continue against amounting desire to stop. And there's no reason to say that men or women will have any advantage over each other in that particular area. I suppose when we see weightlifters stepping up to the plate, things like bone density, muscle mass, testosterone levels, stuff like that, Those really have a pronounced difference there. But when we're talking about a race that takes place over, you know, 50 days, it's going to be a lot more in terms of where can you put yourself mentally?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I look at the 3,100 mile race like climbing a mountain. Very, very few people are at the level where people, what they can say, like, I climb that mountain faster than you. And they do do that. And those types of people, their achievements are incredible. But for the other 99.5%, it's like just going up and down the mountain is enough. And so I look at the 3,100 that way. There was a woman named Superba Becker, an American woman based in Washington, DC, who ran the race the first 13 years and she finished all 13 times. 13 times. I mean, it's just like, it's an incredible, incredible achievement. And I look at that as akin to someone climb the Everest 13 times.

Like, I don't care if it took her five days or a hundred days. It's like just the mindset to be able to endure that many miles across that many days. It's an incredible achievement. So talking about sort of rounding off the event itself, are there any media sponsors that I've never heard of this race before, but it's the sort of thing that I would be interested in, that why is it not more publicized? Is that purposeful? They, you know, doing the race is hard, and pulling off the race is hard enough to do, no matter what.

And they get 10 to 15 runners every year. Every few years there's a big article, there was one recently last year in the BBC. There's one in the New York Times every other year, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, I think has covered the race. But it's so out there. And it's more of a thing that people really have to come to see to experience.

And you know, because the movie coming out in the States last year, 2018, there were hundreds of visitors. They actually came out to watch the 3100 last summer. And people brought food, picnic baskets, sat on the benches. And it's one of the most oddly entertaining events to spectate at because it literally feels like you're in a temple for human achievement. It's like you can see Kipchogay run the two-hour marathon once in your lifetime and that's an incomparable experience. Having, if someone was there in Austria and there's just the thrill, but it's like that same type of ethos that he brings to his races.

On a different level is present at the 3100 mile course. Like everyone on that course believes in their heart and in their feet that no human being is limited. And that's what the atmosphere is like there. So you can spend a minute or an hour there. It's like going to the beach. You go like, I can spend five hours at the beach. What happens? Nothing. But I feel good.

Yeah. Right. It's a really good analogy. So as we move forward with this, is this the longest race on the planet? It's the longest officially certified race. There is a cross-country US race from San Francisco to New York City. People end up running anywhere between 3,050 and 3,100 miles to actually do that. But they can choose any course they want to. So it's not a great

race, but it's not officially sanctioned by distance like this is. I understand. Is there anything else that you think? Is there anything beyond this? Have you heard any rumors, any murderers of this? This frightens too many people in and of itself. You know, it's like people who are incredible specialists at 100 or 200 miles or five days or 10 days, some appreciate the race, some are totally frightened by it. And I think we're going to see a number of top ranked American and international multi-day specialists and ultra runners beginning to come to this race as the fear factor dissipates. I don't know how you can look at 3,100 miles in 52 days and not have fear in the back of

your mind. I mean, that's the marathon monks, these monks in Japan. It's like a fear is in the back of their mind doing the thousand-day trek. They're dead. They literally have to kill themselves. It's like you have to get to that starting line, you know, and be so full of joy and surrendered, saying like, I might finish the 3,100. I might not. It's not up to me.

I'm going to give it my best. I'm going to exert myself, but like the Hopi elder, Rex, Tally, I'm Taylor said, I'm going to find joy in that exertion. And that's the purpose. It's like, it can be a great transformative experience whether someone hits that 3100 miles or comes close. Yeah, it's interesting. interesting to round off the discussion. One thing for me is someone who I'm interested in sports, I'm interested in human athletic accomplishments, but really as a person who's not into distance running,

I think, oh, like there's a marathon and then there's like a 50 and then there's like 100 and that's kind of it. And it's like, it's just, there's long stuff and then there's everything before that. But now there really is these ultra events. You know, we've got the Barkey Marathon guys have just recently released that thing where you have to do a number of miles per hour. Yeah, actually, it's called the Big Backyards Courtney Duhwaltter won it pretty recently.

You it's I think it's a 4.1 mile loop in the backyard of Lazarus the the founder of the Barclay Marathon and you have that it's in one hour cycles you have an hour to complete the 4.1 and you have to show up to do your next lap precisely on the hour. So if you finish it super fast, that's your rest time. If you don't quite make it, you don't get to start the next lap. So it's really a race of attrition. So what happened a couple years ago was Cornie Dow Walter was neck and neck with the male leader and a number of people dropped out and

They pushed it to God people will have to look it up themselves, but a couple hundred miles It was they were over 60 hours no sleep or whatever sleep you can get in between your return and the start of the next hour Now here's the kicker. Let's say you and I are doing it and it's 11 p.m. and you finish at 11.55. I don't get there. You don't win the race. You have to start at 12 and finish that last lap solo. If you don't make it before one, no one wins the race. No way. Yeah, no that rule. That's brutal. Yeah. Yeah. So it's beautiful that way.

And these types of like unsanctioned, unregulated races really are much more similar to the types of things that we used to do in running. Like the Native Americans and the Bushmen would look at running as a game. It wasn't just point to point, like one against the world. There was one type of race that was done in the indigenous northeast of the United States, where there would be teams

of three or four, and there would be maybe 10 teams, and there's one corn bushel. And we'd all start at the same place, and the team that carries a corn bushel across the finish line, maybe 10 miles away, wins. The draw straws to see who has to carry the corn bushel from the beginning, but you have to capture the corn bushel from the other runners.

So it's a matter of like, I'm not going to try to take it from you at the beginning, but I'm not going to let you cross at the end. So there's a lot of intricate strategy, and there's a lot of wrestling. It's like you literally have to rest the bushel away from the other team. So it's these things which are not measured. You can't say they had the fastest time or that the slowest time,

but it's much more about running and play and strategy than what most of us have been used to in like school yard running. I wonder how many more people would enjoy running if that was the ethos that was brought to it. Well, that's become rugby, right? It's fine. Yeah, you're right. You're right. So you're right. So it's like, you know, the more we can broaden running, the more we can look at obstacle course racing, the more we can kind of broaden out this exploration of the world

on our feet, and the more we can bring spirituality into our feet and into our breath, I think the more we'll get out of the multiferious world of endurance running. I couldn't agree more. So Sanjay, where can people watch the 300 race? It will have 50, 50 UK US US listening so where should they head? So to watch 3100 run and become in both parts of the world, you can download it on Amazon, you can download it on iTunes, it's available right now mid-October to stream on Amazon Prime in the US and it will be streamable in Amazon Prime in the UK by mid-November. Amazing, well I will leave the links. If I manage to find them, I will leave the links to

where you can go and check that out in the show notes below. If anyone wants to follow you online, Sanjay, where should they head? At Mr Sanjay or at 3100 Film. Amazing. Thank you so much. It's been absolutely awesome. I'm looking forward to when the documentary comes out and good luck with the rest of the promo for it. Thanks a million Chris, it was great to be on your show. you