The Rich Roll Podcast - He Ran Across America — On Plants

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Imagine running an ultramarathon. It’s a huge undertaking for anyone. And a bucket list dream for many. Now imagine running an ultramarathon every day. A minimum of 40 miles, 75 days in a row. Starting in Los Angeles. Finishing in New York. A 3,200 mile transcontinental run. This is the story of Robbie Balenger. Just 6 years ago, Robbie laced up his first pair of running shoes to alleviate the stress he was experiencing managing a restaurant. A small act, that first run set in motion a chain of events that led to a passion for running long distances, followed by a purpose-driven mission promote a message — the power of a plant-based diet to fuel athletic performance. Prevent and reverse certain lifestyle maladies. Ameliorate suffering. And redress climate change. What Robbie didn't expect? The many extraordinary ways running creates community. Unites people across the economic divide. And bridges the political differences that drive us apart. I was unfamiliar with Robbie until an e-mail hit my inbox courtesy of my friend and former podcast guest, Olympic cyclist Dotsie Bausch (RRP 355). Her non-profit Switch4Good was sponsoring Robbie's attempt to cross the United States by foot. Would I be interested in helping to support their efforts? I jumped at the opportunity. On March 16, I showed up at dawn in Huntington Beach to meet Robbie for the first time and help kick off his momentous attempt. Running the first several miles alongside Robbie and a small crew of supporters, I immediately took to his earnest yet humble disposition. His passion for promoting the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle. And his determination to reach New York a mere 75 days later. We struck up a friendship that day. I kept keen tabs on his progress over the following months. And made him a promise: Finish the run and you earn a seat at the podcast table. All heart, he indeed finished it. Today I honor that promise. And it’s a great story, well told. You can watch it all go down on YouTube.  I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange as much as I relished having it. Peace + Plants, Rich

I think it all came down to like I desperately wanted this. I wanted it for a lot of reasons. I wanted it one for the outreach for the advocacy it meant a lot to me to start being a force for positive change and two I was lost I'd come out of 15 years more in the restaurant industry and it didn't feel like I wanted to do that anymore. I knew whatever I did next, I wanted it to be something that fed my soul. And moving my body does, and pushing the limits of what I can do physically.

So I just kept doubling down that this is what I had to do. I had to get this together, and a lot of it was just faith that it would come together. And again, going back to that mantra that my mom instilled in me, you can do anything you set your mind to. And I think that's something for important for people to understand is just because something's hard in the beginning doesn't mean it's always going to be. It's amazing what we're capable of. And I think a lot of what you have to do is not get overwhelmed by the larger task at hand, whatever it is, and just start chopping away

little by little at whatever you're trying to achieve. Nobody gets to something huge overnight. It's going to take time. That's Robbie Ballinger, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Imagine running an ultramarathon. It's a huge undertaking for anybody, a bucket list dream for so many people out there. Now I want you to imagine running an ultramarathon every single day, 40 miles a day, every day for 75 days in a

row, starting in Los Angeles, finishing in New York, a 3,200 mile transcontinental run. This is the story of Robbie Ballinger. In many ways, in every man, a guy who just six years ago laced up a pair of running shoes for the first time, simply to alleviate the job stress of being a restaurant manager. And it's a path that led to a passion, not just for running, but the potential of running to promote a message. In Robbie's case, a message close to my heart,

the power of a plant-based diet to fuel athletic performance, to heal and prevent chronic lifestyle disease, to alleviate suffering and climate change, and ultimately make the world a better place. Robbie is a friend. He's a great guy with a big heart and his extraordinary yarn is coming up in a couple of few,

but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming

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I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Robbie. So about a year ago, February of 2019,

I get this email from my buddy, Dotsie Bausch. You remember Dotsie, right? The Olympic cyclist from episode 355 from about two years ago. I think that episode went up in March of 2018. Well, Dotsie has this nonprofit organization called Switch for Good. It's a vegan advocacy group promoting plant-based diets

for athletes and more. And she basically asked if I would be willing to help support this guy, Robbie Ballinger, who Switch for Good was sponsoring in his attempt to run across America. I didn't know Robbie. I actually hadn't heard of him before, but I said, yeah, sure.

And on March 16 of this past year, I showed up at dawn in Huntington Beach to help kick off his attempt and run the first several miles with him. And I immediately took to this guy, his genuine down-to-earth, humble disposition, his enthusiasm for running and the movement. We struck up a friendship that day. I keenly kept tabs on his transcontinental attempt over the next few months. And I made a promise to him that if he should finish this thing, when he should finish this thing,

that he would come on the show and tell me all about it. Well, he did finish it and it's a great story. So here we are and here we go. Robbie, good to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to you about this epic adventure that you just completed. We had a conversation about it in Denver about, what was that, like six weeks ago or something like that? Yeah, something like that, a couple weeks to a month or so, yeah.

How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. Yeah, when I saw you in Denver, I was still in the depths of understanding what I had just done. I guess I still am to some degree. You'd barely gotten home. Yeah, yeah. I think I'd been home less than a week. Right. Yeah, I was in New York for a week post-run and then had been back in Denver a week or so. And it looks like you're back running a little bit here and there.

I am, yeah. I went as far as to try to run the Leadville 50 a couple weeks ago. I made it halfway. Why? What do you think? That's definitely what I'm asking myself now. I think I just wanted to see where my legs were and try to understand my fitness level and definitely found a lot out.

I think I have a level of fitness I did not before. In a lot of ways, the 75-day run was a training block. Right. But in other ways, it destroyed my legs. So I have this fitness, but my legs weren't ready for what my body could do, if that makes any sense. Yeah. So I would imagine it's a weird thing where part of you is like, hey, man, I should probably lay low for a while. But also, I just did this thing. I'm crazy fit. Let me go show what I can do. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I'm new-ish to running and a pretty new ultra runner.

I've only been running for six years. I ran 250Ks and 250 milers before I made the decision to do this. But you did those like right on top of each other. Well, this, I mean, before I decided to do it. Once I decided to do it, then I kept pushing. In a year, I did a lot. So, yeah, there's this newfound level of fitness that it's fun to explore, yet how far can I explore it right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you decided to run across the country, you'd only done two or three?

Yeah, 250Ks and 250 miles. All right, well, let's paint the picture. You ran across the United States in 75 days, 3,175 miles. Is that correct? That's correct. Averaging something like 45 miles a day? It was average 43, 45 after day 23. We had to go there to make sure everything was going to be in line for my 75-day finish.

Right. All right. So why? Why do this? Yeah. I mean, there's kind of a long to that. That's what we do here. That's what this is for, right? I believe it all really started in 2016, right at the outcome of the presidential election. I kind of was in a place where I felt really lost, didn't understand it really. And through that, I also found that I had a lot of family members that saw things much differently than I did. And one of those, someone whom I love and who has supported me through so much of my life, but we just see the world through a different lens, my aunt, we got on the phone a couple of days afterwards and I was just spitting venom. I was pretty upset. And in that conversation, she posed a question to me and she said, what are you doing so great that my opinion matters so much?

And that really resonated with me. At the time, I was running some restaurants in Austin, Texas. And from that point on, I was also very overworked and overstressed at my job, a lot of which I was putting on myself, I think, due to a lack of confidence. I wasn't delegating. I was just taking it all in, taking it all in. And through that, her posing that question, it put me in some type of existential crisis.

And that was, what, November 2016? By September of 2017, I had left the restaurants. Wow. So that's a, you know, first of all, it demonstrates your ability to listen and hear because you could have deflected that. So something that she said resonated with you. She held a mirror up to you like, you're such hot shit, man. Exactly. And you were able to hear that and process it.

And then the second piece of that being that you actually did something about it. Yeah, I think in that question, it made me really start to look at myself and our culture as a larger thing and see that we're all, so many are armchair advocates and armchair pundits. And that just didn't sit well with me as an individual. So that started, yeah, this longer process of figuring out what did I stand for and what was something I wanted to make an impact in. What was the process of trying to unpack that for yourself? Well, over the next, again, eight months or so, it was 10 months, was figuring out that I needed to leave my current career. And on the heels of that, my fiance fiance decided she wanted to go to nursing school.

So we were going to move to Denver. And as we made that choice, I was going to take some time for myself and go travel Southeast Asia or South America. And at that time, the hurricanes hit down in the Caribbean. And I lived on St. John and the US Virgin Islands in my early 20s. And I still had a lot of friends and loved ones down there and didn't hear from them for a while. And it scared me. And I decided instead of taking that aloof trip abroad, I would go down there and help. And when I got down there, one, I ended up feeling very powerless in helping, just being an individual. I think I was there for them emotionally and let them have someone that wasn't a part of it. There was a lot of trauma. But I also saw a couple of things.

One, I saw, wow, like Mother Nature's pissed. This storm's filled. They just felt like they were entirely too big. And two, I saw hope and happiness in people who had lost everything, everything, all the things that we all work for. And somewhere in that, when I came back, I knew I wanted to do something in environmentalism. And so then it was the thought of going into solar or possibly a little wildland firefighting. But I was, I had been running prior to that a lot. I'd already done some ultras. And I moved to Denver, and I just kept running more and more.

And it was just where I was processing and sifting through what I wanted to do. And in that, I ended up going down to the Caballo Blanco 50 down in the Copper Canyon in Mexico, made famous by Born to Run. And down there, I met a guy, Patrick Sweeney, who had ran across the country. And I just was like, okay, this is a thing you can do. Here's a guy who has done it. And when I came back, we were at this time, my fiance and I, understanding our food choices to a bigger degree.

We were both at that point vegetarian. And I had a gut check with myself about that. And I was like, here's an environmental stance that really matters that as individuals we can do. All of us can have a part in and that's to adopt a plant-based lifestyle. And also understood due to the examples in front of me of Scott Dutrick and you, it's really good for you performance wise. So all these things started to just circle around on my first run back after going to the Copper Canyon. And I just hit all these things.

Let's do this. What's the biggest thing you can do? Well, I can run across the country like that guy I just met. And why would I do it? And it's to promote a plant-based lifestyle with the initial reason being mainly just environmentalism. And so that kind of helped to align all of my passions and the things I understood. I understand food. I've been in food my whole life and I loved running

and this environmental crisis scares the shit out of me. Right. So at that point though, you weren't a hundred percent plant-based. Is that correct? No. But the guy who, Patrick is his name, who ran across country, he was he? He is, yes. Yeah, right. So he had done it at PlantBase. He had, yeah. So that example was there. That example was there, and another guy I found out later has done it at PlantBase.

Right. Prior to you, there were two dudes. There's no governing body over this, so it's kind of hard to say for sure. There is like a website where they kind of keep track of everyone who does it, though. There's a Facebook group. That seems to have a lot on there. Yeah, there is a website that's kind of got most of it. Right, because every year, like, a couple people make this attempt, right?

How many people total have done it? I think approximately 330. First person was in 1909, I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The history of it is crazy. Like, there was a period of time that doesn't get talked about or written about very much where there was, like, people were running crazy distances in the early 1900s. 1928, 1929.

There were two races coined the Great Bunyan Derbies. And they were to show off the beginning of Route 66. And yeah, they were stage races, but they went all the way across the country. And they were like tourism. They were like marketed. They were supposed to be like to create awareness around this new highway, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And which was nice or interesting that I ended up spending the first half of the run on Route 66. And here we are on the other side of Route 66. It was just starting, and now there's not much left of it. There's parts of it where there's no funding and bridges are washed out, and we saw all kinds of interesting stuff. Isn't that part of the narrative in that animated movie Cars? You know that Pixar movie? Yeah, yeah.

I think it takes place on Route 66, and it's about kind of what happens to that economy and culture when they build the superhighway. Okay, yes. I mean, it makes all the sense. That movie, I vaguely remember it, but that makes all the sense in the world. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, it's incredible that it dates back that far.

So you've kind of had this journeyman life for most of your adulthood, right? Kind of like this into the wild sort of know, sort of sensibility about you. Yeah. Where does that emanate from? I don't know. Growing up, you know, my mom really, she liked to travel. We traveled domestically, but we were always hopping around. You're from Georgia, right? I grew up in Georgia. My mom's family was in Texas most of my childhood. So I spent a lot of time going back and forth. My mom's father, he traveled a lot, and he'd take me on road trips and stuff. So I think it started there. And then when I was, it's funny you said into the wild.

When I was 22, I moved to Denali National Park, and they were actually filming that movie that summer. So yeah, that was kind of definitely, that helps to kind of sum it up. And then from there, I moved to the Virgin Islands for a couple of years, which I mentioned earlier, and then made my way to Austin and spent the majority of the last 10 years there. But during that period of time of travel, did you have a sense of what you were just having an adventure?

Adventure. Was the idea like, I'm just going to do this as long as I can? Or do you have a sense of, well, I'm going to settle down and do X when I'm done with this? No. No. Even I think when I moved to Austin, it was a jumping point. My mom had moved there and the rest of my family, my mom's family had moved kind of to the Austin area. But I got there and anyone that spent time in Austin knows it's beautiful. It's fun. Being in my early 20s, it was a great place to kind of settle for a while and got really involved with the restaurant industry there and had a great time. Yeah, so you were like part owner in a pizzeria?

Yeah, I started off just overseeing operations. There were six employees, and we had one little spot. It's a beautiful little restaurant, Bufalina. And then from there, we grew into a second one, and when we opened the second, I became partner. I had some ownership in it, but was overseeing operations for the two restaurants. Yeah, that was kind of what I was doing. I was using running as a stress reliever from all of the mounting stress of the job.

The job, right. How does running enter the picture specifically? My fiancee now, girlfriend at the time, she was also working at the restaurant. We started dating a couple months after it opened. And I was living a lifestyle that's very, very much a part of, I think, all restaurant industries, not just the one in Austin, but it was work hard and party just a little bit harder. Yeah. Of course, man. That's why you do it. Yeah. It's readily available. Everything. Of course, man. That's why you do it. Yeah, it's readily available. That's the appeal.

Everything. You can do it at work. Yeah, exactly. And so I was doing that, but I really had worked hard and stuck to making sure that this restaurant opened. It meant a lot to me. It felt like it was a big step up for me, a big career move. And as it opened, we were wildly busy right off the bat. It's still to this day such a beautiful, successful restaurant.

And the mounting stress of that wasn't working with the partying so much. And my fiancee now, she had ran one marathon. Her father was a marathoner. And she asked me to go out on a run. And we went two and a half miles. And I got a cab home. We got a juice at Daily Juice downtown Austin and a cab home. That was all I had in me.

But it stuck. That was it. That was the way. It hit so many of the things that that party lifestyle hit. I've talked about it in the past. It's like running is the inverse of a drug. Sometimes, especially when you're starting off or just getting back in shape, you feel like shit while you're doing it and then you feel great afterwards. What are drugs? You feel great while you're doing

it and then you feel awful afterwards. I really like that. I like that. For me, running taps into this primal thing, and it just feels like everything aligns. It's like where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to be doing. It just feels so good. So that, again, it just stuck, and it was two and a half miles, half marathon, a couple months later, Philly marathon the next year, 50-miler the next year.

So it just kept being. Basically, a light switch got flicked and that was it. Yeah. And there was another instance that really got me in it. I ran a marathon. I'd heard about ultras. I was clued in enough that I think I was following some guys on Instagram. And we took a weekend, long weekend vacation up to the San Juans in Colorado to Silverton. And it just so

happened to be the weekend before Hard Rock. And went downtown Silverton and there was all the big boys. They were all there. And I grew up an only child, but also with just a single mother. My father passed away when I was really young. And I think I've always been wondering and searching for what does it mean to be a man? Who am I in all of this? And for me, for so long, partying was that. There was a sense that that was a way to be hardcore, to be a man. And being up there and seeing these guys, it was just so quick. It was like, well, that's another example right there. And so that really resonated with me and on the way home I had Shelly look up how do you qualify for hard rock I was so naive to it that I thought I could just you know quickly work my way to hard rock so like the hardest race basically in America exactly and so yeah we found a 50 miler that was

a qualifier or you did the 50. And then the following year I could do the a hundred and that would qualify me. So I went and did one in back where I grew up in Georgia. What was it about the ultra? Was it just seeing those guys and the access that you had because it's such a low key like subculture? Um, what was it about the ultra community that made you think this is for me as opposed to, Oh, I ran a marathon and I saw these guys that won the marathon like you could have keyed into that instead i've always had a draw to trails and just being more in the wilderness i grew up on in the foothills of the appalachians and was always on or near the appalachian trail so there's always been a love of

that living in alaska i, marathons are fun. I still enjoy a marathon. What's terrible about a marathon is you never take a break. In 50-milers, you come to an aid station, at least you stop for a minute. Well, you can. You can take a break in a marathon. Yeah, but no. But then whereas ultras, it's just, yeah, it takes so much.

And you get to be in the middle of, you can choose these races that put you somewhere where you may never go. A lot of that, just the grit of it. I think grit would be the word. Yeah, well, that's a pretty quick trajectory from newbie runner into doing ultras. Yeah, yeah, it was.

It was only a couple of years I when I decided to do that 50 miler I'd only ran the Philly Marathon uh-huh and then in the training block to get ready for it I ran the Austin Marathon and Hell's Hills 50k in Smithville Texas and during that period of time what were you relying on in terms of how to structure your training? Well, actually, who ended up being my crew chief for my run across the country, my fiance's sister, Jackie, she wrote a very basic plan for me. And I stuck to it. It was just when to run and how far to run.

That was it. That was it. That's all you needed. Yeah, and I stuck to it i mean uh-huh almost every i think almost every workout right so i gather that with each one of these races that you you did you became more emotionally engaged with this community in this world and you have this thirst to go farther and do more totally absolutely yeah and then moving to denver kind of upped that a little bit

more. I didn't personally know any of these elite runners that live in that area, but just being amongst them, being close to them just made me just fiend for it even more. Well, when we had dinner in Denver, you were like, I mean, you had just returned from your run. So you had moved to Denver, but then you really actually didn't really live there very much right and you were saying like i just don't you don't like know anybody there no yeah very little community there because when we got there yeah i i got obsessed with this idea i had a plan to build and i had a sponsor to find and yeah i had to get all those things in line so you've done these couple ultras, you come back from the Copper Canyon and you're like, I'm gonna do this.

So walk me through the process of going from audacious idea into actual reality with this, right? Like what happens when you tell Shelly, like when you're like, okay, I'm gonna do this thing, like how was that received? And, you know, I'm sure some people were like, slow down, cowboy. Yeah. Shelly's always very supportive.

And it was just a kind of in a matter of fact, okay, all right, let's do it. You know, there was some questioning later on as I struggled to get momentum in the way I needed to make it happen. But for the most part, everyone around me was very supportive. And in hindsight, I do think that's rare, that I didn't have, along the way, very few nice hairs. I had a lot of friends that kind of chuckled. That just would give me kind of a look of, okay. But some of them ended up being my crew as I did it.

So there was a big, yeah. Now being on the other side of it and appreciating the magnitude of the whole thing, do you think that you benefited from the naivete of like not really fully grasping what it was that you were trying to tackle? Like there's something about that innocence. Like when you don't, like if you had, like let's say you'd been around ultras for five or ten years. You know, it's like you, then you have a sense of like how hard this is going to be and maybe like, yeah, I don't know if I want to do that. But like the enthusiasm of being new and not really having all the experience that perhaps one might have suggested you need for something like this can work to your benefit, right?

Because you're just like, oh, yeah, I'm going to do it. Yeah, don't worry about it. Well, most of it's in our head anyways. So just not having those blockers of what the status quo would be for something like this. Yeah, I think it was to my advantage. And then it was just a matter of how am I going to do it? There was the training that had to happen

and there was creating a plan so that I could shop that to sponsors or someone to help me along the way. And so with those two things, the plan or the training plan was pretty rudimentary. I kind of broke it up into three parts. The first part was I wanted to make sure that I could run consistently every day. So I ran 10 miles a day, taking every 15th day off and did that for a couple months, three months or so, maybe a little longer. And then the second part was continuing to run every day, but upped it to 100, 110 miles a week. And then by the third time, the third set, or the third block, I had obtained my sponsor, Nodamu, dairy free ice cream. And together we went to a handful of races

and I wanted to make sure that I could, I wanted to normalize 50 miles. So the idea was get to race pace, do it every other week and do that for a while. And then if you can do it at race pace, hopefully I can just do it a little bit slower, but for days on end. So literally running an ultra every other weekend. Yeah, I did. Back to like a weekend in between two of those, like two sets of those, another 100K in there, and maybe a 50K too, I believe.

So how much time between returning from the Copper Canyon and day one of the cross-country trip? A year and one day. Okay, so a year, a year to get ready, but not like you'd banked years of ultra races with everything that kind of happens when your body acclimates to that kind of pounding over time like the ligaments and the tendon,

like these things take more time than your heart and your lungs to get in shape, right? So that's a lot. It was, it was a lot. And like these things take more time than your heart and your lungs to get in shape, right? So that's a lot. It was. It was a lot, yeah. And no real room to get injured or for any margin of error. No.

At one point early on, I got like a neuroma on the bottom of my foot, so an inflamed nerve. It feels like you're just stepping on a nail. And yeah, it was mortifying. I was so scared. But you always can adjust. There's always, I feel like, a way to adjust. I was so scared, you know, but you always can adjust. There's always, I feel like a way to adjust. I'm blessed with really good biomechanics.

Unless I push, I found when I get injured is when I try to run fast. And luckily for this, that wasn't really part of the equation. That's not part of the game. Yeah. All right. But where did you come up with this training plan? Was that just your idea or did you start getting some insight from some people that know?

I love that. Yeah, I really feel, I mean, I, again, am blessed with good biomechanics, so I felt like it was all in my head. And it was a matter of just gaining the confidence I needed, normalizing distances. And I thought with those things together, my willpower. My mom always, she always, I remember growing up, there was one mantra. It was, you can do anything you set your mind to.

And I've lived by that one. And this was like the ultimate test to that in a lot of ways. This idea of going plant-based though i mean that was you're coming back again i keep going back to the copper canyon but this is like the genesis of all of this right the idea of doing this plant-based or becoming plant-based 100 i mean that was theoretical at that point so you're on top of doing all this training you're making this dietary shift at the same time, right? So how did that go? What did that look like?

It wasn't overnight. It wasn't. We were already vegetarian. And at that point, there was no – so one little tidbit. When I went down to the Copper Canyon for that race, I didn't finish it the first year. So when I made the plan to do this, and the reason was is we were staying at a really small hotel. It felt more like just a host family. And they up three meals a day and they were not vegetarian. And I didn't, I didn't want to be a difficult guest. So I was just eating what they put in

front of me. And I got food poisoning the night before the race and ended up scratching at mile 20 and it was some rancid chicken. That was the last time I've ever had meat. That's for sure. And then getting back, it was, it was over a couple of months before I was like, okay, I am 110% plant-based. And I think that was important, the process in order for me, as I set out across the country, to be able to talk to others about this. And I think something that really resonates with me is the idea of not preaching like absolutism and allowing people to have space to make these decisions over time. I think it's so really daunting

when we as advocates are just like, you need to be vegan right now. And instead it's, I like the idea of we have three meals a day, how many can you make a positive change in? And then over time, you can cumulatively make more and more until hopefully at the end, you've ended up with something that's more absolute or not.

And you're still just doing better than maybe you were before you were turned on to this idea. Well, I mean, I think that's really the only way to advocate. You know, I mean, this is how everybody makes positive changes in their life. It's not linear and it's not perfect. And if you set up a structure or an expectation that that's how

it has to go for people, you're creating a barrier and you're just alienating those people who would otherwise perhaps be interested. Absolutely. And you're making them destined to fail. Yeah. I mean, it is a problem in the vegan community

because there's a lot of, you know, I mean, no matter how vegan you are, there's somebody else who's more vegan and they're going to tell you about it. And there's nothing that upsets me more. Well, there are certain things that upset me more. But it is upsetting when you see somebody who's made a positive leap in the right direction or in this direction. And then somebody from the community tells them they're doing it wrong or they're not doing enough or why did you know and and just you got to put wind in people's sails don't like you know snuff out that light when it's just been you know lit for the first

time i agree yeah totally um yeah negativity and putting people down is not the way to get anyone to do anything. So I couldn't agree more with that. And going across the country, we met a lot of people, dairy farmers, cattle farmers, and everything in between. And I'll say that we didn't have a single naysayer about what I was out there to talk about. And I think a lot of that came from that outlook and coming to people with positivity

and not from a point of higher than mighty. It was just, you know. You're not going to tell the dairy farmer that he's got to change his business or his practice. I mean, when he would ask me, it's gone back for generations. Yeah, when he'd ask me what I was doing, I'd just get a grin.

I was like, I'm running across the country to create conversations about better food choices. I'm vegan. And we would both just kind of grin. We knew what we were, you know. But I'm sure to a degree, it resonated to some degree with him. You know, when I was 19 or 20,

I saw Super Size Me. It was about when that came out. And it was the beginning of this catalyst for change. And it took another 15 years for me to end up with what I just did. And I like to think of that when I was out there of just being, maybe it's just putting something in someone's ear and maybe that dairy farmer ends up having some health issues 10 years down the road. And maybe he remembers back to meeting me. And that helps him to make a change that will better impact his life.

Yeah, who's that Forrest Gump dude with the beard that ran 10 years ago? How did it go with acclimating to the dietary shift with training and recovery and the like? It was all positive. I didn't have any issues. I had a lot of affirmations that it was the right thing to do. The closer I got to completely plant-based, the less and less recovery I needed between runs. Another one that really got me was phlegm. Like just not getting out on runs and feeling clear. I could breathe really well. Yeah, there was no negative side for me. I didn't feel as though that there

was some detox transition time that was needed. I think if you start tomorrow, you're going to feel it within two or three days. Yeah. Well, you had to get off all that pizza cheese. Yeah. Yeah. That was hard. You know, cheese is like, well, you had to get off all that pizza cheese. Yeah, yeah, that was hard. You know, cheese is like, oh, of course, yeah. Mozzarella all day. Yeah. So a year to prepare and you're ramping up this training pretty quickly.

I mean, that's a lot of miles to suddenly be putting on your legs and all these races and all of that. Meanwhile, just trying to corral, A, the resources, so you're trying to line up these sponsors. And then second to that, the logistics of trying to pull this thing off. I mean, it's a tall order to try to figure out how you're going to get all the way, 3,000 miles across the country in one piece with people that are – because you can't do it alone.

You've got to get people to help you and support you and all of that. And it's a, it's no small undertaking and financially, it's got to be daunting as well. It was. Yeah. So those two parts needed to come together. And I started by making sure I had the support around me. I'd figure out the logistics later. And so I started by driving back down to Austin and sitting down with my fiance, Shelly's parents. They're recently retired. They had the time and are both really smart people. And we sat down together and over four days created an initial outline of what I wanted to do. And from there, I started shopping that around to organizations and

brands. And a couple of doors shut in my face and really had to look at those as just an opportunity to see that those were not the right fit. That wasn't the right person to bring on as my team instead of getting defeated by it. And then I approached Notamu Dairy-Free Ice Cream out of Austin. The CEO, Daniel Nicholson, is an old friend acquaintance from Austin. And I'd seen through social media that his coconut milk-based ice cream company was making some plant-based advocacy stances on social media. And I contacted him through Instagram and said, hey, can we have a conversation? And 30 minutes turned into an hour and a half. And the synergy was just right. It felt like this was who I wanted to do it with. And he really seemed to be, he put the advocacy in front. It was, it was

more than I had, you know, a lot of why brands will come on board with athletes these days is your social media, you know, exposure. I think I had 800 followers. So it wasn't that, you know, I wasn't doing much for him you're not gonna boost their game no no but he believed in what i wanted to do and i and you know that was something as as i set out on the run that also motivated me throughout is that belief that he had in me you know at that point by the time i started he had put a lot of resources into this the company had a lot of people had put a lot of resources into this. The company had a lot of people, had put a lot of time, a lot of money, and I don't take someone's confidence in me lightly. So that was a motivating factor as well, once we decided to do this together.

And then with it being an ice cream company, I thought it was a good fit. It was playful. I thought that was really important. When I went to these races building up to it, we took ice cream with us. And I realized really quick how big of a bridge this was. Everybody likes ice cream. Yeah. If you're leading with ice cream, the doors are opening. Totally.

Coconut or whatever it's made out of. Exactly. And it provides a good example of where we need to head. We're not going to get rid of ice cream. I don't want us to get rid of ice cream. Ice cream's great. It's iconic. It's American. And it's a good example of a way that we can move forward without using animal products.

And so I really liked that about the product. And it short circuits the divisiveness around the conversation because we can all agree that we all like ice cream. Yeah. And that little peace offering. We gave them push cards. So as I went across the country, the way we created conversations, my crew did a really good job. They took care of talking to a lot of the people along the way and being advocates. And the way that we did that was I had a camper that was being pulled by a van,

and we had wrapped those with my sponsors. So the van was wrapped with Nodamu and then Switch for Good, Dotsie Bosch's. Right, which is how we first connected. Yeah, exactly. She came on late in the game and helped a lot as well. And so she wrapped the camper. And this was really cool. It made us look like a NASCAR team going across the country,

but it also provided a focal point for people to come talk to us. And then as people would come up at gas stations in rural Oklahoma and ask what we were doing, my crew could, you know, they could hand them two things and they would hand them a pint of ice cream and a push card that said who I was, what I was doing. And it provided five or six recipes that they could go online and find. And so that was how we created this conversation. And then a lot of the time they would wait on me to come in whoever was who we had engaged with and i'd get to talk to them for a moment

and then be on my way again so that was kind of how many pints of ice cream did you guys give away i don't know that's a good question you know we were our size was limited but we kept re-upping we all we had was a mini fridge and a mini freezer in the camper were you getting like fedex shipments of more ice cream though because you're right along the way luckily uh not only recently uh went national so we were able to find it around now like it's funny because when we i was i was familiar with the brand like i knew of the brand when we ran on that first day um but i hadn't seen it around but now i'm seeing it everywhere i go yeah Yeah, they're growing. And it's a good product. It has really low sugar compared to other ice creams.

And, yeah, it wasn't as hard to find as I had even anticipated. Luckily, as I was getting ready for this, they were also ramping up their distribution. Yeah, you're a good ambassador. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I gather from this is that, like, I'm interested in the audacity of, like, chasing an outrageous goal, right? And kind of the mindset that's required to do that. And, you know, my belief and my sense is that you would agree with this is that you have to, first of all, you have to have the confidence that you can accomplish something like this, like deep, deep down.

And then you have to just, or even if you have some insecurities, you still have to act as if. You have to come together in order for you to pull this off. You can't wait until all that's figured out because the clock's ticking and you've set this date, like you have to just presume that this is happening, right? And just say, it's going to get worked out. You know, you're doing the footwork, the legwork, like literally in your training and whatever you're doing on the phone to like pull these things elements together. whatever you're doing on the phone to like pull these things elements together. But that, that belief, like you have to be the lighthouse because if you don't believe it and have that confidence, how can you expect the CEO of not a moo and all these crew people who are going to sacrifice their personal time to support you in this? Like they have to,

they have to, they get that from you. Right. So you have to carry that vibration. They get that from you, right? So you have to carry that vibration. Yeah. I think it all came down to like I desperately wanted this. I wanted it for a lot of reasons. I wanted it, one, for the outreach, for the advocacy. It meant a lot to me to start being a force for positive change. And two, I was lost.

I had come out of 15 years more in the restaurant industry and it didn't feel like I wanted to do that anymore. And as much as I enjoyed that time in my life and I was good at what I did, it doesn't give you a lot of skill sets outside of it. And I knew whatever I did next, I wanted it to be something that fed my soul and moving my body does

and pushing the limits of what I can do physically. So I just kept doubling down that this is what I had to do. I had to get this together. And a lot of it was just faith that it would come together. And again, going back to that mantra that my mom instilled in me, you can do anything you set your mind to. And it's easy to sit here and say that it just was that easy, but there was a lot of discouragement. There were a lot of times that I probably wasn't too pleasant to be around at home, and my fiancee was really, she's an amazing human to put up with me through a lot of that.

Because there was a lot of times where I was scared. How was I going to get this together? And, and then there was that moment, you know, going back to the, the plan of once I did get everything on board, I still didn't have the logistics together. And then that all came to a head over Christmas. You know, I left again, March 15th and over Christmas, we were back in Austin and I was having a pretty big freak out. I didn't have a route. I didn't have a crew vehicle. I didn't have a crew chief. I didn't even really have my nutrition plan yet. And luckily, the support of my in-laws and my fiance and her sister, we all sat down around a table and we started figuring it all out and just checking those things off.

And it was the first time where I realized how much a team mattered. Again, going back to my career in the restaurants, I was a good leader, but I wasn't a really great delegator. And I wasn't really good at trusting in others. Fiercely independent person. Just have been my whole adult life, if not even in in childhood and that was my first place where I felt overwhelmed and I had I needed help and they all came together so selflessly and without me having to beg for it they did they sensed it that I needed it and we sat down and we broke off chunks for everybody to take care of and within

a week span most things were in order. And had I continued to try to do everything by myself, March 15th, 2020. A little bit of a control freak? I don't know if it's, yeah, I guess it's control freak. It's not that I don't believe other people are capable of things. I just have a hard time asking.

I think is more where it comes from. And I don't know if that's just, again, only child, just like really independent. I don't know if that's just again only child just like really independent I don't know where that really comes from but I'm glad to say that through this process I'm much less that way well the route part of it seems like it shouldn't be that

hard to figure out because so many people have done 300 people have done this and they share their routes right aren't there like there are like specific routes where they're like if you're going to do it like this this is what, this is the way you do it. Yeah. The official route is from San Francisco. I want to say it's from San Francisco city hall to Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Yeah. I, when we sat down again at this table at Christmas, I really wasn't sure what my route was going to be.

I was looking at everything. Part of me at one time really wanted to do it through the deep south, being from Georgia. I felt like it was a place that I could talk to people in a way maybe others couldn't. And we started looking, but then someone put in Google Maps LA to New York City and just seeing it on the map. I was like, well, that nobody denies that you ran across the country if you do that. It's definitely the longest route. And at that point, it's like, that's what I want to do. I know it's longer.

You know, you go other spots, you can go 2,600 miles, where this one was just under 3,200. And we found that there was a race in 2011 that some Frenchmen put on and it went, it was called Lanny LA to New York. And we found some PDFs that they had left online of a route. And so we took that and we started laying that down on Strava maps and built out my, my route. Cause my, the biggest thing I was worried about was sometimes it's really hard to judge what is the safest route. Where's the shoulders? Where's the most optimal road to run on the side?

I mean, I'm on the side of the road every day for 12 hours. That's a lot of time for something to go wrong. And so that was, yeah, that was how we found the route. It ended up being something that was weighing on me. But once we found that, it alleviated that. And then Chris, Shelly's father, he took the time to put it all into Strava Maps and then also double check it with Google Earth and stuff of that nature to just make sure it looked right. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I never really thought of it in that much detail. Like it's not necessarily, like the best route isn't necessarily the most direct route. Obviously you want to stay off the busy roads where there's lots of traffic and it's dangerous. But if a busier road has a

broader shoulder than a country road where you're going to be running in uneven gravel and there is no shoulder, then how, you know, like you might want to go with the busier road. I prefer the shoulder. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. All right, and how do you begin to put the nutrition plan together to figure out how you're going to eat and how much you're going to eat and what your stomach's going to be able to tolerate? I mean, I know you have an iron gut and all of that, but still that's got to be a tricky equation to sort out. It was, and I'm not a nutritionist.

I love food. I understand food. I understand food on a higher level in restaurants and such, but what it's going to take to fuel me exerting that much was not my specialty. But luckily in my corner was Jackie, Shelly's sister, and she just the year before had done the Appalachian Trail plant-based. And so coming into it, and she also had gained some plant-based nutrition certification in that time and is someone who aspires to get into more plant-based nutrition. And she put it together and she's a spreadsheet whiz. And the idea was high fat, high carbohydrate. We figured I would need between, we thought we'd start with about 5,000 calories a day

and ramp it up to about 10. When we got out there, we ended up just like day one, it was 7,000 and then 8,000 pretty much another month in and it stayed there. So between seven, 8,000 calories. But yeah, that was, I left that on her and I just had faith that she could pull it together. And I mean, I didn't have to have faith.

She's a very capable human. I knew she would. And yeah, she devised the meal plan, and a lot of it was made up in smoothies. I had 1,000-calorie smoothies that I had four times a day. Like a lot of coconut oil, like high-fat. Yeah, coconut milk, chia seeds, bananas, carrots, kale, powdered peanut butter, and soylent. We used some soylent mill replacer in there. It just really rounded things out and made sure we got the calories where we needed it.

And what kind of real food were you chewing on? In the mornings, I'd start off with a bowl of oatmeal and with maple syrup and chia seeds and bananas, a big bowl of that, a cup of coffee. And then I stopped every five miles. So the first five, I'd have that first smoothie. Second one, a big bowl of fruit. Third one, smoothie. And then more carb, starchy, cold pasta. We went through a lot of things for the things I would eat during the middle of the day. went through a lot of things for the things I would eat during the middle of the day. Started off, I'd come up with this kind of vegan banh mi, and it was just sliced bread with tofu, hummus, cilantro, and cucumbers or something like that. And quickly, I did not want bread. Bread was not working for me. I think it was more because they were

pre-making the sandwiches and it got soggy, and I just couldn't do the soggy bread. So we ended up doing every rendition of that possible. It was within, it was in tortillas. It was just loose in a bowl. Um, and then we moved on to cold pasta and vegan quesadillas and mac and cheese or vegan mac and cheese a little bit. And then, um, yeah, just stuff like that. Starchy, carby things. And then at the end of the day I would have, uh, like a camping meal, outdoor herbivore. And I would have a double portion of that cooked down with coconut milk. So the coconut milk went a long ways and a peanut butter, no gels or any of the kind of, well, you, one of the things you said was you didn't drink, you really didn't drink any water, right?

It was all electrolyte drinks. Yeah, it was scratch. I used scratch the whole way. Through some reading, we had found some people in the past who had said they didn't drink much water. There were two things that Jackie recommended that I was like, no, I'm not going to need to do that. And one was that I wouldn't drink water.

And two was that I would need aid every five miles. I thought I could make it 15, 20 miles every day without aid. And those two things she was completely right on. But I get the aid thing, I think, the no water thing. Like, I don't understand that. It was calories. Each of my water bottles that I carried on me, most of the time i carried a hydration

vest with two water bottles and each one had 60 calories in it and you just when you're doing something like this you need to get those calories whenever you can wherever you can and it was replacing the salts so i just stuck with it we just found that at the end of the day when we would tally up how many calories i was getting we kept a pretty good log of of that. Had I not been drinking scratch all the time, we would have been in a deficit where with it, it was just allowing everything to flow. I mean, day one, we started that and we just kept going with it. So when you're depleting yourself of salts at that kind of a rapid rate, it's like too easy to get hyponatremia is that the idea yeah and i sweat a lot so it was a fear and i you know in races have always been one that um i take salt tabs about every hour i didn't out there the

scratch was taking care of it so we just stuck to the scratch it did the job and it was one of those things if it's not broke don't fix it right and um it held up the whole time so this whole thing comes together. You get the funding. You get the sponsors. You get the crew. You get the van wrapped. You got Dotsie.

Everybody is on board. And I joined you for that first day in Huntington. It was Huntington, right? Yeah, Huntington. We ran from the pier. And it was cool. There was a whole scene of people. There was a lot of, you know,

structure and formality to this whole thing. Like I was like, wow, this guy's got his shit together. This is really happening. And it was really fun because we hadn't met to get to know you a little bit that morning. And then at some point I was like, all right, dude, I'm out. Like I got to turn around and go home. And you just, I just watched you like run off into the distance. And I just like, all right, dude, I'm out. Like I got to turn around and go home.

And you just, I just watched you like run off into the distance. And I just thought, man, that guy, like what an adventure lies ahead for you. Like, you know, there was, it was so exciting that morning, but how long before that wears off and the, you know, the reality starts to dawn on you? Morning waking up day two. Yeah. I mean, the most daunting part of the whole experience was the mornings, right? When I wake up, it was just like, are you kidding me again? You know, again, 12, 15 hours today. So it was quick that, you know, coming into this, I'd spoke to a couple of people who had done this or something similar. And there were two, two things that they told me. And one's, if you can make it through the first two weeks without a show stopping injury, your body would hold up. And the second was after the first month,

it would get a little bit easier. And those two things really rang true. Um, day three was extremely hard. Uh, day three, I hallucinated. It was the first time from running have I ever hallucinated. And it was a wild ride. What happened? It was early on in the day. There was this, in retrospect, it feels as though there were two days that felt like this where everything almost had like an Instagram filter on it, like kind of dark, like the Tokyo filter on your, and it was

just dark and spooky kind of. And that was kind of the visual of it. And I had a unfounded fear of a dog coming out of nowhere and biting me. And also I, my senses were in overload when cars would come by, I would, I would just cower. And at one point, I had to go into a diner to use the restroom. And at that point coming out, I was mortified that I was going to come in contact with someone that scared me or that was sketchy or for whatever it was. And I just battled with that for the majority of that day. Like weird paranoia. Weird paranoia. Weird. And I think a lot of that was a hormonal thing.

I think everything was realigning. A lot of this is about adaptation. It's about applying a pressure over time and eventually your body and your mind adapts. And this was my mind, the part where my mind started to say, no, no, we don't do this. And I had to continue to just say, yes, we do.

Yes, we do. And so that kind of started it off with that. That was one of the weirder days. Yeah, this weird war that you're waging with your body and your mind. You would think that it would be a more linear thing where you start off fresh and you just kind of progressively get more and more tired and hopefully you make it to the other side. But I uh, you know, I've never done anything near like what you've done, but in my limited experience, it is a strange thing where it's like, you start off great, then it gets hard. And then suddenly it's really hard. And, and, and you're like, I'm done. This is, and then there's a, if you can stick with it, there's a

weird breakthrough where it's almost as if your body, and I wrote about this in my book, like your body goes, okay, like now I get it. Like I misunderstood. I thought you were trying to kill me. Now that I know that you're not, like now we can get on the same page. And then suddenly there's almost like this rejuvenation period that happens where you then enter kind of like a flow with the whole thing. Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

And isn't the same true with other choices in life? Wanting to quit something or start something new, it kind of goes like that. And I think that's something important for people to understand is just because something's hard in the beginning doesn't mean it's always going to be. There's always an arc to it. And if you break through, it doesn't mean that then it's going to be easy after that either no no no but i think there is a tipping point where you know it it

does get a little bit easier and then it's maintenance i didn't once it got easier it didn't mean i didn't have to run every day right but it did become a little more just who i was and what i did um so yeah it was mind and then body. The body had two main moments where it almost broke. And it was early day seven, I think, I got shin splints in my, I believe it was my right shin. And anyone's had shin splints. That's awful. And it's one of those things where in normal day, what would you do if you got shin splints? You would rest, elevate, ice, rest.

I didn't have a lot of time to elevate or ice, and I definitely didn't have any time to rest. So it was a lot of, luckily with my crew, we just started troubleshooting, and we figured out some things. We changed the shoes I was wearing. That was a big thing. You were wearing, initially you were wearing like a zero drop shoe.

I was, yeah. Zero drop shoe, which had really worked for me in the past. It was something that I had been running in in the last couple of years before. Just for this application, it was not right. And really found out quick that the right answer was the Hoka Bondi 6s. They're the most cushioned shoe they have. They've got a good drop in them. So you're always just kind of helping to push your leg, your feet along. And that was a huge step in the right direction. And then the other one was interesting. I didn't have to stick to it the whole time, but in order to overcome this, I needed to put on ankle socks. There was something about the mobility of my ankle that allowed, once I allowed it to be free to move as it wanted to,

that I could tell that instantaneously. And then we put a compression sleeve on the leg as well. So prior to that, you were wearing a sock that covered your ankle. Yeah, it was like a crew sock more. And not a ton of compression there, but it was just enough. I mean, it's just, you know, as you get longer distances, ultras and like all the things you've done, the little things add up over time. It's just these little tweaks and these little things. It's like a little pebble in your shoe can destroy everything.

Yeah, that's the crazy thing, right? And no matter how much you try to control for every single variable, and there's innumerable variables in what you're trying to do, it's this weird thing you'd ever thought of that's so tiny that makes or breaks you yeah absolutely and that was one of them it was it was overcoming those things and putting those three things changing those three things compression saw or compression sleeve given the mobility of the ankle different shoe back back on track that's crazy because shin splints don't go away overnight so what they went over they went away over five nights uh So you just ran through it and it just slowly dissipated. Yeah. Through that, we were every five miles for a couple of days, at least every other

five, I was taking more time on my stops. I was elevating and icing in order to overcome it. I found throughout the thing, if I ever got where there was immense pain starting in my feet or in my legs, elevating went a long ways, just getting all the blood back to where it should be. Yeah, so that was how we overcame that one. And then day 19, it was tendinitis in the other ankle. Right. That one came compiled with a mental break as well. Emotionally, mentally, physically on day 19, the wills fell off. Everything just came crashing down. The night before, I realized that I was having this pain in my ankle.

Woke up the next day and again, this was the second day where I got that weird Instagram filter and everything got really dark. I called my fiance and I just lost it emotionally. The best way I've been able to describe it is I was crying so hard, like snot was coming out of my nose, just done, just so broken. And when I came into my 15 mile stop, I was dragging my leg, literally dragging it. And my crew insisted that I take a two hour nap. And so I did. And when I woke up, I had the inability to even step on my foot. I couldn't walk, much less run. And so we decided to take the rest of the day off. They wanted me to sleep in the following day. And when I woke up, we could get in whatever miles I could do. And I woke up the next day. And again, I could not, I couldn't step on my, on my leg at all. So they talked me

into just taking the whole day off, which was interesting. It really took a lot that day. It was, there was a lot for me to process and a lot for me to let go of. Um, what I realized in that was up until that point, I had been, it had been brute force. I had just been forcing this with everything in me. And actually something that got me through it was Jackie, my crew chief was not out there at the time, but she sent me a voice memo and she had somehow managed to record your audio book in the part where you're floating in the water day two or three, I think of your thing, and talking about succumbing to the task at hand and how it's really not in your control. And that was one of the things that helped me to let go of this brute force. I couldn't do that. I had too many days ahead of me and I had to go with the

flow. And I had to listen to my body and succumb to something bigger. And I don't know exactly what that was, but I definitely from that day on was able to just have more, again, faith that I was gonna get through this and it was gonna be something that I was going to do and it couldn't all just be up to brute force. That's really beautiful. Because I believe in my heart of hearts

that the greatest accomplishments occur or the breakthroughs occur when you can get to that place where you can let go, where you can surrender and avail yourself to a higher power of whatever that looks like for you. I think as somebody who is, you know, certainly you've got to be a competitive person to even, you know, have, have the, the dream of trying to do something like this. There's that sense, there's, there, there's a willfulness with that. Right. And you're rugged independence and like, you know, being a single child and all that kind of stuff informs this worldview where you have to take care of your own shit and like, yeah, you need help, but like fundamentally it's about you. your own shit and like, yeah, you need help. But like fundamentally it's about you. Right. And, and ultimately what I think, one of the amazing things about the ultra world is it forces you to confront the limitations of that. And, and the people that really succeed and maintain success over periods of time are the people who can let go and, and hold on to those dreams and those goals a little bit more loosely to ask for help and allow help to come in and tap into something more fundamental that ultimately is a more sustainable source of power.

Yeah, I agree. And that was – it was a profound day. I know without a doubt that day will stand with me more than most on this trip, and it will be one that stays with me for a long time. And I think now that I've finished and I'm understanding the new me that's come out the other end, it's definitely a big part of that. Anxiety is something I've battled in my life a lot, and a lot of it is done, I don't know where it's coming from a lot of times.

And I think it was a fear of it all falling apart, whatever that thing is. And that lesson that day made me realize that there's a flow and there is something that hopefully will keep you going and you don't have to be so forceful. And that idea that something is going to fall apart, um, require basically behind that is in order for it to not fall apart, like it's on you, right? Like you're the one who's going to have to make sure that everything is firing on all cylinders so that this thing that wants to fall apart, won't fall apart. Yeah. And, and that's how you flame out. Exactly. Right. Um, so that's like a huge, that's, it is out. Exactly. Right? So that's like a huge, it's a physical breakthrough,

but it's predominantly like a spiritual breakthrough. Absolutely. Yeah. And I knew going into this, there was a hope and a desire that those kinds of things would happen. I think setting out on something like this. Yeah, and you'd be naive to think things like that are not over 75 days of pushing yourself. And yeah, that day was profound. It put a lot of things in perspective and allowed me to move forward in a much more sustainable way

after that. Again, up until then, I think I was treating it as an ultra, like as I had in the past, which was just brute force. Just give it... I mean, I was calculated. I wasn't pushing at race pace. I knew when certain things started to ache to slow down, but something did fundamentally change that day. Yeah, acceptance. Accepting what is, right? Exactly. Rather than fighting it.

But still, how do you go from not being able to put weight on your leg to running again? That doesn't just disappear. No, it didn't. I did. I took the day off, day 20. Day 21, I got up and everything felt pretty good. And we decided I was going to walk that day.

I was going to walk 40 miles. So up until that day, we had broken up the segments in different distances. So for the entirety of the 75 days, it was going to be anywhere from 28 miles a day to 60 um that was wreaking havoc on me emotionally uh you know big days having a 52 mile day i couldn't think more than a day or two ahead and i would ask midday well how much do i have tomorrow and just seeing one of the crew members just look at me with like they didn't want to have to tell me and they'd be like it's 50 you know he's like

so anyway so that day we got off of the track of what it had to be and it was what it could be and I was going to walk 40 I made it three miles and the pain came right back and I was scared that that I knew going into, that if anything was going to stop me, it was going to be an injury. That was the only thing that was going to stop me. And I was worried that this is it. This is that injury. But then right away it was okay. Let's start tweaking things. What can we tweak? And the first thing that came to mind, I knew we had packs of mace bandages. And I asked the pilot car that was with me to go back to the camper, grab an ace bandage. And I was going to try something and they did did and they came back and i wrapped my ankle quite tightly and it was

essentially the opposite was needed as was needed for the shin splints the lowering mobility decreased the pain significantly and i was i was able to start walking so i made it 10 miles just under just under 10 miles again i'm stopping every five. Up on the horizon, I saw some people running towards me. My first thought was, okay, this is some random people from the area that want to run with me. As much as that was what I was out there for, this was not the day. I wasn't sure how I was going to cope with it. As I got closer, I realized it was three friends from Denver who had just – that was the day they had picked a long time before,

and they surprised me and showed up. It was the best thing that could have happened to me on so many levels. It gave me company. I mean, it was perfect. Again, that was a higher power maybe at work. They proceeded to walk out 30 miles with me for the rest of the day. Took 15 and a half hours and we walked out 40 miles. And then the following day, they left that night and I still owe them all so much. It was such a good day. That's beautiful. What could have been one

of the worst days ended up being one of the best. And then the following day, I ran walk 40 miles, maybe one more day after that. And then we settled on 45 from that day out. And that would following day, I ran walk 40 miles, maybe one more day after that. And then we settled on 45 from that day out. And that would get me to New York in my 75 days and also provide a cushion in case something else happened. Why was 75 days so important? I mean, ultimately, does anyone care whether it would take you 75 or 90 or 100 or 80? The ultimate goal is to complete it and not imperil that larger goal because you're on some unrealistic timeframe goal. It was arbitrary, but it was a goal I set.

And once I did, it was part of the narrative, and therefore I wanted to do it. That for me personally was a sign of success. Had I taken longer, fine. And I would have still been very happy with my accomplishment, but I think you need a metric to hold to. And I wanted to hold to it the best I could. I wasn't going to be devastated and quit had I not been able to, but I wanted to try everything in me to make sure I did it in that time. And also, 75 days is a long time. As much as it's, oh, you could have taken longer, less mileage,

that's more days out there. There's some other folks who have completed it this year, and they've taken a little bit longer. And for me, it sounds worse. They're still doing it? Yeah, exactly. I enjoyed this. I did in a lot of ways, but it's that type two fun

that also has the side of it that it's somewhat miserable and you're away from your family and your friends and your life and 75 days meant wrap it up, get it done. What's the fastest that anybody's done this? Peter Kulshnik, he just did it in the last couple of years. It's incredible, like 45 or something. It's somewhere right around there. I mean, every route's different.

Yeah, this is a little lower mileage. He did, again, the official San Francisco to New York. And I want to say it's like 2,800, 2,628. But he's moving. I mean, 70 miles a day or something like that. He's incredible. That's incredible. He went from Kenai Peninsula to Key West in 100 days

solo. Wow. Yeah. I've not met this guy, but I want to shake his hand. Is he American? Wow. That's unbelievable. So as you're progressing through this, you're sharing these daily updates on Instagram, little videos, and you're quite transparent about what's going on. And it was really cool to follow that. How often were people dropping in on you out of the blue to just run along? Did that build in steam as you went along? It did, yeah. More and more as we hit the East Coast, I think a lot of that's just population density.

There were more people that were engaged with this. You're in the middle of nowhere. Oklahoma, there were a few people. Yeah, so it did grow as we went across and it was heartwarming and amazing. And there were a couple instances, people I did not know at all, who now I consider good friends.

There's something about that. I mean, yeah, you have this time with each other when you're running and you're running that distance and people are spending half a day with you running. There's nothing to distract us. You get good conversations. And whether that be random people that are now friends of mine due to this experience or friends and family that came out that I got to reconnect with in a way. I grew up, I had a cousin who we were like brothers growing up and then adulthood hit and life happens and our lives went in a little bit different ways. He has kids and a family and I don't. He lives in Georgia. I have left a long time ago and I've always, he's been dear to me, but we've had little, very little time as adults together. And he came out, and on the first day, he went from his longest run was 13 miles to a marathon and ran with me all day. And we were able to know him on such a deeper level than I did before that.

And I'd run across the country just for that experience. So those kind of things meant a lot. It was really amazing to have that time, again, with people that I did know and then with others that now are friends, that we keep up with each other, whether it just be on social media or text, but there's a couple of them.

And where does the advocacy aspect of this begin to creep up? Like I would imagine you're running through farms and people are coming out. And we talked when we had dinner, you were talking about, was it the Navajo Nation you were running through? Like what that experience was like. So I want to hear about that. But walk me through how that kind of worked.

Again, it was the focal point being the camper in the van, being wrapped as they were. They're very colorful, all blues and whites. And through rural America, they just don't see stuff like this. It's different if you're here in LA or in Austin, Texas or wherever and everybody's trying to- Somebody else doing something crazy. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't happen, again, in rural Oklahoma. So people were just coming out. They were stopping on the side of the road. They were at gas stations, Walmart parking lots, you name it, coming out, asking what we were up to. And then it just created conversations.

And some of my crew were also plant-based, and advocates want to spread the message, and others are not. But they understood how important it was to me. So they played the part. And those that are in that situation that are not, I know in talking with them in retrospect, it definitely impacted them as well. And they make different choices with food now. So it was just all along the way, grassroots as it could be, just meeting people as much as we could. And some of the crew members were really assertive in that.

They would make the. And they would make the point and they would go out and say, hey, guess what this guy's doing? And others would wait for him to come to them. Right. No meat, no dairy. He's doing what? Yeah. And going into this, that was something. I said about supersize me and this epiphany it gave to me. I didn't understand how bad fast food had fast food was for me. It was a catalyst for change. A lot's changed in 15 years, and I wasn't aware of that, but I'd say that no one was just caught off guard. Everyone understood what plant-based was.

They knew what vegan was. And I found that I don't know exactly the riddle or how to crack this yet, but rural America is ready. They want to talk about this too. And we focus so much in the plant-based food industry. And as advocates, I feel like a lot of that emphasis is placed on urban areas and people with whom we're more closely identified with. But there's a whole swath of America out there that needs to hear it and wants to hear it. Well, what's mind-boggling is the extent to which

the breadbasket of America is actually a food desert. They don't even eat the food that they're producing. It gets shipped elsewhere. It's used for feed, for cattle, et cetera. And in a lot of those places, there just aren't the healthy options that you would imagine would proliferate because that's where they're growing it. It's true. And I think a lot of times that's kind of thrown out there as a reason why we don't go to those places. go to those places but desire creates demand and then if people are asking for it hopefully somebody shows up with it and i think that we have to talk about it and then as we talk about

it over time hopefully we find mechanisms to get that food to people what was the most surprising encounter that you had along the way? Individual encounter? Navajo Nation. Just some really more interesting, playful conversations. One guy in particular who stopped on the side of the road. He whipped his car around his truck, and he got out, and he was taking pictures of me as I came up. And as I got closer to him, he said, Hey, my wife told me if I saw the tall, bearded white man running through our nation, I had to stop and get a photo.

And that realization that this whole community was embracing me. One person had stopped at Davis before and got a photo, and it had made it onto these Facebook groups that they had in their community and little did I know after that every car that passed me I had the feeling that they knew what I was doing and they were supportive so that was a really profound experience

the nation in general if you handled that inelegantly it could have gone in a very different direction there's protocol you can't just roll onto the nation and expect to be welcomed, right? Did you do some legwork ahead of time and let everybody know this is what you were gonna do

or how did that go down? No, there was a lot of naivety. I don't think anyone realized how big it was. Huge. It's the size of West Virginia. It took eight days to run through. And it tested me. The first full day in the nation.

I had blisters on top of blisters on top of blisters. It was awful. I felt as though I was running with just raw feet. Um, and I was concerned about being there and being on, and then it's another nation. It someone else's it's not mine and uh it just overwhelming sense of of welcomeness though and i don't i i do know that my crew all along the way and especially those that were with me at that time are open-hearted kind kind people and i had no anxieties that we were going to instigate anything negative. But I think a lot of it comes from the pride those people, they hold in stewardship of their land. And the pride, they felt pride that I chose to go through there. And I think a lot of

that came from maybe that a lot of people try to skate around it for those same anxieties and fears that I was feeling. And instead, we just push forward. And they were extremely welcoming and comforting and responsive to us being there. Yeah, it was really an amazing space to date. It was my favorite part of the trip. Yeah. And what was their receptivity to the whole vegan thing? More like per capita, probably the most,

like no naysayers anywhere throughout the whole experience. But in there, I felt as though they were listening on a deep level. And a lot of the people we were coming and meeting were what they would even consider like the elders. Like there were some generations below them and they had a lot to say about how they had seen their communities get fatter and become less healthy and Wendell the guy I was talking about earlier he he went as far as to say you know when I was a kid I remember my dad and his his friends being built

more like you and and they ran. I mean, indigenous cultures are known for running. It's not just the Tatamana. Navajo have their own history there. And they were, again, receptive. And I just hope that – I can't see what the repercussions were for my actions. I only know what I saw and hope that that catalyst was there and And maybe there was some change that happened. Yeah. But talk about food deserts. Oh, that's, that's to a level even further than anywhere else. They're grocery shopping at gas stations. It's not fair. Yeah.

And obesity, diabetes, like the rates are crazy, you know, in these reservations. Wow. What an amazing experience. Yeah. That was a really great area. Just unexpected and beautiful. Yeah. What was the hardest part terrain-wise? Late in the game, the Appalachians. Appalachians. God, they were relentless. I mean- Because they're up, down, up, down, up, down. Up, down. They don't understand what switchbacks are. Everything's straight up, straight down.

And I grew up in the Appalachians. There was something interesting about that. As an adult, I've always gravitated further west and really enjoy the western scape. And having gone back east into the Appalachians much, other than that first initial 50-miler I did, I felt a sense of being at home there, which was really interesting that I definitely want to explore more. But coming into it, my splits were getting faster. Again, I was doing 45 miles a day from day 22 on. So we had this good metric. We had this way to see how I was doing. And I was cruising every day. It was just a little bit shorter, a little bit shorter. And then we hit somewhere

in West Virginia and it was literally hit a wall. And that wall continued to be up for three miles and down for three miles for six days, six, seven days. And it tested me. I had got to where those 45 miles were taking me 11 hours. I was back to 16 hours. It's a lot of extra time on your feet. And what it also does is when you're on your feet that long, it allows less time to come down at the end of the day.

Instead of getting to feel human for a minute and sit with my crew and talk and laugh, it was straight to bed. Get up and do it again. And everything just starts becoming so much more, just this linear mess of running. So the Appalachians, they tore me up. It was also humid. It was getting warm. And yeah. Yeah. That was my response. What was the recovery protocol when you would finish each day? It was definitely the weakest spot in my plan. I hadn't planned really well for recovery.

I had this sense that if I ran so much every day, I'd just be tired and I'd pass out. And it didn't work that way. I dealt with immense, the robbing pain in my glutes and quads, down even felt like the bones. In the first couple weeks, I didn't get a lot of sleep. I think the first week I'd say I got cumulative 10 hours of sleep. Wow. 10 hours cumulative for the first week?

Because you would think, yeah, you're exhausted. You'll just sleep through the night. Yeah. Yeah. No, the pain was too much. I couldn't, I was, I would wake up with my feet where my head should be in my head where my feet should be. And then I'd wake, I'd get up and I'd walk around the camper. I do whatever I could to just try to alleviate this pain. We built, we got some of those like swimming pool noodles from a Walmart and we bound them together so I could have something to put my legs up. So I would elevate my legs while I slept in the bed. And it just, it didn't work. Nothing was really working. And then it ended up being like a concoction of some cayenne pepper supplements, pills, like two Tylenol, CBD to get me to sleep.

And it was a company called Pure Power. They reached out and sent out this like supplement thing they have. And one of them was Power Down. And that Power Down was a sleeping aid, like a herbal sleeping aid. And melatonin. And really, I don't know that it was that the pain went away or I just slept through it. It did over time.

Again, it was adaptation. It's crazy to think that you would need all this assistance going to sleep. Yeah, and Theragun. I slept with a gun by my bed, Theragun. Yeah, Theragun. But no like Normatec boots and ice baths and masseuses, nothing like that? You didn't even like, oh, hey, we're coming into an urban area. Can we see if we can get somebody to come out here

and do some deep tissue massage or anything like that? No. I should have. Yeah, you should have, right? Yeah, no, none of that. I put on my first pair of Normatec boots afterwards. Was that when you were at Recover? Recover in New York.

Yeah, they hooked me up with John Joseph sitting there. I should have had these the whole time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But no, I did not. The only time we almost seeked help, I can't remember what day it was. It was midway through, and all of a sudden I realized I was dragging big time. I couldn't figure it out. Every day I'd wake up and I had less energy than I did the day before. I couldn't get going.

And we were concerned that something was off as far as nutrients. Was it low in iron, this and that? And we were at that time scheduling for me to go get some blood work to try to figure out what it was. And one morning I just realized, I was like, I feel like I just haven't had coffee. And we had been using instant coffee just for convenience for the crew. And I came into the next aid stop and I said, can I see the bottle of instant coffee we're using?

And they had picked it up at a convenience store and it was expired. So there was no caffeine in it. this this deficiency i was having was caffeine you had a caffeine deficiency yeah yeah and that was that was that was the only time when you hit you hit that first cup of real coffee first cup of joe we were lights go back on oh my god did you do any blood pulls along the way so that you could register the iron levels and all that kind of stuff? No. One of my biggest regrets from the whole experience was going into it, I got blood work done before I left, and everything was spot on. Vitamin D was a tiny bit off, but it was middle of the winter in Denver, which Denver is usually sunny.

It was off a little bit. Everything else was spot on. I haven't had a blood work since. I really wish I would have. You were at recover. Did they pull blood there? They could have done that. I don't know.

I didn't see anybody getting that done, but I should have. It's definitely a regret. But you feel good now. I feel great. Even coming out of it, even as I finished, again, we talked about earlier, if you would just progressively get more tired along the way. I had this assumption that I would just crawl through the finish in New York. I finished strong.

I went for a run three days later. I went out around New York with John Joseph and some folks on International Running Day. You felt good. Yeah, there were some aches, but it was overall well. It's amazing what the human body is capable of. I went and joined the Iron Cowboy on the last day of his 50 consecutive Ironmans and ran the final marathon with him, and he was throwing down a serious pace.

The last 10K, he was running sub-seven-minute miles. I was playing around with that along the way. I had one consistent crew member who was with me the whole time, Elliot. There's a whole story there. I met him two weeks before we started the run. And I would just play with him, like in the last couple of weeks, and I'd drop down to sub-seven-minute mile just to see him react. And I could do it, though.

That was what was interesting is I was getting stronger as I went. And I do give a lot of that to the plant-based diet. You're putting stuff in your body that's building it up instead of tearing it down. And with that diet too, I don't understand how somebody could consume 8,000 calories a day if it wasn't plant-based. I just don't. But I do think that that had a lot to do with my ability to feel strong throughout. No cheeseburgers. No cheeseburgers. No cheeseburgers.

Yeah. Talk to me about how you, like the process, what it feels like, and the process of walking through, like confronting obstacles. Like when you're out there and you're just like, I can't even go one more step. Like how do you break that down and work your way through it? Because I think like whether for a lot of people, like they're going to hear this and they're like,

I can't even relate to this, right? But if we drill down to the essence of what it is, which is like confronting yourself in the most fundamental way and strategies for quelling the resistance. I found early on that every single day was different. That helped a lot. There were whole days that sucked really bad. But I quickly understood that one bad day had no correlation to the next whatsoever. I could be on top of the world and the next day crash down, but vice versa.

So in those hard days, it was a matter of, on the bigger scale, just get through today and tomorrow's gonna be different. There's a good chance it'll be better. And then I broke this up. I's a good chance it'll be better. And then I broke this up. I ran across the country in five mile segments. We stopped five miles for me to eat and get rehydrate. And a lot of it was just not looking too far ahead, like having amnesia for what had happened and just blindly going into the next thing, just keeping it compartmentalizing.

Compartmentalizing, having small, small goals that cumulatively over time would equal a greater goal. Yeah, it was an interval workout. 600 times five miles, right? Exactly, yeah. So that did a lot for me was in that. It's amazing what we're capable of and i think a lot of what you have to do is not get overwhelmed by the larger task at hand whatever it is and just start chopping

away little by little at whatever you're trying to achieve um nobody gets to something huge take time. So the original kind of activist aspect of this began from mostly an environmental perspective, right? But my sense is that that's kind of evolved since then. Yeah, it definitely has. Environmental is still a very big part of it for me, no doubt. I've talked to others about this and how becoming plant-based, when you make that switch, there's a level of compassion and empathy that just happens. And I don't understand it completely, but it definitely happened for me. for me and the way I sleep easier at night and I have this overwhelming sense of that it's the right move just based on the fact that I'm not creating suffering for any other beings. And that aspect of it has definitely come to the forefront for me. And as I was running across the country, there were a lot of livestock that I came in contact with. I saw way more cows than people and understood as much. I grew up, my grandfather had cattle, but I was young. You're not really thinking too deep about much. But one thing that I definitely definitely a thing i gained along the way was just how aware these these animals were and how much they were they were curious beings they cars go by all day

they know what a car is they don't know what a guy running is they want to come see what it is and they're playful they all come to the fence when you're right come to the fence and run with you at times um there was a day where it was it was one of the few days it snowed. I woke up and there was snow all over the ground. And I started my daily miles and there had been a calf who had been separated from its mother and had somehow gotten out of the fence. So it was on the roadside with me, very desolate road in the middle of Oklahoma, I believe. with me, very desolate road in the middle of Oklahoma, I believe. And I had for the better part of an hour, I had to hear this calf cry for its mother and its mother get separated from the

pack and keep looking between, do I go with the pack? How do I want to stay with my child? And it was gut-wrenching. It was no different than seeing that in a human. And eventually, luckily, the calf found a spot to get back through and it made its way to its mother and they trotted off but that part matters that part of the advocacy matters more to me now than ever um and those two right there and i mean just overall health and well-being you know we live in a in a society with a lot of problems and a lot of good things but you look at a lot of the problems in front of us. And that was when I got into this. I felt there was this naive epiphany that

a plant-based lifestyle was like a silver bullet. It could take care of so many of the problems in front of us. We have all these talks and all of this debate about healthcare and how to approach healthcare in America. What if people just weren't sick? The environmental crisis is huge. It's looming. Animal production equates for, it said over 50% of the degradation of our environment, silver bullet. Just eat plants. And so it does mean a lot to me. And it has evolved a lot over time. And it's just, there's three pillars to it. To me, there's environmentalism, ethical, and health.

And those three still stand true as like what matters and why it is such an important topic, important enough to run across the country for. Yeah. It checks all of those boxes. If we avoid animal products in our diet, we can avoid chronic lifestyle illnesses. We can sidestep the environmental wreckage that this industry provokes and produces. And we get to spare the lives of these sentient beings.

And we need not raise so many of them only to lead them to, you know, a most unpleasant demise. Exactly. So it seems like really elementary to me, but I think the role of the athlete, what's so important about the athlete is people might intellectually be able to kind of understand that,

but then they still think, yeah, but I'm going to be deficient or I'm not going to feel good or I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do in my life. So you can go and get in front of a microphone and say the things that you just said, but ultimately the power in your message is the fact that you got across the country in 75 days on two feet, which is undeniable and can't be debated. Yeah. Right. And that there, so that was one of the reasons I got into this too, was as we were making all these changes in our life and we were talking about plant-based and we had gone vegetarian, I was expressing this to friends and family. And they knew that I liked to run a lot. And there was that thing of, well, you can't do this, Robbie. Like you really, you're going to need, you need that meat for strength so you can run.

And it was just one of those things of like, well, what's a way to prove that? You know, and that was definitely circling around in this too. And going into this, I wasn't really aware of plant based advocacy. I didn't understand that there were so many others out there that were working towards this. And that was an interesting thing to realize that there was a whole fraternity of others that were involved, which has really been awesome to understand and see. And I do, I think athletes, we stand poised in a very interesting position because if it's good for us, why is it not good for everyone else?

You know, yeah, again, if we can perform at this, well, then everybody in their normal lives and weekend warriors, it's good for them too. Right. The human mind though is pretty good at denial and dissonance. So it's, you know, they'll look at, what happens unfortunately

is the more extreme and audacious the athletic feet, like in the case of yourself running across the country, it then becomes unrelatable. And then you just become an outlier who's easily dismissed as like a freak. Like, yeah, he could do it, but like, he's like, he's not he's like, you know, he's not like me. Yeah. So then the challenge becomes, you have to bring it back and make it

relatable again. And that's why I think it's important for you to talk about the fact that you haven't been a runner your whole life. That's why I wanted to hear like that part of the story too, because I think people can see themselves in that, that you're not some crazy super human Superman guy. I mean, you clearly have talent and ability and all of that and a work ethic. But it's not like, oh, you were an NCAA track and field superstar coming into this. No, not at all. I've never ran a Boston qualifying marathon. Yeah. Did you play sports when you were a kid?

Yeah. I played team sports growing up. I played football in high school. Yeah, did you play sports when you were a kid? Yeah, I played team sports growing up. You know, I played football in high school. I was a good football player. I wasn't great. I didn't play in college or anything. And then after that, I was not an athlete for a while. I rode bikes, fixed gear bikes around Austin just being like a young little thug

and spent a lot of time in the bars and was much more in favor of that lifestyle and wasn't taking care of myself or my body. When I moved to Alaska, I think I was up to about 230 pounds. I'm at 170 now, and I've fluctuated a lot. No, I've not always been in touch with my body on an athletic level, and only in the last two years have I to a high performing level. It's a great place to be now though. And I do know that, you know, I've just tip of the iceberg. Like I want

to continue to push and I have like a sense of, I feel legit now. You feel, dude, you're legit. We can just end that part of that right there. What else did you learn about yourself? This is a journey of self-discovery. It's mental and emotional and spiritual, I would argue, even more than it was a physical feat. You had to confront yourself in profound ways. What did you learn? On the surface level, devices, our phones are distracting us from a lot of things that really matter. Being forced to not be around my phone for so long was so amazing and allowed me to ponder life and also be open to people when I did come in contact with them. That was a really big thing.

I think we put up a lot of walls and we have a lot of labels for different types of people and different people in regions of the country and stuff. And we get all of these assumptions about each other based on updates on our phone. And having to put that down and interact with others, I found that people were extremely beautiful and awe-inspiring and just interesting. and awe-inspiring and just interesting. Just the random guy in overalls in Missouri just blow your mind with the stuff that they have to say. That was a big thing.

Yeah, I mean, just to extrapolate on that a little bit, sorry to interrupt. If you're on Twitter, it's very easy to fall into a state of despair thinking that we're at each other's throats and that we live in a country that's very much divided, ideologically, politically, and there's a lot of vitriol and downright hatred out there, and there is.

But there's something about the tactile experience of boots on the ground at that slow of a pace that gives you a very different lens. Like I have a friend who every year takes a train. He's not an ultra distance runner, but he takes a train cross country every year and he gets off at every stop and spends time and connects with people in a real way.

And he you know, he will say, and I'm sure you will echo this, you know, what my real life experience of going to all these places is very different than what you would imagine based upon the narrative that's being propagated by social media and even, you know, news and newspapers and the like. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We're giving up a lot of our power and a lot of our ability to connect to these devices and these few powers that be that run them.

Or it's not even that, I don't think that there's some like body orchestrating it from behind. I think it's just what's happened. It's just the way we're receiving information. It's through a filter that's not reality. There's just a lot more beauty out there. We have a lot more in common than we have. We have these key issues that are stupid. Well, they're not stupid, but there's a lot more to a human and to individuals than what we're getting through these updates and through what we see on social media.

That one was very big. That was profound for me. I definitely put a lot of those walls up for myself. And then the other one... And also, sorry, I'm doing it again, but going back to truly the original catalyst for this whole thing was an ideological difference with your aunt. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And that was a struggle. It was a struggle I went through and a lot of people went through was just immense love for someone or multiple people in your life that you see something so polarly opposite from. And it helped to come back and heal those things or have a better understanding of that those small differences don't equate to enough to feel

separate from those that you love that might see things differently or even a random person on the street how are you and your aunt now oh we're great oh you are oh that's good we have always been she was someone that i mean i love her to no end and you know she's been there for me and is still there for me at times and right now in such a profound way and that's what made it so that's what makes it so painful when we get into these like political debates like there's just it's such a minute part of who we are as individuals as as those things so yeah that was there was a lot of self-discovery in that for sure yeah um also i would imagine having you know accomplished this that you must have an expanded sense of your own personal capabilities you know outside of just

running like if i could tackle this and achieve this like what else am i capable of like where else can i apply whatever skill set i developed as a result of of this endeavor to other areas yeah for sure you know once you chase your dreams and you get them you know maybe it makes a little easier to go for them the next time or like you have to because you know it's possible well that but that it's a two edged sword though right because you know there's an. Well, that, but it's a two-edged sword though, right? Because there's an existential crisis with having achieved something like that. Like, okay, do I have to top this and what am I gonna do now?

There's a vacuum. For sure. I don't know that you can top this as far as like an endurance feat, but I definitely wanna do more things. You played your man card. You don't have to do that. But I mean, I do wanna do more.

I wanna keep pushing myself physically in an endurance endeavors. A conversation I had recently kind of resonated, it resonated with me with Dotsie, our mutual friend, Dotsie Bosch. And we were talking about plant powered athletes and there's still not enough examples of us. And we're all just individuals.

So it kind of made me want to double down. It was like, well, I can't be more than just me, but I can continue to do things. And, of course, that's like the most virtuous reason I would want to do this. But also, you know, it's fun. It's like what I love. I want to continue to push the envelope. But also outside of it on a more interpersonal level and in other parts of life. You're right.

I definitely mentioned earlier you can have anxiety and battle anxiety, and I find now that it's way more manageable because I feel as though everything is overcomable. I have that strength in myself and an understanding that I can get through it. Most things are overcomable and you can get through it. There's been, since I finished, there's, it is, it's open ended. What, who am I, what am I doing next? I worked on this. Like, what is my mechanism to move forward in so many different ways as an athlete, as a person, financially, all of these things. And they could bury me. I could be buried by these things and anxieties, but instead I'm keeping my head above water. You know, there was a, there was a really dark month I'd say, right, right about the time I saw you in Denver. No, I got that sense. Like you're like, okay, like the, the excitement

of the whole, like being in New York is exciting, but you had just gotten back from that. And that was just on the heels of completing it. So I think the reality was just beginning to set in on you. Yeah, and it was, you know, going back to profound things I learned, you touched on this recently with Zach Bush, I think it was, or some form of this. But one thing I realized out there, in retrospect, and once it was over, when it finished, I felt a big sense of

loss of a lot of things that I wanted around me weren't and the realization that there's a couple things that make me feel full and one is direction and others community and feeling heard and when I was on this run I had clear direction of those Northeast all the time I had a crew around me that was there to support me and they were community. And I was always heard. Whatever I said, they wanted to hear and they wanted to understand and react accordingly. And taking that now, I just want to make sure to keep those things present in my life. It doesn't have to be a goal of running across the country um but i think everyone should always have some type of a

goal whether it's to just re-understand your morning routine so that you can have a better more fulfilled day or run a marathon or whatever it is you should have a goal well there's something about being um deeply engaged with an activity that you love and also a group of human beings as well. Like, yes, you're being heard, but you're also part of this clan. Like, you know, I would imagine for the rest of your life, there's going to be like an intimacy with those people because of what you guys collectively endured. But if you were proceeding on the belief that like, this is gonna fix me or like, when I'm done with this, then I'm gonna be good.

That's the really alluring delusion in the whole thing, right? Because then you finish it and you're like, you're still you. You did this amazing thing. You were in your peak state and all of that. But fundamentally life goes on. Yeah. And that was something. That was real. That was something I think I was feeling. There was a moment when I, or somewhere in this when I was setting out on it is that it would, it would, I would just get done and birds would be chirping and the sun would shine forever.

All these doors are going to swing open and like the rest of your life is going to get taken care of. Yeah, totally. And that's not the case. And then you really look at it, and you wouldn't want that to be the case anyways. Right. It's all about the journey and just looking to what can I do next. And I'm not talking about upping myself. It's just to keep moving forward. Forward momentum is important in life. And keeping people around you you love and people that support you and you want to support and trusting in that, trusting in those relationships.

So that was a really big part of it for me, for sure. What was it like when you finally got into Central Park and completed the whole thing? It was a major sense of relief initially. Just like I get to wake up tomorrow and I don't have to run. Instead, I woke up and Shelly made me, we got a cup of coffee and then we were straight to the barber. That was the first act of business was to clean up a little bit. So that was the move of the day. But yeah, a sense of relief and an overwhelming sense of accomplishment and pride.

A real shower. Oh, a real shower. Oh, a real shower. Yeah, a bed that wasn't in the back of a van. In New York City, it was a wild place to be coming out of this. There was a lot to grapple with. While I was out there, I had the ability to – everybody I talked to outside of my crew was hitting me while I was running or right when I got done running.

So left brain, right brain are just like, they're connecting, they're jiving really well. And you get done and you're not doing that anymore. And all of a sudden conversations were really hard. I felt like I couldn't keep up with conversation, some social anxiety. Had a hard time navigating really simple technology like the Metro, putting money on a metro card.

Not easy for me. It's the most simple interface made. And you had to go and speak at that. There was the plant-based nutrition conference, right? Yeah. That was going on at the same time. Yeah, and that's why I stayed around New York. That was 10 days after I finished.

And the plan was just a lot of downtime and just take it easy, do that event, zip on home. just a lot of downtime and just take it easy, do that event, zip on home. But I ended up having lunch with our mutual friend, John Joseph, and he just opened the doors of New York. And all of a sudden there was engagement. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? You've got to call me before you do. I got a guy for that. Exactly. Why are you eating there? You've got an organic grill. Vlad's going to hook you up. And he did. And Vlad was amazing. You know that and yeah, the recovery center and just all these different engagements. But it goes back to like, one of the things I learned from this was perseverance. And though I had all this social anxiety and I didn't feel up to these social engagements, I knew the only way through it was to do it. And I every day woke up and I put on a face and I went and I engaged with people. I had a

massive amount of imposter syndrome. So hilarious because you just ran across the United States. Yeah, but I ran across the United States. I had normalized it. I had to do it. And so all of a sudden, I'm at the recovery center and I get out of this infrared sauna, and there were a couple people that waited to say hey to me. They wanted to meet me, and that's never happened in my life. I was like, well, but why? And it's taken a lot of time to start understanding that and to give gravity to what I did so that I can, to a degree,

process it on the same level everyone else does so that I can move forward and know what I have in front of me and this accomplishment that I've had, what it means to me and what it means to others so that I can use it to my advantage and to the advantage of the advocacy. Yeah, and my advice to you would be to own it. It's charming that you have a healthy sense of humility around the whole thing. And I think that's great. But at some point you have to say, okay, well, this is what I set out to do. There's a reason that I accomplished it and this can be leveraged for good. And in order to really

do that, you have to step into the power of it, right. And just, and, and, and own it. And it doesn't make you like a crazy egomaniac to do that if you do it in a healthy way. And you see people do this in different ways. Like a lot of people do it with alter egos. Like I had the guy who wrote the alter ego book on here and you see what James Lawrence does. He creates the iron cowboy because it doesn't feel right to James as James to be that superhero guy for whatever reason, but he knows when he's, yes, I'm the Iron Cowboy, he can talk about these things in a different way.

Yeah, and that's something I'm definitely still grappling with and figuring out. On the way here, I was a little nervous about this podcast, and I definitely said to myself in the mirror of the car, I was like, you ran across the country. Yeah, dude. You did. So that helped. Nothing to be nervous about here. I was like, you ran across the country. So that helped, you know, I'm learning. Nothing to be nervous about. I'd be nervous talking to you, you know? No, it is amazing.

And I think it's important that you not rush this next phase that you're in and allow yourself that time and that space to really figure it, figure out like what you want it to mean for yourself and what you want your life to look like, like you're gonna have opportunities. But because perhaps you feel that vacuum, there might be like a sense that you gotta rush in and do something

because an opportunity might pass or whatever. And I think it's okay to like not quite know right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I am, I'm settling into that. And, you know, I think initially when I heard things like that, and actually from you at dinner in Denver, it made me feel as like, okay, well, I'm not supposed to move my body. I'm not supposed to exercise. And that I know is like I'm incapable of that. It's one of those things that I really need and want. But as far as a larger, larger goal, yeah, I'm kind of resting in right now of just enjoying the moment, enjoying the space I'm in and, and, you know, like reaping the benefits of what I've done and feeling

accomplished for a while instead of, yeah, striving for that next thing. But I'm already finding new passions in ways I'll never, I'll never quit running. Running is primal. It's what, it's the most perfect exercise, but I'm enjoying, I'm getting on the bike now. That's new. I'm really enjoying that. A good friend of mine in Austin, he's a Red Bull cyclist, really big in gravel road racing, Colin Strickland. And he described like cycling to me in a really, I don't know, profound way the other day. And it was that he's so taken back by what I did. And his thing is, he's like, look, when you run, you're the motor and the drivetrain. And you look at a car, what goes out first, the drive train. He's like, get on a bike. Then you just get to be the motor. And with all the pains and the stuff

I felt in my legs and trying to recover, that really resonated that, you know, getting on a bike is such a like lower impact way to move. And you move fast. It's amazing how many miles you can, you can just like, it's in no time. I could have gone cross country a lot faster if I was riding a bike. What was I doing? Yeah. So I'm enjoying that. I think that's something I want to, I want to pursue to some degree is getting on the bike. I like the long distance stuff. The gravel road stuff really seems interesting. 200 mile races. Yeah. It's wild. The Kwanzaa. Yeah. Kansas. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I think it's good. And I think, yeah, you can distract yourself with another audacious goal. And I think there are other audacious goals that are appropriate for you to chase and do that.

But my only thing was just like, you know, allow yourself to, it's okay to be also. Yeah. You know, to just be. And I think, and that is important. We can use these athletic endeavors in a way to hide. Yeah. And I don't wanna do that. I work too hard for self-discovery to go hide by doing another one.

And you see that. I think there are a lot of people that do that. And it's effective because everybody praises you for it, but actually it's a big mask for some trauma or psychological thing that you just are too afraid to look at. Well, you need the quiet space and time to let those things you do to sink in and absorb them and absorb the lessons.

I'm only a little over two months out from doing this, and there's still so much more, I think, that's yet to come out and for me to understand. And if I was pushing really hard already for something else, I might not make it to those things. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's good to hold back a little bit. Are you doing a little bit of speaking? I have some schools and places like that asked you to come and share your message. You know, a little bit. There was a lot in New York. And then getting back to Denver,

I don't have a lot of community there. I don't think anyone in Denver knows what I did. And it is such a wild community. So Denver, I know you're listening to this show. Reach out to Robbie, man. He needs people to hang out with. And then I was just in Austin prior to coming up here, and I did a podcast there and hung out with the Rogue Running people. Oh, cool. And they're great. And that community has embraced me a lot. Spending time, there's a new group forming there that's a running group based around the restaurant industry that a friend of mine started.

Oh, that's cool. The Commodore Run Club. that a friend of mine's starting, the Commodore Run Club. And I really like me and the chef from the restaurant, Philip Spear, had talked about this before my run. It's something that we were both really interested in pursuing. He's a recovered addict, and he just wants to help those that are going through that in the industry and help to get to some before they have to get that pad.

And you can feel the energy. It just started about a month ago, but people are showing up, more and more people every day. And I want to be back and be there as much as I can to run with them and help in that pursuit and also virtually be with them, just helping them with social media and stuff. But stuff like that, yeah, I want to engage with as many people

about what I did as possible and put my hands in other things that are important like that run club. Right. Were you filming a doc on the run? There was some filming done. Before I started, we put together a couple-minute teaser that is already out there about my intentions. And there's another piece in the work.

It's nothing long, but it's just going to be a little overview of my experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And are you still doing stuff with Switch for Good, with Dotsie? Me and Dotsie are always talking. She's kind of turned into a mentor slash if you got Dotsie on your side, you just feel like you can do anything. She's so powerful. I mean, just a force.

So we chat a lot, and I would like to get more involved with her outreach in the months to come, still just kind of getting back to understanding what's what. I want to continue to work with Nodamu and continue to perpetuate our – we coined this the plant powered mission. And I want to continue to do things that will perpetuate that message. And they're a great partner and we'll just see where it goes. I want to help other athletes do things too. Well, let's, let's land this plane with final thoughts on,

on what it is that, that you want people to take away from this experience in terms of how they can better empower themselves. Don't get overwhelmed by the larger task and goals at hand and chop things up into little pieces. And eventually, if you do that, small things become big things. Eventually, if you do that, small things become big things. I think that, and as we talked about earlier, kind of the arc of starting something new or giving something up, understanding that whatever it is, it's going to get easier over time.

And it won't ever mean it won't require maintenance and diligence, but stick with it. Stick with whatever it is. There were many a days I could have stopped and given up because it sucked, but I chose not to, and now I get to forever have this massive thing that I did and get to celebrate, and everybody has that ability to whatever degree they want. Stick-to-itiveness, but also holding loosely, allowing that universal energy to flow through you, breaking things down into little chunks, dreaming big. You know, a lot of it boils down to these stupid adages that are so true though. Like I just saw a platitude the other

day, you know, if you started today, imagine what it would look like in a year. You know, it's like those things that are like annoying, you know, but they're so true, right? It's like, you know, now look what you get to do. You get to go around and share this experience that you've had for the benefit of other people. And it's, it's a gift, man. So great to talk to you. Super inspiring what you've accomplished and I can't wait to see what you're gonna do next. Keep spreading the message. Maybe consider writing a book.

Get out there and talk. And Denver, holler at your boy, right? Yeah. If people wanna connect with you, what's the best place for them to do that? Instagram? I'm pretty active on Instagram. Yeah, it's my name, Robbie Ballinger. B-A-L-L-E-N-n-g-e-r yeah and robbie r-o-b-b-i-e and then also uh we

have a website plantpoweredmission.com that i'm going to get active on blogging again soon cool and uh go get your not a move right yeah exactly dude you got to plug it you got to plug your sponsor not a move um cool man well come back and talk to me sometime again, man. Awesome. All right, peace. That's vegan ice cream. Good kid, that Robbie Ballinger, impressive feat. Hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about it.

For even more on Robbie, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Let him know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly on Twitter or Instagram at Robbie Ballinger, B-A-L-E-N-G-E-R. And while you're at it, check out Dotsie's organization, Switch for Good, switchforgood.org. And if you're going to eat ice cream, why don't you make it not a moo? It's organic. It's non-dairy. It's pretty awesome. And this is not a paid plug. It's just a gracious shout out to those guys

for their incredible support that they gave Robbie to make his run possible. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the program on Apple Podcasts. That really helps with discovery. Tell your friends about your favorite episodes, share the show on social media,

subscribe to my YouTube channel, Spotify, Google podcasts, and you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I wanna thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering production and show notes, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics,

Ali Rogers for portraits, DK for advertiser relationships, and theme music by Annalima. Thanks for the love, you guys. I appreciate all of you. And I will see you back here in a couple of days with the great Guru Singh returning for another episode of Guru Multiverse.

This one's all about awareness. Here's a clip. Until then, peace, plants, namaste. Well, when I say in a world of ignorance, I'm not discrediting the world. I'm witnessing the world because the word ignorance simply means to ignore. And that's a little bit what's happening in the world. The people have gotten so used to the world the way it is, that they're ignoring the implications of the way it is. And I think that what we're looking at in a world of awareness dealing with ignorance is that the onus is upon the awareness, not the ignorance. We're all saying

that they're the ones that are destroying the world. Well, the world is being destroyed. Whatever is causing it, we're the ones that are going to save it. And I'll tell you, if we get enough people to be successful in their life, in their health, living longer, living healthier because of plant-based diet,

if we get enough people who are more intuitive because of their mindful and meditative practices, that's how we outflank the problem. Thank you.