The Rich Roll Podcast - John McAvoy: From Armed Robbery To Professional Athlete — One Man Reformed Through The Power of Sport

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

I can say without equivocation John McAvoy's story of metamorphosis is one of the most compelling, improbable, inspirational, and cinematic tales I have ever heard. Born into a notorious London crime family — think The Sopranos meets The Krays — John is a former high profile armed robber who bought his first gun at 16 and quickly became one of Britain's most successful career criminals and most-wanted men. But it took two spells in prison and a close friend's death amidst a heist gone awry to birth a desire to change — redemption he ultimately discovered through the transformative power of sport. Pulling one of the most improbable 180-degree life transformations of all time, John's greatest heist isn't a bank — it's his life. While serving a double life sentence on the Belmarsh high security wing — space he shared with extremist cleric Abu Hamza and the 7/7 bombers — John decided to take a spin on the prison gym's indoor rowing machine. That experience revealed a unmistakable fact — John's freakish natural aptitude for endurance matched only by an inhuman ability to suffer. The epiphany was miraculous. And it would change his life forever. In short shrift, John broke a cluster of British and World indoor rowing records while in prison. Upon parole, he began forging a new life as a professional endurance athlete. Today, John is the world's only Nike sponsored Ironman athlete, a stalwart mouthpiece for prison reform and a staunch advocate for the inherent power we all possess to course correct the trajectory of one's life, no matter how dire the circumstances. If John's story doesn't inspire you to be better, then you might want to check yourself for a heartbeat.  In all honesty, I cant remember being so excited about sharing a podcast conversation. I sincerely hope the exchange inspires you to rethink your potential and the physical, mental and emotional limits you impose upon your inherent ability to live the life you desire. Peace + Plants, Rich

you're far more likely to get someone to do something productive with their life if they're passionate about what they're doing and i know sport can play such a huge role in helping so many different sorts of people not just criminals but people in life it's such a powerful thing and i'm such an advocate of it because i've experienced it in my own life and as i said like you're not going to meet anyone from that extreme of crime than me. I wholeheartedly say that I was one of the most entrenched criminals you'd ever meet in your life. And sport has allowed me to give that up. That's John McAvoy, this week on the Retroll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What is happening? Greetings. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the podcast. We're going to do things a little bit differently up front today. I don't have a script in front of me. I'm slightly time crunched. And frankly, I'm attempting to streamline this introductory workflow a little bit, which I think we can all agree tends to feel a bit static. It runs on a little bit too long. Perhaps it's dead on arrival at times. So today we are experimenting. I'm going organic. Can I tell you how excited I am about today's podcast? This guy, John McAvoy and his story. It is insane. John has, it is one of the most compelling, improbable, riveting, inspirational, cautionary, and frankly, incredibly cinematic stories that I have ever heard in my entire life.

And that is saying a lot because I've had more than my fair share of extraordinary conversations over the years with amazing human beings. You're going to want to stick around for the whole thing full stop, and we're going to dive into all of it in a minute. 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 and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, 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. 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 and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the

full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, Thank 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. All right, John McAvoy. So I've been hip to John and his story for well over a year at this point,

maybe two years. And I promised myself that if I ever made it over to London, that I would make sure to get him on the podcast. Indeed, I was in London recently, and I was able to follow through on that commitment. So I don't want to say too much. I don't want to give it away. So I will only say this. John is a former high-profile armed robber, a guy who was essentially born into a notorious London crime family, a guy who was bred from the get-go to pull off bank heists. I'm not talking about pickpockets. I'm talking about armored vehicles and banks

who ultimately found redemption through the power of sport. And in my humble opinion, found redemption through the power of sport. And in my humble opinion, John has pulled off one of the greatest 180-degree life transformations of all time, going from this guy in a prison cell serving two life sentences to a guy who breaks both British and world indoor rowing records while in prison to becoming the only Nike-sponsored Ironman athlete in the world, as well as a powerful voice for prison reform. He just spoke at the House of Commons the other week, helping to inspire positive change in others. In all honesty, I can't remember being so excited about an episode. And so with that being said, I give you John McAvoy.

And we're rolling. John, so good to meet you, man. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. So super stoked to have you share your story with me today. Thank you for inviting me. It's a huge honor and privilege, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. Yeah, good, good, good. We're coming to everybody from a conference room in Shoreditch, London. It's a little cavernous in here, so it might sound a little bit echoey in comparison to the way the podcast usually sounds, so you're just going to have to bear with it. But I think it's going to be all fine, right? Yeah. Because you're going to get so lost in John's story, you're not even going to know what's happening. Before we even we even get into that though, what do you, what are you

training for right now? Um, so my season starts in three weeks time. I'm racing Ironman Hamburg. Um, I was meant to be racing two weekends ago, but obviously training for Ironman, you end up developing a lot of injuries, especially as I'm getting a bit older. So I had a problem with a tendon in my foot. So I've had to delay to start my race season, but my season kicks off in three weeks time in Germany. I had to delay to start my race season, but my season kicks off in three weeks time in Germany. Cool, man. So, uh, feeling good injury free? Uh, yeah, yeah. I'm much better now. Um, I've been a bit more consistent with my running. Um, I didn't, I wasn't able to run for three months, um, which killed me because running is actually the thing that I enjoy the most out of training

for Ironman. Uh, but yeah, so I'm, I'm back on course now and I'm ready to rock and roll in three weeks time right on and you're 33 right now I'm 35 35 35 I'm getting on now the gray hairs are coming out and and to date what is your like best performance um my probably my best performance would have been Ironman Frankfurt two years ago um so basically when I started doing Ironman in 2014, I went for a stage where I went an hour faster every race I did. And that sort of really took hold when I did Ironman Frankfurt. It was a massive step up in my form.

I did like nine hours. I ran nearly a sub three hour marathon off the back end of it. Yeah, it was good and it was bad um because the thing that kind of let me down was was my right cycling a bit uh-huh um because i just lacked that riding because i didn't stop riding so i was 30 so yeah that technical element of riding a bike and my cornering and braking and that sort of stuff like it cost me a little bit well i mean 2014 was your first ironman yeah so you're still brand new to this

whole thing yeah yeah like it's it's a learn it's a massive learning process i've been going through um because it was frustrating as well because when i was when i was doing my training and i was training on indoor like static bikes the numbers that i was generating like power output and my physiology like i know i was putting out the same sort of numbers like for FTP tests that what a lot of sort of like decent pro Ironman would be putting out. But I didn't seem to be getting that translation across into road cycling. Because again, I just lacked the experience

of riding a bike. And that's, I've had to obviously work on it a lot over the last few years. And I progressively have got better, but I used to be really, really bad. Like I used to be famous when we'd go on training camps, the Alps, I would descend on a bike quicker than I would climb up the other side of the mountain because I was just so frightened all the time holding the brakes. So, uh, that's amazing. Yeah. There's a difference between the power that you can generate in a lab and then translating that into a real world context, right?

Yeah. So that's like the learning curve for you. It's totally different. Like obviously all of my training that I've ever done for obvious reasons has always been on static machines. Yeah. So like the rowing machine years ago whilst I was in prison. And then when I come out of prison, I carried on trying to, I tried to become a professional rower, but I took up that sport too late. And that's why I decided to do Ironman. Um, so actually power generating on a, on a,

on a static machine. Yeah. You got that covered. I was very, very good. Like what kind of Watts were you putting out? Um, so I could hold like three, 365 Watts when I was like 71 kilo for half hour. Yeah. That's, that's serious. Yeah. For people that are listening that don't have a frame of reference, that's like world-class. Obviously I was fortunate where the transition between rowing on an indoor rowing machine, that power, you tend to find a lot of rowers

are very, very, very strong when they make the transition between rowing to cycling. So it's a leg dominated sport. And also I just think you have the ability to be able to hurt yourself. Like I've never physically felt pain like I felt on an indoor rowing machine. In an Ironman or cycling,

nothing comes close like to that. When you're on the rivet, doing like a 2K flat out test, because it's like the lactate builds up in every part of your body, your back, your legs, your arms, when you're in the rowing machine. Yeah. And I think that, that like in thinking about your story, I mean, I think you have some genetic predisposition, like an ability to generate

huge amounts of power, but your, your gift really is your ability to, to suffer over long periods of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would say that born through pain and life experience as much as anything else. Yeah. Like years ago, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have seen it like that. But obviously some of the situations that I found myself in as a young man and some of the things that I did to myself, like when I was in prison, when I was a young prison when I was a young when I was a young teenager and I segregated myself in a in an isolation cell for for a whole year and that was like defiance against the system um the reason why I chose to do that was because I got moved to a prison and they tried to take all my clothes off me to put me in a special yellow boiler suit so the prison officers could identify that I was an escape risk and and I was brought up to absolutely despise and hate the system and everything it stood for

government politicians banks and then when I found myself in prison the system become very real and those prison officers that locked me up were real people and they took my freedom away from me and and when they tried to take my clothes off me I refused and they took me freedom away from me. And when they tried to take my clothes off me, I refused. And they took me down to this isolation cell and they took my clothes off me and they gave me this yellow suit so the prison officers could identify that I was an escape risk in the prison. And then when the seven days was up,

because that was what I was originally put in there for, seven days- Seven days of solitary. So it's solitary. They opened up the door and they said, you're going to go back onto main allocation and you're going to be a wing cleaner. And again, I hated these people and and and i said there's no way i'm gonna go

and do that that you're not i'm not going to do it i'm not going to clean up your rubbish every day so they put me back in front of the governor the governor said to me you're refusing another law for order and i said yes he said well you're going back in that cell for seven more days and he gave me seven days confined to cell again and then when i was in that process you're going back in that cell for seven more days. And he gave me seven days confined to cell again. And then when I was in that process and I was sitting in that cell, I read about Nelson Mandela. And when I went to prison when I was a young man, I made a decision I would not become institutionalized.

And when the librarian used to come around, this lady from the library, she used to come around with a trolley and you take books off. And I used to think I will not become institutionalized and i will educate myself to come out of here and be a better criminal not not to change not to rehabilitate because i was brought up to believe that if you changed you was weak and the system had broken you so if you had rehabilitated and become a better person you became soft a criminal wouldn't see it like that they would see the system had broken you so i had that mantra in my head and

when i was reading this book um about nelson mandela and in the book he said that when he was in prison he used to smoke tobacco and he realized that the prison officers used to use that as a punishment against him he stopped smoking cigarettes so then my head as a as at this point i was 19 i thought if you think by putting me in this isolation cell that you're punishing me i will take it away from you so when they come like the seven days to put me back up on the wing i refused and then i stayed in that room for 365 days by choice by choice and they would come around christmas and i remember this and and i look back on it now like there was a prison officer i didn't see it at the time i hated him but i remember he opened up my cell christmas and he said to me he was just about to go off

shift and it was in the evening it was about four o'clock because obviously it was christmas people going home earlier that day and he said to, do you want to phone up your mum? And I said, no. And I remember he opened up my cell door and he said, look, just, you can phone your mum up, it's Christmas day. And I refused. I said, I'm not, I don't want to use the phone. Because that would give them some tiny little bit of power.

If they gave you something, they can take something away from you. Yeah, and I think it was me trying to wrestle control of me taking control back of my body. And yeah and i think it was me trying to wrestle control of me taking control back of my body um and it and also again it was that arrogance i'm not wanting to show them weakness that even though it was christmas day i wouldn't break and they they wouldn't get anything out of me and i would sit and at that time i thought i was getting something over on them well in fact i was only punishing myself and I was only hurting myself, but I didn't see it like that. I saw myself at war with them. And

this was about me being defiant and me not showing weakness and me not giving into them. Well, I want to explore like how that ultimately ended up shifting. And I want to get into like how you got there in the first place. But before we do that, like walk me through the experience of being in solitary for such a long period of time, like how that shapes you, how you spend your time, uh, trying to expand your mind, but also what you did physically. So obviously you've got 24 hours a day to fill up. Um, you get into a habit of going to sleep very early. I used to make two choices as well when I was in there, read, and I would not sleep in a day. I would not sleep my prison sentence off. So some prisoners would sleep all day in a segregation cell and I chose

not to do that. So I got into a routine and when I was a child, I had no interest in sport or exercise whatsoever. You never played sports, were never an athlete. Play football. I used to get put in goal. I was the little overweight kid that couldn't kick a ball, but they'd stick me in guard. I'd always be the last kid to be picked and go, you can go and goal.

But I had no, I never idolized athletes as a kid. I never really had any interest in sport bar soccer football um and that was about it but when i was in prison when i was obviously locked up someone once said to me that when you go to prison you don't live you just exist and i started off one day and i don't even know what the trigger was, but I started off doing press ups and I didn't know the names of the exercises I was doing. And then I would do, um,

press ups, step ups. I'd get my chair in my cell and put it up to the back of the wall. And you could open up the tiny little vent windows just to get a bit of ventilation. And I'll start doing these step ups and then, then I'll do sit ups. And then I started putting all the exercises together and I'll do these

circuits and I'd get up every morning at half five six o'clock and i again i was grossly unfit when i first went to prison i was overweight yeah so when you began like how many push-ups could you do not a lot not a lot um yeah you couldn't have been working out like at the beginning like okay half an hour i'm done i i kind of just kept pushing myself. So when, when I've run, like I did 10, the next time I'd want to do 11 until I get the pain and it hurt and that would make me feel alive. And then I know the other exercises on do 10, 10, 10. And then as the months progressed, obviously I, again, I didn't realize what I was doing, but I was obviously getting fitter. I was, I lost weight. Um, and, and I'd end up doing a thousand of each exercise and in total it used

to take me anywhere between like an hour to an hour and a half depending on what sort of exercises like what I chose to do within it um but it used to make me feel alive and again it was me taking control back from the prison officers back to myself and that would last in the morning from six to half past seven and then i'd have my breakfast and then i would read and again when i was in there because of the sort of men that brought me up i remember um sort of one of my stepfather that was a was in prison for long periods of time 16 16 years. And I asked him how did he stop himself from becoming institutionalized before I went to prison. And he used to listen to the radio every day and he would make sure that he read newspapers

to stay connected to the real world because he said, this is not my life. And that is sort of, again, the mantra that I took on. I refused to accept where I was. And I used to think to myself, this is not my life. So I want to stay connected to the real world outside of this wall. And I'd be avidly reading about current affairs.

And this is when I was quite young as well, like politics. I would want to stay in touch with what was happening in the real world. Because this, where I was at the moment, these people would kidnap me. Again, they hadn't. I broke the law and I was in prison for it. Right, and your sentence,

it was a life sentence, was it not? When I first went, when I was a teenager, that was, I got five years for possession of firearms. And then when I went back the second time, obviously because I had previous convictions and the judge expressed my links to the criminal underworld, it was so extensive at such a young age he said no matter what sentence he gave me that day i was still

going to come out of prison a young man because i was only 24 and he said that he believed that my risk to the public was so great that they would always need protecting from me so he sentenced me to two life sentences with a with a with a minimum tariff for five years and what that meant is because sometimes people get confused what a life sentence is. So as we speak today, I'm technically serving my prison sentence in the community.

So at any moment, the police suspected I was involved in any organized crime or I was seen with any organized criminals, they could recall me straight back to prison and I would go back to my life sentence and then I would have to go back up in front of a parole board and demonstrate to them that I wasn't a risk to the public.

And that was what it was about. It was about taking the burden of proof from the police having to prove I was committing a crime to them suspecting I was committing a crime. And it was easier to recall me back to prison. So to this day, you could easily go back. Yeah. If you even tiptoed anywhere near any of this stuff yeah like um even when i want to go abroad to race um i did a i did a talk last week um at nike's european headquarters in amsterdam and i have to ask for permission of my operation officer and then when i come back to the country i have to go and report into it to prove that i've returned back to the united kingdom so that will always hang over me um i don't look at it like, and be bitter

and twisted about it. Like I got the sentence, I know why the judge gave it to me back then, but my life's obviously moved on to such an extent now that, yeah, it would be nice if it wasn't hanging over me, but it is how it is. And there's no point me stressing about it every day, waking up thinking I've got this sentence hanging over my head. I'll try to just let go of that because I don't want to become bitter and twisted and angry over it. Well, you could be back in right now. I mean, you could still be in there, right? So every day is a gift based upon that judge. 100%. And your actions.

100%. And that is why I've got an appreciation of life and how precious life actually is. Because when you go to prison, and again, it's not a hard done by story. I put myself in there by poor decisions that I chose to make as a young man. But when you go to prison, it is as near to dying as what you could possibly get. And being in the actual, being alive still. It's like you entomb your body into a concrete coffin. And when you get those life sentences, you've got a minimum tariff but i can remember the day when my minimum tariff expired i went to bed and woke up the next day and i'm still in prison and then you realize how powerless you are to actually if the system doesn't want to let you out you will stay in there

for the rest of your life if you don't play the game with them. So books, you read the Nelson Mandela book. What were the other books that were impactful on you? Malcolm X. There's like a list, there's like a bibliography of books that are most commonly read in prison. Yeah. I think when I was in there, I was very interested in history. I've always had this fascination even since when I was a little kid. I think that was one of the catalysts why I ended up doing fascination even since when i was a little kid um i think that was one of the catalysts why i ended up doing what i'd done when i was a kid um so my biological father passed away before i was born and my mum explained to me about he died and i was only young i was like five six years old when i was going to primary school and because kids

kept teasing me where my dad was and my mum um she explained to me what death was and i was too young to really understand what legacy was but i developed this this sensational appetite for history like i can remember my mum used to get me these magazines every month called discovery booklets and it'd be about napoleon winston churchill and I can remember being a little boy and hundreds of years after these men were dead, people were still reading about them and they left the footprint on the earth. And that motivated me. Like I remember thinking, I don't just want to die,

I want to achieve something with my life. And that thread of that wanting to learn about the past always stayed with me. So when I was in prison, I kept reading about the past always stayed with me so when i was in prison um i kept reading about the past because i still wanted that legacy i still wanted to achieve something in my life and when i decided to make that connection about changing years later like i said the when i read lance armstrong's autobiographies that had a profound impact on me. That opened up my eyes to a possibility of like the characteristics that I had that I was using, like the will, the drive,

the wanting to achieve something with life, wanting to be successful. The only people that I ever met in my life with those characteristics were all involved in organized crime. Then suddenly I was opened up to this man that did sport and they were massive attributes. And he was successful. And then I started reading all

these other books of all these sort of Olympic athletes and endurance athletes. And again, they all had the same reoccurring blueprint of the same characteristics. But you're thinking at the time, like how you can channel those characteristics to become a master criminal. Yeah. And honestly, like Rich, I'm very fortunate that since I've been out of prison, I have a lot of friends and associates that have gone to the Olympics and they've medaled, won gold medals at the Olympic games, very pinnacle in rowing and what sport they've chosen to do. They've been highly successful. They've worked for like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, big financial institutions. And when I, when we train together and there's a couple of them that we go for runs

on the weekend, like long runs. And, and I've said to them before, you would be amazed the conversations that we're having about the world. I'd be having exactly the same conversations with people that were in prison for being contract killers, for people involved in drug trafficking. You will be amazed the similarities in the mindsets of the two of them, but how from a young person, their lack of opportunity or the bad role models that have come into their lives that have warped what they've then chosen to do with those characteristics and they've been exposed to criminality and they've thrown that into crime and they was exposed to rowing or sport um and their fathers worked for big corporate banks and and they've chosen that path and it and it and it even fascinates me sometimes like the

similarities in the conversations between two groups of people and the mindsets are exactly the same. That's profound and fascinating. The same mindset, the ability to focus uniquely on a specific goal and work your way towards that, whether it be criminal or athletic or professional. Yeah, I can see how those traits would cross over and the differentiator is of course, the environment. That's amazing. Some, some, and again, so give me a taste of like the,

that kind of conversation, um, amidst, you know, the criminal underworld. Um, cause I know what the, I know what the athlete conversations are like. Obviously in the criminal fraternity, everything revolves around money, acquiring money, making lots of money. You tend to find with a lot of people that commit crime, what they've got that a lot of normal members of society haven't got is there's no real cutoff switch. Like there's nothing they're not really prepared to do.

That I was brought up with a moral compass and you don't hurt women you don't hurt children you you don't sell heroin um you don't attack old people you don't you don't attack the working man but the system and everything the system is is fair game um and everyone that i was around as a criminal who had that same belief system um and so you tend to tend to find your whole conversations were based around making money, but making it through the system.

And that would be through sort of committing robberies, people committing fraud, but all against, not against business, but against government. There is a code, right? Oh, yes. And the way that you see it, my only frame of reference

is what you see on television and movies, you know, but if you watch Goodfellas or The Sopranos and, you know, movies of that ilk, stories told of that ilk, like there's always that code, right? And that code cannot be transgressed. And when you're part of that universe, it all makes sense. Yeah. Like my stepdad used to say to me when I was a young boy, sense yeah like my my stepdad used to say to me when i was a young boy um but i was it must have been at 10 11 years old the only thing in that world that you've got is your name and if people don't respect you because you've informed on your friends or informed on anyone and you you sort of grasped ratted people out and told the police anything your name's finished and the only thing

you have ever got is that um as a criminal it goes before you like if people don't think you what you call class and crime in this country has been any good that's the end of you is doing what you're doing being being being involved in criminal activity yeah um but like again if i was ever disrespectful to a woman in any way, like touched a woman, was disrespectful verbally to her, my stepdad would have gone absolutely mad. My mum would have gone absolutely mad, but my stepdad would not tolerate it. You always treat women with respect

because your mum's a woman, your sister's a woman. And I found that quite fascinating because as my life's progressed, since I've been out of prison, there's been occasions where I've met women and their parents have found out about my past and they're kind of like, Oh, you've got to be careful. But the irony of it is they'd probably be safer with me than they would with someone else. And I've always found that quite ironic because the way I, the way I see a woman, you can't blame them though. You know what I mean? That's so funny. Like armed robbery no problem you know

good on you pat on the back but uh you know sort of said a weird thing to a woman or touched her inappropriately and like not so good so let's take it back to the beginning so you you never you never really knew your your biological father no but give me a sense of like the family that you grew up in what the environment was like so my my actual biological father he died um when whilst my mom was eight months pregnant with me so he went to bed one night he was 38 years old um and had a massive heart attack it was there was no symptoms there was nothing leading into it that led him to believe he had a bad heart my mom said that he was a he was an absolute workaholic. Like he wasn't a criminal. He owned nightclubs, betting offices. He had shops, construction business, but all legitimately, he didn't, he didn't, my mum used to say to me, that smells sort of like the terrain of the mafia. And, and all of it, and to be fair,

all of his brothers, like they were from a big Irish Catholic family. A lot of them were involved in crime. But my mum used to say, my dad used to look at them and think they were idiots because he could see the writing was on the wall with them. But what my dad did, because my mum told me that, because he owned stuff like nightclubs and then he owned betting offices,

because he had these different sorts of businesses, he was staying up all night at the nightclub making sure that people wasn't stealing money. And then he was waking up again at five six o'clock in the morning and then going out in the construction business so he was surviving on very little sleep um a lot of stress and anyway bad diet dies at 38 years old i get born into the world um and i had a relatively sort of what i would class as a normal upbringing like i wasn't abused christmas has come around everything i ever wanted my mum loved me i had loads of aunties um no real men come into our lives my mum was single um only uncles come into our home

um and it and it was just a normal child like i said earlier on the only thing that really made it a bit different was when i started going to primary school people used to tease me about not having a dad and I asked my mum and my mum told me my dad died and then my life completely changed when I was eight years old and before my mum met my father my mum grew up in a place in South London called Peckham and she grew up on a council estate and she grew up with a place in south london called peckham and she grew up on a council estate and she grew up with a man called billy tobin and they got they grew up as kids and when they were 16 they're both catholics um they get married my mum falls pregnant my sister and she's 18 they're just a normal young family in london billy goes out with his dad one night and he's working as a

plasterer and he sees his dad get murdered in a pub and three men stabbed his dad's death. When that happened, Billy's life then completely spiraled. And then I don't know, I couldn't tell you what was going through his head, but I could only imagine he then looked at life and he then went on a journey of becoming a normal guy plasterer young family to becoming one of the most prolific armed robbers in the united kingdom he had five acquittals at the old bailey the police shot him two times on robberies um he was a multi-millionaire when he's 21 eight years old this man comes out of prison after serving 16 years and he come into our home when i lived in crystal palace with my mom in south london first time i will ever i had a seen this man and he was i can remember it as clear as day like he come in i was a young kid i'm at him. He was immaculately dressed, massive gold watch. And he come in our home and he, um, he asked me to make him a cup of tea and

I made him his cup of tea. And then as he was leaving our house, he gave me a 20 pound note. And it was the first time anyone had ever given me paper. And I took this 20 pound note off him and he patted me on the head and he went, you're a good boy. And he left. And then I said to my mom, who is he? And my mom explained to me that it was her ex-husband. He didn't say like, hey, if you want a job, you know, come and see me. No, no, he didn't. I mean, he's very cinematic.

You know, it's like I can see it happening. Just like in the movies. He, to be honest, he never, ever, ever, ever talked. So he didn't come into my life, to my mom's life again to be in a romantic relationship. But obviously because of my sister. Yeah, he's around. Yeah, he's around. He didn't live with my life but to my mum's life again to be in a romantic relationship but obviously because of my sister yeah he's around yeah he's around he's around he didn't live with my mum he was living his own life and when he used to take my sister out he would take me out he didn't have a son i didn't have a dad so you can already see what started

to happen here and he never ever ever mentioned to me anything he did and he would take me to these restaurants and there'd be a lot again a young kid a lot of older men big watches nice cars outside people stopping by the table to say hello all all of that stuff like going into restaurants being in good tables never having to queue you could see when you were into clothes shops the people in the clothes shops treated them differently everything was cash christmas would come around i remember like them all putting money together and giving you like a thousand pounds when i was a young boy um always always always talking about money every conversation was about money and that was it but no one really went into detail where the money was coming from and again you're a young boy i couldn't connect your dots up

and it was only when my granddad died that me and my mum and my aunties went around to my granddad's flat to clear it out and as i opened up this drawer there was a massive envelope and i opened up this envelope and it had all of these front page newspaper clippings from all like the national tabloid newspapers and it was basically billy on the front of them and it was like how he sort of um noble juries which meant corrupt juries paid them off to find not guilty how the met police were after him for years and how he was the most influential bank robber in the country and that they organized crime and millions of pounds and i was reading all these newspaper clippings

and then i then connected up the dots where all of this sort of this money and you were how old at this point i was 12 years old um and it really that didn't send me over the edge that wasn't the catalyst for me deciding to do what i did um that come a little bit further along but it all started happening around the same sort of time i asked bill Billy about this and he didn't really want to talk about it. He didn't ever, ever, ever really talk about when he was in prison. He didn't like really doing it unless I really used to push him on it. But then when I was 12, big TV channel in his country, ITV, there was a doc, there was a film, so I not documented documentary film. And this film was about my real brother, my real dad's brother.

And he committed the biggest armed robbery in the world. And he sold 26 million pounds worth of gold bullion at Heathrow Airport. And when I would go out of Billy as a young kid, again, all the dots started connecting up. Everyone would go, is that Mickey's nephew?

And I never used to really question it and and everyone used to always like that was why they was giving me the money at christmas and that was why they was always making sure that if i haven't if i wanted anything like do you want to drink you want this you want that so did mickey mickey got killed or he was in prison he was in prison so right mickey m. Yeah, and he got 20, 25 years for the armed robbery of stealing a gold bullion. Right, so a way of paying respect to Mickey was to slip you cash.

Yes, yes. Because within crime in the United Kingdom, obviously it was the biggest armed robbery in the world. You're then dealing with men that hate the system. You've attacked the system on an unimaginable scale and stolen, which if you put it into today's money would probably be a couple of hundred million pounds worth of gold bullion because this was like 19 1983 yeah so if you put it into real world terms to that how much money

that'd be worth so within the criminal underworld in this country it was it was the pinnacle of of doing anything against the system and then you've got this young kid that's then out with this very high profile armed robber that's then going into this world with other high profile organized criminals as a blood relative of that man so then what that then started doing when i watched that film that film inspired me that night and honestly rich i generally feel embarrassed to say it but it inspired me to become a criminal um i didn't see the fact that my uncle was in prison for 25 years for that offense i So I saw a Hollywood actor sitting on 26 million pounds worth of gold bullion.

And that to me at that moment was pathway of how I could become rich and how my definition of success was how much money I would make. And that was the pathway in which I was going to choose to do it. So then really that sort of age, I then started to have complete disinterest in school,

complete disinterest. When we're talking about like a criminal enterprise and we're talking about armed robbery, we're not talking about holding people up on the street. You're talking major bank robberies, like, like big heists and an organization, an organizational structure beneath this that's supporting this endeavor. Right. Yeah. So how vast was the enterprise?

Um, when, when, when I started getting involved in crime, when properly, when I, when I left school when i was 16 um i i sat my gcses because my mum pleaded with me to sit them but i knew that if i got an a in english or maths it wasn't going to get me what i wanted in life but i'd done my gcses and and i remember when i sat there and i i got my grades at the end of the summer my head of year was there and he gave them to me and he went if only you would have applied yourself what you could have done and i still managed to salvage some decent grades considering i did none of the coursework leading and i've got these qualifications i ripped them up chucked them in the bin at the end of my school drive and i thought i know what i'm going to go and do my stepdad found out that i bought a firearm when i was 16. And in his head, he believed that I would be safer committing crime

with them than I would be people my own age. And as perverse as that is, like it is. Yeah. There's a logic there. It's a warped sense of protecting you and trying to prevent me from killing myself or killing someone else. And meanwhile, your mom had to see the signals, right? So where is she in this? My mom, like when I was a young boy growing up to the degree, my mom would not even let me play with sort of toy guns, like cowboys. She would not like, she did everything she could to shield me to the degree she told Billy, never, ever, ever take him and do anything with him.

So when he would swing by and take you out to these restaurants, was she, I mean, she must've said at some point, like, look, you got to stay away from this guy. She did. But the problem that you start getting is when you're a young teenager or a young man, you become harder and harder and harder for your mom to control what you're doing. you always think your mum's wrong i look back now my mum everything my mum said was right um but it's very hard for a a woman to control a young man to stand around these such dominant strong alpha males that are enticing you in to that world it's like a lot of those guys that that i knew as growing up as kids a lot of their kids went to private schools. They had the best education you could afford to buy, basically.

They all went private schools. They went on lavish holidays around the world. They had nice things, tennis courts in the garden. Every single one of those kids left that private school and they become drug traffickers. And they've all ended up in prison. But they had the best of everyone. And that just shows you what happens when you have that terrible role model like they've had the best of everything

they they they come out of school with top grades top school and come out and end up selling drugs because their dad sold drugs and it wasn't discouraged in fact most of the time dad's got the sons on board and the sons got involved in their empire, in their drug empires or got involved in whatever criminality they were committing. My stepdad realized that I was following him in that line. So, like I said, he thought in a false sense of protecting me. It'd be safer if I commit a crime with him than other people. So he then basically used to get me to go out and with video cameras and and i would film vid like lorries making deliveries to security depots in the suburbs and they would basically fill up the security depots

and i'll give these cctv tapes so it's like recon yeah you're scoping out a job you gotta figure out how the money's flowing so you know where the vulnerability is like my my my role in it become i used to be very good at memorizing number plates so like i look back on it now so i would go out in my in a car or a motorbike and obviously if you're you're delivering money to sort of banks in armored trucks but you so we call them security vans in the armored trucks the same van used to make the same delivery on the same day, every week, week on week on week. And you knew how many sort of, how many times he's walking in at the bank,

how much he was taking in and out the bank. So you would know on a Thursday, they was delivering X amount of hundreds of thousands of pounds into each bank. These guys that work for these companies aren't looking at a 17, 16 year old kid. They're looking for middle-aged men, stocky, stubble,

like your typical criminal, not some sort of spotty teenager that's a little bit overweight, chubby, but they're not looking at me as a threat. So it's very easy for you to like get near them and count and look and observe and then pass relay that information back on. I realized very quick

that my goal was to be a millionaire. That was it, bottom line. And I set myself goals. I wanted to be worth a million pounds when I was 21 years old. And then as I got older, I wanted more and more money. But there was these goals. And was your stepdad like, look, just, we're going to bring you in. We're going to start you with small stuff, but be patient and you will be a millionaire. Like, was there a, it was an overt and explicit like that? Well, it was, it was, it was the only way I can explain what he was like,

so he never used to stop telling me that he was a millionaire when he was 21. So that was why that stuck in my head. And he always used to say to me, do you think you'll beat me? And it was like a test. And even little things like when I was at school, he had a Porsche 911.

And I was being a bit cheeky to my mom because i was cheering in didn't want to go to school and i said we live too far i don't want to go i ain't getting the bus and he said take the car i'm 16 years old and i said what he said take the car he said if you're a big man take the car drive to drive to school so i said all right so i took his car and i drove the car to school now most adults you wouldn't let a child drive any car but let alone a car like that it was was all, it was all, that was what he was like. He was always testing. He was always seeing how much bottle I had and did, did I have that sort of capability to keep pushing it? And what started happening when he was, when I was out with him and I remember this,

and he was relaying these stories onto older men that at this time i knew that we were involved in crime they would lavish praise on you and they would show you respect and and that starts feeding into psychology as a young man especially young like a boy and you're getting these like 40 50 year old men saying oh you got some but all like i wouldn't have done that when i was a kid and that starts feeding into it and then you start again you've got no fear i had no fear i didn't fear the police I didn't I was brought up it didn't mean anything to me for a prison police none of that bothered me at all I had literally zero fear so if they said to me go and drive 10 guns to the other side of the country I would have put them in the car and drove there right because it was all and they actually did I was gonna say that was a but they actually did do that. There was a couple of times where they did do

that. And sometimes I look back on it now and I think they're kind of exploiting me to a degree. And I didn't, I was too young to understand that. I thought I was in, I was in with them. And when actually it was about me taking these massive risks. Right. Cause you're the one who's going to take the fall. Yeah. Right. And you're, you're, you're expendable. Right. Yeah. Right. And you're, you're, you're expendable, right? Yeah. The amazing thing is that we'd all like to think that if we found ourselves in your shoes, that we would make a different choice. And it's just not how it works. You know, it's like this slow drip of you growing up in this certain environment and, you know, a billion small encounters and exchanges with people that leads you to that place where the obvious choice is to do exactly what you did. And that if I've had grown up in that environment, that I would have made the same choices. Do you know what, Rich? That's aided me

so much what I've gone on to do with my life because I can have this conversation that we're having right now with a politician and and I've had countless times I've met people in authority and they sit across the table from me and they go I cannot see how you've gone to prison for what you've gone in there for even when I was in prison on parole hearings I was sitting with my probation officers that have been in that system for years and they're like looking at a file looking at me looking at a file looking at me foal, looking at me going, I cannot see how you come across the way you do and you've done this.

And what that has done for me is I can express and show them what can happen to young people, the most intelligent, articulate, driven, focused young men that there are up and down this country when negative people come into their lives and how that intelligence and drive and focus can compete completely and utterly warped and and that's why we've got this huge problem in our country at the moment with young kids

killing each other getting involved in gangs like in america they're not like ambitious and they're not not driven like they're incredibly ambitious and driven, but it's all channeled into the wrong thing because the wrong people have come into their lives and channeled that energy into something so destructive. And they don't see the destructive nature of what they're really doing until it eventually leads to them being killed or spending their lives in prison.

Yeah, a big part of what you do, probably the most important part, you know, everyone knows you as this triathlete, but, you know, with this incredible story, but it's your advocacy on behalf of prison reform, you know, that, that, that I think, you know, holds the most power to really shift culture. And if you just scroll through your Twitter feed, like you're constantly talking about what's not going right, what needs to be changed. There was just the thing the other day about somebody's trying to get incarcerated individuals into sport while they're incarcerated, but it was like dismissed or something like that. And you had a few, few words to share about that. Yeah. Yeah. Like,

so you talk, yeah, a tabloid newspaper sort of, um, with political agendas that don't necessarily want things to change. Um, when I was in prison the second time, there were 85,000 men incarcerated. There was 28 of us out of that 85,000 that were deemed to such a high risk that we had to be put in a special high security prison unit in Belmarsh prison called the HSU we were completely and utterly segregated out the whole prison system because we were either deemed to be a threat to national security or our escape was so highly likely and we did escape we'd post such a risk to the police that escape must be made impossible. And I was kept in that unit for two years with Islamic suicide bombers.

The system wrote me off, said I'm never changed. Yeah, who were you? You were in there with like Hamza? So Sheikh Abu Hamza. Right. The 21-7 suicide bombers that tried to blow themselves up on the underground system. And the guys that tried to actually blow up

the transatlantic flights going over to the States with the liquid bombs so i'm in there with them i'm told basically you're here because we believe you're going to escape and the likelihood of you changing got two life sentences is so slim it will not happen and i can remember someone from the home office was like the ministry of justice come into the um prison and i was trying to get off this unit to try to get into the main prison because i did actually want to try to escape or get out as fast as I could. And she said, we're not stupid. We know people like you will never, ever, ever change

because again, serious crime. And if I've managed to do what I've done through sport, why can't the other 85,000 people do it? And that's what makes me so passionate because I understand that once I had an awakening in prison and I wanted to do something else with my life and I discovered sport, what sport done for my life and sport allowed me to be successful.

It's given me everything that I've got today. And it isn't even about being a good athlete. It's about what it's done for my life. It's about the people it's brought into my life. Incredible people, not just Olympic athletes, but it's allowed me to go in and speak to kids, thousands of them up and down the country. I've met some of the most amazing, incredible people

I've ever met in my life through sport. Now, it doesn't mean you have to come out, you have to break world records in prison, but it gives you access and exposure to positive people. And that is what sport done. And when I got released from prison, my social circle completely changed overnight. And I'm friends with nearly everyone

that I was friends with when I first come out. And it broke me away from that, those negative people that were involved in crime. And I know sport can play such a huge role in helping so many different sorts of people, not just criminals, but people in life. It's such a powerful thing. And I'm such an advocate of it because I've experienced it in my own life. And as I said, like you're, you're not going to meet anyone as it's from, from that extreme of crime than me. Like I will wholeheartedly say that i was one of the most entrenched criminals you'd

ever meet in your life i wasn't a horrible bully i didn't bully normal people can happen i wasn't that sort of like mafia don boss like you went around and bullied people and tried to take money from restaurants and stuff but i was driven by greed and every day and sport has allowed me to give that up. And I would imagine one thing you come across regularly is this idea that the more you accomplish, the more you achieve, the more you become an outlier so that somebody can say to you, yeah, John, like, look what you did, but you're, you're like, you're the, you're the unique example. Like this is not going to be the case for all these other people. So like, why even try? I would say to you, I would say to anyone that says that, like, I have, I've gone and visited prisons and I've gone and visited young offenders and schools. And, and I'm not the only person

that there are countless stories of other people that have used sport. Um, and it's played such a massive role in their lives and they've, they it's allowed them other opportunities to to be better people um again i understand there's varying there's varying levels of it and i know i've probably taken it to the extreme because of the characteristics of which i've always possessed the ambition to drive i was in prison i mean i mean i was good at sport went to be a millionaire next thing was i want to be a professional athlete but i've always had that like i've always been ambitious and driven and and i know you you can get varying levels of of that but it's about what sport can just give people to be better people and access and as i said again it comes back to like i said earlier

about having negative role models in people's lives this can expose them to positive role models in people's lives and and i've also noticed that when i go into these prisons and i talk to inmates you're far more likely to get someone to do something productive with their life if they're passionate about what they're doing and i am yet to go into a prison or young offenders and talk to an inmate one-on-one so you tend to find i've got this sort of of, I'm fortunate where when I go into a prison environment, prisoners don't see me as the system. They don't see me as the enemy. So they're quite open with their talking. So they'd be quite open about what they really think. And the amount of conversations I've had with inmates where they've gone, I said,

what would you want to do if you got out of it? And it's been be a personal trainer, be a coach, work with children, give back. Do they ever say be a better criminal but i don't want to be but if they want you to turn alive they want to change it's about they you're more likely to get them to stick it if they're passionate about it and most prisoners in prison are passionate about the gym the gym is the most popular thing in prison other than food so their food then it will be gym and the take-up rate again like we was i was having this conversation with ministry of justice like within the prison system so ethnic minorities make up i think 25 of our prison population they attend the gym more regularly than caucasian men in the gym system in the prison system in this

country so you can engage with some of the most disenfranchised people involved in gang activity more regularly than caucasian men in the gym system in the prison system in this country so you can engage with some of the most disenfranchised people involving gang activity straight away you've got them in you they're susceptible then to change and if you say look this you've shown them positive role models and you're showing them ways that way they can get away from that life by becoming a personal trainer or doing something that they're passionate about when they get released they're far more likely to stick at it than if you basically give them a qualification that they've got no interest in doing that when they get out of prison. Yeah. I mean, I'm not that familiar with UK's prison system and I'm certainly no expert in the prison industrial complex in the United

States, but, you know, at the core of this whole thing is not just, you know, punishment, but rehabilitation. And we've just lost any appreciation for how to properly rehabilitate people when they're in prison. There doesn't seem to be very much energy put into that. And what we do is we just create, we're just perpetuating and increasing the criminal underclass as a result. And in the United States, I don't know what the statistics are,

but it's far more ethnic and minority than I would imagine it is here. And the prisons are privatized. So we have a built-in incentivization to incarcerate more and more people, keep them in there longer and longer and longer because money is being made. And there are vested interests and lobbying groups

that are trying to only increase the scope of a system that is inherently broken. And what you're saying there is, if you look at like the European model of incarceration, so the United Kingdom hands out more life sentences a year than the whole continent of Europe puts together. So that's staggering. Our justice model is far more similar to yours

in the States than it is europe and we've got what 12 miles of water between us and them between us and like continental europe and again privatization of prisons um incentivizing so another example i went into a prison recently so a prisoner was being paid so he had no money so he was in prison he's got no cash outside no real family he's been paid to go to the workshops five pound a session to make a file of facts so he's either got that choice or earning one pound fifty to go to english or maths he's got no money so what does he pick he wants to buy tobacco and he wants to buy tins of tuna so he goes and he even said to me

what am i going to do when i get out of prison making filofaxes and that is the problem like you just said if you incentivize that part of prison and you start putting in call centers and you pay them 50 pence a session you give them like five six sessions a day and they're earning like 20 30 pounds per week or they're going to do education and learn something can better their lives and they're only getting paid four pounds a week it's quite simple where they're going to go where that that flow is going to end up going and then you get this huge problem like we've got the moment where it's costing 15 billion pounds a year on people just coming out of prison and going straight back in again within a year it's a huge huge huge problem so if you had your druthers what is the reform that you would like to see

that you think is actually achievable i think there has to be a thing yes i i do genuinely believe that sport in prisons could be a far more powerful use tool than it is at the moment um it as things stand we're just it's like a dog chasing its tail like there's a shortages of prison officers that needs to increase because again if you haven't got the prison officers you can't let the prisoners out to engage and access the courses and and stuff to help them sort of change um but i believe sport could play a far more pivotal role in what it actually does at the moment like sport and exercise in prisons is used but it's not used to the degree in which it could i think if you used it in prisons i think straight away a prison officer would tell you

this violence would drop dramatically because you're allowing young men to vent that anger and frustration through physical activity whilst they're in prison um and again i think you you then they're more susceptible to change. I think they wouldn't necessarily just keep getting up every morning and be driven by hatred towards the system. And again, lots of in the gym setting in prisons, that relationship's so different to the relationship it is between guards that work on the prison wings and prisoners.

A prison officer changed my life. If it wasn't for that Darren Davis, the prison officer at Loudoun Grange that didn't just notice my athletic ability, but he actually had an interest in me being successful with no agenda. Like he used to come in on his days off and sit with me as I would try to break

some of the records on the RAM machine. And he'd bring me in books and he'd talk about his family and I've developed a relationship with him. And that's taboo. Like in that world that does not happen. And that just shows you like when you get people like the prison officers that if you have, if they're like Darren and they can reach out to people and they treat them like human beings and go, I want you to be successful. A lot of these young men, it's the first time someone's ever really wanted that for them. Yeah. But I would imagine a lot of the, you know, these officers, they're just,

they're just hardened, you know, they're used to being on the receiving end of, you know, a lot of difficult situations and they just become emotionally checked out. So, I mean, I mean, how unique was the scenario where this guy took an interest in you? unique was the scenario where this guy took an interest in you he he is a very special man like rat a shadow of a doubt like he the way and that's that wasn't just with me that that's what he's continued to do of his job to today like he the way he treats inmates um he treats them like humans um he gives them a chance like to the degree where there's been occasions where he's had altercations with other prisoners and the prisoners are stuck up for him over the other prisoners when they've been out

having arguments i think someone like darren and me together collectively we can change mindset because i think you can go in and talk to these prison officers and say you're not just paid here to open up a door and lock it up you're here like you are the front line to help these men change their lives and show them there's job satisfaction. And you're actually being appreciated that you're doing a massive task. Because also, of course, like you, when I've gone into prison,

you talk to the prison officers that you, I totally get if you're underpaid and you don't feel like the system and the government are really looking after you, you've got no, you've got complete disinterest in your job really. Like, and if you've got no passion for it and you look at prisoners like scumbags and you just think i'm just gonna lock

them up like i can't bother to deal with them i'm not paid enough you again the circle just keeps continuing and these guys get out and they foster more hatred towards the system and they come out and then the offending gets progressively worse yeah so you should you should go maybe you already do this but when you go and you give talks talks, you should go out together with him, right? Yeah. You guys do that? Yeah, we've done some joint talks together. But it's something that definitely I want to develop.

Because obviously, I've got the balance next to the moment with what I'm doing in Ironman. And then once that's put to bed, that will free me up a lot more to do a lot more things that I want to do. Right, right, right. Well, let's, let's bring it back to, you know, this sort of development of your criminal career. So you're scoping out the, the armored trucks and when does it get like more serious to where you're actually committing these crimes and participating in them? So that was when I was like 17 um i then started getting more and more involved and my stepdad gets arrested um loads of his associates got arrested and he was the only one that wasn't arrested and i remember the morning of his arrest i said to him that you

need to go and he was so arrogant he was like they'll never be able to touch me and then later on that day they did they ended up arresting him with armed police so i knew it was probably highly probable that the police were probably aware of me and again my arrogance was they can't do nothing to me there's not enough evidence there was enough evidence they were arrested me because i knew where i was and they didn't touch me but what they did do they set a surveillance operation up on me um and when i was going to go and commit an offense one morning they were waiting in ambush and basically cars come from everywhere um i had this car chase i got away originally it was the furthest i'd ever run like i can remember i jumped over all these garden fences and i was being chased by police and i

actually got away from them and i felt like I was going to have an asthma attack because I was so unfit and I was in this telephone box what was the crime you were trying to commit so we was waiting for well we went there the night before to park up all the cars and we were going to commit a robbery on a cash and transit van that was making a delivery to the post office um so what we did we went there the night before to park the cars up in the vicinity and the police had watched us do this so they knew it was going to happen next morning and then they basically were waiting in ambush for us and then on the way there they decided to try to arrest us and that's where the car chase happened and as i said i got away from the actual

car chase and i was jumping over all these garden fences and i got to a telephone box and i remember i always tucked 20 pounds in my sock to get a taxi home if anything ever went wrong. And the next thing I know, I heard a screech, and I looked around and I saw this massive man running towards me with a gun pointing to me, and I thought I was dead. Like, I genuinely thought, I'm dead.

And he come running to the phone box, and there was loads of others in my peripheral vision. They dragged me on the floor, and then he identified himself as a police officer. And I thought, oh, thank God for that. Like I thought I was going to be killed. And so that was your first arrest. Yes.

And did they get you, were they trying to spin you or roll you to get some bigger names? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. Cause you're the young, you're the lowest on bigger names? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, yeah. Because you're the young, you're the lowest on the totem pole, right? Yeah, they were trying to intimidate me. But then when we got to the police station,

there was a very famous criminal lawyer in Britain, and every most high-profile criminal was using him. So when I got to the police station, like it's getting more and more like a movie. It was, it was, it was, it was like a family lawyer and the, um, yeah. And they, he, he basically, he was on the phone. He said, don't, don't tell him nothing. I'll, um, I'll send someone down.

And then I was there for three days and, and then, then they try to get really pally with you. And it's all like, you're really sort of oh you like your uncle and they try to like you become they try to become pally with you but even though they're not they're trying to get snippet they're trying to get you to lessen the mask you let something slip out um yeah and i was there for three days and it was just no comment no comment no comment and he was well drilled on it he was well drilled not to tell him anything i didn't tell him my name and address i didn't tell him like my date of birth i was being as awkward as i possibly could be and they let you go no they didn't let me go they didn't

no that was that was when is that when you got the five years yes uh okay yes and so you were like you were just fresh out of the gate like your your career hadn't even really quite begun yet no but that that was the downside mix him with such high profile criminals. So I was mixing with criminals that had been doing what they've been doing for 20, 25 years. Lots of them have never really been arrested or they had that Billy had been out of prison at that point for like 11 years. They wasn't sort of revolving doors of prisoners in and out and then that, and that it's just that when they went in, they went in for huge periods of time

and then come back out and just carried on doing what they did before they went in there. And how often was it getting violent? Like how often were the guns getting discharged and people getting hurt? Very, very rare. Very rare. No one ever got hurt. In fact, like I was, again, my stepdad always used to say to me when i was young about you don't need to be violent towards people it's all about verbalizing and talking um so it was

never like that you would watch a movie a hollywood film and everyone's running around with machine guns letting them off into the sky and stuff it wasn't like that at all it was very controlled very verbalized very taking control of a situation verbally letting them know that using control um and people get lost to that sometimes again because you see these you see these films and things get glamorized and you watching people like i said with machine guns shooting helicopters up and right and it actually isn't like that but it wasn't to the degree with the people that i was with should i say what else is the are the differences between the reality versus what you see on tv or in the movies um this world one one like the it isn't sort of as violent like as violent as what is portrayed to be. And you get these nutcases with guns,

putting them to people's heads. That does not happen. The drug abuse, that side of it, that happens quite prevalent, I would say. It's quite realistic because again, you don't realise this when you're in that world, but I think people are trying to always escape the reality of what's going to happen to you.

And you're always living in that moment. It's like a form of escapism that you know eventually that it's going to run its course yeah that dissonance of like fronting like it's all going to be good but knowing in your unconscious mind you know it's only a matter of time yeah and it's inevitable like you can't help but everyone that you even if they're not close to you you're always hearing about people having their doors kicked off and the police arresting them and someone getting arrested for this. So it's always in your subconscious that these things are going on, but you kind of believe that it's never going to happen to you.

But I do think when I look back now retrospectively, like a lot of the stuff around the drugs and the drink and the partying all stems back from that belief that you know eventually that you're going to end up going down that same road um and were you did you were you part of that yeah yeah yeah definitely and again like being a young man like with my stepdad like it was never discouraged like never ever ever like i remember taking young friends out of my night that they were the same age as me um and there wasn't that many of them but i remember going out and

giving them drugs and and and offering it to me right like and i was i was 18 yeah it wasn't like again most fathers wouldn't do that with their children but when you're in that life that that lifestyle a lot of people that is flagrant disregard like they just don't care they don't care about anyone really other than that really tight grouping of people and where's all the cash go like where do you keep where do you use i mean is it literally under the mattress or you have places where you're stashing it or are you laundering it you would be you'd be surprised by how a lot of people live when they do that um they live like footballers and it's like a never-ending well

of money so whenever they start getting to a degree where they're getting low they just go and commit another robbery um and they're stealing like hundreds of thousands of pounds like they're not dealing with a couple of thousands or millions sometimes, but they spend it as fast as it comes in because it's that high octane, never ending well of money that's going to, and how do you steal it? Like you got to pay like on some, you got to pay some taxes though. Right.

Or then you have problems that way. So you get, you get people that you get people setting up a lot of, you start just buying a lot of stuff with cash, then, you know, that's only gonna last so long. Yeah, you get a lot of people that buy a lot of restaurants and they buy a lot of industry where there's a lot of cash.

You just park it all there and right, right, right. And there's, yeah, there's a lot of ways people get around it. Like they've closed all the loopholes off now, but like people would, for instance, give someone that owned a property, whatever the value of that property was and give it to him in cash and that would go to a businessman that then had half a million pound in cash but his house didn't really belong to him anymore it belonged to this criminal and if the criminal

ever needed the money out of it the guy would remortgage the house to get the money and there was ways around where how people would sort of circumvent send the money abroad send it up invest money people would put money into drugs. A lot of robbery money would be invested in basically other elements of criminal activity. So it's just a never ending. But it's a lot of work, right? So it seems like, oh, you pull off this robbery,

you got all this money, but like there's still a lot of, like that focus, like the level of like attention you have to pay to all of those things if it was channeled in a different direction. you know, if they were at Goldman Sachs, you know, they could probably have the same result. Yeah. Just the other day, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and I was saying about like how, when you look at like a lot of people involved in like drug trafficking.

how when you look at like a lot of people involved in like drug trafficking and if you got like a kilo of drugs in south america and you manage to get that from there and they're not just one kilo drugs talking tons across the atlantic into europe without ever sending an email without ever making a phone call and you've orchestrated that and then the people are actively trying to show that you're linked to it and you're keeping such a distance and so many people in between you and that that they can't link that back the intellect to do that right is incredible and even i used to get impressed a bit sometimes i'm like how on earth like that you get that from there to that level of like money from one side of the world to the other and never even make a phone call or never directly be linked to it and then you've got actively people like the dea and the fbi serious and organized crime trying to link you to it and they can't right and they know you're

involved in it but they can't oh my god all right so uh fast forward to you getting busted and getting the five years so so yeah i originally i was charged with um nine counts of robbery uh-huh um i was at the old bailey i was 18 years old what's the old bailey so it's like the highest criminal court in the united kingdom so it's like the real sort of, yeah, you can't get better. It's like the Supreme Court, I would imagine, in America. It's like the highest court in the land, criminal court. And I was category A because, again, they believed I was such a high escape risk as a teenager.

And that made it quite exceptional because I couldn't be kept with young offenders. So if you're under 21, you can't be kept with male adults. But because I was so high security, I had to be kept with them because they believed that because my uncle and my stepdad so i go to court i was looking at 16 years and i was 18 and like to me a kid that was like i can't even imagine i i can't imagine i'm gonna be in there for that long and before my trial was about to commence i was offered a plea bargain and it was for the five years and my solicitor said take it take it because at that point i'd served a year and he went you'll do another year and a half two and you're out so i took it the police were livid they were all sitting in the dock at the

old bay i was in courtroom number one um judge goddard sentenced me a lady and and as i was walking down the police were all sitting in the footwell and I was so arrogant back then. And I looked at him and I said, it's a shit and a shave. I'm going to be out of here. And I was smiling and laughing. And I remember as I was walking down the steps to take me back to the cells, the prison officers that took me to the court were all laughing. And they said, did you see the looks on their faces? And I said, yeah. And I was buzzing off it. Like it didn't bother, again, that arrogance, it didn't bother me. And I was buzzing off it. Like it didn't bother, again, that arrogance, it didn't bother me. And then I went to back to the prison I was held in. And then that's when I got moved to the other prison where I ended up going into that segregation unit where the process of my training and exercising

really begun. Right. So the fitness began with the first sentence. Yes. Yeah. And how long were you in before you started? Well, so you were in there for a while. You get the, you get the solitary, you decide to stay there for a year and this is where this all, this all begins.

And then, then I got released. I come out. So you come out looking like a totally different person. No one could even really recognize me. My mom, I look completely different. I went in there like overweight, come out like I had abs and I was very skinny. I went down to about 11 stone. And I remember some people said I looked ill, but I felt good. But I relapsed. I started going out very sporadically, go to the gym.

Again, the greed, it was all about money. I was determined then to make even more money than before I was locked up. money i was determined then to make even more money than before i was locked up and a year and a half later um i get arrested for conspiracy to commit robbery and like i said it complete the game completely changed the second time got the two life sentences kept in high security unit in belmarsh the minute i was in there i knew i was going to be in there for a long time i knew i wasn't gonna there was no get out of jail cards. There was no plea bargains. There was nothing on the table. I was completely boxed up.

And no smirking in the courtroom. No. No shit in a shave this time. No, no. There was absolutely nothing. I knew, like my solicitor on the first legal visit, I said, how bad is this? And he went, you're 50-50, you're going to get a life sentence.

And I said, really? And he said yes he said like it's one of the one of the most shut and cut cases that i've i've seen with evidence um and we kind of just then i just had to accept it and so when i went back i knew i couldn't escape because they made that impossible so again how often do people escape uh it does happen it does happen it's very rare but it does happen maybe one or two a year but normally it's people getting them out so it'd be like people going to court and someone stopping the van on the way to court and breaking right not in the complex itself not not so much that's very it's quite rare that's quite rare like then from from high security

prisons i don't think anyone managed to break out in the last like 20 years so it's very sort of bolt down tight how they've got it and and they have because believe me when i was in there like you would look and there is nowhere to go like there is no and i can concede that point. And yeah, I kind of just had to get my mindset back into, all right, I'm here. I can't get out. I can't break out. My friends can't help me get out. How do I get out of it as fast as I can?

And when you hear a life sentence or two life sentences, that doesn't mean what you think it means. There's still this potential opportunity that you're going to get a parole after a number of years. So realistically, what did you think you were looking at? Um, I knew I wasn't going to get out on my minimum tariff straight away, but my mindset back then, Rich was, I didn't intend to serve that prison sentence. So in my mind, when he sentenced me, it meant nothing. So people say to me me when i got the sentence and he said life you'd expect it to have an impact on you where you'd you'd you'd like shrivel down and you think oh my god

my life's ended i didn't i listened to it and it meant nothing i didn't respect the man that was giving it to me i didn't respect the police i didn't respect the prime prosecution crown prosecution service so to me in my mind when i was got that sentence was you can give me what you want but there's no way i'm going to sit here and serve that whole sentence and like i said like i had to think of other ways that i could get out i knew i couldn't get out through running for the door like literally breaking out they made that impossible because the level of security i was on so it was like however what other ways can i do to get out of it and it was basically play the system,

do what they want me to do. So when they took me back to the prison, I said, what reoffending behavior courses do you want me to do? And they said, we want you to do X, Y, and Z. And I said, okay. They transferred me out of the high security unit. They moved me to another maximum security prison. I turned up there and I did the courses.

And then the next year I'm a sentence plan board. What do you want me to do? And it was basically like, we want you to do this, this, this, and you do this, this, this, and you're ticking all the boxes and they start downgrading you through the prison system. Is it like educational stuff or what is it exactly?

It's a mixture. So when you sit on your sentence plan board, you'll sit there and they'll say like, for the next year, we want you to get like, enhanced thinking skills. We want you to do a victim awareness course. And we want you to do your English and maths, like GCSEs.

And then you do that. And the following year, they say, we want you to now do this course. We want you to do like your A levels in English and maths. And you do that. And then what happens as you go through year on year on year, you basically tick all these boxes. And then when you go on your parole hearing,

it says that you've done everything they've wanted you to do it becomes impossible for the parole board to say we're not going to let you out as long as you've not been violent in prison you've not been violent to staff and other inmates but again i didn't even think that i would even i had no interest in going to a parole board like my thing was i just needed to get out of this maximum security prison so and it happened it worked after two years they downgraded me to a category b prison and i think i'm out like this this is my release i'm nearly out now so he transferred me to this open like this category b prison and i can't explain the difference in security is huge like i went from being on this tiny little wing in this maximum security prison in yorkshire up north to this prison where it was so open there was not that many prison

officers walking around um it was very sort of relaxed and I got there straight away you know people don't know people and said anyone got a mobile phone people have mobile phones and you're not allowed to have them obviously and I got a phone I phoned up my friends that lived in the Netherlands my best friend Aaron and I said to him i've just got transferred here and stuff and straight away his first thing was tell me when when the first opportunity you get to go we'll get you out and and and i know it sounds like a film but this is how my mindset was back then like um my when when my uncle was in prison when when i was a kid they tried to break him out of a helicopter like so so this was always in my psychology like i knew these things were possible yeah so when i'm in access to the phones

i'm in regular contact with my friends in in holland and spain um and it was all about first opportunity wait and i was okay let me just see how things are going to shape up and in 2009 my life changed forever when When I found out my friend that I was on the phone to all the time, Aaron had died committing a robbery in the Netherlands. And that was the catalyst for, for me being a different person. Um, was there like an initial sense of, of like hopelessness or what was it exactly that shifted before you start to channel that into a positive direction? I remember like that stuff, people dying, people getting murdered, people getting stabbed, shot. Like it never happened to me. That bad stuff happened to other people.

And I would talk to my friends and someone would say, guess what happened to so blah, blah, or so-and-so. So I was from a young person that I was always hearing about these things that were going on. That never happened to me. Me and my friends were good. You're immune, you're bulletproof. Yeah, that doesn't happen. Even I was in prison.

You're smarter. That's, yeah. You don't anticipate that one day that other person is going to be someone that you love and care for. So when that happened to him, I can remember when I was in disbelief. And I remember sitting in this prison cell and I was in complete disbelief. I couldn't actually compute that he was dead. And then the following evening on the news, on Channel 3, because it was so rare that these English criminals were committing crime abroad in the evening um on the news on channel three because it was so rare that these english criminals were committing crime abroad in the netherlands it made news at 10 it was our prime time news

and i remember sitting in this prison cell watching my prison tv and my friend run up to the cctv camera and spray the can of cs spray into the lens. And the camera froze literally before he sprayed it. And I know it was my friend. I could tell by his eyes. I could see it was him. And I remember sitting in that cell watching the last moments of his life. And then the camera crew then cut away to the car

because as they were getting away, the car tire blew out, the car flipped. My mate got thrown out the car. And the car was just a crumpled mess on the side of this Dutch motorway. And I remember sitting in that cell and I looked at my life and I realised how precious life is. Like, that should have been me in that car.

I should have been that person. I was the one that nearly got shot by the police two times. I was the one that had the mad car chases with the police. I was the one that drove guns up and down. My friend didn't. My friend got unlucky one night, never been in trouble with the police in his life the one that drove guns up and down. My friend didn't. My friend got unlucky one night, never been in trouble with the police in his life. He committed a crime with a group of people.

And one night that cost him his life. And then I looked at my life in that place and everything that I was brought up to believe in about the system, money was everything. It wasn't. And I felt embarrassed. It was pathetic. Like I looked in my life in that prison cell and i had a 16 000 pound gold gold rolex watch on my wrist in prison in prison no because again it was it was how arrogant i was because to me that was

a demonstration expression that even though you've put me in here i've still got money and you can't take that off me and you can't change me. And subconsciously, again, it was that expression of, of, of, of power over the system.

It wasn't about me saying to the working man, fuck you. Like you've got no money or anything. It was about me demonstrating to the system that I've got these nice things and you can't do nothing. And again, it is, it was, it was controlling.

And I looked how pathetic it was. And all of these men that growing up as a kid that I looked up to and they were my heroes they were all old men sitting in prison or they were dead and my friend just lost his life and I knew from that moment that that was me done I honestly like I can't express it into words it was like someone switched on a light in my head and I had this awareness of how precious your life is as a human. And the next morning I went down for breakfast in the communal eating area and there was all these guys and they were talking about when they got out, they was going to do this and that. And this person was an informer and he was a grass and he was going to do this and that. And I thought, I can't be around these people no more.

I can't listen to this rubbish. and I thought I can't be around these people no more I can't listen to this rubbish and the only way I can explain it is like if you was a drug addict and you wanted to get off drugs but you was locked in a crack den around drug addicts and you're trying to get off and I needed I wasn't fortunate where I couldn't get up and walk out of that place I was trapped physically so again I had to then develop a way of a form of escapism to take me out of that world like take me out not just prison physically but mentally and that's when training took on a far greater significance to me and exercise so did you then resume that like diligent uh you know protocol of the push-ups and the sit-ups and the step-ups and all of that or was

there was there the rowing machine there and you just said okay i'm gonna try this or like what it was when when you're in prison you get limited to the amount of gym access that you can have and i and so your gym your wing gets gym certain times a week that's it so you get free gym sessions a week on your wing and it's to stop you from meeting people on different wings case of fights and stuff and when i went down the gym there was this guy on the rain machine and he was down at every session i was on and he wasn't on my wing and i went up to him and i asked him said what are you doing and he said i'm around this million meters for a children's hospice and i said what and i let you have as much gym as you want and he said yes so i went to the prison officer that works in the gym

and i said can i do what he's doing and he said if you go back up on the wing with sponsorship forms and the prisoners sponsor you come back down give it to us you can row and raise money for children for the children's charity so i went up i went and did it come back gave him the shorts and he performs and he gave me a dispensation note so it allowed me to get off the wing to go down the gym as much as I wanted. So it was to row a million meters and you could row it 5K a day, 10K a day, 20K a day, however you want it to row it. Got on the round machine.

First session I'd done at 26 was 20 miles. So I rode 32,000 meters. And when I did it, I was in another world. And I mean that like people left me alone. Prisoners didn't talk to me. Prisoners didn't talk to me. Prison officers didn't talk to me. And I remember looking at this little monitor in this prison gym and I could have been anywhere in the world. And I just honestly, it was like the only, it's the nearest I could say.

It was like meditation. It was a form. It generally was like a form. It transcended me out of prison. I could have been anywhere in the world. And obviously I didn't understand about endorphins. I didn't understand about that. But that is obviously what was happening.

I did it. The next day I went back down 32 000 meters next day 32 000 meters and then i just it become a compulsive to go down and keep doing the same distance i did the first million meters a thousand k in a month and then i thought i can keep doing this and this is going to help me get through my prison sentence so i asked if i could do another million i said yes did that did the third million, three months. Then a prisoner went to me, if you row 5 million meters, that's equivalent from around from Britain to America. So it's equivalent to the Atlantic.

So I asked the prison officer, I said, look, can I just row the extra 2 million? And it's cool thing to say that I've rowed across the Atlantic, but really it was because it kept me in the gym for two more months. As I was getting through the fourth million, because it kept me in the gym for two more months. As I was getting through the fourth million,

I woke up an ability in my body that I never knew I even had. I'm in this little bubble in a prison. You're not in the real world. You're in this cocoon. You don't know what fitness is. You don't, it's warped. I've never been against athletes. I didn't know what was good, what was bad.

I just knew in prison on this RAM machine, i could hold better numbers than bob next to me and a prison officer darren davis walked behind me one day and he looked over my shoulder and he went wow he went that is is quick and he left and then a couple of days later he came back with all of these sheets of paper and they had all the world and british records on the indoor rail machine and he gave them to me and honestly rich at that moment i remember looking at this list and i was like i can break some of them records now and i didn't think they were real i generally didn't and i've woken up this physical ability in my body i never i never knew i had i was good at endurance sport and i never realized it and it planted the seed and i went back to my cell and i come back and i said can

i do this can i try to break some of these records he went to a man called gareth sands and gareth sands was the governor of this prison he was a deeply religious man like really really religious and darren went this guy prisoner john he, he wants to do something with his life. He wants to change. And I believe this could help him. Will you let him try to break these records from prison? And I don't want to interrupt you, but had you voiced your desire to transcend your criminal upbringing and change your life? Or were you just sort of quietly, you know, hitting the erg every day i had you told this guard like look man i really know what i never had i never i never had

that conversation with him because again like he could just see it in you yes he could sense a physical ability and i and i think he could sense that i was a good guy i was i wasn't horrible the way i treated people in prison um even to the regard that the other week, like I can't even remember this. A guy on Instagram commented on one of my photos and I'd read this, I read the message and I met this guy. He said he was in prison with me.

I can't remember meeting him. And he was like, I remember the impact you had on my life when you was in prison and you was on the round machine, you was encouraging me. And he went, you I remember the impact you had on my life when you was in prison and you was on the round machine. You was encouraging me. And he went, you made me feel so special and it helped me better my life. And I can't remember, but that's what I mean.

Again, I wasn't a bully. I wasn't a horrible person. And I think Darren could see that in me and he saw that I was good. And he thought this guy could do something here. So he went away and the governor approved it. And he thought this guy could do something here. So he went away and the governor approved it. So Darren, a lot of the prison officers,

they're not so open-minded and stuff. They're trying to take you down a peg. A lot of them don't want to, a lot of them then didn't want to, I don't know, maybe not want you to succeed, but Darren did. So Darren had to come in on his days off. So he wasn't being paid by the prison to sit with me to basically validate the records. And they had to set a camera up. They had to put a special chip card in the RAM machine to pull the data off and take photographs and film it. So the first record I broke was for the marathon and I broke it by seven minutes.

And so marathon 26.2 miles. Yes. Right. On indoor. Right. British record. British record. Right. You broke it by seven minutes.

Seven minutes. I broke the first one. And your first attempt. First attempt. And even to the degree I can remember. So when I did it, like I can't tell you my lack of knowledge on nutrition like uh glycogen sugar energy drink i did i didn't have access to it for a start so i didn't have gels or any of that sort of stuff um it was only my basic knowledge so when i was doing the record i i promise you

a prisoner had to go and get me a satchel of these sugars. And I was putting raw sugar in my mouth and drinking water. Right. Like what you would put in your coffee. Yes. That stuff. So I was having to put that in as energy. Um, and obviously I made me start feeling sick and stuff, but it just about got me through it. And I remember when I broke that record, I was laying on the gym mat after, and i remember feeling this overwhelming sense of achievement and and everything i'd ever wanted as a young kid to be better than average to achieve something my life to leave a legacy i felt it everything i could do it through that through sport and i could use my vehicle my body as a vehicle to get me out of

that world and not only that but be successful and this was the thing that i could do to find that success then from that moment i become obsessed with being an athlete like to the degree where i'd go down to the library every friday and i used to get the librarian she had to order books in from the outside library into the library because obviously there wasn't that many prisoners interested in sports nutrition and training and stuff so she would send to get these orders and bring them in and i'd have a week i'd read read read read read and i started understanding about physiology i started understanding about sports nutrition then i started reading all these books lance armstrong's

book all these olympic rowers what year is this this was in 2009 and i started reading all these books, Lance Armstrong's book, all these Olympic rowers. What year is this? This was in 2009. And I started reading all these autobiographies of all these athletes. And I was like, I've got these characteristics. I know I can be successful. And then from that moment, my dream in prison was to be an athlete. That was it.

Within 16 months, I'd set eight British records and three world records on the indoor rowing machine. And I was, at one point, I was the only lightweight man in the world to have all three ultra endurance world records simultaneously at one point. And, and that was it. I knew that I had this ability then. And Darren said, it's me when you've got the ability, not that you're fit, but you have the ability that you can suffer. And he went, if you come out of prison and you waste that gift, it will be the biggest travesty that I've ever seen as a prison officer. And those words to this day stick with

me in my mind every single time I race in the Ironman on that marathon. I'm trying to imagine how this must have shook up the rowing community. I mean, did this make news when you were doing this? I'm just, I'm picturing like the guys at Oxford and Cambridge who are getting the print out. What do you mean? Who's this guy? Like he's in prison. He broke these world records. Like what's going on here? Do you know what? You'll be very surprised. It actually didn't. And the reason it didn't. So when the records went on the system, they wasn't being put down that I was a prisoner. They were just putting my name and and i was in nottingham um so there was none of that sort of fanfare around it right the only time like again

it seems very cinematic i broke the world record for the most amount of distance rode in 24 hours on the indoor rail machine and i rode 265 000 meters in 24 hours. And I remember Darren said, start the record at four o'clock in the afternoon. And then you'll finish at four o'clock the next day in the afternoon, because in that way, you'll be able to go to bed that night and your body clock's not going to be all out of sync.

And I remember I went back on the wing the following morning. I broke that world record by 13 miles. And when I went on, even to today, I can remember it. They open up the gates on this wing and i walked on and all of the prisoners were being kept aware of what i was doing they kept saying to prison officers is he broken it is he nearly going to break it and what happened when i was in prison i become a bit of a champion because i was competing against people outside

and so the prisoners in prison wanted me to do it. Yeah, of course. They wanted me to break those records. And I remember walking on and these prisoners were on the landings and they was all clapping that I come on and I broke this record. And I felt, I remember I felt shattered, but I felt amazing. I thought, wow, like I've just achieved something amazing. And I've had that sort of impact.

All these people wanted me to do it. And it was an incredible feeling. and I've had that sort of impact. All these people wanted me to do it. And it was an incredible feeling. And it's only since I've been out, I've gone back to that prison and they've got like pictures of when I broke the records in the gym.

And it's absolutely incredible like to know that you can plant those seeds in other people's heads to show them what you can do with your life. But yeah, that, that was, it, it was amazing, but then it did start becoming really frustrating when I couldn't get out.

Um, I broke all the records I could break. There was none left for me to do. I realized I had this physical potential. I was young. I was strong. I was the fittest or fittest rowing fits I've ever been in my life. But I was trapped in prison and I couldn't get out.

I was doing these life sentences. And I remember I went through a real sort of stage where it becomes so frustrating to me. Like I knew I changed. I was demonstrating it. I broke all these records and people were saying how amazing it was. But they wouldn't let me out because I still had a year left to serve my prison sentence. cords and and people were saying how amazing it was and and but they wouldn't let me out because

i still had a year left to serve my prison sentence um and that got delayed because they they sort of made mistake bureaucratic mistakes and that led to me end up being in there three years um over what i'd originally be sentenced to so when did you eventually get out and how did that work so my first parole hearing we sat there and i had to get in front released in front of a crown court judge he had to come in and what year is this this was in the first 2011 and i remember so you get your crown court judge retired he sits in front of you and it's a typical parole here now you can imagine that you've got your judge in front of you directly in front of you you've got to his left the lay person member of the public you've got a criminal psychologist you've got your probation officer front of you, directly in front of you. You've got to his left, a lay person, a member of the public.

You've got a criminal psychologist. You've got your probation officer sitting next to you and your solicitor sitting next to you. And the judge went to me, what are your release plans? So I said, I'm going to be a professional athlete. And he sat back in his chair and he was smiling at me and he leant forward and he went, I have never heard a prisoner sit in front of me and sat.

But Rich, I absolutely believed it. And I know you might think I'm making this up. Oh, I believe it. No, I don't think you're making that up. I mean, you just broke three world records. You didn't just break them. You crushed them. Without knowing anything really even about the sport and having never been in a boat

and having not grown up as an athlete. I believe you. He was like like and he's smart and he went i've never said he went i've never heard a prisoner ever come and say that in all the years i've sat life centers or parole hearings so i had a criminal psychologist that does reports when you're in prison and he looked at him and he went, what we're seeing today was you say, this is all smoke and mirrors. And the criminal psychologists in British prisons,

they're notorious. People often say a swoop of a pen can keep you in prison for years. If they believe, so they have to diagnose if you've got an underlying psychological disorder. So sociopath, psychopath. If you are, you're a massive risk to the public and obviously then you're probably never going to get out until you've gone for

all these special courses that they want you to do and i thought oh my god you seem to think you're delusional please yeah and actually the the psychologist said to him if he he's gone well beyond what he would have had to have done to try to pull the wall over your eyes. He went like, he could have just done a couple level three gym instructor courses and sat and said the same thing. He went, but the stuff he's done, you could not black.

Like he was talking about the longest continuous row and those things. He went, you physically couldn't do it unless he deeply, deeply had a desire to do it. So the judge basically asked me to leave the room. I went back in and they didn't release me. What they'd done, I get it. He went, I don't think your release plan's based in reality.

He went, but I'm going to move you to a semi-open prison so we can slowly integrate you back into society. So they moved me to an open prison where I was able to go out every day and work voluntarily in a fitness first gym. So it's like halfway house. Yeah, basically. you're still in prison but it all works on trust so if you if you left and didn't want to go back you didn't have to but it did it reintegrated back in society i got used to working i never had a job in my life um i started working as a

personal trainer in this gym in this little village up north um and yeah and i was there for a year and a bit and then i end up getting released in 2012 after the olympics i get released i google high performance rowing clubs in london and this london rowing club comes up in near putney in southwest london and it was like a feeder system into the gb setup yeah so i go down there and just to give people a bit of an understanding physiologically for my weight for a lightweight man i was putting out the same so you get your 2k and your 5k in rowing those numbers mean everything that that is it so there's minimum requirements that you have to pull on a rowing machine to even be looked at to become an international rower if you don't pull those numbers you won't even be looked at they won't even watch you row on the water so my 2000 meter

time was 14 seconds faster what you would have needed to get into the international gb squad and on on my 5k it was i think it was like 38 seconds faster. So aerobically I was much stronger over 5k, but the problem that I had that I seem realized was rowing is such a technical sport that in rowing your class is a veteran at 26. I took it up at 29. I was nearly 30. And I realized quite soon that I couldn't get to that level in rowing that I wanted to as an athlete. So I had to make a tough decision after four months that this isn't going to work this isn't going to facilitate me doing what i want to do so i had to basically i looked around and when i was in prison i saw this episode

of transworld sport and there was a show called iron man or a sport um it was an iron man show within it and i remember watching kona and and i just remember these men are that it's incredible like watching them get off bikes and running like two and a half hour marathons and it inspired me when i was in prison and then when i realized i couldn't become a professional athlete being a rower i went on google googled the criteria and i thought right i'm gonna go and do ironman um i went off on ebay and i bought a bike as i said i've never ridden a bike. I was 30 now. Um, I taught myself to swim off YouTube videos. Never swam. Never, ever, ever swam. Ever. Like even when I was out of prison, you might've caught me in a sea bobbing around like when I was

on holiday, but no swimming, no nothing. Um, so I basically taught myself to swim and the only race i could do was ironman uk because i wasn't allowed to leave the united kingdom and ironman uk was in six weeks time after i decided that i went to the ironman so that was where i was gonna do it so i was in for what i'm going at the deep end so i go into ironman uk i tried to win at the race sold out so i had to go and get a charity ballot place and get into Ironman UK six weeks later so the furthest I'd ever swum was the day of the race the furthest I'd ever cycled was the day of the race but I'd run like I'd run further than that before like as longer than a marathon you had run longer than a marathon yeah like so I probably I should have

probably mentioned this earlier on so when I was in the open prison um I decided to run an ultra marathon because I was wanting to test my body i went to a different challenge so the governor there there was the gym instructors in the prison um there was a couple of them um like in the royal navy and then when they retired from the royal navy they come to work in the prison service and obviously they knew i was this really fit guy um come there i broke all these records so my reputation sort of proceeded before i got to prison so all these prison officers like this guy that's broke all these prisons and obviously a bit of banter and stuff like that and one of them started talking about ultra marathon running and i was like all right what is it and said

anything over a marathon and stuff so i said oh cool and when i was working out in the gym i used to go to the library in the village before i would go to the gym to work every morning so i'd had like a little half hour windows to get the bus half hour to go to this library gone there ultramarathons there was an ultramarathon from london to brighton which was like 56 miles long and i went back to prison i said look do you reckon they let me out to do it so like for the weekend so they go away says yeah governor says you could do it so the only running i had ever done was on a treadmill in the prison gym um furthest i've ever run was 10k on the treadmill and and next thing you know they've given me this note to start the london to brighton ultra marathon so they let me out i'll go down to blackheath where the london marathon starts and literally you run from there it's a trail marathon

down to the coast and and it was probably as i said because everyone never run one of the hardest things i think i've ever done like i remember my legs my quads after i finished i finished it yeah i did it i did it 12 hours i did it and then i remember like when i was running down the hills i had to run backwards because my quads were completely gone and then i paralyzed myself afterwards i got the taxi coming back and I remember the taxi driver dropped me back from Brighton back to London and he didn't want to take the money. He went, I cannot believe you've run

from London to Brighton. And I walked back to the prison. All my legs were bruised up. All the swelling come out. But yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing. Like 1 million percent, when I've finished with Ironman,

I will 100% do an ultramarathon running. Like to me, it is, it is amazing. Like the, the, the, the way you feel is so much harder than Ironman. So, so, so, so much harder than Ironman. Psychologically, I feel like it's more challenging. Physically, it's challenging, it's harder. But I enjoy, I love running. running i love it i find like when i run now like i love i don't like running with other people i like running on my own it's like a form of meditation i can really i find it really hard to relax like i'm always thinking about stuff like when i go out riding my bike i'm always thinking about things to swim i'm always thinking i can't switch off but when i run just switch off and i could be anywhere in the world again. And it's as near, if not more than when I used to sit on that round machine. From 10K being your longest run on a treadmill, not even running 10K, like on roads or trails to running 56 miles on a trail. It was amazing though. And I'm still like picturing, we've kind of put rowing in the rear view, but you kind of rolling up on this, you know, semi elite rowing club, having never been in a boat before and saying, oh yeah, here, here's my, here, you can look at these numbers, you know, and they're faster than probably most of the one of the first sessions i've done so i i got released from

prison on a friday saturday morning i'll go down to the club um the head coach there was like who are you yeah yeah like i emailed him before i come down i said so he was aware i was gonna turn up they did not take novice rowers but he said to me what what's your 2k time so i told him and he went all right that that is good and he was like and he he had this philosophy and he said all the time you can't coach what god's given you and he he used to say to me if you've got a big engine you can't some people not just haven't and you can coach that big engine to row well and that's all you need to do that's my job so you i know you've got the raw power and it's my job to teach you how to use that power on a boat but if you haven't got that power

doesn't matter how much you technically get good the guy with a bigger engine will always beat you when he learns to get that sort of the technical element um but the problem is you just needed to get in a boat as a much younger person yes i it's the same with swimming it's really hard to learn swimming yeah you know older when you're older, you know, in your later years, it's just something that you can pick up quite easily if you're in the right environment. Totally. But like trying to, you can learn to run, you can learn to ride a bike, but like swimming,

it's, it's, it's a whole different thing. And you see it when you see people like come across from doing like cycling and running backgrounds into Ironman, but they get to a point where they just don't progress. And the people that are like those low 50, sub 50 minute swimmers, you tend to find come from swimming backgrounds that have swum their whole lives. And like to them pumping out those sort of times, isn't really a challenge where like the other guys are like trying to just get under the hour and stuff. Yeah. And they're expending a lot more energy because the people who really know how to swim, know how to make

the water work for them. So they're so much more efficient and their output is de minimis compared to the guy who's, you know, just slashing the water. Yeah, yeah. So how did that first Ironman go? I mean, six weeks. Like, there's only so much you can do in six weeks. Yeah. Especially when you don't know how to swim. So, like, the guys, there was a couple of guys at the row the rowing club that like were there just recreation and we were chatting about it and

like one of them said to me um he said look there's no point you're going out doing massive bike rides now because you've never in the bike you probably get injured so you might as well just ride the distance in the race um so it was it it was it was like when i race i put like i've i see this as an athlete so i have nearly been killed two times right literally been to the point where i'm fractions of inches away from a policeman shooting me dead in the bigger picture of things in life like i've nearly lost my life so i look at everything like that through that lens so there's a really really doing a rec, doing a swim in Ironman. It's not really that big of a deal. Or getting on a bike, riding a bike.

Like it's just physical activity. It's like exercises. There's no real greater significance other than that. Like I'm not going to lose my life doing it. And I just put everything into relative terms of like, when I've had my life taken off me for 10 years, that's stress. That's a lot of stress to go through.

Like when you're an iron man i see that as it's a privilege i'm there that morning i'm physically able to do it one day i won't be able to like and i see it as a massive honor and privilege to be there and be able to physically do it and compete it um and i did that morning i turned up i didn't have any fear whatsoever and i thought just experience it see what it's like and you know what the only thing that i really got from it like one it was amazing when i finished it like to watch that tv show in prison and then be there and actually do it and run down that red carpet was it was it was incredible but it was when i

was on the bike one of the pro guys went past me and even though i'd never obviously ridden that he lapped me because it was like three loops of the same circuit. And I thought that will never happen to me again in an Ironman race. I remember that. And those were the things that really stuck with me. And I finished the race and I thought, right, I didn't, honestly, Rich, I didn't feel that touch by it. I didn't feel, I felt comfortable.

I felt I was within myself. Like I didn't feel like I was going to blow up. I wasn't massively quick. Like Ironman UK is quite hilly. And I did it in like 11 and a half hours so I finished I think 100 fat about three and a half thousand people um but I just thought 11 and a half in six weeks without knowing how to swim and having never ridden a bike I was very rowdy yeah I was very yeah yeah I get that but it was um but yeah and then I thought what this is this is what I'm gonna do this is it and and then I started um I made a lot of I made a lot of errors then um because then I thought it was too easy and I thought I would train how I trained on a rail machine in

prison the same Ironman so I went from basically never really being a runner to running nearly a marathon every Saturday Sunday morning around Battersea Park within eight weeks I could comfortably run sub three hour marathons it wasn't hard it worked like I remember and what happened it become very addictive because I was talking to guys and they were like they're talking about like running a sub three at London I was thinking that's not hard like I can do that in training I do it all the time I do it every Saturday and and I got quicker and quicker and quicker and the and the same thing bike I was thinking, that's not hard. Like I can do that in training. I do it all the time. I do it every Saturday. And I got quicker and quicker and quicker. And the same thing with bike.

I was riding indoor bikes, squat bikes in the rowing club. My watts just got bigger and bigger and bigger because I kept training as hard as I could every session because the suffering- And you're just, you're freewheeling it though. Like you're not working with a coach. No program, no nothing.

And again, that was something, this is something that stuck with me from being a kid of distrust. Like I thought to myself then, this is my goal. This is my dream, not someone else's. And I don't trust anyone else with this. And I thought I knew better. I thought that I could do this myself.

And as I said, I dug myself into the biggest hole. I was sweating. I was waking up in the early hours and was sweating i was getting up early and then to me then it become how much do i like even though i feel like crap i'm just gonna go out and just keep hammering it and i'm gonna hammer it and and again i just kept digging this hole and i was getting quicker but my body wasn't recovering it was breaking down it's breaking down and then i end up really getting sick i started um i went on a training camp and i remember

it for a swim one morning and i couldn't breathe and i thought what i've never felt anything i could not breathe physically breathe and i got out of water and then later on that day i was in the car couldn't breathe again and obviously i was having like a panic attack where i was draining the life out of my body got a virus then went back to iron man yet katieman the following year and just absolutely fell apart it was the most humiliated I'd ever felt in my life I felt worse that day than I ever did

being in any of those courts getting that life sentence I felt ashamed all my friends Terry come up, my really close friend and Darren the prison officer come up and I remember them being on the side of the course. I felt I let everyone down.

They put a lot of time. And I come away from that race, and I realized I didn't have the skills to coach myself. Or the humility. Yeah. You know, the humility is the big lesson there. Going from this stubborn guy who thinks he knows best, you can't be a great athlete without the humility

to be able to take direction from people who want to knows best. You can't be a great athlete without the humility to be able to take direction from people who, who want to help you. Totally. And I had to realize that, but I had to realize it in that moment that had to happen to me. That had to happen. Yeah. Otherwise you're, you're, you were unteachable. Yeah. Right. Totally. So your most impressive world record is perhaps a world record from going from complete novice to over-trained in the shortest period of time. Yeah. I went from like, yeah, I went from like literally zero hours for Ironman training to like 35, 40 hours a week of just, yeah. Just as hard as I could do it. Right. That was always the body can't absorb that much that quickly, but I thought he could. And again, I thought it could because I was thinking,

I rode two hours a day every day in prison on a rail machine. I remember like some of those sessions when I was in prison on those rail machines and I got to like a couple of million meters and it was every day. Like there was no rest days. And my hand, it was like the tendons of my hand become like a claw and you could unclick my fingers. So I knew I had that propensity to push myself that hard. And to me, that suffering of getting up in the morning and feeling like crap because I was over-training was to me an expression of how much I wanted this goal. Cause it was like, I can suffer more than other people. And that really become my Achilles tendon. But it was the best thing that happened to me falling apart that day. Yeah. Better then than now. Right right so it must have taken you a while to climb out of that hole yeah i had to go to

hospital and i had ecgs done to make sure i didn't mess my heart up um i just had a post-viral fatigue um i was very fortunate that my body did kind of over in a couple of months like i didn't stop training completely but but I completely backed off. Like I still, the longest I've not exercised for him since 26 years old or 25 was probably last year. And I had 12 days off completely. I'd done literally no exercise. And that was, it's such an ingrained part of me. Like I couldn't ever imagine not being physically active,

of just doing something. Even that means me getting up and going for like a 10k run or something like that like that was but i've learned that's what i mean i've learned about my body i've learned i need to do that i can't especially as i get a bit older i can't keep sort of like going to the well all the time and pulling the bucket down and i'm trying to just absorb loads and loads and loads of load i have to be a bit more intelligent with stuff yeah i mean I mean, that's quite the arc. Like if you go to your website, like right there on the homepage, it's like you have all the people that, you know, comprise your team that are helping you. So from that guy who's so stubborn, who thinks he knows everything and won't let anybody tell him anything

to having, you know, what I saw when I looked at your website, I was like, oh, that's humility. Like he understands that this is a team effort and that you can't do what you do alone. We have Terry here who, I mean, is this around the time where Terry, you know, comes into your life? No, Terry coming to my life. Well, Terry coming to my life when I was working in the gym, someone was working part-time, Terry was a member and a gym instructor that was helped, like worked with Terry sometimes doing massage with him, come up to me one day, said, see that guy up there,

he's like a sports psychologist and all I had was sport. So he went, I introduced you. So Terry was on like a treadmill and I'd gone up and I've just introduced myself. And I think Terry thought, who is this guy? And then obviously we sat down and I told Terry my backstory.

Go with the crazy eyes. Yeah. He thought, who is this man and stuff and and we just struck up this friendship and terry was like he just he paid an interest in me and that that he wanted to help me and again there was no agenda and then when i used to get out on a sunday i was so far from london because i was i was up in a near just outside der, which is about 200 miles away. So I couldn't commute to London and go back up with my, you'd get like something they call a town visit. You'd be out of prison for 12 hours.

And Terry, me and Terry used to go out for dinner or lunch in the local town. He would take me out for a Sunday dinner and we'd sit there and we'd talk about stuff. And then he was really just part of my journey ever since. And Terry was one of the first people I'd say that i really really did trust like i really opened up and and everything i've gone into doing my life like without him being part of it it wouldn't be where it is today um he's been he's been he's been a massive part role of what i do um and again you it doesn't matter how driven and focused you are you need good people around you to help you reach your potential in life. And it works both ways.

I'm sure Terry's learned things from the experiences that we've been through and vice versa. I mean, it's been amazing to share it with someone else as well. Right, right, right, right. And then you bring on somebody who's triathlon specific. Yeah. Yeah.

And then he's been, yeah, the physical element of it. So we did some training sessions before that Ironman and I fell apart and he knew how fit I was because he saw through some of the training stuff that we were doing together. And then when we did Ironman UK, he finished fourth, fifth overall.

And I finished like a hundredth. And he went, he run past me when I was walking on the marathon. You had your way. Now we know what happens when you do it your way. And he reached out to me and he said look i'll coach you for free i just want to help you just be the best athlete you can be and i've been working with him for the last sort of three three and a bit years so then when was your big breakthrough race probably frankfurt

um yeah that that was quite a step up like and you went nine or something. Nine, nine, nine. Yeah. Like again, I'm always learning. Um, the bike has really been the thing I've been learning the most, like the running, for instance, like my Ironman marathons, like three hours,

I can get off and run a three hour marathon, fairly comfortable. Like it's not really a push. Um, but the bike's been the thing where it's not been the power. It's been the, just the, the been the power it's been the just the the lack of riding years and that the like taking corners too wide breaking too much and that starts adding up a lot over 180k and then sometimes i've looked at races where guys that make my weight um are

putting out similar numbers that i'm putting out and they're like 15 minutes up the road for me and you know you can't give that sort of time away. Yeah. You're not, you're, you have to learn how to translate that engine that you have into speed. And it's, and it is coming. Hopefully it comes in three weeks time. Yeah. I mean, do you live in London proper? Yeah. You do. So where do you go to train and do your long rides? So I'll out to like windsor um so after you leave when you leave mine you've got like a 20 minute a bit of faff with traffic and stuff and then it's kind of just flat fast roads going out to windsor castle or you've got the surrey hills again it's another 15 20 minutes getting out and then you get clear roads around like all around the surrey hills

and stuff which is quite nice running breccia and park down the towpath like that's one of my favorite runs all the way down the tow path. Like you could run from, you can run from basically Putney Southwest London all the way up to Thames. There's actually an ultramath and the Thames 100. It's just up the side of the tow path. Right. Right.

Cool. And, and the swimming you do, there is a pool where you get out and open water. Yeah. You got high park. So you've got the serpentine. Right.

Oh yeah. Almost the other time I just swim in Lido Park. So you've got the Serpentine. Right. Yeah, or most of the other time, I just swim in Lido's. So there's quite a few of them dotted around London. And do you train alone? Yes. What's the community like here? It's quite good. Southwest London,

you tend to find a lot of guys at Kona. The Brownlees live in town here? No, they live up in Leeds. They do. So they're Northerners, but like a lot of- Tim Don's in Boulder. Yeah, Tim, yeah.

But a lot of the um i think he's been tricking my originally he's really grew up yeah he grew up in twickenham that's not that's not too far away from richmond it's about 15 minutes away but a lot of really good ironman triathletes actually live around southwest london so a lot of guys that are very very good age groupers like are based that way so you do get some decent guys going out but i do train on my own a lot yeah you strike me as that you're a lone wolf yeah i don't i i go out i do go out riding sometimes with people and then i think why have i done this it's different if you go out like i'll go out sometimes it's hard sometimes because i've got guys at row and they're very very fit

but then they want to push the pace too much and it's too too too hard the discipline is you gotta you gotta do what what you gotta fulfill the intention for that workout and when you're training for ironman or ultra endurance a lot of that discipline plays into holding back yeah right yeah because everyone it's you know there's a dick measuring contest totally i didn't want to put it like that. But yeah, we would just say it's like willy waving. Everyone would just like see how quick they can go up a climb and then they all blow up. And then you're all sort of, they're limping back coming.

Like the other week I went riding with a friend of mine out to Henley. It's like a hundred mile ride. And I said, are you sure you want to come? He went, yeah, yeah, I'll sit on your wheel. So I said, okay. So we were averaging like 35K an hour and he's on the back wheel. And and we got to this like open stretch of road and he's come

out behind me about 60 counts of ride tore off right and i thought what i'll do i'll just keep him that 10 minute gap just do a bit of practicing so i'm not drafting him it's a bit of iron man work and he's looking behind and he thinks he's dropped me and i'm thinking oh go on i don't go and he's looking behind and i can tell he thinks i've dropped him so i thought well I'm just gonna have to let him see now so I've come up into his wheel closed the gap and then just tore around him and gone yeah and he's like wow like he can't you weren't supposed to that wasn't part of what you were supposed to be doing that but you can't help it I just what happened to him when we were coming back he was quite tanned and I looked at him and he started going like do you see someone going ash white and i said you're right he's like yeah yeah yeah and then he went no i'm not even i really feel bad can we stop and

get a mars bar and we used to be able to pull over to the side of the shop and he he got and that so that's probably a lot a lot of the reasons why i don't like training with other people well here you are today and you have fulfilled this promise this aspiration that you articulated to the parole board of being a professional athlete. I mean, you are a professional athlete. You're a Nike sponsored athlete. You're the only triathlete triathlete that Nike sponsors, right? Ironman triathlete. Wow, man. How did that come together? Um, how can I put this rich? It was like, it was, it was like a fairy tale it was like honestly it was one of the biggest things in my life

as an achievement a man that was in prison at 26 that said I want to be a professional athlete people laughed at people said you'll never be able to do it you took up sport too late, you'll never do it when you get out of prison you're a prisoner, you'll re-offend

it was hard when you get out, you'll never be able to do it. You took up sports too late. You'll never do it when you get out of prison. You're a prisoner. You'll re-offend. It was hard when you get out. Like, you'll never be able to do that. Like, you're just slipping through all crowds and you're stuck getting involved in robberies. And that hit me. And then, but out of prison, over-trained, got sick, made decisions to get a coach,

carried on it, believing every day. I honestly, there's one thing I visualized and believed every day, everything I was doing would pay off. I knew it. I knew it. I didn't there's one thing I, I visualized and believed every day, everything I was doing would pay off. I knew it. I knew it. I didn't know what it would be. And I just, where does that knowingness come from? Self-belief. I always believe whatever I put my mind at, I believed when I was a kid that I'd be a multimillionaire. I believed I, I've just always had it in me, this intrinsic thing that it's the overwhelming need to want to

do something great with my life, um, from being a young kid. And that's that belief that I could do it. I've never lacked belief. Like my mum said this to me recently. She said, even when I was little, she would take me to that summer camp and all of these kids would be in a corner and they'd all be like looking around and never knew what to do. And I'll just go off on my own and do it. So like there's rock climbing, everyone there we wait for the thing i'll put the thing on and i'll just climb the wall and then sometimes i didn't put the safety on so they go mad at me but i've always had that in me like i would always be very assertive and i'll be like bang i'm gonna do it and do it from being a young boy and and i had that belief and i remember i was

out of prison for two years i over trained and I was around my mum's one day. And I remember like, I was talking to my mum about it and I said like, I can't, I cannot and will not give up on this. And I had the CCG box on my heart from the hospital. They went to my unit for 24 hours and I went, I know mum, it will pay off. And my mum said, just carry on doing what you're doing and follow your dream, do not stop.

And I didn't. And I went up and I raced again the following year and I had a much better result. And then last, the Christmas before last, Terry, that has obviously been a massive part of my life, he acts as a bit of a firewall. He runs my website. And every day we ring each other up in the morning

and he says, these are the emails that have come through last night or yesterday and we talk about maybe a school wants me to go and do a talk a prison whatever it is it'd be something and he said now i'm about to say something it's going to change the rest of your life so i said what and he went to me guess who sent us an email last night? And I went, who? He went, guess. And I went, who? And he went, it's a massive brand. And again, it wouldn't even compute.

And I said, who? He said, Nike. And I was like, no, I don't believe you. He went, I'm going to send you the email. And he forwarded the email one. And it was a guy called Dan Smith that worked in London, head of track and field. And he basically said that they become aware of my story and they they felt inspired and at the time i had

like a relationship where i was an ambassador for a clothing range it was another sportswear company called craft and they were giving me like t-shirts and stuff to raise him and dan said in the thing like have you got any contractual obligations and Terry said to me on the phone he went look do you want to talk to him or should I and I said I trust you implicitly you talk to him so Terry rang him up and had a conversation with him and it was to and fro to and fro to and fro then it went really cold and I was like saying Terry like this means everything I to me what I'm trying to do in my life like this could aid so much to it rich not just as an athlete but what it allows me to do and what it represents and and it went cold it heated back up and then they said to Terry can

John come into the London office and do a talk to the staff so me and Terry go down to Soho and do this talk for an hour. And at the end, there was a hundred of them in there. It was like a little cinema. And they was all sitting down on the aisles and in the chairs. And literally there was a line of them coming out and every single one of them shook my hand when they left. And they said, like, it's incredible. And then Dan was standing next to me and he went,

I have seen them, I've seen them being spoken to by some massive athletes and he went i have never ever ever seen them react to someone like that and i said to terry when we left that talk i said do you think like that's got me over the line with him and terry says you're in and in two weeks later dan emails back and says can john come out to the netherlands and talk at our European conference? It'd be about 850 people from like global. So people from the States would come into it. Terry says to me, can you go?

I had to ask my probation officer and I said, look, the Nike want me to go out there. So they said, she said, look, you can go. So he cleared it. I'll go out to the Netherlands. We go to this auditorium the day before where we're going to do a practice run of what we're going to do that day and then i meet this guy called edgar and i didn't realize how powerful he was within the brand so he's head of vp marketing

in europe so he's one of the most powerful influential man in nike within europe so i meet him and we go for the stress rehearsal so we're going to open up this massive conference, these 850 people. And it was called the path from within. So it was about normal people achieving extraordinary things. No one in this auditorium would know anything about me because no one knew about me in the brand. Like we're all new to them.

So we do our dress rehearsal and then we go out for dinner that night. So we're sitting in this restaurant in Amsterdam and Edgar's sitting next to me. And he was saying to me about, do you know how we sponsored you? So I said, Dan, he said, no. He said, I was reading about you at an airport in Holland, in Schiphol.

And I read this sports supplement and I got halfway through and I put the paper down. I got my phone out and I sent an email to London. I said, find that man and sponsor him. And he was talking to me and he was telling me a story about years before that,

when he was a young guy working at Nike, when he first, he'd been in the brand at 32 years. And he said, there was a, an ice skater in Holland, in the Netherlands. And he said,

the man was beautiful, charismatic, charming, good looking, outspoken. And I went to the brand and I said about sponsoring him and at the time Nike didn't sponsor ice skaters and he went I always regretted that we never got him and the next year become Olympic champion European champion and he went to become this massive superstar in Holland and I always thought damn right if only I'd have got him and he went i always promised myself if i ever got to a position in the brand where i could make that decision i'd make it

and he went and when i saw you my heart told me it was the right thing to do and and that's how it all sort of come about and and and when they reached out to me initially obviously as an athlete it's the pinnacle like. Like Lance Armstrong was a massive hero of mine in prison when I read his books, Nike, Michael Jordan, Mo Farah, Paula Radcliffe, all of these endurance athletes that I aspire to be like were all under that brand. a dream. What I really come to realize, the power that that has, that night swoosh when you go into schools is unbelievable to young people. And I make a conscious effort when I go to schools and I talk to young people, I do not scare them into crime, not committing it because it does not work. It's fact. It's been proven time and time again, you can't scare them. But every kid wants to be a Nike athlete. Yes.

Or there's a rapper or musician or an actor that is wearing that. They see that as success. They don't care about Ironman. They don't care about the records. They see the swoosh. And when you're part of that, you're part of like the England football team.

All of these things that these kids are seeing as being successful. And I can demonstrate to them, and i don't preach i just explain i say this is a set of decisions i chose to make as a young man this is what happened then at that point when i decided to do that this is what's happened you don't need to do that to achieve your dreams in life you can do positive things with your life and you can achieve your dreams that doesn't mean every kid's going to be an athlete but that night's which to me was my dream and i said if i've managed to achieve that in my life from being that kid that was ripped off and spent all those years in prison and i've made my dream become real you can make your dreams become reality

and the proof's in the pudding and when you can demonstrate it and show that to those young people it is such a powerful thing like i've gone into assemblies where there's been like six seven hundred kids and you can hear the gasps when you turn around at the end and say, and you go click the slide, last slide, the night's wish. And they're like, and they all stand up and stand in ovation. Like, and it's so powerful to really connect into some of the most disenfranchised young people in the country. Yeah. And it's symbolically just underscores the incredible arc of your journey because you are in a situation where, you know, few people get that low and there's, there's few things, you know, more heralded or, or, you know, more coveted than being a Nike sponsored athlete.

Like it's just, you know, that point to the, you know, from A to Z is insane. And beyond that, like, let's not forget the compressed time period that we're talking about here. This wasn't 20 years ago. When did you get out of prison? 2012? 2012, yeah, the end. It's like, you know, it's like, that was yesterday, man. Do you know what? When I was writing the book, so I was fortunate I got an opportunity to write a book and it was really, really sort of,

when I got the opportunity, it was hard to take it because I knew I was going to leave myself wide open to be critiqued and people to criticize, but I knew that book would be a key to a door that would give me a platform to do good with the rest of my life and and I kind of and it was the reason why I sort of chose to do it and the ghost writer that did it with me um we that we did these sittings we used to do two sittings every month and the book was written quite quick it was written within four months five months but we do these sittings and i'd be telling them and sometimes i have to be

quite honest with you i would be i wouldn't be sort of as open with some of the stories to because it embellished stuff like i didn't really want to put too much detail in some of the stories because i thought um i'd be involving other people that i didn't really i wanted to keep the book all about sort of me and not talk about people because i knew it could open up pandora's box of causing me issues later on in my life and stuff and so i i was very controlled with how the book was written and and i was very sort of mindful about what i said and and i remember like you sit there sometimes and like you you could see he was like thinking really like and then um and it happened he never met no one else in the story and then he met terry and then him and terry met

each other at one of my races and he was having a conversation with terry and he was like is this for real right terry was like so he wasn't buying it no he thought you're full he kind of i think in some ways he thought it was all pre-planned like i was a sociopath like i was thinking about this later on in my life like when i was in prison i was like i'm gonna do this and do that do this uh-huh and then he he couldn't get well i think the thing that he really struggled with was a lot of people helped me um for nothing he couldn't get that he he he everything sort of about money it was like but they must have seen i was they must have seen something in it like there must have been something in it they must

have seen there was an opportunity in them to help themselves later on i was no there wasn't there was none of that like darren didn't do what he'd done all these years ago thinking that i'd be where i am today terry didn't think six years ago where i'd be where i am today like well what's happened there wasn't and and and in sometimes we would sit there as I said do these sittings with him and he generally didn't believe it and and then once he got involved then what's happened afterwards he brings me up now um and like he's my life has never been normal like from being a young clearly yeah it hasn't even i can admit that that's some like rich like not many people know this so um last year i got invited to the house's parliament

to meet the minister to talk about using sport in prisons and in the community to stop kids from making bad decisions right the meeting ends she says to me would you like to come on the veranda of parliament to come to this boxing event so i said yeah so we walked through i'll go to this boxing event and it was a bit of a showcase it was about more boxing clubs in london to get more kids engaged in sport there was at all these young gb olympic boxers they was all doing the q a um there was a young muslim guy there from bolton and he wasn't very articulate guy said to him why did you take up boxing and he went because i didn't want to be a bum sitting on the streets taking drugs and he went when i was a kid i watched amir khan fight the

olympics when he was 16 and i looked and he was like at that time he was eight nine years old and he went when i'm when i'm that age i want to go to olympics and fight for my country and win a gold medal anyway he went to rio he come forth and he was gutted and he went when when I'm that age, I want to go to the Olympics and fight for my country and win a gold medal. Anyway, he went to Rio. He come fourth and he was gutted. And he went, when I go back to Tokyo, I'm going to win a gold medal for Britain. And I thought, this kid is incredible. Like, he's amazing. He's everything what sport is to me.

And then I left. And as I was walking out for the car park of Parliament to get a taxi, they're all just screaming, look up. car park a parliament to get a taxi they're all just screaming look up and like from here 10 feet away um i walked straight into the middle of a terrorist the terrorist attack at west minster and i watched the guy get shot dead and i saw the policeman running towards me and collapsed on the floor and he obviously i didn't realize at the time the guy had stabbed him stabbed him to death but i didn't i didn't see that part of it i just saw the guy getting shot and and i remember i got locked in parliament at night the whole thing was on a lockdown it was completely like you can imagine all the politicians we all got put in this like

room and then we all got locked there to like 10 o'clock that evening and then when i left and you're actually kind of mentally and emotionally equipped to handle this in a way that everybody else isn't. But even, even, even I, even when, when it happened is because you're in an environment where you don't expect to see what you're about to see. Um, and, and that was the thing that took me out. But what happened when, when I left that night, I remember they let us out one at a time and they took all our names and addresses and details. And they said, have you witnessed anything witnessed anything and i said i saw the guy shooting and then they all stopped and i was like because they didn't expect someone do you know you just don't expect the policeman's taking notes from everyone and then one guy says you actually saw it and he's like what so he took

my name address and he said okay we're going to class you as a priority witness because you've actually witnessed the event and i remember walking out the houses of parliament and it was about half 10 11 o'clock at night and the streets were dead. Like there was no one walking around. There was cordons and you could see blue lights flashing, but there was no sirens. It was dead. And I remember walking out there and I thought there is no way on earth I saw that for no reason. There was no way, like the chances of me being there

that moment, being with all those Islamic suicide bombers all those years before, listening to that young Muslim kid talk about what sport meant to him and then coming out and then witnessing that, the chances of me being there were so small that I thought, like, I don't believe in God, but I genuinely believe there's something where I was meant to be I don't believe in God, but I genuinely believe there's something

where I was meant to be, don't see what I saw, because it made me unbelievably driven to continue doing what I'm doing. I can remember that I walked home and I woke up the next morning and there was a guy that was with me, he was in the army that day, and he tried to save the policeman's life. And he was a guy that was with me. He was in the army that day. And he tried to save the policeman's life.

And he was a battle-trained medic, like been to Sandhurst, been out to Afghanistan, battle-hardened, like he was a hard man in that regard. And I said to him, there is a reason why me and you were there and saw what we saw to continue doing what we're doing. And he delivers lots of courses into prisons because what I saw that day

was a man that was disenfranchised with society, that hated the system. I chose to attack it through taking money from it. He chose to attack it for committing terrorism. But somewhere along the line, he got lost somewhere and someone come into his life and warped what he thought was right and wrong.

And in my head, I thought that is totally totally preventable you can stop that stuff from happening by stopping those people from having that mindset where someone negative can come in and not brainwash them but completely warp what is right and wrong yeah it begins with the disenfranchisement exactly you know and if you're too late to address that, it's too late. And that stuff happens. But that's a profound awareness. I mean, that synchronicity of events is pretty remarkable. You know, it's almost surprising to hear you say that you don't believe in God, given like what you've experienced and how far you've come. And when events like that, that seemingly don't make sense on paper occur,

it's hard for me to hear that and not think that there is a purpose and a plan and some kind of, you know, map laid out for you. Do you know what, what was, what was quite powerful? I did a book festival last year, like November, and it was in a very affluent area of the country, one of the most expensive places to live. And they invited me to go down and do sort of a talk about the book and the Q&A. And I've gone in the room and I said, what's the demographic for the area? And they went, you probably won't get anyone under the age of 60, wealthy retired um very white middle to upper class so we they start letting the guests in and i'm sitting there and i'm looking around

like all these old people and i'm like they're gonna they're really gonna start trying to grill me on the q a at the end and what happened was when we finished, they come up and they were offering me money. They were saying like, we want to give you money like for what you're doing. And I was saying, look, I can't take your money, but when my foundation's up. Yeah, you got to have a foundation. Yeah, that went live a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, wow. And I said, look, I can't take money from you. But when it's set up, please donate to it and the money will go to sort of working with young people and then um a priest come up to me and he went can i ask you something i said what he said has your book got a religious connotation to it redemption and i said no and he said are you religious and i said said, no. I said, I used to be, but I kind of, I fell out of love with, I grew up as a Catholic, but I lost that when I went to prison, if I'm honest.

And the reason why, before I ever used to commit a crime, I always used to pray that I'd get away with it. And I know it sounds bizarre, but I did. I did. Like my stepdad was really catholic my nan and granddad devoutly um and I got arrested and I went to prison and that completely and utterly switched me off I didn't believe in it from that moment onwards and he put his hand on my shoulder and he went to me I have never seen a man put on earth to do what you're doing right now even it's so clear to me when and you might not believe in god even but i believe god's got a bigger plan for you and and again i don't i don't believe but it was quite a powerful moment where i was like that's that's that's and he was looking at me and i was like wow like i didn't know really know what to say because it's it was something so above me where he could quite he could see something what I'm trying to do in my life today

that I've been put here for a purpose and I and like I said I believe I don't believe in God but I do believe things happen for a reason and I think I was there what I saw that day and I think my stepdad coming into my life when I was a kid the people that I met in prison um my stepdad taught me a lot of good things you I can't just blame him for sort of warping my perspective of life he taught me a lot of skills when I was a kid that evaded me as an adult um one was never just hang around with criminals when I was a young boy he went always make sure you mix with different groups of people and that's allowed me then to be able to converse with different groups of people all the time and not be like, I can only talk to like criminals

or I can only talk to school kids. Right. Well, I would echo that priest sentiment. You know, I can certainly understand why your relationship with Catholicism fell out of grace, but I think there's a difference between religious dogma and having a spiritual connection to something greater than yourself. And I would certainly, you know, echo his thoughts in saying that you're on the path that you're meant to be

on. It's super inspiring, man. And it's quite a remarkable tale. And we got to land this plane, but I got to know, what's going on with the crime syndicate now? And how's your mom? The crime syndicates fell away. Basically, all of them are in prison. All of them are in prison. My stepdad's never been out since I went in when I was a teenager.

Do you go and visit? Do you stay in contact or you completely? I cut them all out. I cut all my dad's side of the family out. I see you see my mom's side, but my mom's side were all legitimate. My co-defendant, he got released from prison recently i found out but yeah everyone else is they're either in prison or dead um and my mum my mum's good i see my mum all the time i'm still really close to her and she gets all the trophies and medals and everything

they're all around the house in vases and but yeah my mum's mega supportive and i think it's so nice now to make my mum proud of what i'm doing but my mum was always proud of me even when even when i was in that high security prison unit i remember she come up and she's left one of the visits one day and she said to me it was one of the only times she saw me in prison but the first time she was like i'm so proud of you and i was like yeah mum yeah, she's a, yeah, she's your mom. Like mom's lovely. You go unconditionally and she always has. And it's so nice now, like when the neighbors say, I saw Jonathan on TV or the radio or sees me in the magazine that she buzzes off it. Yeah, of course.

Wow. That's so, it's such an incredible story and I feel like it's just beginning for you. Thank you. That's the beautiful thing is like this whole thing is just starting, you know, and I see a rich future ahead for you and the opportunity to impact a lot of lives. Thank you. So what is the, to kind of end this, you know, what is the one sort of sentiment that you want to make sure you impart to somebody who might be listening to this, who is struggling or can't find their way forward? You know, I'm not talking about necessarily somebody who's incarcerated, but, you know, somebody who just feels stuck in their life and is frustrated and feels like opportunity has eluded them.

and feels like opportunity has eluded them? I think that you, I think it's quite simple. And I know it's just never give up and always believe it can get better because it can. And I think life is so precious and you're alive and you're breathing. And one day we won't. So you're winning the battle because you're still

breathing and i believe that every day like there's days i get up and you have a bit of an off day and you just but you have to be appreciative i was out my bike the other day and i was riding along i thought wow i'm alive and i love this life life so lovely it's precious is we're here the chances of us being here right now are trillions and trillions of when you've probably got more chance to win a lottery a million times over than us actually breathing air so just be appreciative of it and and just believe that can always get better no matter how dark that hole is you can always get out of it and and i've done it and if i've done it and i don't think i'm any different to anyone else like if i've managed to do it anyone can do anything in life i think

that's a good way to end it thanks thanks for talking to me man thanks rich um really incredible uh much luck in the upcoming iron man what are the other races you're doing this summer i'm challenge almera in the netherlands uh-huh and is the uh is the goal to qualify for kona or what's you know what is the kind of longer term just to finish as high up in the field as I possibly can and be in the mix of everyone. Right, right on. And try to break that sub-three-hour marathon in an Ironman. All right, cool.

That's been a big deal. All right, well, come back and talk to me next time I'm in London. Thanks, Rich. Or let me know if your parole officer lets you come to LA. All right, if you're digging on John, the best way to connect with him, at John McAvoy, pretty much everywhere, right? And johnmcavoy.com.

Yeah. That's it, right? And are you ever doing like talks to the public where people can come and see you? Like, do you have a schedule on your website, public appearances? Not at the moment. I do mostly school stuff, but yeah, I'll probably in the future, I'll probably start doing a bit more public speaking in the context of like events, but normally it's either schools, prisons, or maybe sort of business talks. Right. And tell me, remind me the name of the book um redemption redemption yeah just add all all all my offers royalties and profits go into school projects so is there a different uh website for the foundation uh not currently no so you go to my website all the information will be on there

cool all right man thank you much love take care all right peace See you guys on my website. All the information will be on there. Cool. All right, man. Thank you. Much love, brother. Take care. All right, peace. I don't know about you guys, but I was profoundly impacted by that conversation. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. But more than that, I really hope that it touched something in you, that it catalyzed a shift in your perspective

about your own life, your relationship with gratitude, and perhaps the internal limiter that you place on your own capabilities. But more than anything, my hope is that you take what you heard today and you translate it into positive action for yourself and for the benefit of others. Do me a favor, let John know what you thought of today's conversation. You can find him on Twitter at John McAvoy2, J-O-H-N McAvoy2, or on Instagram at JohnnyMac83,

but that's J-O-N-N-Y Mac 83, no H. And give him a push for his upcoming Ironman. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. While you're at it, check out John's book, no H. And give him a push for his upcoming Ironman. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. While you're at it, check out John's book, Redemption. There's a link in the show notes to that. Check out the show notes, as always, where I have all kinds of resources to take your experience of this conversation

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Normally, I thank Blake and Margo, Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for video and editing, but there was no video on this show, but they did generate graphics. So thank you for that. And theme music, as always, by Anna Lemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with another amazing episode. And until then, be grateful.

If you got one thing out of today's conversation, it's that we should all be grateful for the freedoms that we have, for our ability to move our body. Until then, be well, much love, peace, plants. Namaste. be well much love peace plants Thank you.