The Rich Roll Podcast - On Sobriety, Prison & His Quest to Become The Fastest Human To Run Across The United States

Episode Date: January 9, 2014

People ask me all the time, “Who inspires you, Rich?” For the most part, the people that inspire me are people you've never heard of. Everyman guys like Josh LaJaunie who toil tirelessly yet essentially anonymously to actualize profound personal change. The single dad working two jobs that still finds a way to lose 50 pounds, get off his statin medication and run his first 10K. Or the soldier stationed in the Middle East doing his best to eat plant-based despite confronting tremendous daily obstacles. Then there are guys like Charlie. The story of Charlie Engle first found it's way into my consciousness back around 2006 or 2007. I still vividly recall hearing Charlie relate the facts of his experience in a radio interview he did with a host I cannot recall. What I do recall is just how moved I was by his journey. A story that didn't just click with me, but one I related to with every fiber of who I am. Addict. Alcoholic. Sober. Ultrarunner. Father. Felon. Inspiration. Charlie is a man of very high highs and very low lows. A man with addiction and athletic stories of Gilgamesh proportions that make Finding Ultra sound like pre-school recess. An alcoholic crack addict essentially living out of his car, it took gunshots in his Toyota 4-Runner and the birth of his son in 1992 to finally get sober. Ultrarunning became the focus of his affections, an affair that took him to stunning heights and accolades, the nadir being an unprecedented 111-day run across the Sahara Desert with compadres Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin — a feat chronicled in the Matt Damon narrated documentary entitled Running the Sahara. Life was pretty good. Certainly not entirely balanced, but hey, nobody's perfect. He had done some amazing things. Maybe he had a shot at some modicum of happiness after all. Then came quite possibly the most improbable, unpredictable challenge he could ever imagine facing. A saga with all the trappings of a bad B-movie. An obsessed local IRS agent illogically hell-bent on justice. Wire taps. Garbage probes. And the requisite wily female dispatched to enchant and entrap. A saga culminating in a federal conviction for mortgage fraud for misstating income on so-called “liar loan” documents (something hundreds of thousands of people did), Charlie heads to Beckley Federal Prison in West Virginia. A poster child for everything awry with the mortgage backed security crisis and fallout of recent years, Charlie serves 16 months. How do you survive something like that? And yet Charlie comes out the other side not just intact, but quite possibly more whole than when he entered. A man changed by the experience, but maybe more attuned to what really matters. And a man running better than ever. Just one year after his release, Charlie returned to the Badwater 135 to clock a 5th place finish and break the master's world record by over 3 hours. Next up? Aside from getting married this weekend, Charlie will attempt to run across the United States faster than any human being ever has previously. A feat he calls Run 2 Boston, Charlie and wheelchair athlete extraordinaire André Kajlic will line up at the LA Marathon on March 9, complete the 26.2 miles and then just keep going. And going. Until they reach Boston, where they will run that marathon. All in an effort to raise funds and awareness for the victim's of last year... Read more HERE. Enjoy! Rich

Welcome to Episode 67 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Charlie Engel. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, Rich Roll here. It's the Rich Roll Podcast, the first one of 2014. Happy New Year, everybody. Rich Roll here. It's the Rich Roll Podcast, the first one of 2014. Happy New Year, everybody. Hope you guys had a great holiday season. I certainly did. What do we do here? Well, each week, except for the last two weeks. Sorry about that, you guys. Hey, man, I need a little vacation too. I need a little bit of a break. I've been overcommitted. My intention was to make sure that there was a new podcast every week, but things got really crazy and just I overestimated, or I should say, yeah, I overestimated what I was going

to be able to deliver. So sorry about that, but that will not happen again. It is a new year. And one of my strong convictions for this year is to really turn the volume up on the podcast. That is my focus, getting you the best guests and of course, never missing doing at least one per week. And at the beginning of January of each year, that's the time of year where you sort of sit down and take stock of your life. What's working? What's not? What do I need to discard? What should I turn the volume up on? And we can always use a little inspiration, right? It's always nice to hear the story of

somebody who has done something extraordinary, maybe done something even so extraordinary, you didn't even think it was possible that a human being could accomplish that. And today's guest certainly fits that bill. Charlie Engel is a guy who I have admired from afar for quite some time. He's a great source of inspiration to me, somebody whose story I've followed for many, many years. But until today, I had actually never met him in person. We were both at Badwater this last year. I didn't actually meet him. I've spoken to him on the phone, et cetera, and actually could have interviewed him via Skype some months ago,

but I really wanted to do it in person. And I'm so glad that he was passing through Los Angeles today en route to Big Sur, where he's getting married in a couple days, which is cool, to sit down and chat with me. And we had an amazing conversation in excess of two hours. So many points of commonality and interest that I have with him, I could have literally spoken to him all day. Everything from alcoholism and addiction recovery

to our love of ultra running to this search, this ongoing search for a balanced existence and what does it mean to be happy and content uh how do you sort of pursue a healthy relationship with your partner um what is it like to write your memoir he's in the middle of writing a book called running in place about his experiences we talk course, about some of his big races, like running the Gobi Desert and running Badwater, which this past year he broke the master's record and got fifth place.

You might, if you've never heard of Charlie Engel, you might have some knowledge of one thing he did, which is he was one of the three guys who ran across the Sahara Desert a couple years ago. And it was documented in a documentary, not surprisingly, called Running the Sahara, where over 111 days, Charlie and two other guys traversed the entire Sahara Desert in this wonderful documentary that's narrated by Matt Damon, that I believe you can get on Netflix, or you should be able to find it anywhere. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. It's pretty remarkable. We talk about that,

and we talk about Charlie's next big adventure, which is that he is on the cusp of attempting to break the world record for the fastest transcontinental run. In other words, he's going to try to be the fastest person to ever run across the United States. And he's kicking that off on March 9th. He's going to run the Los Angeles Marathon. And then he's going to keep going. And he's going to go and go and go until he gets all the way to Boston and run the Boston Marathon. He's doing this to honor and

raise awareness and funds for the victims of the Boston shootingathon. He's doing this to honor and raise awareness and funds for the victims of the Boston shooting from the previous year. And he's doing it along with a guy named Andre, I think you say Kreilich, who is a disabled athlete who is going to try to break the wheelchair record for fastest person to wheel across the United States. So that's kind of amazing that they're partnering up to do this together. We talk about that. But what is really kind of distinctive and amazing about Charlie

are these incredible high highs and low lows of his personal life. Everything from, you know, suffering from crack addiction and, you know, essentially living in his truck and getting shot at to the high highs of crossing the Sahara or, you know, winning some crazy ultra marathon to then being incarcerated, being convicted of mortgage fraud and going to prison for 16 months, federal prison. It's fascinating to hear him talk about what it was like to be incarcerated and how he navigated that experience while keeping his head high and retaining a positive attitude, not just retaining a positive attitude, but exuding it to the extent that he was able to inspire his fellow inmates. He continued his running. He even did his own self-styled bad

water race, running around the prison yard until he had completed 135 miles. And in so doing, getting some of his fellow inmates out and running themselves and some of the personal sort of stories of some of his friends in prison is quite touching and interesting in its own right. So a remarkable, epic life story, a very dynamic personality, someone who definitely knows how to spin a yarn. As talented as he is running, his greater talent may be his compelling and dynamic personality. But anyway, he is a great guy. Again, I am grateful that he took the time to sit down with me to share with you guys his story. And I find it to be very inspiring and a great way to kick off 2014. So I hope you enjoy it.

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, introducing Charlie Ingle. 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, an 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, 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. 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. How are you doing? I'm doing great. There's a lot going on right now. There is, man. I appreciate you taking the time to swing by the house on your way north. Well, based on this beautiful setting right here, you can ask me to swing by anytime you like. Right.

It's cool. We're sitting in the garage. It's got to be like 74 degrees out or something like that. We have the door rolled up, which is why you can hear the leaf blower guy or whatever's going on. Yeah, I think it's 74 in North Carolina too right now. Negative 74, maybe. Beautiful day here. I know the rest of the world is gripped in a polar vortex,

but we're pretty lucky here. I feel bad for them right now, but I'm going to let that go just for the minute and just enjoy where I am. Right. Be present, Charlie. Right? Wait.

Have you been talking to Astasiana back there? Because being present has not been easy for me lately. It's not my default, but I've been told that it's a better way to live that way. I hear that, too. I'm going to try it sometime. So you're getting married. I am. I'm getting married in three days.

So a Saturday up in Big Sur to a woman, Nastassia Hatcher, sitting over here. Sitting behind you. I can verify that she's quite lovely. I'm just really glad that she hasn't gotten a chance to speak to all that many people who know me up until now. That's why you're racing to marry her as soon as possible before she finds out. Trying to keep things isolated. Good, man. And there's so much to talk about. I just tweeted out that we were going to sit down and talk,

and I'm just thinking there's so many things I want to talk to you about. We could be here all day. I mean, so many points of interest and relatability from the addiction story, the recovery story, the ultra running, the epic sort of adventures that you have in the works right now. I mean, I don't even know where to start. But I guess what I'd like to start with is what's about to happen. You're about to embark on this cross-country run,

this attempt to break the world record for fastest guy to run across the United States. So let's talk about that a little bit. Great. Yeah, I'm calling it Run to Boston, and it's because I'm running to Boston. Yeah, right. It's a very creative title, Charlie. That's the way I work. So no, but I'm, uh, along with, uh, a good friend of mine, Andre Kylick, uh, we are going to begin at the LA marathon when the gun goes off and run the

marathon in LA. Unfortunately it goes, that's March 2nd, March 9th, March 9th. And unfortunately it goes, uh, East to West. You're going to have to double back. Which is really annoying. I mean, it seems like such a small amount of distance, but it goes east to west. Well, if you miss breaking this world record by four hours or so, then we can point our finger at that, right? That would be bad. But we need the mileage anyway, so it's actually okay. So we'll start there, run to Santa Monica, and symbolically be at the coast right there,

and then turn around and head back when everybody else is enjoying their beer and bagels, and continue running that day. Andre is actually... Andre Kraslik. It's actually Kylik. Kylik. Yeah, and Andre, I wrote about him several months ago in Runner's World. I did a feature for Runner's World about Andre.

He and I met in Brazil just a year ago doing the Brazil 135, sort of a Badwater sister event over there. And I come across this guy 20 miles into the race who's in a wheelchair, and he's going up this incredibly steep climb and i'm like i'm seeing him like i'm seeing a i don't know some sort of you know ghost out in the middle of the of the jungle i get closer and and indeed he is in a wheelchair so he's like it's like an off-road wheelchair exactly he's put off-road wheels on this somewhat standard racing style wheelchair, a little more upright than the ones you see like in the Boston Marathon.

And he's going up this hill. He's actually got a guy with him, a crew member who has a knee in his back. So he's not helping him at all, but he's making sure that when he rolls forward six inches that he doesn't roll back. He's going to ask if there's some kind of braking mechanism to prevent you from going backwards. There's not. He needs to work on that.

And I come up and I speak to him for just a second, and I continue on up the mountain, and I'm with a friend of mine, Chris Roman. We're running next to each other and Tony Portera. Two guys have done Badwater before many times. And I will freely admit, I turned and looked at them and I said, there is no way in hell that that guy is going to make it to the finish line. It wasn't a...

How many miles in were you? Yeah, we're like 20 miles in. Oh, right. And I know what's coming. We hit these jungle portions where there were muddy single track. I mean, not the kind of thing you can be in any sort of chair. Right. When he got out of his chair, tethered the wheelchair to a tether,

literally went on the ground. He'd go 50 feet up, pull the wheelchair up behind him, go another 50 feet, pull it up. Anyway, 62 hours later later he finishes this race and i went and asked him if he would mind if i you know pitched a story to runner's world about him and he said sure and i did and they loved the idea and he was the he was the first in a series of stories that I'm doing called Hard One Wisdom, where most of the article is really their own words, quotes from them. But Andre and I started talking about, I told him, I said, you know, something I'd really like to do is to take another shot, because in 2008, I tried to

break this same record. So I'd like to take another shot at the Transcontinental record. Would you be interested? I just asked him if he'd be interested in doing it because i thought it might be cool for you know for a guy uh in his position to take a shot at that record too he calls me back a couple of days later and he's the one who said hey i was i was just looking at the calendar and did you know that the la marathon and the boston marathon are 44 days apart this year. I'm like, wow, that sounds like a terrible idea. Let's do that.

Well, the thing about that too is that at least the cross-country running record is, what is it, 46 days? It's close to that, right? But the cross-country wheelchair record is like 71 days or something like that. So he's looking at, oh yeah, I'm going to cut this in half. Yeah, I don't want to be overconfident on his part because he wouldn't like it but i mean i think no well yes pun intended the wheels would have to come off for him to not break it right because he's just you know he won the he won kona and the uh hand cycle division a couple of years ago, not this past year but the year before,

and he's just a tough guy, you know, and his story is amazing. You know, he lost his legs, wasn't born that way and didn't fight in any wars, you know, had a crazy, almost unexplainable accident in Prague, uh, went out with some friends and had a few cocktails and went his own separate way later that night and ended up falling off a plane train platform onto the tracks and got run over by five subway cars. And, you know, it took one of his legs all the way up to the hip and the other one mid

femur and broke every rib on one side and i mean there's absolutely no no logical reason that that he should still be alive after that accident but he you know he's gone on to not just live a full life but a you but really a fully functional or more than functional life. And so I'm excited to have some company like him. It's very humbling. And I think, again, that he's actually going to attempt this record on a basically stock wheelchair, like a street wheelchair. You're kidding.

Not with the zip wheels on it and the whole thing? No, no. Why is that? Why is he handicapping himself further? I think it's a message in a way. I mean, he wants to say, because these racing wheelchairs are really expensive. There's a lot of folks out there who are in wheelchairs. And the idea that you can't have exercise or that you

can't be active because of that is something that he feels very strongly is not the case. And so, you know, he'll have to make some modifications and it may not be, you know, fully stock, but it will certainly be as close to it as he can make it. Wow. That's amazing. And just, you know, in case people are not comprehending what we're talking about here, the intention is to, you're basically going to have to cover about 70 miles every single day in order to cross the country in 44 days. And that's running or wheelcharing, rolling 70 miles every single day without any rest day. So how do you even begin to approach that, not just physically, but mentally?

Those people that know me know that the mental part of it is, that is the big question. And it may just be that I don't have enough going on up there to really think about it. Right. I mean, to backtrack, when you ran across the Sahara, that was, what, 111 days or something like that, right? So you've gone more days, but that was around 40-some-odd miles a day, right? It was going to be a record. If we could make it all the way across, which, of course, we did, it was going to be a record.

Whether it took 75 days or 150 days, it would be a record. So when the inevitable logistical or physical problems came up, they didn't really curtail the possibility of the record. The only thing that would do that would be if Libya hadn't led us into Libya. In this case, and if we had a bad day in Africa, we could, in fact, I could call it, you know, a short day. I could say, okay, today we're going to do 40 miles instead of 50 or whatever. And that's just not the case with run to Boston. You know, we, we, we have to cover 70 miles every day. And I, I made a lot of mistakes in 2008. When you and Marshall were doing that run across the U.S. Yeah, I just, it was, you know, one thing is I spent a ridiculous amount of time before that expedition.

I mean, for six months having to deal with almost every aspect of the production. There was a film. There was, you know, me dealing with my own training and all of that. And I really just didn't. We had a great production company, Next Productions, that was doing the production of the film. And they were awesome. But I was really left alone for all the rest of it. This time I have a partner in Andre who is equal in his approach to the way we're doing this. And he is taking on a lot of the planning and logistical tasks.

And in 2008, I was left to do those myself. And I also over-trained. I made the mistake that I tell other people to don't do all the time. Well, it's because it has to be so daunting and so fear-provoking that you almost can't help yourself from overtraining. I need to run 500 miles a week when I'm crossing the country. 500 miles a week, and that's for six weeks in a row. And that is an absurd. If I actually think about that, I would recognize that it's simply not possible. So not possible. I mean, and, and so it's back to the moment, it's back to the moment, being in the present moment and being in the now. I mean,

we had an interesting conversation on the phone the other week where you were talking a little bit about this and you were saying, you know, in, in sort of reflecting back upon how you over-trained last time and, and this understanding based on your experience that, that the body will adapt. You just have to get through the first two weeks and then the body almost sort of says, okay, I get what's going on. You're trying to kill me. You can kind of adjust, but you've got to take those first couple of weeks really easy and cautiously. Yeah. And, and the first time I was absolutely a, uh, a slave to the schedule. Like if it said we had to run 70 that day, I ran 70.

When had I stopped at 60, I might have actually salvaged a decent night's sleep and whatever. I just wasn't willing to change it. This time, would I love to run 70 on all those first days? Absolutely, because any day I don't run 70 is another day I've got to run farther than 70. But the reality is if I destroy myself in the first two weeks, then it's a moot point. It doesn't matter what happens after that. So I've been working actually with Jeff Galloway. He's been kind enough to help me with some training programs that initially made no sense to me at all, because Jeff believes very strongly in sort of a run walk approach when he's training people for marathons. And when I reached out to him to say, Hey,

here's what I'm doing. You know, can you help me figure out a way where I can actually cover 70 miles a day in 15 hours or less, get some time to eat, get a quick massage, and hopefully get a minimum of seven hours of sleep? Can you help me? And he absolutely stepped up and said that he thought he had a plan for me, and he has given that to me. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's it's very strange as a runner sometimes to walk you know to sort of you know fast hike which I actually do pretty well but to to slow it down and realize that the goal of course is to get to the finish I mean mean, it seems counterintuitive. And yet at the same time,

it seems completely elementary. Like if you, if you, if you just have to cover those 70 miles, you know, between when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night, it seems logical to me that the best way to do that is to incorporate walking into it. And even, you know, after I crewed bad water this past year, people are like, well, what, you know, what is it like? What kind of pace are these people running? And I'm like, you don't understand. Like there's a lot of walking. Every time there's an incline, people are walking, they're marching, they're doing a fast paced hike or what have you. So to me, it seems like that would be, of course, that's the answer to pacing yourself all the way across the U S.

Well, Badwater is a great example because when I, when I speak to audiences very often, I'll one of the first questions I'll ask is I'll say, okay, who in here can run an 11 minute mile? Most everybody in the room raises their hands. I'm like going just one mile,

11 minutes. They're like, everybody's got their hands up. Like, okay, if you could do that for every mile at Badwater, you would set a new course record. No, you wouldn mile at bad water you would set a new course record yeah no you wouldn't just win you'd set a new course record and people are looking around going what like yeah i said it's also you know it's like it's like running on the sun and

it's it's crazy hot and there's other things that just happen that you can't imagine would happen. But in running America, I mean, running America back in 2008, what I learned, I tried to be proactive and account for every possible thing that could go wrong. And I think I did that to a certain degree, but every possible thing did go wrong. And so while I was, while I had acknowledged those things might happen, I really wasn't completely prepared for what to do about it when they did. This time? Like what would be an example of something going wrong?

You know, well, the best example is three days before that run started, I actually was diagnosed with a staph infection called MRSA. And I'd never heard of it before. I didn't even know what it was. I'm like, oh, okay, a little staph infection called MRSA. And I'd never heard of it before. I didn't even know what it was. I'm like, okay, a little staph infection. I'll take some antibiotics. The doc who was with us actually said, look, you know, you really can't take antibiotics right now. First of all, they probably won't help. But if you do, they just destroy your system and you're getting ready to try to run 70 miles a day

so i'm not sure what i could have done any differently there other than you know not getting the hot tub but uh you know it i i think that the and ultimately that's what that pulled you out of the race well infection it was and i had 20 different injuries that took place that are fairly normal most were overuse injuries, tendinitis, blisters. I mean, you name it, things that are fairly common, but you deal with them. And as I said before, the body has an amazing ability to adapt to stress and to overcome those things. And one after another, these, these injuries that the doc did an incredibly great job of helping me. And they all went away, but one, you know, and I had this tendonitis in the front of my right ankle

and my, my right foot had gone numb basically. And, uh, and he, he basically said one day, look, it's going to be permanent. You know, the nerve damage here is going to be permanent if you keep running on it. And I still have three toes that are numb, but, but, you know, it's, it's, and I, I, against everything inside me, I made the decision, you know, to, to stop at that point. I jumped on a bike actually and rode the rest of the way across the country and, and supported Marshall and, and was, you know know as good of a cheerleader as I as I could be for him and hopeful that for the project overall that he would be successful and he and he and he was he did make it so that was great but looking back on that and thinking all right here's what I'm going to do differently this time you're not going to over train you're incorporating this

run walk method what are some of the other things that you're going to do differently this time. You're not going to overtrain. You're incorporating this run-walk method. What are some of the other things that you're going to do a little bit differently? Well, nutritionally, I'm really going at it differently. I've always had the attitude, honestly, that calories are calories, especially during a race. And my joke was in the Sahara even, there was a time when it seemed like everyone might quit and I might continue on. And I always made the joke that if I can get some candy bars and a camel to go with me, then I'll be fine. You know, this time, very much thanks to Estaciana, I'm looking at my nutrition a lot differently. And I'm a vegetarian and have been for many years.

But this time I'm taking that more seriously and realizing that I do need to fuel my body properly for something like this. And not just assume that because I eat, you know, 5000 calories worth of junk food in a day that that's going to sustain me right in the long term but actually bad water in hundreds and some of those things you to a certain degree you can get away with that you know you need to eat some good food of course and have good nutrition but you can get away with yeah because you're not getting up and doing it day day after day after day but that stuff's going to add up for you and you know I think a lot of people don't realize you're doing a multiple day event when you're eating, you're not eating for how you're going to feel in the next hour you're eating for the following day, you know, and you have to always be bearing that in mind, even if you're not hungry,

making sure that you're on top of that stuff and you're not running into too much of a deficit. Yeah. It's not about bonking. Like I'm not worried on any given day about bonking because I'll, I'll take in enough calories hour by hour to, for that not to happen. But it is how am I going to feel later in the day and how am I going to feel tomorrow? And well, really the answer to that isn't going to feel like crap. I mean, there's no doubt. But how do you minimize just how crappy you're going to feel? Yeah. Minimizing it. And, and. So what are some of the foods that you're going to be relying on? Yeah, minimizing it. So what are some of the foods that you're going to be relying on? Eating things that are, for example, real bread, Ezekiel bread,

and things that, you know, my dad of all people said something to me today that was funny, and he was quoting a nutritionist, so I can't remember his name, and he said basically if it you know if it won't rot you shouldn't eat it and and kind of the philosophy of uh eating things i i've found that when i cut dairy out almost completely a long time ago you know now if i if i were to dare i made a big mistake uh probably five or six months ago. There was some regular milk in the refrigerator. We were out of almond milk.

And I used it on a bowl of cereal. And it freaked my stomach out for about two days. And I learned that, of course, not only is that not right for me, but milk is not something that we sort of naturally are meant to drink. We teach our bodies to tolerate it by drinking it all the time. It's also quite inflammatory, too, and acidic. Yeah. So when you're trying to kind of repair your body as you go, not really the best thing to be taking in. Sure.

Well, and I am a—I think I'm a pragmatist when it comes to inflammation. I take, uh, you know, I take a fish oil supplement, uh, a Senta is a company that I've been using for a long time. And I think they have a really pure product and, but I'm also taking Advil, you know, I mean, it's a combination of things because with the sheer volume of miles that we're talking about in something like this, it is my job as much as anything to keep inflammation down to a minimum. I use Arnica regularly, which is great both as a topical gel and then also as a sublingual pill. And that is a natural anti-inflammatory and you know i'm a big believer that those kinds of things can make a huge difference and then for you look just the obvious things fruits and vegetables and you know i do eat uh you know bars of all kinds of

different types and you know out there i'm not going to really use gels and such because I don't ever really need that instant rush. Yeah, you're not doing interval training. Right. I don't need the instant rush to get through the wall. I need something that's long-term sustaining. Right, like a lower glycemic version of a sugar. Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know,

and, and, you know, the rest of it is mental. I mean, my friend Ray Zahab from, from running this era, you know, it's, it's, it's one of the best quotes ever that, you know, these things are 90% mental and the other 10% is all in your head. It's true, man. Well, I mean, it's pretty exciting. It's, uh, I just, I can't even wrap my brain around it. It's going to be quite an adventure. Where are you at in terms of sponsorship and kind of having all the T's crossed and the I's dotted to have the crew all sorted out? Yeah, it's a daily work in progress right now.

So we're only a couple of months away from the start of this expedition. The clock is ticking. And we are. I feel incredibly lucky. just a few weeks ago a group called the campus agency in boston actually came on board to to really try to run the ship here and and bring in sponsors that made a lot of sense for this and their connection of course to the city of boston and to at least tangentially the bombing you know from last year i mean this you know, you know, this run, many, many things are going to happen around the Boston Marathon this year, uh, to both honor and

acknowledge what happened last year. And we certainly aren't, you know, we want to just be a respectful part of that. And the run to Boston is absolutely though to support Boston in a general sense and and support running I mean we you know as well as I do that I'm biased of course but runners are by nature resilient and stubborn and you know if somebody does something as as heinous as that was last april the response is going to be overwhelmingly to uh to make a positive move towards you know rejecting anything that would you know dampen the spirits of an event like that but overall also acknowledging the people lost their lives you know they were permanently changed some of the people that survived of course lost lost limbs and that affected not just them but families their whole families and i think it's uh

it's a critical thing for us to just acknowledge that and just say that you weren't there well you weren't there i wasn't there yeah no i wasn't like everybody else or those that weren't there you know the news was i i would say that was as fast as any news has ever traveled given the way. It was crazy. Yeah. I was actually at CNN headquarters in New York City sitting with a news producer friend of mine. And, you know, in the offices, they all have the TVs on, right? They're all watching TV.

And when it happened, and I watched CNN, like CNN jump on the story as it was unfolding live, and it was insane how quickly they got on top of it and stuff was broadcasting live from the moment it happened to editorializing it. Crazy, you know, across the world. No doubt. Well, and, you know, as it should be. Well, and, you know, as it should be. I mean, they certainly spend an incredible amount of time and energy on… The Kardashians.

Yeah, exactly. On things that you just roll your eyes and shake your head, and it's like, really? And, you know, and I am, I'm biased by everything about Boston. You know, I've been very lucky to have run Boston, you know, quite a few times in the past. Boston. You know, I've been very lucky to run Boston, you know, quite a few times in the past. And one of the things that I say, I've run it, I think, five times now over about 20 years. And so the interesting thing is, you know, 20 years ago, I was a much different person. I was newly sober. I was 20 years younger, not surprisingly, funny how that works. And all I cared about was going fast. Like I wanted to break three hours at Boston and you know, and I did, and like,

that was my big goal. And, and then the next time I found that, you know, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of cute girls at Wellesley. I should stop and at least acknowledge them, you know? And, and then the next time it was like, well, there's a bunch of kids out here that are handing out orange slices. I should take those and high five them. And so, you know, my time... It comes more about the experience. Yeah, my time's changed.

And the point being that I changed. Boston didn't change. That marathon course is exactly the same every time. And that's the beauty of it. You know, it's, you know, the support of the community and the attitude of the runners and just everything about it is so, you know, it's, you know, it's almost an otherworldly experience. But, you know, we, of course, and me in this case, you know, I've changed. And and that's a cool thing to sort of acknowledge when you're running on a course like that. Yeah, and I think it's kind of incumbent upon someone like yourself that if you're going to undertake a race or an adventure, that it has to be about something more than you.

You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm going to run across the U.S. Well, other people have done that. Other people have done it faster. I'm going to try to be the fastest. But, you know, why are you doing it? Like I'm going to try to be the fastest, but, but, you know, why are you doing like, what is driving you to do? What is the under current that it, that is creating this compulsion to show up for this kind of adventure? And I'm sure, you know, there's many

reasons for that internally. Maybe your therapist knows a little bit about that, but, uh, but, uh, or your sponsor, but, uh, you, uh, or your sponsor, but, uh, you know, but to tie it to something bigger than yourself, like this cause of Boston and, you know, you have to do that. Well, you can, and again, my, my answers change and it's not, it is because I, you know, hopefully I, I morph and change and, you know, I'm, I'm really, I like to say that these types of adventures, these long, very painful, they're not things that I, I don't think they're good for me. Like healthy, I don't, you know, people have said is this, you know, how do you feel about what this is doing to your body? I'm like, it can't be good for me, you know, and I'm not, I'm not the one saying that it you know that it is however

it is something i am compelled to do and it is probably not probably it's related certainly to my addictive nature and and certainly an obsessive personality to a degree and my lifelong goal has been finding balance and marrying nastassiana who is a much more balanced person than I am is, is part of the, is, is part of what I think that the growth that I've been able to experience over these last few years where a lot of things have happened to me, you know, I've gone through a lot and I'm fond of saying, because I believe it so deeply that just because something seems impossible doesn't mean I'm not supposed to try it because the likelihood of completing this run to Boston and breaking this record, it's not like I'm sitting

here saying, Oh yeah, I'm going to do that. You know, and it's not about playing the, you know, the mental game we sometimes do with ourselves where we feel like confidence is going to overcome it. This is too big. It's too difficult for that. And so humbly I say that I am going to give it my best shot and that I hope that I learn some more things about myself along the way and that I can also acknowledge some positive things, both in Boston and, and in other ways and about sobriety. And we've got some great charitable partners that are coming on board and, and really just make it a, you know, make it an experience that somehow helps me get along further and, and be know be better in general again back to this theme of

showing up and being in the moment right I don't want to be afraid I am afraid of it you know I'm I am you know what I'm afraid of I'm afraid that three days into this thing let's say I shouldn't even pick a day because that makes me nervous some you know a few days into this thing but like you know I'm gonna something's gonna happen and i can't go on and it's like i i tend to um my my successes have been pretty uh broadly watched then and my my failures uh both as a human being and and as an athlete have also been pretty uh pretty easily viewed by anyone that wants to take the time. Yeah. But you're like, it's almost like in the world,

according to Garp, when the airplane crashes into the house and he says, I'll buy it. It's a pre-disaster, right? It's never going to happen again. So you've had these epic fails that you've had, you've experienced,

you know, incredible lows in your life. So the idea of showing up and running across the country and not making it, it's like, eh, you know, like I was in jail, you know, I was a, I was a crack addict. Like, what is that? Who cares? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, is that water off your back? I mean,

of course you're afraid and you want to succeed, but you know, in terms of perspective and proportion. Well, we all think that everyone's watching us too. You know, like, like that somehow what we're doing, even if you're just a, you know, no matter. That's a self-obsession of the alcoholic mind. Right. Everybody in the world cares about whether or not I succeed at this. And the reality is. And at the same time, everybody hates me.

Right. Yeah. And that may be true, but you know, it's, it's certainly not true that every, you know, nobody else's life is like hanging on whether or not i complete this thing and and that reality in some ways is very um it's refreshing and liberating yeah because i'm gonna you know yeah i i this crazy thing happened a couple of years ago and i end up in prison and initially there was a part of me that thought you you know, wow, this is, you know, yeah, I think everybody, certainly anyone who knew me or knew of me at that point seemed to know that this thing had happened to me. But then very quickly.

Well, it was like giant articles in the New York Times about it. Yeah. And in a way that was cool. I didn't have to be the one to step up and say. Defend yourself. This was, was yeah wrong or right i i let other people do it and and i'm happy to say that you know they did it they did it well you know there's always going to be it's really funny that you know because running the sahara

is such an interesting movie and it's 500 hours of film boiled down to 90 minutes of documentary. So people who see that film have a tendency to think that, that they know me like that is me. Like every, if I yelled at someone, it was definitely edited so that you come off on the dickish. No doubt. Exactly. And I don't deny that I am sometimes, you know what I mean? The thing is that I think it's fair to say that I have my, you know, I have my moments. I'll be the first one to say, I am sometimes. You know, I mean, the thing is that I think it's fair to say that I have my, you know, I have my moments. I'll be the first one to say I am not an easy person to, you know, to be around sometimes. I'm not fair. I'm driven in ways that are occasionally embarrassing to me.

But certainly as a, you know, as a human being that I, you know, I say things I wish I hadn't said and, you know, and all that. But I, I think that through recovery and through a lot of things, I'm, I'm pretty quick also to apologize for my shortcomings, but not for being who I am. You know, this is, this is the, this is the package that there is, and it makes me really good at a few things, and I suck at some other things. knowing, seeing so many things being written and printed and talked about out there about how, you know, how unfair it was and how wrong it was. And, and, uh, you know, I didn't need to say a thing. Right. And I want to get into, into that, into that part of the story a little bit. Um, but to kind of backtrack, I mean, I first, the first time I heard an interview with you, it must have been like 2007 maybe. It was before I'd ever done any of this stuff, any of the Ultraman kind of things.

And I think it was either Bob Babbitt or it was, you know, that guy Kevin at Endurance Planet maybe. I'm not sure. planet, maybe, I'm not sure. And, and, uh, the question was something like, you must get this all the time that, you know, all this, the ultra running and all of that is just, you've just transferred your addiction onto your running. And, you know, what do you say to somebody who, who, uh, who accuses you of that? And you had a really, I don't know if you remember, but you had a really fascinating answer to that question that really stuck with me because it's something that I struggle with. And I feel that same question all the time. Do you remember what you said?

I know what I would say now, so no, I don't remember what I would say. I'd be interested to hear what you say. What I would say now is, you know, is that drugs and alcohol absolutely masked everything that I ever was, no matter what that was. It was a mask. It was my way of hiding from anything. And running and adventure actually shines this huge bright light on exactly who I am. You know, there's no way to mask that when you're running a hundred miles, eventually during a hundred miles, you will become exactly who you are,

you know, for better or for worse. That's, that's not always the best thing. So, but I mean, my, my feeling today anyway, is, is that, did I say something more brilliant back then? No, I think it was, it was pretty much around, I can't remember exactly what you said, but it was essentially thematically consistent with that, which is that, um, you know, when you're using drugs and alcohol, you are, you're hiding from the world. You're afraid you're, you're cowering. And when you're running and embracing these incredible adventures, you're saying yes to life and you are inviting challenge and inviting community and inviting, you know, inviting the opportunity to confront and walk through fear into your life. You know, and acknowledging imperfection. I mean, I'm as imperfect as any

person you'll ever meet, but I, I know that through through running, and through scraping away those outer layers that we pretty much all wear all day, every day, you know, running, once you get to the, you know, whatever it is, relatively for each person, you know, it when you see it, you know, because I don't care if you're just running five miles, you know, for someone who's never run five miles before, by the time they've run three miles, they're thinking they are raw. They're that raw human being.

And that's what I want. I want to be that raw person and see what's down there. And drugs and alcohol did nothing but, of course, hide all of that and made it impossible to ever have an actual real emotion. And with running, my emotions are sometimes too real, but I would rather have that any day. trying to deny the fact that there's this addictive compulsive nature within you that that certainly is attracted to doing that and is you know drives you towards that and allows you in many ways to be able to not just entertain the idea of these feats but actually see them through you know it's like of course like if somebody says well you just transferred your addictions well

it's like well yeah you know yeah in many ways that's true. I can't say no to that, but, but it's, it's a way to access the best part of who you are by finding out exactly who you are. I agree completely. But, but here's another funny, I mean, people who tend to be that critical and tend to, you know, when they, when someone says to me, haven't you just transferred? I usually take that as a criticism. I don't usually take it as a comment. I usually hear them saying, something is wrong with you. And there may very well be, but I don't necessarily appreciate them saying it.

And the thing is, you know, it does tend to come very often from people who maybe haven't gone out there and pushed themselves to their limit, whatever that might be. And maybe they're just exploring and trying to figure out if they should. Maybe it makes them feel better to acknowledge, you know, someone else's shortcomings. Or that you're doing this only because you have a disease exactly something's clearly wrong with you and again i i say to them you are probably right but here's a you know here's another funny example there i think you know how you you touched on why like do these things and one of the other reasons why is simply because my hope is that i do in fact become that I become better that without making myself better, I certainly don't have the capability of ever truly helping someone else.

And that's in running and recovery and any other part of my life. If I'm not if I'm focused on other people all the time. How does that make you know, that can't necessarily make me better. I can do both things in conjunction, but I use the example of like most of my big runs, I've had some cause attached water for Africa. You know, I played a part in raising $6 million to build wells. And I'm, I'm eminently proud of that. You know, what I helped to build there grew into water.org which is matt damon and my friend gary white and i introduced the two of them i fought to bring them together in fact when when they actually you know sort of refused to work together for a while and i worked and i'm proud of that you know with running america the first time in 2008, it was, you know, the United Way and some other nonprofits. And I love attaching something because if I'm going to do something,

why not try to also do some good, but I'm also honest enough to say that I'm selfish. You know, I'm really doing this as much as anything, because I as a human being want to see if I can do it. as anything because I as a human being want to see if I can do it. And what happens I see very often is that people run for charity all the time and are for nonprofits and such. And I totally, you know, I'm supportive of that. I admire it and all of that. But here's the conversation I hear in offices, like the runner is in the office there where they work. And the runner's telling other people, you know, yeah, I'm going to run this marathon. And people are looking at him who are non-runners and saying, why would you?

I don't even drive my car that far. That old say, why would you do something like that? And that person is then pinned into a corner, and they say, well, I'm doing it for cancer or diabetes. It's a disingenuous response because it's not really true. I mean, it's great that they're raising money for that and they're trying to make it somewhat about something other than themselves. But yeah, it's not...

There is a level of, you know, not being completely frank about the motivations. It's okay to do something just because you want to see if you can do it. And I would hope that anybody who ever toes the line of a marathon or an ultra or any race for that matter, is at least partially driven by this desire to see how good they can be and what they can accomplish. And at the same time, if they can, absolutely, if they can honor something that's important to them or raise money for it or whatever it is they might do, I completely support that, but I, I, I'm always telling people to try to acknowledge the fact that you're accomplishing something big and you should be proud of that just for you and not necessarily comfortable

saying I'm doing it because I want to see if I can do it. Yeah. I'm a runner and I want to see if I can run 26 miles in X time or just if I can survive it and not throw up on my shoes or, you know, whatever it might be. Throwing up on your shoes. There's nothing wrong with that. No, there's not. I think it's a, you know, I think, I think we're, people are biased against those of us that, that vomit on our shoes regularly. Right, right, right. All right. Well, let's step it back. I mean, for people that aren't familiar with your story, um, and in the show notes, I'll do an introduction to this interview on all of that. And I'll in the, in the show notes on the website, I'll put links up to some of the articles. Um, but I do want to hear, I do want

to get into a little bit of the addiction story because personally that's so resonant with, with me, um, you know, growing up and sort of, you know, being a college kid and having your needs met and then just going left on the world, you know, like what is, what's going on? I mean, somebody would say you're a crazy person. Like what happened? You know, what didn't happen? Yeah. You know, I was, I was a pretty, uh, I was gonna say I was a typical high school kid, but I probably was a little— You kind of had hippie parents then, right? I was a little above—but I was a little above—I don't want to say above average, but, you know, I did a lot.

I played, you know, five sports in high school. You were like a football quarterback, right? Yeah, and I was student class and and then student body president my senior year and I you know made good grades and had a good SAT and was going to a good college at UNC Chapel Hill and all you know I mean I I like wrote and produced a radio show actually in high school I'm sorry a tv show a closed circuit show in our high school every morning so I mean I was I was up at five running. At six, I was at the radio station getting the AP wire

because we didn't have, you know, I didn't have a BlackBerry or an iPhone at the time. And, you know, I'm doing all these things all day, every day. Well, I get the UNC. The world's your oyster. I'm the man, right? And I get the UNC Chapel hill as a 17 year old freshman and like there's no banners that are saying welcome charlie we're so glad you're here you know and

and it took me you know probably a whole couple of weeks to realize that you know going to a place like that with 4 000 other freshmen i was basically average you know average going to a place like that with 4,000 other freshmen, I was basically average, you know, average at best even. And there were a lot of very talented, you know, athletes, students, dancers, you know, they were better looking. I tried to reserve the fact that I was funnier than other people, but I don't know that I got that one either. But, you know, and what I found pretty quickly was that I was really good at one thing and better than everyone else at least in my dorm and that was drinking yeah I was I was awesome I was uh I was world class and I planned on setting as many records as I could and that was not conducive to making good grades or studying or anything else. Did you do the fraternity thing?

I did, ultimately. And again, it dates me a bit, but in North Carolina, where I went to school, the drinking age was 18 for beer and wine when I went to college. And while I was there, it actually changed to 19 and then to 21. But I managed to stay just in front of the curve in that. But, you know, I joined a fraternity my second year. And it certainly wasn't their fault.

You know, we would party. And I was introduced to cocaine at that point. It was the 80s, though. It was ubiquitous. It was as common as marijuana always has been or alcohol. And, and I, it just didn't seem, it seemed like what everyone else was doing. I, I tried it and it took very little time to realize that when I would do it, you know, I'm seeing two or three sunrises in a row without sleeping while the other guys you

know they might do whatever a couple of lines or they might do they might do some and they're actually going to sleep at four o'clock in the morning and getting up and you know going to class or doing whatever it is you know they were they were truly the definition of recreational users right but there's a big difference between sort of understanding that, like kind of that clicking in and going, oh, like I do this a little bit differently than everyone else. I mean, a normal person would say, well, that's when you start to rectify this situation. But, you know, I know for myself, very early on, I was like, I'm definitely an alcoholic. But I would never admit that. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was, because I knew that I drank differently. And I have a huge scar on my

leg from a lost weekend I spent at UNC in 1986. I woke up at, I don't know, maybe we partied together. Were you there? Wait, did I hit you with an ax handle? Yeah, maybe you caused the scar on my leg. I wouldn't be surprised. But what happened to me was that that set in motion a chain of events to protect my future right to continue to use. It's like, oh, well, hmm, I better really kind of watch myself because I want to continue to be able to do this. So if it gets too out of control too soon, then I'm going to have to do something about it or somebody else is going to tell me I have to do something about it.

So it was all about trying to preserve your ability to continue to be able to party. And, of course, never being able to get that balance right or that mix right, and it just continues to get worse and spiral out of control. Well, I went to my first aa meeting when i was 23 years old in atlanta right and i didn't get clean and sober until i was 29 so that tells you something and so the the acknowledgement of the problem right was there very early on self-knowledge will avail you nothing oh and right exactly right and i and i absolutely kept fighting it and kept, you know, of course, I changed my plan a thousand times.

You know, I'm not going to do, you know, drugs. I'm just going to drink. I'm not going to drink liquor. I'm just going to drink beer. I mean, whatever it might be, I did it. be I did it I did at least seven or eight geographical changes which is common for addicts you know where I would go somewhere and I'd move to Seattle and get a new job and a new girlfriend and a you know life would be fantastic for six months and then you wake up and you go oh shit I brought myself with me I gotta move again move again, darn it. And that would be what would happen is then within a year,

I'd be off to some other city to do it better and, of course, do it exactly the same the next time because, sure enough, there I was. And it just took what it took. The last time, yeah, the last time was, at least the last time up to now, we say yeah uh was uh over 21 years ago and it was a very because you and i are gonna go we're gonna go we're gonna go right after we finish the podcast people ask me every why wait until we're done let's see what we have in the

cabinet people ask me every year they're like oh i'll tell them yeah it's my sobriety birthday like i don't celebrate my regular birthday but i's my sobriety birthday. Like, I don't celebrate my regular birthday, but I celebrate my sobriety birthday. Like, what are you going to do? I'm like, I'm going to go get shit-faced. Right. And they'll look at me like, really? I'm like, no, I'm not. Well, people would be amazed how many people relapse on their first year anniversary.

Oh, yeah. Because only the alcoholic will think it's a good idea to celebrate a year of sobriety by getting drunk. Yeah. You know, that makes perfect sense to me. Well, clearly they've proven that they can drink like a normal person now. So, yeah, I messed it up. I messed up, you know, jobs and certainly my own life and wasted a lot of time. I mean, I did my first three marathons I ever did.

Really, my first four were still when I was very unsober and you know, I, I'll never forget in fact, doing my first marathon, which was big sir, back in 1989. And I, I mean, I didn't enter the race until about a week before the race did essentially no training, but i'd been out doing some running and uh and i just decided that this was another way this was how i could prove clearly i'm not an alcoholic addict if i can go out and do a marathon so i enter this race and i go and and i uh and i do actually finish the thing and in a in a decent, I think, three-and-a-half-hour time, having no idea what I was doing. And Big Sur was a fairly hard marathon.

And I get to the finish line, and I'm looking around, and there's all these people hugging and crying. And they're like, I mean, this amazing thing. And I make the joke, if anybody watches Dexter, it's like Dexter trying to figure out, you know, when he's watching other people have emotions and, and, you know, he's trying to figure out not only why he doesn't feel that way, but how to fake it. Right. And, you know, like I desperately wanted to find somebody to hug and cry so that I could feel fantastic about what I had just done.

And instead, I just went out and got drunk that night. Right. And you bring up an important point, which is this idea, and I relate to that. I used to do this all the time, this false pride that takes over. You test yourself. Say, well, if I can go out and run this marathon, I can just bang out these marathons on the weekend, then I must not have a drinking problem. bang out these marathons on the weekend, then I must not have a drinking problem. It's artillery to, you know, sort of, you know, use it as you will to continue to be able to justify your drinking and using, right? And also like, hey, look what I did. Like, not only did I, you know,

run, I went out, I got completely shit-faced, I woke up, I was hungover, and I still ran a marathon. Like, what did you do this weekend? You know what I mean? And it's like, there's no humility in that. There's a complete false pride thing that takes over that leads you in a very dark direction. Ultimately, I was at the end of those first few marathons, I could not have been emptier. And it actually even goes back to what we were talking about before, because I had the raw emotion, like I'd done this work and I had indeed scraped off those outer layers to find that I was absolutely completely empty inside. And at least drugs and alcohol, you know, gave some texture to the emptiness. And then being, you know, having that not as a crutch really, really was something I couldn't imagine at the time.

And I was doing, you know, I was 25 or 26, you know, I wanted to, like I think I bought my first house right around there and I bought cars and I wanted to be and was like the top salesman at whatever job I was doing. And those were all nothing more than my proof that clearly there can't be any kind of a problem. If, if I can do those things, then, you know, how could I possibly have a problem? Right. And that looming sense of emptiness is so terrifying that the only way to deal with it is to drink more and use more. Fill it. I could fill it up that way, at least, you know, temporarily. And, and that's of course what we all do in that situation. And,

you know, and it taught me, it, it did teach me, I will say it did teach me how to suffer properly. You know, the things I did to myself then that's true suffering. And when I'm, when I'm out running and whether i'm falling apart or having a great run i mean even races like bad water people tend to think that oh you know you you did it and you had a good time and like a good finishing time and you placed well and whatever so you had a fantastic race like somehow that means that you didn't struggle during the race and like bad water is a race that, you know, I've never not thrown up at Badwater.

Like it's the only race I've ever thrown up in, in fact, but I've done it every single time. Like something about the heat mechanism there. Just the point being that there's a series of ups and downs during that race that are inevitable. And no matter how I plan, they're going to happen. Those, those downs. And that's what I finally had to understand.

Well, it's what I've had to understand about sobriety. It's over 21 years. That didn't stop me from going to prison a couple of years ago. You know, it didn't, it didn't stop, you know, my first marriage from falling apart. It didn't stop, didn't stop anything. Life just continued to roll on. It's just that I actually had to be present for it, which was, which was really... You had to feel it.

Yeah. Damn. You know, it's sort of that idea that, you know, sobriety doesn't promise you anything other than, you know, a life without drinking or using, you know, and there's this, this notion, I think, when you come in and you have the pink cloud that all your problems will be solved. And in fact, you have to sort of deal with the wreckage and all of these problems, but you actually have to feel them and you're like a loose, you know, a raw nerve ending at first. And, and, but, but the beauty of it is to be able to walk through those challenges and those difficulties with dignity. And that's something that I think you did in spades, you know, in terms of your prison sentence, your jail sentence.

I mean, you know, I've been following you on Twitter for a long time, and I remember, you know, you would send out these tweets, and I'm thinking, is he allowed to tweet from jail, or is his son doing it for him? Like, how is this even? I'm, like, fascinated by, even, I'm like fascinated by the, like the, just the pure logistics of how that happened,

but persistently putting out, you know, this positive message, this refusal to allow this experience to control you or to lapse into some kind of victimhood. And then to read subsequently or during the latter stages of, of your tenure, you're there, the impact that you're having on your fellow inmates and these guys that are starting to run and are losing tremendous amounts of weight and are kind of rediscovering their

lives in a new way. Yeah, it was that part of the experience was fascinating and it, and it is the, you know, one of the basic tenets ofets of addiction recovery, which is attraction rather than promotion. I certainly didn't go into prison and say, hey, all you fat guys over there, you guys should come run with me. It would have been a great way to get my ass kicked. Get shanked. Right. And so instead, I simply just did what I do. I just went and I ran and I worked out and I actually found people.

There was no AA in prison, if you can believe it. It was shocking. In federal prison. I can't believe that. I mean, I've done tons of panels in jails and stuff. In state and in jails and those places, absolutely. They have pretty active programs. But federal?

Nope. No formal AA. Is there a reason for that? Well, I ended up teaching, which is funny, addiction recovery classes. And they were well attended, but guys got certificates. You know, you were sort of required to do a certain amount of that kind of work while you're there, which is good. It's good and healthy, but most of the guys sitting in there were there to get the certificate. And like any AA meeting, though, I would absolutely, you know, I just did what I would do and hope that somebody maybe got something out of it.

But it's an interesting thing. So I was in Beckley Federal Prison prison and there is it is actually ironically a drug education prison meaning that they have a program where guys who I mean 90% of the people there are there for drugs anyway most for for selling not for using but uh you know they were required if they wanted they had a chance to get time off of their sentence if they completed this very long nine-month drug education program. But basically, and I'm sure the prison and the program would argue with this viewpoint, but my viewpoint was that the program basically said, you're bad, you have destroyed your family, you've destroyed your lives don't do drugs like that was that was the extent of the education you know so it wasn't really recovery oriented it was more of a sort of a nine-month shaming process you're a piece of shit don't do drugs you know and and so stop doing that and and while a lot of people would probably think that's a good approach

the nancy reagan yeah just say no approach the fact is would probably think that's a good approach somehow nancy reagan yeah just say no approach the fact is that can be that's all well and good people can be you know feel strongly about how they view people who who do drugs or have gotten in trouble with the law for doing drugs but the reality is if the goal is to actually turn out people when they come out of prison who are better than when they went in and more likely to make a contribution to society, then shaming them is certainly not the way to do it. And very little is spent on treatment, as we all know. I mean, it's been proven time and again that every dollar that's spent on prevention

will come back tenfold. Whereas, you know, every dollar that's spent on incarceration and on sending these guys, that's why, you know, it's another reason, Rich, that I never, I really, it would be embarrassing to me to complain about my plight and how I might have felt about how, you know, how that all happened to me when I'm in there with guys, African-American guys who got 20 year sentences for a small handful of crack that I had in my hand tons of times. And if I had been a black man in this country in those times, I would have been stopped driving the car that I would have, that I was driving, which was just a Toyota 4Runner. It's not like it was fancy,

but I would have been stopped. They would have searched me. They would have found that. And I would have been the guy getting 20 years, but I wasn't that guy. I was the white guy driving the car in the hood that for whatever reason, just never, you know, that didn't happen. So, you know, I knew that it would have been embarrassing to me being in there next to guys who really had their lives, their whole lives taken away from them. And, you know, and actually the, you know, the sentencing and the Congress and everyone else is now acknowledging that the 100 to 1 crack to cocaine sentencing guidelines were very possibly the most unfavorable and really unforgivable sentencing guideline ever handed down in any country. And so there are some changes being made to those

guidelines now and acknowledgement that that was wrong. But anyway, my point of all that is I, I would, I would have felt like a total idiot. Yeah. But you're also a human being who's been incarcerated and could very easily hang your hat on this, you know, argument as to how you'd been wronged. And, you know, in recovery, they say, you know, justifiable anger is, you know, And, you know, in recovery, they say, you know, justifiable anger is, you know, a luxury we can we cannot afford. But that's, you know, a stupid little, you know, annoying saying. And to be able to, you know, to be able to actually embody that when you're in the scenario that you're in, I mean, is no small feat. Well, I knew very quickly. And even after I got arrested, I mean, I'm sitting there in this holding cell knowing that my life had just changed forever. And that was the night after, the day after the Running America premiere. Right, you had the premiere and then it was the next day.

We should probably complete the timeline a little bit so that people that don't really know your story can understand what we're talking about. Essentially, at the end of your drinking and using using you're essentially living out of your car and smoking crack essentially and there's some kind of altercation that involves bullets in your forerunner yeah and your son being born that catalyzes uh you know you embracing sobriety yeah well it is in wichita kansas which is i always say if you can get if if you can get sober in wichita you can get sober anywhere Wichita, you can get sober anywhere. No, there was good sobriety there. But it was a place where I don't know why it was different.

I just sat there on the curb that day looking at the police going through my car. And I'd been up for six days without sleeping or eating. And it was another in a long line of those episodes. And, you know, I just remember looking and thinking to myself, okay, this just seems like a pretty good time to quit. And I'm not a religious person, you know, I'm certainly a spiritual, which is sort of one of those catchphrases these days. And we don't have enough time to go into all of that because it's, we could talk all day about that. But, you know, I, I don't know who I was praying to, but I absolutely said, you know, I would like to have this obsession removed because I'm going to die. You know, and I, I really wasn't, you know, I didn't, some days I wanted to, but not, not that day.

And somehow that weight was lifted from me. And, you know, I started into recovery that day for the first time ever seriously. I had certainly dabbled in it from time to time, and I went to a meeting that day, and I went to a couple of meetings every single day without missing a day for a year, and my life changed. Very slowly it changed, and I became present and, and, uh, I struggled,

I struggled today staying present, but you know, at that point everything changed. Right. Balance being the fickle. I always say balance is the fickle lover that is disinterested in my affection. Well, I got, I got sober and ran 30 marathons in the first few years, so clearly I had found balance. Yeah, exactly, right? But you go off and you kind of, for lack of a better phrase, make history doing these incredible endurance challenges, the most notable of which is running across the Sahara with Ray and what was the other guy's name?

Kevin. Yeah, Kevin Lin. Documented in this incredible documentary, which if you haven't seen it, you should definitely check out, called Running the Sahara. That's narrated by Matt Damon. It's captivating and brilliant and amazing. And in many ways, you know, you're sort of on top of the world. You've got an agent at the William Morris Agency, and you're flying around giving motivational speeches and planning your next crazy endurance adventure

when a young man by the name of Robert Nordlander gets it into his skull that there's something a little amiss with this Charlie Engle character. Well, apparently being an ultra runner is a... Suspect in its own right. Right. You're a suspect if you're a runner and you're spending a lot of time training. Somebody might want to know how it is you're managing to make a living if you're spending all that time running. And that is just how it, you know, it's how it came about. And it was a,

he was like a local IRS guy, right? So he's in your town, you're in the local papers and you're getting a little attention and, and he's, you know, for some reason, you know, it's, he's got it in him that he's gonna. Yeah. He, he decides to start digging and every time he hits a wall, you know, and, and again, it's, it's difficult to go into all, of course, even, uh, even touch on the real details, although there'll be, uh, many of them will be in a book soon, but you know, the fact of the matter is the Patriot Act is, um, is something that I learned a lot

about during that time, because in essence, every time he hit a wall, he was able to basically take some action to change the investigation in a way that allowed him to, yeah, to just once he hit a wall, for example, this supposedly started off as a tax investigation. You know, he was curious about you know how i how i paid my bills and my taxes and when he checked into it you know what he found i paid my taxes there was no and i always say to people who are self-employed especially i'm like

you let the irs look through 20 years of your tax returns if you're self-employed and find nothing i i challenge you you know to that same thing but that's exactly what he found was it was absolutely nothing and for some inexplicable and you know the i have the memos that show that and those all came out at trial and you know so there's no secrets there and because i pay my taxes but you know for some reason it didn't end there and because I pay my taxes, but you know, for some reason it didn't end there. And that's, that's where I'll probably never understand it. Why? Right. Suddenly he decides he's going to be a DA, right? Like he's becoming a prosecutor. Who's, I mean, you know, as in his role at the IRS, you would think, well, inquiry done, you know, I explored it. There's nothing there moving on, but that's his job. And even if, even if you't like I mean, he's famously quoted in the grand jury investigation.

He's famously quoted as saying, you know, if I'm riding down the street and I see somebody driving a nice car and I don't think they belong in it, you know, I'll run their tags and pull and pull their tax returns. And like apparently I mean, that's a direct quote from the grand jury. I mean, there's no doubt about what he said. And I was like, really? That's where we live now? That you can just do that? I mean, but anyway, that's the way it went down. Right, and with the latitude allowed him under the law because of the Patriot Act.

You read about these crazy sort of spy novel episodes in your life where they set you up. There was a woman who was planted. You would go on a date with her. You think it's a date, but she's wearing a wire and all kinds of craziness. you know, the fact that in hindsight, I had gotten a couple of loans, you know, mortgages that were, you know, just like everyone else was getting. I didn't know I was getting them, just like most people didn't know they were getting those stated income loans, right? I mean, that was just what was being given. I mean, as a borrower, we don't go into a bank, or I certainly wasn't sophisticated enough to go to a bank and

say, I want this type of loan. You just, you just go in and you fill out whatever paperwork they tell you to fill out and you either qualify or you don't. And I did, you know, I did that exactly the same as I had done a dozen times before, no different in any way, shape, or form. During that, you know, 2005 to 2008 or whatever time period, you know, it's widely acknowledged now that it was much easier to get a loan. You know, look at, I forgot who it was in the New York Times today. I think there was, is it JP Morgan paying another $20 billion in fines? I mean, they've paid something like a hundred billion dollars in fines around that whole thing.

And to say that a borrower, not, I wasn't in the real estate industry. I wasn't, I was just a guy, just a, just a guy with a little bit of local notoriety to think that I could somehow, you know,

manipulate the system in some way, uh, that I was some genius mastermind, which anyone who knows me well can attest that's not the case. Uh, you know, it's just absurd. It's, it's actually just, it's laughable. But what happens is, you know, when you're, once you're in the system the system you know he investigated me for over 700 hours uh just my taxes just my taxes and you know it's my opinion you don't do that and come up empty you know you find a way to reach right you know to reach an end result that is desirable for for them and i think it was a little, you know, again, years later now, everyone sort of understands that we're, you know, the banks are still answering questions about what happened,

but none of them are going to prison. They pay a fine. Right. Essentially what happens is you become this poster boy for mortgage fraud, for better or worse. And technically there are some Right. in America. We're in this mortgage crisis all of a sudden. We need to point fingers at people. And rather than taking the guy at JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America or Countrywide or whatever, let's make Charlie the bad guy. Ironically, the Countrywide headquarters are just down the street. If you want to go visit after the podcast, there's probably some kind of alarm that'll go off. Yeah, I know. I'd like that guy to be doing, he should have done my time. There's a lot of people.

There's a lot of people that would say that. And I think we're all still waiting for those guys to be held accountable for a lot of the things that were going on, but whatever. It'll never happen. Right. So, so here you are suddenly you're going are. Suddenly you're going to be the guy. And kind of in retrospect now, the revisionist history of the whole thing is it backfired in the other direction. Because with all of the kind of journalism that transpired around your tenure, you ended up coming out looking like the victim in the whole thing.

Well, and I was. I mean, you won't hear me say that very often. And I don't want to dwell on that, but I, what I also knew and sobriety is what taught me this recovery is what taught me this. I had a choice. Like when that happened and when I, uh, a good friend of mine actually said to me something that I was one of the greatest compliments I've ever been given in my life. because the people around me were devastated you know of course my family but my my friends I mean people by the hundreds were you know were just didn't know

what to say I mean they looked at me like I I had a terminal disease and and it was like what do you say to a guy who's getting ready to go off to prison? And it was me that was consoling them most of the time. And so my great friend, Chris Justice, who helped me with many things, he basically said, you're spending all your time making us feel better instead of the other way around. And what I figured out quickly, though, and it was, again, because of my long-term recovery I believe I believe this and that is that I had a choice I could either be miserable or I could be as positive as was possible and it wasn't

pink cloud positive it wasn't like some false positive like I I, I had to say, okay, I'm going to find a way to make the best of this. And I, I have no idea what that even means yet, but you know, ultimately I went in there just, just saying that, uh, I can be one of those guys. And I saw them every day who had long prison sentences and they, they checked off the calendar every day. And to me, that would have been maddening. I don't know if I would have made it through my short time, you know, it was a year and a half, which is a long time, but relatively speaking, not that long compared to many of them. Right. 16 months, but it was the sentence longer. Sentence was 21 months. And the way the federal system works is you sort of get a, you get a pre nearly 15% discount on your sentence. It's you get your good behavior in advance.

And if you screw it up, they can take it away. Right. And then technically you, you, you normally would get generous of them. Yeah, absolutely. You normally would get 10% of the halfway house. And so that's what I got to. That's why it was a, it was a 21 month sentence. Basically I had to serve 18 months of it. But after 16 months I was released to a halfway house in Greensboro, which actually, by the way, was far worse than prison. Oh really? Yeah. Well in a, in a camp like where I was, basically there with nonviolent criminals, generally speaking. I mean, a lot of them are. Well, Beckley was divided.

There was like a minimum security and a medium. And a medium, right. And the medium, you know, I got to know some of those guys too because they would graduate from there. I don't mean graduate like high school, but, you know, they would move from there if they were less than 10 years left on their sentence and whatever, they might come to the lower security place. And, you know, what I found was, of course, that, you know, these were almost all just regular guys. But when I got to the halfway house, you have guys from all security levels that are being dumped into the halfway house.

You know, so you got some rapists and murderers and some genuine bad guys in there, and there's 30 people stuck in one room on bunk beds, and you can't leave. It was tough. How different is it from, I mean, my only sort of point of context, other than doing the occasional panel, you know, in downtown LA, is what I see on television, or what I see in movies, you know, my, this is what, this is the way a prison guard acts and behaves, it's all informed by media that I've seen, it's all, you know, crafted by a screenwriter and a director, so how, how, you know,

how different is the real life experience of being in a place like that versus what did you expect and how is it different? Well, of course, I feared the worst all the time. I went in there on Valentine's Day 2011. That was the first day of my sentence. And my major concern was being someone's Valentine that night or any night. Or any morning. Or any morning or any time and that you know that didn't happen um i'm debating asking you the question of right you did become somebody's valentine i'll never tell we've been sworn to maybe that'll be in the book you'll have to read the book. Exactly. But it was very similar in many ways to what we do see on television.

The difference is I, of course, being on that side of it, got to see the human aspect of it. I got to know guys and I got to know their families and visitation. I got to see their pictures and hear their stories and hear about their lives. And, you know, it's a funny thing about running and working out, you know, all of us who do that understand the camaraderie that's built. And so every day out in the rec yard, when we're doing whatever workout we might be doing or running around that quarter mile loop and talking and, and just, you know, commiserating. It was fascinating to find, you know, the similarities were far greater than the differences and, you know, and it is true. Most of them, you know, the large majority of

people in there came from poor backgrounds and they were, they were destined for prison. I watched this amazing documentary just this past week called The House I Live In. It's on Netflix, by the way. They didn't pay me to say that, but it was so fascinating because it really explained so much around the history of incarceration in this country and where, you know, where it came from and, and why we have 14,000 statutes on the books that are actually punishable by prison sentences. I mean, it's, it's, it's amazing the things that are illegal and, and yet, you know, 97% of the people who are in prison are there for nonviolent crimes. So what we do is we lock up

the people that we're mad at, not the people that we're afraid of. And what is the percentage of incarcerated people that's related to substance abuse? Almost all. It's got to be, yeah. Almost all, over 90% are related to drugs. And less than 1% those uh have anything to do with the word you know kingpin right almost all of them are just regular drug users and yet the lack of of treatment and uh and rehabilitation within the system it's almost non-existent it's shocking i mean we we in this country we have five percent of the population of the world in the United States, yet we have 25% of the incarceration in the world. So, you know, in the free, I don't know what the answer is, but I know that we haven't found it. And the tough on, tough on crime is the words, but it's really tough on drugs is, is the way it plays out. You know, it just really

means that, you know, alcohol and, and other drugs have just have better lobbyists, you know, I mean, well, and the more privatized, uh, incarceration becomes then, you know, then the K street lobbyists start lining their pockets and this is not going in any other direction other than to continue to expand. Well, if you build it, they will fill it, you know, is how it goes. And here's the thing, I'm certainly a liberal at heart. There's no doubt. I'm a, you know, I'm a liberal guy. But from a fiscal standpoint, no matter which side of the political aisle you're on, if you take a look at the economics of locking people up for incredibly long sentence, you lock up a 20 year old for 20 years on a drug sentence, that person will end up

being a ward of the state or a ward of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. Right. And what is it like $60,000 a year or something like that per person. And that's maybe, and that's only the hard cost maybe of what it, you know, feeding them housing that doesn't count. That doesn't actually take into account the cost of maintaining the entire system. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a crazy, crazy big number. And when we were, although I don't know when this was, when we were flush with cash or felt like we were in this country then that was fine everybody gets behind tough on crime you don't want to be the politician

that stands up and says you know we should ease up on these guys some but what what it's done is create this situation where now we have to pay for it and and it's not just paying for it while they're in prison it's paying when they get out. And, you know, I don't know, as your neighbor, would you rather have the guy who, who's actually had some strong rehabilitation and learned a skill and had some positive things happen as your neighbor, because they're going to get out and they're going to move somewhere, you know, or would you rather have the angry guy who just lost 20 years of his life and feels like he was wronged and basically he's just waiting to go back? Right. Well, and he can't get a job and he's dependent upon the state to provide.

Recidivism rates are 70%. I mean, that's why most guys go back. They just can't quite get over the hump. And it's not even to say. There's programs to help guys. There's all those things. But it's easier said than done. For me, I get to check that box for the rest of my life.

The article that I enjoyed the most on all the sort of articles that are out there from outside, Men's Fitness, New York Times, all that kind of stuff that kind of talks about your prison experience was the one in The Oxford American because that really got at the heart of, like, this is what it's really like. I'll put a link in the show notes up to that, but it was a very touching piece.

Leslie Jameson wrote that, and she was incredible. You know, she came to visit me. And what's funny is it goes back to running, right? Right. Because you had met her at an ultra, right? I met her at the Barkley. I met her at the Barkley. And she wasn't running, but her brother was actually running the race.

And she wrote a piece about him for the race. I wrote a piece about the race for Runner's World, actually, that got put off being published. It actually was published in Runner's World while I was at Beckley, which was pretty fascinating. Do publications like Runner's World, are they scared of you now? Or are they just love the story? Yeah, no, they love the story. And I give David Willey and the guys at Runners World great credit for recognizing that readers are sophisticated enough to make their own decisions. And if I can tell a decent story, I mean, that's what it should be about, right? If I can tell a decent story. I mean, I used to make the joke that I'm, even with running the Sahara, you know, a lot of people

might admire me for that. Some people really dislike me for it. I mean, it's all over the board, but my attitude is if something happens where people actually have a strong opinion and want to talk about it, I'm happy. Yeah. It's good. Right. I still get, I got a note last week from a guy like on Facebook who said, you know, on Facebook who said, you know, you were the biggest jerk in that movie. And I wrote, he gave some reasons, and I wrote him back. I said, dude, I couldn't agree with you more. I said, you know, but just realize that it's not always exactly what you see. And that's the way everything is.

That's the way prison was. That's, you know, again, I'm, I'm hoping that in writing, I can tell that story, uh, in a, in a way that doesn't, you know, I don't want to bore anybody and we're not going to go into all the details in the book of, of, you know, every minuscule thing that happened at trial or in prison, but the book is really going to be a running book more than anything. But, but I mean, there is room to kind of talk about all of that. Right. So the, the working title is running on empty, running in place, running in place. Sorry. Um, and I had the great privilege of reading the proposal and, and some of the, the sample materials, the sample chapters that you've already prepared. And it's, it's a barn burner. And I,

when I first reached out to you, I think I even said on Twitter, I was like, I can't wait to read this guy's book. Like, this is the book, you know, like if you like Finding Ultra, this is like Finding Ultra on steroids times a billion, you know, like the epic tale of Gilgamesh or something. But I'm interested in where you're at right now in the process and, you know, what, you know, how long is it going to be and do you know kind of the trajectory of how you're going to get this book done and out? I've got a fantastic agent

and with the help of a professional team, really, we managed to put out, I think, what is a really good proposal and that proposal is actually out to publishers. Oh, you went out with it already? Just now. Oh, cool. Literally just now.

And we've had a couple of great responses already. And I'm hoping that in the very near future, there'll be an announcement to be made that, you know, then it's like, it's kind of like entering a race though. Then I actually have to write it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which as you know. I know. It's just one day at a time. It's a of like entering a race, though. Then I actually have to write it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, as you know, is a hard part.

Just one day at a time. I think I wrote about 1,000 pages when I was at Beckley. And so if I could just transfer all that over and it was useful, that'd be great. But again, as you know, that's not the way the process works. But you're not staring at a blank page. You have all this material to work with. You know I've done enough things. It's not like you don't know the story, either. Yeah, it at least you don't, but it's not, you're not staring at a blank page. You have all this material to work with. You know, I've done enough things. It's not like you don't know the story either.

Yeah, it's mine. I can't really be wrong, can I? You know, the question is, can I make it compelling? And I like to think that it'll be, you know, I'm here to say, as always, that it's a work in progress and so am i and and there'll i will never have all the answers to you know who i am and why i do things and i don't think any of us do and and if i if i quit asking those questions and i'm i'm in trouble i i'll tell you something actually uh astaciana uh who i'm lucky enough to be marrying on Saturday, you know, asked me one of the hardest questions I've ever been asked at one of our first dates. And she, she sort of looked at

me probably wisely wondering, you know, what was going on with, with me. And because there's all these, uh, tales of misery, you know, I'm good at overcoming the difficult things and, you know, putting myself sometimes, you know, some of the things I did myself, some were done to me, which is like most of us and some things just happen. And I'm good at setting my mind to that. But, you know, she asked me the question you know do i do i have any clue how to be happy like how to just be happy like if things were going fantastically could i just be happy and i thought it was the most amazing question ever because i realized right away that really the answer to that question was no you know they don I've never really understood like how to be happy.

And I'm hoping that there's, you know, that there's that ability is going to grow in me. Certainly with her, it will be forced to grow because she's much better at it than I am. But it's an interesting thing. You know, I've all, I think maybe I've relied on suffering and my desire somehow to suffer and find my discovery through suffering, uh, that that's the way I've always functioned. And so, well, you have, you have alcoholism. It's the ism. It's the, I seek misery. Yeah. Right. But you know, happiness, It's the I seek misery. Yeah.

Right. But, you know, happiness, happiness, I don't think is a, uh, a destination. It's a, it's a process. And I think it, you know, I think that, um, you get glimpses of it or I get glimpses of it when you can get out of yourself and be of service. And when you're tapped into somebody that you care about and when you are expressing yourself authentically. And I think that in terms of your book, if all you do is share your experience and you do it honestly with integrity

and you allow yourself to be vulnerable in that process, that it will be difficult and you will suffer, just like you do in an ultra but there will be a sense of satisfaction and i think we talk a lot about happiness but it's really about like are you going to be a satisfied human i think that's more of that's a better sort of inquiry or one at least i can relate to a little bit more i agree and if the the fear although it's not rational but it doesn't have to be rational, you know, the fear is somehow that if I'm content, like even for five minutes, that I'm going to lose

some edge. Like, oh my God, now I'm going to sit on the sofa and eat popcorn for the rest of my life. And that would just be terrible. And it's finding, it is is it's trying to find some sort of a balance where I can enjoy myself, I can enjoy just being and not always be looking forward to whatever that next thing is. And I, you know, I vowed now, you know, that when when run to Boston is finished this year, you know, I'm gonna, it it's not even so-called taking a break. It's just going to do nothing. I'm going to, I'm going to, it's time to be married

and to work on life actually instead of always working on, doesn't mean I won't be looking forward towards something, you know, at some point in the future, but it's finding that next thing that she and I can do together and that, you know, we can travel to some great place.

I mean, we took our first, we got engaged in Puerto Rico, and it was the first time I had traveled, I was going to say out of the country, Puerto Rico. Not for a running related. Exactly. In more than 10 years that I had actually gone somewhere, if you don't count prison. Yeah, I was going to say, well, Beckley. But you ran Badwater at Beckley. I did. So technically you went there to do that, right?

Exactly. But we had an actual vacation. And now she's a former pro athlete, so we ran every day. And we certainly were very active, but I wasn't there for an event. Although the event turned out to be and you didn't engage you didn't uh you know dissolve no I apparently I got through it just fine so you know it's uh it's been a it's been a strange and interesting learning curve these last few years and the the oddest thing about it is you know if I knew I could be here right now, uh, you know, getting married on Saturday

and, and just all the things going on for me, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even change the last few years and, uh, and the difficulties. And you touched on it a second ago, being at Beckley, I, I had some of the most satisfying times of my entire life while I was in there because there's, there's nothing like, you know, watching somebody else transform and, and knowing that I at least had a small hand in helping them change their own life, whether it was losing weight or, or, you know, or just running or, you know, working out or changing their, their attitude towards how they ate. I mean, you know, or just running or, you know, working out or changing their, their attitude towards how they ate. I mean, even in, even in prison, you know, you got this, this issue with eating all the time. He said, I don't know. It was just really, it was wonderful. Well,

I think what's great about that is, um, you know, by the way, I don't want to do it again, by the way, just to be clear. Let's try to, yeah, let's try to avoid that, right? What I loved about it, though, was that it really was this kind of, you know, using the principles of recovery in that, you know, you referenced it earlier. You know, it's a program of attraction, not promotion or recruitment. And so you would just go out and run every day and you weren't like trying to get anyone else to go with you. You're like, this is what I'm doing. And then slowly, you know, these guys are starting to show up and I love the characters. They're like butter bean and bootsy and block. And these guys,

you know, the, from what I can understand, like the furthest thing from, you know, being an athlete or being a runner, some of them tremendously overweight. And over the course of this 16 month period, like one guy lost 180 pounds or something like that. I mean, it's, it's so schmaltzy that it's like, Oh,

what is this? A Disney movie? Like this is the, you know, the guy, you know, you could see the montage sequence in the, in the movie about how that all transpires.

But there's, you know, there's real beauty in that transpires but there's you know there's real beauty in that well there's some good guys too i mean that again through whatever circumstance you know i mean some of them were just addicts some of them you know had other other issues or just bad luck or whatever and there were a few genuine bad guys of course i mean you know prison isn't full of people that that shouldn't be there right there's a few that should but generally speaking you know they were just regular guys and what I found funny is nobody ever of course came up to me initially guys even made fun of me to a certain degree which is not unusual

for me but you know through time and the fact that they saw me continuing to run and to do these things, you know, they would never like approach me in the middle of, you know, the chow line or something like that. They would come up to me sort of surreptitiously and say, hey, you know, man, I'm thinking about, I've been thinking about running, you know, what do you think I should do? Like very quietly. I even had a couple of the guards in there who came to me for running advice. And that was totally against, you know, any policy. Oh, they're not really allowed to. No, no. And they were, you know, again, and those guys were, you know,

some of them weren't good guys. I mean, unfortunately, you take guys and give them some power in a situation like that. And there were a lot that really treated people poorly, but there were also plenty who were, you know, were in fact just doing their job, you know, and I never held that against them and, uh, were good guys. And if they asked me, you know, how to start a running program, I'd, I'd tell, uh, uh, an officer just as much as I'd tell, uh, you know tell an inmate because running is running, man.

If you're willing to take a shot at it, then I don't want to ever discourage anybody from getting out there and finding out what they can do. And are you in touch with these guys still? You know, that's the irony. No is the answer. And the reason is not because i don't want to be but it's not allowed uh oh a former yeah can't correspond with somebody who's inside correct i didn't know that yeah and actually technically i can't i mean it's been interesting for me just because i'm i'm easy to find uh you know out here in the world. And so if somebody that I was in there with wants to find me through whatever, social media or anything else, it's pretty much impossible to stop. Although I do laugh every once in a while.

I'll get some kind of note from somebody. And I'll tell you the truth. It'll be their real name. And I have no idea who it is because they've got a name. It's not Butterbean. Yeah, Butterbean. Right. But, you truth, it'll be their real name, and I have no idea who it is because they've got a name. It's not Butterbean. Yeah, Butterbean, right. But, you know, it's interesting. It's not allowed.

So it's weird and frustrating. It would be like going to college, you know, for years with guys or being in a fraternity or being on some team sometime, and then when that's over, never being allowed to have contact with them again. And it's, I don't know i mean i assume you go visit or no no god they won't let you visit or no i can't visit i can't vote is that the rationale is that you're you could be some sort of proxy for them to take care of business in the outside world yeah half or something not only that it's just that

technically you know if you have supposedly bad guys that are all you know continuing to have contact with each other right and that could somehow lead to something i mean the here the irony i've always found in that is that you know prison is essentially you know criminal college i mean you know i don't want to say what i could do because i'd probably get myself in trouble but you know the the stories you hear and the things that you learn how to do, right. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm, my drug past is, uh, going to be right where it belongs and that's in the past forever. But you know, the, the ways people do things, I mean, and I will say that, you know, meth is the killer of today, you know, very much like other drugs have been in the past.

But it's the it's the scourge of the earth right now. And you can make it in a bathtub. And so it's a it's bad news. But I mean, I guess the the idea is that they don't want guys, you know, being able to get together when they get out of prison. And there's you know, I there is some logic to that. when they get out of prison. And there's, you know, there is some logic to that. But once you've shoved them together to basically share information in tight quarters for months or years together, you know,

that ship has kind of sailed. So it's frustrating, though. I mean, I got, you know, these guys who were my friends, are my friends. They'll always be my friends. I mean, from that time, I, I don't have any idea what's happened to any of them at this point. And so we kind of glossed over the fact that you actually ran, ran your version of bad water when you were in prison. It took,

you had to do it over a couple of days, right? I did. I really let you run a couple hours a day. Yeah. Well, they, they discourage, I think the rules probably even say you're not supposed to run more than, you know, three miles at any time or something. And, uh, they made an exception for you. Well, they, they, you know, they didn't really make an exception. I just sort of did it, but, um, you know, it is, I still had to go inside for, you know, count. And obviously I had to sleep inside. But they let you go out in the yard all day and do it? Yeah. A camp is interesting because, you know, you do have, you have jobs. I mean,

my job was working in recreation. And so I had to like clean the pool tables every morning. And there was some specific jobs. Um, and then I taught classes, uh, the addiction recovery classes, those kinds of things. But, you know, in a, in a sense at a, at a camp, there is, you know, there's guys in there that have to work. You know, I was lucky enough that, um, you know, I had some support. It was my own money, but I had some, I had the ability to get some money every month sent in. I mean, there's a limit to that. It's very complicated, but suffice it to say some guys in there, there's nobody that they don't have anybody on the outside. If they don't earn $10 or a hundred dollars or whatever it might be that month, then they can't go buy, you know,

a new pair of tennis shoes at the commissary, or they can't get, you know a new pair of tennis shoes at the commissary or they can't get you know snacks or coffee or anything else and so those guys work right and very often what you'll see not to be too detailed but where you see a camp you usually see like a medium present a higher level security and it's really a lot of the guys at the camp, it's their job to actually take care of the grounds or whatever it might be for the higher level security presence. It's a very intricate, interesting, weird, twisted system. But, you know, for me, I was able to teach my classes and to do those things in a way that allowed me, you know, a lot of, a lot of freedom during the day. Yeah. And so, I mean, I could go, I could go run. And you're just running around a yard. That's what,

like a quarter mile perimeter or whatever. I call it a goat path because it even had a hill. So I had to decide that I want to run the, the direction that meant that I went up a sharp, steeper hill one way or the other direction had a much, you know, yeah, he had that short, steep down, but you had a much longer, gradual up. I don't know. It was very, you know, like any runner, I overthought it just about every day.

I was like laying in bed at night, like pondering this deep decision that you have to make. Is that way faster or is the other way faster? But, you know, I got to where I was doing, I mean, I did speed work. I did all kinds of stuff in there and even was able to, you know, I ran a few five-minute miles in there and did some things I hadn't done for many, many years. So just because I had the time to do it and, you know, I read. You're not going to be returning any phone calls or anything. I read 150 books.

I wrote every day. I did my best under really stressful circumstances to take care of my body, but also my spirit. And that was done by helping other people. And look, you know from being in recovery. Talk about helping other people. Sounds very giving and very generous. And we know in addiction recovery that the thing that I can do

that is absolutely the most selfish thing I can do and best for me is to help someone else. And so I set my sights on doing that. And still, hopefully, still do. I get a lot of requests to speak and to, you know, hopefully still do, you know, I get a lot of requests to, to speak and, uh, to do things, you know, with, you know, talk to kids and adults alike. And, and I try to never say no to those things just because I think it's, it's what I'm required to do. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to keep it, you got to give it away. Exactly. So how did the Twitter thing work?

You got to answer this driving me crazy. Yeah. So I had a, I had a, the, the twitter thing work you gotta answer this driving me crazy yeah so i had a i had the the way prisons work these days is they do federal prisons are equipped with computers these days it's very expensive and it's very limited the amount of time you can spend on it so what i would do is i would actually write my tweets uh in advance and sometimes i would mail them out in a in a letter sometimes i would get on email but that was heavily that was monitored by by the system but it wasn't illegal it's not you know again there it did turn into a they didn't care for it let's just put it that way they weren't happy about the fact that you're tweeting from no they weren't happy about it but the fact of the matter is and someone else had to actually you know type the tweet exactly right exactly

but that happens every day you know all over the place and it's not illegal there's no and i wasn't you know if i had been sending out posts that said you know here's how you sneak some contraband into me or you know naming the guard by his name or yeah anything or even or even an inmate by his name then that's not cool i wouldn't i wouldn't have done that but you know it was all generic i mean my my favorite one was i did this whole little series called overheard there was some there was some funny stuff you know, because guys in there, you know, would just say, you know, say some crazy things. You know, it was, I don't even know if I can give an example. I know, I'm trying to remember.

Well, I'm standing in line, you know, for lunch one day and, you know, these two guys are talking in front of me. And one of them looks at the other one and says, now wait a minute. Exactly what part of the cow does the liver come from? It's like we were having liver and onions that day and another guy asked me he asked me he's like now you know how many laps around this track equals a cupcake you know things like that and i mean they're they're just they're great funny you know genuine questions and some and also some heart- wrenching things, you know, guys who hadn't seen their kids for 10 years and they're getting a visit that day and you know, things like that.

I mean, it was, uh, I mean, speaking of that, how has that, um, kind of colored your relationship with your sons? I mean, how has that, how has that impacted? Well, my kids are doing great, but I couldn't have, I couldn't have been taken away from them. Is there ever a good time? But they were teenage boys and, you know, one of them, my youngest is now a freshman at UNC in Chapel Hill. And, and he's, you know, to say they survived it and got through it. Okay. Is just to acknowledge the physical manifestation of what

happened. I mean, you know, they're still alive there, you know, they're doing their thing, they're living their lives, but you know, it's a, it's a pretty, uh, scary thing, you know, for a teenage boy to just have, have their dad, you know, taken away. And, and my older son's had some addiction issues himself and, you know, he's doing fantastically right now. And he's a, he's a personal trainer and I'm, I'm hoping that both of them get to come out during run to Boston and spend some time out on the road and helping out. And, you know, they're, they're doing well, but it, it, you know, it destroyed my family, you know, and the shock waves from that will probably never go away fully. You know, but I say to them the same thing that I'd say to anybody.

Nobody can ruin my life except for me. Nobody gets the right to do that. Not, you know, not, you know, some federal agent, not prison, not a prison guard, not anybody, you know, I'm fully capable of messing up my own life. Right. And, and, but to kind of come out of Beckley and carry that pain of knowing that, you know, what happened really impacted those boys, you know, in a, in a profound way. And how do you, you know, kind of move forward with that? Well, and as a father, they, they, you know in a profound way and how do you you know kind of move forward with that well as a father they they you know I called them and I wrote and I would do all the things that I could and it was you know at the beginning we had a lot of contact and as as time moved forward

you know what I was and this is my my kids are loving boys who both will, you know, hug and kiss me in public, you know, and I judge that as success as a father, but they, they to protect themselves actually had to like withdraw from me to a certain degree. I mean, it was almost like too painful to hear from me. Right. And, and I tried to respect that and to not try to be, and one of the hardest things to do is to try to stay in touch, but also try to not be like a parent. Like I couldn't, I couldn't tell them what to do from the situation I was in. And, you know, again, and I watched other guys, I learned from other guys. I had a guy, you know, block who was listed on your, your list there, you know, and he had a, a son who was one of the top basketball players

in the country and he's the first one who said to me man you got to let it go you got to let it go because i'd call and i wouldn't hear back i'd go weeks sometimes without hearing from my own kids and he'd say you got to let it go they're in their own pain right now and you just got to let them get through it you can't save, and they can't save you. Do your time. Don't let your time do you. Right, right. And there's this incredible dichotomy between your Beckley,

which equals imprisonment, and running, which is ultimate freedom, right? These two worlds butting up against each other, and your ability to find freedom through running during your imprisonment, you know? It's kind of like this Venn diagram kind of situation, and I was thinking about that last night when I was going to bed, like the two extremes butting up against each other. And, you know, somebody who's used to experiencing that kind of freedom going all the way to the other side. Well, and I had a close friend who said to me, you know, before I went to Berkeley, and he was honest with me,

he said, you know, I can't imagine anybody less suited to lose their freedom than you. Because I am. suited to lose their freedom than you because I am in a way even my conviction in a way was uh was an attack of lifestyle you know because my lifestyle is not normal I don't you know I've never worked like nine to five and and I not not because I I just really have proven myself very incapable of being able to do it. And so it's really a shortcoming. It's not a anything else, but I always sacrificed some security and money and those things to maintain my freedom, right? Because that's what I wanted. I wanted to be able to go run or to go travel or go to a race or go do those things when I wanted to do it.

And that was more important to me than having money in the bank. So the irony is all the more palpable. Yeah. And I look at it, you know what? It's the same reason that just a couple of days I got up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go run around a track in North Carolina for 10 hours in training and working on my pacing, as I was saying. I did that because I want to, you know, prove to myself, not to anybody else, but that I can do the things that are difficult and that I don't want to do,

and that I know I'll be stronger if I can do it. And prison forced me to face that, you know, a thousand times over. Well, yeah. And it's a way of sort of staying connected to that experience, right? It's sort of like the, the homeless guy who's given a bed and still sleeps on the floor. Yeah. Yeah. You almost don't want to get too comfortable. And I will say it's, and you know, I'm, I don't ever like to be a fear monger, but I never imagined something like that could have ever happened to me. And most people can't, you know, most people don't go through life, their lives thinking, oh man, at any time I could be arrested and go to prison, you know, and, and yet, uh, and not to get off on another big tangent, you know, you look at all the stuff going on with Edward Snowden and just the, you know, and yet, and not to get off on another big tangent,

you know, you look at all the stuff going on with Edward Snowden and just the, you know, all the things being disclosed now. It's an interesting place we live in these days where there's very little privacy. There's very little that's not suspect. And somehow we've become afraid of our own shadows. And that somehow justifies that, you know, that nothing should be private any longer. It's a very bizarre mashup because on the one hand, we've never had more access to more information. So there's a

level of transparency that you would think would translate into, you know, sort of greater personal sovereignty, et cetera. And yet at the same time, we have this clampdown kind of happening or this consolidation of governmental power that we're all kind of signing off on willingly, kind of volunteering for it. And in a very Orwellian kind of sense, you know, that we, you know, people say, well, the NSA can, you know, that we, you know, people say, well, the NSA can,

you know, access your iPhone and it can turn on your camera and the microphone and listen to you. And everyone's like, okay, all right. So, you know, what are we doing tonight? You know, like we're just sort of yawning over this whole thing. And we feel powerless. Yeah. It's like, well, what am I supposed to do? You know, I enjoy my day. I'm not going to give up my iPhone. Yeah, exactly. Forget about that. And it is. We laugh about it, but it is.

It's a question that I think, I mean, I'm sort of enjoying watching it in the media because it's become a really hotly debated topic, as it should be. And I don't have the answers. topic as it should be, you know, and I don't, I don't have the answers. And I consider myself to be, I consider myself to be a true patriot. I mean, I am a patriot. I certainly believe in all the, all the basis of what this country was built on and its freedoms. And I think it's very debatable that we even resemble any of that, you know, vision that our forefathers had, you know, these days. And some of that is inevitable change that's come through growth and technology and other ways. But some of it's a, you know, a psychological shift that we're just comfortable

and we're just kind of okay with the stuff that, that we feel powerless to control. And you know, I don't have the answers either, but I, but I know that, I know that, you know, asking the questions and continuing to talk about it is really important. I think people are, are a little fed up and, and, and worried though, you know, about, about where the direction it's all heading. And I'm glad we We should be worried. But we're not sort of rallying in the streets like Vietnam era. No.

We're too distracted. We're too busy for that. Well, we're busy, but we're busy doing what? We're busy distracting ourselves with technology and convenience. Yeah. And disposable content. And running. I don't have to stop running well just not running very good yeah

no well let's we've been going for almost two hours i don't want to keep you too much longer but we do i do want to say you know sort of you know in the wake of getting out of beckley it was a a mere year later where you show up at bad water right and uh i mean what were your expectations kind of returning to that race you know i wanted to be under the radar like as much as i possibly could be which is you know at that which is not being impossible yeah especially at that one i mean but but chris costman the race director who who i consider a friend and a great guy and lives down the street here oh yeah that's right the supermarket the other day yeah yeah in the canyon there and actually the you know we don't have time to

talk about it today but everybody out there should should google bad water right now and right national parks and all i tweeted i tweeted about that i mean i'm sure you saw that article about the um the radiation and that caused a reaction with people because you know it's kind of a suspect story but they're you know basically there's not going to be any Adventure Corps racing in Death Valley next year. They have their permits. We're not rubber stamped for the first time. It's crazy. I mean, the economic impact alone in Death Valley, you know, is fantastic.

And the tourism, I think, that tangentially comes from the notoriety that a race like bad water has i mean it brings people from all over the world they have to see this place yeah so it's gonna i mean do you have any behind the scenes knowledge about that that you can impart or no i really don't although that i know that every summer there's a lot of germans around in death valley it always fascinates me they're in dead they're in bad water i don't know if you noticed this well all the kids that work in the restaurants in the hotels are all from strange foreign countries doing their like year abroad and i'm like you got sent here right you came to this is your american experience like stuck in the middle

of the desert at age 19 you know like what do you guys do all day when you're not working well it's a you know in bad water is a great race for when you're not working well it's a you know in bad water is a great race for a lot of reasons it's certainly a very difficult race but it is like like most big ultras it's a family you know you go to western states you go to you know leadville any of these you tend to see the same people generally over and over and it's this big celebration really of something difficult and interesting and beautiful and and for no reason that's been taken away for this year I mean literally for no reason and hopefully people will you know at least write to the right appropriate people and

and complain but anyway to my race this past year I there, Chris gave me the race number two, like he assigned me number two. And usually race numbers are assigned based on your previous year's finish. So obviously that wasn't the case for me. So I don't actually know this, but I assume whoever was second the year before didn't, didn't come, you know, know last year otherwise they would have been assigned number two so whoever that was didn't didn't make it um last year so he gave me number two which to me instantly put like tons of extra pressure like there was some expectation uh and in fact somebody before the race i overheard a comment that someone made a woman made that you know that i didn't deserve number two I didn't deserve

number two. She didn't know I could hear her. Yeah. And so I was like, I will admit to sort of going, okay. But, you know, I really went there with a, I think a good conservative plan. And I, I, I went there to win the race though. I would never have said that out loud and never will before a race. But in my mind, that's the mindset that I, I had to have. And I was fortunate enough to run a time that, that actually was fast enough to win a whole lot of the years in the past. Right. And break the master's record. Yeah. Yeah. I actually broke it by three hours and, and had a,

if there's any such thing as an easy race at Badwater, I certainly had the easiest one I had ever had. I saw you a couple times. You didn't look like it was easy. You didn't look relaxed. You did not look relaxed. Dang it. That's so bad.

But you were killing it the whole time. I was happy to see you up there. I remember, what's the town where you come in and you get all the ice? Well, there's Stovepipe. I think it was Stovepipe. It was like 3 in the afternoon when the heat was really dialed in. I saw you. I was getting ice for Dean, and I saw you coming through.

And you ran into the bushes to go to the bathroom or something like that and running by. And I was like, wow, you're really up there, man. You were killing it. But you didn't look like – it wasn't like you were smiling smiling and waving you know what i mean like it's it was really hot well my my crew and nastassiana i was really just trying to impress i was really just trying to impress her she's laughing that's the only thing i was trying to do was to impress her so i had to look good right but you know the fact is i do my crew always knows that I actually, I joke the whole time.

And I, even if I'm miserable, I do enjoy the experience tremendously. I like being out there. But this year, I don't know, two things happened, I think, that made me have a great race. Maybe three if I just count having an awesome girlfriend at the time. But she taught me how to hydrate properly, which sounds like a funny thing. The guy who ran across the Sahara Desert needs to be told how to hydrate? Well, I used to show up in Death Valley every year, and I'd maybe start drinking

extra water a few days before. And certainly when I got out into that dryness and hotness, I would ramp it up. The fact is, what I figured out was my dehydration was chronic and that, you know, as a runner, I I'm almost, I never had done a great job. So a couple of months before that race, I really, thanks to her started focusing on hydration. The other, honestly, is it was the shoes. I actually switched to Hoka's and, um, you know, I had run in some fantastic shoe brands before that had supported me. Well,

Newton most recently, and they're a fantastic brand with great people, the opposite of, uh, they are. And I, and I really, you know, for, for ultra for for someone my size, I'm a little bigger than most of the guys that were up there where I am in the race. And Hoka being a fairly new brand, I never had an experience like that in my life. I mean, I actually ran the next day after Badwater. Right. And two days later, I ran five miles with no pain. And I'd been in a wheelchair before after uh you know after bad water with a variety of other brands because it's just a it's a hard race yeah it's a hard race it's hot

and you get dehydrated and everything else so hydration made a difference and and again i would i would be disingenuous if i didn't admit having something to prove you know i went there fearful that i would fall apart i hadn't done the race in a few years i was 50 years old and i was like going you know deep down i was like should i really be doing this again right or should i you know i think people expected me just to go out and be you know just participate right and and I went out and was lucky enough to have a good day and, and race well and have fun doing it and, and actually feel good when it was over. And I've never had that experience. And I think you surprised a lot of people too. I think there were a lot of people there that didn't expect you to perform at that level. Yeah. And I was probably

one of them, but you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't, you know, if you go into Badwater or any race like that ever thinking you're going to do a certain thing, you're probably going to get your ass handed to you. So, you know, I knew that if I kept a good plan, and as always I was pretty far back in the pack halfway through, and I didn't start going faster. I just maintained and managed to catch up. Yeah. The front pack was, was pretty aggressive. They were overly aggressive.

And usually a few of them will, you know, fall off and that, that happens every year, you know, they're, they're going after it. And, uh, but it was a great experience. Again, I credit Chris Cosman, uh, and the Badwater family for welcoming me back. And there was no, you know, there was never any discomfort around any of that. And I had a blast. I had a blast. I hope the 2015, I get to do it again.

Yeah, so they're going to do it. They're going to have the quote unquote Badwater race. They're just not going to do it in Badwater, right? So it's going to be out like in the Salton Sea area or something like that correct chris will find a way he'll find a way to make it happen and to make it a good good event i mean he's you know he's a brilliant tough race director yeah that puts on safe uh really really wonderful events and i hope i know he'll do the same this year, even, even without death Valley. Speaking of events that go from very low points to very high points, you've been public in talking about this, uh, expedition that you've wanted to do going from,

uh, what is it? The dead sea to the top of Everest. I mean, are you shelving that for now, or is that still on the bucket list? It is very much still on the bucket list Everest. I mean, are you shelving that for now? Or is that still on the bucket list? It is very much still on the bucket list. And it's, it's something that, uh, I would like to do on all seven continents to go from the lowest point on each continent to the highest. And it'll, it'll probably, if I get to do it, it'll take, you know, the rest of my life in all likelihood. Um, I've promised, uh, that for this year, you know, we'll get through run to Boston and kind of focus on life as much as possible for the rest of the year and on hopefully finishing a book and doing those things. But, you know, I love this metaphor of lowest to highest because I feel like I've, I've been at that lowest point many times. Except for you, it's not a, it's, it's not this linear thing. Your, your courses should go,

they should, they should go high, low, high, low, high, low. There should be a lot of up and down. Well, if I could put all seven continents together on the same expedition, that would, that would happen, I guess. But I, I absolutely am still, that's still on the agenda. And sponsors and finding companies that, and angels out there too, that support the things that I believe in is important to me. And certainly something that I'm always looking

for those partnerships. And I've been very lucky in the past to find good ones and people that believe in what I believe in. And I'm confident that will happen again. Cool. Yeah. That sounds like a good place to end it. So now do I get to ask you some questions? Well, that'll be the next time. Okay. Or we can go running now and you can do that. That'd be great. Yeah. If you want want it you should start your own podcast you're a radio host you do a podcast i'll start a network you can join my all right that'd be great i would do it in a heartbeat i'm sure you know plenty of characters i could i know a few i know a few i know a few cool all

right so uh running in place coming to bookstores probably next year. Run to Boston. If people want to support, follow, do you have like a donate? Can people donate? People want to support this? Is there a place for them to go online and learn a little bit more about? Absolutely, yeah. So just, I mean, it's pretty simple. Run to Boston, and the two is the number two. So run to Boston.com because of Andre and I.

Dot com and at run to Bostonoston on twitter we actually just got that handle today oh you did you know somebody else i would imagine somebody would yeah well but it was just they weren't using it it was a guy it was an italian guy who ran boston a few years ago and and and you know he had one follower and didn't ever post anything and so uh so we got that and then there's a Facebook page that just went up my first, uh, my first article on the online, the digital version of runnersworld.com. Right. I mean, really runnersworld.com is the best place to follow it because they're going to not only post the things that I do, but their own stuff. And you know, most runners are there anyway,

so it's an easy way to follow it. And there will be at least one post a week written by Andre and I separately. We're telling our own kind of stories. And you're documenting this on film, aren't you? Absolutely. Have your crew all sorted out for that? Yes, but it's going to be a much lower key affair than certainly not running the Sahara and not even at this point running America. It might just be me with my handy cam and, uh, and out there talking, but, um, you know, maybe some GoPros attached to some things, but it's, it, you know, this time I

certainly want to tell a story, but, um, you know, I'm going to do it more through, through writing and through, you know, the runners world portal, generally speaking, just because they've been great about wanting to help tell the story. And obviously they're fully invested in the story of Boston and of, you know, the purpose behind Run to Boston and helping to tell an organic story. You know, that one doesn't need any embellishment. It's just a poignant story on its own. And so, yeah, it can be run to boston.com or just the runnersworld.com site. We'll always have an update. And absolutely, we hope that people will sign on to receive daily updates.

And the one thing about running for 44 days in a row is there's, you know, you can ignore a couple of days and you don't feel like you've missed very much. Are you going to have any, like a live GPS tracking kind of thing? Absolutely. Yeah, so we'll have some mechanism that will. There's a couple of possibilities there with some of the apps that are out there and other ways of doing the tracking. So, yeah, people can get on anytime and see where we are.

Including the NSA. Yeah, exactly. Well, they're welcome to watch. And Robert Nordlander. Absolutely. He'll be watching very intently. I'm sure. When I left Greensboro, he apparently took up running.

Oh, he did? Oh, I love that. Yeah, it was interesting. You guys are going to be buddies. We are. We're going to run together someday. I fully expect that. Yeah, I would like to see that, actually.

Cool. All right, and if you want to just know a little bit more about Charlie in general, charlieengel.com, right? Yeah. On Twitter, at Charlie Engel. Yeah. E-N-G-L-E. Correct. charlieengel.com right and on twitter at charlie engel yeah e-n-g-l-e correct and uh go to rich

roll.com on the page where i'm going to host this episode i'll put up a bunch of links to some of those news articles like the new york times and outside and the oxford american one which is my favorite and other good stuff including and the run to boston site and all that kind of stuff cool perfect all right man so uh we'll get you back on the road so you can go enjoy your wedded bliss. Absolutely. I'm ready. Thanks again for dropping in.

I'm glad it worked out. Thanks, Rich, for having me. I'm looking forward to coming back someday. Yeah, absolutely. When you finish the run and break the record, you got to come back. That's a deal. And then you got to come back again

when your book comes out. That's a deal. Happy to do it. Anything I can do to help with the book stuff too let me know well we we figured out we have a lot of problems to solve out there and i think we can do it all right good yeah cool man all right best of luck man i can't wait to follow you online for thank you i appreciate it all right man i'm out here peace plants Thank you.