The Rich Roll Podcast - Sanjay Rawal On Running As Spiritual Practice

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Most contemplate running as exercise. A physical practice we reluctantly endure. An uncomfortable discipline we tolerate for the sake of fitness. For weight loss. Or to competitively measure ourselves against ourselves and others. Running is about metrics. Pace maintained. Distance covered. Calories burned. Energy expended. And results quantified. But ask Sanjay Rawal and he'll tell you that definition isn't just limited — it misses the point altogether. Running is so much more than podiums and aesthetics. At its core, it's a most primal activity that unites us all. It's about growth. It's about self-understanding. And for many cultures dating back millennia, it's about spiritual growth. Survival. Healing. And even transcendence. Running as devotion. Today Sanjay and I explore this theme in a riveting conversation focused on the inherent and indelible power of this shared human experience to better understand ourselves, our environment and the unseen world. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a B.A. in Molecular & Cell Biology and Neurobiology, Sanjay was on the fast track to a career in medicine when he began to question his path, seeking answers and solace in meditation. This quest led to becoming a devoted student of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian spiritual teacher based in New York. What followed is life committed to spiritual expansion. And a calling to improve the collective human condition. Sanjay spent a decade in human rights philanthropy before realizing he could deepen his impact by turning a lens on cultures and communities worthy of notice. Hence was born a career in documentary filmmaking. Sanjay's oeuvre includes Ocean Monk*, Challenging Impossibility, and Food Chains*, which takes a hard look at migrant farm labor exploitation. Sanjay's latest offering, and the focus of today's conversation, is 3100: Run and Become. A behind-the-scenes immersion into the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race — the world's most elusive and elite, multi-day running race. Held annually around one utterly unremarkable half-mile urban sidewalk block in Queens, New York, it demands competitors to complete at least 59 miles daily for 52 straight days. The goal? Not glory, but rather the promise of personal expansion and a deeper sense of self. The film also explores the historic and current relationship between running and spirituality through intimate visits with the Marathon Monks of Japan's Mt. Hiei; the persistence hunters of Africa's Kalahari tribe; and Arizona's Navajo Nation. The act of running to transform oneself is as old as time. Ancient man and woman ran not just for survival, but to connect with Nature and the Divine. This is a conversation that explores this essential truth. Because to run is to be human. I sincerely hope you enjoy this very special exchange with a truly remarkable man. And make a point of seeing the movie. Peace + Plants, Rich

Running unites us. At one point, every single culture on earth relied on running. So it's literally baked into our DNA, and it's baked into our culture. We've been running for millions of years, and it's an activity that we're going to continue doing for hundreds of thousands more, regardless of what the political state of humanity is. If we can go back to that state, I think we'll all realize that there are things that unite us

that are much stronger than the things that we think divide us. That's Sanjay Rawal, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? This is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. Hope you guys are doing good. Got a great show for you guys today.

Before we get into it, I wanted to say that the best and the easiest part of this whole podcast experience for me is having the conversations with the guests. I love that. It comes very natural to me. But the hardest, the most awkward aspect of doing this is recording these intros. There's just something about me being by myself talking into a microphone that just feels unnatural. And I know that it comes off stiff and a little bit stilted. And so I thought I would mix things up today by doing something different. Today, I have a co-host for the intros, my man, DK, David Kahn. Hello.

How's it going, man? It's good. I like the way you do the intros of the show. I don't think there's anything stiff or anything. It just feels like, it just doesn't feel, I don't know, like it just doesn't feel as natural or as like flowing. It's just easier to talk to somebody else when somebody's sitting across from you.

No, I get it. Because you have to do work and you have to write it out and you're trying to like balance all. I get all up in my head. You know, that's the thing. Now I get to look at you. We're going to try this out as an experiment and we'll let the listeners decide. All right. How do you feel? Do you feel the pressure? They should just be generous when they send you notes about DK's performance today. Right. So DK, for those of you who don't know, is my main man. We've been friends for like 20 years, right?

Yeah. And DK came on board the podcast to manage all the sponsor relationships and he's doing a great job. Thank you. We're getting such great sponsors for the show. All the sponsors that we have now are companies that I really believe in, that I love, products that I use, and that just feels really good. Hey, man. It's your hard work, man. You do all the hard work. I do a little bit of work. No, it's been good, dude. So today we have a great conversation for you guys. It's with a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker called Sanjay Rawal. And he's a super interesting cat. This is a guy who's got a very diverse dynamic background. He started out in human rights and philanthropy, got into documentary filmmaking. And this is going to be a conversation about running

predominantly, but not running in the context that you might expect. This is about the spirituality of running, this idea of running as devotion, running for enlightenment, running for spiritual growth, which is a topic, a theme that Sanjay explores in depth in his new documentary that he just directed called 3100 Run and Become, which is a great film. You guys should all see it. Why 3100? I'm going to tell you guys in a minute. But first.

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Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, Sanjay Rawal. What do I want to say about him? Well, I guess I would say up front, Sanjay is an award-winning documentary film director based in New York City. And before I get into his films, I think it's worth mentioning that he's got this really interesting background. This is a guy who graduated from Berkeley with a BA in molecular and cell biology and neurobiology. So he's super smart, but instead of going into medicine

or research, like I think his parents would have preferred. He ends up going on this wild spiritual quest. He gets super into meditation. He becomes a devotee of Sri Chinmoy. Do you know who Sri Chinmoy is? I do. I actually had one of his books when I was younger. One of my friends gave it to me and I checked it out. What did it tell you? The only two things I remember, one of them was you absorb all the principles of whatever you're eating. And I remember it was the first time that I stopped eating eggs and meat for almost a week. Oh, you did? Yeah. How old were you? 23. And look

at where we're at right now. But it's interesting that you still remember that. I remember that. It had an impact on me immediately. Yeah, it's cool. So Sri Shenmue, he's since passed, but he was kind of this legendary guru in the Hindu tradition that lived in New York City. And there was something about him that really just captured Sanjay's fascination. And he ends up moving to New York City to become a devotee.

And professionally, he gets involved in human rights and philanthropy. He ends up developing, I'm talking about Sanjay now, developing projects in over 40 nations, working with all kinds of people like luminaries and heads of state and business leaders and celebrities and private equity funds. And they were all initiatives designed to make a measurable positive impact on the world. But then he flips the script, he turns the page, and he becomes this documentary filmmaker. And over the years, he's made a number of films, including The Ocean Monk, a movie called Challenging Impossibility that is about

Sri Chinmoy. He made a movie called Food Chains that you might have seen. And his newest film is called 3100 Run and Become. And that's the focus of today's conversation. I met Sanjay through my friend, Tom Scott, who you might remember from being on the podcast. He's the founder of the Nantucket Project. And Tom just thought that Sanjay and I would hit it off. And he sent me the trailer for this movie, 3100 Run and Become. And I loved it. And I knew like right away before I even met Sanjay that, or even seeing the movie that, that, that he would make a great guest on the show. And I think my instincts were correct and intact because this really is an amazing conversation. We talk about

Sanjay's incredible personal story. This is a guy who grew up in, or was born, I should say, in Nigeria and lived in Colorado and Oakland. And this search that he goes on to find his own path and how that led him to meditation and spirituality and Sri Chinmoy. We talk about who that guy was, which is an amazing tale in its own right. And then we get into this movie, 3100, which is a beautiful look, a beautiful journey into this nexus, this connection between running in its purest form and spiritual growth. And in telling that story, Sanjay explores a number of different subcultures, including the story behind and all the personalities behind this crazy race called the Shri Shenmue Self-Transcendence 3100, which is, get this DK, a 3100 mile running race that takes

place every summer in New York City, where I think there's like about, I don't know, somewhere between 12 and 20 every year, show up to run circles around this one half mile loop in Queens. It's basically just a very average city block around a high school in Queens. That's the same distance as running from New York to Los Angeles. Right. So they just do it like they just keep running in this circle. I think every day they switch, they go counterclockwise one day, clockwise the other day, but they have to do it. I don't remember the number of days that the cutoff is. I think it's like 57 days or something like that. So they literally have to average about 60 miles a day to keep pace and get it done, which is insane. Yeah. Had you, living in New York City, had you ever heard of this race before?

I never heard of it. I had heard of it, but I think I just dismissed it as apocryphal. Like I couldn't believe that people actually did this, but it's been going on for decades. It's crazy. And so Sanjay really goes behind the scenes of this race and the people that participate in it.

And then he goes off in the movie on these tangents where he explores other cultures that have historically used running as a method for expansion. We visit the Kalahari Bushmen in Africa. He goes to commune with the Marathon monks of Mount Hiei in Japan. Have you ever heard of these people? No. Oh, it's crazy. It's this sect of Buddhism where they believe that enlightenment can be achieved through running.

I don't wanna spoil it because the story that Sanjay tells about this culture is totally amazing. I'm gonna have to start running more. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm gonna have to start running, period. You do, man. Well, you're wearing your odds, right? more. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm going to have to start running, period. You do, man. Well, you're wearing your odds, right? I know.

Come on, man. It's hard. We'll go running together. I know. I did that once with you, and you're like running up the hill. I'm like, I'm walking. You're like, come on, DK. We're going to make it up the hill.

We're going to do it together. And he also visits the Navajo tribe, which has a rich history in running as well, which I wasn't familiar with. So that's all pretty cool. So all of these cultures, the thesis of the movie is looking at this culture of running or these cultures where running is used as devotion, where running is leveraged as this vehicle to transcend, to survive, running for enlightenment and running for healing. It's a super cool movie. Sanjay is the perfect person to tell this story. And this conversation is amazing. So with that,

should we dig into it? Yeah, I want to listen to this. How do you feel about how this intro went? I think it went well. Was it good? I mean, yeah. It made it easier for me, man. That's all that was important. It's an excuse for me to talk to you. No, it's great. It was good, man. So everybody out there, let me, let DK know.

You don't have to let me know. You don't want feedback? No, I get a little bit of feedback, but I'm sure they're going to be like, hey, why is that guy on Rich Roll's show? You got to mix up the format every once in a while, man. That's true. You can't be afraid to experiment.

I know. I feel like I'm going to have to go on a better diet and be healthy just so I can sit here next to you. That's my ultimate agenda. Good luck. All right. So this is me and Sanjay Rawal. So she pronounces it Jaya. The Sanskrit and North Indian pronunciation is Jaya.

Right. We go by Jaya with our daughter. Nice. And we've got a friend who's got a child named Jaya as well. Oh, cool. So it seems to be in the air. And my name is Sanjay, which means with victory. Oh, I didn't know that.

The same root, Jaya. Oh, that's cool. In Sanskrit, my name is Sanjaya. Uh-huh. And Jaya, the loose translation of Jaya is victory. Yeah, Jaya is a Sanskrit word for victory. Right. So, where are your parents from?

My dad's from Gujarat, which is on the border of Pakistan, northwestern India. Mom is from Madras, kind of southeastern tip of India. And when did they immigrate? They met each other in their first jobs in Nigeria, which is where I was born. Oh, you were born in Nigeria. Wow. And then they moved to Colorado pretty quickly to teach. My dad had gone to school in the States and worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Africa, collecting indigenous seeds. So that's where the human rights genetic material kicks in for you?

I think so. I ran away from it for as long as I could. And it just rubber banded you back. Yeah. And the funny thing is like my dad was a geneticist and after kicking and screaming, I ended up working with him on like a tomato genetics company. You know, like all the tomatoes that you get at Whole Foods, the ones that are in the clamshells from Baja are all his varieties. So I kicked and screamed every way possible and was roped back in like the most brutally harsh way. Yeah. What do you mean brutally harsh? I wouldn't, if somebody had told me that I would be following in my father's footsteps when I was like 18 or 19.

Because everything inside of you was to do something different. To like forge my own path. And it's like, you know, we follow the footsteps of those who walked before us. Right. As much as, you know, we don't think we do. Of course, man. So you grew up in Colorado then? Colorado and California, Oakland, and then went to Cal,

and then met a student of Sri Chinmoy's at Cal. And as soon as I graduated, I wanted to get as far away from academic rigor and materialism as possible. Moved to New York, where Sri Chinmoy was based, but I was at $400 or $500 per month in terms of my own budget. But the original impetus to move to New York City was really to be a devotee of Sri Chinmoy. Yeah, that's exactly it.

Wow. What did your parents think of that? They freaked out. Did they? They both have PhDs. They're like, you're supposed to be a professor. And all my relatives were like, why are you in America if you want to follow a guru?

Yeah, exactly. We don't move to America. To follow an Indian guru, you've got to go back home, right? Yeah. Instead, you go to Queens. I go to Jamaica, Queens. And for people, I don't know if you've been to Queens or been to Jamaica other than like on your way to JFK. But it's like bottom of the barrel in New York City.

It's very diverse. Yeah, and Sri Chinmoy's thing was like, don't hide from the world. And so most gurus live in Kauai or Malibu. Right, and he's in Queens. He's in Queens. So I learned fast. It's a trip. I mean, what was it about Sri Chinmoy that connected with you?

Why did you feel this pull? In high school, I was in a really conservative community, a suburb of Oakland, a weirdly conservative community. In my senior year, friends of mine started getting into, just to kind of rebel into the Dalai Lama and like, you know, Jonathan Livingston Siegel and those types of books. And when I went to college, it was Berkeley. You can't, you know, you can't avoid it. And so I started meditating and started trying to find a spiritual path. And most places I went to- What was the driver behind that though? You know, because my parents were so academically minded, they had made me do everything I did,

like from sports to music to like overachieving. I did exactly what they wanted. And when I got to school, I realized I was still doing exactly what they wanted and I needed to find my own way. You're being a good Indian son. Are you the oldest? Do you have siblings?

I don't know if I was, I was being the average Indian son. Yeah, just doing what you were expected to do. And so you experienced some kind of void in trying to figure out what it was that made you, you. I realized I was so deep on a path that wasn't on my own choosing, and I needed to find a way to choose my own path. And I realized quickly that couldn't be through academics. I had to find a way to choose my own path. And I realized quickly that couldn't be through academics. Like I had to go on an inner search. And, you know, the writings of Sri Ramakrishna really, really inspired me. And that's when I realized like, I've got professors,

you know, like, why can't I have like a teacher for what I want to do in terms of self-realization? Right. Well, that's also going back to your Indian heritage. It is, but it was almost like osmosis because my parents' generation moved to the U.S. to get away from that. It was the first time that Indians in the modern era could have material aspirations. And so they were all about the material life.

Now they're not, but they were then. And they're trying to acclimate you to become American, so to speak. Oh, big time. It was like Kraft macaroni and cheese and hamburgers. Right. You know, like now I love curry. I can't believe like I didn't eat any of that stuff

when I was growing up. And so when you start meditating and going on this path and your parents must have been, well, I would imagine it must be somewhat mixed. Like, on the one hand, like, okay, he's verging from this trajectory that we've sort of established for him. But at the same time, there's something, you know, beautiful about you connecting with what, you know, could be characterized as, you know, your sort of inherent native traditions.

It's true. The one thing that everybody has a difficult time with, especially in the West, is how much obedience you need to follow a teacher, whether the teacher is a Zen practitioner, whether the teacher is your martial arts teacher, or whether it's an Indian guru. And so I literally put myself at the feet of Sri Chinmoy. And I asked him, my parents really want me to go to grad school and want me to be a doctor. From an inner standpoint, what's your belief?

And Sri Chinmoy meditated and said, in an almost otherworldly tone, your soul does not want you to be a doctor. Your soul wants you to strengthen your heart. And so the first thing I did is I went to my parents and it was like, I asked Sri Chinmoy what I should do. And he said, your soul doesn't want you to be a doctor. And they're like, what does that even mean?

Like, no, you know, like you are becoming a doctor. And then Sri Chinmoy told me cryptically, you know, that I still had to please my parents. So it's like, it was almost like a koan, like, don't please your parents, but please your parents. And what does strength in your heart actually mean? I had a hard time understanding that because I think as men or boys in this country, we're not really, you know, at least when I grew up in the 80s and 90s, we weren't really encouraged to find those qualities of the heart, like love and sympathy and generosity. And academic life obviously strengthens your mind much more than your heart. And I realized I needed to develop qualities of love, of sympathy, of joy, not for anybody else, but for myself. And that would actually give me the strength to be confident with my convictions.

And what was the process of exploring that for you? It was totally detaching myself from that Western tract. I mean, I went from like 4.0 at Cal to working at a community health food store in Queens at $100 per week, living in a house with 15 other dudes. Were they all devotees? They all were. And we all had our own little rooms. You know, rent was $200 per month. And, you know, going to morning and evening meditations. And that was it.

That was it. Wow. That was it. And a lot of service. Like, we gave a lot of free meditation classes and there were like athletic races that weirdly enough, you know, this Indian teacher really wanted us to participate in. And I traveled with him. And I did that pretty much nonstop until a point when he said, you know, he didn't say this explicitly, but he was like, you know, you're ready to do more. And that's when he kind of pushed me into this fear of human rights. We were chatting the other week when we first met, and I was sharing

with you that my only real awareness of Sri Chinmoy was when I was living in New York City right after college. And I would see people running, you know, in Central Park or all over the city wearing Sri Chinmoy t-shirts. And I was like, who is this Sri Chinmoy? Is he like a coach to a running club? But there seemed to be this almost cultish conglomeration of people everywhere I looked who were running all over Manhattan wearing paraphernalia that was advertising Sri Shinmoy. And I thought he must be some kind of cult guru or something like that. And I didn't really explore it any further than that at that point, but I've since come to learn. And what your film, which we're going to talk about in a minute, so beautifully explores is like who this man was, what he stood for,

and the impact that he's had, not just on you spiritually, but on a vast community of people, and how that sort of intertwines very beautifully and naturally with the running community in New York City. You know, it's hard to believe that marathon running at one point in the 60s and even mid-70s was absolutely counterculture. I mean, if you read the early New York City marathons, which were just five or six laps around Central Park, the people that did those were thought to be crazy. And when Fred Lebow decided to do the 1976 big five borough marathon in honor of the bicentennial, I think that's the first time that marathoning kind of reached the mainstream. And Sri Chinmoy was in New York at that point and was very, very supportive of this flourishing

of people's aspirations to try to do something that was seemingly impossible. I mean, now, like from your five ultras to now 50 ultras in 50 days, that bar has been pushed. Right. But in 1976, 1977, like 26.2 miles was like the edge of the envelope. And it's New York City in the 70s.

So before the 1977 and 1978 New York City marathons, the day before Fred Lebo and the New York City Roadrunners would have Sri Chinmoy lead meditations. So you had an Indian guru in a dhoti in Central Park with runners meditating. It's crazy. Yeah, and just to kind of provide a little exposition on this.

I mean, for those that don't know, Fred LeBeau is a legendary character who really can be credited with contributing to the explosion of interest in distance running by virtue of the work that he did with the, was he the president of the New York Roadrunners Club? He was. He really, did he, he founded it too, right?

Actually, Ted Corbett founded it. Oh, I don't know about Ted Corbett. Ted Corbett, African-American, 1952 Olympic marathoner for the US in Helsinki. Ted is known as the father of modern ultra-marathoning just by accident. He lived in the Bronx and his training weeks were sometimes 200, 300 miles in New York City because he was- In the 50s. In the 50s and 60s. He would leave his home at seven or eight in the morning and he would run

and he would come back and he'd do these 12, 14 hour runs every Saturday and Sunday just for fun. And Fred was the founder. I mean, Ted was the founder of the New York Roadrunners Club and Fred ended up launching it into what it is today. Right. So, Fred pioneers this craze of marathoning. And I remember as a 10, 11-year-old, 12, whatever, there was this period of time in which marathon running kind of exploded into mainstream awareness. And you had guys like Jim Fix who were writing books about it, and people were discovering this for the very first time. And Manhattan, and specifically the New York Road Running Club and the work that Fred was doing, that was like the mecca for everything

that was occurring at that time. It really was. And I think Fred's imagination was unbounded. He had heard that in the late 1800s, there was this phenomenon of pedestrianism, six-day races held in Madison Square Garden, where people bet on the man or woman who would do the most miles in six days. And Fred wanted to revive that in the 80s. So with the help of Sri Chinmoy and his marathon team, they started a six-day race in Flushing Meadow Park. And that brought out the people that had the feeling and that knew that they had the capacity for more than 26 miles, like the great Stu Middleman and all these characters

that wanted to go well beyond the 26-mile limit and well beyond the 100 or 200-mile limit. So these races in Madison Square Garden, when was that going on? They were hugely popular, late 1800s to the early 1910s. Wow. Extraordinarily popular. And if you look back, even before the first Olympics in 1896, people were doing like cross UK walks, you know, these epic walks in the United States too.

And they were races where people would race almost Tour de France style, trying to get from point A to point B in the fastest time, taking help from villagers or town folks, et cetera. That's like lost history though, because I've never read anything about that. And it's the foundation of what was known as multi-day running. I mean, these days, ultra running is more popular than ever.

And the multi-day idea has kind of been lost. But in the 80s and 90s, it seemed much easier to do larger events around half mile or one mile loops where the situation was controlled. Of course, now, like, you know, with the Leadville and Hard Rock 100 in Western states, the idea of mountain running and point-to-point hundreds have really, really exploded. But it's so fascinating that, you know, in the 70s, when marathoning really came of age, that was considered, like, the ultimate distance that a human being could run. And it completely belies the true history of these crazy races that preceded it, which get no ink. And sadly, the marathon was considered to be the greatest distance a man could run. It wasn't until the 1984 Olympics that there was a 10K for the women or a marathon for the women.

When did it, so it was 84 the first time there was a women's marathon? Yeah. In 1980 in the, in the Russian Olympics, there was an exhibition 10K. Um, and it wasn't until 84 where women had been running professionally for eight to 10 years. Um, of course there'd been women that had like Catherine Schweitzer that sneaked into the Boston marathon, you know, 15 years or so before, 12 years before the 1984 Olympics. But it wasn't until I think the, in my opinion, until the multi-day race circuits happened that people realized that the capacity, the difference between men and women really wasn't that great. You know, there's- The longer it gets, the narrower that gap is.

It's true. There's almost no running distance under, actually, there are no running distances under 26 miles where the top 10 men, you know, where the top woman is in the top 10 men. But when you got to 24 hours and 48 and 72 and then six-day races, you know, it wasn't unusual for a woman to actually win the entire event. And now you have people like Courtney Dowalter who's just crushing the dudes in these super long races. It's unreal, you know, and that goes to the heart of, I think, why Sri Chinmoy was really into these races. It's a concept of self-transcendence, you know, going beyond what people tell you your limitations are, what you think your limitations are, digging deep into your heart and trying to pull out an energy that transcends male or female. And for a little bit more exposition, it's worth kind of exploring the history of Sri Shen Mui because for him, running wasn't something that was tagged on top of his spiritual perspective. Like he himself was a champion

runner. He ran the 100 meters, ran his whole life, was running races, essentially up until the day he died. And running very much was a part of his perspective when it comes to this idea of self-transcendence. He grew up in an ashram in South India that was run by Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo was one of the original revolutionaries in India. And he had a spiritual revelation and, you know, basically up renouncing themselves and moving to follow the spiritual life. But after India's independence, a lot of Europeans came to the ashram and, you know, brought this dynamism into Indian spirituality, which had been absent for a few hundred years. And Sri Aurobindo really encouraged track and field. He really encouraged the development of the physical body to be a true vessel of the spiritual energies that people were aspiring to. And so Sri Shinmoy was a disciple. He was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. And he competed

in the 100 meter dash and the decathlon there. And then when he moved to America in 1964, I think there was a gap of six or seven years where he was so focused on being a spiritual teacher and serving people's needs spiritually that the athletic side was absent. I don't think it was until the early seventies and running really began to revitalize, especially long distance, that he saw the corollary between long distance running and spirituality and the metaphor of us running towards a spiritual goal and using outer running as a way to practice that too. Right. So, he starts as a sprinter, later realizes the potential of long distance running to serve a spiritual end or goal or pursuit or journey. And he moves to the United States. I mean, this is also an interesting period of time where

there's sort of a group of spiritual leaders who are arriving in the United States from India. You have Krishnamurti, you have Yogananda, who comes much earlier. And what, so what is the, you know, what was the rationale behind him leaving India to come to the United States? The way Sri Chinmoy tells it is that he would have been content to stay in India and meditate, you know, 12 to 18 hours a day as he'd been doing, but he hadn't experienced, like a lot of these teachers did, of the supreme, of the divine, basically instructing him that his destiny lay in the West, to be of service to sincere seekers. So he just got on a plane, like no real visa other than a tourist visa. There are students of Sri Aurobindo's that lived in New York that were his sponsors, but he just came based on inner obedience. And it was Greenwich

Village in 1964. And it was pretty quick that he began to attract students. Yeah, that's a soft landing, Pat. It was a very soft landing. For the kind of ideas that he's talking about, right? And so by 1970, he began leading twice a week meditations at the UN. And there was a rapid, rapid acceptance of his philosophy because it dovetailed so much with, I think, what Western seekers were looking for. But at the same time, he didn't require a complete outer renunciation. Like nobody wore robes and

nobody had to move into caves. Right. So you're not walking around like a Hare Krishna. No, not necessarily. Hopefully we all have the same spirit within. But he didn't pay much attention to the same type of outer signs or outer decorum that Indian spirituality traditionally required, like the robes and the markings and the beads and things like that. And did he, I assume he must have run the New York Marathon himself many times. He did. He ran the New York City Marathon a few times. But then, you know, he started a 47-mile race in honor of his 47th birthday, which I believe was in 1978. And that was the first time his students began running ultras.

And he enjoyed it. And then he began pushing that and doing 100-mile races, 200-mile races. And when Fred LeBeau came to him in the mid-80s and said, let's do a six-day race, I mean, Sri Chinmoy and what became his marathon team was ready. And so where does the 3100 come into play? Like, how is that birthed? You know, I think spiritual teachers develop vessels for consciousness in the sense that I think if you tried to start, obviously, if you tried to start a 3,100-mile race in 1976 when the marathon was limited, you know, that would have been like somebody would have checked him into some type of facility. But after the six-day race, it became a 10-day race. After the 10-day race, it became a 700,000 and 1,300-mile race. And people were doing really,

really well at that. And by 1996, he decided to almost double the 1,300 and make it 2,700. And people did it. There was one woman and three men that did it. And then in 1997, he said, okay, this is the distance. I'm not going to go beyond it. It's 3,100. Right. 3,100 miles. This race has taken place every year since 90, what is it? 1997.

1997. And this is a race that entails running 3,100 miles within a period of 52 days, which means each runner is going to have to complete on average about 60 miles a day. The kicker is the course is essentially a half-mile loop around a high school in Queens. On sidewalk in the summer. Yeah. It's ridiculous. It is absolutely insane. And I'd heard whispers of this race over the years, and I think I just filed it away in my brain as apocryphal. I thought, well, this can't actually be occurring in New York City because you don't really hear about it. It doesn't get

any press. And what was so amazing about seeing it in your movie is that this occurs without really any fanfare whatsoever. There's how many? There were 12 people that did it, that were documented. What was it, last year that you followed these individuals? Yeah, 2016, there were 12 participants. And they just spend their summer running around in a circle. They alternate the direction every other day or something like that. There's a couple buses and campers parked out on the sidewalk, and some volunteers there to hand out food and write down how many laps they've done every day. The course is open from 6 a.m. to midnight, and it just goes on until it's done. And when it's finished, they're like, okay, you did it.

And then essentially that's it. It's mind boggling. You know, I'd lived in that area since 1997. And I frankly was frightened of that race. I'd run by it. It's on like my one mile point on my morning runs. And we didn't even talk about the fact that you're a runner, like you came from a competitive running background. But that distance just frightened every single pore of my body. You know, I didn't understand how or why anybody would want to do that. And after, you know, I guess a career in human rights, when I started getting into film, I started wondering why a film hadn't been made on that race. Of course, it would be the most boring film in the world

if any film was just about people going in circles. But I was encouraged to do a six-day race, to try to feel what people might possibly get out of a 3,100-mile race. Was that when you were kind of contemplating the idea of trying to find a way in to make a movie about this event? You know, it was even more elementary than that.

Before trying to make a movie, I needed to understand like why to make a movie. You know, what could possibly appeal to a non-3-mile runner about this race? Like, why would anybody want to watch a movie about something that's so beyond what we might even want to consider doing? And so I did a six-day race on the same course that Fred LeBeau had started in 1986. And I didn't really train much. 1986. And I didn't really train much. The interesting thing about ultras is that, you know, you see people from 18 to 70 years old doing ultras. And particularly since a lot of older people do ultras, I went in without much training thinking like if a 70 year old could do it, like, why couldn't I? You know, I did about 50 miles the first six hours, then I got injured. It's like,

I felt my hamstring twinge. You did 50 miles in six hours, then I got injured. It's like I felt my hamstring twinge. You did 50 miles in six hours. That's pretty good. You know, it's like I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to approach it. But then I felt my hamstring twinge. And as it twinged, a few 75-year-old ladies walked by me and asked me how I was doing. And that's when I realized I can't quit. You know, it's like these women are doing this race. And also the nature of how you approach and conquer an event like that is very different than the mindset, you know, of the typical runner or whatever your background in running experience

was. And so the next four days, actually the next four and a half days, I was out on the course 18 hours and I was barely doing 32 miles because I had a pulled hamstring. And all I could do in those four and a half days was pray, pray that I would get to run again in the race. You know, I was never more conscious of like my frailty than having 75 yearyear-old men and women chatting with you and then apologizing, saying, you're slowing me down and then moving beyond. But I would say almost miraculously and without hyperbole, with the day left, my hamstring felt normal. It just in an instant felt normal. And then I took off. It's like I channeled, I'd held like five, almost five full days of prayer in my heart. And when that prayer had been answered, I took off.

And for the next about 21 hours, I was honestly in the highest meditation I'd ever been in. And you know, it's like, we all say that, like people sometimes say, like, when I chop onions, it's meditative. And I don't mean like repetitive. I don't mean that my mind was turned off. I mean that every single spiritual pore of my being felt like it was about to have the biggest awakening. I was feeling like every Indian mythological story I'd ever read. I was feeling the presence of those beings on that course. And no matter what I did, whether I stopped to eat, I stopped to fix my shoes, as soon as I'd start running again, those experiences came to the fore. You were having a transcendent experience.

I was. So what do you make of that? You know, when I talked to runners after that who did the 3100, they said, this is why we do it. And I said, does that experience happen in minute one? They said, no. But after four or five or six days, regardless of injuries like I had in the six-day race, after four or five or six days, they find that their mind shuts off, finally surrenders to the inevitable fact that they would have to be running for the next 52 days. And the heart comes to the fore. In some cases, the soul comes to the fore and they get experiences that are extremely challenging to get through silent meditation alone. You hear stories from people who are quite expert in meditation that it takes a very long time, perhaps years, of consistent, diligent practice to get to a place where you can have that kind of experience.

But once you have it, you develop the acuity to drop into it a little bit with more facility, right? And I would imagine for some of these runners, maybe they can, if they're experienced in this sort of thing, they can drop into that state perhaps sooner without having it to be, you know, on day six of the six-day run. So, do you think you have to reach a certain level of suffering and pain to arrive at that place? Or what's the trigger? I thought I did. I thought that was a trigger. After the six-day race, I realized that there was a movie to be made.

If I could capture that spiritual essence of ultra-distance running, it might be of some service. I wanted to explore traditional practices of running. And of course, people who have been born to run know about the Roromari, the Tarahumara Indians that are connected culturally to the Indians in the Southwest of the United States. So I went to Santa Fe to meet a friend who ran an organization called Wings of America, which really focuses on Native American running culture and revitalizing that. I met one of the board members

who is an ultra distance runner on the Navajo Nation. And when I went on a morning run with him, I realized that his attitude towards running was totally different than mine. I started my watch. You know, I was looking for the GPS signal. It's like, this is going to be a great Strava run through this canyon.

And it was a canyon that people who weren't natives weren't allowed to run in, but we had permission to run in it. So I was like, I'm going to get some course records, all this stupid stuff that technology and competition kind of formed me to believe. But he was running for different reasons. The Navajo run towards the east in the morning because that's where the rising sun is. And I could tell that this fellow, Sean Martin, who's an athletic director in Chinle High School in Arizona, he was receptive to the

idea that this run, this regular morning run would make him a better person. It could also give him an exceptionally spiritual experience. And that was his attitude for running. And that had been baked in through 32 years of cultural training on how to run. And so that's when I realized, like most spiritual teachers say, like suffering isn't the only path to enlightenment. And I think it's the same in running. It's like suffering isn't the only path to the ultimate running experience. Carl Lewis used to say the same thing. He used to be so against the idiom, no pain, no gain. There's a different attitude to approach sports. And I saw it in Sean Martin

that day. Through the movie, you explore the culture of the Navajo Nation. You travel to Japan and spend time with the running monks of Mount Hiyai. Is that how you say it? Yeah, I would say that you pronounce it as perfectly as any American ever would. Right, which is fascinating. And I want to dive into that more in a minute. And then also the Botswanan tribes of the Kalahari, right? And the culture of kind of persistent hunting and how running plays into that. And in your kind of learning process, your discovery process of trying to understand these cultures and how running and spirituality form essentially who they are? Like, what is it that you have discovered about this relationship between spirituality, transcendence, running, and really, you know, the title of your movie, which is Running to Become. Like, what does that mean?

You know, to preface it all, colonization has been a really bad thing for running cultures. From the British colonization of India to the Black Botswana government's colonization of the Kalahari to Anglo-European colonization of the United States, there haven't been many cultures that have been able to keep this connection to running in the past 500 to 600 years, or maybe in the past 10,000 since we've been agrarian societies. But in the last few hundred, the remaining running cultures have been forcibly separated from that tradition. And first and foremost, that's been really sad to see. And it's not just white Western Europeans. Again, the Botswanan government is black African. And the Chinese, for example, destroyed a culture in Tibet of long gumpa

running, which we tried to explore. And this almost sounds like woo-woo, but people were sequestered into caves for two or three years at a time, and they sat in lotus position, and using their prana, they would gradually try to burst upwards. And at the end of two or three years, they were able to, in lotus position, burst up three feet. And that gave them the kind of pranic, the metaphysical approach to a different style of running. There was a German priest and a German nun in the 30s and 50s, respectively, who witnessed runners running across boulder fields in Tibet, going at what they estimated was, you know, equivalent of now six minute per mile pace, where these runners would fixate on a star at 8pm and run towards it till six or seven in the morning. And that's a 12-hour run

where they're going six-minute pace through this Longompa running. And when the Chinese took over Tibet, they didn't destroy the monastery, but they killed all the monks in that monastery. So as we explored these ancestral traditions of running, we found that there were very, very few. traditions of running, we found that there were very, very few. Native American running culture was extant until really about 150 years ago. Now, they didn't have horses, you know, in a modern sense until about 1680, 1700. Before that, they relied on runners to run 100, 200, 300 mile, you know, trading and spiritual routes. So that was, you that was kind of an exhilarating discovery, especially when we saw that alive and well in Botswana. Well, the sort of most well-known of these cultures is probably the Tarahumara in Mexico. And I would imagine that a big reason why it serves as such a test case, a case study, is because the Copper Canyon has done such an amazing job of protecting them from the outside world, preventing that kind of pollution that's occurred that's sort of undermined these other tribes.

sort of undermine these other tribes and has sort of allowed them to continue their ancestral habits, which prioritize running as essentially a lifestyle. I don't know what the spiritual connection is with the Tarahumara, but I did have one experience where I ran with one when I was in Mexico City. And it was amazing. It was an event that was sponsored by Runner's World, and it was on a was in Mexico city. And it was amazing. It was a, it was an event that was sponsored by runner's world and it was on a track in Mexico city. And it was like kind of a expo type situation. So I had the opportunity to run around a track with this guy and he's in his traditional garb with the sandals and like the whole thing. And I almost felt, it was almost

like he was a fish in an aquarium. I was like, I wasn't even sure that he really understood what was happening. Like he'd been flown out there, almost put on display. But I could tell in running with him, it was so natural. It was so pure. Like you said, there's none of the trappings of our modern culture of running. There's no GPS watch or anything like that. And his gait was so effortless and beautiful. And you could tell that this is just an extension of a lineage that goes back, you know,

many, many, many generations. I mean, that's the great thing about running. You know, my colonization rant aside, running unites us. You know, at one point, every single culture on earth relied on running. Again, we weren't agricultural. No one was agricultural until 10,000 years ago, which meant that we were all hunters and gatherers. And the fastest, strongest runners were the ones that were most adept at hunting. So it's literally baked into our DNA and it's baked into our culture if we can rediscover that. So, when someone says to you, we were born to run, like, what does that mean to you?

You know, the book was really, really inspiring. But I think there were some parts of the book that might have been misunderstood. There's a fascination with these traditional ancestral, call them ancient running cultures, like the Tarahumara, like the Navajo, like the Hopi, like the Bushmen, that they have some deep genetic advantage, that they're superhuman or they have special DNA or that it's their food, their chia seeds that make them- Right, the pinole or whatever. Yeah, that make them better runners, but they're better runners because they work harder at it and they feel it's more important. I mean, for someone who wants to run to lose weight or run to win a race, those are really

strong and powerful motivations. But if you feel that running is a form of prayer, you have a different attitude. And our Navajo character, who actually is the race director of the Tarahumara's Copper Canyon race, he told me, he said, running is a prayer. You know, when you're running, your feet are praying to Mother Earth.

You're breathing in Father Sky. Running is a celebration of life. It's like when you run, you appreciate everything around you. And running is a teacher. You know, it teaches you about who you are. It helps like when you run, you appreciate everything around you. And running as a teacher, you know, it teaches you about who you are. It helps you get through hardships. My high school running coach never said anything like that to me. He might've gotten fired if he did.

Yeah. It was like run to win. And that was it. And if you were a second, even if you PR'd, it was just like, that's three points. It's not five points. Yeah. It's super interesting. I heard you tell a story about one of the participants in the most recent iteration of the 3100, who I think is a semi-pro runner from... Where was this from? From Israel. From Israel, right, right.

pro runner from Israel, who kind of showed up guns blazing, laid down a torrid pace for the first thousand miles or whatever it was, and then had a little bit of a reckoning that led to an epiphany that kind of speaks to what you just said. Kobe Oren, and I was in one race with him. And in that race, he wasn't ultimately successful, but he was trying to break a 10-day record of 901 miles. That's the level that he's on. He was on pace to do 90 miles a day in that race until the last couple of days. That's insane. He's a really good runner, and like all Israeli citizens, he has a military background. He's a really good runner.

And like all Israeli citizens, he has a military background. So he came in to the 3100 race this last summer, 2018, with a plan. It was just like operation control, everything tactical that you could need. He had it. And in the first 1,000 miles of his 3100-mile race, that 1,000-mile split set an Israeli national record for a thousand miles. And he was racing. He was racing this fellow from Russia named Basu. But then something softened in Kobe and not softened in a weak way. Kobe later recounted that there was a point in the race when he realized that he could race.

He could race the race. And he could be just pushing his physical limits, but he would have missed the point entirely. And he felt that if he'd done that, maybe he would have won the race, but he wouldn't have remembered anything significant about it. He had the epiphany that

that 3,100 mile race wasn't a journey from point A to point B or zero miles to 3,100 miles. He said the race is a pilgrimage. And that separated himself from even the kind of like micro focus of like lap by lap by lap. When you're on a pilgrimage, everything that you do is a ritual. And he realized that each one of his steps was a ritual. His motions, his attitude were rituals. And that reminded me explicitly of the marathon monks of Mount Hiyai, the running monks of Mount Hiyai. They choose one aspirant every seven years to do a000 days of running, split up into 10 100-day chunks. Each 100-day cycle will have a set mileage. The first one is 11 miles a day. The last one is 56 miles a day. And all of their cycles occur on a mountain that's about 3,000 feet in net elevation. So

they're going up and down the mountain at least once. Towards the end, they're going up and down two or three times. And they're so precise in their footsteps that every single day, every single step is in the exact same place. I mean, that's next level. It's like, that's how much they're just focusing on the moment. That's so Japanese. It's so Japanese. It's so Japanese. But I love that idea of running as ritual. And I think it was somebody in the movie said, I'm just trying to be the best person that I can be with each stride, right?

This ritualization, running as ritual, as prayer, as this act on the journey toward self-transcendence. And I think the example of these running monks is the most powerful and demonstrative. I mean, a thousand days of doing this, 10 100-day cycles. And the penalty for failure is suicide, right? You should say that again. The penalty for failure on this quest to literally for a thousand days go out and do anywhere between like 11 miles and 50 something miles, right? If they fail, suicide is the penalty. And correct me if I'm wrong, but they select one person at a time to attempt this, right? If they fail, suicide is the penalty. And correct me if I'm wrong,

but they select one person at a time to attempt this, correct? And their selection process has become so rigorous that in the last 150 years of this now 1500 year tradition, no one has had to take their own life, but plenty have. And they said, and this is the interesting thing, they said that when they start this quest, no one is thinking of suicide. It's like they're thinking of bliss. But they feel that because the penalty is so great, they've been able to keep this practice absolutely uncompromised for the last 1,500 years. It's been going on that long. Yeah, and that's the interesting thing to me. It's like the stakes are so high that the only people that are gonna do it are ones who are going to basically establish the deepest commitment to that goal

where they're willing to sacrifice their life. Yeah, and you have to be so dialed in mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to come from a place of joy and gratitude and bliss rather than fear. I mean, the American, the Western perspective on that would be to just be terrified the entire time. I mean, it's absolutely insane. The ridiculous thing too, I mean, from a Western standpoint, is that there's no aid. There's no aid stations. There's no helpers.

The aspirin starts in the morning, usually without even as much as a cup of miso soup, just some liquid. And after about two thirds of the way through, sometimes 30 miles, has an aid stop, takes some tea, and then continues to the end, and then has to make his own meals at the end of this 56-mile day. And they're not really running, though. I mean, they're essentially hiking. They are. It's a very steep mountain, and the aspirants are all wearing sandals, bamboo sandals. They wear this beautiful costume with this amazing hat. I don't know what you call that, but it's incredible. It looks like Star Wars. Yeah, I know. It really does. And so they're

in this garb where, you know, without getting too crass, I think it would be really hard to disrobe if you did have to go to the bathroom. So they're very light. At the same time, you know, we were up there with the aspirant and no one had been allowed to film up there since 1984. Is that when they made that really grainy documentary that I saw? Yeah. There's actually a lot of things wrong in that documentary because I used it as research. And when I presented those facts to the monks, they were like, where did you get that from? And I said, from this movie, they're like, none of that's- Like what was incorrect in the movie? There was a lot of numbers that were wrong. Daily mileage, you know, and I think that movie

established them as with the moniker of marathon monks. And like you said, they don't run and they hate, even though I call them the marathon monks, they hated that label. But when we were up there, label. But when we were up there, the aspirant on flats is doing about 11, 11 and a half minute mile pace. So it's like he's walking, but you can say he's walking with an incredible amount of purpose. We didn't even attempt to keep up with him. We had to spend two days to be able to kind of cover his one circuit, just because it was impossible even in a car to get to places before he would. And if you were to ask these people, what is the purpose of this? What is their reply? This is the interesting thing. You know, in order to get permission to do this, I met the head monk three times. And this head monk had actually done this quest. He was the last finisher. Everything I asked from him that. He said, I don't understand the question. He said, we do this because we feel that we are the go-betweens, the intermediaries between the Buddha and humanity.

And that our prayers actually have an effect on the prayers of sincere aspirants worldwide. on the prayers of sincere aspirants worldwide. He basically intimated that the purity of their quest raised the bar for every practitioner of Buddhism, whether or not they were aware that this quest was existing. It's almost an aesthetic practice of purification that somehow penetrates consciousness. Sri Chinmoy said something similar. He said that faith is collective, that your faith is my faith, is everyone's faith.

And that power of faith essentially is like a bank that we all from different cultures draw upon. essentially is like a bank that we all from different cultures draw upon. And I think that's what this Marathon monk, this monk of Mount Hi'i intimated, that they were basically depositing large sums through their quest into a vault that aspirants were drawing from around the world. Right. I mean, it's part and parcel of the kind of core perspective of Buddhism being that the best way to better the world or improve the world is to improve yourself. And this is like the ultimate process of purification, like their version of that. You know, the interesting similarity that I found between these monks and the main character in the movie, Ashprey Hanal, was that they have no lethargy. I mean, imagine what lethargy means. It means comfort. It means sitting. One might say that

we're in a very comfortable position right now, sitting. These monks, they don't sit. They'll sit to pray, but they'll sit and pray with intensity. And when that's done, they'll move on to the next activity. And the monk that we were interviewing the last aspirant to have completed it, he's physically active from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep. Every minute is accounted for. He's not wasting a single second. minute is accounted for. He's not wasting a single second. The word comfort, relaxation, is not in his vocabulary at all. And the people that do the 3100, the one similarity is that at least in that period when they're doing those 52 days, there's not an ounce of lethargy. It's like they're looking at every moment as though it counts. If they're resting, they're resting. at every moment as though it counts.

If they're resting, they're resting. There's no cell phones, there's no music, there's nothing. But they'll find that they can get enough rest from a 10 or 15 minute nap to get back out on the course and do 20 or 30 more miles. Whereas the normal human being would extend that 10 minute rest into a five, six hour rest. Of course, yeah. Well, this aspirant, this Japanese monk uh did you feel like you could like connect

with him i mean does he or is he just such a foreign creature that you almost feel like he's a different species like does he have a humanity to him that you can relate to at all you know not to to even mildly toot my own horn, but, you know, like my life, even though we don't dress as renunciates, it's very much an aesthetic life. Like I've never married, you know, we're celibate, don't eat meat, don't drink, don't smoke. So when I went up to Mount Hii, I had a daunting task. You know, a lot of people, I mean, I think every week they field media requests and they turn down nearly all of them except for some photography requests of people wanting to see the monk coming or going from his domicile.

But a nun in Kyoto made the introduction between me and one of the head monks. And, you know, as a triathlete, it's like when you're with other triathletes, you can speak a certain language. And it's like they'll know how many triathlons or what your approach has been just by the language and the verbiage you use and the reference to certain races and certain courses. And so I immediately began speaking with the head monk on that purely spiritual level. And it was unusual, I think, for him to have a media request from somebody that wasn't your prototypical... Right. This isn't the BBC rolling in. No. And my question to him wasn't whether he would give me permission to do what I wanted to do. I asked him, I guess in a very Japanese way, if he would give me permission to do

a film that he essentially would direct. And then he was a little taken aback. And he said, I've never thought of this in this way. And I said, well, you know, if you were with humility, if you were to make a film about this, how would you do it? And then for the next hour and a half, he laid out exactly how he would do it. And then at the end of that, I said, I promise you, I will do exactly that. And so it was that kind of like spiritual recognition that I think got us in the door. And when I saw the monk who was doing the quest, I understood how serious his commitment was. Not that I could relate to it. It was on a level that I'd never experienced,

but I could recognize that he had a tremendous amount of purity, a tremendous amount of honor, and a tremendous amount of heart. You know, you're in a state where you're praying to the divine. The Buddhists wouldn't use the word divine. They'd use the word light or soul. But you're praying to the highest. You're praying to the Buddha with all your heart's devotion. And in the purely Indian sense, devotion's a beautiful, fluid thing that's full of love. And I recognize that in him. It's like his commitment was serious. He did not want to be messed with. He did not want to be disturbed because he was communicating with his beloved. He was communicating with the divine.

And it's like, if you weren't going to be exactly a part of that, then he had nothing to do with you. Or if you had the inability to appreciate or really understand that that's what was happening. Exactly. And we couldn't have done it without his permission. So in his off season, the winter, they don't do the quest. In his off season, he consulted with the head monk as to what we wanted to do and what the head monk thought would be possible and gave his explicit permission and then made his own requests. So in essence, even though we weren't communicating with him verbally when we were up there, he

would recognize when we were doing something that, you know, that he'd already given approval to. And there was a few things that it was embarrassing that he did twice because he recognized that we didn't exactly get it the first time. There was one spot where he would sit and he would pray. And he did a second take, especially for us, without us even communicating that we needed for him to do it a second time. Because he realized you didn't quite get it or something like that? It's like, imagine being the star of a narrative film. Like, let's say you're Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. When you do your take and you realize that there's a little bit of chaos.

I didn't nail that. Yeah. Or that the DP and the crew didn't nail it. Like you did your best part and they kind of screwed it up. You could either just go like, that's it. I'm not doing this scene again. Or you could go like, okay, I know you guys didn't really get that. Right.

And you're not saying it. So like, let me do it again. So he was very wary that he was a focus. And we had, you know, like I wouldn't say like non-spiritual crew, but we had crew that, you know, this was their first experience with someone like him. And at the very end, these were like young ACs and, you know, assistant camera people. At the end of our shoot, we hustled to like this point in the forest where we knew that he would stop for a minute if devotees came to ask

for his blessings. So there was a row of Japanese ladies, and then there was a row of us, and like, you know, 20-something hipster Brooklynites in their like, you know, jean shorts on their knees with their hands folded. And he came by, and he said prayers over us. And then he looked at us, obviously knowing that we speak English. And he said, thank you. And for these assistant cameramen, these 22, 23-year-olds from Williamsburg, they were blown away. Because after a few days with them, they recognized that he was on a higher level than any of us.

And when he recognized their work and said, thank you, they recognized that he was on a higher level than any of us. And when he recognized their work and said, thank you, they just became like putty. They couldn't stop talking about it. That's so wild. How long were you up there? For the shoot, we had to spend two weeks on location planning every shot. The head monk and his assistant stipulated that everything we did was planned effectively with the same meticulous nature as everything they do on that mountain. So from pans to zooms to cables and dollies and everything, they went through it. And we rehearsed it because we knew that, number one, as you know from our movie 3100 Run and Become, there's no interviews.

There's no talking heads. At the same time, watching running is really boring if it's just people passing by a camera. And the question was, how do we put people into the spiritual mindset of this aspirant if we don't even get to talk to him? So our shots were planned with great detail. As you saw in the movie, we shot a lot at night. The monk carries around at night a single lantern with a single candle to light the five feet in front of him. And it's mystical.

It's beautiful. And we didn't want to miss the opportunities that we had. Yeah. Where do you stay? Do you have to hike up the mountain every day? Like you weren't staying in the monastery, were you? You know, a lot of these big mountain monasteries, they have hotels, but the hotels are run by monks.

And Japanese temple cuisine is an absolute delicacy because you can't find that in any city, in any restaurant. You have to go to these temples and people make reservations months in advance Absolute delicacy. Because you can't find that in any city, in any restaurant. You have to go to these temples. And people make reservations months in advance to go and eat effectively Japanese vegan cuisine. And dinner will be 26 to 28 items. I mean, they'll be like an udon soup preparation that's literally two slurps in a little tiny bowl on a little clay pot lit by a single candle, and you'll have 25, 26 things like that. Wow. That's cool. That reminds me of that beautiful Korean monk, chef, woman, who is the subject of Chef's Table, who's on a monastery, I believe it's somewhere in

South Korea, who prepares just the most exquisite cuisine. It is an art form to her. And there was an amazing New York Times profile about her. This is in that tradition, although the quality is probably not at her exceptional level. You know, when we were on the mountain, we were immersed. And that definitely helped us in our own mindset for shooting. Yeah, amazing. What a gift. I mean, you're really the first people to be able to go up there and observe and document them in decades. It's shrouded in so much mystery.

I mean, I know there's that. I've watched clips from that grainy documentary, and I've seen the book. What's it called? The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei clips from that grainy documentary, and I've seen the book. What's it called? The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei. But that's really it, right, in terms of documenting this incredible culture. That's it. There have been a couple of short pieces. To actually even be initiated into the monastery, people have to do 100 days times 11 miles.

Everybody does. And they don't get the whole uniform. They don't get the big bamboo hat and the staff. They have to do 11 miles a day for those 100 days. If they don't complete a single day, they don't have to kill themselves, but they don't get to be a part of the monastery. So there have been films about that, which look visually similar, but there haven't been people that have been allowed up on the mountain while an aspirant is in this thousand-day quest. You want to hear something that's even

wackier? I say wacky in the most spiritual sense. At the end of the sixth cycle, the aspirant has to do an eight-and-a-half-day fast. It used to be a 10-day fast, but too many aspirants died during it. It used to be in the summer, but too many aspirants rotted from the inside out because it's not just no food. It's no food, no sleep. The aspirant has to sit up, lotus position, 24 hours a day. There are monks by him chanting with him to keep him awake. But the third caveat on why it's so dangerous is no water. No food, no water, no sleep. For eight days.

Eight and a half days. How is that possible? I don't know. I don't know. Traditionally, the aspirants have said that, number one, on the most human level, they can smell what you've eaten the last three meals. Number two, they can smell any food that's being cooked on the mountain. Number three, and this is where it's actually spiritual,

they're so close to the verge of death that their senses are hyper-attenuated. They can actually hear, they say, the ash falling off of incense. And so after you've crossed that threshold or you've, you know, straddled that threshold for a period of days and you come down, I don't think anything makes you afraid of death anymore. That is wild. And I would imagine some, the purpose of that is to even heighten that level of attunement. You know, it's an interesting thing because the monks are doing something exceptionally physical in this quest.

The mileage is just mind-boggling. But they're told over and over and over that the mileage isn't important. The main monk that spoke to us refused to talk to us about the mileage. He refused to put any numbers on camera because he said, it's only about the prayers. It's only about the prayers. But there's recognition that the body is as vital to this quest as the heart, as the mind, as the soul, as the center of prana, the five major centers. But to hammer that point home after

you've had six and a half or six years effectively of this deeply spiritual physical practice, I think they want to kind of send you off on your last 400 days with a little bit of a higher recognition that nothing can stop you. If you made it past that fast, it doesn't matter what comes your way. That is so wild. It's crazy. And there's one last thing they have to do. It gets crazier. They say this is harder, although it doesn't sound as hard. At the end of their 10th cycle,

they have to sit for 10 days for 12 to 14 hours a day in front of a big bonfire and drop in bamboo sticks that have prayers of individual devotees of the monastery. So they have like a million bamboo sticks, which they basically have to, I believe, read and throw into the fire for 12 to 14 hours a day. And the monk that we spoke to who had done this said that was more difficult for him because he said that you're not allowed to drink water during those 12 to 14 hours. He said he got more dehydrated every single day and felt so,

felt closer to the end every single day than he did towards the end of that eight and a half day fast. And once you complete this, then what? They say you're a living Buddha. They say that you've, you've now crossed the threshold and your life is only to be of service to aspirants. So the monk that was the previous finisher, who was our guide, all he does is he administers to devotees. 20, 21 hours a day, all he's doing is serving his disciples.

And it's exceptional because it's like there's not a single minute in his day that he doesn't use. And it's really just one person, essentially every generation. More or less. I think that every once in a while, by the weird math of years, there's a crossover where there's two people that are doing it at the same time, but no one's ever really on the course at the same time. Yeah, that's wild. What a gift to be able to experience that. And I think another thing that's interesting about that quest

as being very Buddhist and very Japanese that kind of distinguishes it from a Hindu pursuit is the idea that the body is essential, right? A Hindu perspective would be more along the lines of we're trying to transcend the body. The body is just this bag of bones that's here to carry our consciousness, but there isn't attention to it in this very specific way.

I mean, in my own humble way, India's downfall in the last few hundred years was disregarding the physical. But if you go back to the Bhagavad Gita, the physical is absolutely essential. It's a warrior text. Yeah. The greatest spiritual figures had understood the power of their body. You know, they might've gone to the forest, like some of the great sages, and meditated for 10, 15, 20 years at a time and practiced great austerities. But a lot of those austerities came through physical practice. And nobody ever disregarded the physical. It was an essential part of our spiritual being. It's just been in the last 300, 400, 500 years that there's kind of been an infection in Hinduism,

this idea that the body is Maya and that we should disregard it. And I think that's led to a lot of ill in India, including being colonized. We weren't strong enough to like fight off this tiny little island, for goodness sake. You guys weren't doing enough yoga. I know, it's like, come on.

It's like, we're the land of Krishna, we're the land of Arjuna. And when these like pasty guys came off of boats, you know, we surrendered. Yeah, that's crazy. Well, let's get back to the 3100. Just this is so fascinating, this crazy race. And one of the things that really struck me that's just undeniable when you watch the movie is when you take a gander at these 12 competitors that show up to do this, you may be thinking these people are going to be serious athletes or about to tackle like the craziest thing you can possibly imagine.

And then you look at them and they just look like, it's not that they don't look, it's not that they look unathletic, but they don't strike you as examples of the athlete you might be imagining. They just, they're like everyday people. It's shocking. Like, and to put it in the most kind of most derogatory or discriminatory language, one of the best runners is a plumber. And it's like if somebody told you he was a plumber, you'd go like, yep, I see it. But if somebody told you that he can run 3,100 miles,

I'd agree. We'd all say like, nope, I can't see it. Little stocky, missing a few teeth, 48 years old. Right. And you're right. It's like people aren't ripped. They look like weekend warriors. They do.

You know? They do. And the true protagonist of the movie is this guy, Ashbrahanal. Yeah, that's exactly right, Ashbrahanal. Who is, he's a paper boy from Helsinki, right? Is he like 45 or something? 44 years old. But, you know, the paperboy aspect kind of belies this incredible focus on a Spartan-esque lifestyle.

He's chosen to be a paperboy because he can train for 12 hours a day. You know, he's pushing a little cart through the streets of Helsinki, going up and down stairs, delivering mail. And for him, it's the ideal lifestyle. Like he's on his feet 12 hours a day. At the same time, he lives in a little tiny cabin. You know, like a teenager, he eats ramen, chocolate, and soda all day long. And his six-day mark, actually his 10-day mark

is 833 miles, which means he ran 83 miles a day for 10 days. Right. He's ranked on all-time rankings of races. But it's like, like you said, it's like, the question is like, how does somebody who does not look like the prototypical ultra runner achieve things that the prototypically built ultra runner probably couldn't even dream of? Well, it's because all of these people are first and foremost devotees and secondarily runners. Not necessarily devotees of Sri Chinmoy, but they're devotees on this path towards higher consciousness. And the athletic aspect is really just a vehicle for that. That's exactly right. There was a gentleman from Germany named Wolfgang Schwerk,

who has the second best 24-hour race time of all time, I believe around 180 miles done in 24 hours. And he came to do the race in 2004 and averaged 76 miles a day. And he looked like an ultra runner, world champion in a number of different races, tall, lean, athletically built. But for a German, he had actually taken up the name Madhupran, an Indian name, and he was following another Eastern spiritual teacher. So, he had an attitude that was beyond competition, even though he was a globally ranked ultra distance runner. even though he was a globally ranked ultra distance runner. Mm-hmm. Have you thought about what you think might happen if suddenly Rob Carr,

like the current crop of elite ultra endurance runners showed up to tackle this race? What might happen? Well, we did a pre-screening of 3100 Run and Become in Denver and Claire Gallagher was there and Chrissy Moll. And Mike Wardian had just finished, I believe, The Hard Rock. And he lives on the East Coast. And his kids had wanted to see Ant-Man.

And so he goes into this random theater in Denver where we're doing this pre-screening. And he sees Chrissy and Claire. And he goes like, what are you doing here? They're like, aren't you here for the running movie? He's like, no. He's like, I'm here to see Ant-Man. And they're like, come see the running movie. He's like, absolutely. Pushed his kids into Ant-Man. And after the movie, he said, you know, we all have known that this race existed, but it's not on social media. You know, there's no real way to learn about it. You know, it's like when people climbed Everest, there isn't

like documentation in the New York Times. Once a decade, the New York Times writes a story on the 3100, but that's it. And he said afterwards, I'd always been curious about this race. Now I'm a lot more curious. And you know, he's vegan. He meditates. And I think he also was once kind of sponsored by Carnival Cruise Lines to run some crazy distance around the deck of a ship. So, you know, he's got everything you need. He's got the inner attitude. He's also got this like mindset where you can run in a circle for countless hours and you could see the movie spark something in him. Camille Heron, who I think has the 50 mile world record for females, won the

Comrades Marathon. She emailed me that she's always been interested in the self-transcendence race. I think there's so much mystery around it. And I'm hoping that the film will unlock some of that mystery and show that like Ashby Hanal, he doesn't care about nutrition. He doesn't care about anything other than the meditative aspects of the race. Other people are much more regimented, but they all, like you said, have that same type of inner attitude where they're expecting to become better people through this race. And that hope and belief and reality is what helps them make it through the miles. Yeah. I mean, he repeats time and time again that this is his meditation.

That's why he's doing it, right? And the race each day starts with a one minute meditation. And he, you know, you could see his head is bowed and his eyes are closed and he kind of begins that run with his sort of offhanded shuffle that he does. You know, it's like, you see him going and you're like, look at that form. How's that guy possibly gonna run 3,100 miles?

You know, to your previous question, I think people like Rob, Timothy Olson, you know, people like that, Claire Gallagher, there's a whole crop of people that have popped up. Scott Jurek, obviously, you know, incredible runner, who've done these like epic races with this like otherworldly focus, you know, if they use that determination and also they probably have it, but built the patience, understanding that this is a 52 day race or 45 day race, if you're going really fast, I think they'd have exceptional experiences, you know, and do exceptionally well. You know, our Navajo character, Sean Martin's dad, Alan Martin, who's in the movie, is a medicine man. And the Navajo hadn't ever allowed people to film the running prayers.

And for some reason, he wanted to open it up to us and got permission from other elders. And so he was asking me, who were the keepers of the land of the 3,100? He's a very normal, very deep and beautiful man. And I'm not trying to make this sound like he's some shaman up in the hills. But he said, who are the keepers of the land of the 3100? And I'm thinking, this is a sidewalk around Thomas Edison High School

bordering the Grand Central in Queens. And so I said, well, the Lenni-Lenape tribe used to be there, but they left in the 1600s, 1700s. And he said, they've kept this land sacred. And I said, does that mean that they knew that the 3100 was going to be there? He said, of course not. But it's like any time, and this is what he said, he said, anytime there is a sacred race held on a particular piece of land, that piece of land was destined for that race. For the Navajo and a lot of Native Americans, it's like places have consciousness to a greater degree than they do for any of us in the West. It's not just the beautiful mountains that have consciousness or that deserve prayer and worship. It's everything. It's the rock faces. It's the rock walls. It's the pathways. It's the plants. It's the consciousness of the dirt. And so he basically said that this course has been consecrated for time immemorial. And even though it's crazy to think that sidewalks have consciousness, you can either say that runners have attributed the consciousness to it or they've drawn out the consciousness. That course has this exceptionally deep piece for the location that it's in.

Right. Right. It's so ironic and bizarre, though, because it And the course dictates that you look at this as a pilgrimage. And a lot of people have done the transcontinental, like from San Francisco to New York. And the logistics of going up the Sierras, the Wasatch, the Rockies, and then the flats and the rolling hills of Nebraska are exceptionally challenging. And it's very difficult from seeing people who've done that race, you know, to disassociate your mind from the trucks whizzing by, you know, the lack of aid every half a mile. But this course allows a type of flow. Yeah, it's almost, you know, the simplicity of it, the fact that it is so banal,

And the simplicity of it, the fact that it is so banal, contributes to the ultimate goal, which is to kind of transcend physical place and reach some kind of higher state of consciousness. And the repetitiveness of it, it's almost like repeating a mantra or using a mala or a prayer read. It's ritualized in its own way. The repetitive nature, the fact that it's only a half mile and not a two-mile course, the fact that you're constantly passing the same thing, there's something about that that almost creates that trance-like state or allows that to percolate to the surface, perhaps with a little bit more facility? I mean, there's two outcomes for discipline, right? There's austerity, which is suffering, but with a lot of determination. And there's joy. I'm sure people have had the experience of austerity in that race. In fact, I know for runners that oftentimes the first six to 10 days are filled with exceptional suffering

where the body, the mind, the heart are getting used to the pounding, to the repetitiveness, to the monotony. But at some point in that race, like for Sean Martin, when he leaves his door in the Navajo Nation, his discipline is translating to joy. In the 3100, those of us

with the Western mindset find that or see that it takes six to 10 days for the runners to overcome suffering and channel that focus and that discipline into joy. But even the craziest, most sociopathic, psychotic, loony, insane person on earth could not complete 3,100 miles. So the question is like, why are they doing it? It's not because they're crazy. It's not because there's like a path, this is a path of austerity or suffering compounding into more suffering. It's because there's a legitimate feeling of joy and dare I say bliss that these runners feel. And you end up seeing it in their faces. If someone wants to go there, the race is usually from mid-June to August. Yeah. And it's not like there's a big

crowd of people there. You could just walk right up and be right there. And all the runners will come up and greet you. They want to talk to you. They want to offer their joy, not just because they're lonely out there, but because it's like they're feeling these deep, deep emotions and feelings. And it's like the Japanese say, it's like when you're feeling that, it's like you want to be an emissary between, in the Japanese sense, the Buddha and humanity, or here, between your soul and humanity. You're feeling something that you feel that other people are looking for and you can offer it. And so these runners, they're like little vessels going around in a circle. How come it doesn't get more attention? You'd think like, okay, here it goes again. It's been going on forever. You're in New York City, media capital of the planet. Why aren't people writing

about this and talking about it more? You know, and this is why I wanted to do this movie. ESPN and a few other filmmakers had tried to do a movie on the 3100. And the only way to approach it, I found, is through the spirituality. And if you're looking at making a movie, something has to be inherently visual. The 3100 isn't visual. That's why we have the Kalahari Bushmen, the Japanese monks, the Navajo. People that have come to write about the 3100 have that really relies on the writers. That relies on the editors to recognize that this isn't a one-day assignment. I mean, we were out there for 52 days. This is a 52-day assignment because drama happens in moments. And you have to be there when someone has kind of like a flowering

of a spiritual experience. Does it make you want to do it? It does. You know, filmmaking is a really hard lifestyle for me because we're always traveling. And, you know, I've been told that my body type is like of a bird, meaning, and the practitioner who told me this was like, what does a bird need?

And I said, worms. And he said, no, a bird needs a nest. So it's like, you aren't meant to be traveling, but I'm always traveling. So I still do 45 or 50 miles a week. But to train for this race, apparently the way to do it is five or six mile runs, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 45 or 50, Sunday, 35 or 40. That's what everyone says. That's the way to go. It's like stacking. It's like you want time on your feet.

And even then, it's like you don't need to worry about pace. It was one of the best training runs of my life. I did a run with one of the 3,100-mile runners. We started in Queens. I had my MasterCard. We ran eight miles to a donut shop because you have to train and eat. Yeah. We ate donuts. That's the thing about running in New York. There's always some place to go. shop because you have to train and eat. We ate donuts.

That's the thing about running in New York. There's always some place to go. I know. Jump in and eat. You're never too far away. And so we ended up doing a 30-mile training run that was just going from like smoothie bar to ramen shop. And that's the way they train. They run 40, 50 miles on like Ted Corbett on one day and they try to repeat that to get their body used to the idea of like maximum mileage with zero rest. Well, Ash Bernal, he sort of said he doesn't really, he didn't even really train, right? He just lives an active lifestyle where he's kind

of moving all the time. And he didn't really put too much thought into some kind of race specific program. So I asked him, and again, he'd done the race 13 times before. And he's won it how many times? Eight times. Eight times, right. So I asked him, what's the most important thing? And I think every ultra runner knows this in their heart. Your ability to finish a race is directly proportional to your ability to overcome problems and to realize that most problems aren't actual problems. and to realize that most problems aren't actual problems. And so Ashby Hanal tries to change activities every chance he gets to during the daytime to keep his mind nimble

and to realize that it's like you can have a problem and you can push past that problem by changing the way you approach it, changing your activity, changing your mindset. This part's not in the film, but we ended up going with Ashby Hanal to Japan where he was climbing Mount Fuji as a way to train for the 3100. That's amazing. It's so counterintuitive because you would think the best way to train for this

is to run as much as possible and to really connect with what it feels like to stay in it in that same repetitive motion for as long as possible, irrespective of the level of discomfort that you're experiencing. And that would mean just doing the same thing as long as possible. I think there's two reasons why he tried to climb Fuji. Number one, he wanted to do it in the winter with no preparation. So by the time he got up the mountain, his feet, his shins were covered with blisters. And he knew he would never have

worse blisters than he did on that trip. And the physical challenge was so enormous. Again, he knew that he'd never face anything like that in the 3100. At the same time, when you are going around the block, you are relying on your power to visualize. And being in those exceptionally beautiful areas gave him the imagination to you know, to be able to like just transport his mind. Transport himself, right. Well, there was that other guy who had horrible blisters. Vasu. Vasu had a blister.

Those were horrific. Yeah. Honestly, the size of like a lemon. Yeah. You know, honestly. I've never seen blisters like that in my life. And he did 700 miles. And he just kept going with that.

Like, I can't believe he didn't quit. Vasu is also like the sweetest, most sincere person on that course, where like, he's just overflowing with gratitude. I mean, like, that's the combination of spirituality, right? Trying to be grateful to everything. And you see him, he's just like, just this like mush ball of gratitude. And he's pounding out 72, 75 miles a day. And you'd expect to see these athletes throw temper tantrums once in a while with their crew.

And you don't see any of that. They do. They do. That didn't make the final edit. No, no, no. As people will see in the movie, one of the first time participants, a woman named Shamita Akenbak-Koenig, who's a professional cellist, you know, thousand mile, 10 day specialist. She decided to bring her husband as her handler. And for people who've done, you know, stage races or 50 milers or 100 milers with crew, I think they'd all agree that like your worst handler is your spouse.

Yeah, that's what they say. So he was her handler and you can't lose them. Like if you're in a 100 miler, you lose them for 10, 20 miles and then you see them again. You know, every half a mile he was there with, you know, pure love, but also pure concern for her. He kept telling her like, you got to drop out. You know, and people will see this in the movie, but in 1996, she did an ultra in Vienna, a hundred K race where, you know, she was hot. It was 80, 85 degrees. She overheated and she was in a coma for two days and the 3,100 and 80 day, 80 degree day is cool. You know, a couple

of summers ago, even this summer, it was 95, 98 degrees for six, eight days in a row. That's not even heat index. That's just like air temperature. And how many people dropped out? Last year, there was, I should say, very few Americans have done this race. There's been one woman named Supraba Beckard from DC who did the race 13 years in a row and finished it. The first finisher was a man named Ed Kelly. There was another American man that did it too. Last summer, an African American woman, 60 years old named Yolanda Holder finished with 15 minutes to spare.

And she was a race walker. So there's only a certain pace that you can keep up. So she had a couple of bad days and she couldn't make it up by doing a 70, 75 mile day. She had to do like one lap extra every day. She came back at 61 to do it this summer. But unlike most summers, the first two weeks of this year's race, the temperatures were already hot. And she had blisters the size of wassup, like the size of like half lemons after 12 days, ulcers in fact. And nobody's young. No. Well, the youngest finisher was 29. Really? Was that recent or?

That was about 10 years ago. Yeah. I mean, they all look like they're in their 50s and 60s. And I think that speaks to the kind of spiritual strength that you need. It's not brute physicality because unless you can tap into a deeper energy, you're not going to get joy out of it. Yeah. Let's talk about the Navajo a little bit. I didn't realize that there was this rich running culture that infused the Navajo nation. Native Americans didn't have any other modes of transportation other than their feet until the Spanish brought horses. And even then, even though the Spanish came in the 1500s, it wasn't until really the late 1500s and some parts the late 1600s that Native Americans, indigenous people, had access to horses.

What they did for thousands of years is they ran. They were exceptional runners. did for thousands of years as they ran. They were exceptional runners. There's a story of a man named Louis Tawanami, who was a Hopi runner and represented the U.S. in the Olympics in 1912. And he went back to the Hopi nation to do an exhibition 10K race. And he and another kind of anglicized, westernized, there's other reasons why they were anglicized. They appeared in their singlets. And a couple of elders said, you know, you're going to dress like that to do a race up here on the mesa? And this was a person who was actually third place in the Olympics, Louis Tuonema. And the elder said, I'll beat you. And apparently, the two elders who jumped in the race were so far ahead of the two

kind of modern participants after three or four miles that one of them, the bronze medalist in the 1912 Olympics dropped out. That's a trap. Running wasn't just a way of life. Running was a way to connect with Mother Earth and with Father Sky. It gave men and women such a deep sense of place and a deep sense of power. In a lot of Southwestern traditions, the Navajo in particular, running is still used as a coming of age ceremony. The equivalent of a bat mitzvah is practiced and young girls as one of their last rites of passage have to go on long runs. It wasn't just exercise. It's like, if you look at one of the most spiritual practices, the coming of age ceremonies and realize that like long distance running is a part of that, you can get a glimpse into how important it was.

That's amazing. What do you, I mean, this is a little bit askance, but how do you think about that relationship between running and it being this really primal transcendent experience? Like why running? Why not something else? Like, what is it about running that triggers that in the human body and mind? You know, when we were with the Kalahari Bushmen, and they had been living in an unbroken lineage in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and northern South Africa for more than 125,000 years. And evolutionary biologists say that we might not have all descended only from the sand bushmen of the Kalahari, but each one of us has DNA markers that are only found

or only exhibited by the sand bushmen. So it's like we flowed through those people. When we were with them, I asked them, I said, and they run to survive. They go on long persistence hunts. And what that means is that when we were beasts on the savanna, we didn't have a physical advantage over any of the creatures, from the large elk to obviously the big cats. What we could do was run for quite long distances. We'd sweat through every pore of our body.

At the same time, when we took steps, those steps were decoupled from our breathing apparatus. A horse or a dog, when they extend fully their four legs, their rib cage expands, take a breath. When they push off, all four legs come together and the breath is pushed out. They're anaerobic machines. We're aerobic machines. At the same time, we learned how to carry water. We could carry water in gourds or in skins. And we learned to chase big beasts away from watering holes. And they'd run 30, 40 miles in a gallop. And we'd track them and we'd scare them away from the watering holes that we knew were in that area until after two or three days, they were quivering masses of like dehydrated

flesh. And it was easy to approach them with a poison arrow and shoot them. So that's how we survived on the Savannah. At the same time, there's a deep cosmology among the San Bushmen around running and the practice of hunting. They say when they run and hunt, they're able to access the power of their ancestors. They're able to access the power of the earth to overcome the feebleness and the weaknesses of the human body. And so my question posed to one of their hunters was, what came first? Did you build it? I mean, not that he's an anthropologist, but do you know, was the cosmology around running built because of the physical reality that running was our weapon?

Right, that necessity drove it. And he said, no. He said that we hunted because we understood the power of running. Like running was our spiritual practice. And we challenged that, we channeled that into an ability to survive. Running was the first religion. One would also say dance, but running and motion, motion on Mother Earth and using the human body that channel non-human or superhuman energies, that was man and woman's first religion that's baked into us as mammals. That's amazing. I'm not sure I totally got that from the movie because when we explore the Kalahari, it's more about the threat to their way of life because of hunting bans and how they're kind of trying to figure out how to preserve this culture of running and their way of life in the wake of, you know, changes in the modern world that have now basically told them they can't do what they've always done.

But I didn't understand the spiritual depth of how deeply that runs. You know, there was a lot in this type of a movie where we're trying to combine the 3100, the Kalahari, the Japanese. Yeah, you're trying to tell all these different stories. And trying to make them all work together. There were only certain ways that they would all work together.

Yeah. And some things had to be left on the cutting room floor. Yeah, of course. That's the nature of it. At the same time, it's like, as you saw in the movie, when you see people still running after animals, it forces us to pose that question. forces us to pose that question where we try to dive into the cosmology, into the spiritual power that running might be able to afford somebody. And that's kind of the impetus of the movie. Yeah. I mean, what I got out of that is, you know, just for people that are listening, a ban has been placed on hunting and the Kalahari are in this position of saying,

okay, do we defy the ban or do we adhere to the law? And ultimately, at great peril to themselves, they say, we're going to do it anyway. And you can look at that a number of different ways. You can say, well, they're just, they're not law-abiding citizens. Or you can say, frankly, maybe they don't have a choice. This is so deeply bred into who they are that they just have to do it no matter what. In 1997, I'm using the color because it's important in this case, the black Botswanan government found copper underneath the Kalahari Desert, which is the size of Massachusetts and it was considered an uninhabitable mass. And the Kalahari Bushmen were allowed to live there unmolested, even though they'd only been discovered less than a hundred years before. But once copper and other resources were found,

this anti-indigenous colonial mindset kicked in and the entire population of the Sand Bushmen were relocated, much like almost every single native population in the United States. In North America was relocated. So we actually took one of our associate producers, who's the executive director of Wings of America, the native running organization with us on that trip. And his face was, he's a dark skin fellow, but his face was ashen white most of the time, because he recognized that what happened to his ancestors on the Navajo Nation in 1868, when four years prior, they were force-marched off their nation because a Civil War general thought that there was gold there that could finance the entire Civil War,

proved to be untrue. He was seeing that happen to the Kalahari. He was seeing an entire generation that was forcibly separated from the culture. And our main hunting character was forced off the Kalahari. And like you said, for the movie, chose to sneak back onto their ancestral home site, penalty of death and penalty of imprisonment if he was caught hunting. But the hunting ban was placed as an excuse, saying that the San Bushmen sunbushmen shouldn't be allowed to hunt animals because we have a lot of tourists coming in to look at animals, and we don't want them to kill them. The sunbushmen said no animal species have been extinct or wiped out by us in the last 125,000 years. So there's a complex set of rationale.

It's complicated. But the main thing is that the government is forcibly trying to strip these ancient runners of their ability to run and hunt. Yeah. And that dovetails into Sean's story on the Navajo Nation, this hundred mile run that he embarks upon that you chronicle is really his way of connecting with his ancestry by traveling from the school that his father was, correct me if I'm wrong, the school that his father was, the sort of government school that his father was forced to attend that taught, you know, the traditional historical record that is at odds with this person, you know, this tribe's experience, traveling all the way to his father's ancestral homeland. Is that accurate?

It's absolutely accurate. It was legal in the United States to forcibly remove a Native American boy or girl from his or her parents until 1977. And what that really led from was this notion that by stripping Indian kids away from their cultures, they could, the phrase was, kill the Indian, save the man. If you kill the cultural part of the Indian, you would save his or her soul. By indoctrinating them into a historical record

that basically tells the conventional wisdom of America. And forbidding them from speaking their own language and forbidding them from their ancient practices. So our Navajo character, Sean Martin, his dad, Alan, was forcibly removed from their property in Northwestern Arizona to a government boarding school near Flagstaff. And as a six-year-old boy, he was so traumatized that annually he began sneaking out of the school and running at night 110 miles back home. A number of kids tried that. The father did or Sean did? The father did. A number of kids around the country that were forcibly

around the country that were forcibly schooled tried that and many died. And this was a trauma that young Sean, Sean Martin, the modern day runner lived with. He knew that his father had a terrible childhood. At the same time, he knew that running saved his father. He and his brothers became exceptional runners, but they ran to the point of absolute physical suffering because they knew of the suffering that their dad experienced. It was a way to connect with that. Yeah. So in the film, we look at four aspects. We look at running to transcend, like the 3,100-mile race, running to survive, like the Kalahari Bushmen, running for enlightenment, like the monks, and then running to survive like the Kalahari Bushmen, running for enlightenment like the monks, and then running to heal. Either your own trauma or this historical trauma of your people.

And Sean's run from Loop outside of Flagstaff up to his ancestral home site was about 110 miles. And I don't know if I've seen anybody who was shouldering so much responsibility. Sean's a teacher and a very popular person on the Navajo Nation. And a lot of people knew that he was running in honor of his father. And because they all had relatives that had been forcibly schooled, they all felt that he was running for their relatives. forcibly schooled, they all felt that he was running for their relatives. So Sean carried not just his own historical trauma on this run, but the expectations and the trauma of hundreds of other people. Yeah, I didn't realize that. That's a heavy burden to bear. It was heavy. It's hard enough, as people know, like running an ultra. But when you're running an ultra to challenge pain and where overcoming that pain means success

and if you don't overcome that pain the run was for naught and so that's what he was doing he was trying to use this run as almost like a last ditch effort to address the trauma of his dad's childhood. And Sean's son, who lives a very wonderful, and I would say sheltered life on the Navajo reservation compared to this young boy's grandfather, Sean's father, was accompanying Sean in the car, and Sean's dad was too. And so it was just a beautiful experience to watch this family, not just come to terms, not just heal their trauma,

but expose it and address it for a lot of people that couldn't run the same way that Sean was running and a lot of people whose ancestors died unlike Sean's dad. Yeah, and he's running across the most beautiful landscape. I mean, there's no aid stations here. He's not running on highways or roads. Like he is in the middle of nowhere in the most beautiful landscape you can imagine. And I think anyone who's been to Monument Valley, which is on the Navajo Nation or to other kind of

exceptionally beautiful landmarks in Indian country, realize that when Native Americans say that Mother Earth is the equivalent of the divine, you see it. You know, it's like if the Grand Canyon isn't like something that transports your mind and heart into other planes of consciousness, you know, nothing ever will. Yeah. What has the process of making this movie taught you or how has it changed you? I guess with respect to running, of course,

but also in terms of how you think about and approach your life. At one point, I fancied myself as a quasi-competitive runner. I mean, even in high school in a state, the state of California with 30 million people, I mean, even in high school in the state of California with 30 million people, I was one of the top-ranked middle-distance runners.

Burned out by mid-college. Really didn't know why I was running in my 20s. I was still racing a little bit, marathons and stuff. 30s also didn't really have a purpose for running. It wasn't until I met Sean, and Sean said again that running is a prayer for the Navajo. It's a celebration of life. It's't until I met Sean and Sean said again, that running is a prayer for the Navajo. It's a celebration of life. It's not punishment. And it's a teacher. It's like, if you're going through hardships, you know, don't just sleep on it. You know, don't go eat like

a tub of ice cream or a bar of chocolate, address it and address it the way humanity used to address it by connecting to your breath and to your feet. That totally changed my attitude towards running. At the same time, you know, again, I guess these days I'm a person of color. But I reject those types of labels. And I think running is a safe way to show that there are actually things that unite people. Like, you know, when you're on a trail or you're in a race, there's no red, there's no blue, there's no elections. You're not, when you're running, especially when you're competing, you only have yourself.

And if you're in a relay, your teammates. But ultimately you have your feet and your breath and your heart. It's elemental. And that's given me a lot of solace. It's like, I know that we've been running for millions of years and it's an activity that we're going to continue doing for hundreds of thousands more, regardless of what the political state of humanity is. If we can go back to that state, I think we'll all realize that there are things that unite us that are much stronger than the things that we think divide us. Yeah, this ritualization of human behavior.

And I like the characterization of running as a vehicle to connect with your breath and the power of breath, right? When you think of it in those terms, it starts to sound a lot more like a meditation practice than an athletic endeavor. At the same time, I think the question is, here's a question for you, like, how do you balance your spiritual life and the aspect of competitive racing? Yeah, that's a tricky thing, right? I mean, I think my personal perspective on competition has always been inward facing. Like I'm not that concerned with what anyone else is doing. I'm

trying to be the best version of myself. And if I can walk away from an event satisfied that I had done that, then that's a win irrespective of whatever the leaderboard says, right? That's a win irrespective of whatever the leaderboard says, right? And I think that's echoed in the movie with these runners in the 3100. As much as, you know, Ashbrahanal, I don't know how to say that. Exactly. That's exactly right. I don't want to spoil it.

I was about to spoil it, but I'm not going to. He sort of iterates throughout the movie that it is a competition, but that it's really not about that. And I think the more these competitors or anybody for that matter can get to a place of being able to let go of that externality, ultimately the better they perform anyway. We began our theatrical run on Friday in Santa Fe. And as you know, the film's going to be rolling out around the country from the Southwest to the Pacific Northwest, California, Colorado. But we were really lucky that at opening night,

Billy Mills, the Oglala Lakota 10,000 meter champion from the 1964 Olympics was the host of the event. Oh, that's cool. And I got to ask him that very same question. I said, from a traditional native standpoint, you've told us about the importance of the spirituality of running. At the same time, it's like you made your mark

as a competitive runner winning a race that nobody but you thought you were gonna win. I mean, nobody thought that Billy Mills was gonna win that 10,000 meter race. And if anybody needs a pick-me-up just on YouTube, type in Billy Mills was going to win that 10,000 meter race. And if anybody needs a pick me up just on YouTube, type in Billy Mills Olympics, greatest last lap, I think, in any modern race. And he said exactly what you did. He said, I never raced to compete. He said, even when I won, I was racing against myself. I was racing against my pain. I was racing against my limitation. I was racing against what my body was telling me it couldn't do.

And I pushed it beyond. And it just so happened that I won the 1964 Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 meters. But like, that's not how I defined my races. Yeah, that was the external manifestation of a mindset that allowed him to do that. But it wasn't the goal. No. And that's the interesting thing because I think like once I realized that I could run for spiritual reasons, I became a better competitor. It's like I was much less dissatisfied with the second or third, even in a local race, than I ever would have been. It's like, I look a lot more to

preparation. I look a lot more to the ritual of practice. And I know that if I show up at the starting line and I've done all the right things, I'm going to have a good experience. You sound like you're ready to toe the line at next year's 3100. I would love to. I would love to. If not next year, then the year after. Have you shown the movie to any of the protagonists yet? I did. We did a little screening for the stars of the movie. You didn't go to Mount Hiei, though, have you?

No, we haven't shown it to them yet. You've got to show it to them. Well, they probably don't have Wi-Fi up there. You can't send them a link. I want to be there and watch them when they see it. But we showed it to a lot of our Navajo characters in Sedona at a film festival, which was our official world premiere in June. And we decided to start our theatrical launch, not in New York or LA where everybody wanted us to, our distributor in particular, because it's such a Southwestern story. And it's like we wanted to bring it to the Southwestern native populations.

southwestern story and it's like we wanted to bring it to the southwestern native populations so we launch in santa fe then albuquerque and then phoenix and sedona and then go up to the mountain cities like and i'd say mountain like outdoor cities like portland and seattle and boulder and denver before hitting all the big ones yeah that's that's great that's that's uh very smart uh uh guerrilla marketing as well. To hit the hotbeds of running where people are going to be really interested in this and create that kind of good word of mouth. At our premiere in Santa Fe, Henry Rono came.

Henry was one of the first Kenyans to come to the United States for schooling in the 70s. He ran for, I think, University of Washington, maybe Washington State. But in 1978, he set four world records from the 3,000 meters to the 10,000 meters. I think even including the 3,000 meter steeplechase in the matter of just a few months. And this is like in the 70s. And so Henry told me, he said, when I grew up in Kenya, it's like, I never practiced running.

We hunted in the 60s. Like, this isn't like ancient history, like these ancient bushmen. He said, in the 60s, yeah, we all hunted. And that's how we ran. I would run 20, 30 miles, 40 miles for play, you know, and for work. And that's how we trained. It's like, we didn't separate. This is the interesting thing for me.

We didn't separate running from our way of life. We didn't put on new gear to go running. We didn't take off our old gear to go inside. He said everything was done in the same stuff because it was all a part of our life. Yeah. You still see that, I think, with some of the cultures in Ethiopia and Kenya with these great marathon runners, Kipchoge and the rest. It really emanates from a way of life. This summer, Jim Walmsley, who won the Western States, he trained up at altitude and lived basically in a tent the last six weeks in preparation for the UTMB. And you look at that and you go like, that seems so elemental, the idea of just living to run and running to live. Yeah. All right, we got to wrap this up. But I think we can close it down with a final question, which is, what is it that you want people to take away from this movie?

That's a great question. I think a lot of people have come in contact with running. Some people haven't enjoyed it because they weren't taught the real purpose of running. enjoyed it because they weren't taught the real purpose of running. I think a lot of us that do enjoy running might not have the words to expand our enjoyment of running. And I'm not saying that I know anything more than anybody else, but the characters in the 3100 bring these perspectives, which I hesitate to say aren't mainstream, but they're so core and identifiable that I'm hoping that when people see the movie, they'll have a newfound appreciation, not just for running, but for physical activity and our place in the world.

Yeah. I would imagine you come across people who will say, this is great, but like, I hate running. Yeah. It's like, if you hate running, that's okay Yeah. It's like, if you, if you hate running, that's okay. But it's like, do you like walking? Do you like hiking? Is there a way, is there an activity where you can go outside and put your feet on mother earth and understand that your breath is your connection to the heavens? Do that. Like that's the attitude that we all used to have back before we were encumbered by cars and shoes and Strava and GPS. And also when you see the runners in the 3100 and you see what they're actually doing, it might change how you define running for yourself. It's definitely a lot.

Because it's not what you think. No, and it's a lot harder for me to cop out of doing a daily workout now that I know that on any of my weekdays of three, five, six, seven miles, somebody out there could have been doing 50 or 60 miles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. I love the movie, 31, Run and Become. I was very emotionally impacted by it. You did a beautiful job. It's really just a fascinating exploration of this relationship, this nexus between running and spirituality and

self-improvement and how this really is part of what makes us human. And thank you for making the movie. I'm really grateful for the chance to have shown you the movie. You're obviously an inspiration to me and to a lot of people. And I hope that we can all just follow in the footsteps of your work and the other great guests that you have on. Oh, thank you. If people want to see the movie, where should they go to find the schedule? They can go to www.3100, 3100film.com. We're playing all over the country, four to five shows a day, rolling out city by city.

Yeah, excellent, man. Awesome. And I'm gonna see you later this week, right? Yes. You're coming to the Running for Good screening. Super excited. It's gonna be good, man. We're gonna do a live podcast.

It's the premiere of that movie. Super excited to have you. Thank you for, man. We're going to do a live podcast. It's the premiere of that movie. Super excited to have you. Thank you for sharing today. Thanks so much, Rich. Is there anywhere else where people can connect with you? There's an Instagram account for the movie as well, right? Yeah, it's at 3100film, at 3100film. And then on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash 3100film.

You can message that and I'm the one answering all the messages. You're the guy. I'm the guy. Hit me up. Let me know if you're coming out to a screening and yeah, I'll say hi. Alright, cool. We did it. Thank you. How do you feel? I feel great. This is one of the most inspiring conversations I've had in like a year and a half.

Oh, good. Well, come back again. We'll do it again. Thank you. Alright. Thanks, Sanjay. Peace. Plants running. Come back again. We'll do it again. Thank you. All right.

Thanks, Sanjay. Peace. Plants running. I thought that was kind of magical. What'd you think, DK? I feel like I'm in school right now. We're joking because DK has not listened to the podcast yet. It's okay.

You're going to get to it, right? I feel like I'm just learning, like constantly going to Rich Roll 101 school about my diet, my consciousness. So it's all a good experience for me. Will you promise me that you will listen to this podcast? 100%. I'm going to listen to it. He's a beautiful guy. I thought that was a phenomenal conversation. I hope you guys connected with it as well. Do me a favor, let Sanjay know how this one landed for you. You can hit him up on Twitter or Instagram at Mr. Sanjay R, or on Instagram at 3100film. I think that's the preferred place that he would like you to find him on the social networks. And the website for the movie is 3100film.com. Go there and you will see all kinds of information about the movie and upcoming screenings.

As always, please take a moment to visit the episode page at richworld.com to check out the show notes. We put a lot of time and energy into creating essentially like a syllabus for every conversation to expand your experience of the podcast beyond the earbuds. We're really proud of the work we put into that. And I think you will find it enlightening and entertaining. Are you glad that we do show notes,

DK? Yeah, I think it's helpful, especially if somebody wants to find some information on one of our advertisers, you can go to the show notes and there's a link and it allows you to test out some of the people that support our show. Yeah. And if you want to support the sponsors of this program, who are the people that literally make it possible for us to do that, I always have all the links up on the episode page as well. And if you want to support the show, support the sponsors. If you are looking for additional nutritional guidance like DK to dial up your plate and start eating healthier, what does your plate look like these days? A lot of fruit and too much juice, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's not good. You got to get on our meal planner, man. It's hard, man. It's not hard. I tried one of our other clients. I tried for a week. I tried a couple of weeks of going vegan, and it's like it's not hard like you know i tried one of our other clients i tried for a week i tried a couple weeks of uh going vegan and it's um it's hard i can get to like five ten days and then i just and then i just i fall back spoken like somebody who has yet to experiment with the

plant power meal planner this is gonna get you on that Am I going to have to move you into the house to get it done? It's super easy, dude. That would be a huge challenge for you. Just go to meals.richroll.com, and there you will find thousands of plant-based recipes, grocery lists. It integrates with Instacart, so you get all your groceries automatically delivered to your house. I used Instacart yesterday. Easy instructions, how to prepare all of this stuff so you can eat healthy.

It removes all of the excuses. It's fantastic and it's just a dollar ninety a week when you sign up for a year super affordable so to learn more about it and to sign up go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu on my website if you'd like to support this podcast and all the good people like dk that helped me put it on the best the best way, what would you say is the best way to support the show? If there's an advertiser that you like, don't be afraid to try it out. Go listen to it. Support the show. Use the link, the promo code, Rich Roll, or Roll, whichever one it is.

And tell your friends about your favorite episode. Definitely. That's the best way. I agree. Make sure you subscribe on whatever platform you enjoy this content. Also, for those of you who might be new, we have all of our episodes now on YouTube as well. We're filming all of them.

So you can find that at youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll and make sure you subscribe to that channel as well if you're enjoying the content there. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today dk for co-host duties and sponsor relations and all kinds of miscellaneous behind the scenes tasks mischief if you uh if you're enjoying dk and the co-host chair let me know we can make this a regular thing i'm going to be in new york next week so the next two episodes are going to be me solo, but we'll gauge audience response. Just be kind. How do you feel about that?

Be kind. I'm not a professional. That's okay, man. This isn't my first time in the booth. It's all love. All right. It's all love, man. I'm excited.

I want to thank Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production. He works hard on the show notes and composes the interstitial music and lots of other miscellaneous behind the scenes tasks. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin, they're the ones behind the camera who create all of the video assets that we're now using,

as well as all the graphics that I share on social media and theme music, as always, by Annalema. Thanks, I love you guys. I'm going to see you back here in a couple days. We've got two episodes coming up next week. The first one, a midweek episode, is audio from my live event in Dublin with the Happy Pear Guys. That was a super fun, cool event from Smock Alley, which is where I did an event with them like a year and a half ago or so. This one's a little bit different, and I think you guys are going to like it. And then Sunday night, I'm going to publish my interview with vegan strength coach, kettlebell expert Mike Mahler. And that conversation is all about hormone optimization. It's good stuff. Your hormones checked out?

Not recently. I need to dip. Yeah, this is another episode you're going to have to listen to. I'm going to have to go to the doctor and get a whole blood workup and everything. You're my long-term project, brother. I got the dentist next week. I'm going to go to the doctor the week after. It's a little self-care, man.

It's great. I'm grateful that I get to go to the dentist. All right. See you guys soon. Until then, much love. Peace. Plants. What's your sign off?

Love. Take care of the planet. Thank you.