Unleash the ultra runner within you in a fascinating conversation with James Poole, an iron man, and outdoor enthusiast. Embark on an enthralling journey as we delve into James' transformation from Ironman competitions to the thrilling world of ultra marathons. Be prepared to be inspired by James' riveting experiences racing in the Gobi Desert, engaging with the underground Speed Project, and tackling grueling self-supported ultra marathons. His tales of hallucinations and battling sleep deprivation shed light on the extreme mental and physical demands of ultra running.
Let's sprint forward as we explore James's unique approach to ultra-running, which surprisingly emphasizes the significance of walking for long-distance runners. Get an inside track on his energy conservation strategies, safety measures, and coping methods for sleep deprivation. For those ready to take the leap into endurance sports, get ready to be inspired by James' book recommendation, 'Always the Runner.'
For our final sprint, we pace into the evolution of James' global running community, Advent Running, birthed from a 25 Days of Exercise challenge. Feel the exhilaration of leading weekly running groups, partnering with brands, and navigating the pressures of being self-employed. We cap off our conversation with a stimulating debate on adventure running, breaking norms, and crafting new experiences. Lace up your running shoes for this electrifying exploration into the mind of an ultra runner!
This episode was sponsored by The Trusted Team and 4th Discipline
Unleash the ultra runner within you in a fascinating conversation with James Poole, an iron man, and outdoor enthusiast. Embark on an enthralling journey as we delve into James' transformation from Ironman competitions to the thrilling world of ultra marathons. Be prepared to be inspired by James' riveting experiences racing in the Gobi Desert, engaging with the underground Speed Project, and tackling grueling self-supported ultra marathons. His tales of hallucinations and battling sleep deprivation shed light on the extreme mental and physical demands of ultra running.
Let's sprint forward as we explore James's unique approach to ultra-running, which surprisingly emphasizes the significance of walking for long-distance runners. Get an inside track on his energy conservation strategies, safety measures, and coping methods for sleep deprivation. For those ready to take the leap into endurance sports, get ready to be inspired by James' book recommendation, 'Always the Runner.'
For our final sprint, we pace into the evolution of James' global running community, Advent Running, birthed from a 25 Days of Exercise challenge. Feel the exhilaration of leading weekly running groups, partnering with brands, and navigating the pressures of being self-employed. We cap off our conversation with a stimulating debate on adventure running, breaking norms, and crafting new experiences. Lace up your running shoes for this electrifying exploration into the mind of an ultra runner!
This episode was sponsored by The Trusted Team and 4th Discipline
I'm Charlie Venigan and I'm Claire Fudge and this is the Tribe Athlon podcast.
Speaker 3:I start to see things. Rock formations start to appear as things that not a crazy like you know pink elephants and things just your mind starts to play tricks on me.
Speaker 1:That was James Poole, and this episode is pushing the limits inside the mind of an ultra runner. James Poole is the founder of Advent Running and the ultra runner, iron man and lover of the outdoors. He's run some of the world's most prestigious ultra races around the world, including Western States, utmb, tds, tgc God how many acronyms can we use here? And so many more. And he holds the FKT for crossing the Beleric Island of Mallorca on the GR221. Claire and I really wanted to get an understanding about what drives James and we wanted to chat to him about some of his strange hallucinations while he's been exploring the world through ultra running, the incredible locations that he visits for ultras, places like the Gobi Desert, dealing with the high and low temperature races, and also the long-term health impact of ultra running and insurance sports. So I know you're going to really enjoy this interview with James Poole.
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Speaker 1:So, james, welcome to the Triathlon podcast. Really looking forward to chatting to you, been listening to all sorts of podcasts for you and know we're going to have loads to talk about. So welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you, charlie. Thank you, claire. I love starting these podcasts with the story. So how did you find your way into? I think you found your way into the world of ultra-running via the world of Ironman. So let's start with the question how did you find your way into endurance sport and how has that progressed?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back to first principles, then my journey started when I was like five years old, and one of the questions often comes out without leaping ahead, is how do you train for ultra-marathons? And the answers you start when you're five years old.
Speaker 3:We obviously don't have that in mind at the time. But when I was a kid it was always active, always outside. I remember my school sports day and having a you know, getting silver or something in, probably some sort of. It felt like a long way at the time, probably was about 30 meters and loving running from kind of that age, three or four, five years old, and then over time just spent my, you know, my youth riding bikes and roller skating and running around and doing things a lot of kids do and did and do.
Speaker 3:And then those that period of sort of again probably similar to a lot of people, I suppose you go to university and you get more interested in partying and drinking and things and I had a few years out and doing sort of sport back then, but then really got back into cycling, initially through the bike to work scheme, which was a great way of getting a bike for not much money.
Speaker 3:At the time I was working in finance and it came straight out of my salary, so I got a bike rode to work instead of the tube, and then again I kind of fell back in love with endurance sports by initially cycling and then mountain biking and 24 hour racing in mountain biking and then road biking, and then I went and saw someone do the Bolton Ironman, which, if you haven't seen the Bolton Ironman, it's not necessarily the Ironman that you probably. It's not Kona, let's be honest, and it's not Lanzarote, so you sort of the run is through Bolton and the swim is in, you know, in the lake, somewhere. I can't even remember the roads, but I saw someone else do it and I was like this is looks crazy and brilliant and I've done, I can do the biking and I can do a bit of running, and for how can the swim be? And yeah, that one thing led to another and I did a few Ironman and then, yeah ended up in just doing a single sport.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And so, before we come on to the ultra running side, what was what do you think? What was your highlight of your Ironman journey? What was the, what was the race that stands out most?
Speaker 3:Well, I wasn't very good at Ironman, if I'm honest, because I couldn't have to learn to swim. So and I and I easily thought that you know running and cycling are are typically sports where if you they're like hitting a nail with a hammer If you hit that nail with a hammer repeatedly, the nail goes into the bit of wood. And in running and cycling, if you want to get better, typically volume doing more of something gets but gets you get better budget in that. Swimming, on the other hand, this doesn't really follow that approach because it's very technique driven and if you go and have a poor technique and you go to swim, you will get an event loop. I think it'll take decades to continue to follow the same approach. So this is around.
Speaker 3:There is a reason to get to your question in a second. But I so I've learned to swim and in my early 30s, which is really late to learn to swim properly, so it's not very good at it. But I did mention to go to some cool places in the meantime. So I did Frankfurt twice, which I absolutely loved. So the swim is beautiful there. It's in a really clean, pretty leg a little bit outside of Frankfurt. And then I also did a Landerotti, which I absolutely loved but was my first ever. The day before this the race was my first ever sort of proper sea swim, swimming full stroke. So yeah, I kind of made it hard for myself and had a absolutely terrible swim because it was a lot harder than swimming in a lake.
Speaker 1:But I loved.
Speaker 3:Ironman, but it's very expensive and to some extent, ironman is all about going faster and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's for me. It was a few years of enjoying that experience but I don't think it has longevity, certainly not for me. You can't go faster than ever and it's and whilst it's very social in its element of before and after, no one ever goes on a social Ironman. Well, one, it's really difficult because you can't really have a social swim while you're racing. And two, the roles also make it such that you can't certainly on the bike, you can't, you can't draft and you can't ride alongside someone and it's a long way.
Speaker 3:So it felt like a thing that I did, have did five and that was my. You know. That was probably enough and I learned a lot during those five. And you know, still part of me thinks maybe I'll go back and do another one one day. But but I don't always. I'm happy not to be in that sort of Ironman world of buying upgrades and spending a lot of money on you know I hope you know sorry bearings and wetsuits and things, and I have been there and done that and there's nothing wrong with that and I wouldn't judge anyone else, but it is a. It is a different experience to perhaps the running and ultra running game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this, this topic of kind of athletes doing doing the same sort of thing as you've done and moving towards the ultra world or kind of more extreme and kind of off the off the beaten track endurance sport. But, what was it initially that took you into? How did you first get into ultra running, having kind of done the Ironman?
Speaker 3:Well, I just and the reason I mentioned Ironman makes sense is because I realized I was a pretty good cyclist and it's certainly from the mountain biking 24 hour pairs events where you run, you ride on a relatively short course for 24 hours and it's with winners, two of you. It's actually quite fast and quite furious, and you ride 25 hours and so and used to do quite well in the UK on those things, and realize my biking was pretty good and my running was pretty good. And obviously I had this swimming deficiency which meant spending a lot of time in the pool, which I wasn't wasn't against, but I don't really enjoy going to the gym and I feel like going to the pool is like a wet extension of the same thing. Now you go down there and you follow a black line and if you want to get better at swimming you have to do 20,000 meters a week or something realistically to get to lose the sort of time I needed to to be more competitive. And so I looked at running and I was putting my strongest, maybe my biking stronger, but running was was. I was a bit time pause working in the city in London and I suddenly felt well, if I can do 10 hours. I'm in what I just ran 10 hours. Maybe that can't be very hard, and the answer is much harder but also quite addictive and quite fun, and I've been doing it for a long time. So when I started doing them, there was less races, the fields were smaller, things like UTMB were several thousand people, not 10,000 people, and so it was a different world and I just enjoyed it.
Speaker 3:And, taking some of the things I learned from Ironman, which is in Ironman racing, I always preferred to be self sufficient. So when I would train, I would train to say that I would take nutrition from the course. I would have a very stripped down drop bag at T one and a stripped down drop bag at T two, so I wouldn't, you know, I'd be like I don't need to think about lots of extra things. I would have a very clear mind about how I would, how I was going to race. I would take bottles from people holding up on the side of the road rather than worry about my own nutrition. So one less thing to worry about and if you take that approach into ultra running, I think it can be really helpful Just a very simplistic self. Sufficient. You'll take the food from the tables in your ultra. Whatever there is, you will carry, you know, whatever you need and that works pretty well for me.
Speaker 1:And what, what is? What was your first ultra marathon and how did it? How did it go?
Speaker 3:It was the country's a capital, which is a, which is it's filled as country table 4545 miles. It runs from Wendover in the Chilterns and the first 22 miles or so are in the woods and it's and it's unmarked, and you get a bit of paper. It's pretty inexpensive. It still happens every year. It's in January. It's pretty expensive and this is unmarked. You get a piece of paper with some directions on it and it's pretty much. Back then because it was about 2010,. There weren't too many of the GPS watches with mapping on, so you sort of had to follow the paper rather than now you just look at your wrist and it was good. I mean my feet hurt and that I'm really just 25, 22 miles through the woods and then 22 miles pretty much along the, the canal path into made a veil and, as everyone, I think, he you know he's kind of over you set yourself some expectations on on how quickly do it and those went out the window pretty quickly and but but it was good.
Speaker 3:And it was a. It's pretty small, you finish it. You know there's a couple of pubs at the end and just kind of a nice way to finish it. I think it's actually pretty popular as a lot of people who live in London. Certainly it's a good first time ultra marathon, 42 miles is a is a decent chunk of change, more than a marathon. So you know it's definitely more of a challenge, but it's in and it's in January, so it can be cold and wet, but it is. You can get the train there, you can you finish. If you live in London, you finish probably pretty close to home. It's a very I'd thoroughly recommend it for about 60 pounds or something, so it's a very inexpensive way to to do a race and well supported and some really strong runners. Every year the times for the winners are crazy, crazy fast.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I mean that does sound like a good race. I think I think so. Claire and I did the ARC 50 last year as our first proper ultra and yeah, we I think we should have picked the race that you just described as our first part.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it seems so at the time of year, but not on the, not on the Southwest Coastal path, which I mean could, could you could get anything in January on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were lucky, we were very lucky with the weather we were pretty lucky, I think if we'd done it the year before, I think it would have been snowing, so, but one of the races. So I know you've done an incredible array of races and I don't kind of I can't obviously talk we can't talk about all of them but one of the ones that intrigued me most was racing in the Gobi Desert. You know, there's something that you know we've talked a bit about this on the podcast, whether it's the Mib Desert or obviously, marathon decimals come up many, many times, but the Gobi Desert sounds awesome. So describe to us your, your kind of the amazing experiences you've had in the Gobi Desert, but also perhaps sew it in with. You know there's obviously the that prompts the safety conversation around racing, and that's a part of the world. So so tell us about your experiences there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, gobi Desert was, as you said, was, as amazing as it sounds and and I was actually meant to go back a second time and it didn't happen. But if anyone gets a chance to go in, there's not many races there now, given the changes of endurance sports in China after after the tragic deaths of a number of athletes a few years back. But it wasn't, it was. It was 400 kilometers, that's what it was billed as from from nowhere, pretty much nowhere, to Dunhuang, which is an ancient city, the ancient city of Dunhuang in in well, even nowhere, is really hard to describe, but it's sort of in a Mongolia, very much on the Silk Road in China. I was invited to go. It's a very small. It's a very small race. I say small, it's had 150 people, which which isn't huge compared to some of the big races we have now. It's logistically very challenging, so I think there was probably at least one member of staff per athlete. I'm not sure there was. There's a lot of people there to make sure we were safe.
Speaker 3:It wasn't my first rodeo into, into. I should clarify this single, single stage, multi-day ultra marathon opposed to a marathon. To Saab, say, where you the day ends when you cross a finish line and you go to go to a camp and sleep. This is the clock doesn't stop If you go and sleep, the time continues. And so in my mind, certainly that this that's a more difficult approach than than something like a marathon is. A lot of versions of marathon, so ultra X to a to a series of five day, roughly 50 kilometers a day on average, type races in that model. But I think the single stage it doesn't the clock doesn't stop type thing is is in is a lot harder because it pressures you not to sleep, not to not to spend too much time sorting out potential problems and the. You know that either cost you or it doesn't, but it is.
Speaker 3:It was an incredible race. It was very, very dry, as you'd expect. It was very cold at night, much colder than expected it was. It wasn't a sort of yeah, I think the pictures of marathon to Saab. Everyone knows the big sand dunes and the, the cockroaches of sand as people jump off the standard. That is not like that. In the Gobi days there is a little bit, but largely it's very, very rough rock, sort of fist sized boulders largely that are very, very rough. They eat your, your running shoes for a past time.
Speaker 3:But yeah, the race started and we've. You know, there are a few of us as a cup. There was another British guy, nathan who, and I, and then mostly Asian Chinese runners, a few Europeans. The women's winner was from Iceland, but it was mostly Chinese. It's quite difficult to race in China. Even now and back then it was equally difficult. You have to have invite letters and permission to enter certain places and that all takes time and obviously, a visa. So it took a lot of organization, but it was off the back of doing the trans-Grancon area 360, which is a 265-ish kilometer race on the Grancon area. So I did that in 2017 and then then and then raced the Gobi Desert in 2018.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I mean it does sound like an awesome place to go race and I can understand the pressure of that kind of not sleeping. What I couldn't quite get my head around was the swing of temperature that you seem to get there and you've probably raced other places where the sweat, but that I mean. You mentioned briefly how cold it was, but do you want to tell us how you dealt with that kind of that swing of temperature, whether it's the Gobi Desert or elsewhere?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I mean, I've raced a few deserts now and they do have that same characteristic, which is, largely speaking, very hot in the daytime and very, very cold at night. The Gobi Desert combined that with a lot of altitude, so that's the highest point, and I think it was all above 2000 meters, and the highest point was about 4000 meters. So the scientific calculation is, for every 100 meters of increase in height, you lose one degree centigrade. So there's going to be a 20 degrees difference between 2000 meters and 4000 meters. Plus and this is true of other deserts is the wind. That is probably more of a problem than the altitude. Certainly, in the Gobi Desert, once you get up high, you get not far, not far, but some 1000 miles from Tibet, from Tibet, but it's a better plateau with really big mountains in the 7000 and 8000 meter heights. Those are covered in snow all year round and they pull cold air down onto the plateaus. So what you end up with is a situation where you're running, there's always a wind and that wind is always cold, and I can't remember which of the many famous Chinese prophets or kings or talked about the wind in the Gobi Desert cutting like a knife, and absolutely does that? So in the daytime you can be running along.
Speaker 3:And to answer your question more specifically, I took there was a quite demanding minimum kit for Gobi Desert. They were very conscious about looking after us in terms of our health, our well-being, but they did, and we should have had to have four season sleeping bags. We had to have down jackets with certain regulations around fill weights and trousers and all sorts of things. So I had a 25 liter pack but we was absolutely jam packed with down, of which I ended up wearing most of it most of the time, as in the reality, because even in the daytime it was cold enough that two down, a down G-lay and a down jacket was often what I wore, and running tights, of which I hate.
Speaker 3:Running tights and anyone who knows me knows that you know has to be absolutely minus something horrible for me to be wearing anything other than shorts. But yeah, four days in shorts, in tights and down was pretty much what I used and that's been the same for the speed and we're going to know, we're going to talk about the speed project later on but yeah, again the same thing at night in the Mojave Desert. Very much the same cold winds and cold temperatures. So and to add to the thing is you don't move very fast in a lot of these races, or at least you don't move very fast after the first day or two, and often it's an. Often it makes more sense not to move fast early on because you use a lot of energy, but inevitably they tend to be more of a run like walk crawl type strategy, and the latter nearly you get to crawling. Obviously, the less heat you do, body, body generates and the more you have the need for for down and technical fabrics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a good segue onto the speed project. So tell us, for those people that don't know I mean, I did a bit of reading about this tell us what the speed project is and your experience around it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there's lots of people won't know the speed project because it's intentionally kind of underground and there's an article on the if you Google my name speed project and there's a BBC article came out last month that goes into some depth about it but called it the the fight club of running, which are quite light it was. It was set up 10 years ago as a relay run by six people who decided to hire an RV I don't think they may have not even had RV, just been a minivan or something and they decided to run from Santa Monica Pier to Las Vegas, which is their original route is 340 miles, and so he did this thing and I think it was a. It was pretty wild, it was a bit of a party, I think. I'm pretty sure some beer was consumed and they had a bit of a good time on the on the roads, running as much as they could and swapping over and with no rules and no spectators. And those sorts of no rules and no spectators have continued to be a strong ethos behind the race. Now. So 10 years, seven years on, they opened up, the race became quite popular and it was full of relay teams. It's quite a. It's got quite a young following of people who got RVs and they 50 or so RVs might will race now in middle end of March from LA to Vegas. It takes them about the winning team, usually about 30 hours for 300 miles, which is pretty damn fast. The rules are that you could, you must start at Santa Monica Pier and you must finish at the last welcome to Las Vegas sign and you can choose any route you'd like and there's a few sub categories for the racing.
Speaker 3:But in 2018, they approached me about or was it 2019? 2019, niels, one of the founders approached me about they were going to do a solo version and I was fairly keen. I didn't really know what I was going to let myself into and I was actually saved by COVID and by the bigger COVID pandemic and although I was really cool about doing in 2020. And I hadn't really had other focuses and hadn't really given it a lot of thought, but it didn't happen in 2020. And then it happens in 2021 with only American fields because no one could travel.
Speaker 3:And then in 2022, I got myself to the start line in Santa, in Santa Monica, with we're very fortunately backing from the North Face who looks support me in my running to make a film. So I ran three just under 300 miles, 299 miles from LA, from Santa Monica, over Mount Baldy, along the Yermo road, which, if anyone's driven, is a very long 75 mile road, with the bends through Red Rock Canyon and into Las Vegas. And I was fourth and I took me a 19th. Can't even remember how long it took me now 98 hours or something to cover that, wow, which is pretty cool and it was a very cool experience and, yeah, and it sort of opened up my it's sort of renewed my love for ultra running and and again sort of perhaps reopened my eyes to what's possible in terms of moving on two feet.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know parts of that stretch and it is again. It's an amazing part of the world, isn't it? Would you put that as your, as the highlight of your ultra career so far? Or, if not, what would it be?
Speaker 3:No, not really, but I'm not sure. I feel like every race I've done at some point has been a piece of a jigsaw puzzle to which isn't an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. So it would be wrong. I couldn't say one thing has been better or worse than another. It's, they're just pieces of pieces of the jigsaw. I mean it's certainly been one of the best pieces of that jigsaw, but it certainly isn't that. I mean, alongside the go, I wouldn't have dreamt of doing it if I hadn't done the Gobi Desert, and I might not have done the Gobi Desert if I hadn't done a lot of these things are, you know, stepping stones from one to the other, but it certainly. I mean it was to continue the story a little. I guess is that it was good enough that I went back and did it again this year, in 2023.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't my intention, wasn't to do it actually, but I was planning to to some of the photographer as my part, as my, as my employment, as my job. So I'd been planning to shoot photos of a of a teen woman's team and that didn't happen because there was a Mexican team and they didn't get visas to enter the US, so that so I suddenly had flights and and some agglomeration in LA and nothing, nothing to do. So I obviously could have probably jumped in a van or something with another group and just made, made some my own luck and shot some photos, but I also looked at my training and was in a pretty good place for be a better place than I was in 2022. So, after some lengthy conversations with my girlfriends who's always super supportive, but, but also what I was about to do was perhaps more dangerous I talked through doing it self supported. So running the distance a different route, just on my own, with a backpack and no outside support. That wasn't available to everybody.
Speaker 3:So there's a few different rules around ultra marathon fastest known times, and one of them is that you, if you, if you want to do self supported, you can't have outside support. But you can buy things from shops, you can use taps if they're public taps, you can stay in a hotel. Those things need to be available to everybody equally. So you can't do is stash water along the way. You can't take things from somebody else, friends or other competitors. It needs to be a fair, level playing field. So did that and it took me a little bit longer another eight hours longer to do, to do it on my own, with a backpack, sleeping in derelict buildings and under bushes. So, yeah, it's a. It's a, you know, a different way of doing it, without a film crew, without the, without the RV driving around following me or or being up ahead and and was, yeah, it was an amazing experience.
Speaker 2:Do you have a strategy? So when you, in terms of doing something self-supported, so would you go out and think about where you might sleep, or even like a strategy for your sleep? Or do you have enough experience to know when you need to stop, when you need to pick up foods, like, how do you, how do you even start to plan that? I guess you've got so much experience that you might know when you need to do things, but what's your strategy?
Speaker 3:It's a bit of everything, to be honest, and you know, originally I talked about the Ironman being flexible, and that's that, I think, was a good thing for me originally, because if you make things simple for yourself in Ironman, I mean you would go back to taking the bottles from somebody handing them on the side of the road. Use the on course nutrition. You limit the number of things you need to think about In Ironman. You that typically you can, if you can stomach those things and you can train with them. You can go faster. You minimize things you haven't got this worry of have I got it or haven't I got it? Have I forgotten it? You know you very much simplify your decision making and long distance events and I would throw long distance cycling it as well are a culmination of making good choices and making good decisions, and if you can simplify those decisions as much as you can, then you have less opportunity to make a bad choice. So, in a roundabout kind of way, what that means is I plan what I can plan for. So, for instance, when I did the speed project last year, 2022 with the film crew, I wanted to go and have the venture of a lifetime and go over Mount Baldy and do the mountains and and I planned that all because we had a COVID pandemic from from where I am now in my flat in East London using Google Maps and Camus and Strava and anything like that and some people who who lived there and I spoke to, but I pretty much plotted it without having stepped a foot on that route. And I plotted a route that I knew that there would be a vehicle along and whilst it wasn't there to support me, I knew there was some a get out jail free card, if you like where I could get water from them or I could they could help support me. And it was actually a very dangerous experience. And I went to Mount Baldy in the one o'clock in the morning and it was heat ice for maybe two miles and I fell and slipped and I had no mobile phone cell reception at that point and spent a good half an hour working out whether that was, you know, potentially the end of my experience, because there was no way round. It was either go forward or go back and I obviously couldn't without cell reception. I didn't have a plan beat for rerouting. It's actually, incidentally, the same place that I think is named Julian Sands, the actor who went missing in January, and they found him two weeks ago. That's where he went missing in January and then obviously sadly died. So it's in the same stretch where he was. I didn't know. It was as dangerous as it is. It is high and icy and in March it was very, very treacherous.
Speaker 3:So it's a long way around saying you can plan for what you can plan for, and that's what I did this year, the difference being as I now knew that with us know they've had in California was completely out of the question. But also I need to stay near some civilization for food and water. In 2022, it was 40 degrees in Death Valley and I was in again the fortune that I had a film crew, because there was when they appeared, there was a warning and I could get some shade under their vehicle. I obviously this year I thought it was going to be the same sort of heat, and so I needed to find ways that we're going to be relatively close to civilization. So I followed a route that was fairly similar to the route that most people follow. It's called the OG route. I followed something a hybrid of that, which meant I was only ever about 35 to 40 miles away from a gas station or a motel or a small town. So I could always thought, in reality I'd network be always be seven to eight hours away from maximum from somewhere to get water, assuming it would be open, of course.
Speaker 3:So it's a very long winded way of saying.
Speaker 3:It's a case of planning what you can plan for.
Speaker 3:And then, in terms of sleep, I don't know if there's a wrong or wrong answer.
Speaker 3:This year I was much more disciplined with sleep and my aim was to run 300 miles in four days and to run 75 miles a day and sleep.
Speaker 3:And what I did in previous times, both the Gobi Desert and Speed Project last year, was to run 75 miles and then realize I've done it quite quickly, relatively speaking, and to push on and to say I'm going to do 105 miles per day rather than 75 miles because I feel good and I don't think, and so I decide, and then what happens is you get 140 miles in and you're you've had two hours sleep and you can't again going back to making good choices.
Speaker 3:You can't make good choices because you're so tired, you can't study, your body stops functioning in a very you know, in a good way. So my plan this year was to do 75 miles and then sleep, and I did that and bizarrely, I started at 4am and at 8pm I'd done the 75 miles, so I was. So I pulled out my emergency bivvy bag and see, and I had for this year I have an amazing down jacket and trousers but instead of a sleeping bag so I could wear them at night if it was cold, and then I wouldn't have to carry extra, and I just crawled into my little emergency bivvy bag and took a couple of hours sleep at 8pm. So I think it's a case of trying things and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't and learning from those experiences and also minimizing the things that you can you know you can worry about.
Speaker 1:With regards to sleep, talk to us a little bit about how you know when you get it wrong. I've heard you tell the story of a hallucination that involved a lake. I don't know if you've got any better ones than that to tell, but certainly that was a story worth hearing for people to understand the impact of not having enough sleep. So tell us a little bit about hallucinations, and if you want to use that as your example, then fantastic.
Speaker 3:No, no, I've hallucinated. It's a regular thing now and it's the first time it happens. It's kind of a bit scary, but now it's a kind of accepted part of knowing that you need to sleep and sometimes it's just plainly not convenient to do so. I guess I think everyone's different, but I get to a point when about probably 40 hours in and I haven't slept, that things really, the wheels really start to fall off. You're getting the approaching two days without sleep. I don't like getting to that point, but sometimes, particularly things like the Gobi Desert where there were life bases, but I felt that in that particular one I felt there was more competitive, there's a race. It was more competitive and I felt more pressure to not sleep.
Speaker 3:But it tends to happen to me at around about that point where I start to hallucinate things even in the daytime. I start to see things. Rock formations start to appear as things that not a crazy, like pink elephants and things. Just your mind starts to play tricks on me and lights and shadows and things start to create images in rock formations and bushes and things. Particularly as it starts to get darker, you start to shadows and things start to become make the terrain more interesting to look at but more gives it perhaps more depth and feel, more texture. You start to see things appear and I think sometimes it comes down to also desire to see people, especially if you've been on your own for a long time. The idea that somebody up ahead, that you're one of your crew or something, in the case of the Gobi Desert, might be a tent or something in the distance. Or speed project it was the film crew but it rarely. You rarely think, but as you get into night it tends to get worse. The speed project last year I mean part of the area goes through. It goes when you're about halfway along goes through. In my route last year was through a lot of military US naval bases and there's always talk about it's like Nevada and the whole aliens thing. You have this loosely in your mind, this idea of restricted airspace, and on the road to Vegas there is alien jerky shops and things. They obviously make a big part of this whole thing.
Speaker 3:Last year I saw lights and things in the sky and I was running along and I'm pretty certain that I was expecting to meet a police car further up. I was on a bit of dirt road, a lot of the roads you run on, the service roads for power and water out there. They were often the old roads but now the freeways are in place that a lot of these roads are now closed to all traffic apart from electricity and water vehicles. But you do go through these things and there's big wire fences either side of here on a sort of 100 meter wide sort of channel of rough bushes and things. And I was convinced I saw red and blue lights running perpendicular to me in the distance and I would come to a junction and there would be a police car. And I was kind of expecting to see this because I could see these lights moving across in the distance, maybe a mile away, and I carried on running, carried on running, started to think about what was going to say when I got stopped by these police and I thought maybe it's military police.
Speaker 3:I am running with a head torch in a restricted space legally, but obviously expected someone to come and say what are you doing out here? And I ran and ran and then there's bushes and shrubs and then I got to this junction and I looked and no police car, nothing at all. And then five minutes later I swear I was being followed by lights in the sky, maybe 50 meters above me, and maybe it was a drone, maybe it was. But your bright brain stopped to worry about different things and I'm going to bear with me one second.
Speaker 3:So your brain starts to just work and you start to see stuff, and I kind of regret when something's not getting my phone out and like filming this stuff.
Speaker 3:You don't think about it at the time, but that's probably why I should do it, because they would settle the answer Was I seeing things or was it actually real? And so then you have a little bit of sleep and it tends to sort itself out. And then I mean certainly Gaby Desert, the bridge version is I thought I was on a frozen lake and climbed over things and boats and things and I was so tired I had had a sleep I think about seven hours sleep, actually hyperfermir as well at the time and so. But when I came out in the tent I was at 4,000 meters and there'd never been a lake and there'd never been boats, and the whole idea was being that I heard in the briefing about this section of reeds that were somewhere along the way and that planted the idea that this is where it was, and when you're tired, these little things work in your mind and you start to hallucinate stuff.
Speaker 1:It certainly sounds like a fun part of it, but also a scary and dangerous part of it, because I suspect it's all happening at the point of which you are sleep deprived, and it can lead you to I mean, particularly when you're talking about racing in some of the areas that you're talking about it must create a significant safety issue as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you're probably not aware of so much of the safety issue until after the fact, which may or may not be a good thing. Yeah, I mean, gobi Desert was taking me an hour to do a mile or something, at which point I arrived in that checkpoint with hyperthermia because it was minus 15 or something outside with the wind chill. So, yeah, it certainly isn't ideal. And the other obvious thing is that you don't make decisions around navigation and you go the wrong way. And in fact in the Gobi Desert, the other British competitor, nathan, he thought his GPS unit was wrong. It wasn't marked when we had handheld GPS units to guide our way. He thought his was going wrong and it was, but he went maybe 15 kilometres off the direction he should have done, which is when you're in the desert, and then 15 kilometres back the way you came. He probably added half a day onto his journey in the desert with not much water and not much food.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, it can do, it's certainly, and that's why to some extent, it sort of feels fun after the fact. But your things can go wrong and you know, fortunately most people have to tell, make a good story. But that's why this year I wanted to try and be a bit more disciplined in sleep and take doing 75 miles a day and taking an enforced sleep break Seemed like a good way of you know taking four if you. If you can do 75 miles in 20 hours and you're trying to do it 24, then in theory you can take four hours of sleep and still roll over into the next day and do another 75 miles. It's again, it's easier to write it down and do it on paper than it is to do it in reality, but at least at least you start from a plan of sanity rather than a plan of just running until you hallucinate and and get yourself in trouble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's actually the second time in this series that we've heard we were just hearing it earlier on from Ian Allamson, who's the world champion adventure racer and obstacle course racer, and he was talking about a race where his team only wanted to take half an hour sleep, but he didn't set the alarm and they got six hours and but they ended up winning the race because of all the mistakes that people might and it's so. It's that that old running out, isn't it? You've got to slow down, to speed up taking the sleep. Actually, it puts you in a better place to win.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's definitely a learned skill, I think, of being patient and it doesn't the race doesn't. It's not the first person in the case of people, it's not the first person to 150 miles. Is the first person to the finish line at 300 miles doesn't matter if you get to the halfway first and in fact, in 20 last year 2022, two people ran very fast, went out running I think they got 150 miles in about 28 hours or something like that something, and then never made it any further than like 180 miles because they ran on the tough roads out there and got tendonitis and an injury problems and that was the end and it's it's. It's a very heroic way to get halfway, but if the aim is to get to the finish line first, it's not. It's a bit of a foolish foolish way to do it and does it. This is starting.
Speaker 1:Sorry, sorry. So this is quite a lot of talk. I've heard quite a lot of talk recently about the the negative impact on long term health by missing just one night's sleep. Have you, have you had, you know? Have you done any reading around this, around, you know, be interested to know your thoughts of kind of the long term health implications of ultra running, whether it's sleep, whether it's kind of your you know your joints, because clearly there's a lot of amazing health benefits for doing lots of running. But by taking it to the extreme, to those kind of you know, is it, is it worse?
Speaker 3:I've been the problem with it, with all the scientific research around, this odd thing is the cake. You know, the, the pools of people who do it as a tiny that it's impossible to to have any real fear for your group assessed. I you know solid evidence that one thing does another, and I agree it's. I'm sure there's lots of life affirming improvement benefits from doing these things and, conversely, the negative as well, and I think, I think you can do a few things that that make the Make the experience. I mean, I want to go and continue to do these things for as long as I can. I'm in my late forties now. I want to continue to do these as long as possible, and so you know, in my minds there's definitely a longevity idea in there, and as much as there is no point, right, could I run 150 miles and get there with the first front people? Yeah, probably could. Would it be a smart idea? Probably not. And so the more I do these things, the more I feel like well one. I want to come back to them, which you know, come back from them, which was one of the worries I had this year with speed projects and was was a definite problem last year. I think last year probably came as close to to not coming back as I've done on anything, given how dangerous it was on Mount Baldy, which might sound like I'm being male dramatic, but it genuinely was Very, very dangerous, given the lack of equipment. I spent some time in the mountains, moving in altitude with crampons and ice axes and things, so I'm familiar with how to move. What makes you very aware, though, is of moving when you haven't got it, and but I think you know, there's a few things for people who want to get into this longer end of the culture, marathon spectrum, is it? You just have to realize there's a lot of walking involved, and actually that's a very smart way of executing your race strategy.
Speaker 3:If you, if you do some simple back of a bagpocket maths and you realize that if you do five miles an hour in which, in running standards, is pretty slow, 12 minute miles you can cover 100 miles in 20 hours. If you're covering 300 miles, in theory, you can do it in 60 hours. If you just do a measly 12 minute miles for 60 hours, it doesn't sound very hard. In reality, of course, is you kind of put in. You know time for eating and time for sorting things out, problems out, and five, but five miles an hour, it suddenly becomes in reality is actually very difficult. Eight kilometers an hour is suddenly quite a difficult thing to achieve. But you can get to six kilometers an hour, seven kilometers an hour by just walking. And if you walk you use less, you need less calories input, you expend less calories, you need to put less in, you make yourself less tired In theory, you need less sleep, you cause less defunctional damage to your body. You know your impact forces are lower, you're not taking longer strides, you're not creating muscular skeletal stresses that you would do if you were running. So you can.
Speaker 3:It's a very tortoise and hare type approach and I think the more you start to realise that you can do all right by running for two or three hours a day and walking for 17. I mean you need to learn how to walk in a meaningful, purposeful, quick way and I think I spent some time last year not so much this year but last year trying to get to, you know, walking up eight kilometers an hour. Five miles it's a different group of muscles, but getting to a fast walking pace so that when I was tired I could still do six and a half seven kilometers an hour and you eat on new walk and you can do so much more when you walk. You can pretty much do it. You can pretty much function and walk. You can't really function and run.
Speaker 3:And so you end up getting to a point where you know 10 minute miles which again, as for a lot of runners, is either their regular run around pace or is slow it suddenly becomes actually quite a hard thing to achieve at such a long period of time. So it's just a change of mindset I'm not going to run, I'm not going to. I might be able to run a six minute mile, but I don't need to. What I need to be able to do is run 12 minute miles consecutively for 60 hours in theory, and then I will do, and then you would win it by a day. You know that's the kind of reality of our slow walking pace. That's the kind of reality of how slow these things are. But even so, you know, be able to function normally at three miles an hour is still pretty hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, it really is interesting and it makes it feel a lot more accessible. And when we did the ARC 50, my immediate instinct was right, I've now got to go do the 100 mile archer patrician. But was yeah, actually, if we'd walked more of that it would. That would seem far more achievable.
Speaker 3:But but, it's a, it's a, it's a running thing and, like every runner, you know when you start running you do some walking and your aim is to not walk Right. That's running, because walking is not running. So when you start running, the whole function is I hear people all the time and it's. You know, I got round park run without walking this week. You know that's the kind of beginners. And when you do a couch to 5K it's a run walk strategy. So, unsurprisingly, walking is sort of the is the thing you do.
Speaker 3:You know is banned in running, but the reality of ultra running is walking is a really smart way of of conserving your finite energy source. If you, if you only we all have a finite energy source and when we train we, we can extend that. We can extend, we can be more efficient so that the finite energy we can take In we use by burning fat or burning glycogen or a mixture of the two, but we get fitter or heart rate is slower. We can do more on the same amount of fitness and efficiency. Obviously, you know running a cannot mechanics works into that. So if you're an ultra runner, the smartest thing you should be doing is is not running, using, is not fighting gravity. You know, if you're really strong. You're the world's best mountain runner and you know you can run up a thousand meter hills. Then go for it. But the vast majority of runners and I include myself in this don't can't do that. So the smartest thing would be to use that energy reserve when I'm not fighting gravity either so much, either on the flat or on the downhill, and actually conserve that energy to use it in a place where you're going to get more bang for your buck, and so it makes a lot of sense
Speaker 3:not to say there isn't a skill in in fast hiking, power hiking, and I think that's just the mistake that a lot people if you're going to go do 100 mile race and archivist, then spend less time running on the flat doing intervals and more time hiking at an effort level that's comparable, you know, at an effort level where you can feel your heart rate rise and work on that as a skill.
Speaker 3:Well, because what happens to most people is they they run up and they go to a mountain ultra and they get to the first hill and they go oh, I must walk, but then they're walking is so terribly slow that they lose so much time. So there is a skill set there in in, effectively, our military backpacking. Yeah, like a proper not thinking that, as all this is the bit where I ease off the gas and because it's uphill, it's okay, I'm going to work hard. The impact forces of going uphill are much less physically, so you can. So in your training you can actually do a lot more uphill work than you can downhill or flat. But make that a learnt skill rather than just being well, when you get to a hill, you walk, and I'm going to be slow because you can make up a lot of places competitively by being a really good, a really good power hiking.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, that's excellent, and so one of the things that we do on this podcast is we get the last guest to ask the next guest the question, without knowing who that is. So the last, the last guest was Evan, who was a nutritionist and and also a speed walker, actually, so and his question was when did you know what you wanted to do in life?
Speaker 3:I still don't know what I was doing like, so next week maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3:I started. Yeah, I mean it's a good question, but I think it's a question I'm going to answer around about, kind of way, like I have done all the others. I think it's a question that, as the world changes the more we don't have to make that decision anymore. I think when we were younger, we went to school and you went to careers counts, careers advice, and there was somebody there who said and you said, when I'm older, I want to be a byman, policeman, you know, soliteter, or whatever. And that's what we did for the next 40 years of our lives.
Speaker 3:Now I think you can look at what happens in 10 years in all sorts of industries, but increasingly our lives are in technology and in that sort of thing and technological changes in 10 years. So, to answer my darling, the question myself is I was in finance for 15 years and at the time I really loved it and you think that's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. But Lehmann's crisis and various other financial crisis has happened over that period of time. By the time I got to 14 years of being in it, I was like this is horrendous, I don't want to spend. I don't want to be living for the weekends and working 12 hours. I wanted to be doing. I was doing Ironman and things, but I was cramming it into 12 hour days and where I would be too tired the weekends to do the things that I wanted to do. And so you and I had good salary but spent the money on fast bikes and not riding them.
Speaker 2:And that's no way to live your life?
Speaker 3:I don't think in the long term, and so now I'm a struggling photographer and content creator and I do a lot of things with the North Face, but I've never been poorer. But but also, conversely, I'm my own boss and I spend my time as I want to, and and I'm certainly much happier. I would never go back to that world again. So, in a rather that kind of way.
Speaker 3:I don't think anyone needs to choose. I think you just need to be adaptable and willing to take some risks, which I guess comes round to some of my approach to running as well, which is adaptability and managing those risks in a way that means you can come back tomorrow and do it again.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I think that's great advice and I couldn't I couldn't agree with you more. I think you know, gone are the days of getting a career for the next 40, 50 years and and sticking with it. I think, yeah, I think that that trend is just accelerating. So we've also got a question from a listener. So this question is from Fee, which is which life event felt like a nightmare at the time but actually shaped you into the person you are today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it's probably a good segue on to if you change if you do change careers it feels awful. I mean, I was good at the job that I did. I just didn't like doing it. So when you then make the jump to go a job which was comfortably paying the bills and affording new TVs and 10,000 pound bikes and things to go and jump off, throw that all away effectively walk away from something that you're quite good at with You've been doing a long time.
Speaker 3:It felt like an absolute nightmare to be to be and I actually went back and thought this is the wrong decision. I took three months off and worked for an agency and I took three months and realized that I hated that too, and it wasn't just the company I was working for, it was the whole industry that was wrong. So it felt terrible and I spent a year earning less money than I ever. You know, the year after I was 15 years, after leaving university, I had less money and it feels terrible, and it feels money isn't my driver, but it wasn't enough money to really survive on in London. So it felt like a terrible thing to do and yeah, and it was difficult for sure, but it also was the kick in the pants that I needed to go on and do the things that I do now. And I mean to add to that we had obviously COVID and being a self employed person who earns their income from being outside and group activities. I'm a qualified coach and at the time I was leading a lot of run community stuff and for brands and doing a lot of work in that space and yeah, and they all went out the window. So I had the whole of COVID where I think I had nothing, zero, so those things. But everyone was in that place and I think that's you know, everyone had the same challenges and we all and and unfortunately it's a lift to tell the tale when many other people didn't. So you know there's silver linings and all these things and everything that seems like a nightmare and this is something I do think about when I, when you go out and do an ultra marathon, money on your own, a lot of times we're actually in a very privileged place and and we can and there's always lifelines. But even during COVID, you know, have family and my girlfriend is a teacher, so she was still continue to have employment and there's there was ways out. But for a lot of people there isn't, there isn't a someone to lean on and there isn't a safety line. They they're escaping water on countries they live on, they have nobody and they're living on the streets. So we have, you know, ultimately, whatever my personal privileged life challenges are, I'm very happy to have those challenges compared to having some of the lives that other people in the world have and don't have any way of, of escaping from, and I think there's someone said to me this week about what it's like to go to the run, self supported in, from LA to Vegas, and it was nearly five days of sleeping in derelict buildings and eating from gas stations and fast food joints. But ultimately, even though it was a long way from civilisation at times I still had a mobile phone I could still ultimately call an Uber or something and pay a lot of money to get to escape my self in self induced challenge.
Speaker 3:But there's people out there who they don't have that and and it does. When you're out there on your own and you think this is going to be over in four days, and doesn't matter how bad it gets during that four days, it's going to be over. And a lot of people they don't have that. They don't know when it's going to be over. Maybe it will be, and so it's just good to have that perspective. And it doesn't matter how bad, your bad, your worst days, you know one, they always get better. And two, there's somebody out there going to be having a. You know you need to turn the television on. There'll be somebody having a much tougher time than than we are, and so yeah, I mean no, brilliant it's.
Speaker 1:I mean it comes back to that sort of saying of instead of saying I have to do this, it's I get to do this you know, when you're doing these experiences there. You know it is tough. It's bloody hard work, particularly mentally, often as much as it is physically, but ultimately we get. We are privileged to be able to do these things.
Speaker 3:It's a choice. Yeah, it's a choice, and you know, and everyone gets those choices. So, putting yourself in those situations, people are not just like one would go out and and walk, you know, run, walk across 300 miles for the simple reason that, because you can and because maybe it's good to get back to some, some simple, simplistic way of living for only a short period of time. But but I think if you think about it long and hard, you know it's a small price to pay for to get to explore some of those things that people live on on a permanent basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Now we also. The last tradition we have on this podcast is we always ask people for a book recommendation a book that you found yourself. That's helped. You found yourself recommending to other people, if not a book, then something else, like a documentary or something, but preferably a book. Are there any books that you found yourself recommending to other people?
Speaker 3:I think if you, if people like running and we'll start. I got certainly a running recommendation. I need to just check. It's always the runner or always a runner. Let me just have a quick make sure I get the title correct. And it's a book. It's a brilliant book. I think it was sold out, like all good things sold out the boot of a car, and it was printed out in back in the 1980s.
Speaker 1:It's actually yeah, so this is a running book I haven't heard of before, so I'm intrigued to know.
Speaker 3:I think it's called always the runners. It's awful when you, when you don't get the title correct, isn't it for the book, the event you recommend recommending? But it's a book about high school runners back in the 1970s in America and just it's a story. But it's written very much for a running point of view and it talks about just kids in the 1970s, high school kids who do, who go into running, and it talks about it's just written with so much passion, so much joy for the simplicity of going out and high school track and field running, so like the real stuff of best hurting type. Yeah, I think it's this book called always, always a runner, but also I guess the other option is ultra runners is born to run, which is, if you've never read it, it's just. I mean it's. It's a fictitious book but it is based on largely on some, on some real facts and I don't think, you know, I don't think that anyone should necessarily take it as a, as a guide to how to run, but it certainly is a great story and I think in terms of just getting people into the idea of running, like the Tara where Indians in Mexico, and the idea of just simplistic basic running, running off of corn tortillas and corn beer and just the idea of sorts that slow pace thing. It's a great, great story.
Speaker 3:Christopher McDougall is a great writer and I would recommend any of his books he's done Subsequently as a great is great reads and if you ever get a chance to see him present, he is an incredible presenter of his books. Actually had the misfortune of talking about the goby does. Actually in Chamonix, montblanc, a UTMB a few years ago, is invited by a great running magazine. Again another recommendation, if you like something a bit shorter, like the Winds magazine available, like the windscom Great collection of generally stories provided by regular people alongside some great athletes. I was had the misfortune I say this because I went on first and then Chris McDougall went on second to talk about his book and I was totally upstaged by someone who is a brilliant, brilliant storyteller, both in person and written. So, yeah, I go off and I was like, yeah, I was the warm up, definitely the warm up. So Christopher McDougall book for to run is a brilliant one.
Speaker 1:It is a brilliant book and I can't help. I love that. I love that book. It was the book that got me into running. Actually, I started listening to it. It's cliched and everyone's like but.
Speaker 3:But honestly, if you don't need to be, it's a book that you could read without being into running, and that's what.
Speaker 3:Yeah only that makes that's what makes it a brilliant book. You don't need to be a running nerd, you don't need to have a cupboard full of running shoes and you know, no, no difference between your, my, how many kilometers in a mile and how many miles in a kilometer, and all those things and your paces and the watch. You just buy the book and just enjoy it for the story that it is, and the characters are real.
Speaker 3:So this is what's great about it is the characters are real. I had the pleasure of running with a bear for Ted McDonald's for, who came to London a few times, and I was introduced to him and he is the colorful, crazy character that he comes across in the book and that is, you know, barefoot Ted and, and so you know it is. It is a brilliant book and I think the fact that it's it's it's created as a story adds to it rather than makes it not a viable read for serious runners as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. And just one final question. You see you've talked about some incredible races that you've already done. I've heard you talk about sort of you know, the hardest races in the world. I've heard you talk about the most obscure races in the world, including one that involved, like manga, rabbit type races and Chinese. That's crazy. What is the one bucket list race that you haven't done? That you're kind of that, you, that you would love to do.
Speaker 3:I don't know, it's not races I wouldn't do, I wouldn't do Marathons and I wouldn't go and do some of those things. I just, you know, running around in circles and of course, that almost no one complete doesn't really. I mean, I like a challenge, but something that you can, you can genuinely design so that no one can finish is not my, it's not my idea. There is a speed project new version this year and Atacama Desert, which looks, looks like it could be pretty crazy. It is the same format. I don't know whether, at this point, I'm not sure whether I can be able to go, just in terms of it's hugely expensive to get out there and the logistics are very challenging to do it solo, because there is nothing and it is the driest place on earth, so it's a lot of challenges around. You can't do it yourself, supported, so you then need a crew and you need all that you've got to get people to, to Chile, which is not not inexpensive.
Speaker 3:So I don't know what's going to happen for me personally, but it won't get what happened as a racer. That's definitely on my bucket list, but I think it's a much more these days into creating something new myself, or thinking about creating something, than following someone else's idea, and I'm happy that we're getting to the end of the book, so this is probably a really good place to sort of talk about my future ideas.
Speaker 3:But I do think that we have become and include myself and possible into this idea that we can only do these things if someone organizes it for us. And actually the world is an insanely amazing place and I include going out of your door and looking around at the places you see every day and starting to think a bit more about just using what we have around us, and I would. I said this the other day at a workshop that I talked about is adventure begins by going left when you always go right, and that is the simplistic way of thinking about things. And COVID.
Speaker 3:Definitely one of the positives for me was that we were sort of restricted to being able to own the areas that we lived in.
Speaker 3:We couldn't go travel long distances, so we tended to I live in East London we looked for things we'd never been to and the amazing, all the little bits of trail and undergrowth and parks and things that we'd never been to, because runners in particular tend to be creatures of habit and you run the same route, you run the same loop, you run out and back whatever you don't tend to, because you know that that's the, you can do this bit of this segment, or you know it takes this long, or you know it's exactly this distance, but just darting to think about looking at things and saying, is it possible?
Speaker 3:So is it possible to run? You know the London to Paris as a cycle ride. It's hugely popular. It's like a coming of age thing, along with, like John and John are great cyclists, go and ride to Paris and you ride to Paris in three days and then ride to Paris in 24 hours and can you run it? I mean, it sounds like a great. There is the cycling route there. There is the Avenue there which runs from Dieppe to Paris. It's a cycle route. Something like that sounds more interesting to me than follow it and doing it on your own, on your own steam, at any time you like and just having an adventure.
Speaker 3:Rather than necessarily than being driven. I'm certainly not driven by medals and T-shirts and the paraphernalia that comes with, and I think I was and I think it's a very natural thing to be motivated by ticking off boxes and having bucket list races. But also movement, I think, is an important part of my life and so just doing things that make me happy but are challenging I can rattle off some things I have done which I never talk about, which my girlfriend and I we ran around the circumference of Ibiza in four days as a holiday. I had the FKT for running the spine of Mallorca, the GR221. We ran around Menorca on a holiday of 50 kilometers a day for four days. There's tons of those things that you can. We ran around Isle of man in three days. It's just those things to me are more interesting than the checkpoints and beating and coming 29th or 426th or taking 31 hours to do UTMP or whatever. They sort of meaningless metrics in the whole scale of things. If you don't, if you aren't gonna win.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, no, I agree and you're living depends on it, then you're in a whole different space and if you need to win races or you need because you have sponsor requirements and you have income that comes from that, then you need to do that. If you're middle of the back of the back just making up the numbers but having a good time and you want that medals and t-shirts and things, it is the drive of doing it absolutely brilliant. But if you've done a lot of them and those things are sitting in the cupboard and you never wear them, then maybe there's other. You either stop doing it and you look to another sport or I think you look for maybe something that ticks, that tickles the fancy, which isn't. If you're no longer inspired by teacher at some medals, then maybe that your own adventures is the way of doing it and I wanna apply a couple of things.
Speaker 3:One thing, if anyone's listening, and it opens for sale this week and it's a brilliant idea, which is called the Peak Divide, and this is a brilliant example of kind of what I've been talking about, with a bit of help. So the guys who run the One Foot Forward Club and Outdoor Provisions Nutrition in March this year did a organized two day run from Manchester to Sheffield through the Peak District and it wasn't a race. There was no winner. What they did do instead was create groups of people to move together and they'd have someone who knew the route and who would do the pacing and they would then move people across from Manchester to Sheffield. They did it in two days. They stopped in Edale.
Speaker 3:This year in September they're going to do it as a one day experience and people will start in Manchester and then they will run to Sheffield and I've ran and my guys and I ran and I ran the route a couple of weeks back and it's an amazing route. It's super fun. There's not a one kilometer of it I would change. I would say is boring, is gray or industrial. It's all canals and hills and mountains and it's absolutely brilliant and in my mind, this is the future for a lot of new events is forget the timings, forget the winners, go and have a, make it a movement of people rather than a race, and have a great experience and share that experience with other people.
Speaker 3:And people learn off each other and they use each other to achieve something together that maybe they wouldn't be able to achieve on their own, without the egos and the winning and the swag that people seem to need. So it launches on the 5th of July, which I think is the next couple of days, two days time. Maybe this podcast will come out I'm sure it will after that, but I'm sure there's still replaces. But also it's a route that can be as accessible and exists every other day of the year and I would thoroughly recommend it for people who want to do a challenge in two days or three days you could easily do. It's 80 kilometers, so 30 kilometers a day for three days, and I think it's looking at those sorts of things is a really novel for our industry to grow and flourish.
Speaker 1:I think I think you're absolutely right. I think one of the greatest things to come out of COVID was the fact that people start exploring, and it was that drive towards the FKTs rather than organized races and all of that kind of stuff just allowed us to explore a whole lot more. In particular, it's that classic case of you're chatting to an Aussie and I've been around more of Australia than he has, but he's done more of Great Britain than I have. You're like, well, this is crazy. We need to explore more of our own territory, don't we? So that's awesome. And just on that note, I know you do a thing called Advent Running. Do you want to just explain a little bit about what that's about?
Speaker 3:I do. It's not something that I spend much time with anymore, but it was launched in 2014. In fact, it existed before 2014 as something I did with friends it was. The idea was, when I was training for Ironman and other things is that during December we didn't have much spare time. We were all working and we would inevitably get caught up in Christmas parties and family functions and things, and we would do not much training and then get to January and be unfit and out of shape and regret all those December beers and big dinners.
Speaker 3:So it started off as like, just could we do 25 days of exercise, 25 pieces of exercise in 25 days, didn't really? It was largely running because it was just an easy thing to do. You could pack your shoes in your bag and we had lots of caveats about if you did two runs in the same day, you could have the next day off and because people have you know, after a big Christmas party, you can't. So it was built of a sort of fun more than anything. And then 2014, put it on Facebook because a few more friends were like oh, this is really good. Can we find a better way of you doing it than, like you know just doing it. I think we did it on Strava and it wasn't very easy to have people to follow, so did it on Facebook. And then a friend of mine, kate Carter, who was the time as the journalist for the Guardian running blog, that would you write a piece for the Guardian on what this thing is. It sounds like a great idea for people who want to get a bit fit in January.
Speaker 3:So we simplified the whole idea and said you just have to run. In fact, over time it became an annual thing at Christmas 25 days of exercise in December. If you can create Habit in December, you can create it any year of the month. That's the kind of logic because you've time, you're time poor.
Speaker 3:But also this idea with any sort of thing that you're doing in the next curriculae, particularly sports. You know we haven't got extra half an hour, an extra hour a day in our lives. We have to do not do something else, though sacrifice if you like. And so the idea that you could find you could not watch Coronation Street or EastEnders during December so you could do an hour, half an hour's running, would maybe plan that idea. You could do it all year round and it went a bit crazy for many years and it turned out to end up being a 365 day thing in London where we had we didn't do a run every day, but we had physical group runs and we made a bit of events and it became a running community in London and it was very active.
Speaker 3:I coached that thing six days a week for five years. A lot of it was on. We didn't charge anything for it, so it was unpaid and it was crammed into my busy day and we were fortunate to work with a few brands Tenzing and Camden Town Brewery who did pay me to do that, to lead their run. So it provided an income. But then of course COVID came along and we were restricted on what we could do in terms of physical groups.
Speaker 3:And then, but it was also a good time I did to look around and actually make some decisions around. Could I continue to do six coaching sessions a week and earn a living and stay sane? And when we looked around, my girlfriend and I, who was very much part of it, we said this now when it started in 2014, there was very few running communities. And just to caveat that, I think running community is a group that isn't an English athletics affiliated to running club, and by that I mean it's just hasn't got the barriers to entry. That it's not about To define it. I think it's less about winning and going fast and more about running as a lifestyle choice than being competitive. And if you look at in London in particular now, there's hundreds of these brilliant, vibrant running communities of five or six, 20, 100, 200, 500 people who meet multiple times a week and go and use the parks and streets that we live in. And if you look in Bristol, there's left-handed giant running club which is doing a brilliant job. And you go to Manchester and there's track one foot forward brewery running club that's got 100 people meeting on a Wednesday. And now there's lots of things. There's lots of these community groups and I've been running, I felt it served its role as a regular weekly running group and, frankly, I think people were doing were bringing more life to it than I was in terms of just the pressure of me trying to earn, being self-employed and do these things. And we still do it in December. Now it's 25 days. It has a Facebook page. People still get involved and they. But it exists now without.
Speaker 3:It was never meant to be a James Poole thing to raise my, it wasn't. It was much more selfless than that. It was meant to be about having fun and getting active in December rather than a thing about me or a thing about that I had to do to make it continue. And I'm really happy that people in December I see it on Strava people do Advert Running Day one without being part of the, without contacting me, without being part of a Facebook group.
Speaker 3:It's certainly that it's now has an it's organic and has a life of its own, rather than it be forced, you know, pushed for people to come and visit, to come and join us on a Thursday morning for a bagel run, and I think that's good and I hope that and I know there's running community groups that you people who used to come to mine, who now they doesn't exist, do their own thing with other people, and I think that's the healthy way these things happen, rather than it becoming someone's fiefdom and my fiefdom, my kingdom that I, you know, you feel a lot of pressures about and don't want people to, and that's what tends to happen in these sort of running communities is they become someone in one individual's sort of claim to fame and then they get a bit. They can get a bit unpleasant, and you know, and people don't wanna join other clubs if you're not part of this club and that's, life's too short and running is just running at the end of the day. It doesn't need to be. People don't need to be getting so uptight about it. Brilliant.
Speaker 1:So thank you for asking.
Speaker 3:It's not the answer you wanted, which was I would say yeah, come and join us. And, frankly, it's a good story.
Speaker 3:And it's given me masses and masses of opportunity and I wouldn't be sitting here today if I hadn't been on that journey, with the advent running and all the people that came, and I couldn't be more thankful for the things that they taught me while I was coaching them about humility and turning up and just the spirit of good people doing a simple thing. So it was a brilliant chapter, but and it's not necessarily over forever, but I think why continue creating, doing something when there's so many better versions of potentially better versions of the same thing? Brilliant.
Speaker 2:Well, that's fantastic. I now enjoy going to that.
Speaker 3:It's a really great thing to go along to someone else's group now.
Speaker 1:Not being responsible for it. Exactly, you enjoy it without having to do legwork Absolutely brilliant. Well, on that note, james, it's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you very much for coming on. The podcast Loads of great stories there, loads of really inspiring races certainly races that I think are. I definitely want to transition towards more of the ultra running thing. I've got a couple of picks I need to nail, first in the Iron man box, and then I definitely want to do more ultra stuff, and so you can be a lot of people.
Speaker 3:That's what I like to do. That's definitely on the list. If you've got enough money, you just have to buy the 12 now, don't you? And then you can, and then you can, and then, if that works out, well, actually, they've changed the rules.
Speaker 1:They've changed those rules. It's not quite so easy now, but, yeah, no, brilliant, it's been fantastic. James, thank you so much for coming on and I wish you every success in the future.
Speaker 3:Thank you, charlie. Thank you, claire. I look forward to hearing it and I will. Yeah, and Wyoming. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I'll just say you can do so on Instagram. It's always the best way and my Instagram handle is quite simply at James D Pool, p-w-o-l-e, and I happily give advice. Or someone's got a race that they think is, or a crazy idea that?
Speaker 1:I'm all ears Brilliant. Thank you very much. That's it for this episode of the Triathlon Podcast. I hope you really enjoyed it. If you want to find more about James Pool or follow him on his social, the best place to go is to Instagram, where he is James D Pool and that's pool with an E on the end, and you'll get some great photos of him exploring the globe. Loads to take away from that episode for me and some really cool places to think about doing ultramarathans. So if you like the podcast, please download it, follow it, share it, tell your mates, comment on it on our socials, yep, and in the meantime, keep on training.
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