Business of Endurance

Lessons from Cultures in Running: An Exploration with Michael Crawley

• Charlie Reading • Season 8 • Episode 3

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Today on The Business of Endurance, we’re joined by the incredible Michael Crawley – a world-class runner, anthropologist, and author of Out of Thin Air and To the Limit. Michael has spent years running alongside Ethiopia’s elite athletes and exploring the farthest edges of human endurance. In this episode, he takes us deep into the mindset, community, and unseen struggles that define world-class endurance running. We’ll discuss the powerful role of ‘tribe’ in building endurance, the pros and cons of relying on technology, and whether books like Born to Run are inspirational or misleading myths. Michael also dives into what it takes to develop an endurance mindset and why so many people are drawn to pushing their limits today. If you’re looking to sharpen your mental game, understand the science behind the sport, or balance performance with sustainability, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

Highlights:

  • Michael's Running Journey
  • Ethiopian Running Culture
  • Training as a Community
  • Technology in Running
  • Born to Run and Cultural Perspectives
  • Mental Endurance and Motivation
  • Endurance Sports and Environmental Impact
  • Social Media and Athlete Branding


Links:
Click here for additional helpful content mentioned in this episode.
Connect with Michael Crawley on Instagram & Web.

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Michael Crawley:

I would prefer to get back to a time where we're doing a really good job of telling the stories of the athletes and not emphasizing the technology.

Charlie Reading:

Today on the Business of Endurance podcast, we're joined by the incredible Michael Crawley, a world-class runner, anthropologist and author of the brilliant Out of Thin Air and also his new book To the Limit. So Michael has spent years running alongside Ethiopia's elite athletes and exploring the farthest edges of human performance. In this episode, he takes us deep into the mindset, community and unseen struggles that define world-class endurance running. We'll discuss the powerful role of the tribe in building endurance, the pros and cons of relying on technology, and whether books like Born to Run are inspirational or misleading myths. I know for a fact it had a massive impact on the way I looked at running when I first read it, but also now chatting to Michael and reading To the Limit has made me look at it in a very different light. So you're going to love that part of the conversation, I'm sure. So Michael also dives into what it takes to develop an endurance mindset and why so many people are drawn to pushing their limits today. If you're looking to sharpen your mental game, understand the science behind the sport or balance performance with sustainability, this conversation is packed with insights you won't want to miss. So I know you're going to love this conversation with Michael Crawley.

Charlie Reading:

So, michael, welcome to the Business of Endurance podcast, really looking forward to this conversation. Loved your first book out of thin air and literally I've just been cramming your latest book To the Limit, which only came out at the end of last week. So I've guzzled through that in three days and it was an absolute pleasure. Brilliant read. But I like to start these things off with where you, in particular, started. So where did your running journey start? I think there might be one of our previous guests to the podcast, a rather amazing Charlie Spedding, that features within that. So just tell us about your running journey and where it began.

Michael Crawley:

Yeah, sure, I grew up in Durham in the northeast of England and got into running, basically running cross-country races at school and things like that. But then when I decided to take it more seriously. It was because I met a guy called manx colby who was a 214 marathon runner in the 1980s and he was a 214 marathon runner against harry's at a time when that put you as the 12th name on the 12th stage relay team amongst a whole load of guys who'd come to the olympics and run the commonwealth games and things like that. And so he kind of opened my eyes to this kind of culture of running in the 80s where it was normal for people to run 100 miles a week. He would tell me stories about going running with people like charlie spedding and brendan foster and I fell in love with the idea of a culture of running in the northeast, which was actually sort of 20 years before my time.

Michael Crawley:

But that idea of running is this kind of group activity and I kind of. He lent me running books and it got me into this idea of wanting to be a distance runner, always from a slightly different era. He would lend me his training diaries from the early 1980s and I would try to replicate them in my own training. So that's when I really fell in love with running and also when I got good at running, because I started to do all those kinds of things like running, high mileage and things like that.

Charlie Reading:

So I guess that's where my running journey started and that segues really beautifully into so I'm very conscious I don't want to be the podcast interviewer you refer to in to the limit where I try and ask you to summarize out of thin air in three bullet points. So so no pressure here then, but the thing that I most took from out of thin air was the power of the group, the power of the tribe that you're describing, the Ethiopian runners. So tell us a bit about why did you go to Ethiopia and what did you learn in relation to running as a group, and particularly, maybe, how did that reflect on starting in the northeast?

Michael Crawley:

I was actually interested in the connections originally between running and international development or running and the economy in ethiopia and kenya. So what were the connections between distance running and broader economic development in east africa? Broadly, the reason I decided to go to ethiopia was because I felt like when people refer to east africa they're actually referring mainly to kenya, because most people who go and do research on East African running go to Kenya, mainly because it's a bit more accessible. People speak English in Kenya and really people didn't know very much about Ethiopia at all because the running culture I guess runners in Ethiopia are not focused in particular places like Eten and Eldoret, so it's a little bit less accessible potentially and you have to learn a parik to really get a handle on what's going on. So I thought, if I've got a year, over a year, to go and do some research somewhere, ethiopia made more sense and I originally, as I said, I started to focus on what people thought about trying to change their lives, as they put it, through running. So what they thought about trying to make a living through the sport, support their families and things.

Michael Crawley:

But what became apparent was that the main thing that a lot of athletes were concerned about was energy and maintain their own energy levels as athletes and, in particular, thinking about their own energy that was in relation to other people.

Michael Crawley:

So one of the things I write about is this idea that people didn't see energy as this kind of thing that is contained within an individual's body, as, like a sport scientist might think of the body as a system of inputs and outputs, but rather they think that energy can flow between people and be harnessed within a group situation. That's one of the main things that I focus on in our thing, and this idea that people thought of success as an athlete as being something that is collectively produced through a group and something that you can't get by just training on your own. Basically, and I think that there are connections between what is happening in Ethiopia and potentially Kenya at the moment and the way that people thought about running in Gateshead in the 80s, when it was all about getting together in a big group of people, less about specific training for individuals and more about everybody being together, basically, and working off each other's energy.

Claire Fudge:

With my background in nutrition. Like we, you're absolutely right. We talk about energy in such a different way than you've just described. There, with the Ethiopian runners and I listened to a couple of podcasts actually, where you shared a bit more about this idea of energy and taking turns if they're at the front of the group or if they miss a training event, even down to sort of you know. I found it really interesting about the bananas and the bread kind of idea. So can you share a little bit more about this concept of training as a community and how they share that energy and, if somebody misses a training session, what that actually means to them as a group?

Michael Crawley:

yeah, of course. So yeah, as you said, basically people believed people would run in a single file line effectively and the person at the front of the line was understood to be expending quite a lot more energy than everybody else. So a bit like cyclists in a velodrome, that kind of more aerodynamic understanding. So they would evenly divide up the pace making responsibilities on a particular run and make sure that the energy was distributed fairly amongst the athletes in that situation. So they would also synchronize their steps as they were running as well, and that would be understood as reducing the amount of energy that was being expended.

Michael Crawley:

And because their belief was that you had to improve as a group, it was seen as very immoral to train on your own, because if you were going out at night particularly this is the example people gave was people going and training in secret at night to try to get better.

Michael Crawley:

But what that would do would be it would be detrimental to the rest of the team because they would then come to training on the Monday morning tired and not be able to help other people by leading the run in the same way. So when people did things like that, there was this kind of energetic rebalancing, I guess. And also if you missed a training session, that was bad because it meant that you weren't helping other people. So the punishment would often be bringing enough bananas to feed 30 athletes to the next training session as a way of rebalancing that kind of misdemeanor, basically. But really it all comes down to this idea that energy within the whole system of Ethiopian running is limited, so if some people gain an advantage over other people, it means somebody else has to drop down. Basically that's what I'm trying to explain in the thesis and I'm exposing the book as well.

Charlie Reading:

It's a really interesting topic and this whole group energy and this group responsibility and being selfish and using the energy all to yourself. It's an interesting thought. I'm very conscious that I swim with others, I bike with others, and my swimming and my cycling have improved exponentially. Because of the logistics, I end up running on my own almost all the time. My running hasn't improved anything like as much as my swimming and my cycling. Probably no surprise, but for those people that are sitting there going well, that's great, but I have to run at 6am and nobody else wants to join me at 6am. What are the realities of? How important is it that I try and find a group that I can run with and what would be the impact of me doing that?

Michael Crawley:

I think it would definitely improve performance to train with other people, and I totally get your point, because I'm a father of two young children and I very rarely get to run with other people at the moment either, so it's very difficult logistically, but if you are able to do it, I think it's good for performance. But it's also really good for just maintaining your interest in the sport, and that's the other thing that European athletes would say was that running is boring. This is something that elite athletes and people who are doing it professionally will often admit to. They'll say running can get really boring if you don't mix things up and try to approach it in a more creative way. So one of the ways of doing that is to make sure that you're running with other people and making the running as interesting as possible.

Michael Crawley:

So they would do things like go running in the forests above where we live and different people would lead the run at different points. But the whole point of it would be to find new routes through the forest that they hadn't followed before, or to go and find where the hyenas were on that particular day or something like that, and it would be about being innovative and not just doing the same thing every day, basically, and that was seen as a kind of collective or like a social process as well. So I suppose there's performance element to it, but also an enjoyment element which is also related to performance, because if you can try to, if you can enjoy something, then I think that's also good from performance standpoint as well. It makes you want to do it more and yeah, makes you more engaged.

Charlie Reading:

By that enjoyment, I think, are you referring to where they all run random routes through different trails and all ducking and diving. And, yeah, describe for those people that haven't listened to or read your book what that was like for you when you were trying to suddenly be a part of that yeah.

Michael Crawley:

So it was a bit of a learning curve really. So initially I would go to the forest on my own sometimes and just run a bit. There are quite so clearly defined trails, big, fairly wide paths where barn equipment would go down and things, and my natural inclination would be to just follow those which are beautiful anyway between the trees. And what would happen is that groups of runners would come and just physically grab me, basically, and tell me that I had to run with them because they're sort of the thing about not training on your own, and they would lead me on routes that I initially thought were just not very sensible places to run, because it seemed like there was a very high chance of getting injured, because they would go on very steep cambers, be jumping up and down over tree roots, sometimes going up slopes that were so steep you had to pull yourself up slope using tree branches and things, and so I would end some of those runs, especially when I was really tired, quite frustrated, and be saying can't we go and find somewhere easier to run next time? And the answer to that question was basically no, and you don't really understand what we're trying to do when we do that kind of running.

Michael Crawley:

I think there's an element of kind of one of the reasons that they run on such uneven surfaces is to actually avoid injury, because they say that it's actually the monotony of running on surfaces like roads that lead to injury. But it's also about using the forest to run in a kind of more creative and interesting way and to contrast that kind of running with the some more kind of structured training sessions that they would do three mornings a week where they were under a lot of pressure to hit particular split times or to run in a very particular way. The forest was seen as the kind of antithesis of that. So it's about making the separation between easy running and hard running, but also between the kind of really serious kinds of training that you have to do as an elite athlete and the more fun kinds of running that you can do to also sustain your own kind of sense of inspiration and wanting to keep doing it.

Claire Fudge:

I suppose it makes complete sense, doesn't it? Because high performing athletes, there is that monotony of training because you have to go through the same things over and over again to get. You need to get good, but it sounds proper interval training, from plyometrics to you know, strength work, putting yourself up as well. You mentioned there about like almost frustration at the beginning of what is this about? Let's just go and do something on the flat where we can, potentially I don't know is that about? So I can measure myself against what I would usually do. So it brings me on to the technology side of things, and we talk about tech quite a bit and I think it's always a fascinating subject to explore. So could you tell us a little bit about technology and what you sort of found out about the runners in Ethiopia and the technology that they do or don't use, and what your experience of that is?

Michael Crawley:

Yeah, sure, so the main time I was in Ethiopia for long-term field work was 2015, 2016. And that was when GPS watches were only just becoming available in Amsaba, where I was living, and what I found was that people were sort of intrigued by that kind of technology, but they would also use it in a very selective way. So I think in the UK most runners have adopted this mentality that you have to log every run. I think in the UK most runners have adopted this mentality that you have to log every run. You have to have this kind of very consistent data about your training. If you don't upload something to Strava. It didn't happen sort of thing In Ethiopia. It was very much.

Michael Crawley:

The idea was that the watches were appropriate for certain kinds of training where you really needed to know what you were doing, and therefore they became quite sought after for particular kinds of run, by tempo runs on roads, for example. But what would happen is that because there weren't very many gps watches around at that time, people would share them. So someone would borrow the watch to go and do a tempo run on the road and then they would give it back to whoever owned it. But it was seen as inappropriate in the forest for those kinds of runs. So I give an example in a paper I wrote a couple of years ago of the coach giving a gps watch to the group and saying you have to run. I can't remember what it was exactly, but it was an hour and 20 minutes and they were supposed to run 19 kilometers in that time or something like that through the forest on very uneven surfaces, and the guy who was given the watch was running way too slowly and just meandering around and somebody else shouted we need to run faster, otherwise we're not going to have all the kilometers that we're supposed to have by the end of the run. And he said this is as far as training. We're not, but that's not what this is about and he basically just turned the watch off and when he got back to the coach he said the watch is broken.

Michael Crawley:

So there's this idea that they want to be. There's a lot of time pressure. If you're an aspiring Ethiopian marathon runner, you've got to be able to run two pressure all the time, basically. So there was an embrace of some kinds of technology and a rejection of others, and in the more recent book I've written also about what happened when carbon fiber shoes were introduced in Ethiopia, and I think there's a slightly different idea about what sporting fairness is in Ethiopia, where people are very concerned about making sure people have access to the same kinds of things, so that people have access to the same kinds of footwear and the same kinds of coaching, and ideally people would have access to different training environments and things to level the playing field as much as possible.

Michael Crawley:

And so when those kinds of shoes started to arrive in Ethiopia, the Athletics Federation actually sent them to the anti-doping office to be cut up and looked at. They wanted the shoes to be banned, basically, but they didn't have any authority over that process. But when new technologies have arrived, they've tended to be looked at quite sceptically and when they are embraced, they're embraced in quite a selective way.

Charlie Reading:

Into the limit. You make a really interesting point which I'd never thought about before, in that when you're referring to super sapiens the glucose monitor, that that doesn't actually exist now I don't think, but obviously we have glucose monitors with zoe and the like, but you said you gave an example of I can't remember there's a kenyan or ethiopian athlete that actually that's the same sort of testing that they were using for anti-doping testing, and I think it was an iron deficiency, wasn't it. Do you want to tell us the story around how? Because I just found it fascinating how, yeah, for one side you've got a technology actually being used against them, but then for others it's been for particularly age group athletes. They're using it as an advantage to gain. So explain what happened there yeah, sure, so it's less.

Michael Crawley:

it's about that example's less super sapiens and more of the kinds of home blood testing kits. Oh yes, full fed wasn't it.

Michael Crawley:

Yeah, exactly.

Michael Crawley:

So those things.

Michael Crawley:

What I thought was interesting about that was that the kinds of blood tests that elite athletes have to do if they're part of the sort of whereabouts program, are more or less exactly the same as the ones that are marketed explicitly as performance enhancing to amateur athletes marketed explicitly as performance enhancing to amateur athletes, in the sense that they're marketed as things that give you unique insights into what's happening inside your body that you can use to get better as a runner.

Michael Crawley:

The example I give is the former adobe half marathon record holder who drops out boston marathon with basically clinically low iron levels, and the point I was trying to make was that he'd been giving blood samples to all athletics every sort of week and a half the months up to that race and he hadn't been given that information. So one of those kind of testing regimes is the kind of surveillance regime, which is about banning people from sport, and the other one is about giving people insights into what's happening, and they're very different systems and basically in Ethiopia people don't have access to that kind of information. So I was just trying to think about the fairness of the access to those kinds of technologies, basically worldwide.

Charlie Reading:

And with all of this in mind, how do you approach technology in your running?

Michael Crawley:

I would use the watch for important training sessions and not wear it at other times, and then now that I'm not running as seriously, I'm running mainly just track myself getting slower.

Michael Crawley:

But I do have an ambivalent relationship with the new shoe technology because I think, I don't know I feel like it has prevented us from making historical comparisons really between what's happening now and what happened in the past in terms of times, but also because it's skewed competition quite a lot in places like Ethiopia.

Michael Crawley:

I think a lot of the research suggests that it's not that that kind of technology makes everyone a certain amount of percent faster, but rather it's the specific interaction between the shoe and the biomechanics of an individual that make them better, and so some individuals, in spite of potentially not being as fast, might be made faster by the shoes. It should be about the athlete rather than the shoe from my perspective. But also the experience of actually running in the shoes is really nice, and so I can see why it appeals to people, because you feel faster and you feel bouncier and you recover quicker and you can do more days of fast training. So I guess I've got a kind of critical lens on it on the one hand, but I also see why people do want to wear those shoes.

Charlie Reading:

We've had a few discussions lately on the podcast about this. We had Ben Rosario, who runs the Hoka team in the us, and he had a really interesting perspective in the sense that when nike had got this technology, hoka had, and of course they were restricted to only use hoka shoes, so suddenly athletes were beating his athletes that weren't even close to them a few weeks before. So it's a really interesting conversation and that kind of I suppose the opposite end of that scale is the concept of barefoot running, which, I have to admit, I picked up Born to Run as I was starting to run and I listened to it while I was running and I went from a runner who described running a sport with all the fun bits taken out of, to feeling like I was born to run. I was designed to roam the wilds of the UK and maybe even in barefoot shoes, although thankfully somebody taught me how to do that and actually, to be fair, it was Vivo Barefoot that taught me how to do it.

Charlie Reading:

So fair play to them, but I love Born to Run, but Into the Limit. You talk quite a lot about that and about what I'd known as the tarot. You can tell us the better name to refer to them as. So that book is famous in the running world. What do you think are the pros and the cons of that book, because you talk about it quite a lot?

Michael Crawley:

I think you've covered the pros pretty well and I kind of when I read it I had the same reaction. I read it in a day and a half, loved it, found it incredibly inspiring some of the stories that he tells about ultra running generally they're extremely inspiring and also found this idea that we're born to run pretty compelling at the time as well. But I do think the critique that I make is mainly that the focus of born to run pretty compelling at the time as well. But I do think the critique that I make is mainly that the focus of Born to Run is mainly actually on the American runners, people like Scott Jurek and Mika Tru, who the author comes across in Mexico and there's actually comparatively little about the Rarámuri or the Tarahumara and about what they actually think about running and why they run, what motivates them to run. So I've tried to kind of redress that balance a little bit by having a bit more of a focus on people like Silvinho, who also appears in Born to Run, and actually trying to look at it a bit more as an anthropologist and say what is it that running means to this particular culture of people? I guess Chris McDougall would best focus on that, but he has no control over the way.

Michael Crawley:

That exploded after the book was published. But it didn't seem to me that people were particularly concerned about footwear in Mexico, and actually Silvinho was wearing just like standard trail running shoes when we went running together. I suppose what I found was to the Rarámuri. Really, running is primarily a form of prayer. Basically, people run because there's this belief that God likes to see people running and he likes to see people dancing for long periods of time, and that is something that potentially leads God to reward people dancing for long periods of time, and that is something that potentially leads God to reward people with rain, people who rely on farming for a living, and so that's one of the main motivations for running, and I don't think that really comes through born to run very clearly. So I've tried to emphasize that basically.

Claire Fudge:

I think it's fascinating your side of science as well and it's just telling a different side to it and that is fascinating around the dancing and I didn't know that actually before in terms of and that religious sort of aspect to it as well. So I think it's great to have like this bigger picture about the history behind the running as well. So really good to explore. So in your book To the Limits, you explore within that book about the physical limits of endurance but also the importance of mental endurance as well. I just wondered if you could tell a few stories around that and build on that for us. How does an athlete sort of build on their mindsets? If you were thinking about somebody who was maybe sort of new to running, so more of an everyday runner or an age group runner, how would they be able to build on their own mental strengths to sort of push through limits and boundaries?

Michael Crawley:

I think again, that's something that a lot of the best athletes that I spoke to said that they learned from other people Pick up on those kinds of things through kind of social interactions with people, and also I suppose what I've tried to do in the book is try to emphasise the kind of variety of different ways that people experience endurance around the world or the kind of meanings that they bring to it.

Michael Crawley:

So I've got a chapter on climbing sherpas in the bull who help people go up everest and that's the way that they make a living. And one of the interesting things about that was that I interviewed somebody who did their phd on climbing shirt and went to several times as part of their phd field work as an anthropologist and what they found was that, whilst there's been these kinds of assumptions that Sherpas don't feel pain or that they are able to just like, what he found was that in Sherpa culture there's this very strong sense of basically not talking about discomfort and just focusing in the way that you talk to other people and the way that you express yourself, just focusing on the positive aspects of what's happening. I thought that was quite interesting that he describes it as a cultural trait rather than something that a sports psychologist would teach, but it's very similar to what we might think of as positive thinking, but expressed in a slightly different way.

Charlie Reading:

Is it also linked to? I remember you talked a bit about Damien Hall and the why behind their running, and it strikes me that seems very similar to what you just said about the Rarumuri or the Tarahumara, which we want to call because it's a bigger purpose, isn't it? Is it really about why we run, that motivates us and delivers that sort of endurance mindset?

Michael Crawley:

Yeah, that's kind of what interested me about the evolutionary hypotheses around running was actually I explore how likely it is that we actually did evolve to run, particularly through conversations with an evolutionary anthropologist in the department here who suggests that it's not actually that likely that we evolved in environments that allowed us to do much persistence hunting. So it may not be that we evolved to run, but it seems to be really important to people to believe that we did, and it was for me as well. It's an interesting question to think about why we need to keep running that level of meaning rather than just accepting that it makes us feel good. A lot of people seem to feel very strongly that it's something that we're supposed to do, and I've often felt that way myself.

Michael Crawley:

The other thing that I've noticed that a lot of people connect to is ideas about trying to raise awareness about climate change and things like that. That's something that's important to Damien Hall and people like Jasmine Paris. If you can attach your endurance practices to something that is much bigger than you and much more significant, then that seems to help people to have this kind of why behind it. So for Damien that's like carrying extinction rebellion flags to the end of races and things. But for different people it can be different things. So I also interview Lewis Pugh, who's the UN patron of the oceans I think he's called and he does the very cold water swims in Antarctica and places, and for him a lot of the motivation for doing those extremely difficult things is raising awareness again about what's happening in the environment. So it seems like people connect, moving through the environment in very difficult and challenging ways, to broader narratives about what's happening to the environment as well.

Charlie Reading:

So again, yeah, finding big picture motivations, I guess, to tie things to I think that I was going to come on to that actually the whole. So Damien Hall refers to the fact that he does it for his kids, even though they don't really care whether he does it or not. I remember having the same conversation with him when he was on the podcast, but also then, yeah, as you say, it's very much about extinction rebellion. I was going to ask you about the impact of endurance sport on the planet. There's champions for good and then there's people like me that's flying to Hawaii to compete in the Iron man World Championships, which kind of is against very much what Damien would suggest. Where do you think the world of endurance sport brings awareness to the problem around global warming and where is it a detriment?

Michael Crawley:

But what people like Damien Hall say, and what Lewis Pugh said, is if you're doing endurance sport a lot, you're spending much more time than the average person out in often in the hills or in nature, at least having a kind of intimate interaction with the natural world, and therefore you're probably more likely to want to protect it in some ways.

Michael Crawley:

But then concurrently kind of trend within the sport generally to to move towards far more technology and the emphasis on using far more kit and investing in all that kind of, I guess, stuff that in a sport, especially a sport like running, which can be very simple, is potentially the opposite of what we maybe need. So for Damien, he really worries about whether to compete in UTMB because of the sponsorship by car manufacturers and things, but then he also does need to travel to races sometimes. So I guess his message is always that anyone can be accused of being a hypocrite at some point for some decision that they make, but it's about making your own decisions about what you are and aren't willing to do and then, I guess, about in terms of the kind of all the technologies that may or may not be actually necessary, making decisions about what you do need and what you don't.

Claire Fudge:

What do you think, in your experience and with all the research that you've been doing and the different runners that you've spoken to, what's an overriding thought amongst sort of endurance athletes, in terms of what drives human beings do you think to go and do these endurance events? Because you mentioned why they might do it in terms of for something. But what have you really sort of learned from your research?

Michael Crawley:

The sort of motivations behind these things can really be various. It might be not the kind of headline answer that you want, but in some ways it's like a vessel that you have to fill with meaning yourself to a certain extent, and that people will come up with different ways of finding that meaning around the world. I think for Ethiopian athletes it's primarily this sense of wanting to change their lives. That's what people will always say if you ask them what they want to do with their running and they say I'm running to change my life and that of their family, which is primarily in terms of materially wanting to make a difference to their lives. Same is probably true of Sherpas in Nepal. And then, yes, I also have a chapter on trail running in Nepal where people were really connecting trail running with other kinds of physical culture trying to become a Gurkha in the British army and saying that really it's about the same sort of sets of things about representing Nepal on the world stage, about making your village proud, about making sure that your name lives on once you die, because you've got things in the world internationally and physically that people will look back on and be proud of. So it's very different motivations to just wanting to run a PB or doing something. That's very much about yourself and your own sense of achievement. I guess it depends on the particular context.

Michael Crawley:

I suppose one of the messages from the book is just on a pb or doing something. That's very much about yourself and your own sense of achievement. I guess it depends on the particular context. I suppose one of the messages from the book is just that it feels like in some ways, the way that running culture is going in the uk, in the us potentially, is that we're being trained to think of ourselves increasingly in terms of the numbers that we're producing from gps watches or through other kinds of wearable technology, and less about the kind of social relationships that we build through these kinds of sports or relationships, the environment and things. So maybe one of the things we can learn from other parts of the world or other kinds of approaches to this is to look beyond just ourselves in these kinds of things.

Charlie Reading:

I also think that in Western societies, the growth of obstacle course racing whether it's Ironman, whether it's trail running, ultramarathons it's definitely societal, isn't it? It's almost like we've got a polarization in society, we've got an obesity crisis, and then we've got lots more people going off and running 100 milers or completing Ironmans than ever before. What do you think it is that's driving people to create a different type of misery for themselves?

Michael Crawley:

That's a good way of phrasing that question. I'm not 100% sure, but that was kind of the big puzzle that motivated the book in the first place. In the first chapter I look at some kind of precursors historically, of moments when people were really into doing endurance activities. So a couple of examples of sport, of pedestrianism in the 19th century, which was basically where you had people competing in things like six-day races, where they would walk around a track in somewhere like Madison Square Gardens for six days solid, barely sleeping, with these huge crowds of people paying lots of money to come and watch this kind of spectacle of human suffering. And it was the biggest sport in the world at that time in terms of how many people were watching it, how much attention it got. But it also that moment in history was also when people were really worried about the introduction of cars and the fact that people wouldn't have to walk anymore and this kind of automation and jobs are going to disappear. And then you had in the 1930s in America you have the obsession with dance marathons where people would basically just be in a big hall and dance until there was only a couple of people left standing who would win the competitions, and that was in the kind of depression era in america. So it was connected to ideas about exhaustion in broader society and also to ideas about the american dream, so this idea that you could just if you can just keep dancing long enough, everything will be okay. So basically in history, the booms in endurance sport tended to happen in moments where there's been kind of tension in broader society and worries about things like automation.

Michael Crawley:

So I wonder whether people do often talk about wanting to get back to a more simple kind of way of being.

Michael Crawley:

I think that's really craving reducing everything to just needing to keep moving and remembering to eat and basically just surviving for a couple of days and not being extremely, almost therapeutic. I wonder whether they also coincide with in society at the moment. I suppose the things that we're concerned about would be the rise in AI or if we're all going to lose our jobs, our robot's going to take a few minutes, sort of thing, and maybe things like ultra distance running, where it's just you in the mountains for a couple of days, is a way of really getting back to what makes us human and that goes back to those evolutionary narratives as well. But that does seem like a lot of people's motivation is people talk about stripping things back, of wanting to get away from phone, that being an extremely challenging way of baffling phone addiction, but it definitely does seem to be something about the way that society is set up that makes people want to do these things I think it's so interesting, isn't it?

Claire Fudge:

people like wanting this, potentially this kind of real simplicity back, but I also find it really interesting. In one hand, you've given some really good explanation there about getting away from phones and things like that, and yet, for a lot of endurance athletes and a lot of athletes in general, we're crazy about technology in terms of whether and I've heard you speaking about straps, that you tried, and we talked about watches and whether you've got watches, rings, straps, whatever it might be and yet, even though, in that simplicity of doing some long event, they're probably using some sort of device of some sort. What are your thoughts in terms of? I know we touched on technology a bit, but what are your thoughts in terms of where technology is heading? Where is the world of AI heading, do you feel in sport? How could it be helpful, maybe? How? What, maybe, is a hindrance to that?

Michael Crawley:

that's a good question. So in the chapter on technology I kind of focus on advanced games, this idea about a version of the olympics where people can take drugs and where they'll encourage the use of kind of biotechnologies and things like that which would influence humans to see what is possible with kind of science basically, and what is interesting about that is that it has been fairly widely critiqued, I think, by the broader community, by people like sebco. In some ways it's not actually that different to the logic that's driving everything else, which is that we should embrace technology. We should be taking blood samples every couple of weeks and really using that to enhance our performance and everything.

Michael Crawley:

And my main worry about that level of embracing technology would be that if somebody wins the enhanced games 100 meters and they run under nine seconds, for example it's unlikely to be the case that the emphasis is on the athlete that's done that and it's more likely that the emphasis will be on the technology that has caused somebody to do that and that technology will then be marketed really broadly to everybody. And I think to a lesser extent the same is true of carbon fiber shoes. You know, you see the articles about when broke the world record, most of the articles were about the shoes, very minimal quotes from the athletes about their experience of running, and I think if we go too far towards embracing technology, we end up celebrating the technologies rather than the athletes, which I think is a shame. So I would prefer to get back to a time where we're doing a really good job of telling the stories of the athletes and not emphasising the technology, even if the technology continues to exist, which obviously it will.

Charlie Reading:

It's a really difficult conversation, but I think it's a really valid point. Nobody sits here and says Tiger Woods was a great golfer because he had Nike golf clubs. In fact, there was a time where he was playing well despite the golf clubs he was being forced to use through sponsorship. But with running, because it's such a pure sport. Conversation about the sub two effort, for example, wasn't about how amazing Elliot Kipchoge was, but it was all about the shoes and the nutrition and the strategy and not about him and his coach, which I thought was a really important message, and I'm not sure I'd really picked up on it until I listened to the Limit it disconnected from the amazing achievement of the runners.

Charlie Reading:

I suppose this leads me onto thinking about social media, because we talk a lot to professional athletes who now have to really be a professional influencer as well as a professional athlete. They have to be able to do the times, but if they haven't got the followers, they're not going to get their sponsorship. I guess that it must be a challenge for you in the same way, in the sense that you're a writer, so you need social media followers and a presence to promote your books, and I know you've got a chapter in To the Limit about social media. So how do you negotiate between that difficult line of spending lots of time on social media versus totally ignoring it?

Michael Crawley:

That's a good question. I'm also an academic so I'm not as reliant on social media and book sales as some writers would be. But walking through the interviews that I did with a variety of mainly American distance runners on their social media use, was that they really do experience using social media as a form of work, basically, and as a source of stress and as something that has become an expected part and an explicit part of athlete contracts with brands, to basically become a kind of marketing executive, more or less, or content creator, but without really any training on how to do that. For some athletes that comes really naturally to them and they actually quite enjoy it, but for a lot of athletes that's actually just very stressful and they talk about having five, six hours a day of screen time versus sort of two hours of training time, and I think that's just become the way that the marketing of the sport has gone or the way that the contracts have gone.

Michael Crawley:

But I guess one of the things I'm trying to emphasize in in that chapter is that what happens with social media is that the kind of professional athletes create these scripts for the way that runners post about what they're doing, which then are followed by amateur athletes who don't have to do it.

Michael Crawley:

So the message is really that if you're not dependent on the money from the sport to do it, then you don't have to copy an elite athlete who's being paid to do that and finding it miserable.

Michael Crawley:

You can just switch off if you want to. But yeah, and I also think that the fact that the contracts are so dependent on engagement with social media is also a real problem for athletes in ethiopia and kenya who don't really have any kind of social media training or often don't have instagram accounts unless their managers set them up for them. So I think if if this sport is going to move towards being mainly funded through social media and engagement, that kind of marketing, it would be sensible to also make sure that money is fairly equally spread out amongst athletes in other parts of the world where it's less accessible to do that kind of thing it is difficult in the sense that I remember chatting to jackie herring, who's a professional triathlete but she's's also a mum, and she openly admitted that she did not have time to be a mum, a professional athlete, and do social media, so the social media thing gets parked.

Charlie Reading:

So therefore she has a distinct disadvantage in the sense that she can't get sponsorship because she just has to opt out. There just isn't the time to do it. It is really challenging, and I don't think you name which athlete. It is in the book, but you allude to somebody during COVID times putting the message out there of isn't it all wonderful, isn't running all fantastic? But behind the scenes they weren't feeling what they were portraying through social media.

Michael Crawley:

I think it's interesting because certain brands have different expectations for what they want people to post about. For those kinds of companies they want you to be performing in all cylinders at all times. But actually a lot of the people that I talked to here around for more like running brands. They found that the most successful content is the stuff where you are actually being really vulnerable. So there's the posts about being injured, struggling with motivation and things, because those are far more relatable for the average runner than a post about running kilometer reps in two minutes, 30 or something like that. You know everyone has the struggles, but then they found that you're really having to give quite a lot of yourself away. If you're posting about being vulnerable all the time and you're posting about injuries and the more that you open up about yourself, the more engagement you get. That could be quite an invasive thing.

Charlie Reading:

It kind of depends on the athlete, but it's a difficult one to be authentic on social media I have a feeling that particular person that you're referring to might have already been on this podcast as well. But yeah, it is a challenge. We always like to ask guests on this podcast of books that they found helpful on their journey or they find themselves recommending. Certainly, I find myself recommending Out of Thin Air and Now to the Limit I will be because I really loved your books. But what books have been important to you on your journey?

Michael Crawley:

I think my favorite running book is probably running with the buffaloes. It's the university of colorado cross-country team.

Charlie Reading:

I'm not always finished it, but I'm reading at the moment okay, that's just.

Michael Crawley:

I thought that was brilliant. I think because he spent so long embedded with the athletes and because such significant things happened in that year, he gets a real depth of understanding of what running can mean to competitive collegiate runners. Really like a book called barbarian days, which is a surfing memoir by william finnegan. He's an american writer. It's about surfing and surfing culture basically in his life, but that's a brilliant book as well, oh, excellent.

Charlie Reading:

I've not heard of that. That sounds like a great read. And then one of the other things that we do on the podcast is we get the last guest to ask the next guest a question, without knowing who that is going to be. A previous guest was Rini McGregor, and I think Claire has got Rini's question, which is certainly going to get you thinking.

Claire Fudge:

Her question is what is it that you're unwilling to feel you're?

Michael Crawley:

unwilling to feel, I wouldn't want to feel absolute certainty about everything, which I think is what a lot of the new technologies are trying to tell us, is this idea that we'll be able to understand absolutely everything and have all the data that we need to understand our bodies or our lives, and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.

Claire Fudge:

Effectively. Technology may mean that we don't feel anything.

Charlie Reading:

But as somebody that loves technology, I thought it was fascinating how you identify that somebody wearing a woop band and a garment and an aura ring is getting different data from all three actually. So therefore, how useful is that data? And sometimes it helps lead you to better decisions, but other times perhaps not, and learning to train and race on feel is maybe part of that journey, so I think that's really interesting. One last question so we've obviously seen these two brilliant books come out of you so far, but is there another one in the pipeline and what's next?

Michael Crawley:

uh, there's no other book in the pipeline. I'd really love to do some research on the enhanced games next, just because I think it probably will happen at some point next year. I think it opens up some really interesting questions. For an anthropologist there's some really interesting questions there about where the limit of the human is and where the human ends and where the technology begins, and also about connections between performance enhancing drug use in sport and performance enhancing drug use more broadly in the workplace and things like that, which I think part of the reason that the enhanced games is happening is to try to legitimize the idea that we should be taking happening is to try to legitimize the idea that we should be taking performance enhancing substances more broadly in everyday life. I think that's an interesting thing to explore.

Charlie Reading:

That might be the next book project, but for now I need a bit of a break that will be fascinating yeah, absolutely I remember chatting to dr nikki k, who's an endocrinologist who used to work with fourth edge, I think, and I remember asking her about you know you could have a male athlete that is deficient in testosterone. So from a health point of view they want to be taking testosterone because otherwise it's going to potentially affect their life expectancy. But of course they'd be banned from the sport were they to take testosterone. So where do you think that goes? Of course there's plenty of examples from Russia and Germany where athletes have had very negative later life experiences as a result of taking performance enhancing drugs. Where does that balance?

Michael Crawley:

I think that's one of the interesting questions really is the enhanced games. The idea is that they'll have actually much better medical testing and medical care for athletes to make sure that athletes are healthy during the games. But one of the questions I've got is that that's okay for the period where they're actually competing and things, but, as you say, a lot of the more negative repercussions are sort of 20, 30 years later. So I'm interested in seeing whether they extend that kind of health coverage throughout the lifetime of an athlete or not, because it definitely can have negative effects later in life and negative effects that we don't actually really understand that well, because it's hard to do research on the effects of performance enhancing drugs because they're often taken illicitly without anybody knowing anything. So I think there's a lot of unknowns there.

Charlie Reading:

Interesting question, michael. It's been absolutely fascinating. I genuinely love reading both books. I wish you every success. I know Up to the Limit is only just literally out in the last few days. When we record this, actually it'll be out in a little while once we release it. When we record this, actually it'll be out a little while once we release it. But yeah, absolutely brilliant. Congratulations on that and thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. Thank, you.

Michael Crawley:

It's been a pleasure.

Charlie Reading:

So what did you make of the chat with michael crawley?

Claire Fudge:

do you know? It was so interesting for me from the world of sports science, but from an anthropology perspective was just so interesting. I just think that, in terms of the stories that he had around the Ethiopian runners and the idea for me of energy, like how you share this energy, and actually when you think about it, it makes like really good sense on one hand. So yeah, for me I thought it was amazing. How about for you? Because I know there was quite a bit in there about tech. So I wonder what your thoughts are from a tech and AI perspective as well.

Charlie Reading:

I think from a tech and AI perspective, it was brilliant. The energy conversation around how training alone is being selfish because you're basically stealing energy that you could have provided to the group, and the importance of running for fun that tribe concept was fascinating. And the importance of running for fun that tribe concept was fascinating. In terms of tech, it melts my brain because I want the tech, I want to know the data, but actually he's completely right in that it's taking away some of the important stuff. I think it definitely has its place.

Charlie Reading:

I was racing the weekend before last and, because it was considered a training race in the lead up to kona, my coach had said run the first 10k at race pace and then just run the second 10k easy, and so I thought I'll just do the second 10k on. Feel ended up running a pb on the and I was supposed to be going easy on the set, but I was just like just run as as you feel. So I have this internal battle. What I know you? You're not quite so drawn to technology as I am, albeit that you're still wearing an aura ring, so you must be to a certain extent. What did you make of his technology conversation?

Claire Fudge:

we didn't discuss it in lots of detail, but he's written and spoken about it before, and maybe in his new book actually as well. I feel very much it's this balance between having the technology to help guide you but knowing what that technology is telling you. But going back to this being with your own body, like listening to your own body, and actually he talked about it in terms of we asked him the question about why do you think people you know are looking for these endurance events? You know, getting away from technology, listening to their body. So I think it's really interesting.

Claire Fudge:

On one hand, we almost want all these things to tell us how to do it and what to do, but actually then we've lost our intuition of how to do things. I think there's a balance between using data and technology to help guide us, but also being able to have that inability for us to be our own technology, for us to tell us how to do it as well. You went on your own feel and you're like that's really good run. If you were following a watch, would you have gone slower because you thought I must hold on to a certain pace?

Charlie Reading:

I see actually there's another factor which ties into the first point. An old mate of mine ran up behind me and I knew he was going to go by me, but I ran, ran with him for five or ten minutes chatting, and so that comes back to the energy of the tribe as well, doesn't it? Yeah, the fun, the fun, and so actually, you know that's the heart of it. It's difficult, I really know. Listening to his book, having this conversation has reinforced it, but I really, over the winter, need find a way to start doing some track running or some social running with a running group and a running club, because I know that it'll improve my running, I know that I'll do it better and enjoy it more, and I've got to find a way.

Claire Fudge:

I think it's really interesting to think about how do we use technology, because, well as technology is coming at us faster and faster, being able to make that decision now is actually probably really important.

Charlie Reading:

I agree, and I think there is certain technologies that I've tried and I've thought this is actually just taking away from the experience. The technology is becoming the conversation and for that reason I haven't adopted them, because I can't actually remember the name of it, but it was a gadget that monitors your swimming and would give you, like, vibrational feedback on your neck, and it also works for running and I tried it and it was like this is changing the whole thing too much for me. It's taking me away from thinking about the nature and the surroundings and it's all about I'm waiting for the next buzz because my technique's not quite right. Yeah, it definitely has its place. The other interesting conversation was coming back to born to run, because born to run was such an instrumental part of my running journey and it clearly was for for michael as well.

Charlie Reading:

Equally, there was a bit of a debunking within, to the limit of some of the. You know what the ramari, which, interestingly, born to run refers to as the Tarahumara what they actually felt versus what was portrayed in the book, like the whole barefoot shoes. They actually don't want to use bits of car rubber tied to their feet. It was a necessity historically, but actually they'd all far rather use trail shoes. I picked up from the book on that topic. There was so much more talk about the American ultra runners. Scott Jurek's mentioned five times more than Anulfo and Anulfo beats Scott Jurek. It's just there's a weird dynamic which I didn't pick up on at the time but reflecting back on it, there is definitely that really interesting conversation. Any last takeaways from you that you got from the interview with Michael?

Claire Fudge:

I think you know, going back to the kind of differences and different sorts and different people having different perspective on things, but also the science behind as well, because he was coming from an anthropology perspective and I think that's fascinating when you're looking at it from lots of different angles, because there's never one blinkered way to look at something. So, from an Ethiopian perspective and running what you were saying about the book, I think it's great just to see something from a different angle. And that is the world of research, of science. It's ever evolving, it's ever changing and we should be opening our minds, I feel, to like all of this different knowledge that's coming at us and making our own decisions about it. So I love that evolution.

Charlie Reading:

And we want the evolution, but we also enhanced games. Surely it's all going to come down to the conversation of, well, he had this technology or he had this, as opposed to you know that's going to go even further away. You know, if we're talking about the Nike Vaporflies instead of Kipchoge, surely the enhanced games will all be about this athlete took that versus that. That, to me, I can't get my head around. There are very different books actually out of thin air about his time in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian runners, Whereas To the Limit is much more an exploration of the endurance mindset and people in the world of endurance Both fascinating books. I hope you found that as interesting as we did.

Charlie Reading:

And until the next episode, keep on training if you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the business of endurance podcast. We don't ask you to pay for us. We don't ask for patronage. All we ask for is that you subscribe to the podcast, ideally on apple. Give us a fivestar rating because it shows us you care and if you've got time, leave us a comment. One word is fine, something like inspiring or amazing or something like that, but we really do appreciate it and it will help us to continue to deliver amazing guests on what we hope you find to be an amazing podcast. Thanks very much.