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#008_ Running For Self-Transcendence · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: H h h h h h h h. So she
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: pronounces it Jaya. The Sanskrit and North Indian pronunciation is Jaya.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Right. We got by Jaya with our daughter nice, and
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: we've got a friend who's got a child named Jaya
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: as well.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Oh.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Cool, So it seems to be in the in the air.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: And my name is Sanjay, which means with victory. Oh,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that the same root ja jaya. Oh,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: that's cool and sunscrit My name is Sanjaya, uh huh.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: And Jay, the loose translation of Jaya is is victory.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Jaya is a soundscrit word for victory. Right.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: So where where are your parents from?
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: My dad's from Gujarath, which is on the border of Pakistan,
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  Speaker 1: west northwestern India. Mom is from Madras, kind of southeastern
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: tip of India.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: And when did they immigrate.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: They met each other in their first jobs in Nigeria,
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  Speaker 1: which is where I was born.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, you were born in Nigeria, wow.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: And then they moved to Colorado pretty quickly to teach.
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  Speaker 1: My dad had gone to the school, gone to school
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: in the States, and worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Africa collectic indigenous seeds.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: So that's where the human rights genetic material kicks in
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: for you.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I think. So I ran away from it for as
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: long as I could.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Ah, they just rubber banded you back. Yeah.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: And the funny thing is like my dad was a geneticist,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: and after kicking and screaming, I ended up working with
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: him on like a tomato genetics company. You know, like
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: all the tomatoes that you get at Whole Foods, the
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: ones that are in the clamshells from Baja are all his. Right.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Oh wow.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: So I kicked and screamed every way possible and was
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: rope back in like the most brutally harsh way.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what do you mean brutally harsh?
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't if somebody had told me that I would
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: be following in my father's footsteps when I was like
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: eighteen or nineteen.
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  Speaker 2: Because everything inside you was to do something different, to.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Like like forge my own path. And it's like, you know,
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  Speaker 1: we follow in the foot We follow the footsteps of
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: those who walked before us, right, as much as you
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: know we don't think we do, of course.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Man. So you grew up in Colorado, then.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Colorado and California, Oakland, and then we went to cal
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: and then met a student of Reachinoys at cal and
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: as soon as I graduated, I wanted to get as
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: far away from like academic rigor and like materialism as possible.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Moved to New York, where streachin Toy was based. But
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: you know, I was at four hundred or five hundred
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: dollars per month in terms of my own budget.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: But the original impetus to move to New York City
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: was really to be a devotee of Srechin Moy.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly it.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Wow, what did your parents think of that?
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: They freaked out. They they both have PhDs. They're like,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: you're supposed to be a professor. And all my relatives
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: are like, why are you in America? If you want
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: to follow a group.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, to follow an Indian gurus, you go back home, right,
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: Instead you go to Queens.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: I go to Jamaica queens and for people for if
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you've been to Queens but or
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: been to Jamaica other than like on your way to JFK.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: But it's like bottom of the barrel in New York City.
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  Speaker 2: So it's very diverse.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and treachin mois thing was like, don't hide from
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: the world, and so most grows like live in Kawhi
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: or Malibu in Queens, so like, you know, I learned fast.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: It's a trip. I mean, what was it about Shreechin
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  Speaker 2: Mooy that connected with you? Why did you feel this poll?
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  Speaker 1: In high school, I was in a really conservative community,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: a suburb of Oakland, a weirdly conservative community. In my
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: senior year, friends of mine started getting into just to
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: kind of rebel, into the Dalai Lama and like you know,
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  Speaker 1: Jonathan Livington, Segull and those types of books. And when
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  Speaker 1: I went to college it was Berkeley. You can't you know,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: you can't avoid it. And so I started meditating and
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  Speaker 1: started trying to find a spiritual path. In most places, I.
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  Speaker 2: Went to what was the driver behind that? Though?
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  Speaker 1: You know, because my parents were so academically minded, they
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  Speaker 1: had made me do everything I did, like from sports
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  Speaker 1: to music to like overachieving. It was I did exactly
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: what they wanted. And when I got to school, I
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  Speaker 1: realized I was still doing exactly what they wanted and
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  Speaker 1: I needed to find my own way.
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  Speaker 2: You're being a good Indian son. I was the oldest siblings.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: I don't know if I was I was being the
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  Speaker 1: average Indian son.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, just doing what you were expected to do. Yeah,
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  Speaker 2: and so you what you had, you experienced some kind
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: of void in trying to figure out what it was
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  Speaker 2: that you.
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  Speaker 1: I realized like I was so deep on a path
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  Speaker 1: that wasn't on my own choosing, and I needed to
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  Speaker 1: find a way to choose my own path. And I
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  Speaker 1: realized quickly that couldn't be through academics, Like I had
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: to go on and in research, and you know, the
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: writings of sre Rama Krishna really really inspired me. And
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: that's when I realized, like I've got professors, you know,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: like why can't I have like a teacher for what
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  Speaker 1: I want to do in terms of self realization? Right?
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  Speaker 2: Well, that's that's also going back to your Indian heritage.
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  Speaker 1: It is, but it was almost like osmosis because my
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: parents' generation moved to the US to get away from that.
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  Speaker 1: It was the first time that Indians in the modern
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: era could, like, you know, have material aspirations, and so
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: they were all about the material life. Now they're not,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: but they were then.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Huh, And they're trying to acclimate you to become American,
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: so to speak.
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  Speaker 1: A big time. It was like Kraft macaroni and cheese
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: and hamburgers, right, you know, like now I love curry.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: I go like, I can't believe, Like I didn't eat
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  Speaker 1: any of that stuff when I was growing up.
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  Speaker 2: And so when you start meditating and going on this
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  Speaker 2: path and your parents must have been well, I would
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  Speaker 2: imagine it must be somewhat mixed. Like on the one hand, like, okay,
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  Speaker 2: he's verging from this trajectory that we've sort of established
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: for him. But at the same time, there's something you
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  Speaker 2: know beautiful about you connecting with what you know could
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  Speaker 2: be characterized as you know, your your sort of inherent
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: native traditions.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: It's true. The one thing that everybody has a difficult
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: time with, especially in the West, is how much obedience
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: you need to follow a teacher, whether the teacher is
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  Speaker 1: a zen practitioner, whether the teacher is is your martial
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: arts teacher, or whether it's an Indian group. And so
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: like I literally put myself at the feet of Streech
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: in Mooint and I asked him, you know, my parents
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: really want me to go to grad school and want
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: me to be a doctor. You know, from an inner standpoint,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: you know, what's your belief and streach in MyD I
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: meditated and said, in an almost otherworldly tone, your soul
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  Speaker 1: does not want you to be a doctor. Your soul
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: wants you to strengthen your heart. And so the first
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  Speaker 1: thing I did is I went to my parents and
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  Speaker 1: it was like, I asked streach In what I should do.
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  Speaker 1: He said, your soul doesn't want you to be a doctor,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: and they're like, what does that even mean? Like, no,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: you know, like you are becoming a doctor. And then
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: streach In I told me cryptically, you know that I
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  Speaker 1: still had to please my parents. So it's like it
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: was almost like a coon, like, right, don't please your parents,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: but please your parents.
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  Speaker 2: And what does strengthen your heart actually mean?
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  Speaker 1: I had a hard time understanding that because I think
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: as men or boys in this country, we're not really
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  Speaker 1: at least when I grew up in the eighties and nineties,
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  Speaker 1: we weren't really encouraged to find those qualities of the heart,
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  Speaker 1: like love and sympathy and generosity. And you know, academic
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  Speaker 1: life obviously strengthens your mind much more than your heart.
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  Speaker 1: And I realized, like I needed to develop qualities of love,
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  Speaker 1: of sympathy, of joy, not for anybody else, but for myself,
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  Speaker 1: and that would actually give me the strength to like
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  Speaker 1: be confident with my convictions.
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  Speaker 2: And what was the process of exploring that for you?
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  Speaker 1: It was totally detaching myself from that Western tract. I
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  Speaker 1: mean I went from like four point zero at cal
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  Speaker 1: to working at a health a community health food store
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  Speaker 1: and queens at one hundred dollars per week, living in
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  Speaker 1: a house with fifteen other dudes, and going to devotees
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  Speaker 1: they all were and we all had our own little rooms.
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  Speaker 1: You know, rent was two hundred dollars per month, and
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  Speaker 1: you know, going to morning and evening meditations and that
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  Speaker 1: was it.
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  Speaker 2: That was it.
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  Speaker 1: Wow, that was it. And a lot of service, Like
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  Speaker 1: we gave a lot of free meditation classes, and there
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  Speaker 1: were like athletic races that weirdly enough, you know, this
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  Speaker 1: Indian teacher really wanted us to participate in and I
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  Speaker 1: traveled with them, and I did that pretty much NonStop
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: until a point when he said, you know, he didn't
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  Speaker 1: say this explicitly, but he was like, you know, you're
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: ready to do more. And that's when he kind of
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: pushed me into this sphere of human rights.
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  Speaker 2: We were chatting the other week when we first met,
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  Speaker 2: and I was sharing with you that. My only real
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: awareness of Sri shin Moy was when I was living
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: in New York City right after college, and I would
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  Speaker 2: see people running, you know, in Central Park or all
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  Speaker 2: over the city wearing Sri shin Moy t shirts, and
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  Speaker 2: I was like, who is this Sri shin Moy? Is
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: he like a coach to a running club? But there
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: seemed to be this almost cultish conglomeration of people everywhere
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  Speaker 2: I looked, who were running all over Manhattan wearing paraphernalia
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  Speaker 2: that was advertising Sri Shinoy, And I thought he must
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: be some kind of cult guru or something like that.
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  Speaker 2: And I didn't really explore it any further than that
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  Speaker 2: at that point. But I've since come to learn what
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  Speaker 2: your film, which we're going to talk about in a minute,
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  Speaker 2: so beautifully explores, is like who this man, who this
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  Speaker 2: man was, what he stood for, and the impact that
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  Speaker 2: he's had not just on you spiritually, but on you know,
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  Speaker 2: a vast community of people, and how that sort of
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: intertwines very beautifully and naturally with the running community in
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  Speaker 2: New York City.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: You know, it's hard to believe that marathon running at
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  Speaker 1: one point in the sixties and even mid seventies was
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: absolutely counterculture. I mean, if you read the early New
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: York City marathons, which were just you know, five or
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: six laps around Central Park, the people that did those
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: were thought to be crazy. And when Fred Lee Bow
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: decided to do the nineteen seventy six you know, Big
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Five Boroughs Marathon and honor of the bi centennial, I
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: think that's the first time that marathoning kind of reached
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  Speaker 1: the mainstream. And Streachinway was in New York at that point,
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  Speaker 1: and you know, was very, very supportive of this flourishing
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  Speaker 1: of people's aspirations to try to do something that was
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: seemingly impossible. I mean, now like from your five ultars
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: to now the fifty ultras in fifty days, that bar
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  Speaker 1: has been pushed, right, But in nineteen seventy six, nineteen
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  Speaker 1: seventy seven, like twenty six point two miles was like
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  Speaker 1: the edge of the envelope. And you know, it's New
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: York City in the seventies. So before the nineteen seventy seven,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight New York City marathons, the day
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  Speaker 1: before Fred Liebow and the New York City Roadrunners would
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  Speaker 1: have Streachinoy lead meditations. So he had an Indian group
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: in a doughty in Central Park with runners meditating.
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  Speaker 2: It's crazy. Yeah, And just just to kind of provide
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: a little exposition on this, I mean, for those that
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: don't know, Fred Lebau is a legendary character who really
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: can be credited with contributing to the explosion of interest
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: in distance running by virtue of the work that he
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: did with a Was he the president of the New
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: York Roadrunners Club?
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: He was?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: He really did he want he founded it too? Right?
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Actually? Ted Corbett, Oh, I don't know about Ted Corbett.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: Ted Corbett African American nineteen fifty two Olympic Marathon or
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: for the US and Helsinki. Ted is known as the
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: as the father of modern ultra marathoning just by accident.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: He lived in the Bronx and his training weeks were
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: sometimes two hundred three hundred miles in New York City
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: because he was in the fifties, in the fifties and sixties.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: He would leave his home at seven or eight in
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: the morning and he would run, and he would come
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: back and he'd do these, you know, twelve fourteen hour
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: runs every Saturday and Sunday, just for fun and Fred
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: was the founder, I mean, Ted was the founder of
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: the New York Road Winners Club, and Fred ended up
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: launching it into what it is today.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Right, So Fred pioneers this craze of marathoning, and you know,
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: I remember as a ten, eleven year old, twelve whatever,
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: there was this period of time in which marathon running
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: kind of exploded into mainstream awareness, and you had guys
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: like Jim Fix who were writing books about it, and
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: people were discovering this for the very first time, and
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: Manhattan and specifically the New York Road Running Club, and
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: the work that Fred was doing was kind of that
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: was like the mecca for everything that was occurring at
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: that time.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: It really was, and I think Fred's imagination was unbounded.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: He had heard that in the late eighteen hundreds there
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: was this phenomenon of pedestrianism six day races held in
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Madison Square Garden where people bet on the man or
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: woman who would do the most miles in six days,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: and Fed wanted to revive that in the eighties, so
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: with the help of Street Chinhoy and his marathon team,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: they started a six day race in Flushing Meadow Park
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: and that brought out the people that had the feeling
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: and that knew that they had the capacity for more
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: than twenty six miles, like the Great stud Middleman and
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: all these characters that wanted to go well beyond the
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: twenty six mile limit and well beyond one hundred or
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: two hundred mile limit.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: So these races in Madison Square Garden, Like, when was
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: that going on?
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: They were hugely popular late eighteen hundreds to the early
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: nineteen tens, extraordinarily popular. And if you look back, even
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: before the first Olympics in eighteen ninety six, people were
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: doing like cross uk walks, you know, these epic walks
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: in the United States too, and they were races where
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: people would race almost Tour de France's style, trying to
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: get from point A to point B in the fastest time,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: taking help from villagers or town folks, etc.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: That's like lost history though, because I've never read anything about.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: That, and it's the foundation of what was known as
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: multi day running. I mean, these days ultra running is
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: more is more popular than ever, and the multi day
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: idea has kind of been lost. But you know, in
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties, it seemed much easier to do
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: larger events around half mile or one mile loops where
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the situation was controlled. Of course, now like you know
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: with the Leadville and hard Rock hundred and Western States,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: the idea of mountain running and point to point hundreds
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: have really really exploded.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: But it's so fascinating that, you know, in the seventies
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: when marathoning really came of age, that was considered like
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: the ultimate distance that a human being could run, and
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: it completely beliesed the true history of these crazy races
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: that preceded it, which get no ink.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: And sadly, the marathon was considered to be the greatest
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: distance a man could run. It wasn't until the nineteen
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: eighty four Olympics that there was a ten k for
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: the women or a marathon for the women.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: When did it? Was eighty four the first time there
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: was a women's marathon.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in nineteen eighty in the Russian Olympics there was
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: an exhibition ten k And it wasn't until eighty four
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: where women had been running professionally for eight to ten years.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Of course, there had been women that had Catherine Schweitzer
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: that sneaked into the Boston Marathon, you know, fifteen years
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: or so before, twelve years before the nineteen eighty four Olympics.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't until I think that in my opinion,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: until the multi day race circuits happened, that people realized
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: that the capacity, the difference between men and women really
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: wasn't that great.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: You know, the no longer it gets, the narrower of
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: that gap is.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: It's true, there's almost no running distance under actually there
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: are no running distances under twenty six miles where the
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: top ten men, you know, where the top women is
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: in the top ten men. But when you got to
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: twenty four hours and forty eight and seventy two and
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: then six day races, you know, it wasn't unusual for
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: a woman to actually win the entire event.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: And now you have people like Courtney do Walter who's
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: just crushing the dudes. It's in these super long races.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It's unreal, you know, and that goes to the heart
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: of I think y Streech in way it was really
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: into these races. It's a concept of self transcendence, you know,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: going beyond what people tell you your limitations are what you
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: think your limitations are digging deep into your heart and
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: trying to pull out an energy that transcends male or female.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: And for a little bit more exposition, it's worth kind
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: of exploring the history of Srehan why because for him,
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: running wasn't something that was tagged on top of his
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: spiritual perspective. Like he himself was a champion runner. He
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: ran one hundred meters ran. His whole life was running
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: races essentially up until you know, the day he died,
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: and running very much was a part of his perspective
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: when it comes to this idea of self transcendence.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: He grew up in an asherman South India that was
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: run by Sri Rabindo. Sri Abinda was one of the
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: original revolutionaries in India and he had a spiritual revelation
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: and you know, basically renounced his revolutionary ways and moved
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: to then French India which was Pondicherry to escape the
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: British and started an ashram. And a lot of the
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: revolutionaries that followed his in his essence like semi terroristic ways,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: you know, ended up renouncing themselves and moving to follow
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the spiritual life. But after India's independence, a lot of
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Europeans came to the ashram and you know, brought this
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: dynamism into Indian spirituality, which had been absent for a
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: few hundred years, and sore arbend A really encouraged track
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: and field. He really encouraged the development of the physical
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: body to be a true vessel of the spiritual energies
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: that people were aspiring to.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: And so Swreshin Moy was a disciple.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: He was a disciple though, and he competed in the
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: one hundred meter dash and the decathlon there and then
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: when he moved to America in nineteen sixty four, I
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: think there was a gap of six or seven years
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: where he was so focused on being a spiritual teacher
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: and serving people's needs spiritually that the athletic side was absent.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: I don't think it was until the early seventies and
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: running really began to revitalize, especially long distance, that he
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: saw the corollary between long distance running and spirituality, and
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the metaphor of us running towards a spiritual goal and
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: using outer running as as a way to practice that too.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Right, So he starts as a sprinter, later realizes the
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: potential of long distance running to serve a spiritual end
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: or goal or pursuit or journey, and he moves to
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: the United States. I mean this is also an interesting
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: period of time where there's a there's sort of a
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: group of spiritual leaders who are arriving in the United
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: States from India. You have Christian Murty, you have Yogananda
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: who comes much earlier. And so what is the you know,
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: what was the rationale behind him leaving India to come
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: to the United States.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: The ways reach in Whitel's is that he would have
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: been content to stay in India and meditate, you know,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: twelve to eighteen hours a day, as he had been doing.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: But he had an experience, like a lot of these
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: teachers did, the Supreme of the Divine, you know, basically
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: instructing him that his destiny lay in the West to
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: be of service to sincere seekers. So he just got
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: on a plane, like no real visa other than a
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: tourist visa. There are students of Sri Arben, those that
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: lived in New York that were his sponsors. But he
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: just came based on inter obedience. And it was Greenwich
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Village in nineteen sixty four, and you know, it was
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: pretty quick that he began to address a.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Kind of ideas that he's that he's talking about, right.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: And so by nineteen seventy he began leading twice a
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: week meditations at the un and there was a rapid
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: rapid acceptance of his philosophy because it dovetailed so much
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: with I think what Western seekers were looking for. But
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: at the same time, he didn't require a complete outer renunciation,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: like nobody wore robes and nobody had to move into caves.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Right, so you're not walking around like a Hari Krishna.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: No, not necessarily. Hopefully we're all we all have the
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: same spirit within, but you know, he didn't. He didn't
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: pay much attention to the same type of outer signs
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: or outer decorum that Indian spirituality traditional leader required, like
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: the robes and you know, the markings and the beads
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: and things like that.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: And did he I assume he must have run the
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: New York Marathon himself many times.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: He did. He ran the New York City Marathon a
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: few times. But then you know, he started a forty
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: seven mile race in honor of his forty seventh birthday,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: which I believe was in nineteen seventy eight, and that
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: was the first time his students began running ultras, and
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: he enjoyed it, and then he began pushing that and
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: doing one hundred mile races, two hundred mile races. And
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: when Fred Lebaux came to him in the mid eighties
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: and said, let's do a six day race, I mean
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Sri Chinmoy and what became his marathon team was ready.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: And so where does the thirty one hundred come into play? Like,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: how is that birthed?
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: You know, I think spiritual teachers develop vessels for consciousness
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: in the sense that I think if he tried to start, obviously,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: if he tried to start at three thy one hundred
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: mile race in nineteen seven twenty six when the marathon
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: was on it, you know, that would have been like
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: somebody would have checked him into some type of facility.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: But after the six day race, it became a ten
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: day race. After the ten day race, it became a
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand and thirteen hundred mile race, and people
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: were doing really, really well at that and by nineteen
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: ninety six he decided to almost double the thirteen hundred
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: and make it twenty seven hundred, and people did it.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: You know, there was a one woman and three men
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: that did it. And then in nineteen ninety seven he said, Okay,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: this is the distance I'm not going to go beyond it.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: It's thirty one hundred.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Right, thirty one hundred miles. This race has taken place
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: every year since ninety.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: What is it, nineteen ninety seven, ninety.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Seven, And this is a race that entails running thirty
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: one hundred miles within a period of fifty fifty two
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: day fifty two days, which means each runner is going
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: to have to complete, on average, about sixty miles a day.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: The kicker is the course is essentially a half mile
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: loop around the high school in.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Queens on sidewalk in the summer. Yeah, it's ridiculous.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: It is absolutely insane. And I'd heard whispers of this
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: race over the years, and I think I just filed
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: it away in my brain as apocryphal, Like I thought, well,
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: this can't actually be occurring in New York City because
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: you don't really hear about it. It doesn't get any press.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: And what was so amazing about seeing it in your
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: movie is that this occurs without really any fanfare whatsoever.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: There's how many there were twelve people that did it
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: that were documented. What was it last year that you
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: followed these individuals?
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, twenty sixteen. There were twelve participants.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: And they just spend their summer running around in a circle.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: They alternate the direction every other day or something like that.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: There's a couple buses and campers parked out on the
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: sidewalk and you know, some volunteers there to hand out
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: food and write down there how many laps they've done
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: every day. The course is open from six am to midnight,
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: and it just goes on until it's done. And when
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: it's finished, they're like, Okay, you did it, and the
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: it's essentially that's it.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: It's mind boggling. You know. I've lived in that area
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: since nineteen ninety seven, and I frankly was frightened of
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: that race. I'd run by it. It's on like my
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: one mild point on my mind.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: Wouldn't even talk about the fact that you're a runner,
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: like you came from a competitive running background.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: But that distance just frightened every single pore of my body.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: You know, I didn't understand how or why anybody would
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: want to do that. And after, you know, I guess
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: a career in human rights, and when I started getting
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: into film, I started wondering why a film hadn't been
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: made on that race. Of course, it would be the
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: most boring film of the world, if any film was
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: just about people going in circles. But I was an
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: encourag to do a six day race, you know, to
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: try to feel what people might possibly get out of
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: a thirty one hundred miles Is.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: That when you were kind of contemplating the idea of
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: trying to find a way in to make a movie
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: about this this event.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: You know, it was even more elementary than that. I
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: need before trying to make a movie, I needed to understand,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: like why to make a movie, you know, what could
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: possibly appeal to a non thirty one hundred mile runner
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: about this race? Like why would anybody want to do?
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: I want to watch a movie about something that's so
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: beyond what we might even want to consider doing. And
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: so I did a six day race on the same
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: course that Fred le Beau had started in nineteen eighty six,
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: and I didn't really train much. The interesting thing about
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: ultras is is that you know, you see people from
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: eighteen to seventy years old doing ultras, and particularly since
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: a lot of older people do ultras, I went in
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: without much training, thinking like if a seventy year old
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: could do it, like why couldn't I? You know, I
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: did about fifty miles the first six hours. Then I
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: got injured. It's like I felt my hamstring twins.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Fifty miles and six hours, that's pretty good.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: You know. I didn't know what to do. I didn't
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: know how to approach it. But then I felt my
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: hamstring twinge, and as it twinged, a few seventy five
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: year old ladies walked by me and asked me how
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: I was doing. And that's what I realized. I can't quit.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: You know, it's like if these women are doing this race.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: And also the nature of how you approach and conquer
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: an event like that is very different than the mindset,
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: you know, of the typical runner or whatever your background
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: and running experience was.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: And so the next four days, actually the next four
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: and a half days, I was out on the course
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: eighteen hours and I was barely doing thirty two miles.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: I had to pulled hamstring and all I could do
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: in those four and a half days was pray, pray
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: that I would get to run again in the race.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: You know, I was never more conscious of, like my
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: frailty than having seventy five year old men and women
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: chatting with you and then apologizing saying you're slowing me
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: down and then moving beyond. But I would say, almost
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: miraculously and without hyperbole, with the day left, my hamstring
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: felt normal. It just in an instant, felt normal. And
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: then I took off. It's like I channeled. I'd held
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: like five almost five full days of prayer in my heart,
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: and when that prayer had been answered, I took off,
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: And for the next about twenty one hours, I was
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: honestly in the highest meditation I'd ever been in. And
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: you know, it's like we all say that, like people
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: sometimes say, like when I chop onions, it's meditative. And
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: I don't mean like repetitive. I don't mean that my
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: mind was turned off. I mean that every single spiritual
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: pore of my being felt like it was about to
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: have thee as to awakening. My imagination felt like reality.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: You know. I was like feeling honeyman, I was feeling
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: like every Indian mythological story I'd ever read. I was
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: feeling the presence of those beings on that course. And
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: no matter what I did, whether I stopped to eat,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: I stopped to fix my shoes, as soon as I'd
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: start running again, those experiences came.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: To the foe, you were having a transcendent experience. I was, so,
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: what do you make of that?
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: You know, when I talked to runners after that who
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: did the thirty one hundred, they said, this is why
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: we do it. And I said, does that experience happen
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: in minute one? They said no, But after four or
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: five or six days, regardless of injuries like I had
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: in the six day race, after four or five or
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: six days, they find that their mind shuts off, finally
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: surrenders to the inevitable fact that they would have to
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: be running for the next, you know, fifty two days,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: and the heart comes to the fore. In some cases,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: the soul comes to the fore, and they get experiences
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: that are extremely challenging to get through silent meditation alone.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: You hear stories from people who are who are quite
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: expert in meditation that it takes a very long time,
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: perhaps years two, of consistent, diligent practice to get to
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: a place where you can have that kind of experience.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: But once you have it, you develop the acuity to
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: drop into it a little bit with more facility, right,
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: And I would imagine for some of these runners, maybe
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: they can if they're experienced in this sort of thing.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: They can drop into that state, perhaps sooner without having
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: it to be, you know, on day six of the
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: six day run. So do you think you have to
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: reach a certain level of suffering and pain to arrive
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: at that place or what is the what's the trigger?
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: I thought I did. I thought that I thought that
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: was a trigger. After the sixth day race, I realized
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: that there was a movie to be made. If I
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: could capture that spiritual essence of ultra distance running, it,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: you know, it might it might be of some service.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: I wanted to explore traditional practices of running, and of
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: course people who are read born to run know about
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: the Rora Mari, the Taramara Indians that are connected culturally
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: to the Indians in the southwest of the United States.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: So I went to Santa Fe to meet a friend
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: who ran in an organization called Wings of America, which
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: really focuses on Native American running culture and revitalizing that.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: I met one of the board members who is an
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: ultra distance runner on the Navajo Nation, and when I
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: went on a morning run with him, I realized that
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: his attitude towards running was totally different than mine. I
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: started my watch, you know, I was looking for the
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: GPS signal. It's like, this is going to be a
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: great Strava run through the canyon. And it was a
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: canyon that people who weren't natives weren't allowed to run in,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: but we had permission to run in it. So I
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: was like, I'm going to get some course records, all
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: this stupid stuff that like you know, technology and like competition,
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of you know, for me to believe.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: But he was running for different reasons. The Navajo run
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: towards the east in the morning because that's where the
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: rising sun is. And I could tell that this fellow,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Sean Martin, who's an athletic director in Chimley High School
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: in Arizona, he was receptive to the idea that this run,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: this regular morning run, would make him a better person.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: It could also give him an exceptionally spiritual experience. And
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: that was his attitude for running, and that had been
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: baked in through thirty two years of cultural training on
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: how to run. And so that's when I realized, like
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: most spiritual teachers say, like suffering isn't the only path
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: to enlightenment, and I think it's the same in running.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: It's like suffering isn't the only path to the ultimate
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: that running experience. Carl Lewis used to say the same thing.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: He used to be so against the idiom, no pain,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: no gain. You know, there's a different attitude to approach sports,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: and I saw it in Sean Martin that day.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Through the movie, you explore the culture of the Navajo nation,
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: you travel to Japan and spend time with the running
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: monks of Mount Hi. Is that how you say it? Yeah?
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: I would say that you pronounced it as perfectly as
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: an American, an American neighborhood, right, which.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: Is fascinating and I want to dive into that more
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: in a minute. And then also the Botswan and tribe
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: of the Kalihari, right, and the culture of kind of
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: persistent hunting and how running plays into that and in
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: your your kind of learning process, your discovery process of
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: trying to understand these cultures and how running and spiritual
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: duality form essentially who they are. Like, what is it
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: that you have discovered about this relationship between spirituality, transcendence
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: running and really you know the title of your movie,
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: which is running to become Like what does that mean?
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: You know? To precfice it all, colonization has been a
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: really bad thing for running cultures. You know, from the
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: British colonization of India to the Black bots one On
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: government's colonization of the Kalahari to Anglo European colonization of
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the United States, there haven't been many cultures that have
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: been able to keep this connection to running in the
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: past five hundred and six hundred years, or maybe in
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: the past ten thousand, since we've been agrarian societies. But
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: in the last few hundred the remaining running cultures have
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: been forcibly separated from that tradition, and first and foremost
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: that's been really sad to see. And it's not just
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: you know, white Western Europeans. Again, the Botswanan government is
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: Black African and the Chinese, for example, destroyed a culture
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: in Tibet of longum pot running, which we tried to explore.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: And this almost sounds like Wu Wu, but people were
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: sequestered into caves for two or three years at a
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: time and they sat in lotus position and using their prana,
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: they would gradually try to burst upwards, and at the
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: end of two or three years they were able to
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: in loadus position burst up three feet and that gave
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: them the kind of pranic the metaphysical approach to a
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: different style of running. There was a German priest and
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: a German nun in the thirties and fifties, respectively who
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: witnessed runners running across boulder fields in Tibet going at
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: what they estimated was, you know, equivalent of now six
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: minute per mile pace. Where these runners would fixate on
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: a star at eight pm and run towards it till
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: six or seven in the morning. And that's a twelve
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: hour run where they're going six minute pace through this
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: longum par running. Wow. And when the Chinese took over Tibet,
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: they didn't destroy the monastery, but they killed all the
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: monks in that monastery. So as we explored these ancestral
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: traditions of running, we found that there were very very few.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: Native American running culture was extant until really about one
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago. Now they didn't have horses,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: you know, in a modern sense until about sixteen eighty
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: seventeen hundred. Before that, they relied on runners to run
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: one hundred, two hundred, three hundred mile you know, trading
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: and spiritual routes. So that was you know, kind of
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: an exhilarating discovery, especially when we saw that alive and
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: well in Botswana.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: Well, the sort of most well known of these cultures
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: is probably the Tarhamara in Mexico, and I would imagine
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: that a big reason why it serves as such a
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: test case a case study, is because the Copper Canyon
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: has done such an amazing job of protecting them from
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: the outside world, preventing that kind of pollution that's occurred
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: that's sort of undermined these these other tribes and has
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: sort of allowed them to continue their their ancestral habits,
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: which prioritize running as essentially a lifestyle. I don't know
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: what the spiritual connection is with the Taramara, but I
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: did have one experience where I ran with one when
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: I was in Mexico City, and it was amazing. It
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: was an event that was sponsored by Runners World, and
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: it was on a track in Mexico City and it
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: was like kind of an expo type situation. So I
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: had the opportunity to run around a track with this
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: guy and he's in his traditional garb with the sandals
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: and like the whole thing, and I almost felt it
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: was almost like he was a fish in an aquarium.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: You know, I was like, I wasn't even sure that
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: he really understood what was happening, Like he'd been flown
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: out there, almost put on display. But I could tell
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: in running with him it was so natural, it was
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: so pure. Like you said, there's no none of the
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: trappings of our modern culture of running. There's no GPS
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: watch or anything like that. And his gait was so
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: effortless and beautiful, and you could tell that this is
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: just an extension of a lineage, lineage that goes back,
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: you know, many many, many generations.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's the great thing about running, you know
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: my colonization rant aside, running unites us. You know, at
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: one point, every single culture on earth relied on running. Again,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: we weren't agricultural. No one was agricultural until ten thousand
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: years ago, which meant that we were all hunters and gatherers.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: And the fastest, strong strongest runners were the ones that
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: were most adept at hunting. So it's literally baked in
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: to our DNA, and it's baked into our culture if
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: we can rediscover that.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: So when someone says to you, we were born to run, like,
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: what does that mean to you?
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: You know, the book was really really inspiring, but I
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: think there was there were some parts of the book
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: that might have been misunderstood. There's a fascination with these
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: traditional ancestral call them ancient running cultures, like the Taramara,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: like the Navajo, like the Hopie, like the bushmen, that
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: they have some deep genetic advantage, that they're they're superhuman,
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: or there's they have special DNA, or that it's their food,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: their chia seeds that make them. Yeah, that make them
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: better runners. But they're better runners because they work harder
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: at it and they feel it's more important. I mean
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: for someone who wants to run to lose weight or
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: run to win a race, those are really, you know,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: strong and powerful motivations. But if you feel that running
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: is a form of prayer, you have a different attitude.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: And our Navajo character, who actually is the race director
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: of the Tara Marris Copper Canyon Race, he told me
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: he said, running is a prayer. You know, when you're running,
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: your feet are praying to Mother Earth, You're breathing in
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Father's guy. Running is a celebration of life. It's like
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: when you run, you appreciate everything around you. And running
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: is a teacher, you know, teaches you about who you are.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: It helps you get through hardships. My high school running
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: coach never said anything like that to me.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: You might have gotten fired if you did.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like run to win and that was it.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: And if you were a second, even if you pr
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: it was just like, that's three points, that's not five points.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's super interesting. I heard you tell a story
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: about one of the participants in the most recent iteration
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: of the thirty one hundred, who I think is a
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: semi pro runner from where I was from Israel, and
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: Kobe Reel right right, who kind of showed up guns blazing,
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: laid down a torret pace for the first thousand miles
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: or whatever it was, and then had a little bit
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: of a reckoning that led to an epiphany that kind
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: of speaks to what you just said.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Kobe Oran and I was in one race with him,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: and in that race he wasn't ultimately successful, but he
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: was trying to break a ten day record of nine
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: hundred and one miles. That's the level that he's on.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: He was, you know, he's on pace to do ninety
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: miles a day in that race until the last couple
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: of days. He's insane he's a really good runner, and
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: like all Israeli citizens, he has a military background. So
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: he came in to the thirty one hundred race this
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: last summer twenty eighteen with a plan. It was just
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: like operation control. Everything tactical that you could need, you know,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: he had it. And in the first thousand miles of
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: his thirty one hundred mile race, that thousand miles split
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: set in Israeli national record for a thousand miles, and
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: he was racing. He was racing this fellow from Russia
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: named Basu. But then something softened in Kobe, and not
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: softened in a weak way. Kobe later recounted that there
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: was a point in the race when he realized that
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: he could race. He could race the race, and you know,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: he could be just pushing his physical limits. But he
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: would have missed the point entirely. And he felt that
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: if he'd done that, maybe he would have won the race,
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: but he wouldn't have remembered anything significant about him. He
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: had the epiphany that that thirty one hundred mile race
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: wasn't a journey from point A to point B or
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: zero miles to thirty one hundred miles. He said, the
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: race is a pilgrimage, and that separated himself from even
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: the kind of like micro focus of like app by
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: lap by lap. When you're on a pilgrimage, everything that
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: you do is a ritual. And he realized that each
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: one of his steps was a ritual, His motions, his
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: attitude were rituals. And that reminded me explicitly of the
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: marathon Monks of Mount Hi, the running Monks of Mount Hai.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: You know, they choose one aspirant every seven years to
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: do a thousand days of running, split up into ten
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: hundred day chunks. Each hundred day cycle will have a
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: set mileage. The first one is eleven miles a day,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: the last one is fifty six miles a day. And
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: all of their cycles occur on a mountain that's about
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: three thousand feet in net elevation. So they're going up
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: and down the mountain at least once. Towards the end,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: they're going up and down two or three times. And
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: they're so precise in their footsteps that every single day,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: every single step is in the exact same place. I mean,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: that's next level. It's like, wow, that's how much they're
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: just focusing on the moment.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: So Japanese.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: It's so Japanese.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: No, But I love that idea of running as ritual,
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: you know. And I think it was somebody in the
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: movie said, you know, I'm just trying to be the
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: best person that I can be with each stride. Right,
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: this ritualization running as ritual as prayer, as this act
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: of you know, as this act on the journey toward
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: self transcendence. And I think the example of these running
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: monks is the most powerful and demonstrative. I mean, a
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: thousand days of doing this, ten one hundred day cycles,
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: and the penalty for failure is suicide.
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: Right, you should say that again.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: The penalty for failure on this quest to literally for
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: a thousand days go out and do anywhere between like
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: eleven miles and fifty something miles. Right, If they fail,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: suicide is the penalty. And correct me if I'm wrong.
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: But they select one person at a time to attempt
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: this correct.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: And their selection process has become so rigorous that in
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: the last one hundred and fifty years of this now
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: fifteen hundred year tradition, no one has had to take
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: their own life, but plenty have. And they said, and
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: this is the interesting thing. They said, that when they
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: start this quest, no one is thinking of suicide. It's
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: like they're thinking of bliss. But they feel that because
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: the penalty is so great, they've been able to keep
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: this practice absolutely uncompromised for the last fifteen hundred years.
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: It's been going on that long.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's the interesting thing to me. It's like
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: the stakes are so high that the only people that
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: are going to do it are ones who are going
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: to basically establish the deepest commitment to that goal where
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: they're willing to sacrifice their life.
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you have to be so dialed in mentally, emotionally,
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: and spiritually to come from a place of joy and
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: gratitude and bliss rather than fear. I mean the American,
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: the Western perspective on that would be to just be
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: terrified the entire time.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's absolutely insane. The ridiculous thing, too, I
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: mean from a Western standpoint, is that there's no aid
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: there's no aid stations, there's no helpers. The aspirant starts
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: in the morning, usually without even as much as a
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: cup of miso soup, just some liquid, and after about
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: two thirds of the way through, sometimes thirty miles, has
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: an aid stop takes some tea and then continues to
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: the end and then has to make his own meals
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: at the end of this fifty six mile day.
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: And they're not really running though, I mean they're essentially hiking.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: They are It's like it's a very steep mountain and
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: the Aspirints are all wearing sandals.
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: They were the sad beautiful costume with this amazing hat.
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: I don't know what you call that, but it's incredible.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: It looks like Star Wars, Yeah, I know, it really does.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: And so they're in this garb where, you know, without
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: getting two crass, I think it would be really hard
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: to disrobe if you did have to go to the bathroom.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: So they're very light. At the same time, you know,
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: we were up there with the Aspirint and no one
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: had been allowed to film up there since nineteen eighty four.
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: Is that when they made that really grainy documentary that
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: I saw.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's actually a lot of things wrong in that
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: documentary because I used it as research. And when I
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: presented those facts to the monks, they were like, where
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: did you get that from? And I said from this movie.
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: They're like, none of.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: That's Like what was incorrect in the movie, there.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: Was a lot of numbers that were wrong daily mileage,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: you know, And I think that movie established them as
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: with the moniker of marathon monks, and like you said,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: they don't run, and they hate even though I call
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: them the marathon monks, they hated that label. But when
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: we were up there, the aspirant on flats is doing
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: about eleven eleven and a half minute mile pace, So
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: it's like he's walking, but you can say he's walking
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: with an incredible amount of purpose, you know, we could.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: We didn't even attempt to keep up with them. We
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: had to spend two days to be able to kind
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: of cover his one circuit, just because it was impossible
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: even in a car to get to places before he would.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: And if you were to ask these people what is
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: the purpose of this, what is their reply?
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: This is the interesting thing, you know. In order to
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: get permission to do this, I met the head Monk
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: three times, and this head Monk had actually done this quest.
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: He was the last finisher. Everything I asked from a
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Western standpoint, he didn't answer in a Western way. So
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: when I said what is the purpose? I actually asked
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: him that. He said, I don't understand the question. He said,
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: we do this because we feel that we are the
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: go betweens, the intermediaries between the buddham and humanity, and
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: that our prayers actually have an effect on the prayers
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: of sincere aspirants worldwide. He basically intimated that the purity
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: of their quest raised the bar for every practitioner a Buddhism,
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: whether or not they were aware that this quest was existing.
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: This is it's almost an ascetic practice of purification that
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: somehow penetrates consciousness.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: Swechimoy said something similar. He said that faith is collective,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: that your faith is my faith, is everyone's faith, and
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: that power of faith essentially is like a bank that
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: we all from different cultures draw upon. And I think
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: that's what this marathon monk, this monk of Mantei intimated
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: that they were basically depositing large sums through their quest
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: into a vault that aspirants were drawing from around the world. Right.
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's part and parcel of the kind of
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: core perspective of Buddhism being that the best way to
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: better the world or improve the world is to improve yourself.
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: And this is a like the ultimate process of purification.
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: Like their version of that.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: You know, the interesting similarity that I found between these
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: monks and the main character in the movie Ashbury Hunnal
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: was that they have no lethargy. I mean, I imagine
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: what lethargy means. It means comfort, it means sitting. I
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: mean one might say that, like, we're in a very
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: comfortable position right now, sitting. These they don't sit like
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: they'll sit to pray, but they'll sit and pray with intensity,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: and when that's done they'll move on to the next activity.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: And the monk that we were interviewing, the last aspirint
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: to have completed it. He's physically active from the moment
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: like every minute is accounted for. He's not wasting a
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: single second. The word comfort relaxation is not in his
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: vocabulary at all. And the people that do the thirty
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: one hundred, the one similarity is that at least in
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: that period when they're doing those fifty two days, there's
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: not an ounce of lethargy. It's like they're looking at
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: every moment as though it counts. If they're resting, they're resting.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: There's no cell phones, there's no music, there's nothing, but
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: they'll find that they can get enough rest from a
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: ten or fifteen minute nap to get back out on
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: the course and do twenty or thirty more miles, whereas
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: the normal human being would extend that ten minute rest
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: into a five six hour.
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this aspirant, this Japanese monk, did you feel
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: like you could like connect with him? I mean, does
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: he or is he just such a foreign creature that
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: you almost feel like he's a different species, Like does
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: he have a humanity to him that you can relate
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: to it all?
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: You know, not to even mildly to my own horn,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: but you know, like my life, even though we don't
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: dress as renouncyet it, it's very much an aesthetic life.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: Like I've never married, you know, we're celibate, don't eat meat,
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: don't drink, don't smoke. So when I went up to
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: Mount Heai, I had a daunting task. You know, a
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: lot of people, I mean I think every week they
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: feeled media requests, and they turned down nearly all of them,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: except for some photography requests of people wanting to see
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: the monk coming or going from from his domicile, but
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: none in Kyoto made the introduction between me and one
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: of the head monks, and you know, as a triathlete,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: it's like when you're with other triathletes, you can speak
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: a certain language and it's like they'll know how many
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: triathlones or what your approach has been, just by the
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: language and the verbiage you use and the reference to
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: certain races and certain courses. And so I immediately began
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: speaking with the head monk, you know, on that purely
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: spiritual level. And it was unusual, I think, for him
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: to have a media request from somebody that wasn't your
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: like prototypical.
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: Right, This isn't the BBC rolling in.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: No, And my question to him wasn't whether he would
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: give me permission to do what I wanted to do.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: I asked him, I guess, in a very Japanese way,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: if he would give me permission to do a film
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: that he essentially would direct. And then he was a
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: little taken aback, and he said, I've never thought of
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: this in this way. And I said, well, you know,
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: if if you were with humility, if you were to
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: make a film about this, how would you do it?
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: And then for the next hour and a half he
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: laid out exactly how we would do it, and then
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: at the end of that, I said, I promise you
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: I will do exactly that. And so it was that
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: kind of like spiritual recognition that I think got us
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: in the door. And when I saw the monk, I
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: understood was doing the quest. I understood how serious his
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: commitment was. Not that I could relate to it, it was
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: on a level that I'd never experienced, but I could
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: recognize that he had a tremendous amount of purity, a
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: tremendous amount of honor, and a tremendous amount of heart.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: You know, you're in a state where you're praying to
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: the divine, and the Buddhist wouldn't Budhess wouldn't use the
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: word divine, use the word light or soul. But you're
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: praying to the highest. You're praying to the bud that
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: with all your heart's devotion. And you know, in the
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: purely Indian sense, devotion is a beautiful, fluid thing that's
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: full of love. And I recognize that in him. It's
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: like his commitment was serious, like he did not want
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: to be messed with, He did not want to be
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: disturbed because he was communicating with his beloved. He was
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: communicating with the divine and it's like if you weren't
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: going to be exactly a part of that, then he
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: had nothing to do with you, or if you had.
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: The inability to appreciate or really understand that that's what
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: was happening exactly.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: And we couldn't have done it without his permission. So
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: in his off season, the winter, they don't do the quest.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: In his off season, he consulted with the head monk
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: as to what we wanted to do and what the
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: head monk thought would be possible, and gave his explicit
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: permission and then made his own requests. So in essence,
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: even though we weren't communicating with him verbally, we were
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: up there. You know, he would recognize when we were
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: doing something that you know, that he'd already given approval to.
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: And there was a few things that it was embarrassing
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: that he did twice because he recognized that we didn't
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: exactly get it the first time. There was one spot
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: where he would sit and he would pray, and he
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: did a second take, especially for us, without us even
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: communicating that we needed for him to do it a second.
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: Time, because he realized you didn't quite get it or
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: something like that.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: It's like imagine being the star of a narrative film
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: like let's hear your Brad Petter Angelina Jolie. When when
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: you do your take and you realize that there's a
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: little bit of chaos, yeah, or that the DP and
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: the crew didn't nail it, like you did your best
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: part and they kind of screwed it up. You could
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: either just go like that's it, I'm not doing the
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: scene again, or you could go like, Okay, I know
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: you guys didn't really get that right and you're not
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: saying it, so like let me do it again. So
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: he was very wary that he was a focus and
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: we had them you know, like I wouldn't say like
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: non spiritual crew, but we had crew that, you know,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: this was their first experience with someone like him, and
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: at the very end, these were like young acs and
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: you know, assistant camera people. At the end of our shoot,
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: we hustled to like this point in the forest where
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: we knew that he would stop for a minute if
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: devotees came to ask for his blessings. So there was
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: a row of Japanese ladies and then there was a
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: row of us and like you know, twenty something hipster
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: Brooklyn nights and they're like, you know, Jean shorts on
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: their knees with their hands folded. And he came by
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: and he said prayers over us, and then he looked
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: at us, obviously knowing that we speak English, and he
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: said thank you. And for these like assistant cameramen, like
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: these twenty two to twenty three year olds from Williamsburg,
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: like they were blown away because after a few days
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: with them, they recognized that he was on a higher
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: level than any of us. And when he recognized their
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: work and said thank you, they just became like putty.
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: They couldn't stop talking about it. That's so wild.
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: How long were you up there.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: For the shoot? We had to spend two weeks on
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: location planning every shot. The head monk and his assistant
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: stipulated that everything we did was planned effectively with the
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: same meticulous nature as everything they do on that mountain.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: So from hands to zooms to cables and dollies shovages,
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: they went through it and we rehearsed it because we
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: knew that number one, as you know from our movie
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: thirty one hundred Run and Become. There's no interviews there's
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: no talking heads at the same time, like watching running
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: is really boring if it's just people passing by a camera.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: And the question was like, how do we put people
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: into the spiritual mindset of this aspirant. We don't even
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: get to talk to him. So our shots were planned
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: with great detail. As you saw in the movie. We
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: shot a lot at night that the monk carries around
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: at night a single lantern with a single candle to
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: light the five feet in front of him, and it's mystical,
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: it's beautiful, and we didn't want to miss the opportunities
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: that we had.
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, where do you stay? Do you have to hike
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: up the mountain every day? Like you weren't staying in
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: the monastery, were you?
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: You know a lot of these big mountain monasteries they
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: have hotels, but the hotels are run by monks. And
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: Japanese temple cuisine is an absolute delicacy because you can't
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: find that in any city, in any restaurant. You have
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: to go to these temples, and people make reservations months
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: in advance to go and eat effectively. Japanese vegan cuisine
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: and dinner will be twenty six to twenty eight items
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: I mean they'll be like an oudon soup preparation that's
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: literally two slurps in a little tiny bowl on a
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: little clay pot lit by a single candle, and you'll
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: have twenty five, twenty six things like that. So it's cool.
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: That reminds me of that beautiful Korean monk chef woman
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: who is the subject of Chef's Table, who's on a
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: monastery I believe it's somewhere in South Korea, who prepares
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: just the most exquisite cuisine. It is an art form
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: to her, and there was an amazing New York Times
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: profile about her.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: This is in that tradition, although the quality is probably
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: not at her exceptional level. You know, when we were
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: on the mountain, we were immersed and that definitely helped
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: us in our own mindset for shooting.
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, amazing, what a gift. I mean, the first you're
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: really the first people to be able to go up
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: there and observe and document them in decades, its shrouded
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: in so much mystery. I mean, I know there's that
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: I've watched clips from that grainy documentary, and I know
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: I've seen the book what's it called The Marathon Monks
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: of mount Hea. But that's really it, right, in terms
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: of documenting this incredible.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Culture, that's it. You know. There have been a couple
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: of short pieces, like to actually even be initiated into
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: the monastery, people have to do one hundred days times
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: eleven miles. Everybody does, and they don't get the whole uniform.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: They don't get the big bamboo hat and the staff.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: They have to do eleven miles a day for those
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: hundred days. If they don't complete a single day, they
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: don't have to kill themselves, but they don't get to
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: be a part of the monastery. So there have been
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: films about that which look visually similar, but there haven't
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: been people that have been allowed up on the mountain.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: While an aspirant is in this thousand day quest, you
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: want to hear something that's even wackier. Yeah, I say
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: whacky in the most spiritual sense. At the end of
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: the sixth cycle, the aspirant has to do an eight
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: and a half day fast. Used to be a ten
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: day fast, but too many aspirants died during it. Used
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: to be in the summer, but too many aspirants rotted
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: from the inside out. Because it's not just no food
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: it's no food, no sleep. The aspirant has to sit
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: up lotus position twenty four hours a day. There are
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: monks by him chanting with him to keep him awake.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: But the third caveat, and why it's so dangerous, is
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: no water, no food, no water, no sleep, eight eight days,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: eight and a half days.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: How is that possible?
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know that. Traditionally, the aspirants
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: have said that Number One, on the most human level,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: they can smell what you've eaten the last three meals.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: Number two, they can smell any food that's being cooked
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: on the mountain. Number three, and this is where it's
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: actually spiritual. They're so close to the verge of death
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: that their sensors are hyper attenuated. They can actually hear,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: they say, the ash falling off of incense. And so
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: after you've crossed that threshold, or you've you know, straddled
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: that threat shold for a period of days and you
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: come down, I don't think anything makes you afraid of
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: death anymore.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: That is wild, and I would imagine some the purpose
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: of that is to even heighten that level of attunement.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: You know, it's an interesting thing because the monks are
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: doing something exceptionally physical in this quest. In this you know,
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: the mileage is just mind boggling, But they're told over
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: and over and over that the mileage isn't important. The
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: main monk that spoke to us refuse to talk to
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: us about the mileage. He refused to put anything you
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: know in any numbers on camera because he said, it's
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: only about the prayers. It's only about the prayers. But
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: there's recognition that the body is as vital to this
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: quest as the heart, as the mind, as the soul,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: as the center of prana, the five major centers. But
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: to hammer that point, you know, after you've had six
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: and a half or you know, six years effectively of
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: this deeply spiritual physical practice, I think they want to
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: kind of send you off on your last four hundred
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: days with a little bit of a higher recognition that like,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: nothing can stop you. If you made it past that fast,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. You know what comes your way that
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: is so wild, it's crazy, And there's one last thing
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: they have to do.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: It gets crazier.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: They say this is harder, although it doesn't sound as hard.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: At the end of their tenth cycle, they have to
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: sit for ten days for twelve to fourteen hours a
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: day in front of a big bonfire and drop in
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: bamboostics that have prayers of individual devotees of the monastery.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: So they have like a million bamboostics which they basically
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: have to I believe, read and throw into the fire
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: for twelve to fourteen hours a day. And the monk
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: that we spoke to who had done this, so that
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: was more difficult for him because he said that, you know,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: you're not allowed to drink water during those twelve to
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: fourteen hours. He said he got more dehydrated every single
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: day and felt so felt closer to the end every
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: single day than he did do that towards the end
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: of that eight and a half day fast.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: And once you complete this, than what they.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: Say you're a living Buddha. They say that you've now
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: crossed the threshold in your life is only to be
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: of service to aspirans. So the monk that was the
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: previous previous finisher, who was our guide, you know, all
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: he does is he administers to devotees, you know, twenty
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: twenty one hours a day. All he's doing is serving
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: his disciples. And it's exceptional because it's like there's not
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: a single minute in his day that he doesn't use.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: And it's really just one person essentially every generation.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: More or less, you know. I think that every once
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: in a while by the weird math of years as
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: a crossover where there's two people that are doing it
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: at the same time, but no one's ever really on
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: the course at the same time.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's wild. What a gift to be able to
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: experience that. And I think another thing that's interesting about
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: that quest as being you know, very very Buddhist, in
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: very Japanese, that kind of distinguishes it from a Hindu
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: pursuit is the idea that the body is essential. Right,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: A Hindu perspective would be more along the lines of
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: or trying to transcend the body. The body is just
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 2: this you bag of bones that's here to carry our consciousness,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: but there isn't attention to it in this very specific way.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, in my own humble way. India's downfall in
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: the last few hundred years was disregarding the physical. But
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: if you go back to the bug of at Gita,
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: the physical is absolutely essential.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: It's a warrior text.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the greatest spiritual figures had under stood the power
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: of their body, you know, they might have gone to
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: the forest like some of the great sages and meditated
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: for ten, fifteen, twenty years at a time and practiced
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: great austerities, but a lot of those austerities came through
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: physical practice, and nobody ever disregarded the physical. It was
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: an essential part of our spiritual being. It's just been
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: in the last three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: that there's kind of been an infection in Hinduism, this
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: idea that the body is maya and that we should
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: disregard it. And I think that's led to a lot
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: of ill in India, including being colonized. We weren't strong
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: enough to like fight off this tiny little island for
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: goodness enough yoga. I know, it's like, come on, it's
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: like we're the land of Krishna, where the land of Ardena.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: And when these like pasty guys came off of boats,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: you know, we surrendered.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's crazy. Well let's get back to the thirty
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: one hundred. Just this is so fascinating, this crazy race.
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that really struck me that's
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: just undeniable when you watch the movie is when you
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: take a gander at these twelve competitors that show up
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: to do this. You may be thinking, these people are
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: going to be serious athletes, are about to tackle like
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: the craziest thing you can possibly imagine, And then you
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: look at them and they just look like it's not
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: that they don't look it's not that they look unathletic,
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: but they don't strike you as examples of the athlete
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: you might be imagining.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: They just they're like everyday people. It's shocking, like and
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: to put it in the most kind of like derogatory
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: or discriminatory language. You know, one of the best runners
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: is a plumber. And it's like if somebody told you
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: he was a plumber, you'd go, like, yep, I see it.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: But if somebody told you that, like, you know, he
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: can run thirty one hundred miles, I'd agree, but I'll say, like, nope,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: I can't see it. Little stocky missing a few teeth,
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: forty eight years old. Right, you're right. It's like people
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: aren't ripped.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: They look like weekend warriors, they do, you know, And
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: the true protagonist of the movie is this guy, ashprah Hamal.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah said, that's exactly right.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: Who is He's a paper boy from Helsinki, right, is
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: he like forty five or something.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: Forty four years old? Four? But you know, the paper
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: boy aspect kind of belies this incredible focus on a
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: spartan esque lifestyle. He's chosen to be a paper boy
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: because he can train for twelve hours a day. You know,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: he's pushing a little cart through the streets of Helsinki,
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: going up and downstairs, delivering mail. And for him it's
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: the ideal lifestyle. Like he's on his feet twelve hours
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: a day. At the same time, he lives in a
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: little tiny cabin, you know, like a teenager. He eats ramen, chocolate,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: and soda all day long. And his six day mark,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: actually his ten day mark is eight hundred and thirty
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: three miles, which means he ran eighty three miles a
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: day for ten days. He's ranked on all time rankings
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: of these races. But it's like you said, it's like
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: the question is like, how does somebody who does not
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: look like the prototypical ultrarunner achieve things that the prototypically
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: built ultrarunner probably couldn't even dream of.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: Well, it's because I don't really these It's because all
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: of these people are first and foremost devotees and secondarily
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: runners not necessarily devotees of srishin Moy, but they're devotees
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 2: of on this path towards higher consciousness, and the athletic
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: aspect is really just a vehicle for that.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: That's exactly right. There was a gentleman from Germany named
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: Wolfgang Schwerk who has the second best twenty four hour
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: race time of all time. I believe around one hundred
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: and eighty miles done in twenty four hours, and he
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: came to do the race in two thousand and four
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: and averaged seventy six miles a day. And he looked
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: like an ultrarunner world champion in a number of different races, tall, lean,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: athletically built, but for a German, he had actually taken
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: up the name Madupran, an Indian name, and he was
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: following another Eastern spiritual teacher, so he had an attitude
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: that was beyond competition, even though he was a globally
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: ranked ultra distance runner.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: Have you thought about what you think might happen if suddenly,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: you know, Rob Krr, like the current crop of like
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: elite ultra endurance runner showed up to tackle this race.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: What might happen.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, we did a pre screening of thirty
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: one hundred Run and Become in Denver, and Claire Gallagher
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: was there in Chrissy Mole and Mike Wardion had just
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: finished I Believe the hard Rock and he lives on
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: the East Coast and his kids had wanted to see
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: ant Man, and so he goes into this random theater
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: in Denver where we're doing this pre screening and he
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: sees Chrissy and Claire and he goes like, what are
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: you doing here? They're like, aren't you here for the
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: Running movie. He's like, no, like I'm here to see
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: ant Man and they're like, come see the Running movie.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: He's like absolutely pushed his kids into ant Man. And
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: after the movie he said, you know, we all have
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: known that this race existed, but it's not on social media.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: You know, there's no real way to learn about it.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: You know, it's like when people climbed Everest. There isn't
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: a documentation in the New York Times. Once a decade,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: the New York Times writes a story on the thirty
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: one hundred, but that's it. And he said afterwards, I'd
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: always been curious about this race, and now I'm a
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: lot more curious, and you know he's vegan, he meditates,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: and I think he also was once kind of sponsored
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: by Carnival Cruise Lines to run some crazy distance around
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: the deck of a ship. So you know, he's got
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: everything you need. He's got the inner attitude. He's also
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: got this like mindset where you can run in a
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: circle for countless hours, and you could see the movie
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: spark something in him. Camille Heron, who I think has
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: the fifty mile world record for females, won the Comrades Marathon.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: She emailed me that she's always been interested in the
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: Self Transcendence Race. I think there's so much mystery around it,
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: and I'm hoping that the film will unlock some of
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: that mystery and show that like Ashbrihnal, he doesn't care
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: about nutrition, he doesn't care about anything other than the
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: meditative aspects of the race. Other people are much more regimented,
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: but they all, like you said, have that same type
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: of inner attitude where they're expecting to become better people
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: through this race, and that hope and belief and reality
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: is what helps him make it through the miles.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, he repeats time and time again that
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: this is his meditation. That's why he's doing it right.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: And the race each day starts with a one minute
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 2: meditation and he you know, you could see his head
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: is bowed and his eyes are closed and he kind
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: of begins that run with his sort of offhanded shuffle
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 2: that he does. You know, it's like you see him
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: going and you're like, look at that form, How is
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: that guy possibly going to run thirty one hundred miles?
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: You know, to your previous question, I think people like
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: Rob Timothy Olsen to Mason, Yeah, you know, people like that,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Clara Gallagher. There's a whole crop of people that have
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: popped up. Scott Jurrek obviously, you know, incredible runner who've
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: done these like epic races with this like like otherworldly focus.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: You know, if they use that determination and also they
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: probably have it, but built the patients understanding that this
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: is a fifty two day race or forty five day race.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: If you're going really fast, I think they'd have exceptional experiences,
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: you know, and do exceptionally well. You know, our novel
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: character Sean Martin's dad, Alan Martin, who's in the movie
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: as a medicine man and the Navajo hadn't ever allowed
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: people to film their running prayers, and for some reason
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: he wanted to open it up to us and got
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: permission from other elders. And so he was asking me
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: who were the keepers of the land of the thirty
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: one hundred. He's a very normal, very deep and beautiful man,
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: and not trying to make this sound like he's some like,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: you know, like shaman up in the hills. But he said, like,
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: who are the keepers of the land of the thirty
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: one hundred? And I'm thinking, like, this is a sidewalk
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: around Thomas Edison High School bordering the Grand Central in
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: Queens And so I said, well, the Lenny Lenape tribe
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: used to be there, but they left in the sixteen
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: hundred seventeen hundreds. And he said, they've kept this land sacred.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: And I said, does that mean that they knew that
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: the thirty one hundred was going to be there? He said,
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: of course not. But it's like any time, and this
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: is what he said. He said, anytime there is a
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: sacred race held on a particul piece of land, that
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: piece of land was destined for that race, for the
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: Navajo and a lot of Native Americans. It's like places
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: have consciousness to a greater degree than they do. For
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: you know, any of us in the West. It's not
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: just the beautiful mountains that have consciousness that deserve prayer
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: and worship. It's everything. It's the rock faces, it's the
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: rock walls, it's the pathways, it's the plants, it's the
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: consciousness of the dirt. And so he basically said that
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: this course has been consecrated for time immemorial. And even
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: though it's crazy to think that, like sidewalks have consciousness,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: you can either say that runners have attributed the consciousness
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: to it or they've drawn drawn out the consciousness. That
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: course has this exceptionally deep peace for the location that
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: it's in.
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: Right, It's so ironic and bizarre though, because you just
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: it defies any notion of what you think that course
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: should look like.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: And back to Kobe Oran, it's like, here's a guy
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: who's so set on competition and so good at it,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: and you know, so expectant of being able to set
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: records that he even realized that the race is dictated
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: by the course, and the course dictates that. You look
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: at this as a pilgrimage, and a lot of people
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: have done the Transcontinental like from San Francisco to New York,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: and the logistics of going up the Sierras, the Wassach,
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: the Rockies and then the flats and the rolling hills
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: of Nebraska are exceptionally challenging. And it's very difficult from
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: seeing people who have done that race, you know, to
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: disassociate your mind from the trucks whizzing by, you know,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: the lack of aid every half a mile. But this
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: course allows a type of flow.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost you know, the simplicity of it, the
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: fact that it is so banal contributes to the ultimate goal,
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: which is to kind of you know, transcend physical place
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 2: and and reach some kind of higher state of consciousness.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 2: And the repetitiveness of it. It's almost like repeating a mantra,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 2: you know, or using you know, a mala or a
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 2: prayer bed. It's a it's a it's ritualized in its
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: own way. The repetitive nature, the fact that it's only
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: a half mile and not a two mile course, the
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: fact that you're constantly passing the same thing. There's something
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 2: about that that almost creates that trance like state or
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: or allows that to you know, percolate to the surface,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 2: perhaps with a little bit more facility.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's two outcomes for discipline, right. There's there's austerity,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: which is suffering but with a lot of determination, and
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: there's joy. I'm sure people have had the experience of
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: austerity in that race. In fact, I know from manners
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: that you know. Oftentimes the first six to ten days
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: are are filled with exceptional suffering where the body, the mind,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: the heart are getting used to the pounding, to the repetitiveness,
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: to the monotony. But at some point in that race,
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: like for Sean Martin when he leaves his door in
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: the Navajo Nation, his discipline is translating to joy. In
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: the thirty one hundred, those of us with the Western
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: mindset find that or see that it takes six to
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: ten days for the runners to overcome suffering and channel
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: that focus and that discipline into joy. But even the craziest,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: most sociopathic, psychotic, looney, insane person on earth could not
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: complete thirty one hundred miles. So the question is like,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: why are they doing it. It's not because they're crazy.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: It's not because there's like a path, this is a
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: path of austerity or suffering compounding into more suffering. It's
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: because there's a legitimate feeling of joy and there I
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: say bliss that these runners feel and you end up
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: seeing it in their faces if someone wants to go there.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: You know, the race is usually from mid June to August.
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's it's not like there's a big crowd
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: of people there. You could just walk right up and
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 2: be right there.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: And all the runners will come up and greet you.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: They want to talk to you, you know, they want
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: to they want to offer their joy, not just because
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: they're lonely out there, but because it's like they're feeling
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: these like deep, deep emotions and feelings. And it's it's
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: like the Japanese say, it's like when you're feeling that,
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: it's like you want to be an emissary between in
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: the Japanese sense, the bud and humanity, or here between
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: your soul and humanity. You're feeling something that you feel
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: that other people are looking for and you can offer it.
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: And so these runners, they're like little vessels going around
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: in a circle.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: How come it doesn't get more attention? You'd think, like, okay,
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: here it goes against been going on forever. You're in
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: New York City, you know, media capital of the planet.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 2: Why aren't why aren't people writing about this and talking
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: about it more?
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: You know, And this is what I wanted to do
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: this movie. ESPN and a few other filmmakers have tried
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: to do a movie on the thirty one hundred and
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: the only way to approach it, I found, is through
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: the spirituality. And if you're looking at making a movie,
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: something has to be inherently visual. The thirty one hundred
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: isn't visual. That's why we have the Kalahari bush. When
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: the Japanese monks, the Navajo people that have come to
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: write about thirty one hundred have either just focused on
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: the mind numbing that like foot splitting realities of the mileage,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: and there's only so often that you can write about that.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: But the deepest articles have been about the spirituality, and
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: that really relies on the writers. That relies on the
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: editors to recognize that this isn't a one day assignment.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, we were out there for fifty two days.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: This is a fifty two day assignment because drama happens
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: in moments and you have to be there when someone
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: has kind of like a flowering of a spiritual experience.
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: Does it make you want to do it.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: It does. You know, filmmaking is really a really hard
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: lifestyle for me because we're always traveling, and you know,
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: I've been told that my body type is like of
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: a bird meeting and the practitioner who told me this
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: was like, what does a bird need? And I said
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: worms and he said no, a bird needs a nest.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: So it's like, you aren't meant to be traveling. But
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: I'm always traveling, so I still do forty five or
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: fifty miles a week. But to train for this race,
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: apparently the way to do it is, you know, five
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: or six mile runs Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: forty five or fifty Sunday thirty five or forty.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: That's what everyone says, that's the way to go.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: It's like stacking. It's like you want time on your
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: feet and even then it's like you don't need to
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: worry about pace. Like I did it. It was one
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: of the best training runs of my life. I did
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: a run with one of the thirty one hundred mile
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: runners or we started in Queens. I had my MasterCard.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: We ran eight miles to a donut shop. Because you
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: have to train and eat we ate donuts.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: That's the thing about running in New York. There's always
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: some place to go, I know, jump in and eat.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: You're never too far away.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: And so we ended up doing a thirty mile training
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: run that was just going from like Smoothie Bared or
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: Ramen Shop. And that's the way they train, you know,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: they run forty fifty miles on like ted corbutt on
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: one day and they try to repeat that to get
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: their body used to the idea of like maximum mileage
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: with zero rest.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: Well, Ashbernal, he sort of said he doesn't really he
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: didn't even really train, right, He just lives an active
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 2: lifestyle where he's kind of moving all the time, and
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 2: he didn't really put too much thought into some kind
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 2: of race specific program.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: So I asked him, and again he'd done the race
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: thirteen times.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: Before and he's won how many times?
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: Eight times?
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: Eight times? Right?
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: So I asked him, like, what's the most important thing?
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: I think every ultrarunner knows this in their hearts. Your
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: ability to finish a race is directly proportional to your
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: ability to overcome problems and to realize that most problems
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: aren't actual problems. And so Ashbrhanal tries to change activities
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: every chance he gets to during the daytime to keep
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: his mind nimble and to realize that it's like you
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: can have a problem and you can push past that
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: problem by changing the way you approach it, changing your activity,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: changing your mindset. This part's not in the film, but
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: we ended up going with ashburhanal to Japan where he
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: was climbing Mount Fuji as a way to train for
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: the thirty one hundred.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. It's so counterintuitive because you would think the
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 2: best way to train for this is to run as
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: much as possible and to really connect with what it
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 2: feels like, to stay in it in that same repetitive
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 2: motion for as long as possible, irrespective of the level
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: of discomfort that you're experiencing, and that would mean just
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 2: doing the same thing as long as possible.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: I think there's two reasons why he tried to climb Fuji.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: Number one, he wanted to do it in the winter
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: with no preparation, so by the time he got up
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: the mountain, his feet his shins were covered with blisters,
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: and he knew he could he would never have worse
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: blisters than he did on that trip, and the physical
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: challenge was so enormous. Again, he knew that he'd never
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: face anything like that in the thirty one hundred. At
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: the same time, like when you are going around the block,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: you are relying on your power to visualize, and being
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: in those exceptionally beautiful areas gave him the imagination, you know,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: to be able to like just transport his mind.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: Well, there was that other guy who had horrible blisters Vasu.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: Vasu had a blister horrific Yeah, honestly the size of
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: like a lemon. Yeah, you know, I've.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: Never seen blisters like that in my life.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: And he did seven hundred miles.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 2: I kept going with those with that, Like I can't
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 2: believe he didn't quit.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: Vasu is also like the sweetest, most sincere person on
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: that course, where like he's just overflowing with gratitude. I mean,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: like that's the culbination of spirituality, right, trying to be
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: grateful to everything, and you see him, he's just like
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: just this like mushball of gratitude and he's pounding out
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: seventy two to seventy five miles today.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: And you'd expect to see these athletes throw temper tantrums
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: once in a while with their crew, and you don't
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 2: see any of that.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: They do, they do.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't make the final matter.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: No, you know, as people will see in the movie
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: of the one of the first time participants, a woman
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: named Shani to Achenbach Koenig, who's a professional cellist, you know,
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: one thousand mile ten day specialist. She decided to bring
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: her husband as her handler. And for people who've done
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: you know, stage racers or fifty milers or hundred milers
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: with crew, I think they had all agreed that, like
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: your worst handler is your spouse.
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what they say.
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: So he was her handler, and you can't lose them,
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: like if you're in a one hundred miler and you
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: lose them for ten twenty miles and then you see
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: them again, you know, every half a mile. He was
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: there with you know, pure love, but also pure concern
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: for her.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: He kept telling her like you got to drop out.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: You know, And people will see this in the movie.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: But in nineteen ninety six she did an ultra in
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: Vienna one hundred k race where you know, she was hot.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: It was eighty eighty five degrees. She overheated and she
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: was in a coma for two days and the thirty
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: one hundred at eighty day eighty degree day is cool.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: You know, a couple of summers ago, even this summer,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: it was ninety five ninety eight degrees for six eight
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: days in a row. And that's not even heat index,
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: that's just like air temperature.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: And how many people dropped out.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: Last year there was a should say very few Americans
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: have done this race. There's been one woman named Superba
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: Beckerd from DC who did the race thirteen years in
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: a row and finished it. The first finisher was a
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: man named Ed Kelly. There was another American man that
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: did it too. Last summer, an African American woman sixty
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: years old named Miolande Holder finished with fifteen minutes to spare.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: And she was a racewalker, so there's only a certain
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: pace that you can keep up. So she had a
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: couple of bad days and she couldn't make it up
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: by doing a seventy seventy five all day. She had
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: to like one lap extra every day. She came back
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: as sixty one to do it this summer. But unlike
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: most summers, the first two weeks of this year's race,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: the temperatures were already hot, Yeah, and she had blisters
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: the size of ossus, like the size of like half
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: lemons after twelve days ulcers in fact, and nobody's young. No, well,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: the youngest finisher was twenty nine. Really was that recent
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: or that was about ten years ago? Yeah, I mean
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: they all look like they're in their fifties and sixties,
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: And I think that speaks to the kind of spiritual
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: strength that you need. It's not brute physicality, because unless
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: you can tap into a deeper energy, you're not going
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: to get joy out of it.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about the Navajo a little bit. I
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: didn't realize that there was this rich running culture that
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: infused the Navajo Nation.
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: Native Americans didn't have any other modes of transportation other
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: than their feet until the Spanish brought horse. And even then,
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: even though the Spanish came in the fifteen hundreds, it
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: wasn't until you know, really the late fifteen hundreds in
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: some parts the late sixteen hundreds, that Native Americans indigenous
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: people had access to horses. What they did for thousands
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: of years is they ran. They were exceptional runners. There's
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: a story of a man named Lewis Tauanamie who was Tauanama,
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: who was a Hope runner and represented the US and
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: the Olympics in nineteen twelve, and he went back to
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: the Hope Nation to do an exhibition ten k race,
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: and he and another kind of Anglicized Westernized. There's other
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: reasons why they were anglicized. They appeared in their singlets
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: and a couple of elders said, you know you're going
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: to dress like that to do a race up here
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: on the Mesa. And this was a person who was
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: actually third place in the Olympics, Lewis Tauanama, and the
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: elder said, I'll beat you. And apparently the two elders
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: who were who jumped in the race were so far
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: head of the two kind of modern participants after three
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: or four miles that one of them, the bronze medalist
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: in the nineteen twelve Olympics, dropped out. Running wasn't just
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: a way of life. Running was a way to connect
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: with Mother Earth and with Father Skuy. It gave men
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: and women, you know, such a deep sense of place
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: and a deep sense of power. In a lot of
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: Southwestern traditions, the Navajo in particular, running is still used
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: as a coming of age ceremony, the equivalent of a
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: bat mitzvah is practiced, and young girls, as one of
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: their last rites of passage, have to go on long runs.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: It wasn't just exercise. It's like if you look at
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: one of the most spiritual practices, the coming of age ceremonies,
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: and realize that, like long distance running is a part
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: of that, you can get a glimpse into how important
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: it was.
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. What do you I mean, this is a
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: little bit of skance, but.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: How do you.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 2: Think about that relationship between running and it being this
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: this really primal transcendent experience? Like why running? Why not
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 2: something else? Like what is it about running that triggers
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 2: that in the human body and mind?
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: You know, when we were with the Kalahari bushman and
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: they had been living in an unbroken lineage in the
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: Kalahari Desert in Botswana and northern South Africa for more
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: than one hundred and twenty five thousand years, and evolutionary
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: biologists say that we might not have all descended only
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: from the sand bushmen of the Kalahari, but each one
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: of us has DNA markers that are only found or
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: only exhibited by the sand bushman. So it's like we
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: flowed through those people. When we were with them, I
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: asked them, I said, like, you know, and they run
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: to survive. They go on law long persistence hunts. And
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: what that means is that, you know, when we were
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: beasts on the savannah, we didn't have a physical advantage
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: over any of the creatures, from the large elk to
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: obviously the big you know, the big cats. What we
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: could do was run for quite long distances. We'd sweat
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: through every pore of our body. At the same time,
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: you know, when we took steps, those steps were decoupled
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: from our breathing apparatus. A horse or a dog, when
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: they extend fully their four legs, their rib cage expands,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: take a breath. When they push off, all four legs
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: come together and the breath is pushed out. They're anaerobic,
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: you know, machines. We're aerobic machines. At the same time,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: we learned how to carry water. We could carry water
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: in gourds or in skins, and we learned to chase
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: big beasts away from watering holes. And they'd run thirty
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: forty miles, you know, in a gallop, and we'd track them,
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: and we'd scare them away from the watering holes that
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: we knew were in that area, until after two or
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: three days they were quivering masses and like dehydrated flesh,
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: and it was easy to approach them with a poison
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: arrow and shoot them. So that's how we survived on
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: the savannah. At the same time, there's a deep cosmology
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: among the Sound bushmen around running and the practice of hunting.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: They say when they run and hunt, they're able to
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: access the power of their ancestors. They're able to access
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: the power of the earth to overcome the feebleness and
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: the weaknesses of the human body. And so my question
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: posed to one of their hunters, was you know what
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: came first? Did you build it? I mean not that
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: he would, he's an anthropologist, but do you know there
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: was the cosmology around running built because of the physical
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: reality that running was our weapon.
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 2: Right, that necessity drove it.
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: And he said no, He said that we hunted because
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: we understood the power of running, like running was our
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: spiritual practice, and we challenged that we channeled that into
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: an ability to survive. Running was the first religion. One
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: would also say dance, but running and motion, motion on
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: Mother Earth than using the human body the channel non
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: human are superhuman energies. That was man and woman's first religion.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: That's baked into us as mammals.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 3: You know, I'm not sure I totally got that from
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 3: the movie, because when you when we explore the Kalahari,
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 3: it's more about the threat to their way of life
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 3: because of hunting bands and how they're kind of trying
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 3: to figure out how to preserve this culture of.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: Running and their way of life in the wake of
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 2: you know, changes in the modern world that have now
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: basically told them they can't do what they've always done done.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: But I didn't understand the spiritual depth of how deeply
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 2: that runs.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: You know, there was a lot in this type of
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: a movie where we're trying to combine the thirty one hundred,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: the color higher.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 2: They're trying to tell all these different stories and trying.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: To make them all work together. There were only certain
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: ways that they would all work together, and some things
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: had to be left on the of course cutting room
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: floor nature. At the same time, it's like as you
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: saw in the movie, when you see people still running
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: after animals, it forces us to pose that question where
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: we tried to dive into the cosmology, into the spiritual
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: power that running might be able to afford somebody, and
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: that's kind of the impetus of the movie. Yeah.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 2: I mean what I got out of that is, you know,
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 2: just for people that are listening, a ban has been
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 2: placed on hunting, and the Kolerhi are in this position
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 2: of saying, Okay, do we defy the ban or do
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 2: we adhere to the law, and ultimately a great peril
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 2: to themselves, they say we're going to do it anyway.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: And you can look at that a number of different ways.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 2: You can say, well, they're just they're not law abiding citizens,
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 2: or you can say, frankly, maybe they don't have a choice.
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 2: This is so deeply bred into who they are that
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: they just have to do it no matter what.
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety seven, I'm using the color because it's
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: important in this case, the Black Botswan and government found
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: copper underneath the Kalahari Desert, which is the size of Massachusetts,
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: and it was considered an uninhabitable mass and the Kalahari
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: bushmen were allowed to live there unmolested, even though they'd
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: only been discovered less than one hundred years before. But
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: once copper and other resources were found, this anti indigenous
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: colonial mindset kicked in and the entire population of the
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: San Bushmen were relocated, much like almost every single Native
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: population in the United States North America was relocated. So
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: we actually took one of our associate producers, who's the
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: executive director of Wings of America, the Native running organization,
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: with us on that trip, and his face was He's
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: a dark skinned fellow, but his face was ashen white
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: most of the time because he recognized that what happened
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: to his ancestors on the Navajo nation in eighteen sixty eight,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: you know, when four years pri they were force marched
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: off their nation because a civil war general thought that
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: there was gold there that could finance the entire civil
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: war proved to be untrue. He was seeing that happen
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: to the Kalahari. He was seeing an entire generation that
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: was forcibly separated from the culture. And our main hunting
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: character was forced off the Kalahari, and, like you said,
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: for the movie, chose to sneak back onto their ancestral
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: home site penalty of death and penalty of imprisonment if
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: he was caught hunting. But the hunting band was placed
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: as an excuse saying that the sand bushmen, you know,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: shouldn't be allowed to hunt animals because we have a
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: lot of tourists coming in to look at animals and
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: we don't want them to kill them. The sound bushman said,
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: no animal species have been you know, extinct in the
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: you know, wiped out by us in the last one
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five thousand years. So there's a complex
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: set of rationale. It's complicated, but the main thing is
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: that the government is forcibly trying to strip these ancient
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: runners of their ability to run and hunt.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that dovetails into Sean's story on the Navajo nation.
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 2: This this one hundred mile run that he embarks upon
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 2: that you chronicle is really his way of connecting with
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 2: his ancestry by traveling from the school that his father was.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: Correct me if I'm wrong, the school that his father was,
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 2: the sort of government school that his father was forced
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: to attend that taught, you know, the traditional historical record
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 2: that is at odds with this person, you know, this
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: tribe's experience traveling all the way to the his father's
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: ancestral homeland accurate.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: It's absolutely accurate. It was legal in the United States
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: to forcibly remove a Native American boy or girl from
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: his or her parents until nineteen seventy seven. And what
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: that really led from was this notion that by stripping
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: Indian kids away from their cultures, they could The phrase
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: was kill the Indian, save the man. If you killed
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: the cultural part of the Indian, you would save his
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: or her soul.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 2: By indoctrinating them into a historical record that basically tells
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 2: the conventional wisdom of America.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: And forbidding them from speaking their own language and forbidding
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: them from their ancient practices. So our Navajo character, Sean Martin,
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: his dad Alan, was forcibly removed from their property in
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: northwestern Arizona to a government boarding school near Flagstaff, and
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: as a six year old boy, he was so traumatized
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: that annually he began sneaking out of the school and
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: running at night one hundred and ten miles back home.
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: A number of kids tried that the father did, or
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: Sean father did. A number of kids around the country
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: that were forcibly schooled tried that, and many many died.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: And this was a trauma that young Sean Shawn Martin,
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: the modern day runner lived with He knew that his
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: father had a terrible childhood. At the same time, he
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: knew that running saved his father. He and his brothers
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: became exceptional runners, but they ran to the point of
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: absolute physical suffering because they knew of the suffering that
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: their dad experienced.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: It was a way to connect with that.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So in the film, we look at four aspects.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: We look at running to transcend like the thirty one
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: hundred mile race, running to survive like the Kalahari bushman,
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: running for enlightenment like the monks, and then running to heel.
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: You know, either your own trauma or this historical trauma
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: of your people. And Shawn's run from loop outside of
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: Flagstaff up to his ancestral home site was about one
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: hundred and ten miles. And I don't know if I've
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: seen anybody who was shouldering so much responsibility. Shawn's a
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: teacher and a very popular person on the Navajo nation,
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: and a lot of people knew that he was running
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: in honor of his father, and because they all had
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: relatives that had been forcibly schooled, they all felt that
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: he was running for their relatives. So Sean carried not
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: just his own historical trauma on this run, but the
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: expectations and the trauma of hundreds of other people.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't realize that that's a heavy burden to bear.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: It was heavy. It's hard enough, as people know, like
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: running an Ultra, but when you're running an Ultra, had
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: to challenge pain and where overcoming that pain means success
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: and if you don't overcome that pain, the run was
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: for not And so that's what he was doing. He
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: was trying to use this run as almost like a
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: last ditch effort to address the trauma of his dad's
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: childhood and Sean's son, who lives a very wonderful and
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: I would say sheltered life on the Navaja Reservation compared
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: to this young boy's grandfather. Shawn's father was accompanying Seawan
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: in the car, and Shawn's dad was too, And so
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: it was just a beautiful experience to watch this family
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: not just come to terms, not just heal their trauma,
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: but expose it and address it. For a lot of
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: people that couldn't run the same way that Sean was running,
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: and a lot of people whose ancestors died unlike Shawn's dad.
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's running across the most beautiful landscape. I mean,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: there's no eight station here. He's not running on highways
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 2: or roads like he is in the middle of nowhere,
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: in the most beautiful landscape you can imagine.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: And I think anyone who's been to Monument Valley, which
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: is on the Navajo Nation, or to other kind of
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: exceptionally beautiful landmarks in Indian country realize that when Native
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: Americans say that Mother Earth is the equivalent of the divine,
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: you see it. You know, It's like if the Grand
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: Canyon isn't like something that transports your mind and heart
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: into other planes of consciousness, you know, nothing ever will.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what has the process of making this movie taught
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: you or how has it changed you? I guess with
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: respect of running, of course, but also in terms of
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: how you think about and approach your life.
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: At one point I fancied myself as a quasi competitive runner.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, even in high school in the state of
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: California with thirty million people, one of the top ranked
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: middle distance runners burned out by mid college. Really didn't
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: know why I was running. In my twenties, I was
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: still racing a little bit marathons and stuff. Thirties also
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: didn't really have a purpose for running. It wasn't until
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: I met Sean, and Sean said again that running is
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: a prayer for the Navajo. It's a celebration of life.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: It's not punishment, and it's a teacher. It's like, if
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: you're going through hardships, you know, don't just sleep on it.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: You know, don't go eat like a tub of ice
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: cream or bar of chocolate. Address it and address it
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: the way humanity used to address it, by connecting to
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: your breath and to your feet. That totally changed my
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: attitude towards running. At the same time, you know, again,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: I'm I guess these days i'm a person of color,
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: but I reject those types of labels, and I think
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: running is a safe way to show that there are
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: actually things that unite people. Like you know, when you're
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: on a trailer or you're in a race, there's no red,
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: there's no blue, there's no elections. You're not when you're running,
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: especially when you're competing, you only have yourself and if
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: you're in a relay, your teammates, but ultimately you have
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: your feet and your breath and your heart. It's elemental
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: and that's given me a lot of soulace. It's like,
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: I know that we've been running for millions of years,
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: and it's an activity that we're going to continue doing
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: for hundreds of thousands more. Regardless of what the political
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: state of humanity is. We can go back to that state.
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: I think we'll all realize that there are things that
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: unite us that are much stronger than the things that
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: we think divide us.
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this ritualization of human behavior, and I like the
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 2: characterization of running as a vehicle to connect with your
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: breath and the power of breath. Right, when you think
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 2: of it in those terms, it starts to sound a
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 2: lot more like a metica practice than an athletic endeavor.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: At the same time, I think the question is, here's
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: a question for you, like, how do you balance your
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: spiritual life and the aspect of competitive racing.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a tricky thing, right, I mean, I think
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 2: my personal perspective on competition has always been inward facing, like,
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 2: I'm not that concerned with what anyone else is doing.
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 2: I'm trying to be the best version of myself. And
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 2: if I can walk away from an event satisfied that
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 2: I had that I had done that, then that's a win,
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 2: irrespective of whatever the leader board says, right, And I
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 2: think that's echoed in the movie with these runners in
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 2: the thirty one hundred. As much as you know, oshpra Hanal,
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: I don't know how.
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: To say that exactly it's exactly right, is I don't want.
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 2: To spoil it. I was about to. I was about
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: to spoil it, but I'm not going to. He He
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: sort of iterates throughout the movie that that it's not
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: it's not it is a competition, but that it's really
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 2: not about that. And I think the more these competitors
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 2: or anybody for that matter, can can get to a
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 2: place of being able to let go of that externality,
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 2: ultimately the better they perform.
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: Anyway, we began our theatrical run on Friday in Santa
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: Fe and as you know, the film's going to be
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: rolling out around the country from the Southwest to the
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: Pacific northwest, California, Colorado. But we were really lucky that
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: at opening night, Billy Mills, the Oglala Lakota ten thousand
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: meter champion from the nineteen sixty four Olympics, was the
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: host of the event at school and I got to
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: ask him that very same question. I said, from a
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: traditional native standpoint, you've told us about the importance of
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: the spirituality of running. At the same time, it's like
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: you major mark as a competitive runner winning a race
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: that nobody but you thought you were going to win.
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, nobody thought that Billy Merles was going to
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: win that ten thousand meter race. And if anybody needs
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: a pick me up, just on YouTube type in Billy
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: Mill's Olympics greatest last lap, I think, in any modern race.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: And he said, exactly what you did, he said, I
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: never raced to compete. He said, even when I won,
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: I was racing against myself. I was racing against my pain,
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: I was racing against my limitation. I was racing against
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: what my body was telling me it couldn't do, and
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: I pushed it beyond. And it just so happened that I
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: won the nineteen sixty four Olympic gold medal in the
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: ten thousand meters. But like, that's not how I defined
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: my races.
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the external manifestation of a mindset that
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 2: allowed him to do that, but it wasn't the goal.
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: No. And that's the interesting thing, because I think, like
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: once I realized that I could run. For spiritual reasons.
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: I became a better competitor. You know. It's like I
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: was much less dissatisfied with the second or third even
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: in a local race, than I ever would have been.
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: It's like I look a lot more to preparation. I
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: look a lot more or to the ritual of practice,
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: and I know that if I show up at the
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: starting line and I've done all the right things, I'm
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: going to have a good experience.
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: You sound like you're ready to tow the line at
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 2: next year's thirty one hundred.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: I would love to. Yeah, I would love to. If
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: not next year, then the year after.
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 2: Have you shown to the shown the movie to any
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 2: of the protagonists yet?
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: I did. We did a little screening for the stars
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: of the movie if you can go to Mount though, No,
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: we haven't shown it to them yet. We got to
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: show it to it.
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 2: Well, they probably don't have Wi Fi up there. You
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 2: can't send them a link.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: I want to be there and watch some when they
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: see it. But we showed it to a lot of
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: our Navajo characters in Sedona at a film festival, which
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: was our official world premiere in June, and we decided
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: to start our theatrical launch, not in New York or
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: LA where everybody wanted us to our distributor in particular,
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: because it's such a Southwestern story and it's like, we
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: wanted to bring it to the Southwestern native populations. So
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: we launched in Santa Fe, than albut Querque, and then
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: Phoenix and Sedona, and then go up to the mountain
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: cities like and i'd say mountain like outdoor cities like
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: Portland and Seattle and Boulder in Denver before hitting all
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: the big ones.
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. That's very smart gorilla marketing as well,
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: to hit the hotbeds of running where people are going
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 2: to be really interested in this and create that kind
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 2: of good word of mouth.
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: At our premier in Santa Fe, Henry Rono came. Henry
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: was one of the first Kenyons to come to the
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: United States for schooling. In the seventies, he ran for
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: the I think University of Washington, Washington State. But in
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight he set four world records from the
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: three thousand meters to the ten thousand meters I think,
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: even including the three thousand meters steeplechase in the matter
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: of just a few months. And this is like in
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: the seventies. And so Henry told me, he said, when
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: I grew up in Kenya, it's like I never practiced running.
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: We hunted in the sixties. Like this isn't like ancient history,
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: like these ancient bushmen, he said, in the sixties. Yeah,
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: we all hunted and that's how we ran. I've had
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: run twenty thirty miles, forty miles for play, you know,
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: and for work, and that's how we trained. It's like
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: we didn't separate. This is the interesting thing for me.
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: We didn't separate running from our way of life. We
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: didn't put on new gear to go running. We didn't
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: take off our old gear to go inside. He said.
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: Everything was done in the same stuff because it was
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: all a part of our life.
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you still see that. I think with some of
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 2: the cultures in Ethiopia and Kenya, with you know, these
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 2: great marathon runners Kipchog and the rest, it really emanates
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 2: from a way of life.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: This summer, Jim Walmsley who won the Western States, you know,
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: he trained up at altitude and lived basically in a
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: tenth the last six weeks in preparation for the UTMB,
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: and you look at that and you go like that
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: seems so elemental, the idea of just living to run
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: and running to live.
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, we got to wrap this up, but
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 2: I think we can close it down with a final question,
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 2: which is, what is it that you want people to
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 2: take away from this movie.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: That's a great question. I think a lot of people
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: have come in contact with running. Some people haven't enjoyed
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: it because they weren't taught the real purpose of running.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: Think a lot of us that do enjoy running might
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: not have the words to expand our enjoyment are running.
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that I know anything more than
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: anybody else, but the characters in the thirty one hundred
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: bring these perspectives which I hesitate to say aren't mainstream,
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: but they're so cool and identifiable that I'm hoping that
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: when people see the movie, they'll have a new found
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: appreciation not just for running, but for physical activity and
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: our place in the world.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I would imagine you come across people who will
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: say this is great, but like I hate running.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah right, Yeah, It's like if you hate running, that's okay,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: But it's like, do you like walking? Do you like hiking?
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: Is there a way, is there an activity where you
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: can go outside and put your feet on mother Earth
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: and understand that your breath is your connection to the heavens.
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: Do that. That's the attitude that we all used to
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: have back before we were encumbered by cars and shoes
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: and Strava and GPS.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: And also when you see the runners in the thirty
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: one hundred and you see what they're actually doing, it
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 2: might change how you define running for yourself.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: It's definitely a lot not what you think now, And
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: it's a lot harder for me to like cop out
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: of doing a daily workout now that I know you
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: know that, you know, on any of my week days
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: of three, five, six, seven miles, somebody out there could
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: have been doing fifty or sixty miles.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well awesome. I love the movie thirty
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 2: one ron and Become. It's very emotionally impacted by you
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 2: did a beautiful job. It's a it's it's really just
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 2: a fascinating exploration of this relationship, this nexus between running
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 2: and spirituality and self improvement and how this really is
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 2: part of what makes us human. And thank you for
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 2: making the movie.
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: I'm really grateful for the chance to have shown you
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: the movie. You've obviously an inspiration to me into a
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: lot of people, and I hope that you know, we
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: can all just follow in the footsteps of your work
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: and the other great guests that you have.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 2: On Oh thank you. If people want to see the movie,
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 2: where should they go to find the schedule?
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: They can go to www dot three one zero zero,
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: thirty one hundred film dot com. We're playing all over
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: the country, four to five shows a day, rolling out
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: city by city.
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, excellent, man, awesome, and I'm going to see you
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 2: later this week. Right, You're coming to the Running for
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 2: Good screening. Super exciting, going to be good man. We're
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: going to do a live podcast. It's the premiere of
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: that movie. Super excited to have you. Thank you for
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: sharing today.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much. Rich.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 2: Is there anywhere else where people can connect with you.
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 2: There's an Instagram account for the movie.
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: It's all at three one zero zero film at thirty
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: one hundred film and then on Facebook, Facebook dot com
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: forward slash thirty one hundred film. You can message that
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: and I'm the one answering all the message to the guy.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: I'm the guy, So hit me up. Let me know
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: if you're out screening and yeah, I'll say hi.
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 2: All right, cool, we did it.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: How do you feel?
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: I feel great. This is one of the most inspiring
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: conversations I've had like a year and a half. Good.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 2: Well, come back again. We'll do it again.
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: All right, thanks A. Jay Face plans running