Episode 243 | Sebastian Junger on Running, Writing, and Not Negotiating With Yourself | the morning shakeout podcast

You're listening to the Morning Shakeout Podcast. just keep moving forward every single runner knows what that means my life has a purpose and maybe it's not what i thought it was going to be but there were times when i didn't think i would be able to come back there's a lot of people that had different gifts and they don't use it i think if we all use our gifts we could do something really special not for ourselves but our family if we're really good we could do something for our community wherever we live all right chris douglas it's march 2025 we have a new episode of the morning shakeout podcast

and as always i appreciate you coming over to help me set this one up for everyone yeah happy to be here so aside from this conversation with sebastian younger which which we'll talk a little bit about here in a minute.

You're coming off of a 50k this past weekend.

Yeah. I would love to hear more about it because I purposely refrained from asking.

I know that you finished and you got through it in one piece, but I don't know any details of the race.

So whatever you'd like to share, let it roll.

Yeah. Well, you know, as listeners of the show know, I've been pretty injured and this was kind of like a big comeback.

So I was trying to be really realistic, which is something that we spoke a lot about.

out just, you know, all day pace.

I ended up running with two really good friends of mine and doing it kind of like no man left behind, which turns into you're going at the slowest person's pace, um, which for better or for worse, I don't know, at some level you just want to get her over with, but yeah, but it was great to be out there.

This race happens. This is a friend of the pod friend of ours, Dylan Bowman's race.

Um, the big Alta, the big Alta it's literally in our backyard. These are trails that I've been running for years.

It's only in the last two two years since this race has existed that i've seen more than like one other madman out there like especially early in the morning so it's been great to get some some more traffic on what i think are actually really hidden trail like hidden gems of northern marin keep that to yourself i don't want i don't want too many people up here there's a there's a reason uh they are i mean they really really aren't they're world -class trails but everybody it's too far up you know from san francisco people come from come out of the city um it's a it's a haul to kind of get all way

up here um to the the edges of marin county most people are just going to go to the marin headlands which are beautiful or the north side of mount tam which is also great but there's even more good stuff in marin if you venture a little further north hey don't don't do it because i don't want too much traffic on the you can just like bleep this out um yeah but one thing happened that i thought was really funny so before the race you know trail runners everyone's chatting and i'm there with uh you know i can't help but talk about swim runs i'm sitting there with a bunch of folks and this guy comes

up he's like you know i've recognized your voice but it wasn't until you started talking about swimrun and he recognized it not from the low tide boys but from the morning takeout i love it i think his name was was rod or rob i'm sorry if i'm misremembering but yeah it was super funny he was like totally recognized voice as soon as he started talking about swimrun i was able to place it oh that's that that's amazing my my podcast life is complete complete, that your voice is now being recognized out in the wild.

That's amazing. For better or for worse, I guess.

Yeah. What'd you think of this podcast I did with Sebastian Younger?

Oh my God. So for folks who don't know who this guy is, he is an amazing journalist and anthropologist. Like his work is amazing.

Read a lot of his stuff.

Tribe, obviously, In My Time of Dying, which we mentioned in this book, which actually, as soon as you came back from your trip where you purchased that book and read it in one sitting i saw you pretty soon after and he was like you need to take this book and read it which i immediately did um so love that book i think this conversation you know he alludes to uh making attempts at wisdom it was just wisdom there was no attempt there was a lot of there was a lot of wisdom and um just to follow up on what you said sebastian younger is not a name that many running nerds are going to recognize recognize

and he is an award -winning journalist like multiple time number one new york times bestseller wrote the perfect storm tribe war freedom his most recent in my time of dying which is phenomenal i recommend any of those books and we talked a little bit about it at the beginning of the podcast but the first book of his that i read was tribe and as i i'm apt to do who is this guy and i went down the rabbit hole to learn more about him and in some interviews that he had given he mentioned in passing that he was a pretty good runner back in his day so i i did when any any good running nerd would do i

looked him up and turns out he was very fast like 30 minutes 10k 412 mile i think 221 marathon like legit but no one would follow up on that and And I'm like, damn it, that's really interesting to me.

And so even before I – well, as I was starting the podcast a number of years ago, I had my list of like pie -in -the -sky guests.

And he was on that short list. So it was a major thrill for me to go to New York and sit down with him in person at his apartment and really just talk running and writing and how those two things parallel and intersect with each other.

So how did the conversation even come about?

Like, how did you get connected with him?

Shout out to my friend and friend of the pod, Phil Shin, who is also a previous guest of the Morning Shakeout podcast, episode 197.

Go check that one out if you haven't already.

So I recommended In My Time of Dying to you.

I recommended it to Phil some number of months ago.

And unbeknownst to me, Sebastian was doing a book reading in Southern California where Phil lives.

And Phil went to it, again, unbeknownst to me.

He texted me afterward a photo of him and Sebastian with a signed copy of the book.

And I was like, no way.

I was like, dream podcast guest. He goes, well, lucky for you, I mentioned to him that you have this great podcast. Here's his email.

He said he'd love to do it.

And I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

So shout out to Phil Shen.

And I emailed Sebastian, and he got back to me right away.

He said, I'd love to sit down and talk to you about running.

And this was a number of months ago.

And I said, hey, I think I'm going to be in New York in March. I'm definitely willing to wait if you want to sit down and do this in person, which he was.

And I was delighted to talk to him for about an hour and a half or so.

I love it. Phil's a legend.

Full stop. You know, you could tell from the conversation that, and we've alluded to it already, like he doesn't do a lot of, no one really asks him about sort of his running journey and how that's related to his other pursuits and everything.

So in this conversation I mean it just seemed really it seemed like it seemed novel for him to have to think about and sort of reach back into you know go down memory lane so to speak to kind of relive some of these moments.

I think it was. I don't know that he really talks about this stuff not because he doesn't want to because people just either don't know that about him or don't know how to ask him about this but it's a big i mean as he describes in this conversation not to give it away runner is a big part of his identity and has informed his perspective not just on writing but life in general and i don't want to really ruin it beyond that yeah yeah i mean i think there's so many things that he mentions like there was i couldn't help but chuckle and i'm not giving anything away where he's smells bangay and And kind

of takes him back to his high school days.

And I certainly have the Bengay smell sort of imprinted in my mind and just so interesting how, you know, as he moved through life, all the experiences he's had, like running is still such a foundational thing for his, you know, his being.

And just how visceral it can still be in something like Bengay or he mentioned stepping on the track.

And he can't run as fast as he did back when he was in high school, in college, but he still has those same sensations.

and yeah i just i loved this conversation yeah this was great i think uh we should probably leave it there but great great use of your hour and 20 minutes however long it was this was just a lovely conversation and if you haven't read any of his books start anywhere you want tribe is great war is great perfect storm is great you can't my time i've done you can't go wrong yeah all right we'll leave it at that uh before we get into the conversation just want to shout out the sponsors that make all my work here at the morning shakeout possible that is tracksmith new balance precision fuel and hydration and final

surge and you can go to the morning shakeout .com slash partners and there are urls and discount codes for all of those brands that you can take advantage of these are all longtime partners of the morning shakeout i've been running in New Balance and Tracksmith for, God, oh, 10 years now with Tracksmith, as long as they've been a brand, New Balance even longer than that.

They also share my Boston roots, so that is very personally meaningful to me.

Precision Fuel and Hydration, best in class fueling and hydration products for distance running.

Done a lot of work with them over the past seven or eight years.

In addition to just talking about how good their products are, we've created a lot of educational content, which you can find on their knowledge hub.

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And Final Surge is the platform that I use to power my coaching business and have since 2017.

So eight years now, I'm thrilled that they are on board as an official partner for the second year in a row.

And I couldn't do what I do from a coaching standpoint without Final Surge.

So themorningshakeout .com dot com slash partners.

Check that out. There's definitely some stuff for you to take advantage of there.

But before we dive in, just from like a product standpoint, anything in particular that you've been using from those brands that you want to shout out?

Well, interestingly, and I'm a big fan of all these brands, obviously, Precision Fuel and Hydration is about to release a new bar that they're calling their True Bar.

Bar. They were cool enough to send us some samples to try.

And I will say it's a lot like the chews that they release, but the consistency is a little bit different.

And it's, yeah, so I highly recommend people check that out when it comes out.

I'm not entirely sure when it's dropping pretty soon, I think, but that's just another way for, you know, to make sure that you're topping off, you're getting all your carbs that you need in order to perform well.

So yeah, I was pleasantly surprised with just like a new way of like taking in fuel.

They should be out and available by the the time this podcast drops so definitely check those out um great shout out there i'm going to shout out both tracksmith and new balance tracksmith released their first racing shoe it's called the elliot racer i got a pair a few weeks ago they were good to go out of the box i ran straight away a tempo run in them and they were great and i have some somewhat finicky feet as far as fit is concerned and i had no issues um nine and a half fit very true to size i like the shoe Aesthetically, it looks amazing.

But it performs right alongside anything else that is out there right now.

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And then New Balance 1080 V14.

I'm on my umpteenth pair of these shoes.

They fuel most of my mileage.

I do probably about 85 % of my mileage in this shoe.

and I've recently in the past few months uh been using them for more of like a an all -purpose shoe usually I would just wear them for you know my my distance runs some of my long runs I've even been doing some workouts in them because I've been traveling a little bit and I don't want to carry two shoes and they perform just as well for workouts as they do for general mileage so it is the workhorse of my shoe stable I really like put that thing to the test and it holds up every every time.

So, uh, V14 of the 1080, the official unofficial shoe, or is it unofficial official shoe of the morning shakeout?

I think we need to, we need to just drop.

It's just the shoe of the morning shakeout.

The shoe of the morning shakeout.

We will leave it at that.

Uh, and that's all we have for our intro.

I hope you enjoy this month's conversation with Sebastian Younger.

sebastian younger this is a thrill for me to be able to sit down and have a conversation with you i'm just going to give you a little backstory on how it sort of came to be i have a good friend of mine shout out to scott cropper he is a marine corps veteran and he told me many years ago to read your book tribe it's like i think you'll i think you'll like this i've never heard of you no i had no idea of any of your other writing even the the perfect storm growing up in Massachusetts just wasn't on my radar so I read tribe blew through it right up my alley I was like this is great I got to learn

more about this guy because it's kind of what I do so I go down a rabbit hole and I'm trying to find find other books of yours which I've read since then I'm looking for anything else that you've written online interviews that you've done and in a couple of stories it mentioned how you were a distance runner and a pretty good one at that i think correct me if i'm wrong 4 12 mile 30 ish minute 10k 221 marathon yeah yeah that's right exactly right in that ballpark and i was like huh this is this is fascinating but you never talked much about your running and i was like oh if i ever have the opportunity

someday i would love to just sit down and have a conversation with sebastian about running and writing and how those two things like interact and intersect and you know many years later here we are so So thank you for sitting down and doing this.

My pleasure. Running is no longer part of my life in the way that it was when I was, you know, young.

But it completely formed me.

And it's a topic that I adore.

And, you know, the running world is quite insular in some ways.

The athletes can be quite insular because they understand each other and other people don't understand them.

So when I'm giving press interviews or whatever, I don't even attempt to explain what long distance, like competitive intense long distance running is and what it does to a person does for a person because i'm talking to someone who doesn't know anything about it undoubtedly so that's why it never come up in my interviews all right well i don't know how long we're going to talk for today but we can just geek out about running for the next period of time when did it first come into your life uh i as a sophomore i transferred to a new high school and and uh i was a pretty good soccer player but the cross

-country coach said hey just try try try running the first race, see how you do.

And I won it. And so I just, you know, immediately fell in love with running.

There was something about it that, I mean, and I won, I think I won all my races that fall as a sophomore in high school, which of course was, you know, intoxicating and on some level, but, but also the practice of running just made me feel good.

I was a pretty solitary kid and and not at ease sort of socially and there was something about running that made me that I was doing something that no one else was doing that you know I'd run 10 miles or 20 miles that day no one else in the room had done that that kind of calmed me down it made me feel secure within myself and I think addiction is too way too strong a word but there was so there was There was certainly an identity and a dependency on that process that was very, very healthy and probably at some points not healthy.

Help me to place this just in terms of a time frame.

Is this 1970s or so?

Yeah, so I was born in 1962, and I ran my first race at age 15, which was 1977, and I won despite being doubled over by a very intense side cramps, stomach cramp.

I mean, I was running doubled over.

I mean, I never know.

It felt like I'd been shot in the abdomen.

But I did win, and that was all it took.

Yeah. Was that just going out too hard, and you were ahead of your skis?

I mean, as it happened, you just kind of hit the wall?

I don't know. I mean, it was a cross -country race, and I remember it was beautiful fall foliage, and I just remember being—the thing that hurt me most was the cramp in my abdomen.

And I was way ahead of everyone else, and my body clearly was kind of suited to do this.

And I don't have a typical runner's build.

I'm sort of more heavily built than most good distance runners.

So I was always, you know, in college, I was always the biggest guy on the starting line of the 1500 meters.

And so, you know, it probably was, you know, I probably would have physically probably better adapted to soccer or boxing.

There was some of those sports that require a little bit of body mass.

um but for some reason i was good enough at running to sort of make a a little bit of a dent in the in the competition and you know at least the competition that was around me when you started running in high school you mentioned how you came from soccer team sport into running which cross country is a team sport but it's really a solitary endeavor did that awaken something in you from like a competitive standpoint because you're like hey it's just me me against these other guys, and me against the terrain.

I mean, you just mentioned this first race, you're doubled over, but you were clearly trying to win and stay ahead of everyone.

Is that something you've always had, or did running unlock that for you?

You know, this is going a long way back.

I don't quite remember.

I just remember being amazed that I was winning, that I'd won, and just falling in love with the feeling of sort of primacy.

I mean, I'm sort of being, this is just me, and I won this race, and but also i i loved how running made me feel i mean racing is agony right i mean everyone's in their private hurricane of pain right and you know which is very different from a team sport and uh even with you know rowing right like you're i'm i'm sure rowing is incredibly painful physically uh at a kind of cardiovascular level but you're all you know the all the rowers in the the shell, I think it's called the shell, are rowing in unison, right?

They're together. They're sort of like one organism in a way.

Runners don't get that.

And so you really have to be prepared to suffer very intensely by yourself, right?

But something about it just made me, it had something that I needed at age 15, 16, right on through my 20s that I just, I really needed that personally.

I know that you grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Is that where you went to high school as well, or at least in the state?

I went to a private high school called Concord Academy, which was about 15 miles west in Concord, Mass.

Okay. But still in Massachusetts.

And this is late 1970s.

It's kind of like, I wouldn't say peak, but you're right in the first running boom.

I mean, Frank Shorter had won an Olympic medal six years prior.

Bill Rogers was really starting to make his mark at that point.

You guys do share an alma mater in Wesleyan, which I do want to talk about.

Were you aware of any of that sort of stuff, or were you just focused on your own running?

Oh, I was very aware of that.

I remember getting my first Runner's World magazine, right?

And all the gods were in its pages.

And Bill Rogers was this incredibly appealing person.

He was a very, very casual, relaxed local boy.

right and he just seemed to win the boston the boston marathon with just with a kind of nonchalance that was just extraordinary and um uh so yeah i watched every boston marathon and so the um that next spring after i started running which would be the spring of 78 i think toshihiko seiko wanted that correct right um and and i you know because i was a little bigger i was always looking for world -class runners that were a little bigger this made made me sort of feel like Herb Lindsay was a big industry you know he's like a pretty big dude I was like oh you can be a slightly different morphology

and run at a top level I was always sort of looking out for those guys like because Frank Shorter I'm never gonna look like Frank Frank Shorter right so so the next spring I I decide a week before the ball I didn't run all winter I didn't know that you were supposed to right I was new to this and a week before the Boston Marathon I thought I'm gonna run the Boston Marathon so i hadn't run since you know cross -country season so i ran you know like six miles the first day and or four miles the first day and the next day i doubled it i ran eight and the next day i you know like ran 12 and two days

before the boston marathon i ran 20 miles which i you know i never run that far in my life right and it was two days before the marathon and so i lined i just wanted to know if i could do it so then i lined up in hopkinton and did it and And I had 20 – two days before – I was still cramped from my training run.

My legs were still – and, yeah, so it was an illegal entry, right?

I was just a kid. My mother dropped me off.

And about halfway through, for some reason, my nose started to bleed.

So not only was I staggering along, but I was covered in blood, a 16 -year -old covered in blood, staggering through the Boston Marathon. But I finished in 315, right?

I mean, I just – totally untrained and pretty wrecked from a week of intense training.

And that was just sort of a seminal moment because I overcame, as many runners know, this feeling.

Like I overcame just an unspeakable amount of pain to get across the finish line.

And I was like firmly in at that point.

I was like, this is what I'm doing.

And I remember the cutest girl in the school, the next school day – it was like Patriots Day, so there's no school, right?

The next day, Tuesday, I'm limping around the school, and the cutest girl in the school who was a senior, was two years older than me, congratulated me.

I was like, oh, it was all worth it.

Every step was worth it.

That's awesome. And so from there, where did you go?

Were you like just let your body recover, and then you were kind of a year -round distance runner at that point?

Did you try to educate yourself a bit more about what you had to do to train?

Did you have coaching guidance at the time?

No, not really. Yeah, there was a sort of nominal coach, but I really coached myself.

You know, I read Runner's World.

There was a book that fell apart because it was a paperback that I read.

It was called The Handbook of Distance Running or The Handbook of Running, some big thick paperback book that had all kinds of information in it.

And, you know, I just read what I could and started doing intervals.

You know, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had the running watch. And, you know, I'd run quarter, you know, 12 quarters and, you know, 60 something and just destroy myself because I was running by myself.

There's no one to stop me.

Right. There was nothing to slow me down.

And I just ran maximal effort virtually every day.

And I ran up in the woods a lot and near my house.

And, you know, I went to a little private school, so I wasn't really part of the competitive high school competitive running network in Massachusetts.

and um but i sort of demanded to be led into races and i think i was sixth at the state coaches meet in my senior year and um uh i'm trying to remember the name the name of the guy who won he went to he ended up going to bc it was a really great runner uh anyway randy thomas no i remember his name too no um he had a portuguese name is ah shit what's his name he'll come to me anyway he's a wonderful runner i think he still coaches up in the north he's amazing amazing amazing runner but um uh so you know and then i got into wesleyan which had a illustrious running history ambi burfoot jeff galloway

bill rogers and um and you know as a uh as a freshman i was suddenly the second or third on the team and by sophomore year i was the best runner and uh i never performed particularly well nationally but i was you know i I was, you know, I ran some good times, right?

I mean, I ran some times I'm proud of her and, uh, three 55 .1 for the 1500 meters.

That's either four 12, four 13.

I'm not sure what, what, which, yeah.

Yeah. Um, and a nine Oh four for the two mile.

And then after college, I ran, my first marathon was two 22 twin cities and then I ran two 21 in Pittsburgh and, and, uh, uh, 30 Oh five for 10 K and 24 Oh five for five miles.

and 50 minutes 20 seconds for 10 miles you've got me in about half of my prs we're pretty close i think i've got you on the shorter end you're faster than me in the longer stuff all right right but very similar upbringings i mean i grew up in washington massachusetts i didn't start running till my junior year of high school i was a basketball player before before that and i had a basketball coach who said hey if you really want to be in good shape for basketball season you you should run cross country in the fall.

And I did that. But we had a coach nominally gave us workouts, but we didn't run between meets.

We didn't do anything on the weekends.

But I loved what you just described, that primal aspect of it and just being able to line up against people and see who could get to the finish line first. And I was kind of laughing inside when you were describing your first race because that was mine as well.

I didn't know any better.

I just went out as hard as I could.

And then gradually slowed down and ended up doing pretty well.

And I was like, oh, this is pretty cool.

And to this day, that's still a very intoxicating feeling for me.

And then I ended up running Division II at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and ran 409 for the mile, 351 for 1 ,500, 1439 for 5 ,000, but like 3050 for 10K.

And I've since like a 109 half and 227 marathon. So I think we're pretty evenly split.

You got me in the long stuff.

I probably have slightly better wheels.

Would you run the half, did you ever run the half?

Half marathon? No, half mile or 800.

152 and change on a relay.

Yeah, I was 154. Yeah, you had me at the shorter, yeah, absolutely.

And I'm still, now I'm 43 years old and I've kind of had this meandering running journey and I'm still at it, but I'm going back to the mile.

I did last year and I'm doing it again this year and it's been a lot of fun just to put spikes on for the first time in years and do those types of workouts again.

I mean, if I smell been gay, my stomach like turns over with, but it's, it's amazing that it's how visceral that response is just the sounds at an indoor track, my whole body, all of a sudden I'm 20 years old and my adrenaline shoots through the roof and I'm, you know, I'm 63.

Right. And, but it's amazing that those feelings never, they never leave you.

And I watched the Olympics or a track meet and my stomach is just churning, watching watching people sort of like jog to the, you know, like, you know, walk to the start and get into their start position.

And I can barely watch like, it's amazing how embedded those feelings are.

And I, it, uh, and I just read just recently, uh, a 65 year old ran a five Oh nine mile.

I'm like, damn, how do you do that?

I mean, more and more runners are staying with it longer in life, finding it later in life.

I mean, I think there's a lot of things contributing to that, which, which we can, which we can talk about, but I know exactly what you mean.

i mean a few years ago when i turned 40 i ran the master's mile at an indoor meet in boston i hadn't run an indoor meet in 16 years and soon as i stepped in like hair on the back of my neck went up and i was like oh i remember what this is like and it was just like a very like visceral feeling and when they called us a start line i was like oh yeah i i love this but on the flip side like my first marathon i had a bad experience with lemon lime gatorade and to this day it's like a It's like a bad drinking night in college.

I see lemon -lime Gatorade.

It just makes my stomach churn.

Oh, my God. Right, right.

Yeah, there was something...

I mean, obviously, I didn't go to the Olympics or anything.

Had that been the point of all this, running would have been a failed enterprise, right?

But it wasn't. It was an enormously productive, healthy thing to do.

And one of the things I learned was that, like...

And it served me my whole life in different things, different ways, right?

Like athletes have to, endurance athletes particularly, have to learn not to start negotiating with pain.

Not to start negotiating with your body.

It's like, no, we're doing this.

And I'm not going to accommodate you by slowing down a little bit just because it hurts.

You just have to shut up.

It's like governments don't negotiate with terrorists who have kidnapped.

So you just cannot start that process of negotiation because you will wind up in a compromised position.

right and so athletes could very good and just shutting off that sort of like negotiative pathway we're like oh maybe we could just back it off a little bit because this really is hurting an awful lot right and and you you're not going to be a good runner if you give into that impulse i mean you have to be wise and tactical but you can't be sort of blackmailed into um taking it easy on yourself either in training or in racing and um there's something Something about that unnegotiating stance that you can, that I've used my whole life in, you know, when I'm on deadline and I'm tired and I'm sleepy

or whatever, or anything, you know, anything, even emotional pain, right?

It's like, no, I can, I can get through this.

Like, I'm like, don't give in.

Because in the long run, it's going to be worse.

And I use, I've used it with fear, you know, because I covered a lot of combat.

I know how to like not feel.

feel if when things get really bad i know how to like flip a switch and not feel anything which you know any good shrink will tell you is an unhealthy thing to do but in the moment it's very very healthy it's it's protective and very clearly adapted in evolutionary terms is clearly adaptive yeah i mean i think it's the same pathways in in your brain um regardless of whether you're running or i mean i've worked in media for a long time myself pushing on a deadline is as you you described um two things on that one i remember reading in bill rogers book marathoning he said if you really want to be

a good distance runner he's like he's like part of it is learning how to you have to force yourself he's like because there's going to be times when you just don't want to do it you don't want to hang on uh and he's like you got to force yourself and if you can't do that he's like you'll never be good and i think there's a lot of truth to that but to take a fairly big detour here but we'll we'll come back that can get us into trouble sometimes too and i think for you Personally, I just read your latest book, In My Time of Dying, and remember you mentioning before this aneurysm ruptured above your

pancreas, you had felt some pain there for months in that area, but nothing that completely paralyzed you at the time.

time and we deal with that as runners as well.

Like, Oh, my, you know, my ankle hurts, but it's, it's manageable.

It's like, I can kind of like, you know, get through.

And I, I wonder if, I'm just curious, like, was that part of you not wanting to maybe go to a doctor when you started feeling some weird thing?

You're like, Oh, well I just, I can get through this.

Like, I'm going to be fine.

It's not that bad. Yeah.

I mean, what I think I would say just as sort of, just a sort of an attempt at wisdom is that, you know, if you can ignore non -dangerous pain, um you you can lead a bigger life i agree right you don't have to dial things back you um but as you get older you know this i was in my 50s and your body changes and if you have a sudden new pain in your abdomen in your chest your abdomen it's not your ankle nothing in your ankle is going to kill you right but if you have a of a weird new pain even if it's not that intense intense but a weird new pain in your ab you know in your organs basically that just

sort of doesn't go away you got to get it checked out because there's a lot of things that are easy to fix that will kill you there's an awful lot of things like that and the things that will kill you don't necessarily hurt a lot it might just hurt a little bit but if they're new if they're out of the ordinary um if you keep noticing it for a few months something is going on your body isn't random, right?

I mean, something's going on.

It may be nothing to worry about, or it may be something that can be fixed very, very easily until it can't.

And then it's too late.

And then you were just stupid.

And so, you know, when I learned with this, and I, you know, partly because I ran so much when I was young and it was a healthy eater and all that stuff, I've had a, I've been healthy my entire life.

Like I've just haven't had to think about my body at all practically in any serious way and and so what I learned was that you're you are vulnerable athletes don't like athletes sort of function by imagining that they're not subject to the usual human human rules well we think we're invincible and that's adaptive right it helps you do the unimaginable right like and and um you know there's a corollary with some some soldier like highly trained soldiers as well though we're invincible we can do anything you know then you better think that on d -day right because you are doing the impossible right

and so it's adaptive but then you know as you get older that same feeling that myth about yourself which is so helpful when you're young and allows you to do things that will save your life and other people's lives or whatever, like it's a, that same thing becomes a danger to you as you get older and you, and it's that shift from the athlete mentality to like something more vulnerable is absolutely crucial to do and do gracefully and do well and with dignity because otherwise, you know, otherwise you risk dying, dying young and leaving your family bereft. You know, I mean, it really, you really,

really have to think that way.

Yeah, I appreciate that wisdom as someone who is now approaching his mid -40s and only getting older from here as we all are.

I mean, whether it's, you know, running or some weird pain that pops up in my upper body, it's not ignoring those things and pushing through.

I mean, you know, like you said, you don't want to be paranoid about it, but at the same time, it's like you want to make sure that it's nothing major.

You know, all my, you know, you get slower as you get older.

and I'm amazed like now if I sort of, and I'm in pretty decent shape, but 8 minute pace is sort of like a brisk pace for me when I was a kid, 8 minute pace was like walking I can't believe that I'm proud of running a 2 minute half doing what I'm doing, repeats on the track like that's just insane but you know what I would what I would say is that at the um god i just sorry i just lost my train of thought but the you you if you don't if you don't adapt to your changing body you're really not being an athlete athletes listen to their bodies they don't ignore them and your body changes sorry it's

just going to and the changes for me everything seemed sort of unchanged although my obviously your times get slower as you get older but boom in my 50s is when i actually started having actual issues that i needed doctors for a lot of them were related to my athleticism right so you know I I started taking like mineral supplements because I was wearing vitamin mineral supplements because I was running a lot I was worried I wasn't replacing all that stuff and I got kidney stones they sucked right it was good but it was a product of what I was doing as an athlete right and then I started boxing

and um I suddenly I needed a quadruple hernia repair not from getting punched but just because I was doing a lot of abdominals and i think i just tore it up and you're just used to moving in one plane of motion for so long that's that's right and i was used to ignoring the inputs like oh i mean i can i can crunch my way to oblivion right i mean you know if i have to and that's my mindset and so i what happened is like i had a quadruple hernia repair right like oh you know like uh totally unnecessary amount of damage right and then i started getting this crazy thing here's how the denial works

so I run outdoors when I can but sometimes I run in a gym I like to play with my heart rate and the pace on the treadmills, you know, whatever if the weather's shitty out, you know, whatever it's kind of fun to run on a treadmill once in a while and so I'm really curious what's my heart rate for each pace I'm a nerd and it's interesting because I don't have one of those watches so that's my only time to monitor myself in that way so this is like 10 years ago so I um I noticed is that if I up the intensity at all my heart rate would like flip into like 240 250 I'm like 240 like that's clearly the machine's

broken so I go to another another treadmill I'm like right up 240 250 like what like are all the treadmills in New York broken like what what's going on because clearly you can't have a pulse of 250 right i had atrial fibrillation i had afib and it's correlated with endurance sports right it's not heart disease in the classic sense right it's a heart that in some ways is almost too healthy too strong too big and it messes up the electrical process in the heart and i don't know exactly how it works medically but they've there've been many studies that have associated a atrial fibrillation in midlife

with really intense endurance sports when you're young, right?

And the symptoms that are devastating is that your heart is actually not, it's fluttering rather than really contracting.

So it doesn't fully empty its chamber of blood.

So your blood pressure plummets because it's not, you have this big muscle in your chest that's not fully contracting.

It's just sort of spazzing.

So your blood pressure plummets.

So all of a sudden you can barely, you're so weak, you can barely walk right but because i'm an idiot i would try to spar and run through a fib and i was just like no this isn't happening and i'm and you know it's absolutely devastating right and i finally went to a doctor and um and there's this sort of magical proceed there aren't there isn't much heart disease they can they can just fix right like like and this is one of them they i had something called an ablation and it's by catheter they go in your groin up in your heart and they cauterize, they burn around the part of the atrium that is misfiring

that triggers the whole heart to misfire.

They cauterize around that and the electrical signal can't get through the scar tissue and the heart stops going into AFib.

But again, that was from my, you know, very possibly from my athleticism when I was young.

It was a product of me being a very intense athlete.

Yeah. That was a very long detour.

I want to come back to where we were just in your trajectory as a runner.

So midway through high school, you really get into the sport and it just snowballed from there.

What else were you into as a teenager going into college outside of running?

I really liked the wilderness and I would go backpacking a lot.

I'd go camping a lot A lot of hiking I did a course called Knoll's National Outdoor Leadership School Which is our rival of Outward Bound I did that in the 70s And there was a lot of rock climbing I started rock climbing And I was really fascinated by anthropology And I ended up majoring in that in college But I Forgive me but I read a lot of anthropology anthropology in high school.

Like that was, I mean, I was a huge nerd in high school.

Right. So I, you know, I was, I was, you know, I was just fascinated by that and, you know, so I read all the time.

If I wasn't running, I was reading.

Yeah. Did that continue on through college?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I read, so in college, you know, I was a good runner, cross country track, you know, you're never as good as you hope you want to be, you hope to be, you know but but um it was the core of my life and uh um i studied anthropology all the everyone else on the running team was like econ majors and stuff practical things right and i was i was the one hippie on but i was also the best runner on the team right and uh uh so i studied anthropology i did my field work on the navajo reservation and i lived in fort defiance arizona and the navajo who have this, you know, tremendous tradition.

All the Native nations of North America have the, you know, great, great tradition of distance running.

And, you know, before the horse, running is really the only efficient way of communicating and traveling quickly.

And, you know, a runner can, a good runner can compete with a horse, right?

So as a means of communication, communication indian runners native runners were crucial to that society and as scouts and as hunters and warriors like it was the ability to to sort of run at a decent clip all day long was absolutely crucial the apache were renowned for being able to sort of cover 80 90 miles a day for days on end the warriors uh for days on end i mean they would raid down into mexico and then come back you know 300 miles basically without stopping it's extraordinary feats And so I did my fieldwork on the Navajo Reservation and trained with their best guys.

And there was a phenomenal, just world -class runner named Alvin Begay, B -E -G -A -Y.

And absolutely world -class runner that, you know, he beat Pat Porter up in Colorado at one point.

Just phenomenal runner.

And he was competing.

When I was there, he won all the races that I was in.

I'd be like second or third. and um and so i wrote a thesis about these guys about the modern competitive navajo running and its roots in in tradition and um and that was the writing that thesis was got what got me into journalism i got out of college and i i had no idea what i wanted to do and i thought that was probably pretty close to journalism i researched something i wrote about it i got honors in the a thesis i love doing it and so i thought maybe i'll just maybe i'll be a journalist i had no idea how to set out doing that but um that was what got me started on my career while you were running

with the navajo what were some of the most eye -opening things to you just observing them running with them understanding their relationship to running in the land well they're The way that they ran was tied into a cultural tradition that stretched back thousands of years, right?

So the young runners, they'd be there in, you know, Nikes and nylon shorts and singlet.

And they would have red paint dabbed on their forearms. Or they'd have an arrowhead around their neck.

And they were these Ritualistic Processes That helped them run fast I asked them about it I dabbed myself with red paint Because it helps me run swiftly And I wear an arrowhead Arrows are swift There's this direct link to an earlier era An earlier way of being That to me was like Incredibly exciting And they were modern teenagers teenagers that were running wanted to you know wanted to run track you know but they were also tied in deeply to this ancient thing the um the runners uh that were from the pueblo people right so the the hopi the zuni you know these are people that lived in very very

close confines on top traditionally on top of mesas for protection they were farmers and generally that those people would would say, well, I run to represent my community.

It's not me. I'm running for them.

And if I win a race, it's not me winning the race.

The entire community is winning a race.

And there was a lot of fear of witchcraft in those communities.

And so distinguishing yourself individually was kind of dangerous.

Because if you made too much money, if you were too this, if you were too that, people would start to mutter that you were a witch. Right?

It was a serious allegation.

And people were scared of that accusation.

So the runners were all like, no, no, no. no, I'm just doing this for everybody.

It's not about me. The Navajo were very individualistic, and they didn't live in tight communities like that, and they lived in sort of family units spread out in the desert, and they were absolutely running for themselves, right?

I mean, Alvin Begay was like, I'm Alvin Begay, and I'm going to—that's who's winning this race.

And so the cultural differences were really, really interesting, and of course genetically they were all very similar.

They were all extremely good runners.

runners it was ultra marathon marathoner named alwaki who who was early i can't remember what uh tribe he was but he was an early ultra marathoner i think he wasn't one of the first to do rim to rim uh grand canyon for example and uh yeah so just you know it was an extraordinary thing to be part of for a while how did that experience change your perspective or approach to running coming out of it i mean i you know i was already i was a junior in college when i was I was out there in the summer, and I was running 100 miles a week, and I ran everything about as hard as I could.

And I don't know if it changed that much. I mean, what I found with these Navajo runners was that they were trained just as hard as I – you know, we all met in the same place athletically, right?

And a couple of them were better than me.

I earned their respect because I was better than a lot of their good runners.

So I was – they were like, you're the first white guy I've ever seen that could beat our good runners, right?

Right. So I, which was great as an anthropologist because it allowed me, they wouldn't say white guy, they would say Anglo.

You know, I had their respect.

So they would talk to, they would answer my questions.

Right. And, and, and then there's just that fraternity of, of exhaustion and athleticism and pride in sport and sort of pride in your body and your athlete's body and what it can do.

It just transcends everything.

Right. And, and, you know, at the end of a hard 14 mile run up in the chuska mountains we were all the same right you know it was like combat's the same way yes they were all the same at the end of the firefight basically yeah that that's cool to hear that i mean that's what i love about running too it can knock down those walls you can take people from different backgrounds different cultures different communities and put them in that type of environment where we're all doing the same long run together we're hammering out intervals on the track we're on the race but we're all trying to do the same

thing we're all feeling the same thing and that's what i've always loved about about competition.

When you have someone next to you or in front of you, you see them pushing really hard because they want to, they want to beat you and get the best out of themselves.

I want to do the same thing.

And you don't even have to say anything in those instances.

It's just kind of like, you know, little head nod kind of at the end.

Like I understand you, you understand.

Yeah. We're good. Yeah.

I respect, you know, and, and there's nothing like fear or exhaustion to wipe out your ego, you know, and your ego is one of, you know, it's a great thing, but it also gets in the way of a lot of human connection.

And so if you're really exhausted at the end of it never work out a 20 mile run or if you're really scared like in in combat you know it just it gets it just wipes out those differences that we sometimes are too focused on well and i feel like both of those things i've never been in combat but they strip you down to your core and and you're on a level playing field at that right i mean that's the two places at times where i've thought i would give anything to not be in this situation the two circumstances would be when i'm just almost blind with exhaustion uh or when i'm like terrified you know

that either in a war or in some kind of athletic competition and you know i don't race anymore i don't compete anymore the boxing that i do is pretty mellow you know so but so i don't i don't have that i don't often have that feeling anymore more the one time i did recently was um not that recently but i was i was in my 40s and i and i i walked the inca trail um without i didn't acclimate and we flew to cusco and and the next day we stepped out onto the inca trail at 14 000 feet and and um maybe it was two days later but i i mean i you know i was like damn i haven't hurt this badly since college

like since since since running like and i had to summon that like non -negotiative place in myself like you were not going to start negotiating when it was some of the worst pain i've ever been through was carrying i had to carry my wife's rucksack as well so i was carrying two packs at 13th out whatever and completely unacclimated and um oh that sounds brutal oh my god i mean i had real altitude sickness i mean i was splitting headache and nausea and i mean i was actually really sick and probably shouldn't have been up there.

But I made it. Going back to the end of your collegiate career, so you study anthropology, you spend this time with the NAVO.

You're like, I think journalism is what I want to do.

Where did you go from there?

I know that I read some of these things.

I actually found them online.

I don't know if they're there anymore, but I think you ran for Greater Boston Track Club?

Yeah, for a while I ran with, yeah.

I mean, I wore their singlet and I trained with them, yeah.

And you wrote some stuff for their, like, club newsletter because it was online for a while.

I don't know if it's there anymore.

I can see if I can dig it up again after this and send it to you.

But I read some of the stuff that you wrote because Tom Duderian put it all online many, many years ago as he does.

Talk about a historian, documentarian type of thing.

And so you were writing a little bit about, you know, running at the time.

What were your objectives?

What did you want to do?

Obviously, you kept running.

You ran pretty fast in some longer distance races.

What were the next steps for you there and also as a journalist or aspiring journalist?

Yeah. So at some point, I was diagnosed with spondylolisis, which is a sort of a crack in the vertebrae, the lower L5 or something.

And it was pretty incapacitating back pain.

And it might have been genetic.

See, the spondylolisis or spondylolisthesis, they're related.

I can't remember which it was.

was at any rate an x -ray diagnosed it and I you know I couldn't run at all right and I had to do a lot of physical therapy to I was in a lot of pain I lived on aspirin for like five or six years I was just in continual pain and um so you're in your 20s I was in my mid -20s and uh in that sort of period where I wasn't an athlete anymore I was extremely depressed it was really hard to stop Just stop running right and and I was getting to the point where I was realizing this isn't I'm not going to the freaking Olympics get real right I remember at one point I was running before my back problem I was running

another interval workout and another 12 quarters and 65 or whatever the hell I was doing right and like halfway through the second or third quarter I just stopped like in the mid quarter I just stopped and I thought that I'm done.

I'm done. I'm not competing anymore.

It's over. Like, and I walked home.

It was like, it happened literally on the back stretch of the third quarter of an interval workout when I was 26 years old.

Just flipped the switch. Yeah.

I didn't see it coming.

It wasn't like I was even, I was like, this hurts too much. I'm going too slow.

I'm done. I'm out. This isn't worth it.

Right. And running was worth it, but competing with an, like, oh, I wonder if I could, you know, done.

done and um so and then my back went out and and uh and i wound up one day i was one afternoon i was at a bar and um i was waiting to hear it there was a there was some music i wanted to see and this guy sitting next to me and we started talking he owned a tree company right and i i was i needed work i was broke and and he said listen i'll teach you to climb because your tree company with the you know basically if you have a tree you know a big tree in a small you know in the backyard or over houses i mean you need a crane or you need a climber to go up and take you know on a line with a chainsaw

to take the tree down in pieces you know carefully in a small space this is very particular work it's dangerous it's pretty well paid and it's super exciting right and and um he said i'll teach you to climb if you work for me you know sort of on call as i need you right where were you living at the time uh i think i was living in somerville okay so you're in massachusetts yeah and um that was a bar called harper's ferry which which was like i don't know if it's still around but it was a classic music bar and uh uh of the era and and uh it was like the late 80s and um and then he pulled rolled

his pants up and he showed me this huge scar across his knee he said if you do tree work this will happen to you you will hit yourself with the chainsaw i promise right i was like all right that sounds okay and uh so he trained me to climb And I started working as an arborist So I did all the aerial work For landscapers and tree companies Around Boston and on Cape Cod And then I moved up to Gloucester And at one point It happened I hit my leg with the chainsaw I hit the back of my ankle With a small climbing saw And it tore up the back of my ankle And laid my Achilles tendon bare It didn't touch

I know, it didn't touch it It didn't cut my But my Achilles was there are right i mean i could see it right and um i turned the saw off it didn't particularly hurt but i turned the saw off and rappelled down to the ground and i remember asking one of the ground one of the ground crew that i had i was like just pull the cut open look at it and just tell me that the achilles is still intact i was super worried about the achilles being intact right and uh he was like no man the doctor can do that i'm good you've been sorry not doing that for you so they sort of helped me to the car and drove me to

the clinic and they sewed me up and I was fine but I was still limping around I was living in Gloucester Massachusetts and I was still sort of limping from this wound when this huge storm hit and it was the storm that I wrote about in The Perfect Storm and the water was up over the roads and bashing the houses it was very dramatic and a local boat named the Andrea Gale was sunk offshore shore and uh with six men and um when i found that out like a couple of days later i thought okay i'm going to write about that i want to write about dangerous jobs and i've been thinking about it because of my

injury i'm like i want to write about dangerous jobs and i'll write the first chapter will be about the andrea gale and what happened to those men you know hundred foot seas you know just extraordinary and then one of the other thing jobs i was going to write about was was um war reporting and there was a civil war in Bosnia and I you know I went off I went off to cover that just self -assigned like I didn't have an a I didn't have a I mean I was an idiot you flew to Bosnia well I I flew to Zagreb or Vienna I took the train to Zagreb and eventually I got into Sarajevo and um and I started picking

up strings you know like filing very poorly paid radio spots and stuff but it was basically kind of journalism school and um so all i mean i'm sort of saying this because that's where my life went but all these are all things that you you really can't be running while you're doing them right you know like i was no way right i was departing your tree work it just blows you out physically too much to even think about running at the end of the day and you know we're reporting obviously you know and so i you know so i well You know, I just, this thing that was a core, core, core endeavor of mine,

I completely walked away from it because I was finding other things that met those physical and psychological needs.

Needs of sort of identity and pride and self and physical, like, physical effort and doing things you think you can't do, but then you do them.

You know, like, I found other ways to meet those needs that running initially met and, and ways that actually were more productive in society, right?

Running, it's like, it's great, but it doesn't really take you anywhere.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of us as runners talk about this runner's high that we're chasing.

Was it sort of that for you?

These other things, the tree climbing, the war reporting, dangerous jobs, like, were you like a bit of a thrill seeker?

Like was it we were seeking that high like something To just kind of like you know well there's a couple Of things going on one is identity right How do I see myself right And I want to do I want to do things That I feel like other people not Many other people can do it so I feel special And that gives me a good strong Identity and then so it's a little Easier to ask a girl on a date you know whatever Like it's a you know it just helps in being A person in societies have a strong identity And you feel confident And proud of yourself right Right.

And then there's a, and so tree work definitely took over that.

Right. And suddenly my body changed.

I was no longer a skinny runner.

I put on a lot of muscle, right?

I mean, suddenly I look like a boxer, right?

Cause you're, you're, you're, you're, you're doing something very different with your body.

It's very muscular and you get sort of big in the chest and the arms, that stuff that no mile or whatever wanted, like have that happen to them because they go slower.

Right. So all of a sudden I had a more, you know, I'll put it in quotes for the sensitive, for the sensitive people but more male more masculine identity because i was just a bigger dude right and that felt good frankly right like that was actually a really nice it was a different way of being male and i really liked it right and um and you know likewise war reporting i mean i mean all those guys smoked and i smoked for a while too you know so it wasn't like that's not about a physical process but there's still a core identity that you can be very very proud of and You have a lot of sense of belonging

as well, I imagine.

Yes, yeah. And you're doing something special.

Like, wow, I'm in Sarajevo.

Not that many people are here reporting on it.

Not that many people that I know are here, right?

And a whole city full of poor people.

But, you know, like, here I am.

And, like, no one I know is in a situation like this.

So that feeling of specialness that being a good runner can give you, like, I found a way to get it in other ways.

Okay. Right? And it also felt sort of bold and courageous and noble.

You know, whatever.

like it and but then there's the you're talking about the runner's high there's also a neuro chemical aspect to running right which that's more what I meant yeah and so that um uh you know I'm not a uh neurologist and I don't well I don't claim to know about any of that stuff other than just the kind of popular knowledge that running produces endorphins which feel good and those are adaptive because it allows humans to do things that are difficult that are hard that that are dangerous, that are painful, do them and get through them without fully experiencing how awful it is.

It sort of buffers people from these sort of like feelings of pain and exhaustion and even can put you in a kind of epiphany, right?

So one of the things I liked best about running was the really long training runs.

And I would just, my mind would just get into this.

I mean, you all, you know what I'm talking about.

We all do, right? Like my mind would get into this place where I just like I'd be like 15, 20 miles in, sometimes I think I ran 25 miles once on a midwinter night, it was freezing cold I wasn't there, I mean I was just like wow, I'm not sure I'm going to need to stop I think this could just, like I felt like I was drawing strength from the universe like my legs, I mean I didn't feel the ground it was just, my body was a machine it was a machine that was never going to run out of power, and there was something Obviously, that's not true, but the experience of that was—I'm an atheist, but that experience

on that one particular winter night under these starry skies, like I was out in a rural area and it was just me and the night and my crunch, crunch, crunch of my feet.

That's as close to a religious epiphany as I've ever, ever, ever had.

Totally profound. How long did you spend in Sarajevo?

well? I was, I did two trips.

I did two months and four months.

And I came back because I'd written a book proposal for a book about a storm.

And I had an agent and he faxed me in Zagreb and said, I sold your book proposal.

You have to come home.

Like, you have to come home to write your book.

And so, you know, pretty reluctantly I came back.

Yeah. When, I mean, you obviously went back and felt some pull to go and report on the war.

Did you think of yourself at that point as, I'm going to be a war reporter.

This is what I meant to be.

That was what I wanted to be with all the passion that I once felt for running.

I wanted to be a war entry worker.

I wanted to be a war reporter.

There was a very small, tight, little tribe of war reporters in Sarajevo, but also in the world.

And the idea of belonging to that group was like completely intoxicating.

And it felt meaningful, right?

I mean, running is a, you know, it's like skiing or tennis or anything else.

It's a very, very intense, pleasurable thing to do, but it doesn't help the world particularly.

Right. Like, I mean, it's sort of a self -serving thing and good on it.

You know what I mean?

Like, no, there's no, I don't have a problem with that.

But it's at some point in my 20s, I thought, well, it'd be really cool to be of service service a greater service right and and um war reporting seemed like a way to do that and you know my you know post -world war ii era my father grew up in europe he was a refugee from three two wars three wars um and uh you know was that war is a tragedy and if it's not reported on adequately it can go unseen and unhindered unaddressed and so journalists provide a crucial function of like keeping an eye on things and putting upsetting things in front of the public so that they will demand that we do something

about Rwanda or whatever and I really believe that and to some extent it's true because some extent it's not but but um so it gave me a sense of purpose and there was a huge amount of pride that came from that the sort of meaningfulness the end of the day if i'd gone to the olympics it's not that meaningful i mean it's meaningful to me right but there's no helping anyone else no broader meaning to it and neither is rock climbing neither is any it was big wave surfing it's all awe -inspiring but it doesn't do shit for anybody right you know that and the the in not that you have to serve anybody

right but for me i sort of ran i sort of ran out the I got tired of just doing things for myself yeah right and no matter how good they felt it felt hollow and so I um this journalism was a way that it felt very very good and felt like I was it was playing the skills that I personally had that I was very proud of but also had this sort of broader purpose that I was I found incredibly meaningful how did you feel when you you got that call from your agent that the book was sold and you needed to go home and and write this book which is a cool opportunity to be like i really want to be here reporting

on this oh i didn't want to go back i mean i you know the book felt like going back into the solipsistic world that was focused on me right and and and it um not entirely true but that's how it felt and you know i was just a kid you know that i didn't my understanding of things was not that nuanced right And it was very exciting.

What I was doing was very, very exciting, and I was part of this group of people that I really admired and wanted to be like them, and it felt noble, and I just didn't want to give those things up.

And I returned to Massachusetts and started writing, and it took three years.

You know, it took a long time to write that damn book.

And, you know, by then the wars were over and, you know, whatever.

Like, I'd sort of missed the show.

Yeah. Yeah. When you were writing that book, how did that Perfect Storm become the book?

Because originally that was going to be a part of a bigger piece on these dangerous jobs.

And now you're focused on this one event.

Yeah, my agent said, look, collections don't sell that well.

Just see if you can expand this to a book length.

Yeah. And obviously you worked on it for three years.

So there were challenges in that.

Talk about that process.

Was that your first book that you ever wrote?

Yeah, that was my first book.

And what was that like for you?

Well, you know, I got a very small advance.

So it felt like the stakes were low and I could fail at this test and it wouldn't be a disaster for anybody.

And that helped. I mean...

You weren't known as an author.

So it wasn't like you were expecting something from you.

No, and my publisher, you know, I think the advance was $30 ,000.

And, you know, I took three years to write the book.

So you can do the math.

Like, you know, it wasn't like I had the burden of this huge financial responsibility ability to you know return that money you know like make good on that money so um i mean just journalistically the main problem was that i'm a journalist i don't fictionalize things i don't invent things i'm very very strict about the truth and what i can assert i can only assert things that i can i can know that i can demonstrate i could show and um the boat disappeared like it disappeared without a trace i'm like how am i gonna feel i mean there's a hole in the middle of this story how am I going to fill it

in and uh you know so that was a narrative problem a journalistic problem that I came to a solution for but that was the hardest thing was like solving that like how do I write about this sort of like the unknown that is at the center of the story write about it both honestly and compellingly yeah were you proud of it when all is said and done yeah I was very proud of it I was very very proud of it I still felt like I was sort of missing the action right all my my new friends in journalism were overseas reporting on Bosnia and you know and other and other other tragedies around the world I was like

you know surf's up they're out they're out surfing and I'm on the beach I mean that's sort of how it felt so I was very distracted by that it was a rather juvenile thought actually but um and as soon as you know back in the day I was living in New York in the same area And I—back in the day, when you turned in a book, you know, you either mailed the manuscript to your editor or you brought it to them, you know, in a box, right?

And so I took the train uptown and delivered my manuscript.

When I finished The Perfect Storm, it was a year late, I delivered the book.

And the next day, I was on a flight to Delhi and on from Delhi to Afghanistan.

And it was right when the Taliban were taking over.

It was the summer of 1996.

96 so the next day after turning that thing in i was i was overseas i'm out i'm going back i'm out of here yeah and from from there when did the book start having some success and people were talking about it eventually it got optioned to a movie uh which yeah it got optioned pretty quickly and um and then sort of forgotten and then the you know there were some rum sort of rumblings that winter that it would might be a big book and and and then by the time it came out there was a lot of buzz about it and you know it was immediate you know it went immediately onto the bestseller list and stayed

there for i think three straight years it was on the list i can't remember but i think it was either on for two straight years or three straight years on the on the new york times bestseller list yeah how are you thinking about yourself at the time you're like uh i'm an author i'm a war reporter i kind of dance back and forth between the two did you feel a pressure to now i have to put out another book well but But, yeah, I mean, I was getting, my agent was getting a lot of offers for my next book.

I remember one publisher offered a two -book deal for like a ridiculous amount of money.

And I was, you know, I was single.

I slept on the floor.

I was still doing tree work, right?

I mean, when the book, when The Perfect Storm came out, two days a week, I was driving north of the city and I had a pickup truck.

I'd load my gear in the truck and I'd drive north of the city.

I was working for this tree, Terrapin Tree Service, this tree company in Chappaqua, you know, taking trees down or whatever.

So I was, you know, I was living, I was sleeping on my sister's college futon on the floor in a studio before I went in the East Village with my tree gear next to me.

That was my life, right?

So the book came out, and I didn't want to turn into the person that people imagine a best -selling author to be.

I didn't want to be that person.

I was very, very happy the way I was.

And furthermore, you know, the book tour is pretty tedious.

It's exhausting and tedious.

And I was just like, I want to go overseas.

Like, and so I, you know, I kept going back on assignment overseas as much as my publisher would let me because they needed me for publicity.

Yeah. Those early book tours, what were those like for you?

Well, I was, you know, So I'd never spoken in public before, and it made me extremely nervous.

And, you know, I was pretty miserable, you know.

And I was a good speaker.

I mean, once I relaxed, I was, like, pretty good.

Now I don't... Now I speak fine.

You know, it used to feel...

Every time I spoke, it used to feel like the moments before the biggest race of your life, right?

Before the gun goes off.

That level of nerves, right?

And, you know, pretty unpleasant to do that night after night.

and um so I was I didn't enjoy it at all yeah the writing of the perfect storm took you three years like you said it was it was tough to kind of square a lot of those circles and get what you needed but what was the actual like process of writing like for you are you someone who tries to write every day do you go in spurts what is your process well I've you know I'm deadline driven so if i'm on deadline i write uh i'm disciplined about it and because i'm it's work and i got to work right and and as the deadline gets closer i'll go from one writing session a day to two to even three i can concentrate

at most for two hours at a time so if i'm really coming up on a deadline i might have three two hour sessions and in a day you know in morning morning, afternoon, and evening.

It's hard to sustain that for very long, but I can do it.

But otherwise, if I'm not on deadline, I don't write at all.

I don't write fiction, so it's not like I'm waiting for inspiration all the time.

It's very task -oriented.

Yeah. Along those lines, I read in my research about you, you said something along the lines of good writing is all about rhythm.

And that really struck me for a number of reasons.

One, I believe that also to be true.

like if you're reading something and there's a good rhythm to it um to me that's that's good writing but I also drew a parallel with running like I always think good running is about rhythm and I mean you described it a little bit in this conversation but if you're racing like you just feel like you're in a flow or even if you're just out on a training run you're just in that groove and flowing and like you know the passage of time isn't even registering with you do you sense that parallel yourself between writing and running good writing and good writing I hadn't thought of it I I mean, it's

the same word, but I think there's a—when you're writing well, there's a feeling of, a little bit of a feeling of transcendence, a little feeling of having been, like, touched by this power outside yourself, right?

Right. And that that feeling when I'm when I'm writing produces prose that have this inner rhythm that feels unstoppable, both unstoppable for me as the writer, it just keeps going and hopefully unstoppable for the reader.

They just want to keep reading.

It's a very particular feeling and and like so.

Yes. So that parallel does sort of work.

and in running like that that feeling of unstoppable rhythm will carry you 10 miles without you even noticing it's a kind of magic and i'll tell you what i it also works with walking um at one point in my misspent youth i decided to um i wanted to walk oh actually i wasn't that young i was 50 i decided i wanted to take a couple of guys that i knew from the military that i'd had been in combat with um and a Spanish photographer I'd grown gotten very close to who was with my my colleague Tim Hetherington when he died in Libya and he was holding Tim's hand and I got to know the Spanish photographer

because he was with my friend as he died right so I got to know him very well his name is Guillermo Cervera and so I took these like three guys and we walked along the railroad lines from uh washington dc to philadelphia to pittsburgh and we we thought of it as a high -speed vacancy like we're sleeping under bridges and abandoned buildings and we're cooking over fires open fires and getting our water out of creeks and um dodging the police who this is the whole thing was illegal of course because it's private property And so over the course of a year And several different stints We walked something

like 400 miles Along railroad lines Carrying a fair amount of gear And we had to carry everything we needed To sort of survive outside And we had a tarp and cook gear And clothes and food And we called it The last patrol So there were times Now this is hard Walking along railroad lines is physically hard The one thing you don't do is go uphill uphill but everything else sucks like the the the the gravel that you're walking on rolls out from under your feet and the railroad ties are spaced badly for your stride and you're carrying a fair amount of weight and it just sucks right physically and but what i

found was that sometimes we would get into this cadence and it wasn't just me in cadence all of us would feel it all four of us would be in this sort of cadence where suddenly the time and distance disappeared we were just floating and it felt I wrote about it I wrote about in a book called freedom and like what free you know talking about what freedom is and one of the things freedom is is sort of like freedom from the ordinary bounds of your physical limitations right and I would get that once in a while when we were on the last patrol but it would be all four of us right and it would I knew

we were in that zone when stopping for a rest break felt like it would be harder than continuing to walk.

Right. The rest breaks, you know, most of the time the rest breaks were like, oh, my God, when can we stop and rest ourselves for 10 minutes because this sucks.

And then you get into that moment and you're like, oh, my God, I want to stop.

That's too much effort.

It's too much effort to stop.

I want to keep going because this is what feels like nothing.

And that—so there is something to that sort of idea of cadence and rhythm that's very, very powerful and I think allows people not just to avoid the physical feeling of pain from effort, right?

It protects them from the feeling of pain, but I think it also allows them to perform at a level—at a higher level than they otherwise could have. That sounds to me like being a part of a big pack in a marathon. I've experienced that when I was trying to break two 30 in the marathon, there were a big group of us who were all trying to do the same thing.

We really didn't say much to each other, but we were in rhythm with one another.

We all had a very similar goal and I have a hard time even describing it, but you could just feel it when you're, when you're in it.

People get that when they're dancing together too.

I mean, you know, there's all kinds of like neurochemical changes in that sort of group connectivity and um you know there's been um serenity hate i think studied that there's been you know a fair amount of research on how that works you know in a kind of human hive basically one thing i want to touch on with you is this period between the end of what sounded like the end of your competitive running career your entry into your professional career as a war reporter and a writer and just kind of the role that running played throughout that you said like Like you can't really run when you're reporting

on a war or when you're climbing trees.

That seems obvious.

But was there any point when it kind of came back in, even though you weren't training to compete anymore, you're like, I really just want to run.

I like how it makes me feel and it's a part of me and my identity.

So I'm going to make time for it.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was so much a part of who I was that I didn't even think about not doing it.

right so if i come back from overseas or whatever you know if i if i'd worked all day doing tree work my body i you know my body had absolutely no desire to run and so i just didn't think about it but um after i came back after you know when i if i was home in a routine running was just an unquestioned part of the day yeah and then um much later in life when i was 50 i was i always always been curious about boxing so i started boxing you know and just at a very neophyte level but i got pretty serious about it pretty good at it i mean i'm okay at it and and it's the only thing that rivals like

the mile in intensity and pain and suffering and oh my god i can't do this for another 10 seconds like the cardiovascular demands in the boxing ring are i mean i was as As an arrogant runner, I thought the mile is the only way to really tap yourself out of a completely untrue, right?

Like it's—what happens in three minutes in a ring is just, like, insane.

Physically, it's insane.

And not because you're getting hit.

Just the demands of the sport, the demands you place on yourself are absolutely the equivalent of running.

Oh, that's fascinating.

I mean, I love the mile, which is part of why I've gone back to it in my 40s.

and I've been asked what I like about the mile and for me it's just the intensity of it and in a four and a half minute time period I've got to make a bunch of split second decisions if I wallow on something I'm going to get blown out the back and everything has a consequence and I imagine it's the same thing when you're in a boxing ring with someone like one bad move could cost you the round or could get you in a really bad spot yeah I mean there's the consequences of getting hit but even if that's you know the sparring that I was doing is like pretty pretty moderate friendly sparring so it's

not like life or death in that sense but the i mean understand that when you're running you're really only using half your body right boxing throwing a punch you know has a has a real caloric cost a real metabolic cost right it uses up a lot of oxygen these these are big muscles in your shoulders right and you use I mean, you throw 10 punches in a row, it's like you just sprinted 100 yards.

Right? But your legs are also working.

So, basically, you're using every muscle group in your body at near maximum level.

So, you're blowing through an enormous amount of oxygen.

I imagine you finish, you're just spent.

Totally cross -eyed.

Right? And one of the tricks to boxing is being relaxed because you can use up those resources just by hyperventilating.

Right? And, you know, if someone's coming at you with their fist raised, your heart rate shoots to the roof just by instinct.

So part of the whole discipline of boxing is maintaining your calm and making it look like you're just shuffling around the ring, not raising a sweat.

But actually, it's all economy of motion and keeping your heart rate low and really modulating your physiological responses.

And you've got to be in just insanely good shape because the cardiovascular demands of doing any of that are just through the roof.

I mean, performance is performance.

I mean, whether it's running, boxing, I mean, a really talented musician puts themselves into it in that way.

I mean, I love hearing those parallels.

I think my listeners like hearing those parallels too because, again, I think to use a lot of the same parts of your brain, and like these lessons that running taught you as a teenager have carried on through the rest of your life and I think a lot of us who've followed a similar trajectory know that to be true yeah and you know if I hadn't if I hadn't been a competitive runner when I was young I wouldn't have sparred my way through AFib and not known and just chalked up what I was feeling to weakness like you're pathetic that you feel tired right now don't give into it there is a downside that can get

you to ignore something you have to pay attention to But basically that mindset of like, no, I'm not negotiating right now.

This is what I'm doing.

And the other good thing about boxing is that it, you know, as you get older, your knees can take a beating.

And you can completely smoke yourself in an area the size of a freaking phone booth.

I mean, you know what I mean?

Like you don't need to pound your knees for 10 miles to just absolutely smoke your cardiovascular system for an hour.

You know, it's pretty extraordinary.

Yeah. Yeah. Is running as a sport something that you're still interested in and follow with any degree of interest?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I'm always curious, you know, I mean, and runners, runners are beautiful, right?

I mean, just the human animal in flight is a beautiful thing to see.

Right. Right. And the right now, my sort of it's hard not to be excited about the what's happening with, you know, running records, but it's sort of mitigated.

I got to say by the fact that those they're clearly in those records are clearly falling partly because of technology.

Right. And no doubt.

Right. And it makes the records that haven't moved all the more extraordinary.

So the mile record, 343, it's extraordinary with these new shoes and whatever else, other tinkering is going on, that that thing is still there.

It's totally extraordinary.

And I believe the 800 record is still intact, right?

Am I right or not? Correct.

Rudeisha still has it.

But I think that one's probably the most under threat right now.

Now, because the men's 800, as we saw last year, I think we'll see at the world championships coming up later this year, is just becoming so deep and so fast. I mean, Bryce Hoppel last year ran an American record and was out of the mess.

But I kind of wish that there was a movement to have—I feel like all this stuff has a kind of asterisk with it, you know.

And so it's hard to know.

It's like you're using mechanical advantage to run faster as if you were running on a slight downhill.

hell yeah you know what i mean like it's a i know it's about being like a purist but i kind of wish that they had that they had barefoot races i wish it was like just this other parallel i i i wish ingeritzen would just run a barefoot mile and see what actually his natural god -given body has in it yeah i i don't disagree with you i'm a bit younger than you but i'm kind of of what i think is sort of like a perfect age because as I came up I ran in pretty similar spikes to what you ran in pretty similar road flats to what you ran in I mean when you were racing marathons and when I first started

racing marathons for me it was early 2000s 2007 was my first marathon the prevailing notion at the time was you wanted a shoe on your foot that was very thin and very light yeah you didn't want to carry any extra weight I can tell you and I was in my I was 25 when I ran my first I was destroyed.

I mean, I was running way more miles than I am now.

I was very young and resilient.

I was super fit. I was destroyed just because you don't have much protection underfoot and you're pounding the pavement for 26 miles and your feet and lower legs just take an absolute beating.

Same thing, I never raced any longer than 5 ,000 on the track in college, but you would race 5 ,000 on the track, and I have friends who race 10 ,000 on the track in a pair of spikes, and they're just destroyed for a week.

It was 2018, I got my first pair of Supershoes.

I actually ran a half marathon here in New York, the first race that I ran, and then a marathon later that year, and set my personal best faster than I had run 11 years prior.

And it was a night and day difference.

It was not the same thing.

And I trained hard. I worked hard. I was fit.

But I had this mechanical advantage underfoot.

And even if you downplay the mechanical advantage part of it a little bit, just the assistance it gave my body and the wear and tear that it cut down on made all the difference in the entire world.

And it's not the same.

I'm all for the technology because even now in my 40s, it helps me recover faster.

I can still perform at a high level.

and as we talked about earlier there are more runners now who i think because of technology and information all this stuff who can stay with the sport longer because running is really hard on the body and all that stuff is great but it's not an apples to apples comparison when we're just looking at the black and white time right right yeah i mean i i think the calculation was four percent yeah difference like that's a lot in a marathon there's a lot in anything right and so that's so i mean listen i'm all for anything that protects people's legs and allows them to to run and be healthy you know

whatever like obviously but just in terms of the the records right like to me there's an asterisk after them yeah and i sort of i had these these two ideas one is that there should be a set of records run barefoot right or or at least in non -assisted shoes right and just to see where i'd just be curious what these guys would do without without that that advantage that factor and the other is is that and this is this is this is a a runner who is a little bigger than most runners trying to even out the playing field.

But it would be really, really interesting to see what I thought of as the 50 -pound mile.

Like, what would the mile record be if someone was carrying 50 pounds?

Or a third of their body weight, you know, like, what would it be?

And that, you know, like, that would be a test of not only sort of like aerobic fitness, but also muscle strength.

It would be sort of interesting.

Overall athleticism.

Exactly. which is kind of what boxing is in some ways but it would be really really interesting to see what body types would actually be world record holders in the in like the 50 pound mile and uh you know that's never going to happen but it's a kind of interesting idea well if it does this podcast will be in existence forever and someone will come back and listen to it and say sebastian younger had that idea right give him credit we'll call it the younger mile the younger yeah right something along those lines no that that's super cool do you get out and watch the new york city city marathon here

every year when it yeah sometimes it depends you know i got young kids and depends what i'm doing but um yeah yeah um what else about the sport is exciting you right now just as a as a fan i mean i just i just love that people are do this with themselves you know it's what a great human thing you know like and running is part you know clearly been part of the human experience since the very beginning there's a credible theory that when we began walking upright and lost our body here and and gained the ability to sweat we could outrun most other animals and that that was an adaptive trait that allowed

us to hunt very effectively in the savannah and so it's sort of core to you know how we formed as humans and you know that's a really compelling idea and that we're still at it i you know as an anthropologist i find like completely pleasing to think about and um and i like the collective i mean runners are very competitive out of with each other but it's also this sort of collective spirit which is very beautiful and I I heard a story about Steve Ovette um by another runner who wasn't quite his caliber but he was in those international races in the like late 70s early 80s and it was I believe

it was an indoor race and they all these like super fit human machines lined up including Steve Ovette who was like at his prime like this spectacular athlete and it was a a one a one mile race and right before the gun went off Ovette raised his hand pumped his fist in the air and said said okay lads let's make it a good one he won the race but it didn't even matter like the idea that they were all in this together and let's make it let's honor the sport let's give the crowds a good race let's give each other a good race that they were that there's this this sort of transcendent value of let's

make it a good one to me is just the most beautiful human thing like i just absolutely adore that story yeah that's a great story i don't know that i've heard that particular one before but i've definitely been on a starting line where i'm bumping fists with strangers it's like hey let's do something special today and that's it that's a cool thing to be a part of yeah we're all facing something scary and painful we let's face it together right you know i mean it's a beautifully human reaction It makes me think of one of my favorite stories, somewhat similar to the Steve Ovette story, but at the 1952

Olympics in Helsinki, Emil Zadopek, who won still to this day, I think only athlete to ever win the 5 ,000, 10 ,000 and marathon at the Olympics, is on the start line of the marathon. And he looks at his competitors and he says, men, today we die a little.

And I have that poster on my wall in my office at home.

It just says, today we die a little.

and that's a little more morbid than hey let's make this a make this a great day but i think anyone at that level at the olympics i mean this is the pinnacle of of sports there are obviously very highly trained athletes and they know what they're in for they're going to go through it together much like we were talking about earlier in this conversation whether it's a race whether you know you're in war together um there's something about that which i mean this is a a big part of your book tribe which i really enjoyed that like brings people together yeah yeah there was there was an amazing incident

that happened a few years ago there's a international cross -country championships there was a spanish runner who suddenly took the lead because the lead runner who was african east african i think took a wrong turn right at the very end any any um any crop no no i'm sorry this the african runner stopped because he thought he'd crossed the finish line he hadn't the finish line was another 50 yards and the Spanish runner pushed him ahead said no no no this is your race and gave up the chance to win international cross country but was an incredibly honorable thing to do and I remember I was in a championship

race in college it was the NESCAC New Orleans small school whatever it was still exists and I was one of the best or maybe at that time the best NESCAC runner and I was leading this race by quite a lot and i went off course it was it was poorly marked and there was a guy who was like 30 yards behind me you know we're coming into the closing stages of the race and um i went off course it was not my fault right and he i was kind of shocked like i would have stopped and waited for him clearly going to win the race it's his race i would have stopped and i you know like i would and and he just like

realized i'd taken a wrong turn so he knew which the right way was was and just cruise right by and won the race i always thought that was really like um dishonorable yeah like winning a race isn't worth being dishonorable ever and and he made that choice that really really shocked me well in contrast to the international cross -country race that you just described i mean that second place runner just recognized that the other person made the race it was theirs to win there's just an unfortunate i mean and shit happens you know But to your point, it's like that's the honorable thing to do is respect

the effort. And he'll be remembered for much longer than he would have had he just won the race.

Right. I mean, actually, he's emblazoned his name in the pantheon, right, for doing that.

Well, and that's sportsmanship too.

And I think that's just something, especially this day and age, that we can certainly use a lot more of in general.

Last couple questions before we wrap this one up.

Are you still running at all?

Yeah. Yep. Yep. You know, I alternate between boxing training and running.

So roughly every other day I do one or the other.

And, you know, it's three, four, five miles.

You know, it's not a lot.

I live near a track, so often my running, often when I go out running, I find it easier to run intervals than to just, like, run.

Do you go to the East River track down here?

I was there this morning.

Yeah. Great track. Yeah, yeah.

Windy, but nice track.

Today would have been windy out there.

It was pretty windy out there.

Uh, so yeah, so I, I, um, you know, I'm still hammering myself like in my own pathetic way.

Yeah. When you are out running and you're hammering yourself in that way, what feels the same as it did when you were 15 year old first getting into it?

I mean, look, if you're running quarters and you're, you're, you know, you're coming around the like bar turn of your quarter, it's, you know, like halfway through the workout, it still sucks just the same way.

Right. Like it's exactly the same feeling of this is the worst feeling ever.

As soon as we get older, you get slower.

So you're out there for longer.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah.

But it's the same. It's just it's amazing how similar it is to when you're 18.

Like it just doesn't change.

Yeah. I mean, in my 40s now, I'm still competing at a fairly high level, but not running anywhere near as fast as I was 20 years ago.

But I found for me, I still take my splits, but I don't look at them when I'm out there.

I'm chasing that feeling because that's really I mean, you know, the splits are ephemeral they're gonna change depending on the workout but I can still feel what I did when I started and that's a pretty special thing yeah, I know, it's amazing and I'll just finish with this so a few years ago I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery so aneurysms are random things, it's not like high cholesterol and you know whatever narrow you know i i know you know yeah my my mom passed of an aneurysm oh i'm sorry 2008 at the age of 50 so i'm i'm aware age of 50 out of nowhere right yeah i'm sorry

that's yeah where where was it at home no no where everybody in her brain yeah in her brain so it's similar to i mean i read your i read your book which i recommend everyone listening to this definitely read it.

I mean, I, I actually picked that book up that I'm sorry to distract you.

No, no, go ahead. Yeah.

I picked that book up.

Um, I was in the Midwest. My father -in -law lives in St. Louis and he had a quadruple bypass, uh, out of the, out of the blue three weeks before my sister -in -law, his daughter's wedding.

Uh, so kind of upended our lives.

My wife and I are in California.

We went back and took care of him.

Uh, we were there through the wedding and I picked picked up your book at the airport on the way home from that.

So it was just kind of this sort of crazy timing of when I read that book relative to that event.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I had to just throw that in there.

But I blew through it.

I read it on the flight home, and I encourage anyone who's listening to this, just read that book.

I mean, it's an amazing read, and I'm glad you're still here to talk about it.

Thank you. Yeah, it's called In My Time of Dying, and it's about what happened to me when And this aneurysm ruptured in mid -sentence with my wife.

Like it's an aneurysm, sort of ballooning of the artery.

And they grow throughout your lifetime.

Like this is a slow process.

But when it ruptures, you're bleeding out.

You're bleeding to death, you know, into your own abdomen, right?

Or into your own brain or whatever it is.

And so it took me, I was in a remote area.

It took me 90 minutes to get to the ER.

and by the time i got there my blood pressure was 60 over 40 i needed 10 units of blood i was probably 10 minutes from dead i was still conscious um and the doctors later said one of the doctors was like you know it's amazing you were even alive when we got to the when you got to the hospital like 90 minutes with your blood the rate of blood loss it's incredible you were even most people wouldn't have even been alive, and that you managed to survive.

He said, that's probably because you were in such good shape.

You had such a strong heart, which was from years of running, right?

That I've been athletic my entire life.

And he said, most people would have died because their bodies just would have failed.

And he said, your heart just kept going.

and that's I didn't realize it that was the race I was really training for my whole life it wasn't the NESCAC championships it wasn't this it was at age 58 if I hadn't had a marathoner's heart I would have died and I would have left my little girls without a father and my wife without a husband and I'm eternally grateful to that he was a history professor who also coached cross country when I was in 10th grade and he said hey just Why don't you just run the first race and see how it goes?

And without that guy, I'd be dead, right?

Literally, I would be dead.

And so it's just strange how life works.

At the end of the day, you don't have to go to the Olympics.

If you're a fit, healthy person who respects their body, you have a real chance at surviving a medical crisis that will take many, many other people.

I think that's a great place to wrap this one up.

Sebastian Junger, thanks for joining me on The Morning ShakeOut podcast. Thank you.

All right, that's it for this one.

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And that's all I've got.

[The Intersecting Paths of Running, Writing, and Survival: A Conversation with Sebastian Junger]-[Episode 243 | Sebastian Junger on Running, Writing, and Not Negotiating With Yourself]

📋 Summary

The Primal Connection: Running as a Foundational Identity

The Anthropological Lens: Running as Cultural Tradition

From the Track to the Front Lines

The Ultimate Race: Survival and Wisdom

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript