Christopher McDougall: Born to Run author on everything from barefoot running and the B-52’s to life as a war correspondent
Running Tales spoke to the man behind the world’s most popular running book about doing less and donkeys - among other things
His 2009 bestseller, Born to Run, is the most popular book ever written about running, but Chris McDougall has a strong message for new - and current - runners: Do less.
“Less shoe, less miles, less speed, do less,” he told Running Tales when questioned about his top tips.
Anyone who has read his New York Times bestseller - for those not in the know its full title is ‘Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, The Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen’ - won’t be overly surprised by his words.
McDougall’s masterpiece tells the story of a mysterious tribe of Mexican Indians, the Tarahumara, who live quietly in canyons and are reputed to be the best distance runners in the world.
He explores how they are able to run huge distances without picking up injuries, and whether modern trainers and creature comforts are causing more problems than they are solving.
Running Tales caught up with the author, who has also written Natural Born Heroes, Running With Sherman and, most recently, training guide Born to Run 2, to not only talk all things running, barefoot and how to find the perfect form, but also about how his father both embarrassed and inspired him by running laps round his kindergarten, life as a war correspondent, and how to get a stubborn donkey to run.
Our Q&A with Christopher McDougall aims to break his number one ‘do less’ rule, and go just a little bit further.
We hope you enjoy it…
Were you always a runner?
I observed it more than anything because I had this Superman father origin story. I absorbed this transformation and this dedication that my father had to running.
And it didn't really interest me at all. I was live and die, ride or die basketball. That's all I wanted to hear about. That's all I did.
Philadelphia was a basketball hotbed back in the 70s when I was growing up, with Dr. J and Moses Malone. And so that's all I wanted to do.
But I watched my dad, who, when he left home at 17 years old, joined the Marine Corps, did his service, came out and was working two jobs while trying to put himself through college at night.
And he used to study - because, he worked by day, went to school at night - by walking around with a book in one hand and a big sandwich in the other. The only way he could stay awake to study was by chewing and reading and walking at the same time.
When I was five or six years old, he got pretty heavy.
We lived about six blocks from my kindergarten, and I used to be so embarrassed because I'd be sitting in my class and I could see my dad huffing up the street in his baggy gray sweats, wearing his Chucky’s black converse on his feet.
And then he would run laps around the school. I was mortified - like, dad, go away. But that was his way of getting back into running.
He bust out his old Marine Corps sneakers and sweats and just started running a half a mile. Then a mile. It got to the point where by the time I was a teenager, he was busting out consistent double three hour 30 marathons. He was in his 60s by that point.
And every year, he would run the Marine Corps Marathon in DC and then either Philadelphia or New York, and they're only a few weeks apart. He would get out of DC, bust out a three 30 time, and weeks later up in New York, he’d bust out another 330.
And the other thing was he had this training system - this is how old school it was. His training system was to run the number of miles pertaining to the month. So come January, February, you're not doing too much. It's cold, it's shitty out. But come April, it’s four miles a day, May, is five miles a day, June six.
Now, if you think that's easy, wait until you get to August. It's hot, and you're busting out those eight miles a day, every day. I grew up watching this and I think it got into my bloodstream that this is an activity that is utterly transformative. It can make you the person you want to be.
He chucked off, I don't know, 70 or 80 pounds and was a diehard runner through the rest of his life.
Do you think you were destined to be a runner, even though you didn't realise it at that time?
So that is a fascinating question. And I would say unequivocally, yes, but not for me, but for everybody.
This is the thing that gets me most volcanic about the discussion of running, because we have reduced it to this thing that it's good for some people, but not for others. He’s fast, and I'm not.
I wholeheartedly believe that the human animal, all of us, evolved as runners. We are to running what fish are to swimming, what birds are to flying, and we've turned it into an activity that's associated with pain and inadequacy and punishment. So the attitude is, I ate too much, I had better run. I want to be in shape for football, I had better run. Running is this awful thing you have to do in order to do something else.
And that's my biggest beef. I was the guy told there are lots of people who run, but you are not one of them. You are 250 pounds, six foot five. You should be guarding the president from an assassin, throwing your body in front of a bullet, not running 26 miles on asphalt streets.
And I believed it for a long, long time until I suddenly got set straight.
We hear a lot on Running Tales about how running is used as a punishment at school and when people are growing up. Is this something you recognise?
I think most people are still on that shame and pain spiral when they look at their running.
How often do people run and feel really joyful and satisfied with it? Or how often are they saying ‘something's bothering me, my foot hurts, I wasn't that fast. I should be doing better, should be doing more. Shoulda, shoulda, shoulda’.
I think that the fun and playfulness has been stripped away because so much of the running machinery, the profit making machinery, is based on making you feel inadequate.
If you're inadequate, what do you do? You buy shoes and you sign up for races and you buy training programs and you buy gels. As opposed to having some fun.
I want to reverse a bit, because after college you ended up working as a war correspondent, including covering the genocide in Rwanda. How did that come about?
It was pretty unexpected. I always wanted to write, but didn't really do anything about making that happen. I had banged around in Europe for a few years doing odd jobs and teaching English.
I had a friend of a friend who was working for the Associated Press in Madrid. And my Spanish was pretty strong. So I applied for a job with AP in Madrid and ended up somehow getting hired to be the AP correspondent in Portugal, a country I had never visited. I didn't speak any Portuguese, didn't know anything about Portugal, and I think the bureau chief was only thinking of sticking me in there short term. I think she thought someone better was going to come along.
I got trained up for the job in Madrid for about two weeks, and was then stuck on a train from Madrid to Lisbon. On the day I arrived in the Lisbon office, I walked in with my stuff, and it's a two person office - me and another person. And the other person goes, ‘thank God you're here, civil war just broke out in Angola’.
I thought, ‘that’s too bad, but what do you care?’ It turned out we covered Angola because it's a former Portuguese colony. That was the depth of knowledge I had at this point. And so even though Portugal is on the extreme western part of Europe and Angola is in sub-Saharan Africa, somehow we were the official news correspondents, mostly because all the news coming out was in Portuguese - a language, of course, at that point, which I did not speak.
Less than a month later, I was on a plane from Lisbon to cover the Angolan civil war. It was a figure it out or go home moment. The photographer I was assigned to spoke Spanish and Portuguese. I spoke Spanish and English. I would ask him a question in Spanish. He would ask somebody in Portuguese. He get the answer in Portuguese, translate it to Spanish, and I would translate it to English. This is how we were gathering news.
But I had a feel for it. I think the thing about it was, I've got pretty good attention deficiency disorders. I like to run around. I like to see a bunch of different things, and I like to try to figure out how to tell that story.
So I settled into the job pretty well and was a correspondent for a good few years. It was eight years, traveling around Europe and Africa, mostly Spain, Portugal, and then all the conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa - Congo, Angola, Mozambique and Rwanda.
Did what you saw in Rwanda and elsewhere change your view of the world?
Things are completely cyclical. We just go around and around. One thing that was so apparent in Rwanda was that if you think you're going to shit on people and they're going to take it forever, you're in for a very unpleasant surprise.
And that's what happened. You had one group that was dominating the other. At one point, boom, it blew up in their faces. And then the minority party came racing back like avenging angels.
You can't assume you're going to drop your big bloody boot on people's necks and keep it there forever. And honestly, my own country takes a lot of the responsibility here. I think the United States has sent a message, particularly in the past eight or so years, of tough, tough, tough. We're the best, you're the worst. We're going to bomb you, we're going to shoot you, we're going to build a wall. We're tough, tough, tough.
Where is the humanity and the compassion? We have this screeching that started in this country about ‘we’ve got to build a wall, and people are coming across the border’. It's a humanitarian crisis. No one's coming here because we're such great people or because our personalities are so wonderful.
It's not like people are coming here to be our friends. They're coming here because they are desperate and they're making a journey that is extraordinarily dangerous. They're doing it for a reason, not to get anything from you.
In Minneapolis, you're fine. Florida, you're fine. They're not taking anything from you. They're trying to survive. And instead, we got to turn it into something else.
That was the thing I would see again and again in Africa, particularly in Angola, where I spent the most amount of time and had the most warm welcome.
I got myself into some situations. One time I snuck onto a Doctor’s Without Borders helicopter. A rebel group had taken over an area of the country. This humanitarian helicopter was able to fly over the government troops. They had a 12-hour window to come in, check on the humanitarian situation and get back out.
I was able to sneak on the helicopter and get access to this city, which had been under siege, and no one had got in or out for nearly a year. And I missed the helicopter leaving.
I was stuck in this town. It was in northeastern Angola, surrounded by government troops. I couldn’t get out, and I had nowhere to go. There were no hotels, there was no place to go.
And a family took me in and shared their food with me, gave me a place to stay, and we were able, by radio, to get word back to the capital that there was a journalist stuck that needed to get out.
A few days later, the government helicopter came and got me out of there. But I look back at the kindness that family gave me - a big, dopey white guy in the middle of Africa, and no one showed me anything except kindness.
What I find is 99.9% of the world just wants to have lunch, play with their kids, and it's that other 10th of 1% that just fucks it up.
They just won't stop pushing and fighting and stirring up shit. And unfortunately, it's us older white guys who don't give a shit anymore, and we’ve got to exert our power.
That's what I saw. I saw that people want to enjoy life, and live and love and have a good time, and people in power stir up shit and won't stop.
After you finished as a war correspondent, you eventually found yourself in a situation that led to you writing Born to Run - but if I’m correct it was a different story that originally led you to Mexico?
It is so weird how this all shook out. When you're working as a news correspondent, you shit the ceiling pretty quickly where you know a lot more than you can ever tell.
I was spending a lot of time in Africa and learning a lot of stuff. I knew a lot about Angola, but not many people really care. And that town I told you about, after I got helicoptered out, I spent three days living in the back room of a very small bombed out house with a family.
And this is a story that hadn't been told - about what living conditions are like in a town that's under siege by its own government. I sat down and I wrote a 3,500 word story that night, typing away. And the only way to get the story out was by a satellite telex. I had to take this big box up on top of a hill and then telex it to headquarters in New York.
To me, this was my masterpiece. This was my Moby Dick. I thought, ‘I will never write anything better than this’.
All of our communication was one way. You could telex out, but you couldn’t receive back in. It took a few days before I got a satellite phone link. So I called AP headquarters in New York, and asked what was the reaction to that Mona Lisa of mine.
And they said, ‘yeah, we cut it down to about 300 words’. And they told me - I remember the words exactly - “Hey, Chris, if the country of Angola disappears from Planet Earth, we'll give you 500 words. Until then, 300 is all you get.”
That was it. Someone in Detroit doesn't care about what’s happening in Angola. What happened was I realised I was just absorbing all this information, but I’d got no outlet for it.
That’s why I decided to move back to the States, drop out of hard news and get into magazines. The problem with that is when you're a magazine freelancer, you're competing with all those magazine staffers. There are plenty of guys on salary at Esquire or on the New York Times Magazine. They're getting paid whether they write or not, and so their editors want to get them out doing stuff.
As an outsider, if I show up with a magazine pitch, it's got to be pretty volcanic for anybody to hire me instead of using the person they have. And secondly, something that only you can do, that they can't assign out and take from you. That’s the real trick of freelancing, making these pitches that are absolutely mouthwatering?
You're constantly promising stuff you're not quite sure you can deliver, because if you knew it, somebody else could do it.
In this case, what had happened was I had a friend who was working for the Associated Press in Mexico City, and I was checking in with her, and she said, ‘hey, you guys covering this Gloria Trevi story?’
I didn’t know any about it. Gloria Trevi was the biggest monster star in Mexico at the time, in 2004 or 2004 - the Taylor Swift of Mexico. And she was on the run from the law.
The story was that Gloria Trevi and her manager were up to some kind of shenanigans with the backup singers. When police went to investigate, they knocked on the door of the mansion, the door swung open, it was unlocked, and the house was empty. Trevi and her manager and about ten of these girls had just vanished.
And so they started a manhunt across South America. They couldn’t find them. Then there were sightings - someone thought they saw them in Argentina, someone saw them in Bolivia, someone saw them in Spain, but no one knew where they were.
I called the New York Times Magazine, said I had this great story and I thought I knew where they were. I said I was going to get an interview, and I'm also going to interview the families of her backup singers. The New York Times Magazine said if I could do it, go for it, I’d got the assignment.
But I had no idea where the hell they were. And then they were captured in Brazil. I had gone to Mexico already to interview the families of some of the women that were involved in this clan. And a lot of them were based around Chihuahua.
For some reason, Trevi and her manager used to recruit these young women from the city of Chihuahua. And so while I was in Chihuahua, that's when I first saw these images of the Tarahumara.
When I asked what there story was, people said there's this tribe of amazing runners that live down in the canyons, and they can run 200 miles. At the time, I was a contributor to Runner’s World, and was thinking, why have I never heard about these people?
I was thinking, ‘there’s these people in North America that run these distances and I've never even heard about them’. That’s when I thought, ‘okay, this is a cool other story’ - but it was only the tip of the iceberg. I didn't realise how cool it was going to get.
At that time, when Born to Run was beginning to ferment, were you a runner already?
I was not really a runner when this was happening, and that was the whole perspective of the story. When I heard about those guys? I couldn’t work out how they could run at 80 years old and in sandals.
Because everyone knew that running is bad for the body. Everyone knew you needed orthotics and shoes. Everyone knew that the marathon is the ultimate challenge, and Pheidippides died. So how were these guys running ultramarathons?
This was back in the early 2000s, and ultramarathons weren't nearly as visible as they are now. You didn't hear about them. You heard about marathoners, you heard about Kenyan marathoners, and that's it. You were not hearing about Western States or Leadville.
I had ridden competitively through college and then came out and tried to do some running and kept getting injured - plantar fasciitis, cuboid syndrome, achilles stuff. It's funny what we consider injuries, which I don't even consider an injury anymore. It's discomfort. I’d go to a doctor and be told I was injured and needed to rest.
And they were always telling me the same thing - running is bad for the body, all that impact is bad, particularly for big bodies like yours. You're 260 pounds. You should not be running. I heard ‘buy a bike’ so many times that I started to listen to it.
So, at the time of this story, I'd not run a step in years. And when I decided I was going to go down to the Copper Canyons and try to locate this culture, I had to go buy a pair of running shoes. I didn't even have a pair.
When I got there, I was so intoxicated by being surrounded by a culture of people who are running and it looks light, it looks like skipping, it looks playful.
I really wanted to do it. Everyone was running and I wanted to do so too. That’s when I met Caballo Blanco, and that was my introduction to how running can be and feel.
And the trick you learnt was getting your running form right and running more naturally?
It's completely like when you walk into a karate studio, you don't just start kicking boards and gear yourself with a bunch of apparel. If you are learning to swim, you're not covering yourself with a bunch of equipment and trying to swim the English Channel.
In any activity you do, you start with the least amount of apparatus, and you focus on the skill. Anything. You're playing an instrument, you're learning to dance. Anything. Learn the skill.
Running is the only one where they start talking about a marathon immediately. If you walk into a running store, you’re asked if you’ve run a marathon and then what time you did.
How far? How fast, how far, how fast? You're suddenly put in this competitive arena. Whereas if you tell people, ‘I'm playing the violin’, they don’t ask if you have performed at Carnegie Hall yet.
This whole thing about barefoot running is both fantastic and tragic. It’s fantastic because people started to pay attention to the fact they didn’t need more this stuff, but it’s tragic in that it’s become niche. You’re one of them as opposed to it being a vehicle for mastering the skill. Start with the ground, feel how your body reacts, and then only add protection as necessary.
I've not run barefoot and my fear would be that I'm going to go out there, I'm going to step on every single stone. I'm going to come home with my feet all cut up. It's going to be a complete mess. And I probably would have done a mile by the time I chicken out. I'm just wondering whether those thoughts went through your head when you were first presented with the idea of it?
Oh, Craig, I think we should pause right now. I actually did that one time. I was having a conversation like this. I was on a radio station in Chicago, and a listener called in and said ‘I really want to try it, but I’m not sure’. And I'm like, where are you now? I'm at home. Why don't you just go run around the block? Rather than talk about it, why don't you just do it? So the caller hangs up, and we continue with the show. And then the producer said he was back. The guy's like, it was great. I ran around the block, and it was so fun. I'm like, why didn’t it ever occur to you to do that before you called in? But it's so funny what a fear of the dark we have when it comes to that.
That said, looking back, if you look at Born to Run, there's only one barefoot runner in there, and clearly I think he's out of his fucking mind. So my perspective at the time of Born to Run was ‘I ain't doing that’. It's Barefoot Ted. And Ted was the last guy I was going to take advice from.
So my perspective was, I am new to all this. I am new to running. I'm new to barefoot running. I'm new to ultramarathons, and I'm meeting this guy, and my attitude was, ‘all right, it works for you, buddy’.
What's funny about that is, though, with Ted, we've now become good friends, and it's been an almost 15 year friendship, and almost invariably, Ted will call me up, and he'll start spouting some nonsense. I'll be rolling my eyes and making fun of him behind his back. And six months after that, I'm doing exactly what he said. He is a lot of wisdom wrapped up in clown makeup.
But at the time, I also did not get it. Where I misunderstood was I thought the point was to run barefoot, and it isn't. The point is to understand how your body operates and then go from there.
With that in mind, what do you make of some of the elite runners at the moment, and the incredibly cushioned shoes that they're using, which are apparently making them run world record times?
If I'm not mistaken, it's not the cushioning, it's the carbon fibre spring. I think one big misconception about cushioning is that somehow it's like a spring - that a cushion bounces, and it doesn't. A cushion sinks, and then you lift your foot off the ground. Cushion does not rebound, it's not popping you up in the air.
And so there's that false apprehension among people that someone with big, thick Hoka’s on is bouncing. They’re not, they’re just deadening the perception of impact. The impact is still hitting their body. It didn’t go away. They’re just not feeling it because it's all mushed into that foam.
But the super shoes with that carbon cantilever, it interests me so little. It's like when people talk about those shark skin swimsuits that Michael Phelps used to wear. I'm kind of not giving a shit. I’ve got a lot other stuff I can do before the sharkskin is going to make a difference. It’s like these pudgy older guys that buy those really expensive carbon fibre bikes. Okay, you took a gram off your bike, but you still got 100 pounds around your waist. You can't buy your way out of it.
So, with the super shoes, again, it's unfortunate. This is how the industry works. They take somebody, Kipchoge, who is operating in the world of hundredths of seconds, where a super shoe will make that difference, and everybody wants to be like him, but that hundredth of a second does not matter to me. It isn’t making a damn bit of difference in my life. And yet that's what we want to buy.
It’s unfortunate, and I'm guilty of it as anybody else. We’d rather buy than learn. I'm trying to learn the Hawaiian language right now. I'd much rather buy it, if I could, than have to sit down and learn it.
So that's my thing with running. There's so many other things you can do which are free and joyful and fun, rather than buying these expensive things, which will be completely defunct in six months when they try to sell you something else.
If the running industry was focused on teaching people good running form and then selling a shoe, great. But they're not. They take no responsibility for that. They just throw you the keys to the car and say you figure out how to drive it.
The bottom line is to enjoy running?
We do lose that childlike ability to run. You watch a five year old run, that five year old does not look anything like someone running with in the London Marathon.
The five year old's got quick little pitter-patter steps and their head’s up, and they're looking around with their back straight.
Anybody in the marathon, has got their head down, taking big, long strides, thumping along. There's no quick pitter patter. There is no elastic recoil. There's no biomechanics at work. It is the slow trudge of death.
A trail is a natural corrective for that. It's hard to run with a big over-stride on a trail because you'll sprain your ankle. A trail forces you to shorten your stride, get a little more pitter-pattery, be more conscious of how your foot's touching the ground. It rewards you for lifting your foot up quickly and not maintaining a lot of balance on one foot at a time.
It’s a great natural learning mechanism, but most of us don't have access to that kind of environment. What we have access to is the man-made environment, which is long, flat, and smooth, and we have our cushioned shoes. And that rewards you for over-striding and running with a long, slow stride as opposed to quick pitter-patter.
That’s the thing that needs to be relearned. You need to relearn that five-year-old. Eric Gorton, who's been my coach since the Born to Run days, he said if you just run in place to Rock Lobster (the song by the B-52’s), you'd learn perfect running form. You can learn it in five minutes. And I went, that's it. That was like the great auto corrective for me. Run in place, barefoot Rock Lobster, and you've learned perfect running form there.
When you run in place, you can't land on your heel and you can't over-stride because you're running in place. When you run barefoot very quickly, you'll learn to stop thumping. You will become a little bit softer on your landing.
And Rock Lobster is 98-beats per minute. So you get that quick, rhythmic stride. When you start to run in place to that quick stride, that quick cadence, you're lifting your foot off the ground, you're landing on your forefoot, and you're driving with your knee. You can't kick back either. It doesn't work. It is unbelievable how effective it is.
Born to Run 2 came out towards the end of last year and it contains a lot more of those tips looking at how people can improve their form - what was the idea behind that book?
So it's a funny thing. Two things happened. One was when I wrote Born to Run, I deliberately did not put any training information in there. I was new to this. I wasn’t sure I knew what I was talking about.
I tried to make that very clear in Born to Run. I was the monkey in the spaceship. I didn’t know if I was making it back to earth or not. And that's the perspective I wrote Born to Run from. But at the time, when I met Eric Gorton, he began to coach me. He said, so, what do you like? I know you want to do this race, but what do you want from your running?
And I was, not much, dude, I just want to be able to go out the door and run as far as I feel like on any day I want. I don't want it to be this thing where I am going to get hurt if I do too much. And he said, ‘that's a good goal’.
These days, he and I get a ton of messages from people all the time asking for training advice. And I always say, well, you know what, talk to him, I’m not a coach. Talk to Eric. And it's the same questions over and over and over again. I'm injured with this. I’ve got plantar fasciitis.
So two things occurred to me. One is, hey, Eric, that thing you promised me about being able to walk out the door 15 years later, it's exactly what I do. I feel like on a whim, I can walk out the door, do 10 miles, and not even think about it. What he showed me has worked.
But the second thing is that that message of embracing running as part of your entire life, not just this punishment you got to do because you had a bucket of Haagen Das, has not really filtered into people's lives.
And so that's what we wanted to do. I wanted to do a book that gave all the training advice that I have absorbed from Eric over the years. Everything I would have put in Born to Run, but I wasn't quite sure of at the time.
I really wanted to reverse that idea of a downward spiral - that I’ve got to run because I ate too much. Now I'm going to run. Now I'm sore, but I'm going to have to run anyway. Oh, now I'm injured. Oh, now I put on weight because I'm injured. It's just down, down.
As opposed to reversing that, being mindful and conscious - I did my Rock Lobster, my running form is pretty good. I can't wait to go out and try it. That felt great. Oh, I got my cadence down, my breathing down, my focus down. And it’s an upward spiral. It feels better and better. Instead of getting sore and injured and overweight and heading down.
And if there’s one thing about running that’s fun, it’s got to be running with donkeys. How did Running with Sherman come about?
I was so in the lifestyle of conceiving of a writing project and knowing what it was going to be. So, for Born to Run, I didn't conceive of it as a book until after that race was over. I thought it was another magazine story. We went down for the race, and as we were coming back out of the Copper Canyon, it’s 4am, and Eric and I are sitting side by side, and I said ‘I think this is more than a magazine story. I think it's a book. There's so much going on here’. I just had to write it. It was the same with Natural Born Heroes.
But with Running with Sherman, I’d got a call from an editor that I worked with at the New York Times, looking for something new.
I’d been distracted as we taken in this rescue donkey, and it had been a real fiasco. I told her I didn’t know if it was going to live, but that - and it may sound weird - I was trying to make it into my running partner.
She was asking why, and the answer was our friend had said every animal needs a purpose. Humans, donkeys, you need a purpose. You need something that gets you moving. Movement is medicine. So, we had to get the donkey moving or it would die.
And my editor said, ‘That's going to be such a great book.’
This wasn’t meant to be a book. This was my life, but she said that was what made it great.
What had happened was we lived in a very rural part of Pennsylvania, a place called Peach Bottom. And we had one day been out on a hike and saw this woman coming up the trail riding a donkey, which is kind of weird. It's not an east coast United States animal. My kids were kind of enchanted by this woman with her pack saddle and this donkey, riding the trail, but the rest of us forgot about it. My nine year old daughter never did. So, for her tenth birthday she said she wanted a donkey.
At first I said dial it back in, you’re not getting a donkey. But she said she could ride it to school and actually it wasn’t out of the question. We lived two miles down a rural road. There was no reason why she couldn't ride the donkey, tie it up and I could run there and bring it home. That little fantasy got in my brain. I started spinning my wheels and asking around, and we had a neighbour who said, actually, we’ve got a person in our church that's got a donkey, and we’ve got to get it away from him. He's a hoarder. This thing is in bad shape. And so, cool, free donkey.
I went and got it, but it was in much worse physical and mental condition than we had anticipated. And that's why our friend, Tanya, who was the woman we'd originally seen riding on the trail, said, you got to give this thing a hobby, a job. I didn’t know what a job is for a donkey, but I ran every day - so I decided to take him running.
And that was it. The thing was, could we turn Sherman into a long distance running partner? And then what I soon realised is the only way to solve a problem with a donkey is to throw more donkeys at it. The more donkeys you have, the easier it is. We ended up with three donkeys and me and my wife and our friend Zeke, who was a young kid struggling with some mental health problems, we became this whack pack with donkeys.
And, man, a donkey will toast you if you ever get out to Colorado for the burros races, where people run 29 miles with their donkeys.
What you see pretty quickly is, the donkeys have got it wired. They handle those mountains - 12,000ft, 29 miles - with no problem.
The trick is convincing them that they actually want to do it. Once they're on board with the concept, they're dynamite.
Finally, what tips would you give someone looking to start running?
I think the thing is, do less. Do less. Less shoe, less miles, less speed, do less.
We are telling people that their initial runs, when they start, should have a low heart rate at a conversational pace, but a high cadence. So you want to be at like 90 strides per foot, 180 strides per minute, but at a conversational pace. If you and I were going for a two mile run, we'd be talking exactly as we are right now, without breathlessness, but our feet would be moving quickly.
We would get a lot of messages from people saying I can't do it. If I do 180, I can't breathe. And I go, do less. Relax. What usually happens when people run is it's this big, muscular thing. They're lifting their feet high, and they're wearing their big cushioned shoes. The thing about a cushioned shoe is, it’s a lot of shoe that you need to get off the ground. It's a lot of cushion that you need to clear. So, you’ve got to lift your foot pretty high to keep that big, thick sole off the ground. It creates an obstacle. You're running with a big thing on your foot. You now have to lift up, and you're trying to run too fast, too far. So just do less.
Come out of it feeling, I should have done more. That’s perfect. Finish your run feeling as if you could do two more - perfect. Do them tomorrow.
That’s kind of my thing. But people don't want to hear that. They're constantly on. Got to run faster than my wife. Can't get chicked. Got to be faster than her. Got to train for a marathon. Got to get the fibre shoes instead of just like, hey, man, just go out, do less.
Leave yourself a little hungry every day.