Ken Rideout: I had tried the mediocre road in life-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … and it didn’t pay very well, meaning it wasn’t very fulfilling. The only things that have been fulfilling to me as a person, as a man, has come with suffering and struggling.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I’m Dr. Andy Galpin. I’m a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today, I’m speaking with Ken Ridout. Ken is an author, elite endurance athlete, and a tremendous storyteller. In this conversation, you’re going to learn a lot and probably, at most, be incredibly inspired. Ken’s journey from really tough circumstances as a child to early career success, making millions of dollars, then falling into a decade-long battle with drug addiction and coming out of all that, breaking records in endurance sports, and having a successful life is as inspirational as anything I’ve ever been a part of. I was lucky to get an early copy of his book. I read the entire thing, almost, I saved the last couple of pages till today, in one sitting. Ken is different than anyone I’ve ever had on Perform, and so you’re going to learn a lot of tactical stuff if you’re into endurance racing and running, but you’re going to walk away entertained, I guarantee you that, and also incredibly inspired. The lessons he imparted are valuable to all of us, regardless of whether you’ll run a race in your life now or ever in the future. I found it valuable. I know you’ll get a ton out of this as well. So please enjoy today’s conversation with Ken Ridout. Mr. Ken Ridout, it is a huge pleasure to have you. This is a very special episode for many reasons. First, I’ve never had anyone even remotely close to you on the show, and I think within about three minutes, anyone listening is going to understand exactly what I mean.
Ken Rideout: Well, thank you for having me. It’s a huge honor to be on such a prominent show, and like I said to you earlier, I’m sure this will be the least technical conversation you’ve ever had on the Perform podcast because I’m going to disappoint everyone with my lack of information about heart rate, all my training metrics. But I can tell you perceived effort.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Well, you’re going to give us a lot of information and a lot of inspiration for sure. I read your entire book except for the last five pages in one day.
Ken Rideout: You’re the best.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I intentionally did not read the last five pages. I actually wanted to save it till after our conversation.
Ken Rideout: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So I don’t know how your story ends.
Ken Rideout: Oh, my God, I love the— I think the last five pages are the best.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Ken Rideout: I sent that last chapter when I was writing the book to my wife, true story, and I’m sitting in my office, she’s sitting out in the kitchen, and I thought I heard her sniffling and sobbing, and I come out, I’m like, “Yo, what’s up? Did you like it?” And she’s like, “Oh, my God, I know how the story ends, and I was still captivated.” And I was like, “Perfect.” And I told my editor, and he was like, “Well, if they cry, they buy. So you’ve obviously hit on something, so you’re doing the right thing.” But I love the last five pages. Really, to me, drives everything home. There’s so many lessons in that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I teared up many times reading your book. You and I have an insanely similar background. We’ll probably discuss later, but-
Ken Rideout: In a lot of ways, I’m sorry to hear that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. No. In many ways, it’s polar opposite-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … and in many, it’s very similar. But I actually wanted to start today with my introduction to you.
Ken Rideout: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And so I’m going to tell you this story, and then I’m going to let you tell everyone else your side of the story.
Ken Rideout: Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So I remember actually probably sitting in this very room a couple of years ago or so, and our mutual friend, who’s the third body in this room here, Rob, told me, it came up somehow, he’s like, “I have this crazy friend.” And he goes, “Now, picture everything I’m about to tell you in this thick Boston accent.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And he’s like, “I’ve got this crazy friend, he’s running 150-mile race in Mongolia. He’s like 100 miles in, runs up next to some guy, looks at him, just goes, ‘You know, the funny thing is, I never get tired.’” “And then bolts off, and the guy falls out and quits the race.” Or something like that. So first of all, did Rob lie to me about that story, or is that actual?
Ken Rideout: That’s true. I was racing in Mongolia. There were two guys who were super competitive with me. One guy, a Swiss mountaineer guy, Reinhold Hugo or Hugo Reinhold. I forget which one comes first. But just a superstar athlete. And he was leading by about 12 minutes. We’re on a 50-mile stage. And then there was David Danu, who was a Israeli soldier, just a real tough guy. Little, tiny guy, but just a savage. And I just ran up next to David Danu. You weren’t supposed to have headphones, but I had one headphone in that I had been squirreling away with a charge because I didn’t have a charger or anything, and I was listening to music because you had to have a phone with you in case you got— There was no cell phone reception, but you had to have it-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … for whatever reason. And I was listening to music, trying to get myself motivated on super low volume, and I ran up next to him, I’m like, “Hey, David, you know something? I never get tired, and I feel fucking great today. Let’s do this.” And we’re friendly. And he didn’t drop out, but I looked back a few minutes later. We were running through fields, pastures. There was uneven footing. It was so hard in hindsight. And I looked back, and he was walking, and he’s a competitor. He came in second, I think, overall in this race. And I looked back, and he was walking, and it was just me and Reinhold off for the rest of the race, and then it was extreme. That day, I won that stage by 90 minutes and ended up winning the race. But yeah, that’s pretty much accurate.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Part of the story you just jumped over, 150 miles through Mongolia?
Ken Rideout: 155 miles, six-
Dr. Andy Galpin: 155
Ken Rideout: … six-day stage race, self-supported, meaning you had to carry everything that you needed, plus some mandatory safety equipment, and they provided a tent every night and water. So the stages were predetermined, so it was like 21 miles, 28Maybe 25, 50, 26, and then the last one was five or six miles.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you do one stage per day.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You sleep at night, you wake up, and then everyone starts at the same time or-
Ken Rideout: And to be honest with you, I think if it was straight through and just like a survival endurance thing, it might’ve been easier because I did not want to hang out in the camp, and to me, I was just wasting time. I’m like, “I don’t want to hang out in this damn camp. I’m starving to death. I’m burning eight to 10,000 calories a day, and I only have 2,500 calories with me.” And you have to manage this every day. But it’s like anything else. You learn so many tricks along the way that I didn’t— I just learned so many things that people who do these races regularly do. It was part of the Racing the Planet series, which they do a bunch of races across different deserts and different rough terrain. So a lot of the people knew each other. It was funny. They all knew each other, and people were like, it turns out some of them knew who I was, but they were still dismissive and not rude to me, but I definitely didn’t feel like part of the crowd. And I probably didn’t say two words to people for the first day and a half. And then once we got to the thing and people started saying, “Oh, that guy is like,” then, “Oh, this is who that guy is.” And they started. There was one guy, Cillian Ryan, Irish guy who was super nice to me. His family owns Ryanair.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, wow.
Ken Rideout: Just a total gentleman, and he was like, after the first day, I got killed. I was fourth, came in fourth place. And Cillian said to me, “Yo, those guys think that they’re going to wear you down every day. They know you’re a marathoner and don’t have experience with this.” And I remember saying to him, “They’re going to wear me down? No one fucking wears me down. I’m killing everyone.” Even though I was like, “I’m going to get killed.” I was just trying to project and I was almost subconsciously trying to talk myself into the place where I knew I had to get to emotionally-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … to, this was, when I say it was hard, man, I know it’s easy to be, “Oh, of course it was hard” and corny and cliché, but it was hard, man. Participating isn’t hard. Competing is hard. Trying to win is hard, and which is why the title of the book is Everything You Want’s on the Other Side of Hard because it’s like, dude, was it easy to get a PhD? Was it easy to start your own podcast, find guests, research the guests? It’s like everything in your life that’s worth having is hard. And I wanted to win that race, and I knew it would be hard, and I felt foolish at times thinking, like, “Why did I think I could win this? I’m an idiot. I’m going to be lucky to survive.” And then eventually I did, but it wasn’t easy.
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Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … you would analyze every aspect of the track-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … the weather. You were hyper-prepared.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Pretty easy to tell from your personality pretty quickly that’s a big part of you, right?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t do anything for this race.
Ken Rideout: No. I knew-
Dr. Andy Galpin: So tell me about, first of all, how many ultras had you done-
Ken Rideout: Zero.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Zero. You went from the longest race of your career being 26.2?
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you 5X’d that?
Ken Rideout: Yeah. Marathon a day plus a 50-miler for six days.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And how many years did you prepare for that?
Ken Rideout: Four weeks.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Four weeks?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You have to give me more. Why the hell did you sign up for 155-mile race on four weeks’ notice, and how were you okay with the lack of preparation and planning?
Ken Rideout: Great questions. I had won Tokyo, the 50 and over race in Tokyo, and had the best-
Dr. Andy Galpin: For the record, you’re the fastest marathoner in the world over 50.
Ken Rideout: I won the world championships at that race for 50 and over. To say I’m the fastest would imply there’s not another man in the world over 50 that can beat me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You run the fastest time.
Ken Rideout: On the race day-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … two guys that came in second and third had both run 225. The best I’d ever run is 228.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But they did some things. I did some things, like all legal things, obviously. You can look-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, yeah, strategy-wise, tactically
Ken Rideout: … at strategy. Exactly. They did some things tactically, and I did some countermoves tactically, and I beat them both by less than a minute.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a narcissist. I don’t think I’m great. I don’t think I’m special. But I would say that what I did on that day was like someone else was executing shit for me. Just everything went right. And believe me, I’ve had races where every single thing has gone wrong. But when I heard about the race, Scott DeRue, who at the time was the CEO of Equinox, former dean at Michigan Business School, and now the CEO at Ironman, just a friend connected me with him. Scott wanted to ask me questions about running in general. And I talked to him. I’d never met him. And I’m talking to him, and he’s telling me about this race. And for whatever reason, like when people ask me, “What about Badwater? What about Western States?” I’m like, “Dude, the race, I don’t know why I’m not, again, there’s nothing special about me. It has to speak to me.” I heard about it, and I was like, “I’m winning that. I want to do that desperately.” Like the Ironman in Hawaii, I’m like, “I have to go there.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Not, “I’m going to do it.”Like I’m winning that.
Ken Rideout: Right. Ironman, I was like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’m going to show up to my first ever
Ken Rideout: … Ironman, I was like, “I want to qualify,” because that to me was the win, is qualifying. But when I started winning races in my late 40s, I never did another race not thinking I could win in some way, shape, or form, some capacity. Whether it was the age group in a World Marathon Major or the, Myrtle Beach Marathon, the day before I turned 50, I won the whole marathon in 2:30 flat. And, but we can come back to that. So Scott’s telling me about the race, and I’m like, “Dude, I think I could win that.” And he was like, thought I was crazy. And, he’s like, “Email the race director.” So I reached out to the American woman based in Hong Kong, and she was like, “Yeah, you can get in.” I sent her some news clippings and stuff and said, “Here’s my background. I would love to be involved in the race.” And she was like, “Yeah, we’d love to have you. Come on.” And I signed up and bought backpacks, and I started researching it extensively, trying to figure out, like, what the hell do I need? What do I eat? I didn’t even know camping food, like freeze-dried camping food, I didn’t know anything about. I had no experience hunting. I had never been camping. And I wasn’t looking forward to it. I’m a big baby when I travel. Like, I want to-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … stay at the Four Seasons. Like, I don’t try to pretend to be a hard guy. I’m like, “No, I don’t want to rough it.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I roughed it my whole first half of my life. I’m done with roughing. So I’m like thinking, I start running with the backpacks, trying different ones in Nashville, and I have water and towels in my backpack to simulate 20 pounds. And let me tell you something, 20 pounds is effing heavy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I was running, and again, everything with me is never heart rate. It’s all perceived effort. So let’s say at the time, and I was in shape, and my rationale to signing up for the race, to come back to that part of your question, I knew that there’s no way that someone had cumulatively more miles run than me. Maybe they had done different training to prepare for this endeavor, but just on a whole, I don’t know how many miles can your body absorb? Like if I run more than 22 miles, it becomes like diminishing returns. The recovery takes so long-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … like running a race. So my rationale was, well, I know I have endurance, and I know I have toughness, and I know I can acquire the knowledge about what to bring, what to do, and the rest is experience. And experience counts for everything in marathoning, Ironman. You just don’t know what you don’t know. And when people are like, “I’ve never run a marathon, but I’m going to do it under three hours,” and I’m like, “I don’t care how good you are, till you get out there and do it, it’s two different conversations.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Because when you do it, people are like, “Oh, man, I hit the wall here.” All the things, it’s like people going to Hawaii saying, “Oh, it was so hot and so windy.” I’m like, “Yeah, no shit. Same thing every year.” “Never changes.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: “Same thing.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: “You did exactly what everyone else did. Welcome to the fucking worlds.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It’s like that’s what it is.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Welcome to Kona.
Ken Rideout: So it’s-
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is exactly what it is
Ken Rideout: … it’s hard. There’s a reason people like, it’s revered and respected and everything that goes along with it. I remember distinctly my wife driving me to the airport and being like, “You excited, Mongolia?” And the other thing is I love exotic travel. Like I like doing just random, weird stuff where people are like, “Where are you going?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m flying to Ulaanbaatar.” And, my wife’s like, “You excited?” And I’m like, “No, I’m not excited. I feel like I’m going to the effing electric chair.” I’m like, “What have I done?” Like everyone, I had some sponsors. I’m like, “I don’t need this pressure. It’s hard enough to go do it. Now I know people are watching.” And she’s like, “You signed up for this.” I’m like, “I know. I know. Just don’t ask me if I’m happy about it. I’ll talk- … I’ll be happy when it’s over.” And I remember walking onto the flight in Nashville, walking down the jetway to start the journey from Nashville to Atlanta to South Korea to Ulaanbaatar, and I had like a literally like a mindset shift that was almost subconscious where I was like, “Oh my God, I’m scared.” I wanted to cry. Like, I had that depressing feeling like my parents just dropped me off at summer camp, and I’m like, “You guys are leaving me here?” And I’m like walking to the plank. And then I just had a mindset shift of like, you know what? F this. I’m no victim, and I’m not going to get bullied around by anyone. And I was talking to Rob more this morning about this. I’m like, whatever you think in your mind is the truth. If you think that you’re scared and you’re going to get killed, then maybe so. But if you think you can kill everyone else and you can go and dominate, then that might be true, too. And it’s much more fun to picture yourself the hero than the like goat, than the like the scapegoat or like the person who’s going to get like mashed up. So I just remember thinking like, “It’s time. Let’s go.” It’s like, get your head out of your ass and stop this moping around. And I I didn’t sleep. I just thought about the race for like the next 20 hours. Got to Ulaanbaatar and slept in the, was like what was the most expensive hotel but was like your worst nightmare.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Tiles falling off the shower, and I’m just like, “What the hell am I doing here?” And then the funny thing is I didn’t know very much, so they said we’re going to… I thought that in the morning we’ll get up and we’ll start the stage race like out in the desert from the city, outside of the city. Like, “No, no, no. Saturday night we’re going to bus you. Saturday morning, we’re going to bus you out all day Saturday into the desert, and then you’ll sleep in the tents, and then you’ll get up in the morning and race.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, there’s one extra day in the tent. I don’t want to be in a tent.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: The funny part is, like growing up as a kind of an outdoorsman a little bit, like sleeping in a tent is very normal for me. And what’s funny for you-
Ken Rideout: If you’re with your buddies and you got your camping equipment and your stove. I had like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, no, no, no
Ken Rideout: … just a backpack. I just had a sleeping bag.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like that would be the part that would make me the most comfortable.
Ken Rideout: Oh my God.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re not worried about the 155 miles you’re about to race. In right now and in the book, you’re complaining mostly about the tent situation.
Ken Rideout: Even thinking about it now, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’m like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: That part of… Yeah, okay. I’ll leave that part alone, but that’s the funny part. So not only, you’re flying halfway across the world, literally by yourself-
Ken Rideout: Yep
Dr. Andy Galpin: … going where you know there’s no cell service for the most part.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re going to go run 150 miles, which is five times longer than anything you’ve ever done. You have no preparation. You don’t know the course. You don’t know anything about it. And your biggest concern is probably waiting in the line to board the airplane and sleeping in a sleeping bag.
Ken Rideout: 100%. Can I get my bags on the overhead without getting harassed and hassled? AndHow is it gonna be sleeping on the floor of a tent next to three other strangers, three women from all over the world?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Not the death that you’re gonna force yourself almost into.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, that part’s okay.
Ken Rideout: No, because that was like, I’m comfortable with physical suffering. That part is like, there’s almost some salvation there. It’s almost like a noble cause. There’s nothing noble about sleeping uncomfortably. I’m a baby with sleep. I need to be in a bed. Everything has to be aligned, the temperature has to be perfect. And dude, the first night, it rained sideways. Like at one point, I thought this tent was going to blow away.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It was just the rattling of the tent. It felt like I was on the side of Everest. And the thing was just getting battered by rain. Rain was coming in the frigging tent. I was like, “God, why are you doing this to me?” And I got up in the morning, again, no one’s talking to me. I’m just going about my business. And you know those crowds, all those people that know each other are like, “Hey, what’s up, Joe? How you doing? Haven’t seen you. Oh, great.” And everyone’s happy. “Yay, we’re going to go do an adventure.” And I’m like, “It’s on. I’m fucking killing all of you guys. Like I’m going to kill you guys.” And sure enough, the race takes off, dude, and we are on the gas. There is no strategy. I mean, matter of fact, typically we get to the aid station, you stop, you load up on water, you do this. I’m ripping through the aid station with like four or five other guys. And I’m like, as I run up, I go, “Yo, do we have to stop?” And they’re like, “No, you don’t have to stop.” I’m like, “Later,” right through the aid station.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What are you, probably what, eight, 10 miles in before that first aid station, something like that?
Ken Rideout: Five or six.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Five or six, okay.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you don’t need that much water that much.
Ken Rideout: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But you probably should’ve.
Ken Rideout: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because you got the next 150 to pay attention to.
Ken Rideout: You want to be, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can’t get behind.
Ken Rideout: You want to be fueling early and often and not get behind, but I felt so good. And then because I didn’t stop, no one wanted to stop. So I was like, “Oh, good. Fuck them. I’m going to drag everyone into the deep water, and then we’ll see who can swim.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. What kind of pace are you at here? Are you running six, six and a half?
Ken Rideout: We’re probably just under seven-minute miles. And the thing, I lost my train of thought earlier when I was saying, when I was training, if my normal pace is at that stage, seven-minute miles would be like, not pushing it, but not taking it easy. It’d be like a sustainable effort where I could run that pace for all day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: When I put that backpack on, 8:30s was like the same effort that I was giving to run seven minutes was like 8:30 pace. And I was like, “Holy shit. I’m working, and I’m barely moving,” relatively speaking. So when we were running, and that first day, you’re fully loaded. It doesn’t get much lighter. Contrary to popular belief, the food doesn’t weigh much. You have mandatory stuff, your sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, which you didn’t need a sleeping pad, but I had to sleep. I couldn’t just not have any comfort at all.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And we’re just tearing, tearing through these trails. We’re running through rivers, your shoes are soaking wet. It’s so hard. But I was like, “I’ll relax when we get done with this stage.” And then we get to about three to five miles to go, and we go up this, literally up the side of a mountain. And the other two guys, the Israeli and the Swiss guy, whipped out their poles, and they’re like . And I didn’t have any poles, so I was like, “Damn it.” And I mean, they would’ve beat me anyway, but I was in hell. I mean, it was so steep. I’m like, “We’re walking,” but I’m stopping and being like, “Oh, shit. How much further is this?” And it’s one of those ones where as you go up, you keep thinking you see the peak, and then you get to the peak, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m not even halfway up here.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And then at the top, you run along a ridge line, and I mean, this is when I was like, “This race is crazy.” The ridge line was so steep, I’m like, “If I fall here, I might die.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ken Rideout: And it was dangerous. And I remember getting back to the camp that night and saying to the person like, “Dude, how did you get insurance for this race? Like someone’s gonna die. If you make a mistake here…” I mean, we would end up doing much more dangerous stuff than the ridge line. But so, after we get up and over the mountain along the ridge line, I’m in third and I’m running, and we come down in a little depression, and there’s like a dried riverbed. So I’m like, “Okay, no problem.” It’s probably 100 yards across dried riverbed. Soon as I step in it, it’s basically a dried riverbed with a thick layer of cake of mud, and then as soon as you step in it and go through, you’re in-
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re gone
Ken Rideout: … thick-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … like clay, like mud, and covered in mud.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That will not come off your shoes.
Ken Rideout: And I got to tell you, I hate being dirty. I hate being wet. Everything about it I hate. I hate being uncomfortable.
Dr. Andy Galpin: City boy.
Ken Rideout: I’m like a baby crying with a dirty diaper. And I’m like, “Oh, my God.” So I’m like, “I’m not going to fall down. I’m going to go slower so I don’t have to fall.” Boom, right down.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Covered in mud. And when I get back, I mean, I fell down a few times and was covered in mud. People came in, you couldn’t even see them. All you could see was their eyes. And, I get to the finish, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? This sucks. I can’t even believe that I have to be here for five more days.” And that’s when Killian Riley was like, “Yo, they said they’re gonna kill you. They’re super confident.” I’m like, “Don’t worry about it, Killian. Tomorrow’s another day.” But in my mind, I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I got myself into?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You know Michael Easter?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I was with him.
Ken Rideout: I mean, I don’t know him personally. I know who he is.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I was with him a couple weeks ago in Vegas. He was on stage talking about how, I think he spent a month or five weeks or something above the Arctic Circle or some way up there, and how he got back and got on the airplane and was washing his hands in the bathroom, and that was the first hot water he had touched in a month.
Ken Rideout: Oh, my God.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And he was like, “This is just the most remarkable feeling.” And he’s like, typically was complaining on airplanes about the food and all that, then he’s like, “This is the most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in my life. Hot water, just completely…” I have to imagine you had a similar feeling when you got back to those camps, and you’re just thinking, “I don’t have my four seasons anymore, but at least I have water to wash this mud off my face.”
Ken Rideout: Well, the other thing is, they gave you water, but they’re like, “Do not waste this. What we have is what we brought with us. Do not waste the water showering, washing your clothes.” Of course, I was like, “Get the F out of here.” There was some Italian guys there who I absolutely loved.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re good at following rules like that, so.
Ken Rideout: Oh, yeah. I’m a big believer in beg for forgiveness, never ask for permission. So one of the Italian guys, I was like, “Hey, buddyWhat the hell was his name? Felipe or something. I’m like, “Hey, hold this water bottle over my head while I quickly shower.” I had a little tiny drop of concentrated-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Soap
Ken Rideout: … camp soap.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: So I would wash everything with my clothes on, then I would take the clothes, hang them up, so at least they weren’t standing up by themselves by the end of the week.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ken Rideout: And then I had camp clothes, so I would hang those up. So I tried to keep myself kind of cleaned up and a little bit comfortable. But the nice thing about finishing so far ahead of the girls is I’d get to the tent, and I’d be like, “Oh, I have the whole tent.” Because the first night, they were like, “Okay, we set up the tent. Yeah, Ken, come on in.” I’m sleeping in the middle. It was awful. And there’s rocks underneath the tent.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: We ended up really getting along well, the girls. So I’d get there first, I’d go underneath the tent, get all the rocks out, because the people are just setting the tents up. They don’t care. I eventually went over to the Mongolian guys. I’m like, “Guys, you don’t see all these rocks underneath? At the very least, kick the big ones out of the way.” So I’d get it all ready, but the nice thing is I’d get my spot set up exactly where I want it, right inside the door, so if I had to go to the bathroom, I could pop out of the tent. And it’s funny the little things that you start to appreciate when you have basically nothing. It’s like when I worked in the prison. You see the inmates would set up the cell, and it would be like, if you touched anything in their cell, it would be like World War III. They kept that thing dialed in. And that’s how I had my tent is like my cell. And they call it the house in jail. Like, “Who went in my house?” I was like, “Yo, don’t let anyone in the house if I’m not here.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: That’s what I would tell the girls.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re doing what kind of a pace for these 20, 25-mile stages? If your marathon is, we’ll just call it 2:30.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Are these five-hour?
Ken Rideout: Yeah, probably. But the thing is, it’s hard to even say a pace because some days, one day we were hands and knees, scaling a giant rock structure that took an hour to get up. I have pictures posted, if you just Google my name and Mongolia, you’ll see there’s one where I’m kind of coming up climbing a rock, and there were race officials, and I go, “Dude, somebody is going to fall here and die.” It was so steep, and there were older people there, too. And I was like, I go, “How did you get permission to do this?” He’s like, “That’s why it’s in Mongolia, not the US.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm.
Ken Rideout: “Because you would never be able to do this.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do you happen to notice on that race if anybody else was following heart rate monitors, trying to use technology? Was anyone there, or do you have to just be intuitive on something like that?
Ken Rideout: I would imagine there were some guys that were super tech and data nerds that were really into it. But it’s like I was talking to Norman Stadler, the Ironman World Champion, one time, and I was talking about power-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … and watts on the bike.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And I was like, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “No, I had a power meter sponsor, but I put tape over it because at the end of the day, I’m trying to win the race. It doesn’t matter what this says. If one guy takes off up the road, I have to make a decision of who is that? Okay, that guy, not worried about him. Okay, that guy goes up the road, I have to go with him because if I can’t cover this move, I’m basically making my whole bet is that he can’t sustain that. I don’t know what he’s done for training.” So when you’re trying to be competitive, I think there’s only so much you can do with data. There are certain athletes that they just hold the same pace, and it works, and it’s like, but you’re making a bet that the other person can’t do what they’re basically telling you they can do with their early move. And it’s like, do I want to bet my whole race on my strategy, or… So there’s a big difference in trying to survive versus trying to win. And when you’re winning, you have to have some intuition to be like, “Okay, I need to cover this.” Or at the same time, you’ll see in the last five pages of my book, one guy makes a move, and I’m like, “If that guy can run that pace and win, be my guest.” He probably ran past me at 5:20 pace at three miles, and I’m like, “Who is this guy?” He’s in my age group, but I don’t know who it is, and there’s only a few guys that I know have a chance to win this, and he wasn’t one of them. So I was like, “Oh my God. Damn you.” But yeah, I’m sure some of them, everyone there was telling me about their ultra-coaching experience, and I’m like, “Come on, man. If you’re coaching, you should be trouncing me, and you’re finishing hours after me. Come on.” It’s just-
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want to come back actually later and ask about how you find this balance between intuition and actually data-driven and coaching and things like that. I know that’s part of your things, but let’s keep going with this particular story. So you’ve smashed through. You’ve got through the lake. You’re dried up. You got another 50 miles the next day?
Ken Rideout: So no, so the next day is 28 miles.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, easy. Nice, soft 28.
Ken Rideout: I’m hurting. So I’m like, “All right. I’m not going to even look at those guys today. I’m going to just run my own pace, because if I keep trying to push the pace, I’m not even going to finish.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ve said this multiple times, “I was really hurting.” I’ve never run a marathon or anywhere close. When you say hurting in a situation like that, I have to filter it. I’m like, okay, yeah, you run 150 miles. Your hurting is not the same as my hurting. What does hurting mean at that stage? What is in your body? What is happening? What are you feeling that makes you go, “I’m hurting right now”?
Ken Rideout: Well, imagine running a 21-mile race. Your body is like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Not 21 miles, like racing it, right?
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Trying to win it.
Ken Rideout: Exactly. So, that first day, I was completely depleted. I hadn’t slept. I was on a red-eye, and then I slept in this hotel, and I end up falling asleep at 4:00 in the afternoon and waking up at 2:00 in the morning, can’t go back to sleep. My circadian rhythm is nonexistent, so my body is just completely shot. Then I go out to camp the next night. I’ve been up since 2:00 in the morning the night before, and I can’t sleep in the rain, and I’m anxious and nervous. So by the time that first day is over, my body is just broken down and hurting.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Are you sore?
Ken Rideout: Sore beyond words. My back hurts. Oh, and I’m chafed everywhere from the backpack, because at this point, I don’t have any tape on or anything yet. I would eventually end up taping my whole body with Kinesio tape and that tape that’s cushioned.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like prewrap or something?
Ken Rideout: Yeah. Not prewrap, the stuff that’s thick. It’s like felt on one side.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay.
Ken Rideout: So I’m putting strips of this thick-ass tape around my waist and on my shoulders because it’s burned, like burn marks from the strap.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, you’re rubbed raw.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. Raw.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re rubbed raw. Your feetYour knees
Ken Rideout: The backpack is smashing against every step against my lower back and creating swelling across, right above my waistline. And it’s like, I almost felt like it was compartment syndrome looking. It was swollen in a way where I’m like, it felt like the worst bruise you’ve ever had, and it looked terrible. I mean, to the point where I’m like, “What the F is going on? My back looks like I have leprosy.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, it’s just a heat rash.” And I’m like, “Well, should I keep taping it?” And they’re like, “I mean, in a perfect world, you should not put your backpack on again, but we’ve got five days to go.” And I mean, it looked terrible.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you’re one day in.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ve got blisters-
Ken Rideout: Heat rash
Dr. Andy Galpin: … rashes all over, and burns. Sunburn?
Ken Rideout: No real sunburn. I-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Lips chapped?
Ken Rideout: Yeah, lips definitely chapped, but not crazy. I’ve always had decent genetics. My skin doesn’t really burn much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay.
Ken Rideout: I don’t get super chapped lips like some people. But I mean, I looked like shit. I was-
Dr. Andy Galpin: You hadn’t slept, and when you said under-fueled.
Ken Rideout: Oh. I mean, I ate 2,500 calories, and I burned at least 7,000 the first day. I mean, instantly I can see I’m losing weight.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, and hydrated-
Ken Rideout: Oh, beyond
Dr. Andy Galpin: … perfectly well.
Ken Rideout: Beyond. Because I only had the salts that I had there. I had an Element with me, and I had enough for two a day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You had two packs of Element.
Ken Rideout: Yes. A day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you probably, I would’ve guessed, I don’t know, dumped 7 to 10 grams, at best, a third repleted.
Ken Rideout: 100%.
Dr. Andy Galpin: At best.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Not even close.
Ken Rideout: So when you’re starting, you’re like, “Oh my God, I feel like shit. This is going to be a long day.” So I was saying, I need to be strategic. The other thing I was saying earlier, too, about experience is when people started dropping out, and they started dropping out the first day-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Day one, sure, yeah
Ken Rideout: … and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m leaving,” I’m like, “Give me that food.” Whatever they had. It wouldn’t help me to carry more, so I would just eat anything I could find.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of course.
Ken Rideout: If people weren’t eating the rest of their food, I had no pride. I was like, “Are you going to eat the rest of those noodles?” “No, I’m going to throw them.” “I’ll have those.” I was like, I’m in combat mode.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’m like, “I don’t care what germs you have. Give me those damn noodles.” I ate a pack of, I don’t even like sardines. Guy was like, “I’m going to throw these sardines away.” I’m like, “I know sardines are rich in calories and fat and-”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Loads of fat and salt.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, I was like, “Give me those damn-”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Great strategy. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Oh my God, that was-
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you didn’t put anything into the preparation for that stuff. You didn’t think about the foods, hydration.
Ken Rideout: I just knew I needed three meals a day, so I grabbed three packs of these-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Jesus, Laura
Ken Rideout: … what is it called, Backpacker’s Friend, or-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Uh-huh, sure
Ken Rideout: … it’s one of those brands.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t have any strategy for macronutrients, whether it or-
Ken Rideout: I was a complete idiot. I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t really care. I was just like, “I’m going to grit it out.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do you remember what you took food-wise? I actually want to know.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, so in the morning, I would eat the, it was an MRE. So it had scrambled eggs and-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yes
Ken Rideout: … sausage in it, let’s say.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, yeah.
Ken Rideout: And you pour hot water in it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Maybe some potatoes or something like that.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, exactly. So it would be some kind of breakfast thing. Then for lunch it might be Thai noodles with freeze-dried chicken. And it was actually good. I liked them. It was just like you wouldn’t eat them normally because they’re loaded with sodium and all this other shit, but-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s intentionally
Ken Rideout: … there I needed it. Yeah. And then for dinner, it might be macaroni and cheese or beef stroganoff. I don’t know. I grabbed a variety pack.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you ate three packs of freeze-dried food. Yeah. Got it. Okay. So basic, I mean, I’ve eaten more packs of these in my life than I can count.
Ken Rideout: Yes. Okay.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because this is what you do when you go hunting, right?
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You take things like that.
Ken Rideout: That’s exactly right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you didn’t take anything else besides those?
Ken Rideout: No. Oh, no. Sorry. I might’ve had a few bars, random.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right.
Ken Rideout: No real food.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Those 150 calories is really helpful.
Ken Rideout: Exactly. I had a couple meal replacement bars, and I forget the brand, but they were very, very dense, and they didn’t taste good, but I would force them down-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Who cares?
Ken Rideout: … during the stage.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then you’re just relying on the aid stations to just grab.
Ken Rideout: All they had was water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, no.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t even have— Oh, okay.
Ken Rideout: It was just water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So traditional ultras, they’re going to have peanut butter and jelly, and-
Ken Rideout: Oh, no. This is survival race, man. They didn’t give you anything except water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because it would’ve been impossible for you to run with enough water that you needed.
Ken Rideout: No, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because that’s not possible.
Ken Rideout: So the aid station would be so you could load up with water. So, and even that, I had two, I had a flask in the back, with the hose on it, whatever that’s called.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep, CamelBak. Yep.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. When I tell you I know nothing about ultra-running-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … or camping, nothing. So I had the CamelBak, and I had some collapsible little water bottles, two of them, that would fit right here. They were small. They were like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … 12 ounces. So I would run through, load up, and be in and out. I was never at the aid station hanging.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So these are every 5 miles?
Ken Rideout: 5 to 10. They were really spread out. On the 50-mile stage, if you covered that stage in the book, if you read about that, the guy who was leading with me, the Swiss guy, he almost dropped dead. He had to stop and sit down in the desert, and I was like, “Man, we got to get to the next aid station,” and they were just so far apart, and he couldn’t make it. And they have an aid truck. A truck came and eventually gave him first aid, and he eventually walked into camp. Dude, it was like a movie. I’ve been in camp for hours, chilling, eating, relaxing, and here he comes walking in in the dark, like, “Ah.” I’m like, “Dude, I can’t believe you made it. 15 miles ago, I thought you were dead.” And he’s like, “Ah.” He wouldn’t let me help him with his pack. Nothing. He’s like, “I don’t want to drop out of the race, and I got to finish this.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: What a tough, tough guy.
Ken Rideout: Dude, tough. Stoic, never talked to me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Somebody had died the year before, right?
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Or the race before.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, and they had to get him out of the sand dunes with a camel. They couldn’t even get the truck in there, it was so treacherous.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This sounds like an amazing race to not prepare for. So four weeks and no strategy. You’re fueling-
Ken Rideout: I think if I knew what I was getting into, I might’ve talked myself out of it.
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Ken Rideout: Five or six miles, kind of a ceremonial stage.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And that’s where the guy, Killian Ryan, said to me, “Oh, you’re winning, man. Are you going to let someone else win this stage? Take it easy. You’ve got a 90-minute lead. You’re going to have a fun day. Relax.” I was like, “Dude, are you insane? I will die before I let someone win. No chance. This is a race to the death.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re going to bury that thing.
Ken Rideout: We’re racing. I don’t care who it is.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And sure enough, the Swiss guy was not going out without a fight. I mean, he couldn’t win the race at that point, but he was like, “I’m winning this stage.” And I’m like, “No, you’re not.” And we were drag racing, and it finished into a little, not a city, but into the first civilization that we’ve seen in a little village, and it’s like going through the, I mean, they’re streets, but it’s bombed out-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … tar roads. So we’re racing through, and then it finishes in this big old Genghis Khan fortress, like a big walled-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Legitimately
Ken Rideout: … fortress. Yeah. Oh, it was gorgeous. And I just came in there like, “Oh my God, I did it. I won.” It’s a stage race, so I knew I had won, but crossing the line first into the fortress was like, “Yes. Thank you, Jesus.” That one, I was pretty happy. When I won the world championships in Chicago in the age group, I mean, I was almost emotional. The relief was— I can’t imagine winning a gold medal or something and just, like, I’ve done everything, relatively speaking, to get ready for this, and then you win. I called my wife and I’m like, “I did it. I won. I won by less than a minute.” And she’s like, “Oh, cool.” I had won a bunch of age groups. I won four of the six world marathon majors. It wasn’t a big deal. I had just won Tokyo. I’d already won Mongolia. She’s like, I’ve won some stuff. And she’s like, “Oh, good for you.” I’m like, “No, this was fucking huge. I won the big one. I won the age group world championship.” She’s like, “What? Oh my God. I didn’t know.” And I’m like, I didn’t intentionally not tell her. And she’s like, “How happy are you?” And she starts crying. And I almost start crying. I’m almost crying now thinking about it. I’m like, “I’m so relieved that it’s over,” like I did it. And I know people listening, again, it doesn’t matter what you think about me. It doesn’t matter what other people think of this endeavor. It only matters what I think, and to me, this was my Olympics. I was never a runner as a kid. Ten years, 15 years before this, I was like a dead dog loser, degenerate drug addict, and now I was a world champion at something. Okay, it was just the age group. I get it. I know, it’s not the Olympics. But to me, it mattered more than anything in the world athletically at that point. Obviously not more than my family, but to me, it was massively important. I poured my heart and soul into doing this, and now I had done it, and I was like, “I can’t believe I did it.” It was just the relief. I mean, I feel it now. It’s like, “Oh, thank God.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ll hear this really consistently with people that have broken world records, won world championships, won gold medals. Very often, relief is the word.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s not joy. It’s not anything else. It is “Cool.” And then what typically happens is what we call post-goal depression.
Ken Rideout: That’s it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you come hammering down off that thing. You just don’t see that thing you thought you were going to feel.
Ken Rideout: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s there, and then it’s gone. Why do you think, for your experience, that’s a worthwhile endeavor? If we know that’s the end-
Ken Rideout: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … why do we even start?
Ken Rideout: That’s a good question, but I had tried the mediocre road in life-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … and it didn’t pay very well, meaning it wasn’t very fulfilling. The only things that have been fulfilling to me as a person, as a man, has had come with suffering and struggling, getting sober. Being a dad is not easy. That comes with struggle, and people could say, some people seem to be on a frigging pleasure cruise, and they’re just like, “I’m the best dad and I love it,” and they look like they’re doing it right, and I’m like, I’m jealous because to me, it takes work. My default setting sometimes is to be selfish and lazy. The kids will be like, on a Saturday afternoon, I did my run, I’m hanging. Sometimes, after a long week, I’m like, I know my wife will be like, “You’re just wasting time in your office.” I’m like, “I’m not wasting time in my office. I’m doing what I want to do. Nothing. I want to peruse the internet, look at Twitter, and be lazy.” And the kids will be like, “Dad, let’s throw passes. Let’s run routes.” And nine times out of 10, I’ll be like, “Yes.” Once in a while, I’ll be like, “Guys, I’m sorry. I have got to just sit here and be quiet.” I’m on full speed all the time, and I don’t want to be.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: That’s the only speed that I have found that I can be successful at. When I tried having balance and doing the things that I wanted to do, and left to my own devices, I found drugs as a way to cope with the emptiness and the void that was missing in my life, which was having a worthwhile endeavor. So left to my own devices, I never found peace. When I started living a life of discipline and goal setting and enjoying the suffering, I was able to find moments of peace, and more importantly, I didn’t turn to drugs to find that peace. I found peace in suffering. So to me, and again, I don’t profess to have all the answers. This is not what I would suggest for anyone. I’m in survival mode. I’m flawed, troubled, trying to find the answers myself. But if you don’t start the journey and get on the road towards where you want to get, you don’t have to know where you’re going, but it all starts with discipline and hard work. You’re not going to get to where you— The easy road never pays well, and the road to heaven can feel like hell, and the road to hell always feels like heaven in the beginning.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But where they end are very different.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want to ask a few more questions about pain.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You said suffering. You mentioned this multiple times. It’s very muchA part of your ethos.
Ken Rideout: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s my opinion, a view, that that is a grounding feature.
Ken Rideout: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You feel safe there. You know what to expect, right? And so the rest of the world gets shut down, and when you’re suffering, and it is a pretty common thing. Right? I’ve heard similar language from other people that do ultras and other friends. Cam Haynes is like this, too, right? It’s a grounding feature of your life to have that. It doesn’t make any sense, though, this oxymoron of enjoying pain or enjoying suffering, right? And I don’t necessarily think you’re saying you enjoy it, though. Correct me if I’m wrong there. But I would love to know more specifics about when you say you’re in pain. What are you exactly talking about? Because it’s hard for me to relate to you saying you’re in pain or you saying you’re suffering. To me, the things that bring you joy sound like suffering. I’m like, “I don’t want to do that.” You gave us a couple of examples earlier. You’re chafed, you’re rubbing raw, you’re sore there. When you are in a race, whether it’s Mongolia or your Ironman or any of the other ones you’ve done, when do you start hurting? And what does that hurt feel like to you when you’re saying you’re suffering?
Ken Rideout: When I’m suffering in a race, it’s like I’m really depleted, and it feels like I don’t know if I can keep going, but I’m going to keep pushing. Now, there’s a difference where you’re like, “Okay, obviously, if I sprint as fast as I can the first mile in a marathon, that’s not sustainable.” But I want to get to the point where I’m as uncomfortable as I can possibly be with the pace and still think there’s a chance I can make it to the finish line. Because I can’t run fast in a marathon, relatively speaking, if I don’t start running fast in the beginning. But I will tell you that if you look at any world record or anyone that’s won a big marathon, they’re either a negative split or very close to negative split, meaning if you run the first half, and it’s something about us, we always try to convince ourselves that, “If I can just bank two or three minutes in the first half, I can hold on for the back half.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm.
Ken Rideout: But what I’ve come to realize and what people should know is your survival pace, where you’re just trying to survive to the finish, is so much slower than your conservative pace early, because conservatively, you’re running 10, 20 seconds. Surviving, you’re running a minute mile slower. So it’s very difficult, and this is where you get experience, and this is where intelligence comes into play in a marathon. If you’re trying to run 5:40 pace for the whole marathon, then you should be able to run 5:20 pace for the first 10 miles. But how do you rein it in and hold back when you’re like, “Oh, I feel like I can do this at mile one, then I can do this at mile 25.” You don’t know until you get there. But that’s where experience comes in. But I would say that the suffering is all-encompassing. It’s emotional. It’s physical. When I say emotional, I mean you’re agonizing over, “Am I going too fast? Am I going to make it?” I’m trying to calculate everything in my brain, and then eventually, 15, 20 miles in, the brain isn’t really working clearly. You’re trying to calculate distance and pace. If I run six-minute miles and I always default to, like, what’s the worst case scenario? Okay, if I run seven-minute miles for the last three miles, that’s 21 minutes. Right now, I’m at 2:10. Can I get to 2:20? And you’re doing these things, and very quickly, your brain stops working accurately because it’s like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah
Ken Rideout: … depleted from glycogen. You’re trying to balance everything from caloric intake, hydration, and in a lot of ways, that is emotionally distressing because you’re like, “I got so much poured into this. This is the big day.” And it’s not fun. And the suffering is just the physical pain that you would feel if someone went out and ran 15 100-meter sprints with 20 seconds rest in between. It’s that kind of pain. But it’s not that I enjoy the suffering in the moment. When I cross the finish line and it all ends, the relief and the euphoria that I feel is like magic. Even when you’ve killed yourself and you collapse at the finish and need to go to the medical tent with IVs, and there’s something rewarding like that where I like, “I did it. I did every single thing that I could. I drained myself as a test of the human spirit.” And I get it. To people that aren’t into that, they’d be like, “This guy’s an idiot.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: Like, “Why would anyone do this?” I get that. I’m not talking to you. Fucking scroll on. Scram. I’m not trying to convert anyone. But to the people who are like-minded and into this, I don’t have to explain to them. They’re like, “Yeah, there’s something magical about testing the human limits and the spirit and…” Like I said, I can tell you, when I didn’t have this mentality, when I was happy to be comfortable all the time, and I was making money, and you know what? To find the void that this provides for me, suffering provides for me, I found that in drugs. I found the euphoric feeling that I liked in getting high on opioids, where I was like, “Yeah, man, nothing bothers me right now,” because I’m using those drugs to mask some pain and unresolved trauma in my life. And guess what? Prior to the drugs, I had this trauma that was unresolved, and I’m in a hole. When I take the drugs, the hole gets a little deeper. And the first thing you have to do to fix this is, number one, stop digging, and number two, start addressing, why am I using drugs? Fucking happy, healthy people don’t do drugs. Happy people aren’t like, “Yeah, I can’t wait. I’m going to get so high this weekend.” No. Happy people have outlets to create that feeling. And when you’re doing those kind of drugs, you’re really sabotaging your own dopamine and mental and neurological reward system. Nothing in life makes you as happy as some of these drugs. It’s completely unnatural to get this huge spike in dopamine and serotonin, all the things that go along with it. And all you’re doing is completely effing this system up, so it’s completely haywire. So now, the feeling that you’re trying to get of sitting on, the best vacation I ever took was in Bora Bora with my wife, one of those over-water huts-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … and it’s gorgeous, and you’re sitting there, and you’re like, “This is it, man. This is heaven.” That feeling is kind of like what drugs provide to a certain extent.The problem is when you’ve hijacked your system with this artificial reward system, whenever you want it, like, “Oh, it’s raining and it’s Sunday. You know what? Let me get high. Oh, I’m in the happiest mood ever.” Now your system, when you get off the drugs and you get to Bora Bora again, you’re like, “Hmm.” Everything’s dulled. Nothing’s the same. And you can’t explain this to someone until they’ve experienced it. And if people can learn anything from my experiences, don’t get into that position in the first place, because of all the things I’ve won, getting sober is by far my proudest accomplishment because it was so hard. It would’ve been so much easier to just keep doing what I was doing. But that two, three, four-week period of getting off, getting those drugs out of my system, and getting back to a baseline of acceptable mood where I wasn’t manic depressed and suicidal, was hell on earth. It was so bad that I put it off for 10 years by continuing the addiction. And I was never using drugs thinking, “This is awesome. I found my answer.” I was always like, “Dude, I have got to get sober.” But I was too weak to deal with the consequences of withdrawals and detox. And eventually, when I started running as a form of penance to deal with my withdrawals and I was like, “I’ll fucking kill myself running because I want to be dead anyway. I don’t want to live like this,” I eventually got better at running, and then thank God, I found suffering as my salvation and a way to cope with the feelings that kind of drugs provided for me. I found a worthy cause in suffering. And again, to someone who hasn’t gone through this and doesn’t understand, they’ll never understand. I’m not trying to convince you of my way of life.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It took you 10 years?
Ken Rideout: To get off drugs, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And 15 attempts?
Ken Rideout: Oh, at least. Multiple attempts a year. Half-assed. Sometimes half-assed, sometimes sincere. I got off them for here and there for a month, two months, and then I would be on Subutex, which is like methadone. It was like a-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Stops opioids from working
Ken Rideout: … it stops the cravings for the drugs, but it’s also highly addictive. You don’t really get high from it, but you can’t just take that for— If you took it for a week and then stop taking it, you’ll have some mild withdrawals, but that’s the way it’s intended to be used. The problem is people take it as a maintenance drug, and when you’re on that for months at a time, getting off that is just as hard, if not harder, than getting off the opioids.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t get the sense that you’re, in running specifically, has really been self-punishment per se.
Ken Rideout: Not anymore. Initially, it was a little bit.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It feels like it’s more of a altered focus.
Ken Rideout: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: If I can pour myself into that, not only is there physical time away from anxiety-
Ken Rideout: Myself
Dr. Andy Galpin: … yourself. It’s hard to have thoughts-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … when you can’t breathe-
Ken Rideout: That’s right
Dr. Andy Galpin: … for six hours or whatever the case is. But it also feels like it’s a target, right? And at some point, you’re winning races, you’re still using drugs. You’ve found international success in a sport that you never started till your, what? Mid-30s?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Late 30s?
Ken Rideout: But I was never using drugs while I was running or having success.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Never?
Ken Rideout: No. When I was using drugs, initially, I would exercise, but when I started competing in any capacity, I never. In 2010, when I got sober, I had done a couple triathlons, but just as an experiment. I didn’t race competitively. I just showed up and did a race without knowing what I was doing with a road bike.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Once I got sober, then I started to focus on racing, not competitively, but I started to set goals for myself, but never when I was using those drugs. I couldn’t. My heart rate would get too high. It would cause complete chaos.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It was not sustainable.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re obviously a competitive person. That’s clear. I don’t think that you’re the same type of competitive as other people, though. Myself, as an example, I am beyond obsessed with competing. I actually really don’t care that much about winning, though. Winning is very obviously a driver to you. In fact, the first thought in your head is very clearly, if there’s competition, if I can’t win this damn thing, well, then I’m going to win it.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s the only option is you’re winning.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I actually am weirdly not worried about winning very often. I want to compete as hard as humanly possible, but winning or not is a little bit less relevant for me than it is for you. Why have you, and it seems to be this way from your book, why have you cared so much about the winning part?
Ken Rideout: Well, I think that that’s a big part of my unresolved trauma and insecurities. I have to be recognized to a certain extent, less so now than previously, but I feel like because I had done the things I had done with the addiction, I feel like I had wasted so much of my life that I had so much time to make up for, that in my mind, I was such a loser and I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. That maybe the winning filled some of that, feeling like I was a winner, kind of made up for some of those insecure feelings that led me to my addiction in my first place. And, like I said earlier, this isn’t a tutorial on how you should live your life. I don’t want to feel like, I want to be able to feel like I can go and have fun and not have to try to win, but there is something about my own flaws and insecurities that for a long time was like, “No, you have to win. If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. But there’s also like-
Ken Rideout: Which is not the right mindset.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure. I understand that. There’s also a huge superpower. You’ve had a wild amount of personal success. You got a incredible family, financial success, professional success, all those things. So wanting to win really bad is a good thing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? There is obviously limits to everything. You and I share a trait, another set of traits actually, that are oftentimes the same thing, that I was obnoxiously ambitious from the time I can remember. And borderline with that is, I would say, I will use the word confident.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Other folks maybe would choose a different word. But the ambition and confidence and arrogance isWe’re talking about first cousins-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … in this thing. And what I’ve come to realize is, it’s my estimation, if I asked you personally what your single best human trait is, you’d probably say toughness. And reading your book, I don’t think that is. You wanted to win. You wanted to be better, and from the sounds of it, other folks in your family maybe didn’t want-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … to be better. And I don’t know if you’re any tougher or less tough than your family is, but it seems the ambition part mattered. I was fortunate, I’ve always felt fortunate that I was born with that, or as much as I can remember. My brother was born with that, but we were just born wildly ambitious, wanting to get out of the spot we were in. Is that something you think people can cultivate? Do you feel like you were just born, because either your circumstances or your genetics that made you want to want to get better?
Ken Rideout: I think that I was born with the ambition, but I definitely taught myself toughness. I wasn’t tough. You read about in the book about getting bullied when I went to Alabama. I was scared all the time when I was in high school. I grew up in a violent place, man. There was always fighting was ever present. And I didn’t want to fight, I was scared. I would fight, but it was death-defying. And, I took practical steps to address these things. I went to the Summerville Boxing Club and said, “I’ll just have to learn how to box. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be here.” But once I learned to like it, I got comfortable with being scared and uncomfortable, and I turned that into a superpower by being like, “I’m going to be so tough that no one will even want to test me, and I’ll never have to show them whether I’m really tough or not.” And it became true. And I tell that to my kids now. One of my sons, my middle son, he’s a very good athlete, but he’s very timid. He doesn’t want anything to do with contact, even in basketball. I tell him, I go, “You know that I can see that you’re pretending to play defense. You’re looking like you’re trying, but you’re letting a guy go right by you.” I go, “You got to get your body in front of his body. He might bump into you.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I am scared. I don’t want it.” I was like, “Buddy, I hear you. But you’re going to have to learn how to do something scared. I’m scared, too.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But at some point, what I realized is that when you start, like the story in the book, where the coach, I was playing quarterback, he’s like, “Dude, you’re just out there taking hits when you’re running the ball. Did it ever occur to you to deliver the hit and run hard?” And that was a huge turning point for me. The next time I ran the ball, I tried to run the guy over like I was going to kill him. And what you realize is, in life, whatever it is, any conflict, any physical interaction, if you’re going to get hit, don’t wait till someone hits you, do the hitting. It’s like I tell my kids, “If you think someone’s going to fight with you and wants to hurt you, this isn’t a tickling contest. You’re not in an arm wrestling match. If you think someone’s going to hurt you, don’t wait to confirm your suspicions. Start firing punches.” And I tell the little one, “Cameron, what do you do when you punch someone?” “Uh.” “Punch him again. Exactly. And then keep punching him.” And he’s like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, the wife sure loves that.
Ken Rideout: Oh, she’s like, “Why are you telling him that? There’s never been a fight in this town since the ’70s. We live in Brentwood, Tennessee.” I’m like, “Well, if we get in a fight, I want to make sure we’re on the right side of it.” And I think that also stems from my own childhood and my own insecurities of being like, you want to impart all of your experience on your kids and be like, “Listen, this is how you handle this.” And they’re like, their brain can’t even comprehend. They’re like, “What are you talking about, Dad?” But the littlest one, he is so full of confidence. He’s like, “Dad, I don’t have to punch anyone.” He wrestles, he does jujitsu. He’s like, “What good would it do for me to hurt someone there?” He goes, “I know I can do whatever I want to them.” And I said to my wife, I’m like, “This kid is so mature. He gets it. He’s such a nice kid.” But I think if I’m proud of any of the things that I’ve imparted on my kids, and I do think this about myself, is for as tough as I might come across, I think I’m very empathetic. And I think Rob Moore and the people that know me would tell you that is like, I’m a very sensitive person. I genuinely care about people. And I say in jest, “I want to kill everyone.” Not physically. I don’t want to hurt anyone. And the minute the race is over, I’m everyone’s best friend. I’m a huge nerd. I like interacting with people, but until the pressure is released after the race, I’ve done so much to get ready for a race. I’m just like a pressure cooker. I’m like, everything is bottled up inside me, and I’m dying to let the pressure out of the race, start the suffering, get the suffering over with so that I can enjoy what I just did. And that’s the only way I know how to do it. And again, this isn’t for everyone. For me, I can’t have one without the other. Or I haven’t figured out a way to show up, be loosey-goosey, everybody’s pal, go out, empty the tank, and then be happy with the results if I didn’t go through the process that I have to go through.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ll see this. You and I have been around enough professional fighters that when they’re backstage and they’re about to walk out-
Ken Rideout: Oh my God
Dr. Andy Galpin: … they’re not the same human you’ve ever known-
Ken Rideout: No
Dr. Andy Galpin: … in your life.
Ken Rideout: Nope.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And when you say, I really want to hope this lands for people. When you hear these athletes say things like, “I was ready to die that day.”
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: They’re not that far off from that.
Ken Rideout: No. I can tell you from my own experience. In my mind, there is a part of me that’s like, if you die, you die. And I don’t want to die, but I’ve also been suicidal as a result of my addiction, and I know the pain that it caused me, and I know that the pleasure that I get from getting the most out of myself physically now, and there is a huge component where I do feel like no one wants to die, right? If you did, you would be dead, if you wanted to die bad enough. I don’t want to die, but I also don’t want to leave with the feeling of having given up. Because the first time I qualified to race in the Ironman in Hawaii, I quit. JustIt’s, I felt hu-
Dr. Andy Galpin: You quit the race. You DNF’d yourself.
Ken Rideout: I just stopped on the run because it was getting difficult, and at the time, the most humiliating, embarrassing thing ever. My wife’s like, “Who are you embarrassed in front of?” I said, “Myself. I feel terrible.” And that feeling and the void that that left in my life changed the course of my endurance career because once I felt that, and all I can tell people is, unless you’ve experienced, you just don’t know. But the emptiness that I felt inside when I didn’t get the most out of myself, when I just took the easy way out, was like the way I think of everything in life. And I’ve given up so many times with addiction and everything else that I just didn’t want to be that person, and it hurt me. And I said, “I will never feel this feeling again.” And to keep going when you want to stop, when you’re completely depleted, it takes a lot of toughness. And that’s where that kind of mentality all stemmed from. And those fighters know that feeling, especially in fighting in MMA. You know the minute that that guy’s getting pummeled on the ground, he doesn’t surrender, but he kind of like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ken Rideout: … strategically lets the guy choke him. He doesn’t offer the resistance. You can even hear the announcer. He’s like, “He’s not defending this choke at all. He’s not doing the right things. Oh, it’s over. He tapped, or he got choked out.” And it’s like your heart breaks because you could see what he’s doing, but he just refuses to say it out loud, but he’s going to have to live with knowing that surrender. And it’s not fun. It’s not easy. But if you don’t put yourself in those positions, you’ll never learn that feeling. You’ll never learn how to deal with that feeling. More importantly, how to avoid that in the future.
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Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Or something to that effect.
Ken Rideout: Sounds good until you get to the dying part.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. And then you also wrote down, this is actually, I think, the direct quote, that, “I’ve quit many races in my mind and then forced my body to keep going until I broke the tape.”
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Walk me through that process. Maybe take a marathon, take whichever one you want.
Ken Rideout: No, I’ve got a good one for you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: When you say your mind broke, and then how do you get yourself past that?
Ken Rideout: So I was running the Malibu Half Marathon. And again, these things are all minor little races, little experiences, but I’m sure a lot of people are going to be able to relate to this, to the thought process, to the event that takes place. We take off in Malibu Half Marathon, I get out in front. I think I won it the year before, and I’m leading, in the turnaround, I’m leading by… It goes out and back six and a half miles.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And what’s your best half time?
Ken Rideout: 1:10.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 1:10. Okay.
Ken Rideout: It’s 5:22 pace.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: So I get to the halfway point. At this race, I think I ran 1:12. It’s kind of a tough course, but funny thing is, when I moved to Nashville from LA the year after I left, Rob Moore won the race.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, no kidding.
Ken Rideout: So him and I dominated the race for so many years.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you really?
Ken Rideout: And he ran the same exact time.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did he really?
Ken Rideout: Yeah. And then at one time, I ran the Huntington Beach Marathon in 2:30 flat and got second, and I think the year after I left, Rob went down, ran 2:30 flat, and won it, so-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s embarrassing because you’re a lot younger than Ken. That’s pretty embarrassing.
Ken Rideout: Rob’s a savage. He also did a sub nine hour Ironman-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … so he definitely has nothing to be embarrassed of. He’s a savage.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I know you were telling me earlier, I think something about the first time you guys met, and you were kind of like not giving-
Ken Rideout: Yeah, I don’t-
Dr. Andy Galpin: … him the business a little bit, and you-
Ken Rideout: I typically don’t like anyone, when people are like, “Hey, you want to train? You want to hang out?” And someone introduced us, and very quickly, though, I was like, “I love this guy.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like you rode 100 miles or something, you’re like, “Oh, okay.”
Ken Rideout: Yeah, this guy’s-
Dr. Andy Galpin: We could be friends
Ken Rideout: … serious. He’s into it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: He’s savage. So I’m running the half marathon, I get to the halfway, and I probably have a minute lead, which is pretty significant. Between nine miles and 11 miles, I look back, and the guy’s on me. And in my mind, in that split second, and I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this, I was like, “Damn it, I’m going to get second place. My God, I thought I was going to win this.” And in that split second, when that guy didn’t go by me and pass me like I was standing still, which is what you should do when you catch someone in a distance race, I had surrendered. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to get second. I’m already running as fast as I can, and now the guy caught me. He’s going to go past me. He must be feeling good.” But in a split second, I was like, “Or he could’ve just emptied the tank from nine to 11 to try to catch me,” because he caught me too fast from where he was. And I was like, “You know what?Let me step on the gas for a second. So he ran next to me, and the funny thing is it ended up being his dad, but someone on the side of the road, I didn’t know who it was at the time, ended up being his dad, handed him a bottle of water, which you’re not technically supposed to take outside assistance, just from the aid station. But it’s a small race. It’s not a big deal. So he takes the water, and I’m running next to him, and I was like, “Hey, buddy, give me that water when you’re done.” I’ve done this many times in races, just barking at people, and they’re like, “This guy’s crazy.” I’m like, “Give me that water.” And he’s like, “Oh,” he starts trying to tell me what’s in it, and I’m like, “Don’t worry about it. If it’s good for you, it’s good for me.” So I drink as much as I can and then throw it away. And he took some, I took some, and then threw it. I don’t know if he wanted more, but neither of us was getting any more. So he caught me between seven and nine, and nine to 11, we’re kind of running together, and then I was like, “I can’t get into a sprint with this kid.” He looked like Prefontaine. He had little shorts, a little mustache. He was young. At the time, I was maybe 50. And so I was like, let me put in a little— no, I was 48. Let me put in a little surge and see if he goes with me. And I put in a little surge, and I opened up a small gap, and anyone who knows distance running knows once you get that gap, you’re all in. I don’t have the gas tank to keep putting these surges in. I know how I’m feeling in the moment, so I’m like, I put in a surge. He didn’t go with me. He didn’t cover it, so I was like, F it. I’m all in now at 11. And I sprinted the last two miles as fast as I could. I was hyperventilating. I was hurting. And I got there, I beat him by 10 seconds. And when he crossed the finish line, and his dad came rolling over, and they’re like, “Oh, it was a great race,” and I’m talking to them like, listen, dude, because again, I’m high when I finish the race. I’m everyone’s best friend. I’m like, “Hey, buddy, had you gone past me like you meant it, I was dead.” Mentally, I was tapped out. I was like, I can’t keep running like this. The minute you didn’t, you gave me new life, and you basically sealed your own fate. You had me. You should’ve ran past me without thinking, and I would’ve not chased you because I couldn’t go anymore.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because then literally the opposite happened. It gave you massive confidence.
Ken Rideout: But when you didn’t go past me, I realized you were hurting as much as I was, and I was like, no one can suffer more than me. And I took it upon myself to out-suffer you. And the dad was like, “Are you listening to this? You just cost yourself a win.” And I’m like, “Sorry, didn’t mean to get you in trouble with your dad, buddy, but yeah, you did. You could’ve beat me.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: When he passed you, you’re at mile, you said seven? Or-
Ken Rideout: Nine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Nine.
Ken Rideout: He didn’t pass me, he caught me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, caught you.
Ken Rideout: But he was way behind.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What are you telling yourself when you’re going, okay, maybe your confidence is back, but you said you’re hurting. Are we 10 out of 10? Are we nine out of tens? And then what are you telling yourself to not go sliding— Because in this case, if you slide down, the smallest thing, I wouldn’t even know. If I was watching, I wouldn’t be able to tell, really. But that would lose you the race.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What are you telling yourself? What’s your, either internal talk or physical talk, or what are you doing to go, I have to run at this 5:20 pace, not this 5:24 pace.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Or whatever the number is, which sounds like the exact same thing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But how are you convincing yourself to do that 99%?
Ken Rideout: At that point, I had done so much training with guys like Rob, and bike riding and running and knowing someone’s half wheeling you, and they’re just trying to stay ahead of you, but they can’t get away from you, but they keep doing that. There’s so many little tactics going into it. I’m running as close to him as I can get, uncomfortably close. We’re just trying to unsettle him, and I’m just running a bit like a bully. You’re not doing anything dirty, but you’re also not trying to be handing him water at the aid stations, which I have done and would do. I’m not a bad sport. But I’m also a competitor.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re trying to win.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And the whole time, I’m evaluating everything he’s doing. I’m listening to his breath. I’m trying to get any kind of sense of weakness. I’m trying to see where he feels strong. There’s a million. It’s just like your brain’s a supercomputer. I’m analyzing every single thing. I’m looking at how he’s holding his hands. I’m looking at his face where I can without being obvious. Every step, I’m like, is he step for step? Is he falling back? Is he coming forward? And I could kind of sense he was hanging on. And it’s a weird thing to say because I don’t know how I would describe it other than that I just got this sense that he was hanging. And I was like, let me just push. And when he didn’t cover that and didn’t stay with me, I’m like, oh, if he could, he would’ve. And I’m like, okay, he can’t do that. Let me see if he can do this. And he couldn’t. But it wasn’t like he just faded away and gave up. He stayed within 10 seconds of me the whole time, and I was like, “Go away,” because I want to have the moment where I run across the finish line, like, “Yes, I won,” and enjoy the sprint. But you saw that finish of the LA marathon-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … where the guy’s like, he’s not looking back, and I’m like, this guy’s coming like a freight train, and this guy’s frigging falling apart. He dives across the line and still loses. I’m like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … man, you got to keep your head on a swivel. If nothing else, you could’ve at least tried to run in front of the guy a little without breaking rules. You see it in track. The guy in the lead comes out, and he starts to drift to the outside lane, trying to force people to run-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s racing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, it’s racing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, it’s racing.
Ken Rideout: There was no racing there. It was like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s more like just time trial
Ken Rideout: … just completely collapse. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Are you trying to avoid losing? Are you trying to win? Are you trying to-
Ken Rideout: Oh, that’s a good question
Dr. Andy Galpin: … remind yourself of technical stuff, like with your own mechanics? What is actually happening there?
Ken Rideout: All of it. There’s a part of me that’s like, I do not want to lose this. Like I said, when he caught me, I wasn’t thinking like, I got to go with him. I was thinking, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m going to lose. I’m going to get second place. And then I came back to my senses. I’m like, literally, I’m talking to myself like, “What the F are you talking about? Don’t you dare give up.” And I’m also focusing on mechanics. I’m like, how’s my form? Let me look at his form. I’m analyzing his form, and it’s all happening at once. It’s like a car race. You see a car race, and you’re like, there are so many things going on in a car race for people that are into it. You’re coming into the corner. What lines he taking? Am I behind him on my slipstream? And I want to pass him, so he can’t then slipstream. But it takes so much time to explain this versus what’s being calculated in your brain. It’s all being calculated. It’s like when I’ve heard Tom Brady describe when he drops back to throw a pass, he’s not like, okay, he’s running this fast, I got to throw it here.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: He just sees it and knows where to put it. And it’s just there. It’s like your brain is a supercomputer. It’s calculating. You don’t have to tell me. Have you ever done one of those online speed reading things, where it’s like, read this word, and it’s like just-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah
Ken Rideout: … the highlighted word. And it’s going super fast, ridiculously fast, and before you know it, you’re like, I just followed that whole story, and I don’t think I read one word. It was like, chi, chi, chi, chi, chi, chi. You fill the gaps, and your brain calculates. That’s what’s kind of happening, is like I’m cal-Not as much as bike racing, but nothing is like bike racing in terms of calculating decisive moves. That sport is so much more strategic than non-bike racers know. It’s crazy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. From the combat world, you and I have been around these people. We’ve done it ourselves. You’ll hear all the time people saying things like, “Oh, he saw that punch coming.”
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t, right? If you look at the actual time and speed and cognitive processing time with vision, you don’t. You do not have the time to see anything and react. What you’re looking at are patterns.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re packaging things and you’re seeing— In fact, you’ll hear funny stories of all kinds of boxers and fighters who, they’re unskilled, and they come in and they’re actually really successful because they don’t have the same tells.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? And so seasoned fi-
Ken Rideout: They’re unpredictable.
Dr. Andy Galpin: They’re unpredictable, but not even on purpose.
Ken Rideout: And awkward.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s the word you hear, right?
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re awkward, weird angles. And what you’re really hearing is the experienced fighter saying, “I don’t recognize this intentionally, but I’m used to seeing the hip move, then the shoulder move, then the head, and then this comes.” And this guy doesn’t have that same package. All of a sudden, the hand comes and they’ll just hit guys all over the place, right? They may not win, but you’re just like, they get frustrating and they’re awkward and they’re kind of like this-
Ken Rideout: It’s like Nate Diaz was unpredictable like that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s just not coming in the normal patterns, right?
Ken Rideout: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re like, “How are you doing this sort of weird thing?” There was a lot of research actually, like a decade or so ago, a little bit more than that, on eyesight in professional baseball players.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And it’s the same basic story. What you’re seeing there is the reason why left-handed pitchers are so much more difficult to deal with than right-handed pitchers, is nothing to do with really the angles, but simple fact that you’ve got 90% of your processing and packaging mental history is in that same slot. And now you have a very limited data set from the left side slot, in this case, and it’s more challenging. So you can’t see the spin on a ball in baseball. It’s too fast. But you can remember it afterwards.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The same thing is, I’m sure, true with racing. You have this package of information that’s coming in your brain that is the breathing, the temperature, the sweat, all that stuff. You know what, and you probably couldn’t have back and gone like, “Oh, his elbow started to flare.” No, but I felt it, right? It’s this packaging. When we talk to younger athletes and competitors and we say things like experience, that is exactly what we’re referring to.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? You have to have that set of stuff come in where you just felt it different and it’s impossible, for the most part, to simulate those things. That was just a monologue, for the record.
Ken Rideout: No, I love it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No question. But here’s the actual question on that. I think you called this earlier, Rob, clean versus dirty fuel.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I want to double dip on that because I think the way you phrase it is you train like you can’t possibly win.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then you compete like you can’t possibly lose.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What is that?
Ken Rideout: When I’m training, I’m training as much out of fear as aggressiveness. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to have to race here in the coming weeks. If I don’t do this now, it’s like not studying. If I don’t study, I am not going to be ready for the test.” And in a lot of ways, I always tell my children, “Pay me now or pay me later, but you will pay.” And that means if you don’t pay now with the suffering and training and do the hard work now, you’ll pay me later with the performance that you don’t get in the race. And that sucks. 10,000 times worse than having an uncomfortable one-hour training session at the track, which is very, very difficult. Like 800s are hell on earth. I can’t stand doing them, but there’s nothing more magical than when you’re doing them and they’re working, and you’re like, “Okay, it’s clicking.” It’s hard. Every one, you’re hyperventilating. You don’t think you can survive, but next thing you know, you’re ticking them off and you’re like, “Dude, I’m doing this.” And that, to me, is the true test of fitness when I’m getting ready for a race. If I can do those 800s on the pace I’m looking for, roughly 2:30, two minutes 30 seconds, maybe a little bit faster. When I can do 10 of those with two-minute recovery, I’m ready to throw down, and that’s a huge test. I think the actual workout’s called the Yasso 800s. You can Google it. It’s very famous assessment tool. It basically says that whatever your time for those 10 800s or whatever the official amount is, maybe it’s 12, something like that, that should be your marathon time. If you’re doing them in two minutes 30 seconds, you should be able to run a two-hour 30-minute marathon. But clean versus dirty is like the dirty fuel is I’m creating enemies. I’m telling myself everyone’s trying to kill me, and I’m going to kill them, and I’m not a victim, and I’m going to show you. I’m trying to show all my naysayers and doubters, even though I don’t think I have any. I mean, I’m sure that-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Nobody cares
Ken Rideout: … there’s always going to be people, no matter what you do, that don’t like you. If you walk on water, there’s certain people that are going to tell you it’s because you can’t swim. There are going to be people that just don’t like you because you represent everything that they don’t stand for, like you’re doing things they can’t do. It’s human nature. And I don’t think I have a lot of them, but in my mind, I create this whole universe of people that are trying to get me, and maybe it’s from my childhood where I’m like, “Oh, they’re going to try and kill me. They’re going to laugh at me if I don’t win,” which is completely irrational. But again, the only opinion that matters to me in that moment is my own, and that’s how I motivate myself. As I’ve gotten older now, I’ve started to find more clean energy that’s racing out of like, let’s get the most out of ourselves. Let’s represent ourselves, and more importantly now, my children and my family, represent them with honor and integrity. Go out and show everyone what you stand for. Empty the tank, give your best effort, and handle yourself with class, which I think that I’ve always done. But that’s how I think of clean versus dirty fuel, and obviously, I think it’s better for your mindset in general to have that, to be training and racing in a positive state of mind and racing for the right reasons and not trying to create enemies where there are none. Because at the end of the day, it just creates bad energy, and a lot of times, your brain doesn’t understand the difference between what someone’s saying versus what you’re saying to yourself. And a lot of times, we talk to ourselves in ways that we would never talk to our friends or our even competitors. The things that I say to myself are so harsh, and I said this to my wife the other day. It’s funny. I was on the plane, I was texting with her, and I was likeI’m trying to think of what it was I yelled at her about. I came out and I was like, the car was crashed up a little, and I’m like, “Dude, did you smash into something with the car?” She’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Well, you not going to tell me? Like you didn’t think…” And what I realized is because she’s so close to me and basically part of me at this point and almost like an extension of me, I catch myself talking to her the way I talk to myself.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, right.
Ken Rideout: And I was like, do you realize— And I go, I’d never thought about this before, but I’m like, why would I talk to her like that? Because that’s the way I talk to myself. Because that’s part of all of my problems and all of my flaws and unresolved trauma stems from this incredibly unrealistic, harsh expectations of myself where in a lot of ways I’m a failure and a loser, at my worst. Obviously, I try not to live in this space and in a constant shame storm. But what I realize is when things like this happen and it involves my wife, I verbally talk to her the way that I would talk to myself because I’m almost viewing her as part of me. If she let me down, I’m like, it’s like I’ve let myself down again like when I was in my addiction, like, “You stupid ba-” I would never say this to her, but to myself, I’m like, “You stupid bastard, how could you do this?” I had a nail stuck in my tire last week, and I said to her, “Hey, can you pick me up at the airport?” She has an SUV, and I said, “Do me a favor. Take my car.” I forgot that the nail was in there, and the tire had gone down to like seven months. So I go out to the car, and she’s there, and I get in and I go, “Oh my God, the warning lights are on.” I go, “I have a flat tire.” I’m like, “You didn’t see the warning light on?” So I basically start yelling at her.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yelling at her for-
Ken Rideout: Like, “You don’t see that I have-”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And then I’m like, “You know what?” I said, “It’s not your fault. I am an idiot.” And for like ten minutes, I’m like, “I can’t believe I was this stupid trying to drive to a gas station.” I get there, it has seven pounds of pressure in it. The tire’s basically-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … on the rim. And I’m like, “I am so stupid.” And she’s like, “All right. It was a mistake. Let it go.” And that’s when I realized, I’m like, “I’m talking out loud to you the way I’m talking internally to myself, but I don’t want that to be a reflection on you.” I said, “I’m sorry. I never thought about it like this.” But in reflecting on how I was venting to her, it wasn’t at her, I was venting at myself externally. And, I guess that’s some insight into my good energy, clean energy, and dirty energy. That was all my dirty energy of like, “Ar.” But at the end of the day, it was just a mistake. I should have been able to just be like, “All right. Look, if the freaking tire is ruined, tire is ruined.” At the end of the day, even if the rim is ruined, it’s like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … it’s a little bit of money. I’m far from wealthy, but I can afford to fix the tire if I have to.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I have personally never been a big kind of like rah-rah guy. I don’t watch an Instagram video or a song and be like, “Great, I’m going to go change.” It feels kind of like a cliche.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s never been my motivation. Though fine, anything that gets people to do positive things-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … I’m all in for, right? Who cares, right? We’re all different personalities, and that’s great. But what I have found so inspirational about your journey is just how candid- … and how raw it is.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? It’s the flaws, it’s everything else there, and I have found some useful things out of it personally. And again, it’s not the big sort of stuff, but if people are listening or read the book and take that out, that’s great. So I’m wondering if somebody is listening and they’re like, “Look, I’m never going to go do an ultramarathon. I don’t have that extreme personality.” Right? So that part doesn’t resonate with them, but they kind of maybe want to make a change, or they’re thinking that they might want. Are there some baby steps that you feel like might be useful for that non-extreme personality? I’m not going to go from zero to an ultramarathon. Like, I can’t do this wild type of stuff. What are some things that you would recommend for a step one path?
Ken Rideout: Great question. I wouldn’t even suggest that you do an ultramarathon.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Like, I wouldn’t suggest-
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want to make sure people aren’t hearing that.
Ken Rideout: Yeah, no.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you’re not recommending that.
Ken Rideout: I’m not even recommending you run races.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But what I am suggesting is that your health, mental and physical health, is your top responsibility in life. It’s more important than your children and your marriage, because without your health, you’re useless to anyone. I couldn’t think of doing something worse than neglecting my mental and physical health and having my wife and children have to care for me before it’s absolutely necessary. You can get in an accident and something happens and you’re married, your family will do anything to take care of you, and I would expect and hope that that would be the case. But if you’re out there smoking cigarettes, eating junk food, not exercising, and putting yourself in a compromised health position, and then you develop some ailment, now your children are having to worry about you. Just like for a parent, you’re never going to be happier than your saddest child. Your children most likely are never going to be happy if they know that their parents are dealing with health issues that were totally avoidable. So I would say to anyone listening, the first thing you need to do is, A, take responsibility for yourself. No one can tell you what you should eat. No one can tell you you have to exercise. But I can tell you that if you don’t eat healthy and exercise regularly, you’re not going to live as long or as healthy a life, period. It’s just impossible, right? Muscle is the organ of longevity. If you don’t have some, you’re probably not going to live quite as long. Maybe you’re a freak of nature and you can live to 100, but if you’re taking care of yourself, you’re probably going to have a lot more healthy, productive years, a lot more time to spend with your children. And, what I would suggest is that you start to institute some discipline, meaning it doesn’t have to be running. How about this? Just get out, if you’re not an exerciser at all, how about you start with a one-mile walk, 10-minute walk, and work your way into being able to walk for an hour several times a week. And if you can do that, maybe you add some weight and do a rucking backpack, and you ruck for an hour. ButI just think that for the people that don’t do that, they’re missing out on a key component in life because to me, there’s such a great feeling that’s available to everyone every day, and that’s the minute you’re done doing something hard. That’s the key. I was telling you, I don’t really get a runner’s high while I’m running, but I get a runner’s high every single day, the minute I stop running. I walk up this little hill to my house every day. I’ve never been in a bad mood walking up that hill. Never. Even when I’m getting emails and texts when I stop running, I look at my phone, and I start walking up the hill. Even when there’s negative news, I absorb it so much better. If I wake up and I look at my phone for the first time and there’s bad news, immediately I can feel a chemical shift in my body of like, “Argh.” The frustration and the chemicals that get released as the response to this negative news, it can throw me off kilter, which is why I try not to look at the phone for the first hour when I wake up. But when I get that same message after a run, I’m like, “All right. Let me just deal with this right now.” And typically, if it’s something that needs to be addressed, I just call them right now. I’m a big caller. I send some texts, but anyone who knows me knows I don’t hesitate to just call someone.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You-
Ken Rideout: Which is funny, because then I see my phone ring, and I’m like, “What lunatic just called someone without texting first?” But that’s me, and Rob can tell you. When I need to talk to him, I just call him.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. I got you there. You wake up in the morning, and run is the first thing that you do, right?
Ken Rideout: In a perfect world, if I’m in my routine, I wake up, have some coffee, deal with some work stuff, read the online news, check the sites that I check. Look at stock stuff, a little bit of finance stuff, and I’ll try to watch a little bit of sports, and I try to relax. I get up, and I slow roll. I do not get out of bed and just start running.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ken Rideout: I need to slow roll it, so I’ll have some coffee in the morning. I try to do the Huberman protocol and not drink it immediately. Actually, the first thing I drink as soon as I wake up is I have, and I don’t have a partnership with LMNT, but I drink LMNT in 16 ounces of water, and I just chug it down. It’s not enjoyable. It’s not fun. I’m like, “This is just necessity. I need to rehydrate.” And then I will have some coffee, and 30 minutes later, I’ll just sit there, relax. And typically then the kids get up, and I try to get them, wait until they go to school at 8:30. So I’ll go through my morning routine, talk to my wife, what’s going on today. Just like a business. I just work from home. So I’m going through the morning routine, and then I’ll run 8:30 to 10:00, come home. Depending on what the phone call is, a lot of times, I’ll take calls while I’m running. If it’s with my own agency-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … if I’m talking to Ben Ald or one of my colleagues, I’ll talk to them on the phone if I’m not working out. Meaning, if I’m just doing 10 miles, that’s my maintenance run. But when I’m training for a race, I’m doing workouts twice a week, a long run. It’s focused. And then I come home, and I get into the work routine, start to get into my diet. I usually don’t eat until after I run and have a very strict, regimented lifestyle. And I’ve just found peace in the discipline, man, and I heard Eliud Kipchoge say one time that a man without discipline is a man with no freedom. Because when you have discipline, you’re free to do what you want the rest of the day. When you have no discipline, you’re prisoner to your emotions. You feel lazy, so you take a nap. You feel hungry, you eat a piece of pie. That to me isn’t freedom. Freedom is to know I’m doing what I know I need to do, and then when that’s all done, I can do the things that I want to do. And to someone who doesn’t have discipline would say, “That sounds like he’s a prisoner to the workouts.” I disagree.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Your maintenance, 70 miles a week.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s baseline.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re going to run 70 a week. What’s the highest you would get up to? 100?
Ken Rideout: 100, yeah. 100 would be a lot for me. Maybe a little bit more occasionally, but not much more.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Would you ever go to that middle ground, 80, 85, 90?
Ken Rideout: Many, many times. If I’m training for a marathon, it’s typically 80 to 90. That would be average.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep. So you’re going to do your 10 every day, and then occasionally, a few of those days, you’ll jump up a little more.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. And then the other thing I would just want to say is I realized that it would probably benefit me more if I took a day off here and there, or if I did three miles. I know that. But this, again, this journey for me, anyone who knows me, I’ve said this is as much about mental health as it is about physical. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone. This is not for anyone else. You could never do this kind of thing for other people. This is not performative. I don’t care what you think about my training. I’m not looking for adulations or congratulations from online coaches, and there’s a lot of them. Apparently, there’s a lot of people out there that know a lot about running. They all want to tell me how I should do it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: But I have to stress, I’m not trying to necessarily run as fast as I can. I’m trying to be the best version of myself that I can be for my family, and this is the only thing that I have found that worked. When I left to my own devices, I found drugs. I found cheat codes, and I realized that, again, the easy road never pays well, and I’m not looking to not get paid well for my work.
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Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ve told me before, 10 miles a day is, that’s the day. And if someone were to ask you, “Hey, can’t you get your run in today?” It’s like, “Well, if you see me alive-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … I got my run in.”
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right. That’s just not a day.
Ken Rideout: Of course.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Where you’re not going to hit that in there. And at some point, that took you from presumably never running a marathon to running a two-and-a-half-hour marathon or something like that, right?
Ken Rideout: I had run a marathon in my 20s when I got to New York in three hours and 20 minutes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So-
Ken Rideout: Just without very much training or knowing what I was doing. So I had some ability to run, but I wouldn’t consider myself a runner.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, so actually I’ll back up a little bit. That’s interesting. You played every sport-
Ken Rideout: Yep
Dr. Andy Galpin: … in high school, like as a kid, you just-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … played everything. Hockey was your main jam.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Played college hockey.
Ken Rideout: And football.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And college football.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then you ran that marathon, something in your 20s, and that was the first time you’d ever run over-
Ken Rideout: Any race
Dr. Andy Galpin: … five miles?
Ken Rideout: You know, obviously I started training, and I had done a handful of 18-mile runs in Central Park. But again, I was running in cotton gym shorts, like mesh Champion shorts, cotton T-shirt. I was so chafed. I didn’t know about gels or anything else. I was fantasizing about food. When you’re not in great shape, you get dehydrated quickly, you’re starved for calories. Your body’s not used to running fasted. Now, I mean, I run 20 miles in the summer with no fuel, no hydration, and no calories easily.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What I think that’s interesting here is you went from a very traditional sport background, right?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Where you, a little success, played some college stuff, that’s great. And then your first marathon is three and a half hours, which is good.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But that’s pretty normal.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Most athletic young men are probably going to finish their first marathon in the four-hour range.
Ken Rideout: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right. Plus or minus, and you obviously have some genetic endowments and you’re better.
Ken Rideout: I ran 2:03 after 3:20 and 3:30. So just to give you context, it wasn’t like, “Oh my God, he’s a natural.” Like I couldn’t-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s not what I’m getting at
Ken Rideout: … I couldn’t, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re a little bit better than some of us.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But you weren’t like a first marathon, 2:45, like anywhere in the stratosphere here.
Ken Rideout: Not even close.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t come from running cross-country as a five-year-old. Like you don’t have-
Ken Rideout: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hockey’s a very fatiguing sport. It’s a high anaerobic sport, though.
Ken Rideout: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s anaerobic threshold.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is nothing like it’s not even running.
Ken Rideout: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s a different movement pattern entirely. And football is, especially a quarterback-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … it’s far from-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that thing. I hope people are connecting with that a little bit because that’s a pretty normal thing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then you start packing on 70 a week.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And that gets you an hour off your time.
Ken Rideout: I mean, I did that in like 1996. I don’t think I ran a marathon again until like 2012.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So that was just-
Ken Rideout: Yeah, you’re talking cra- Like, I did that on a whim. I trained for several months and ran a marathon. And after that, I was like, “That sucked. I don’t want to ever do that again.” And then I got-
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t like running initially.
Ken Rideout: No, I don’t like running now. I don’t. I’m not like, “Yay, I can’t wait to go for a run.” I’m like, “Oh, I got to go run.” Just like I got to go to school, or I got to go to work.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Got to take out the trash.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. That’s it. I’m like, “Yeah, what do you want to do today? Let me just get this run over with. I’ll be right back.” I got involved with drugs. When I got sober in 2010, I started doing triathlon, and through that, I was running. And as I was running in the triathlons, I’m like, “My running is pretty good. I wonder if I do some open races.” And I did like a 130 marathon. Then I did a 124 marathon. Then I did a 117 marathon. I was like, “Holy shit, I’m really getting faster at this.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Half marathons.
Ken Rideout: Sorry, half marathons. And I was like, “Wow, I’m getting pretty good.” And my wife’s coming to the races. We don’t have kids, and it’s fun. And then we had our fourth child, and I moved to LA in January 2016, and living in the Palisades. I met Rob, trained for, I had already qualified for the Ironman 2016 in Kona. In 2015, right after I had my fourth son, I did the Ironman Wisconsin, and I finished like sixth or seventh overall. Like I smashed it. I did like 9:30-ish, and I ran fast. I rode my bike under five hours, and I did terrible in the swim. But we had my first son, and I was living in Westchester County, so I’m driving back and forth to work in the city.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It’s driving me crazy, mad anxiety, road rage every day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s-
Ken Rideout: So I just abandoned the swim. I’m like, “You know what? F it. I’m going to either swim, if I train obsessively, I can swim close to one hour. If I do no swimming, I can swim in 1:10.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: So I was like, “You know what?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You want to make up that difference in the run and the bike-
Ken Rideout: Right
Dr. Andy Galpin: … like easily.
Ken Rideout: Well, so I gave up the 10 minutes in the swim, and I probably missed second place by 10 minutes. And I was like, “Damn it. If I swam, if I did this, if I did that.” And then I was like, “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.” Like, what’s the difference?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: People are always like, “If I didn’t go so hard on the bike, I had the fastest bike split. My run was shit.” But I’m like, “It’s a triathlon. It does not matter if you ran one mile fast, or you did the bike fast, or you had a great, I don’t care if you were the first out of the water. You were last in the race after the run, so that’s all that I care about. If it was a swim race, you’d be the best, but it’s triathlon, you’re the worst.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s a swim, bike, run.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right.
Ken Rideout: Two and a half mile swim in the ocean in Hawaii. 112-mile bike, which is so much harder than it sounds.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Through the lava and pavement and-
Ken Rideout: Up to Hawi, up this long-ass climb, and just, I’m telling you, like dangerous crosswinds. So when you’re coming back down this hill at 40, 50 miles an hour, and you’re getting battered by crosswinds with your arms extended on these aero bars, and you get blown, people get blown right into the lava, and newsflash, getting thrown into lava is like getting thrown into sandpaper.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ken Rideout: They look like they’ve been thrown through a meat grinder.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And it happens. So you’re like holding on for dear life, and you’re trying to make up for time because you’ve just been riding uphill for six miles. It’s so hard. And then you start the marathon around 1 or 2:00 in the afternoon in the Hawaiian heat.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Lovely.
Ken Rideout: And people are like, “It was so hot on the run.” I’m like, “Yeah, no shit. It’s Hawaii in the middle of the day. Of course it was hot.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: I appreciated that context in the book especially because having done the things I’ve doneIt’s not the running, it’s not the hiking, it’s not that stuff that is the suffering part. It’s the fact that you got the chapped lip.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s the blister.
Ken Rideout: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s the fact you haven’t had a normal bowel movement in three and a half days.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And it’s that stuff that grinds on you mentally, and you’re just like, “I just want clean socks.”
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Or like, “I just want this blister to go away. It’s driving me nuts all day.” It’s not your muscle glycogen, it’s not your pace, like it’s none of those things. It’s that little discomfort stuff, and you don’t plan for it.
Ken Rideout: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t know it’s coming. It’s the wind. Like, the thing I always say about hunting in the cold especially, put the temperature to zero. Like, I don’t care. It’s not that bad. But if the wind is blowing in your face-
Ken Rideout: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh my God. Like, that’s the fastest way hunters are back in the truck.
Ken Rideout: That’s exactly right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like, it’s over. Like, you’re done. You can’t handle that wind in your face. It’s just so horrible to be with.
Ken Rideout: That’s what I’m talking about, about the suffering. It’s like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s every second, too. It doesn’t go away
Ken Rideout: … the physical suffering, of course, you’re hurting, but it’s the mental suffering. It’s like, “I so badly want to stop.” So just imagine you’re in a marathon, 1,000 voices in your head telling you, “Dude, just stop. This is stupid. No one cares. You’re not going to win the Chicago Marathon, you loser. No one cares. You’re not even going to be in the top 100.” But there’s that one other voice, like in the corner, like, “Fuck you guys, we’re winning this race. Keep going. Don’t listen to these guys. They’re losers. Keep pushing.” And it’s like, which crew do you listen to? The loud peanut gallery, or the one guy who’s just desperate to win? And that’s literally what goes on. It’s like, everyone’s screaming to stop. All systems are like, “Stop.” Hyperventilating, dehydrated, legs are sore, calf is killing you. And then there’s the one person who’s like, “Do something different. Be a champion. Fight through this.” There’s like a million stories of guys that have overcome, guys and girls that have overcome incredible discomfort and displeasure to go on to do great things.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 49/51. That’s how you wrote it in the book, right? 49% of you wants to quit.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t need it to be 99%.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like, I just need 1% more says go-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … keep going, than the 1% that says stop going.
Ken Rideout: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How do I build that 51?
Ken Rideout: You just have to make the decision that you want. Do you want to win or lose in life? Like, and I can tell you this with certainty because I’ve chosen the losing path many, many times, and it was not fun. And I was talking to Rich Roll recently, and he was like, “Maybe you traded one addiction for another.” And I’m like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … “Yeah. Guess what? One addiction had me suicidal, and the other addiction has me here talking to you about my new book. I’ll take this addiction.” I wouldn’t suggest anyone else does this. I haven’t figured it out. I’m not in a-
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, this is survival mode
Ken Rideout: … I’m not in a state of bliss.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’m like telling you, hey, I’m deeply flawed. I did some cool things along the way, but here are some things that you might be able to learn from. But I wouldn’t suggest that you want to be like me. But I would say that you could take some of the things that I’ve done and some of the tricks and things that I’ve been able to do, and convince myself of, you might be able to take something from this and apply it to your own life, and maybe you can become the best podcaster, the best sports scientist, the best trainer. Like, you don’t have to run. Like I said, I don’t like running. I’m not an advocate for, like, “Hey, come join the running community. I’m trying to build a tribe.” I’m not. I’m telling you, running happened to be the vehicle that I used to get to where I am today, but it was just by happenstance that I was running a lot, and I just started to get good at running. But I was not trying to be like, winning marathons and be a great runner. But I hope that people listening can apply that to whatever it is they’re in. If you run a hedge fund, be the best hedge fund manager in the world. Typically, the guy who tries the hardest, puts in the most work, typically will win. And occasionally, you’ll get people that are like savants, and they’re maybe on the spectrum, and they have some natural ability, like Elon, where you’re like, “How does this guy’s brain work like this?” And he’ll tell you, like I’ve heard Elon say, like, “You don’t want to be like me.” People just want the prize, they don’t want what comes with it. And you can’t get one without the other. I’ve heard Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady talk about the process that it took them to get the most out of themselves, and it doesn’t sound fun. That doesn’t sound appealing. I heard Tom Brady the other day say, “I was a psychopath Monday to Friday on the practice field. I was a lunatic. I wasn’t fun to be around. All I wanted to do was win.” That doesn’t sound like fun. But do you want seven Super Bowl rings? I do. I’m willing to do that. I can do that, and most people think they can do that, and they want to do that. They believe it. But the minute the shit gets hard, you find out how badly you want it. Because what I’ve done is available to everyone. I’m not a good runner. I mean, I’m a decent runner, I’m a decent athlete, I know that. But no one was looking for me in Division I sports. No one was seeking me out to sponsor me to run races. I just tried harder than a lot of other people in a sport that when you try hard, you’re rewarded with results. But I would argue that that’s available in every profession in the world. The person who’s into AI coding or whatever the technical term for AI engineering is, the guy who spends the most time obsessing over that is probably going to be the guy who gets those $100 million contracts to go to ChatGPT or Anthropic or whatever the competitors are. xAI. You studied more than everyone, you know more than everyone else? Here’s $100 million. We need you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: One of the questions I’ve got the most in my career is, having dealt with and personally coached some of the world’s most decorated athletes, many of them actually, what’s different about them? Having done this in baseball players and football, across all these different things, one thing that is consistent across all these people, when they get tougher, it matters. Tough always translates. Skill practice doesn’t always translate, more diet, like those things don’t always translate. They generally work for most people, but always, we’ve found when people try harder, it translates into more. Which is the wildest thing to say. But even the best in the world try harder. Like, that is your quickest, most consistent path to getting better. You call it the other side of hard. We call it try harder.It will deliver. It’s the one consistent thing that I can say. If you’re going to roll the dice on something, just try. More effort tends to win. And there’s the exceptions when that’s like, hey, you’re burying yourself, and we got to back off, Ken. We got to maybe pull some-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … fine. But let’s start with figuring out what hard really is.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. And through-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Let’s get there first
Ken Rideout: … all the training I’ve done, I’ve never felt like, oh, my God, I’ve done too much this week. I’ve never. I feel like I’m exhausted, I’m destroyed, but I never felt like I can’t get more out of myself in a weird way. And it’s a strange thing to say now reflecting, because I’m trying to think, when was a time where I really needed a break? I would say after the Mongolia race, I needed-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure
Ken Rideout: … a couple of weeks to feel normal again. I was run down. But you’re talking a week of extreme racing every single day. But to your point about try harder, I tell my own kids, and I know that for my children, I feel bad because I know it ain’t easy being my kids because they see the intensity that I bring to everything, and it’s like, I understand the reputation that I have.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And that’s not everyone’s personality, but it’s just part of it.
Ken Rideout: But I try to convey to them, I’m like, “Guys, I don’t care if you’re good, bad, or indifferent, but the one thing I do care about is who’s trying the best.” Because I said, if we’re at football or a soccer game, any sport, I said, “We can all sit here in the stands, and we can watch the game, and all of us can say which kid out there is a savage, who’s trying the hardest. He’s not the best, but he’s trying the hardest. He cares. You could see the emotion.” I go, “That’s free for everyone. Any of you can be that guy.” So anyone listening, you can be the guy in work who comes in a little bit early, stays a little bit late, and you can fake your way through that for a week or two, but you can’t be that savage every day, all day. Someone is, but you can’t force your way through it unless you truly believe that that’s who you are. And in a lot of ways, that’s what I’ve been able to do, is convince myself, because there’s many days I don’t believe anything about myself. I’m like, “I’m not that tough. I’m just trying to get through the workout. I’m just trying to get through the day.” But by showing up every day, and even if I don’t believe it internally, that’s the external, that’s what I’m reflecting to the world. And that’s the other thing to know, that the world is a mirror. You get back exactly what you put out there. So if you put out, “I’m tough, I show up every day,” and you put it out there enough, people will believe you, and they’ll start to reflect back to you, like in my case where people are like, “Wow, you’re a really tough guy.” I’m like, “I’m scared shitless all the time, but okay, yeah, I’m tough, if you believe. I fooled you, but okay.” And so that’s what I try to reflect to the kids is, “Guys, pretend that you’re not scared.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: Pretend that you want to try the hardest. At the end of the day, I don’t care what you think, I only care what you do, and if you’re doing it, if you’re out there trying super hard, everyone will see it and be like, “I want that guy on my team.” At the same time, when they see you pretending to do a tackle and the guy runs right past you, everyone knows you didn’t want that, and that sucks. It’s much more rewarding to stick your helmet in there and maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable and get a hard hit than to feel that emptiness of being like, he didn’t even try. You let him run right by you. I try not to tell them that, but everyone can see what happens.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right.
Ken Rideout: And that’s what I try to tell them is, “You’re not fooling anyone.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: I had a really big revelation when I was working with a UFC fighter, and he had won, I think, seven or eight in a row. He should’ve gotten title fight. He was right there. And it was bad luck, honestly, bad timing, injuries, and those things go and whatever. And soon after that, his career was over. Still was a young guy, still hypercompetitive. He just had some, honestly, super bad breaks. Winning a world championship’s hard.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s really, really hard. You can-
Ken Rideout: It gets harder every year
Dr. Andy Galpin: Super tough, right?
Ken Rideout: Guys are so competitive.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So the lesson I learned from him was the last couple of fights in his career, he would come back afterwards, and we’d do these deep dive analyses after competitions. Because I need feedback and on lots of stuff. And he was like, “Man, the hardest part was actually getting hyped up for the fight.” And I’m like, “Whoa.” And this was a enormous red flag for him. Some people are not that way. But he’s just like, “I just didn’t care.” And I was like, “Uh-oh.” And he’s the kind of guy who’s in the back, and he wants you to say the most vulgar things. Probably some of your self-talk would land. That’s the stuff he wants to hear about, this is life and death and this kind of stuff. And he needed that mindset to get in there. And he’s like, “I just couldn’t.” And I was like, “Oh, no.” Because I knew that was part of his process. I don’t know, three fights later, he was retired.
Ken Rideout: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It was like, oh, shit. The revelation I had there was, I don’t think for a minute he ever got comfortable being uncomfortable. I don’t believe in that at all. One of the other conversations I had with a guest, this year, Dr. Lenny Wiersma, sports psychologist, he hates that saying. I’m not fully convinced people ever get comfortable with that, because when you talk to these athletes, they’re still scared. They hate the thing. You hate the race. You’re scared every day. You don’t want to do it. I’m not fully convinced people get more comfortable. Because in my life, I’m waiting to get comfortable with those things. I’m like, “It’s never here.
Ken Rideout: That’s right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: When am I going to get this dang thing-
Ken Rideout: That’s right
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that I’m comfortable?” But I think what people can develop, and I would love your thoughts here, is just a willingness to do it anyways.
Ken Rideout: That’s a great point. I’m not comfortable like, oh, I’m so comfortable with the fact that I’m about to feel like I could drop dead at every step. It’s not that. It’s being comfortable knowing that it’s coming, and doing it anyway. That’s what I mean is like you’re-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s willingness
Ken Rideout: … comfortable with the fact that I know that I’m going to wake up and wish to God that the race would be canceled, there’d be a fire downtown, and no one can race because the fire, or going walking into a boxing match when I was boxing with the New York Athletic Club, I would be praying for the lights to go out. Please, let there be a power outage. Crazy thoughts. But you go anyway. And what I mean by being comfortable with discomfort is like, okay, I’m comfortable, meaningI’m still going to go. I have all these thoughts, but I’m comfortable with the fact that I know I’m going anyway. I’m comfortable knowing I’m still going, but I’m scared. All these things are happening, all these thoughts are there for me. I’m scared. I have all the insecurities, but I have comfort inside knowing I’m still going to go, but I’m going to go through this process. So it’s not that you’re, “Oh, I’m so comfortable with the fact that I might get knocked out in front of everyone.” No, but I’m comfortable knowing that I’m going to show up no matter what happens here. I’m going in, I’m getting in that ring, and I’d be comfortable betting on myself to show up.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How do you get that comfort?
Ken Rideout: Experience. You have to put yourself out there. That’s why I can’t understand why people aren’t involved in any kind of competitive process. If you’re just going to work, coming home, and not putting yourself in those positions, I just feel like you’re missing a lot of important lessons in life. Because what do you do when you’re faced with real adversity? My wife was diagnosed with cancer earlier last year, and that was, man, it’s hard not to get choked up to thinking about it now because it scared the shit out of me, it scared the shit out of her, it scared my children. And we had a moment after a week or several days of crying and feeling like victims and feeling like we have the death sentence that I literally said to her, “Enough of the bullshit. We got to suck it up and lean into this and get ready. Someone’s coming to fight us, and we can either get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight back.” That’s how I looked at it, and she was like, “You know what? You’re right.” And my wife doesn’t have obviously the same mindset as me. She’s a normal person. And it mattered. And thank God she had the best-case scenario. She had the mastectomy surgery. It all went well. She didn’t have to do any really harsh chemo treatments or anything to that effect. And now she’s on the road to recovery. But the point is, I believe, would we have gone through it if I wasn’t doing the crazy shit that I was doing? Probably. But in a lot of ways, it made it easier to cope with and deal with because I honestly think that my mentality rubbed off on her. She’s tough anyway. I’m not trying to take credit for any of her toughness, but that talk-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s contagious
Ken Rideout: … that talk made no sense.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s so helpful. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’m not a rah-rah guy. You don’t have to yell at me. You don’t have to cheer me up. There’s nothing you can say to make me try harder than I’m about to try. But what I would do is, even with my kids, I would lean in and get close to my children. I’m like, “Hey, when shit gets hard, show them who you really are. Be tough out there. And no matter what happens out here, we’re going to leave, go get donuts. I’m still going to love you, and it doesn’t matter, but we’re going to have much more fun if you try your hardest.” And it’s like, “All right. Let’s go.” And you see them, and you see sometimes they respond to it and sometimes they don’t, and they come back defeated, especially the little one who wrestles. It’s like man, he gets pinned twice in his first competitive tournament. But I’m like, “Buddy, those guys have four years of wrestling experience. You’ve been to one wrestling tournament in your life.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’m like, “You have to get comfortable with losing, in the sense that don’t view them as losses. Learn something. Did you learn something? When you did that and the guy cradled you and rolled you over, did you see what you did wrong there? You had him and then you didn’t.” He’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “The champions realize they can process that. Everyone hates to lose. All the kids cry when they lose. It’s okay because it means that you care. But what you can’t do is let that define you to say, ‘That’s who I am. I lost. I’m a loser.’ You’re not a loser.” The world champion has lost in tournaments, especially when they’re kids. You have to go through this. Jiu-jitsu is the perfect example. There isn’t a person alive who goes to jiu-jitsu who didn’t get tapped out multiple times every single training session because how can you get better if you don’t train with guys that are better than you? And when you train with guys that are better than you, they dominate you. Ask anyone who’s gone through any kind of jiu-jitsu. When you’re a white belt and you go with a guy who’s a blue belt or a purple belt, you can look at him and be like, “I’m going to twist this nerd in a pretzel. Look at this guy. He’s a geek.” And the next thing you know, he’s got you in a frigging twister, and you’re like, “How am I stuck in this position?” But it’s all technique, and it’s being calm. Now, I think that jiu-jitsu gives some of the best life lessons. And Cameron, my youngest, he goes to jiu-jitsu, and there’s little girls there who are just, their technique is so flawless. And he goes there. The girls get the better of him, and he comes out. I’m like, “Buddy, you did pretty good.” He’s like, “Yeah, yeah. Did you see I got that girl, and I did this?” And I’m thinking to myself, I love the fact that he realizes that gender doesn’t matter. The technique is there. It’s available to everyone to learn. And when you understand staying calm in an uncalm environment, and it’s like physical chess. I’m like, “When you did that, she basically reversed you. It’s not about being stronger than her.” Because he would say to me, he’d be like, “Dad, it’s crazy. I’m so much stronger than her. I can pick her up. I can take her down. I can do anything I want. And then the minute we get on the ground, she’s on her back, and the next thing you know, she’s got me in a triangle. I can’t…” And I go, “Yeah, buddy, you have to learn what she’s doing. And this isn’t about physical strength. It’s about intelligence.” That’s what I like about jiu-jitsu, is you can apply strength and intelligence, and one doesn’t beat the other. It’s like, which one’s more important? I don’t know, but they’re both critically important in jiu-jitsu. But for parents out there, of all the sports that my kids do, jiu-jitsu is the best for all kids because you can be the worst athlete, the nerdy kid who just wants to be studious, and you can apply that intelligence to that sport and be really good. But the worst sport is wrestling. Wrestling, if you’re not comfortable, like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ken Rideout: … being uncomfortable, wrestling is a hard sport. It’s hard to watch. It’s hard for the kids to do it. It takes so much effort. And man, it is painful when it doesn’t go your way.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, it’s full peg the whole time.
Ken Rideout: Oh, it’s so physically demanding.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s why jiu-jitsu guys hate wrestlers.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because you’re like, “Whoa, you just calm down for a second.”
Ken Rideout: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like, will you just calm down for a second?
Ken Rideout: Calm down and let me put this move on you, and the wrestler’s just sweating all over you just like a savage.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Every muscle in your body is doing something different at different times, and jiu-jitsu’s like, whoa.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You mentioned failure several times.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ll hear these clichés, these tropes, either you win or you learn, and you learn more from your failures than your successes. All those things are true. I rarely hear people give actual insights off of that, though.You just gave a bunch of them. I would love to know more. You’ve had so many failures in your life. Thrown out of your college team, and you’ve mentioned the decade drug addiction, and failures and failures, and-
Ken Rideout: I got fired from my first job on Wall Street.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fired from your first job, and then your second job was-
Ken Rideout: Thank God I did. Every single setback that I’ve had in my life, including my addiction, has become a strength, every one of them. And they all sucked. I didn’t want to go through them. I don’t want to go through them. I hate that I had to go through them. But I got fired from my job for slapping a guy for bullying and harassing me. I was the young guy, and I was like, “No one’s bullying and harassing me. I’d rather get fired.” And I did.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: But when I did, a couple of guys heard about it, bigger traders in the market at Enron. “This guy’s crazy. He slapped a guy.” They were like, “I want him to be my broker. That guy’s a nut. I want him protecting my orders.” Within a year of that slap, I was making over a million dollars a year living in London, flying on the Concorde, driving a brand-new Porsche, had a beautiful house in London. I had everything. And at the time when I got fired, I was like, “I can’t believe I’ve been fired. I can barely pay my rent. I’m making 40 grand.” That was on a Thursday. On a Monday, I had a job making 80 grand. This is in 1996 or ‘97. That was more money than anyone I knew of, including my parents and their friends.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re making more a month than probably your parents made in a year-
Ken Rideout: Yes
Dr. Andy Galpin: … their whole life.
Ken Rideout: I had everything. I had like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Single, no kids, all the stuff
Ken Rideout: … Yeah. But one thing that I realized with having stuff and going through that, and I’ve talked a lot about this before, about money doesn’t make you happier, and it really doesn’t. It didn’t change anything about me. I took myself with me everywhere I went. And you know what? I had all the same insecurities. I developed a drug problem. And no matter what kind of suit I had on, whether it was a shit green suit from Filene’s Basement or a cashmere and wool Armani suit from Sloane Street in London, I was still an insecure idiot inside with a lot of unresolved issues that had to be dealt with sooner or later. And I was poor, then I was rich, and then I was a drug addict because none of it made me comfortable. None of it was the answer. All the things that we’re looking for are internal. All the best things in your life are free. You think that money would make you happier than going home and hugging your children and being with your wife and having dinner together and having the kids all clowning around and teasing each other and just all the fun of having a family. We go around the table anytime we have family dinner, and my wife asks them, “What were your roses and thorns for the day? What happened good and what happened bad?” And then we talk about them like, “Oh, I had a…” A lot of times, the kids, they’re very positive kids. They’ll be like, “Here’s my rose. I did this. I got a good grade, and I didn’t have any thorns today. I had a great day.” So then I always make a big deal. I’m like, “Tensei had a great day.” When they were kids, they had plates that said, “Tensei had a great day,” a dinner plate that she would use for them. I’ll be like, now they’re teenagers, and I’m like, “Michelle, get the plates. Get the Tensei had a great plate day.” And-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Your teenage daughter hates it every second of it, I’m sure.
Ken Rideout: They become different people. She’s like, “Dad, just…” For a long time, she’d be like, if I was dropping them off, like, “Dad, you can just drop me off here.” I was like, “Tensei, I know exactly what you’re doing. If you think that I’m not going to drive you right up to your friends, you’re out of your…” And if I’ve done anything right in my life with this book coming out and some of the attention that it’s garnered has been, I’m not going to get choked up here, but it’s been the greatest gift that I’ve ever given to myself and to my children. They’re so proud of me. I can’t even put into words. They’re like, “Dad, can you sign books for all my friends? Dad, can you sign books for my teachers?” And I’m like, “Are they asking or are you just offering?” They’re like, “No, no, they asked.” Mr. So-and-So, who’s one of the… I coached the local cross country team. I was the assistant coach.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, nice.
Ken Rideout: Which, by the way, we destroyed. There’s two high schools in my-
Dr. Andy Galpin: What? You guys… What? Weird.
Ken Rideout: There’s two high schools in my town, Ravenwood and Brentwood. My kids go to Ravenwood. They’re both great schools. Brentwood is another mile away from my house, but their girls cross country team was… Four of the girls were going Division I on scholarships, which in cross country is a big deal. So the guy who was the coach, I just knew him from running in the neighborhood. He’s a really good runner. And he was like, “Hey, man, do you want to come help out coach the cross country team?” I was like, “I would love to.” Had to go through the whole process of getting fingerprints. It was tons of training to work with kids. It was involved, which is a good thing. And so I started helping them, and I go down there, and it’s like the kids are from the suburbs, and they’re a little bit more conservative, and I come in with-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ken Rideout: … more like a fighter’s mentality, and I’m like, “Guys, don’t give these kids anything. You got to get out there, set the tone, be aggressive. When you’re in those turns, give nothing. Hold your lane. Don’t be afraid to be physical. This is racing. Racing isn’t about we’re not trying to win a tickling contest here. Show them who you are.” I said, “These…” They were like, “Oh, we might be late tomorrow because there’s the homecoming football team.” I was like, “Never mind this we might be late. Do you think that those football kids are going to come watch your damn track meet? Then don’t you dare to condescend to those guys and let them or defer to them and let them set the tone for you. Your race is much more important to you than anyone else’s to theirs. You have to believe that.” And I would just get fired up, and I’d be like, “Don’t you effing give these guys anything.” And the other coach would be like… Because he’d always be like, “Ken, you want to hype them up?” And I’d be like, “I’m not a rah-rah guy,” but I would just talk to them, and I’m like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s pretty rah-rah.
Ken Rideout: Well, I wouldn’t be screaming and yelling.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I get it. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’d be talking to them firmly like, “Guys, you think you’re a shit runner, you think you’re a nerd, you think these guys are tougher? Then let them beat you. But if you believe that you’re tougher than them and you can kill these guys, then go out there and do that.” And dude, they did. They were so good. I never been to a cross country meet in my life.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: There was one girl, she was a sophomore. She finished, I don’t know, fifth in the state, right? And we had the top three finishers, twins going to Georgetown and Dartmouth, because actually, I think Rob knows Ben True, who’s married to Sarah Groff, who went to the Olympics, finished fourth.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: So Sarah Groff, who’s my friend, I’m really close with her husband, Ben True, who finished fourth at the Olympic trials.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh.
Ken Rideout: So in the 10K-
Dr. Andy Galpin: The worst possible spot
Ken Rideout: … and the 5K. It was heartbreaking. And then Sarah goes to the Olympics and finished fourth in the triathlon at the Olympics.So devastating. But Ben was a nasty runner, like sub 60-minute half marathoner, and he was obsessed with NASCAR. So, a friend of mine, Landon Cassill, drove in NASCAR. So one day, and Ben’s very introverted. He doesn’t socialize. He’s very rarely on social media. So I bring him with me to a NASCAR race in the pits, we’re full access. And, anyway, long story short, the girl’s getting recruited, and she says, “Oh, I met your friend Ben True. He’s one of the coaches at Dartmouth.” And I text him a picture of me and the girl. I’m like, “Yo, you trying to recruit my girl?” And she’s like, “Oh, you like Ben?” And she decides to go there. And I was like, “I got you an athlete.” Like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Goalie
Ken Rideout: … my decision didn’t matter. But it was just fun to see this connection in the runner world that all of a sudden I was like, “My God, I’m actually in the running world,” to a certain extent, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I never felt like I was a real runner.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: The girls win the states, but this girl’s coming in one of the regional track meets, and she comes around, and I want to say she might’ve been in second or third in the race, and she looks at me really nice, so mature. These girls were like young women in high school. She looks at me, and I go, “Don’t you dare give up.” There was like 100, 200 yards to go. I go, “You go get her right now. She’s fading.” And I like, “The girl looks fine.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ken Rideout: I go, “Don’t you dare let her beat you. You can catch her.” And she’s like, had 10 yards. She looked at me, and she’s like, “I got it.” Takes off and wins. And I was like, dude, I was ready to cry.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ken Rideout: I was like, I come run over, I give her a hug. I’m like, “You did it. I’m so proud of you.” I just love these kids.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It was so much fun. I had the greatest time ever. But, anyway, all that to say, some of my kids’ teachers are the coaches at Ravenwood, so they know me, and I’d see them at the thing. And of course, all the parents are like, “Man, you’re a traitor. Why aren’t you at Ravenwood?” And I would say, same thing I’d say to them, same thing I’d tell everyone else. Because that guy asked me to help, and no one else over here asked me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No one invited you.
Ken Rideout: I’d much rather be at my kids’ school.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I was at Cal State Fullerton for 13 years.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I didn’t work with a single athlete there.
Ken Rideout: Why?
Dr. Andy Galpin: No one asked me.
Ken Rideout: Perfect.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I had a very famous Major League Baseball player. I can’t remember who it was. And Cal State Fullerton was very good at baseball.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Several national championships, very good there. And I had a pretty good roster of Major League Baseball players at the time. And they asked, they’re like, “Oh, are you doing all the stuff for the baseball team?” And I was like, “No, literally none.” And then they asked, and then this came up, and he was like, “Why?” And I was like, “No one’s ever asked.” And I’m like, “I’m right here in your hall.”
Ken Rideout: So crazy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: “I’m just in the same hallway as you.” Not to sound as arrogant as possible, but I’m like, “I don’t know. We got a pretty good track record of Major League Baseball players,” and then not a single one. Nobody ever asked.
Ken Rideout: Not that I mentor people, or I’m not looking for mentoring. I love everyone. I have four children. I have all the mentees that I need.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But being able to impact other people out there and having people follow me on social media and the messages that I’ve received. I was telling my wife, I’m like, “I would never take someone’s message and just post it and be like, ‘Look at this.’”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Sure.
Ken Rideout: But the book, the messages of support and everything that I have received with regards to the book has been like, I’ve cried multiple times. I send them to my wife, and she’s like, “We have to make a book of these things where people like, ‘Man, this really changed my outlook on life. It’s been so impactful.’” It’s been just a dream come true. But I’m sorry to get sidetracked on that when we were talking about coaching and mentoring, but I absolutely love being able to help young kids. I’ve spoken to a number of all the different local football teams and-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … it’s always funny because I’m like, I can’t tell if this is resonating because I think some of the parents might be like, “This guy from Boston is down here talking to these kids from Tennessee, and he’s got a different attitude than a lot of other people.” It’s not screaming and yelling. There might be a few curse words-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just a few
Ken Rideout: … accidentally mixed in.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’m sure, yeah.
Ken Rideout: But I’m telling them stories of resilience and addiction and what being a loser looks like and how close. I say to them, like, “Dude, no one here is going to look at me or research anything about me and be like, ‘That guy’s a loser.’” But I can tell you, I spent 10 years ideating on suicide because I was in such a desperate state. I was so in need of help, and I didn’t know how to get it. And instead of asking for help and doing the hard thing, I spent 10 years trying to fix it myself. And I got news for you, a lot of times we can’t fix these things ourselves. And my son was struggling with school, my oldest son, and I was like, “Hey, buddy,” just like they would tell you in addiction treatment, I said, “You can’t do this on your own, right?” I said, “You having a hard time figuring it out?” He’s like, “Yeah. I can’t do it.” I go, “It’s okay.” I couldn’t do a lot of things by myself. And in a lot of ways, I’ve started this faith journey recently, and what you realize is, no matter how much success I’ve had, no matter how many things, if there’s still a void there, the outside opinions and the outside world doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s inside. And if you feel a void, and I’ve tried everything from drugs to endurance and everything else, and I finally, I’m watching people on their faith journey, and I’m like, “They seem to have something that I don’t have, but it looks like they have peace that I don’t have.” So I’ve started to explore this and talking to a pastor and to bring it back to what I was saying to my son is like, when you realize you can’t do something on your own, and I think that this is an important message for everyone. Sometimes you just have to reach out and ask for help. And if you’re in a position to help, to me, the greatest gift that I’ve received as a result of my experiences winning, overcoming addiction, the greatest gift that I’ve received is the ability to impact other people and to be of service to other people. And listen, I’m not out here fucking campaigning for a Mr. Nice Guy award. I don’t care. If you don’t like me, you’re never going to like me. I don’t care. But I will tell you that there is no greater reward than being of service to other people. It’s not just words. It’s truth. Think about giving Christmas presents. When you see your kids get the presents that they want, or you’re able to give your wife or a friend something that they just look at it, and it has all me. It’s not monetary value, it’s meaning. Versus the feeling you get when someone gives you something you really want, like, “Hey, here’s a brand-new $100,000 Rolex.” You’re like, “Wow, that’s awesome.” And two weeks later, you’re like, “Yeah, I have a cool watch. Doesn’t really-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … my life’s the same.”But when you can impact someone else by doing something, either of service, providing a service for them, giving them something that means something in their life, that is the greatest gift in the world. And if I’ve learned anything through this process, it’s that being able to help other people is much more important than anything you could win or do for yourself. So, for what it’s worth, know that this all comes back to the suffering. It’s not winning the race, it’s the process of preparing for the race. It’s race day itself. When we adopted my daughter, I complained the whole time when we were living in Ethiopia. My wife lived there for two months. I was there for a week. We stayed in a guesthouse. The bed had no mattress. It was just a box spring.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ken Rideout: Basically, hardwood floor.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, this is your nightmare.
Ken Rideout: I was like, “This is terrible.” My poor wife. I had to go to a local-
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ll find out who’s tough real fast.
Ken Rideout: I had to go to-
Dr. Andy Galpin: And it’s not you
Ken Rideout: … a local hardware store and buy an egg crate thing in Addis Ababa and put it on the mattress. But now we’ll be walking, and I’ll smell a campfire or wood-burning from a fireplace, and I’ll be like, “Oh, my God. You smell that? Dude, reminds me of Ethiopia. It’s so romantic. It just brings back such good memories.” She’s like, “You complained every freaking day we were there.” And I was like, “Yes, just like I would complain about getting ready for a race, just like I would complain about how hard it was.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But when you have that experience, no one can ever take that away from you, and there’s something romantic about the suffering you went through. When I think about the race in Mongolia, it was miserable. I hated every second of it, but now I can laugh about thinking, sitting around the campfire at night with all the people trying to get warm and talking, and the funniest story from that whole Mongolia, you could volunteer for the race and then get in the following year. So, it was like a big caravan that would travel-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, cool
Ken Rideout: … from camp to camp. So, there was a group of Italian guys that were frigging awesome. I wish I could remember the names of everyone, but they were awesome. And one of them had an adult son who was in the traveling caravan who was race support. One night, they’re sitting there like, “Ken, you want a piece of Parmesan cheese from Italy?” And I go… Can we swear on here? I mean, I’ve swore already twice.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, dude, we’re a little past that point, but yeah.
Ken Rideout: Okay. I was like, “You motherfuckers brought a Parmesan wheel?” I’m like, “Who’s carrying this? Who’s carrying a wheel of Parmesan cheese?” It wasn’t like a crumb. It was like a chunk of Pa- And I think that, and then-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Freshly shaved and yeah
Ken Rideout: … then he goes, “Here, put some olive oil on it.” And he pulls out a mini bottle of olive oil. I’m like, “You brought olive oil. You even brought the bottle? You didn’t think to put it in plastic?” I’m like, “None of this makes sense.” You’re not supposed to have outside-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Little bending the rules.
Ken Rideout: I think that the sun-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But again, they weren’t trying to win, so they were just there for the experience.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ken Rideout: And then after the 50-mile stage, we stayed in the most picturesque little camp, and there was a creek, but there’s livestock everywhere. So, I come on, I’m like, “I’m getting in that creek.” I get in the creek, wash my clothes off, and immediately, I’m like hives and rash everywhere.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I’m like, “Oh, my God, the creek is polluted, but it looks good.” I come back a couple of hours later, and the Italian guys are in there. Guys, it’s a co-ed race. The guy’s completely naked in the creek, soaping up. I go, “Yo, dude. I think that there’s bacteria and shit in that creek.” He couldn’t care less. Next day, everyone covered in rashes. But the way that those guys were just so carefree and having fun, they were all from the Dolomites, and it was just so refreshing to laugh with those guys every night about the Parmesan cheese. I’m like, “If one of you guys has a fucking pizza, that’s where I’m drawing the line. I’m calling the race officials.” Because that’s what I was waiting for them. It’s like, pull out a frigging meatball hero or something. After the fact, I romanticize the suffering.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ken Rideout: But in the moment, it’s like getting your PhD. I’m sure there were days where you’re like, “I’m never going to be able to. I’m never going to do this dissertation. I’m never going to pass.” You have these moments of doubt, and then you reflect back on it, and you’re just like, “Yeah, it was something that I did.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But at the time, it was probably the most difficult thing, and that’s reflective of everything in life. The best things are going to be hard, but if you can do them, you’ll have a life of memories and experiences that can never be taken away from you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s a weird part of the psyche, this camaraderie thing you hear from military people. In your world, it’s the time in between the races or on the race.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? It’s probably when somebody beat you-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that gives you the biggest smile.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: For us, it’s the campfire. It’s not even necessarily the, you got an animal or you didn’t, right? It’s just the fact that you suffered all this time, and-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that’s the part you laugh at 10 years later, like, “Remember when this thing broke and we had to walk this whole damn thing and…”
Ken Rideout: Well, the training that you do with the people, and the amount-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ken Rideout: … of things that Rob Moore and I have done together, it’s like, if you told me that, “Oh, we’re going to go here, and you and this guy are going to share a hotel room,” I’d be like, “There’s not a chance I’m sharing a room with a guy.” Rob and I have shared hotel rooms hundreds of times. We’ve suffered through so many things. We’ve been in crazy races, delayed flights. We’ve been in some scenarios where we— I love, I mean, you were at dinner with us last night. I never laugh so hard as when I get together with Rob after a while because of all the suffering and complete oddball things we’ve done, like Ironmans all over the world and-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s the same thing with my friend Dan because we’ve done such wildly irresponsible things.
Ken Rideout: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just objectively idiotic-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … maneuvers, and 90-plus percent of the time, they paid off.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It worked, and then there’s 10% where it just was pure suffering and just delusion, and-
Ken Rideout: No one can take experiences away from you. I really hope the people listening take this away. It’s not about going to Mongolia and winning. It’s about having the balls to go to Mongolia and try to do that. I did a race in Kenya the following year that I came in third in, running and seeing giraffes while I’m running, and elephants. It’s like those experiences are mine forever. When I think back on my time in London, I made millions of dollars. I had all this fancy shit. The stuff, cool. It comes and goes. No one can ever take away the fact that I was landed in a helicopter on that crazy hotel in Dubai, the Burj Al Arab, when it was brand new.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ken Rideout: Landed on the helicopter landing pad.That I went to Venice-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Beautiful building
Ken Rideout: … and stayed at the Cipriani Hotel. And okay, I was a whacked out idiot on drugs and spending money like a drunken sailor, but I stayed in every Four Seasons in Europe at one point. I just loved it. I loved experiencing life and making up for what I didn’t have as a child. And I look back with such fondness. I had incredible experiences.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do you know the name Henry Rollins?
Ken Rideout: Yeah, of course. The heavy metal, like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Black Flag musician.
Ken Rideout: Yes. Awesome.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Few people know he’s actually a huge weightlifter.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. No, he’s super fit. All you have to do is look at him and be like, “This guy’s a freak. He’s jacked.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Strength training, just huge lover of it. He wrote this essay probably 25 years ago, called “The Iron.” I love it. But after that, he put a little thing out where he talked about how he doesn’t have talent, he has tenacity.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. That’s it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I hear you say things like you just said, and it resonates with me a lot personally, because we share many things in our past that are similar, including I was not a good student. And I tried. I was there. I was not on anything else, there was just not that much intellectually.
Ken Rideout: I hope people are absorbing that, that a guy who’s a well-respected, world-renowned, sports scientist, PhD, trainer to stars realizes, I wasn’t a good student and I wasn’t a good runner. And a lot of the things that we weren’t good at, but at some point I was like, “I’m going to be the best, and you can’t stop me.” And I don’t know what, you have to create enemies, or you have to create this impression of yourself, but I think that we’re both, and I’m sorry to interrupt, an example of the only person that can tell you anything about you is you. And if you believe that, you’ll understand. And if you don’t, and you dismiss me like, “F this guy, he’s just talking shit,” cool. You can do that, too. We need people to be in second place. So keep having that mentality that it’s all bullshit. But we’re here to tell you, both of us are an example. Talent cannot beat grit when grit keeps showing up every day and talent just takes days off.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re going to fail. You failed. I’ve failed tons. I would often get lost in that personally. Right? The fail is the end of the road, right?
Ken Rideout: 100%.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you hear those things. And I would always misunderstand what failure meant. To me, it was the expectation that you’re going to fail, you lose, okay, fine. Where I grew up, no one was that worried about failing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I was fortunate. The community I was around was, you would never steal. That was an unacceptable thing. We would lose all the time because we just weren’t much of middle-of-the-road sort of people. We won a lot sports-wise, but you know what I’m saying, right?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But those things were there. It was like, you don’t steal. Why? Because that’s the shortcut.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t take from people who can’t. All those things. So I had that, and then I had the tenacity piece, which is like, if you want something, it’s never going to happen unless you outwork all those city kids.
Ken Rideout: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Because those city kids have all the advantage. And that was our enemy, right?
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Real or not, we created that enemy-
Ken Rideout: No, I love it. That’s what you have to do
Dr. Andy Galpin: … to get out, right? That’s how we’re going to get there. The tenacity. I think that’s true. Personally, I can think back to a billion lessons I learned in sports that gave me any shot of being a professional. Because I had no concept of the real world. I had never met a lawyer.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. No, I can relate to that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I didn’t know what a PhD was. Like I had no clue what those things were. I’d never met anybody famous. I never met anybody who’d met anybody famous. I had no idea. Everyone where I’m from, it’s just like, that’s just not… Now I probably knew somebody that was a lawyer. But I didn’t know, right? I had no idea of knowing that. So as we kind of wind down here, what I’m trying to transition into this is, when you have that lost feeling, you don’t even know where to get going and where to start. You found that in certain paths. I found that in a certain path. The path doesn’t matter. But any advice, any help you could give for someone who’s even pre that step? I don’t even know where to start this thing.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How do I get going?
Ken Rideout: That’s a great question, and a great place to kind of wind down is to say, take everything that I’ve explained here and that I explain in the book and recognize, I had no plan. I just tried to show up and represent myself with the attitude that I was someone to be respected. I almost commanded respect to a certain point. I didn’t always get it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It wasn’t always easy. But if you’re expecting things to be easy, you’re setting yourself up at disappointment. It’s like I said earlier, the easy road never, ever pays well. Everything you want is going to go down the path of maximum resistance. Because if it was easy, what you were trying to do was easy, every asshole would already have done it. It wouldn’t be novel. It wouldn’t be novel to win a race if anyone could do it. It wouldn’t be novel to get your PhD if you could just decide you want it. “Ah, I want a PhD.” Okay, here you go. For sale. No. It takes an incredible amount of grit and determination. I studied sociology in college. I ended up becoming a finance guy working on trading desks. I made a lot of money in finance. I wouldn’t say that that’s the answer, but my point is, stop worrying about being perfect right now. The same thing goes with running. You prescribe these workouts for the week. Dude, don’t agonize over whether you hit all the splits. Show up and do all the workouts. Some days, you’re going to have days where you’re like, “Dude, I couldn’t run two 100, two 800s. I couldn’t do the 10. I had to put it off to another day.” I’ve done that a lot. One thing that my coach, Mario Fraioli, got really well at is he provided a roadmap. I have to get from A to B. Guess what? There was a detour over here, so I had to go a long way around. I couldn’t do my long run on Saturday. I did it the following Monday. So we adjust some of the little workouts. But the point is, in life, there’s never going to be a straight line from where you are to where you want to go. Don’t stress that. Just make sure that you’re continuing to move the ball down the field, meaning, are you taking steps this week? And I know people can be like, “Oh, I got 1% better today.” Fucking be realistic. You’re going to have bad days. You’re going to have days where you’re just like, “You know what? I’m checking out. I need a mental health day.” I don’t do this very often, but I wish I could, is to be like, “You know what? I just need a day by myself.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: The time that I spent in On Site, which is a trauma healing center that people can read about in the books, was one of the most important weeks of my life. I hated every second of it. I was joking with my roommate, who was Eric Decker, the NFL receiver. I had the schedule hanging on the wall, and I’d cross the sessions off that we’d do like I was in prison. And he thought it was hilarious, and I was like, “Dude, we’re almost out of here.”But I paid $10,000 to go there, so it wasn’t like I was trying to avoid anything. I was just trying to make-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure
Ken Rideout: … light of it. But again, to summarize and the point that I’m trying to make is just take responsibility for yourself. No one is going to do for you what you have to do for yourself. And if they did, it wouldn’t be a noble cause, and it wouldn’t really matter. Anyone that can do the work for you, then what you’re trying to accomplish isn’t that important. Because all the things that I did and all the things that you did, no one could do those things for you. That is what you have to realize is you cannot fake your way through certain things. You can show up and pretend, but you know if you’re giving your best effort and if you’re advancing the ball, like I said, down the field a little bit every week. None of this happens if I don’t take responsibility for myself, get sober, show up every day. You can’t imagine what can happen to you if you just deliver your best effort, and it might take longer than you think, longer than you hope. My story was the longest overnight success anyone’s ever heard of.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ken Rideout: I toiled for years in darkness and anonymity until someone was like, “Wow, that guy’s a pretty good runner.” And then when people thought I was a good runner and Rich Roll had me on his podcast and people started to hear my story, they were like, “Whoa, this guy’s got an interesting story, too.” And I started to get better at running. And the story started to get in front of more people, and I got a book deal. It’s just I wish that I could tell someone, “This is how you do it.” But if you’re hearing anything in this, recognize there is no roadmap for success. There is no straight line. Everyone’s on their own journey. And the only thing that you can control is your effort.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Couldn’t think of a better way to end. I want to summarize some of my biggest take-homes, and this was not a direct theme in your book, but this is what I pulled. I actually wrote this note down and sent this to everybody that I work with. It was very clear, and when we started getting into this, but you got from this 3:30 marathon, which doesn’t matter. Its point is average. You were as average-
Ken Rideout: That’s right
Dr. Andy Galpin: … and you spent the first, I don’t know, 25 years of your life well below average.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In life, in circumstances, in all those things. So a fairly average start, 3:30, and then you got just with grit and just with effort and consistency, you got to 2:30 pace. Well, just 2:33. Okay. Cut an hour off. Anyone can access that with any phase of their life, as you’ve said many times now. But it did take you to bring in Mario to go from 2:33 to 2:29. And so I think that-
Ken Rideout: 2:28.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 2:28? Steepest and sincere apologies.
Ken Rideout: You know the effort it takes to get from 29 to 28.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, that minute matters.
Ken Rideout: We need to make sure we— Ugh.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It took a shitload of effort.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The story for me out of that was you can probably get the first 90% there.
Ken Rideout: Definitely.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But you probably do need extra help to finish.
Ken Rideout: You don’t need help doing your dissertation for your PhD until you’ve done all the work leading up to it, which no one could do for you, and no one could help you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: The amount of work that I did to get to 2:33 was essentially 10 miles a day, and once a week for 12 weeks, I’d run 18 to 22 miles as a workout. I would structure it as a progression run. I’d start running. I know I got to run 20 miles-ish, and I’m going to go faster each mile. Not super diligent. Some days it didn’t work out, but as a theme. And when I felt good, I ran as hard as I could on the 10-milers. Sometimes I’d run 15, sometimes I’d run 12. Never less. And when I felt terrible and I needed recovery, I’d just run slower.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ken Rideout: And when I hear people like, “I need a coach, I’ve never run a marathon,” I’m like, “You don’t need a coach. You need to run.” People ask me all the time, “What should I do? I’m trying to get from 2:50 to 2:45.” I’m like, “Run more.” That’s it. And people would, I’d read articles on Slow Twitch like, “To get to this level of marathon, you need to be at the track. You need to do this workout.” I’m like, I never comment and talk shit on the internet, but I wanted to be like, “No, you don’t. You need just to show up and put in volume.” It’s like getting a PhD. You need to study a lot. Don’t worry about how you study and what you study. Just study a lot. Absorb a lot of information, and I hope that that’s what people recognize. I got to 2:33, and then I couldn’t break through. 2:30, I was getting better, like 2:58, 2:45, 2:40, 2:33 over a few years, and then it was like 2:34, 2:35, and I was exasperated. I’m like, “I can’t do this.” Brought in Mario, went right to 2:28, and then ran under 2:30 like four or five times. After I turned 50, I ran 2:30 flat three or four times. In Boston, I ran 2:30.25, and then I win the age group. Call my wife. I did it. I won the age group. She’s like, “Great job.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I ran 2:30.25.” I’m like, “You know how pissed-”
Dr. Andy Galpin: 25 seconds.
Ken Rideout: I’m like, “You know how pissed I am?” She’s like, “Why didn’t you sprint the last section?” I go, “That was me sprinting from 20 to 26 miles. That was me sprinting for a long time.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: So again, hopefully that story is accessible. We keep using that kind of a phrase because it is. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good when you’re starting.
Ken Rideout: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like the most-
Ken Rideout: Perfect.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Don’t worry about the perfect diet or business plan or the way you’re going to have the conversation. Whatever it has to happen, just move. And we can get precision later, and we probably want-
Ken Rideout: Yes
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that sooner than maybe you jumped in-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … on coaching.
Ken Rideout: Sure. That’s fair.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We would’ve done that earlier. We would advocate probably for a little bit of a different strategy than you’re currently using.
Ken Rideout: Agreed.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I don’t want people to think, oh, throw out all the stuff and just go on instinct. That’s not the message.
Ken Rideout: No, of course.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The message is don’t let that little stuff get in the way of moving the mountain.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You got to build the thing first, and we can polish this thing up a little bit later. So I have to ask at the very end here, I want to know, I’m going to go run my first marathonBesides all the things you’ve covered and all the wisdom-
Ken Rideout: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … any specific tiny little trips, because you’ve said this several times.
Ken Rideout: Yeah. I know. Got you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t know until you don’t know.
Ken Rideout: I got you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What should someone think about or pay attention to when they’re going to do their first-ever marathon?
Ken Rideout: Great question. I would say fueling early and often. Don’t wait till you’re hungry to eat something. Don’t wait for you’re thirsty to drink something. I would take water at every single aid station. I do, depending on how hot it is. The hotter it is, the more you drink. If it’s freezing cold, you don’t have to be as diligent. But water, Gatorade, water, Gatorade for the hydration strategy, and I would make sure I’m getting calories at least every 30 minutes. I like Maurten’s gels. No sponsorship with them or partnership.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But they’re like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s great. They’re fantastic.
Ken Rideout: They’re great. And I-
Dr. Andy Galpin: They’re made for runners, for distance people, engineered by that. Yep.
Ken Rideout: And I would also say I have a little caffeine in the morning to just stay on my routine and to get bowel movements going in the morning, keep everything normal and consistent with my training. Keep everything consistent, just like a training week. And then hitting calories every four miles, 30 minutes, and then around 18 to 20 miles, I start introducing caffeinated gels. You will notice a big difference.
Dr. Andy Galpin: To get that big burst. Yeah.
Ken Rideout: If you can cut down on caffeine the week leading up to the race, and you start hitting big caffeine at 20 miles, the halfway point in the marathon, no matter what anyone thinks, whatever, throw away every preconceived notion you have. Halfway point is 20 miles. When you get to 20, you’re halfway there, because that last 10K is difficult. If you-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s what everybody says. It’s 19. It’s mile 19 to 21-
Ken Rideout: It’s the truth
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that is the death.
Ken Rideout: It’s the truth.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: It doesn’t have to be the death. There is nothing better than racing the last 10K of a marathon, meaning you are drilling it. Matter of fact, when I ran the Tokyo Marathon, was one of the best experiences of my life. When I finished the race, I was looking at Strava, and for one of the last two or three kilometers at the time, I had the KOM, the fastest segment ever by anyone who’s run through that. You have to be on Strava, and a lot of the pros are. I ran faster one of those last three kilometers than anyone else had ever run in that marathon. I don’t know what my time was, but one of those Ks was probably close to 5:30 pace at the finish of a marathon, and it was cross the finish line, I’m jogging back to the hotel, versus a 2:35 in Berlin, and I was basically in an ambulance.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: So the races that you execute perfectly, you’re not destroyed at the end. So, and trust me, it is so much fun racing the last 10K versus surviving. So that’s my advice.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hydrate early, fuel early before you, and then save stimulants until that 18 to 20-mile mark.
Ken Rideout: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then full send.
Ken Rideout: And then just block everything else out. Yes, of course, it’s hard. Yes. Yep. You probably have a blister. No big deal. You’re not going to die. And I always say, like, “We’re not going to die trying.” I’m like, I don’t think I can die from running a race. I just don’t think so.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: I really don’t. And I also say this, there’s medics all over the course. If you go down, they’ll help you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: And if you were going to die from running, you might probably should die anyway. You probably have health ailments that were undiagnosed, and let’s expedite the discovery of said problem.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ken Rideout: But no, I’m kidding. I don’t hope that no one dies.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I got you, man.
Ken Rideout: It’s not a joke. But I would say get out there and push it. Your body can take a lot more than you think it can.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I have a complete inability to scroll past any of your Instagram posts without watching the whole thing.
Ken Rideout: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I can’t. I just-
Ken Rideout: You have no idea how happy that makes me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No idea.
Ken Rideout: You know how much I agonize over Instagram posts? I have to give a shout-out to my man, Raphael Vogeti. He’s a young Swiss guy. I met him. He’s like, “Hey, I want to make content for you,” like everyone on Instagram.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ken Rideout: I can’t stand solicitations on Instagram. And I said to him, “Listen, dude, I’m not spending money on thing. You want to make some videos for me, be my guest.” He made the videos. Probably would have charged me X. I paid him X2 because I was like, “This is quality work. If you can help me with Instagram, I’m happy to pay for services.” But again, an example of someone who’s willing to lead with service, lead with-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Value
Ken Rideout: … let me show you what I can do, and then you decide what it’s worth. If you’re not afraid to lead with service and show people what you can do, they’re never going to come in and just be like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll pay you a shitload of money for something that you say you can do.” I like paying for results, not effort.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Fair enough. Well, you’ve clearly given an enormous amount of effort- … in your life and today. I actually have a bunch of more questions I want to get into, but you got to get to a book launch, man.
Ken Rideout: Hell yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Gotta get out here.
Ken Rideout: Dream come true.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Thank you so much. The story is incredible. I actually legitimately, I think I honestly can say this, it’s the only memoir I think I’ve ever read in my life.
Ken Rideout: Oh my God.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t read them. I’m just like, “Whatever, your story. I get it.”
Ken Rideout: Thank you so much, man.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I couldn’t put it down. Literally can’t wait to get out of here, and tomorrow on the plane, I’m going to read the last five pages-
Ken Rideout: Oh my God
Dr. Andy Galpin: … and see how the story ends.
Ken Rideout: You have to tell me what you think.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Thank you so much.
Ken Rideout: Hell yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The book is incredible. You’re awesome. Great to have you here.
Ken Rideout: Thank you for having me. I appreciate you guys, and thanks to everyone for tuning in. I love to be of service to anyone who needs help, so don’t email me crazy shit and ask me to have a phone call with you, but if I can help with anything, please let me know.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Amazing.
Ken Rideout: Boom.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Thank you for joining for today’s episode. My goal, as always, is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support. First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. And on Apple and Spotify, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services. Finally, you can share today’s episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content, questions, or suggestions, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and X profiles also exclusively for scientific communication, so those are great places to follow along for more learning. My handle is @drandygalpin on both platforms. We also have an email newsletter that distills all of our episodes in the most actionable takeaways. We have newsletters on how to improve fitness and VO2 max, how to build muscle and strength, and much more. To subscribe to the newsletter, just go to performpodcast.com and click Newsletter. It’s completely free, and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for listening, and never forget, in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, “If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
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