The RunRunLive Podcast Episode 173 – Jeremy from AltraRunning
[audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi173.mp3|titles=Episode 173 – AltraRunning]
Show intro by:
Eric Arabie – @tri_n_run
I got the following E-mail from the office complex this week…
As usage has increased in the fitness center please take a moment to distribute this note to all tenants who utilize the gym.
- Please respect those around you by wearing clean – odor free work out clothing that is washed regularly.
- Please respect a 30 minute time limit on cardio equipment when others are waiting. White boards will soon be installed in the gym to utilize as an indication to others that you are waiting to use a piece of equipment.
- Please keep in mind that the fitness center is a free tenant amenity and there are no attendants present to wipe down equipment. To safeguard yourself and fellow gym patrons please wipe down the equipment after each use. Sanitary wipes are located in the gym on the center column beside the water cooler.
- Lastly, please do not leave any clothing, towels, etc. in the locker rooms after your gym visit. Soiled clothing left to dry in lockers and on the coat rack create an odor in the locker rooms.
We appreciate your cooperation.
Intro:
Hello and welcome to the traveling man podcast where we sample restaurants, hotel rooms and airlines to bring you, the listener the best in sojourning pleasure. Wait, no that’s my Thursday fortnight podcast, this, this, this ‘thing’ is the RunRunLive podcast where we bring you the honeyed treacle of dripping endurance sweetness, the sacarine smell of sweat and effort and a syrupy selection of tales of personal discovery.
We’ve got a great show for you today, no, really we do. I’ve got a wicked cool chat with Jeremy from AltraRunning. They have a new shoe company with a different take on zero-drop natural running. It’s a good chat.
I’ve got a excellent travel story for you. But this story is not about my travels. You know the young woman who voices my bumpers, like “Run RunLive” etc? Well she told me this story. She goes to college a few hundred miles from Boston and takes the bus when she comes back to the hub. When she was traveling by bus for spring break, back to Boston, it was the week before the Boston Marathon.
She told me that there were a bunch of ladies on the bus who looked like runners. The lady in front of her was listening to an iPod. In a surreal twist of irony she swears she heard herself come across the woman’s earbuds with the RunRunLive intro and her own dulcet tones.
It’s spring time in New England and the trees are in full arborofic explosion. Buddy and I had to stop to let a gaggle of baby geese cross the road in front of us when we went to pick up dinner the other night. Buddy wanted to get out of the car and have words with them. But calmer heads prevailed.
He’s sleeping a lot because we have been running trails! Saturday I did a 2.5 hour brick with a nice hour-plus trail run on the back end of a 90 minute bike. Then I got him out Sunday morning for another 90 minute trail run. We to old timers have been eating up the dirt together and we both feel fine!
Saturday, since I had a 90 minute bike to do as part of that long brick, I took Fuji-san out for a little core of discovery ride. I’ve been trying to figure out an alternate route to my office from my house. The problem with the route I take is 3 huge hills and crazy traffic that has me fearing for my life.
Google now has a bike route feature in GoogleMaps. I fired it up and it showed a promising alternative route that takes advantage of some bike trails and back roads – so I figured I’d use my Saturday morning ride to scope it out.
This first part was still fairly hilly but definitely more back road based. Apparently these roads I was on are favorites of the local roadie weekend warriors because I kept getting passed by pelotons of 30 or so bikes going in the opposite direction as I wound my way through Acton and over to Concord.
About 10 miles in my rear tire flatted. On inspection I found that I had picked up an honest to goodness carpet tack. Like something you’d see in a cartoon where the bad guys throw handfuls of tacks out the back to thwart pursuit. Ironically I passed around 100 other bikers, but I get the carpet tack through my tire and both sides of the tube.
It was an opportunity for me to practice my tire repair skills and it turned out I did have everything I needed to patch it up. You can picture me sitting on an old stone wall in Concord Mass working my tire as roadies stream by each asking if I needed help.
Once I got going again I continued on in pursuit of the bike trail that supposedly would connect me directly from Concord to Bedford Center according to Google. I couldn’t find it. I asked people. They didn’t know of it. Finally I realized that the trail in question was a future bike trail. The current location of this future trail appears to be a dirt single track.
I could not in good conscience navigate this dirt path on Fuji-san, but I’m intrigued and now that I know where it is I will take the 29er out and see where it goes!
And at this point you’re asking yourself, “Where is he going?”
Did I tell you I’m reading a book about anti-gravity? It’s impossible to put down.
– on with the show!
Audio clips in this episode:
Skits, commercials and parodies in this episode:
Story time:
Equipment Check:
11 Lessons for Graduates
I walked into Barnes & Noble on 46th and 5th in NYC last week and was surprised to see that The Seed was on a special table with other books for new college graduates. When I spoke to the manager he said that they thought it would be a great book for college graduates searching for their purpose and passion. While I wrote the book for people of all ages, the conversation inspired me to think about how the lessons from The Seed could benefit recent graduates. So here goes…
http://jongordon.com/seed.html
1. You are here for a reason and the most important thing you can do in life is to find, live and share your purpose. It’s the one thing in life that truly matters and if you don’t pursue it, everything else is meaningless.
2. Follow your passion. It so often leads you to your purpose. Do what energizes you.
3. You may not know what your passion is right now. That’s ok. The important thing is to make it your life mission to find it, live it and share it. To help find your passion, seek out jobs and experiences that allow you to use your strengths and gifts.
4. Beware of Hobbies. Just because you love spending time on Facebook doesn’t mean you would enjoy working for the company. And just because you love to cook doesn’t mean you would enjoy owning a restaurant. For example, I owned restaurants but I realized I didn’t love the food business. I loved the service and marketing aspect of the business.
5. Quit for the right reasons. Don’t quit because work is hard or you’re experiencing challenges. Quit because in your heart you know there is something else for you to do. Quit because you are not benefitting yourself or the organization you work for. Quit because you are absolutely certain you are no longer supposed to be there.
6. Learn from every job and experience. Every job, good or bad, prepares you for the work you were ultimately born to do.
7. Whatever job(s) you take after graduation simply decide to serve. When you serve in small ways you’ll get more opportunities to serve in bigger ways.
8. Your dream job is likely not the one you dreamed about. So often we end up in amazing careers that have nothing to do with our college degree or childhood dreams.
9. The quest for your purpose is not a straight line. It is filled with mystery, signs, obstacles, victories, dead ends, delays and detours. Your job is to stay optimistic and faithful on your quest.
10. Don’t rush the future. There is a process that seeds must go through in order to become all they are destined to become, and you must go through this same process to become the person you are meant to be and do the work you are meant to do. You may want things to happen NOW but more than likely if you got what you wanted NOW you wouldn’t be ready for it. The purpose process prepares you, strengthens you, shapes you and grows you to be successful, not in your time, but in the right time.
11. Be the Seed. Seeds surrender themselves to the ground so they can be used for a greater purpose. Wherever you work, decide to plant yourself where you are and allow yourself to be used for a greater purpose. When you plant yourself and make a difference you grow into the person you were born to be and produce a harvest that will benefit others and change the world.
Featured Interview:
Jeremy Howlett – AltraRunning
Quick Tip:
Outro:
My Pappy said ‘son, you’re gonna drive me to drinkin if you don’t stop drivin that Hot, Rod, Lincoln’
Ok my friends that’s it you have run, naturally, in your foot-shaped, zero-drop, adequately cushioned shoes to the end of yet another RunRunLive Podcast – Episdoe 173 in the can.
I’ve been traveling like a maniac. I’m in Atlanta this week and Detroit and Long Island next week. It’s a challenge to get quality work done. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing too much and as a result losing fidelity in some of my important interactions, but we all have times like these. I just try to get my workouts in, I try to get enough sleep and I try to keep a good attitude and I try to add value when I can with the resources I have at my disposal.
The swimming is the hardest thing to get done because most hotel pools are designed for relaxing in, not for doing laps. Coach Jeff has been giving me some good workouts for the pool and I find that as I’m getting in better shape, and I’m able to swim faster, it is becoming easier. There is a certain point where your natural speed in the water cures many of the sinking and drowning problems I have.
I really like the long, multi-hour bikes and trail runs. I really do. Sometimes it’s tough to schedule a 4 hour workout, but once you get out there it is very relaxing. I know that doesn’t sound intuitive, but the duration of the workouts forces you to relax, it forces you to take the long view. The workouts become journeys, microcosms of living well.
Next week I have Nicky from the UK to talk about Cani-Cross. It’s a great chat.
Let me tell you a London Travel story. I was reminded of this with all the royal wedding hoopla.
I was called to London in 1998 to save a big deal that was on fire. One of those “We need you in London as soon as you can get there” scenarios. I was in the midst of training for the Chicago marathon. I had the idea in my head that I was going to go sub-3 and was training hard because I was closing in on 40 and wasn’t sure how much time I had left to run fast marathons.
The trip to London put the kibosh on that training cycle, but, since I was there over the weekend, I figured I’d do a long run of 20+ miles and go exploring. I was staying near Kensington Park, and Kensington castle.
I had the best long run. I got in all the famous London landmarks except London Bridge which was out of reach. But I did tour Kensington, High Street, Winsor Palace, Parliament, Big Ben, Trafalgar square and the other hundreds of markers and famous things scattered about and along the Thames. It was a fabulous outing.
I ended up mailing in my Chicago that year with a time, that in retrospect I’m sure many of you would love to run, but wasn’t a qualifier for me. One of you runners in the UK should set up some long-run tourism outings because it was a great way to see the city.
…
Remember a few episodes back I was talking about thinking out of the box, and wondering why everyone buys the same black roller-bag on the airplanes? Here’s an update. When I was deplaning today the lady in front of me had an awesome purple roller bag. I made a point of congratulating her on her forward thinking. That’s me – the bag police.
I really like a couple things about Jon Gordon’s piece that we read earlier. First of all Jon wason the RunRunLive podcast in the early days and is a super guy. His first book, “The Energy Bus” is one of the few books I have read multiple times. It’s like a pill for corporate depression.
I like the way he keeps his message simple and clean and to the point. The concept that we are all seeds and our growth and flourishing very much depends on the soil we are planted in, metaphorically. The difference we have is that we don’t have to stay where we fall. We can move ourselves both mentally and physically to more arable ground.
It’s interesting to me, because I get out and see many different companies in my job and I often think to myself how awful some of those jobs are. Why do people work and spend the richness of themselves in this hostile ground? I think it’s inertia. The devil you know seems better than the devil you don’t as they say.
And isn’t it true that we have been guilty in our lives of precipitously chasing the green grass on the other side of the fence in part to avoid challenging situations fraught with risk. I’m sure in the process we convinced ourselves it was for a better opportunity. That line is something we all my draw – we find the balance between running towards the embrace of lush warm fruitful ground and running away from the deserts of our fears.
Kids are seeds. We are seeds. There is great potential in us. We need to find that fertile ground that allows our purpose to flower.
And when you find your patch of earth, I’ll see you out there.
…
New-Outro
Folks – You can and should connect to me on Twitter, Facebook, DailyMile, YouTube as cyktrussell that’s chris yellow king tom Russell with two esses and two ells.
And, you never know when you’ll be struck by a brilliant idea that you want to share, so program 206-339-7804 into your device. Leave a message there it sends me an audio file.
How about breaking out of your shell and reading the show intro? You will find the instructions for reading the show intro and all the content I have ever produced on my website www.runrunlive.com –
Also this week I got my store working and you can buy the complete remastered “10 secrets of successful running” inspirational audio series – a must have if your running needs an attitude adjustment.
I have to thank Dustin Ward from dustinward.com for helping me fix up the wordpress store plug in and finally get it to work. Give Dustin a call if you need some wordpress help.
If you hadn’t noticed all our music was Excellent Ska tonight. This final number to take you out is by Super Hero and it is just over 3 minutes long – so suck it up and push – it’s called “the happy song”
Ciao.
Music:
From Podsafe
subcity_dwellers-hold_the_pressure_down
the_gangsters-dance_til_you_drop
super_hero-the_happy_song
Standard Links:
www.midpackerslament.com
Cyktrussell At gmail and twitter and facebook and youtube
Chris’ book on Amazon – > http://www.amazon.com/Mid-Packers-Lament-collection-running-stories/dp/141961584X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228687012&sr=8-1
Mid-Packer’s Lament E-book
Mid-Packer’s Guide to the Galaxy E-Book
Dial in number for RunRunLive is – 206-339-7804
Chris Russell lives and trains in suburban Massachusetts with his family and Border collie Buddy. Chris is the author of “The Mid-Packer’s Lament”, and “The Mid-Packer’s Guide to the Galaxy”, short stories on running, racing, and the human comedy of the mid-pack. Chris writes the Runnerati Blog at www.runnerati.com. Chris’ Podcast, RunRunLive is available on iTunes and at www.runrunlive.com. Chris also writes for CoolRunning.com (Active.com) and is a member of the Squannacook River Runners and the Goon Squad.
Email me at cyktrussell at Gmail dot com
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