 Ah, this is a bad one. Hello, my friends, and welcome to Running with Ryan. Today we are in the big city of Denver, Colorado. Let's go Broncos. Broncos, let's go. With my friend Brendan Leonard. Make some noise for Brendan. Brendan Leonard is a ultra runner, author. He's from Iowa, my favorite state. Shout out to Raghbri. I'm not lying, I love Iowa because of Raghbri. And you may know him because he directed and starred in a beautifully inspirational running film called How to Run 100 Miles, where he and his buddy set out on one of the biggest challenges of your lives, right? Yeah. Yeah. I would say. Oh, that looks great at R. OK. So Brendan, how do you run 100 miles? It's not an instructional video. So the title is just like clickbait. When I do it, I start slow. I'm going to finish slower. And then you just don't quit. Basically, there's no huge strategy or no elaborate strategy for me, but I'm slow. I think if you're fast, it's a completely different event. That makes sense? Yeah, that totally makes sense. But let's talk a little bit about that film, because it hit the heart of everybody who watched it. If you read the comments on YouTube, a lot of people talk about how I shed some tears, and I was so inspired, and you guys are so great. So what was the premise of this whole thing? The primary premise was to tell my friend Jason's life story. And it seemed like the best sort of event to attach his life story to, because his story is all about persistence. He grew up in a broken home, a single mom raising six kids, and dad left emptied the bank account before he left. So his mom has just scrapped the entire time with these six kids at home. He's dyslexic, so battled that, was bullied. My favorite detail in the whole film is the first two years he tried to be a wrestler in junior high. He lost every single match, so he finally won one, and then ended up making the varsity squad. So he's built his whole life on this idea. And I just have known him for 19 years now. And it was just a way to tell his story, because I think ultramarathons are exactly that. It's just don't quit, believe in yourself. Try hard, and it's not a tough equation. Sure, you can get blisters, and all sorts of other things can go wrong, but the one thing you keep in mind is how to not quit. I'm pretty sure everybody at the starting line of this race is more qualified to be here than us. I'm terrified, but at least we're doing this together. Ideally, we both finished this race. Worst case, one of us finishes, and if only one of us finishes, there had to be Jason, because it's his story. Not everyone finishes an ultramarathon under the cutoff tide, but Jason's whole life has been based on not quitting. So Brendan also makes a lot of really fun and funny and inspirational doodles, and a lot of them have to do with ultramarathons. Was it this film that kind of kicked off the running craze? No, so I ran sprints in high school. 4 by 100, 4 by 200. It was OK. My coach put me in the 400 at one point, and I was like, this is long distance. Coach, I can't do this. The 400 meters, honestly, is very difficult. Well, if you run it really slow, it's not. It goes for anything in life. But yeah, I've been curious about ultramarathons, because I had interviewed Kelly Cordes, who's an alpinist and one of my favorite writers and thinkers ever. I'd interviewed him in 2010, and he said, I said, oh, you're pretty hardcore. And he said, well, you know, when you're on top of a mountain and you have to get back where you're going to die, it's pretty easy to get motivated to keep moving. But what about these people running 100-mile races when they get to mile 50? I guarantee you, no one's having fun. What is stopping you from just sitting down in an aid station where they have a fire and just being like, I'm done. Give me a beer and a bag of chips. I'm done. He said, to keep going when you have that option, it's hardcore. So I've been curious since then. So in 2015, I just started exploring that. I interviewed my first 50k, went OK, and then started doing 50-mile races. So when we signed up for our 100, I'd done a 50k and two 50-mile races. But you're still well aware that you're going into very uncharted territory. So and at the time of my life, I was kind of, had been doing a lot of rock climbing. I was a writer or a contributing editor for Climbing Magazine for a few years. And I just got to the point with climbing where the fear of doing it and all the things that can go wrong were really outweighing the benefits for me. I was kind of looking for something was I would call all the pain and suffering of mountaineering without the risk of death. Because statistically, most people do not die during ultramarathons. No, the worst thing could happen is you might get diarrhea and poop down your leg. Or injure yourself for like four months or whatever. So I guess the long runs is where I found that. As we increasingly get into having data delivered every second and having our phones on all the time, it became an escape for me where I just shut off my phone and I'm out for some days. My long runs take me seven or eight hours. And it's really nice to just be like, OK, no one can communicate with me. So it becomes this place where I do all my thinking of trying to do creative things. I love it. And speaking of running a long distance, when I usually do these running with Ryan's, I run like four or five miles. But today, how far are we running? We're going to go 26.2 miles. Well, why are we doing that? I've been running a marathon every week this year. And this is 49. So we left my house 25 minutes ago. And we're in City Park right now. We're going to go through a couple Denver parks, get two donuts, and hopefully more than just two. We're running a whole marathon, man. We deserve more. And what inspired you to run a marathon a week? That's a lot. I'm turning 40 in January of 2019. Maybe I just tried to do 52 marathons. I love it, man. Guess who else turned 40 in January of 2019? This guy. Look at this. We've got speakers in the middle of nowhere. So lots of marathons this year. Once a week. That's pretty incredible. Has it made you a faster runner? I don't think so. I think it's made me better at running mentally, better at running marathons. I did run my fastest marathon ever last week on this exact trail, just trying to run fast. And I realized, if you're going to run a bunch of marathons in a year, running them fast is a mistake. But yeah, it's like, I'm a pretty, I default to like, 420 marathons. Like, 10 minute miles, I just settle in, and I'm just like, do-to-do. And I could do that weekend and week out on flat ground. And that one was like 346 or 347, which is extremely fast for me. It's not fast for most people, but it's totally a different. I'm not sure what the point is, but I'm thinking the point will emerge at some point. Yeah, well, let's say you haven't gotten faster, but you have a whole hell of a lot of time to think about life. Yeah. You figured anything out? The meaning of life is trying to find the meaning of life. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's a concierge. You're going to keep going. It's never ending. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I feel like the best thing is not like having, trying to do something big every weekend, but trying to do something every week and build something big out of these small blocks. Does that make sense? Yeah, and at the very least, you're outside for five hours every weekend, sun, wind, rain, just enjoying nature. We're going to run down the famous Colfax Street here. Look at this car. This is amazing. Look at that. That is an art car right there. So the reason why we're on Colfax is because voodoo donuts is on Colfax. We're running a marathon today, and we're being fueled by donuts. Absolutely. Brendan, this is the best idea ever. I've never done a donut marathon. So I got the old dirty bastard. Look at this thing. What'd you get? Oh, look at that cute little donut. Maple old fashioned. See how it goes. We're going to walk it out for a second and enjoy these donuts. Oh, god. It's hard to run after you fill your belly with a giant donut. There's the Colorado State Capitol building. I remember field trips when I was a kid coming here, and they told us at the top the dome is made out of real gold foil. This cool building right here, this spaceship, is the Denver Art Museum. Denver is really cool. I need to come down here more often. We are in Cheesman Park now, which is Brendan's old stomping grounds. How long have you been in Denver now? I'm off 14 and a half years. 14 and a half years. And you just mentioned how many times? How many laps have you done around this? I've done over 1,000 laps around this park over those years, so it's my favorite. So let's get to the book stuff. You've written a lot of books. One in particular that was really influential to me is called Make It To You Make It. It's essentially a playoff the whole term, fake it to you make it. But your idea is that you just make what you want to make, and it's been very inspirational to me. I gave it to a lot of my friends. Let's talk about more of that, because there's a lot of people out there watching this video that want to run more or create more. And you have a pretty good method. What is that? I think I teach this on a writer's workshop, I do. Is that most people just feel like they need permission or a reason to do it and to believe in themselves and actually say, oh, I'm a writer or I'm an artist. And I think it's with the democratization of media, it's really easy to start small and keep putting things out there and grow slowly and make mistakes when you're small and get bigger, as you've probably experienced with your YouTube channel. Totally. And for me, I mean, that book really got me fired up years ago when I started doing YouTube on a regular basis. And it was just like, keep on making, keep on creating. That's been the model I've done is just try and put it out yourself. And eventually, somebody you make notice and might notice and pay you to do it quote unquote professionally. One of the things that you make a whole lot of are these fun doodles, these charts on your Instagram channel. You've gotten pretty big. You have like 80,000,000 followers. And people look forward to these things every single day. It's been fun. You know how much money I make for each one of those? And I go up, take a guess. Zero cents? Yes, zero cents. Zero cents. But you get like 7,000 likes. And that's worth so much in today's society. It's worth it in other ways, for sure. And I feel like the people who support me on Patreon at least half of them are going, here you go. Keep doing this. OK, whoo, public bathrooms at Cheezman Park do not smell good. Our smart man bringing the hand sanitizer. What mile are we at? 9.3. 9.3? Oh, baby. So here we are in Washington Park. We're making a tour of all the parks of Denver. And let's talk about your speed. You probably say that you're not a fast runner. You don't really care about running fast. Let's talk about that. I think it's a barrier to entry for a lot of people who think, oh, I could never do that, because I can't run a seven-minute mile or even like a 10-minute mile. And like when you get out here or you go to races, you realize that not that many people are achieving at that high of a rate. Like a lot of people are doing a little walking. A lot of people are running 10-minute miles for a while and then 11. And just to go out and do it is the thing. To me, it doesn't matter. I'm not looking at my watch right now. I'm going, boy, Ryan, we need you really need to kick it in. I got a lot to do today. This is what I'm doing today. It's great to just be like, oh, maybe I'll be back at 3, maybe 4. But just to be out here and enjoy moving at whatever speed is, I think the beautiful thing about it. Do you have any advice for somebody who's like just a little shy about getting out there? Maybe they don't even like wearing running clothes. Or maybe they still feel like they're going to fit into the running culture. Oh, yeah. I guarantee you, everybody in this park right now, 95% of us don't think we look very good. We've got too much sweat. We've got too much jiggle. We don't like the way our legs look. We think we run funny. It's probably like 5% of the people who are like, yeah, I look good. So I think if people could get over that, that's a big step, you know. As the great Micah Tru, Cabal Blanco said, just run free, man. And it was all about just running and enjoying and having a smile on your face. And it's pretty impossible to go on a run and not smile most of the time. Some of the times you're not going to smile. You might have some pain, but most of the time, you're going to smile. I just like to smile. Smiling's my favorite. Brendan just pointed out this amazing van. We're going off route to check it out. You're going to love this. What is that? Look at that. They're kind of like muppet goats in space. So I know a lot of you out there love bikes and bike adventures. Brendan is not only an ultra runner, but he has ridden his bike across the country. And he loves bikes probably as much as the next person who loves bikes. What inspired you to ride across the country when you did that? A friend of mine from high school, Tony, said, hey, do you want a bike across America? I'll pay for it. And I said, of course I do. And we hadn't hung out in about eight years very much since college. So we spent 49 days together. And it was a blast. Did the Southern Tier route from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida. Average 60 miles a day with four rest days. And in retrospect, I think we both think we should have taken more time to do it. But I mean, like you, I think that is one of the best ways to travel. What do you think the value is of doing hard things, whether it's running or biking or being in a tough relationship and getting through some communication problems, whatever? Boy, I think sometimes you get to choose the hard things. And sometimes people have the hard things chosen for them. Cancer, death in the family, a lot of things but I have an experience that I think I've gone after the harder things to see what I'm sort of made of, hopefully in preparation for some of those other hard things that come along that you don't expect. And I do think that people, it's cliche to say, but are capable of way more than they think they can do. And that's a way of testing it for me, getting into a hard situation and figuring out what happens to you mentally, because can you keep going? Can you fight through it? You use those tools. I think I use those tools in other ways in life because you really can't spend your entire life doing physically hard things. You can do them for like 1% of your life, but then you have the rest of the things that come up at work or in relationships or any other thing. And you can use those sorts of persistence or dealing with fear or low expectations or whatever and apply that to the other things. Does that make sense? Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah, that was amazing. The first running TED Talk. Ladies and gentlemen, Brendan Leonard. Donut number two at Habit. Look at this thing, baby. Mile 24. Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. Brendan, what are you showing me? It's called National Velvet. Looks like a pile of beans. I like it. Here is downtown Denver, all the new fancy apartments where all the fancy people live. My body's actually hurting. You know, Javalina wasn't long ago, and I haven't run on pavement this much in a long time, so it's a lot of hammering. A lot of hammering. We are so close. So close. So close. 6 tenths of a mile according to this watch. Oh, that's amazing. Thank you so much for inviting me on your adventure. Thanks for coming all the way down to Denver. It's like a four hour drive. I know. It's a big deal for me to go to Denver. So I thank you very much. I'm so impressed that you've run a marathon a week. I wish you the best of luck for the rest of the year. All of you out there that want to know more about Brendan, check out his website, semirad.com. Follow him on Instagram at semirad. Semi underscore rad. Semi underscore rad. He's got all sorts of inspirational, funny stuff that will put a smile on your face. And thank you for watching. Hope you enjoyed this tour of Denver with our tour guide, Brendan. I give you high five for running a marathon for YouTube. Yeah, that's right. We just ran a marathon for YouTube, baby. Please like and subscribe. We will see you down the road.