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Episode 172: Christopher McDougall — ‘Running with Sherman,’ ‘Born to Run,’ and Finding Your Stride
144 Plays5 years ago
"All writing is re-writing, all reporting is re-reporting," says Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run, Natural Born Heroes, and Running with Sherman.
Thanks to Bay Path University and Riverteeth for the support.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Preview
00:00:00
Speaker
If I could just have a stroke, man, you know, it would just solve everything. Just have a stroke, die. There's insurance for the family. You don't have to write this fucking book. Just, you know, if there was just a meteor, you could just bring it in.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hey hey hey, it's your buddy Brendan O'Mara, hey hey, and this is CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast.
Guest Introduction: Christopher McDougall
00:00:29
Speaker
My guest today is Christopher McDougall, best known for his revolutionary book, Born to Run, and most recently, for Running with Donkeys. Say what?
00:00:40
Speaker
Let's do an ad-read. Discover Your Story Man with Bay Path University's fully online. MFA in Creative Non-Fiction Writing. It's what we do, right? Recent graduate Christine Brooks recalls her experience with Bay Path's MSV faculty as being, quote,
00:00:57
Speaker
filled with positive reinforcement and commitment. They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions, big and small, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere end of quotation.
00:01:21
Speaker
Don't just take her word for it, man. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, first, first. Also, thanks to Riverteeth, a journal of nonfiction narrative for promotional support. Check them out and submit your work. Riverteethjournal.com, com, com.
Exploring Burro Racing and Storytelling Techniques
00:01:43
Speaker
There's a line or a caption in Christopher McDougall's new book Running with Sherman about burrow racing that says, in effect, is there anything more punk rock than burrow racing? Only this riff.
00:02:08
Speaker
Hey CNFers here we go again this is CNF the creative non-fiction podcast where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers and audio producers about the art and craft of telling these damn true stories. I chart their journey and try and tease out what inspires them and how they go about the work in the face of crippling self-doubt among other things. That's right baby be sure you're all subscribed.
00:02:33
Speaker
Hit that little subscribe button wherever you get your pods and we can subvert the algorithm, man. Rage, rage against the algorithm. Social media is a lousy way to promote a podcast, but a great way to keep the conversation going. So be sure to hit me up on Twitter at CNF pod and at Brendan O'Mara. And then we will just, we will converse. We will do that thing.
00:03:01
Speaker
Or just say hi. I'd love to hear from you. Same goes for Instagram at cnfpod. It's all good, man. If you head over to BrendanOmero.com, hey, hey, you'll find show notes and the means for signing up for the monthly newsletter. Oh my gosh. Reading recommendations. What you might've missed from the world of the podcast once a month. No spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
McDougall's Journey to Writing
00:03:24
Speaker
So I've been wanting to speak to Christopher McDougall for years. In his latest book, Running with Sherman, The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero is such a good, fun book that hits on things you never see coming.
00:03:39
Speaker
This book is about fraternity, teamwork, community. He's the best-selling author of Born to Run and Natural Born Heroes and this sort of third big book of his is a culmination of a lot of hard work and in his own words kind of
00:04:00
Speaker
It kind of feels like he figured it out with this one. And it's hard to disagree with him because it's a fantastic book, a lot of fun, and it's everything you've come to expect from Christopher McDougall. So he's one of the good guys and we talk about how we got his start as a writer and the bumps along the way and there were some bumps and I think you're gonna draw a lot of inspiration from that. He didn't just arrive on the scene with this big
00:04:28
Speaker
with this big like headlining book born to run like he hustled that book you know and he was just putting in the legwork and it's uh he's a grinder and you're gonna learn all about it what do you say let's do this episode 172
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I think as always a fun place I love to start is kind of getting a sense of where the writer, where the journalist fill in the blank, where they come from and how they essentially charting that path. And I know you grew up in Philly or on the suburbs of Philadelphia, so growing up around there, how did you start to get the bug to get into this line of work?
00:05:16
Speaker
It was all just from reading books. I was a big reader when I was a kid. Looking back now, I was at this conference once at Harvard, and there's a guy named John Rady. He's a psychiatrist that specializes in attention deficiency. And I was actually on a panel with him, and right before we went on stage, we were chatting, and he says, well, I'm sure that because of your ADHD, you probably had a really hard time in school.
00:05:43
Speaker
And I was like, dude, I'm not ADHD. And he gives me this like pitying look. He's like, oh, yeah, you are. And like he had diagnosed. I just had just come barrel on it. Just the way I'm answering this question, I think verifies his diagnosis. But anyway, you know, looking back when I was a kid, I think I just self-medicated.
00:06:01
Speaker
by bombarding myself with books. When I couldn't chill out and calm down, I would just pick up Encyclopedia Brown or Harriet the Spy, The Once and Future King, and just did a deep dive into another life. And it just took the edge off. And the other thing was that our closest public library was like five miles from our house. And I was like a nine-year-old kid.
00:06:26
Speaker
taking my Schwinn bike and riding all the way down to the seller's library, taking a bunch of books and riding home, I'd be gone the whole day. My parents never bothered to ask where I was. And those two things I think really got it into my head that hopefully someday my life would be all about books.
00:06:45
Speaker
And so you're of course swimming in all these books. At what point did you feel like this is something I want to actually take on myself and maybe contribute in some small way with the written word? So my plan right around then, I guess about 11 years old, was
00:07:05
Speaker
Arthur Conan Doyle hasn't produced much in a long time. Someone's gonna have to pick up the mantle. And that was my thing. I was gonna pick up Sherlock Holmes where Arthur Conan Doyle left off and I was just gonna be like the new Sherlock Holmes guy. That was a fully formed plan at age 12. And I've yet to follow through, has yet to come to completion, but that was the plan. I remember my dad is a lawyer. I remember borrowing one of his legal pads, like sketching out.
00:07:33
Speaker
the plot where I was gonna take this story. And I was fascinated by Sherlock's little known brother, Mycroft Holmes. And that was my jumping off point. Anyway, that was the plan. And I was 12, and by 13 I had moved on and didn't really circle back to writing for a man until after college.
Journalism Career and European Adventures
00:07:53
Speaker
And it's funny you say that with the Sherlock Holmes thing because the historical World War II threat of natural born heroes strikes me as kind of a mystery in nature, kind of suspenseful, and I can almost – the thread and that inspiration of Doyle's work kind of pulses through that in a way.
00:08:16
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people of my generation, I'm 57 now, but we all grew up on the post-World War II, post-Korea War era where it was now okay to sort of have fun with warfare. So it was like A-Team, Hogan's Heroes. War was all about
00:08:41
Speaker
being clever and having adventures. They fired up 500,000 rounds per episode and no one ever got hit with a bullet. In the same with Hogan's Heroes, these guys are in and out of the lines, there's machine guns all over the place, but no one's ever got shot in Hogan's Heroes. I think that was it. I just remember growing up, it's been all my time, playing war, climbing over people's fences.
00:09:04
Speaker
you know, running around and pretending we were on the run. And I guess that just gets into your bloodstream. You know, we were in that little lucky window between the Korean War and Vietnam War, where we didn't actually have to do it. But we inherited all the war stories.
00:09:20
Speaker
And so when you're in college is when you kind of reintroduce yourself to that sort of spark from your early childhood. So what was that moment like when you're like, okay, I want to take this a little more seriously? I was still just a spectator. I was just a reader and not a writer. And I remember a lot of people that I went to school with
00:09:47
Speaker
had sort of staked out their claim like they were going to be the writers. And I just remember them saying over and over again, like, but I don't know what to write about. I don't have anything to write about. And I was like, yeah, of course you don't have anything to write about. You're a fucking college kid. Like, what would you write about? And I just had this sense of like, the shit hasn't happened yet. Don't bother trying. So it's probably a smug
00:10:10
Speaker
self-righteous way of justifying the fact that I didn't do any writing in college other than assignments. I read a ton, talked a ton. I was in the world of literature, but I was not trying to produce anything on my own. It only started later. Years out of college, I got a couple of knock-around jobs working for free weekly papers in Philly and Boston.
00:10:35
Speaker
and eventually worked my way into a job as an overseas correspondent for the Associated Press. And that was it, like my first period of putting words into consecutive sequence was doing news reporting for the AP.
00:10:49
Speaker
And that's an amazing story of how you sort of negotiated yourself into that position to cover this stuff overseas. I'd love for you to just elaborate on that and how you talked your way into that first position. I am not sure I was really doing a Jimmy McGill, like, you know, better call sewing and talking my way into it. I was trying to. I don't think I fooled anybody. But so the deal was,
00:11:19
Speaker
I had worked a little bit for the Brookline Standard paper outside of Boston, very little bit, just a couple freelance pieces for them covering like city council meetings. Meanwhile, by day I was working as a high school teacher at St. John's Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts.
00:11:36
Speaker
and realized I didn't like teaching high school. I didn't like being in high school, let alone teaching high school. So at the end of that first year of teaching high school, I just took the summer pay and went to Europe and just sort of knocked around, backpacked around Europe till I got to Madrid, which I really liked. I really dug Spain and Madrid and just posted up there and stayed there for the next three years, learned Spanish, found a bunch of odd jobs, earned a little bit of money. But I was running into this thing where
00:12:05
Speaker
I had this class every morning where I would teach English. Me and a British guy were teaching English to these two bank executives at 7 o'clock in the morning before the bank opened. The British guy who was teaching this class with me would show up every day with this big mug of coffee. He'd be sipping coffee during the entire hour lesson. I was thinking, man, that guy's coffee's got to be pretty cold by the time we've done the class.
00:12:29
Speaker
After a few weeks, I realized it wasn't coffee. This dude was just sucking down brandy. He was getting himself pickled at 7 o'clock in the morning. But I looked at this guy as like, this is like Ebenezer Scrooge ghost of Christmas future. Do not wake up someday and be that dude. You're 55, you're teaching English in the mornings, and you're wondering, how did I get here? So I decided I was going to go back to the States
00:12:55
Speaker
and I put a self-imposed moratorium. I was not gonna go back to Europe for two years. I was gonna live in Philly for two years and just made damn sure that moving back to Europe was what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life.
00:13:08
Speaker
So I put in my two years of time in Philly and two years to the date, turn around, I'm ready to move back to Spain. Now, luckily a friend of a friend was working for the Associated Press Bureau in Madrid, Mike Phillips. And I gave this guy a call and said, hey man, I did a little bit of freelancing for like Philadelphia City Paper and the Brookline Standard. Is there any chance I could sign on for the AP? He's like, man, it's a long shot.
00:13:35
Speaker
Give it a try. So you set up an interview for me with the Bureau Tree chief in Madrid. So I fly back and I show up.
00:13:44
Speaker
I mean, I'm telling you, I had a handful of clips. If I had 2,000 words combined to my credit, it was a lot. And I walk in here with my half-assed movie reviews and city council meeting notes and sit down with the head of the bureau for all of Iberia, for all Spain and Portugal, and for Portuguese colonies. So she covered all this terrain and I'm applying for a job with her. It was pathetic. So we go through this interview for about an hour and she just
00:14:13
Speaker
Drilled me with questions and I am floundering and flowing and talking shit. And all of a sudden she just stands up, she's like, okay, I've heard enough. I'm like, okay, yeah, let's just put this misery to bed. She shakes my hand and she's like, okay, we'll have you out in Lisbon in no time.
00:14:28
Speaker
And I was like, Lisbon? Why Lisbon? She's like, well, that's what you're interviewing for. I need a correspondent in Lisbon right away. So she hires me not only for a job that I have zero experience in credentials for, but in a country I've never been to, in a language I don't speak. And the day I arrived, civil war broke out again in Angola. And so my second in command, my assistant, you know, I have an assistant. My assistant says, oh my God, thank God you're here.
00:14:58
Speaker
you know, Civil War broke out in Angola. I don't know. Well, that's too bad. What do we care? We care because we cover it. It's a former Portuguese colony. And like two weeks later, now I'm on a plane to another place I've never been to, to cover the Civil War in Angola. And so what kind of stories did you over time start to become more attracted to the more repetitions you got under your belt? The thing about AP reporting is that
00:15:27
Speaker
You know, the good thing about it is that you're really forced to get your head clear about what's going on. You've got to get the story straight fast because you're working with maybe 400 words. And so, you know, if the Unita rebel forces have just surrounded the northeast capital of Wombo, you got 400 words to
00:15:56
Speaker
Identify who you need to is where this town is What the significance of this military movement is and oh, yeah, by the way what's been happening in this country for the past 30 years and so the first thing you start to master is a clear chronology in your own brain of you know the who what where when and why like you figure that out and where they get where it has to go what the sequence is gonna have to be in the story and once you've got that
00:16:23
Speaker
toolbox sorted out, then what I just became attracted to is who's the weird quirky dude that nobody else is talking to? Angola was great because there was nobody else there. It was basically me and the Reuters correspondent. You're not competing against TV news or radio. NPR is not there. Washington Post isn't there. The entire country was mine. I found, for instance,
00:16:48
Speaker
Just by accident, I'd heard that there was a pickup baseball game that took place every Saturday morning down on the beach outside of La Wanda, the capital of Angola. I traveled down there and I had a bunch of kids playing baseball. My first question is, why in the shit are kids in Angola
00:17:03
Speaker
playing baseball. But the reason why was because Cuban soldiers had come in during the previous civil war to back up the communist regime. So the Cubans who had picked up baseball from the United States had brought baseball to
00:17:20
Speaker
Angola. And so the only place in the entire African continent where you would actually find a baseball game was on the outskirts of this town in the middle of the Civil War. So those are the kind of stories I dug. And so who might have you been reading as you were really getting your chops going in terms of maybe long-form journalism or some of the new journalists, the narrative nonfiction books that
00:17:43
Speaker
that maybe they're like, oh, that's a North Star for Chris. That's where I kind of want to start. That's the sandbox I want to start playing in. Yeah, it's an intriguing question because the sandbox that everybody wanted to play in was basically the new, new journalism. You know, Tom Wolfe's book became the thing that everybody wanted to do. Hunter Thompson, like, that was the man. And
00:18:09
Speaker
I look back on it now and I really question a lot of the writing. I reread some of the stories and now I'm just like, man, cut the bullshit. Get to the fucking point. Especially Hunter Thompson started off so strong. His nicks were reporting amazing and they just became a bunch of just blather.
00:18:33
Speaker
widening gyre titans. As a journalist, you're kind of circling around and around the story, and somewhere in the center is you. And the question is, where in that wide orbit, how far in that orbit
00:18:49
Speaker
Do you keep the story away from you and it's probably pretty shitty metaphor but it's kind of what i'm thinking is that they're kind of a Wide spiral and you start way on the outskirts and you're kind of in the center and you're swinging the rope around and around but at what point do you bring it back to you and What happened with a lot of the new new journalism was it just became all about them And very little about what was going on in the outside. Um, even even tom wolf himself, you know, it's just his
00:19:17
Speaker
Ostensibly, he was keeping himself outside the story, his whole thing about he would never appear in it and he'd just blend in. He'd look so weird in his white suits, they would forget about him. I mean, that's clear horse shit.
00:19:31
Speaker
His idioms, his jargon was so dense and so impenetrable that basically it all became a big like, look at me. I'm using 14 exclamation marks. I'm going to string together 17 hard to understand adjectives when didn't even really need one in the first place. The challenge of understanding his rhetoric basically made you pay attention to the writer all the time and distracted from the story.
00:19:57
Speaker
So how did you learn how to strike the right balance between telling the story straight but also pulling on that rope to have somewhat of you in these narratives as a conduit for the reader? I'm still really struggling with that now and I'm curious to see what people think of running with Sherman because
00:20:21
Speaker
If I have the bounds figured out, it's in that book. When I came into my first real book, I wrote a book called Girl Trouble about Mexican Pops and Gloria Trevi, but it was one of these things where I was literally kind of writing a chapter and sending a chapter by chapter off to the publisher.
00:20:40
Speaker
It's almost like World War II days, like, you know, handing dispatch off to the pilot to send your next article in across the Atlantic. I would literally write a chapter and then fire it off to the publisher and then never look at it again, just write the next chapter. And this was a slapdash thing I put together in like three months. So we'll just kind of scratch that from the record. And so my first real book I think was Born to Run. And the first big tug of war I had with my editor was
00:21:07
Speaker
He said, there's got to be more of you in this book. I don't see you. And I said, of course not. I'm the least interesting guy in this whole story. And I got Jen Shelton blowing chunks in my bathtub before running a 50-mile race and barefoot Ted spouting off his wacky karma shit and Scott Short, the greatest ultra-runner of all time, against a tribe of lost Indian superstars and a guy named the White Horse.
Success with 'Born to Run' and Writing Challenges
00:21:35
Speaker
Why on earth would I like get in the frame with that story going on? But my editor's point was that
00:21:44
Speaker
if you handle the first person properly, you're standing in as a proxy for the reader. You're that dude, you're the everyman. And in stories, particularly with outsized characters, sometimes you need some guy who's more scaled back to human size to step in for the reader. So that was my editor's point, and I struggled with it, and I'm kind of in born to run. And in Natural Born Heroes, I felt like I really struggled with it.
00:22:11
Speaker
Don't think I got I think I was all over the place in that book I'm in and I'm out of it some chapters. I'm in hardcore. Sometimes I'm barely in it all I just did not feel comfortable with how to tell the story but my real concern with natural born heroes was that I'm writing about a group of guys who pulled off this amazing feat in World War two with a lot of suffering a lot of pain and I just felt
00:22:37
Speaker
you know, too embarrassed to insert myself in that story, you know, to suggest that in any way like my experience tracing them
00:22:47
Speaker
was in any way comparable to their experience of actually fighting against the Germans. So I really, I really wrestled with how do I, how do I step into this thing? But with running the Sherman for the first time, it felt completely natural. Like I knew exactly the moves. Like I knew exactly how the story should be told. I felt and how much of me to be in it. So we'll see if it worked, then I'm getting close.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly is. And even with Born to Run, I thought The Balance was great too. And with Born to Run, I was uniquely positioned when that book came out just because I was working at a fleet feat in Albany, New York. And so that had been out a year. And I saw how that book fundamentally changed the running industry and the shoe industry just based on the reporting and the storytelling you were able to accomplish with that.
00:23:40
Speaker
What was that like for you to write this piece of non-fiction that truly fundamentally altered the landscape of running and even the shoe industry as a whole? Well, hang on a second. Tell me your story about being at Fleet Feet. How that worked out. What was going on there?
00:23:56
Speaker
Oh, well I was, let's see, I had recently been let go from the newspaper I was working for in Saratoga Springs, and so I was unemployed at the time and I was writing a book about a Saratoga racetrack about Rachel Alexandra, this awesome horse who beat the boys and became Horse of the Year.
00:24:15
Speaker
And I wasn't having any success freelancing or finding anything steady and I had had some running shoe, some Fleet Feet experience in Washington DC a few years prior. So I just happened to be well positioned with some experience to work retail out of there. So I was just fitting people for running shoes while trying to write my book.
00:24:37
Speaker
and get things going in that sense. Was that a hopeful period of life? Like, hey, you know what, I'm doing it? Or was it like, holy shit, is this ever gonna work period of life?
00:24:49
Speaker
I would say more of the latter. It was kind of discouraging. It felt like, oh man, this just isn't happening. And I wrestled with that in some ways to this day.
00:25:09
Speaker
That job, I was fitting a woman who was a massage therapist who knew an editor at SUNY Press, and they were looking for a Saratoga book, and I had already written the manuscript. So as a result of this job, I made a connection who knew an editor who was looking for a Saratoga book, and as a result, that book got published by this university press as a result of me working at this sort of menial retail job that was kind of crushing my soul.
00:25:37
Speaker
So in a sense I owe at least that book to the Soul Crushing retail job. Was the retail job Soul Crushing? Was that your first book by the way? Yes. As of yet it's the only one I've written three but it's the only published one. Was the Fleet Feet job the Soul Crushing part or trying to figure out how to write a book the Soul Crushing part?
00:26:01
Speaker
I would say, you know, because I would always be looking over my shoulder and reading people like you or Wright Thompson or anyone else doing this kind of work. And I just remember thinking like, man, they weren't, were these guys fitting shoes? I don't think they were fitting shoes. And they're doing the kind of work I want to do. So I would get kind of like resentful and bitter. All right, Brenda, I'll stop you right there, man. When I was working
00:26:28
Speaker
So my whole chronology was it was AP, right? And then I moved back to Philly after three years with the AP overseas and I worked a few months in AP Philadelphia and then I quit.
00:26:39
Speaker
to start freelancing again, and I was working for the first of Philadelphia Weekly, then the City Paper, then Philadelphia Magazine, but when I was at City Paper, I wrote a 5,000 word story for $300, and you know, 5,000 words, dude, you know how long that takes. I was so low on cash, I was at a convenience store, and I had hot dogs at home, and I had just enough money, like I could either buy the mustard,
00:27:03
Speaker
or I can buy the rolls, but I can't buy both." It was this long agonizing decision, like, how's the hot dog going to be better? With the rolls, you get more food, but a dry hot dog on a dry roll tastes like ass. That's how things were, man. It was down to the pennies for a long time, and I got myself successfully fired.
00:27:25
Speaker
in succession from first to Philadelphia Weekly and Philadelphia Magazine. And when I got fired from Philadelphia Magazine, it was the week my second child was born. So I walked out of that office, goodbye monthly check, goodbye healthcare, just because I mouthed off to Larry Platt, the editor of Philadelphia Magazine. So we've all been there, man. We've all fitted the woman from SUNY for shoes.
00:27:52
Speaker
Hey, it's me, your CNF and buddy Brendan. Listen, we all need editing. We all need fresh eyes. You need someone who can objectively look at your work and coach it along. Whether that's developmental editing or even copy editing.
00:28:08
Speaker
Hiring a great editor is one of the best investments you can make in your book and your writing. So if you want to take your book to the next level, consider working with me. I'd be thrilled and honored to help. Email Brendan at BrendanOmero.com if you want to take that leap together. And now, back to the greatest podcast in the world!
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my god. So how do you pull yourself out of that and dust yourself off and get back on the horse, so to speak? Not to be too lifetime movie-ish about it, but if I had not
00:28:46
Speaker
gotten my ass fired from Philadelphia magazine, I don't think I would have written Born to Run because it happened right after that. And the only reason I had time to get down to the Copper Canyons was because I no longer had a regular job up in Philly. What had happened was
00:29:02
Speaker
And this is the danger of working with like friends and peers. So Larry Platt had been a writer at City Paper right around the time I was at City Paper. And then he quickly vaulted up to become editor in chief of Philadelphia magazine, which for the rest of us, and they sort of knock around Philly guys was dynamite because, you know, one of our guys, you know, one of us was now suddenly in charge of the circus.
00:29:27
Speaker
And so, you know, he hired up a bunch of us guys who were local freelancers and it was great. We finally had decent money and we're doing the kind of stories we wanted. But the problem is like, you know, when peers are sort of working in a hierarchy, just there's a lot of chafing going on. And Larry and I just did not see eye to eye a lot of things and got to the point where
00:29:50
Speaker
I just remember standing in his office and I'm like, man, like, fuck you. You want to fire me, then fire me. You want to dismiss me? Fucking say goodbye to me. And he's like, okay, goodbye. You're done. And I'm like, all right. It's like I'm storming out. And as I'm storming out, like the wheels are turning like dumbass. How are you going to explain this to your wife that you have no healthcare and a weak old baby in the house? But, um, I had this idea I'd been brewing.
00:30:12
Speaker
for a story about these Indians who I'd encountered the last time I was in Mexico for the Gloria Trevi book. And I thought, well, this is my opportunity. You know, I can pitch this story to men's health or runner's world and get out of the canyons and maybe I can turn this into something. So, you know, your question was how do you dust yourself off? The simple answer is
00:30:34
Speaker
If you have the stupid blind optimism that as long as you keep churning your legs, then the quicksand is not going to pull you down. And that's what I thought, just keep churning, man. And I kind of liked it
Lessons from 'Natural Born Heroes' and Marketing
00:30:49
Speaker
too. I think it really played to my, as of yet undiagnosed ADHD, which was that I liked having like seven irons in the fire at one time. Like I loved,
00:30:59
Speaker
pitching a buttload of stories and juggling five stories at a time and just like turning in, you know, something on finance for ink magazine and something on sex toys for men's health and, you know, some profile of a local politician for city paper. I like that variety. So it worked pretty good as long as it worked.
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah, and essentially, circling back, so you write Born to Run, of course, and it does fundamentally change the industry for a while. We're talking like zero-drop shoes, and for people who don't know that, it's just like –
00:31:36
Speaker
Zero millimeters between the heel and the toe and you know we're talking minimal shoes even you know vibrant five fingers everything really comes out of The work you did with born to run so I what was that what was that like for you to have written something so influential You know it's kind of it's kind of interesting because you're blind to a lot of it
00:31:58
Speaker
And there are a couple different phases. Like the first phase was two years of sitting home alone with this material and feeling like if anybody doesn't like this book, it's because you personally
00:32:16
Speaker
are fucking hopeless like you are a bad writer because someone just gave you like here's some black truffles man beautiful rare just put them on top of the pasta and you have a masterpiece so i had the black truffles the story the material was like pure platinum it was perfect
00:32:36
Speaker
And my question was, like, can you deliver? Can you take this stuff and make a decent book out of it? Because the material is above reproach. And so you have that sort of giddy, like, excitement, like, I can't believe this story is so awesome. And then the more I researched, the better it became. Because, you know, this whole thing about the whole giant, completely immoral scam that running shoe companies are perpetrating, to this day, you know, it's complete healthcare fraud. And the fact that we're getting away with it and have gotten away with it,
00:33:06
Speaker
was really exciting. I'm not sure if anybody else is writing about this. This is a pretty cool thing to put out there in the world. On top of that, you tack it all on in this wacky adventure story.
00:33:18
Speaker
So you have the excitement of the material versus the dread in your stomach of like, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to cook, man. I don't know what to do with a black truffle. Do you cut it? Do you mince it? You know, what do you do with this thing? And I remember sitting in my, you know, I got this like little cabin behind the house where I would work and just sitting there at four o'clock in the morning thinking, ah, you know what? If I could just have a stroke, man, you know, it would just solve everything. Just have a stroke, die.
00:33:47
Speaker
There's insurance for the family. You don't have to write this fucking book. If there's just a meteor, you could just bring it in. Anyway, I was just kind of hoping that I would not have to finish this thing because I just felt it was beyond me. That was the first phase. The first phase was like, Jesus Christ, I can't do this. And then
00:34:05
Speaker
The book came out and it was pretty much universally ignored. I got one review and that was it. One newspaper reviewed it, nobody else, no TV, no radio, no, nothing, no interest at all. I did a nominal, you know, six city book tour, which is, you know, I stood, you want to talk about flea feeds. I stood in the back of a running shoe store somewhere in suburban Boston.
00:34:31
Speaker
talked to three people and the guy who owned the store never stopped ringing up sales while I'm giving my talk. So I'm literally standing in front of a wall running shoes talking to these three people and he's still like, you know, thank you ma'am. You care for some socks with that? You know, have you signed up for our newsletter at the counter? So that was it. Like that was, that was the thing. And then it basically came to an end. Book comes out in May.
00:34:53
Speaker
gets no attention whatsoever, minimal sales, book tours are over, and I just started thinking, man, why stop here? At any given moment, there are people gathering to run. Any moment of the day, there's like four or five people getting together to go for a run, to just be where those people are and have some books on hand. So I started to do that. I just contacted all the running clubs and running shoe stores and cross-country teams
00:35:20
Speaker
everywhere I could drive to from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, including Marathon, New York. That was a five-hour drive each way. Upped Marathon, was there for a race, taught to some people who could not give a shit about me or my book, turned around, drove home.
00:35:34
Speaker
I did that all through the spring and summer, and it started to work. It started to gather a little momentum. By June, July, I was starting to get some sales, and in July, I hit the best seller list for the first time, and then I get this phone call that John Stewart wanted me on The Daily Show, and that was it, man. That was it. That was the lightning bolt, and it was off to the races from there.
00:35:57
Speaker
That's amazing. I love how you took it upon yourself to bring it, you grew this thing and then you had to bring it to market. Like where are the others? Where are they hanging out? And you had this thing you knew was going to resonate with them on some level and you went out and found them. And that's how, I love the agency you took to get that done. It's tough though, Brendan.
00:36:20
Speaker
You know, I spent really two years humping, born to run. I would just, my motto was, the answer is always yes. Anybody who invites any interest, yep, you got it, man. You have a book club you want me to go to in Tacoma? I'm there, you got it, man. But,
00:36:40
Speaker
At the end of two years, I thought I had it all figured out. I thought that I had cracked the code, man, I was Mr. DaVinci Code of how to sell books. Then I turned around for Natural Born Heroes and pulled out my playbook. I got this figured out and didn't do nearly as well. I sold a fraction of the books of Natural Born Heroes. Although I feel that the material was better, it was more important. I think that I matured as a writer. It's a better book on a lot of levels, I think.
00:37:07
Speaker
But all the stuff that I thought would make it like a monster best seller didn't work. So I'm now going back, you know, out in the ring for round three. And I wonder like, do I really know what I'm doing or not?
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, so that's, so what was the feeling of apprehension of going into, like having to have a rebound, have Running with Sherman be your rebound from natural born heroes? Even though I love natural born heroes, I especially love the historical thread that you were able to recreate through it. I thought that was just brilliant storytelling, you know, right out of Eric Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, John McPhee type recreation. I thought that was brilliant for one.
00:37:50
Speaker
By the way, you mentioned Laura Hillenbrand, so I'm just going to tell you a quick story and then move on back to your question. I got an early copy of Unbreakable.
00:38:05
Speaker
read it on a flight. Here's the kind of tour schedule I was doing. I had an event one day in LA and the next day in the Bahamas. So I literally flew from LA to the Bahamas for a book event and read her book on the plane and got off and immediately called her editor because I didn't have a laptop with me and called her editor and said, all right, I'm going to detail it. They take a blurb. And I was like over caffeinated and overexcited and jet lagged and I dictated a blurb over the phone because I thought, oh my God,
00:38:34
Speaker
like this is a masterwork so good and anyway she sent me this personal note and then later on uh I reached out to her because some friends were doing a book club and was there any way she could possibly like send them a little personal note and she sent them the most charming thoughtful note it was so funny and cool and witty and I really kind of stricken with embarrassment that I had bothered
00:39:01
Speaker
to impinge on her limited energy resources yet so impressed at how quickly she just stepped up you know frame for superstar of that caliber to be that kind of people man it always always made a lasting impression like be her man like act like her at all times so um
Storytelling Influences and Techniques
00:39:21
Speaker
Your question has now slipped my mind. What was it again, Brendan? Oh, yeah. I was just sort of complimenting just that historical thread that you did in Natural Born Heroes, but also, of course, it didn't sell quite as well as you and your publisher were hoping, but of course, you dust yourself off, as we've alluded to, and now you've got rebounding with...
00:39:43
Speaker
running with Sherman. So like how did you sort of cast off that apprehension or at least dance with that fear to write this wonderful book? The thing about it is I really spent a lot of time watching storytellers at work and trying to figure out what the craft is. So when I was on book tour for Natural Born Heroes there was a comedian named Liz Mealy
00:40:13
Speaker
who toured with me. And, you know, Amelia, she's been doing this since she was 16. She's been doing this literally half her life. She's been doing stand up. And the reason why she came with me is she's a runner herself, a marathoner, and she's got really good material about running marathons and the mental state of runners. And so it was just like so great on tour where Liz would come out first and just
00:40:36
Speaker
crush the audience, just like break them up. And then all I had to do was come in and like sweep up the pieces. So she'd do five minutes and then the audience would be completely in the palm of her hand. And then she'd bring me on. But what I would do is we did, I don't know, like 15 or 20 events together. And I would watch Miley in action and just marvel at her poise and patience and simplicity of storytelling.
00:41:04
Speaker
I think if I have, well, I should say one of my flaws is like, I feel like I hit the reader with a fire hose. Like all this shit that I figured out, I got to tell you now at the same time. And instead of just, you watch a really good comic at work, they say 10 words and they stop and they pause and they take a sip of water and then 15 more words and they stop. So it's that patience of letting the story come out in a natural flow.
00:41:34
Speaker
that I wanted to learn. And secondly, you know, if I would tell Miley, hey, we've only got 20 minutes, instead of five minutes, can you just do three minutes? And Miley's like, okay. So suddenly she would have to reshape her material and do everything she wanted to do, but do it in 180 seconds. And what I really started to focus on is
00:41:57
Speaker
how do you tailor your material so that you're making it feel lush and unhurried, yet you're moving things along. And that's what immediately would do. She could get all of her jokes in and she wouldn't rush and she'd still pause. It wasn't like she was speaking any faster, but she figured out how to cut or expand her material so she could see everything she wanted to say in the amount of time she had while being patient.
00:42:23
Speaker
And so that became like my thing. And you mentioned that Lancaster story slam competition. So I started going to story slams and I would just watch how the really good storytellers would get on stage and let their stories unfold. And my goal for running with Sherman was to do the same thing. Take a breath, take your time, let the story come. With Natural Born Heroes, I felt like
00:42:49
Speaker
You know, I become this PhD researcher in World War II resistance fighters and natural movement, and I have to educate the world. And I think secondly, that was also possibly a shortcoming of the Natural Born Heroes Tour, was I was traveling around with five or six people, and I would bring them on stage, one after the other, Miley first, then Tara Wood, then Dan Edwards, then me.
00:43:15
Speaker
I had done a similar thing with Born to Run. I would travel around with Scott George, the great ultra runner, and Eric Orton, the coach who transformed my own running. And the three of us would do an event together and take turns at the mic. And so I guess my mistake was I felt like everything that worked for Born to Run, I'll just triple down. You know, if the recipe calls for salt, I'm gonna triple down on the salt. And so I think it was overload. So what I tried to do for Running with Sherman was
00:43:45
Speaker
Get back to the basics of storytelling. What is the simple craft of getting people engaged and not thinking that you are annoyed by supernatural powers to impart wisdom? That's not your job. Your job is to get people sight and then maybe slip a little wisdom in along the way if you can.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think you do that masterfully. I'm really especially intrigued that you were able to look at a stand-up comic as a way to inspire and inform your own writing. I love when other people take a different artistic media and apply those sort of tools or principles from something that's kind of disparate to your actual thing.
00:44:33
Speaker
Sort of logically, there are the same sort of skills involved, but you just, you found it with a comic to be able to tease out the story in a way that just felt natural for you. So I love that you were able to draw that kind of inspiration.
00:44:48
Speaker
When you think about it, when you think about the challenge that a stand-up comic has, it's mind-boggling, especially if it's a comic you've never seen before. Because what they have to do is quickly create an association with you, create an identity that you can understand. Like, who are they? Who is this person I've never seen before?
00:45:09
Speaker
and then launch into some story that has people in places in a time sequence and you've got to figure all out quickly and then it has to have a punchline and then they stop and start over again. So when you watch what they do and the ones you pull off,
00:45:25
Speaker
It is, it's like, holy shit, how do you do that? So if you can do the same thing in writing, if you can master the comics art of launching an audience into a story where they know who the characters are and where they are and what's going on and what the stakes are, fast.
00:45:42
Speaker
You know, who better can you learn from than a standard comic? Yeah. And the, and the, and the connective tissue, I think between, you know, your, your three big books, uh, and I, and then, and this one in running with Sherman, it's especially true. I really feel that at their core are really about tribes and finding your people. And, and I think this one really, really speaks to that because it's not only, you know, you and Zeke and your wife and everyone else who kind of band together, but it's also the animals that band together, right?
00:46:14
Speaker
yeah it's funny i was in france recently i'm researching i'm working on a new book now and one of the guys i'm writing about was in france for an ultramarathon and a running magazine called like the winds was holding a storytelling night in the town uh during the week of the race and they asked me to come up and tell a story about running with sherman so
00:46:38
Speaker
It was the first time I'd spoken publicly about the story. The first time I tried to actually describe the story out loud in person. And dude, I got like halfway through and I just like, I had to stop. I was like getting so teary and emotional because it's one thing to write the story, but then when you are thinking out loud and recreating the drama in your mind,
00:47:06
Speaker
It's really emotional. Yeah, this was a really sad case, man, a donkey who was in horrible shape and in a terrible circumstance and even just ignoring our own participation in that, but to just witness the way his life changed and like what joy, what unbelievable joy, like how freaking happy this guy is now and how healthy and strong. Yeah, it's really,
00:47:35
Speaker
Yeah, it makes my eyes water. Even now, just thinking about the new life that Sherman has.
00:47:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's so great how everyone bands together and into your skill as you kind of like dollop in various other elements through that through line of bringing Sherman along and of course getting to Leadville where you're able to run this race with Flower and everybody else. You also drop in some stuff about the area you're around from, your geography and some Amish culture too.
00:48:06
Speaker
One thing in particular that stood out to me, you wrote that, you know, Sam's uncle knew that happiness. Health and security come from devoting yourself to two things, your family and your friends. And anything that doesn't bring you closer to both is pulling you in the wrong direction. And so much of – so how has being in and among sort of an Amish culture kind of informed the way you live and maybe the way you approach your work?
00:48:35
Speaker
You know, Brenda, you probably experienced this a lot, too, that writing as a career, there's a lot of other apples out there, you know, like I got a pretty juicy apple in my hand. Boy, that Hollywood screenwriter seems like his apple is a lot juicer to my apple, you know, all the journalists who were in New York, like, hey, man, it seems like all these guys who work for the New Yorker all kind of like each other and review each other's books and
00:49:01
Speaker
And so you sort of wonder if like, maybe my backyard is a little too small. And so over the years, I've really considered that. Like, you know, maybe, maybe peach bottom Pennsylvania is not exactly the launching spot for a really powerful writing career, but
00:49:20
Speaker
I look around and think, man, what's better than this? I get up in the morning and I can go and jump in the creek across the road. Again, it's only a crappy little creek, but I'm in there by myself having to swim in the creek. I can go walk out in the fields and mess monkey around with the donkeys and milk my sheep. I think what I learned is that little patch of land that's yours, that old Faulkner thing, that little posted stamp of land.
00:49:48
Speaker
As you get to know it and know the people there, that's where the satisfaction comes from in life. Taking joy in those things that you know really well and watching as they change over time. I feel like I'm talking like a stoner here. This is big Lebowski talking.
Impact of Location on Writing Career
00:50:11
Speaker
That's basically it.
00:50:15
Speaker
You start to just understand, I mean, I guess the lesson I learned from hanging out with the Amish all the time is that when I show up at any of my Amish neighbors' houses, the reception I always get is warmth and welcome. Hey man, we're happy you stopped by. Come on in. And it's not
00:50:34
Speaker
ritual, it's because there are no screens going on. They're not like being kept away from Instagram because you showed up. They're not missing their show because you show up. It's not like they got to get out the door or get in the car and they're late. They're not going anywhere. They're not watching anything. So when I show up, I'm kind of the highlight of the day.
00:50:52
Speaker
There's something about that because Amish entertainment is all face to face. It's all talking to your neighbors and your friends and your family. The day is simple and therefore unhurried. That's basically what I've tried to duplicate as much as I can and make it about people and stay put.
00:51:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people probably fail or they think that they need to be in these sort of media meccas in order to make a go of it as a writer. My friend Eva Holland, who writes a lot for Outside Magazine, she's way up in western Canada. You're in Lancaster County near Philly but on a farm.
00:51:36
Speaker
and you're able to make a go of it too. So really, there's really no excuse. I guess you just need to look. You just have to have the kind of rigor and good ideas to make it work. And it doesn't really matter where you are, right?
00:51:51
Speaker
That was my thinking. When I was moving back to Philadelphia, I should say moving back to the United States from Portugal, I'd worked there for over three years as a foreign correspondent. And the reason I was leaving was because you start to max out on 500 word stories. You start to accumulate all this experience and knowledge about like Angola, Rwanda, Mozambique, Lisbon.
00:52:14
Speaker
You know all this stuff, but you have no outlet for it because your maximum story is 500 words. So I thought, okay, it's time to move back to the States and get into magazine journalism. And all I kept hearing was, you got to go to New York. You got to go to New York and network. And that's where it's all happened. And I thought, well, man, if everyone's in New York, why am I going? I'm already at a disadvantage. And one thing I really learned too, when I was in Portugal, whenever I'd be doing a news story,
00:52:41
Speaker
the portuguese reporters always had me just way out guns because no matter what the story was
00:52:48
Speaker
If there was a murder, there was actually, there was a weird story about a serial killer who, his MO or the person's MO was very similar to murders in London and in Lisbon. So there was this thought to me, is there like a serial killer who's like vacationing in Portugal and then going back to the day job in London? And so when I was working on that story, I was working with some Portuguese local, Portuguese reporters.
00:53:12
Speaker
And if there was a murder on a certain street corner, I could describe the corner really well. But for the Portuguese reporter, they had millions of personal associations. They knew stuff about that street corner that I would never know, that they walked by it when they were 14 and had an ice cream cone, something like that.
00:53:31
Speaker
And that was my last thought was, you know, if you're going to be a freelancer, you got to play the strength, man. You got to go to the place that you know a little bit better than anybody else. And for me, that was Philly. I didn't know what the competition was going to be like in Philly, but I felt like I could at least punch my weight in a city where I knew a lot of stuff and a lot of people.
00:53:51
Speaker
And so that was it. I moved from Lisbon back to Philly and just started scratching it out, freelancing there. Again, it kind of worked. You know, I got some strainer work for the New York Times when something would happen in Philly, they would send down a staff reporter, but in the meantime, they would deploy me to get to the scene, get some quotes, get some contact info, feed that to the reporter when they came down. I got a couple of pieces of print that way of my own and that was it, just by being on the ground and knowing the territory. And to me, that became my,
00:54:22
Speaker
sort of my motto is just be where nobody else is and know everything you can about it.
00:54:29
Speaker
And I love the Leonard Bernstein quote that you use as the epigraph of running with Sherman to achieve great things, two things are needed, a plan and not quite enough time. And I love that so much. And how did that quote not only inform what you needed to do in the narrative of the book, but also maybe in the generation of the book itself?
00:54:54
Speaker
It's probably like the wisest words ever spoken for a freelance writer, right? Like, you know, there's a deadline. No, a real deadline. Like, now you really got to turn it in. Because that's it. I feel like I sort of surrender to this thought of that.
00:55:13
Speaker
The more time you take, the better off you are, because ideas need a marinate. You really gotta think this through, and it comes as, holy shit, I gotta get this shit in, man. Enough marinating, time to start cooking. And that's basically what also happened with Sherman, too. We needed a sense of,
00:55:34
Speaker
It's very easy to not do things that are difficult. Training a donkey I think is pretty much at the top of that list of things that are difficult. Training a donkey is a massive pain in the ass. It is hard unless you're consistent about it. Again, the same thing applies to writing.
00:55:53
Speaker
The more consistent you are, the more you push the boulder up the hill a little bit at a time, the easier it gets. And it's just hard to start from the bottom of the hill all the time. So that was it. What we needed was like, oh my God, holy crap, this race is in nine months. We gotta get cracking.
00:56:11
Speaker
and holy shit this book is due in six months I gotta get moving and that sense of urgency that really makes like the synapses just start to crackle and your juices gets flowing and you start to really produce and come up with ideas that you wouldn't have had if you're just staring off into the sunset.
00:56:29
Speaker
Yeah, and to that point, Eric Orton makes a great point in the book that you don't start with today and aim toward your goal. You start with a goal and aim back toward today. And you do it like that and you'll always find a way. Is that how you approach big projects of this nature that you do work backwards so that you've got a well-worn sort of path ahead of you if you've done your planning correctly?
00:56:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny how much that philosophy applies in different dimensions. So that's actually exactly how I chart out a book, too. I get a big piece of poster board. And the first thing I write on the poster board is what the last chapter is going to have to be. Where am I going? This is where I got to get to.
00:57:14
Speaker
And then, okay, so I got that one, and where's the starting point? Well, the only place to start this thing is here. So, I get this big piece of poster board, and I get a Sharpie, and I just slash it up into a grid, you know, and turn it into whatever it is, like 30 little boxes, and just fill in the very last box first. Okay, so, I'm born to run. It has to end with the race, obviously, the race against the throttle model. That's where it ends. Where does it start? Well, it's gotta start with,
00:57:41
Speaker
first hearing about the race, you know, Caballo Blanco, so that's the first thing. And that's it, so now I got my two pole stars, you know, I'm going from South Pole to North Pole, and how do you break down the distance in between? And that's it, so you basically chart it out that way.
00:57:58
Speaker
There's a moment in the book too where you run across these other characters who are similarly sort of mended by burrow racing and one, you know, this man Rick who found his, I believe it was his brother who had struggled mental illness and killed himself and he had to carry his brother out, he heard the gunshot and carried his brother out of the woods.
00:58:28
Speaker
Bring that up because I want to ask you as as a reporter interviewing Interviewing Rick about this like how how do you handle that such a delicate? Delicate thing that said that you tease out the right materials, but you're also being sympathetic and empathetic to the people offering you that information That was hard I've been talking to Zeke. Oh, yeah So I'm dealing with there were three
00:58:56
Speaker
attempted suicides in this book, one of them successful. And it was, the key is give it time, give it time, you know.
00:59:11
Speaker
You can only, I think, have these conversations if they're not hurried and you take the time to become genuine friends with the people involved and let them tell the story at their own speed and circle back. You know, just like all writing is rewriting, all reporting is rereporting. You hear a little bit and you circle back and you circle back and
00:59:35
Speaker
You think about it. It's funny. Do you know Emilia Boone? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, corporate lawyer for Apple, world champion Spartan racer. You know, this is a person, this is an athlete with a million things going on in her mind. And we'd schedule a call. I was interviewing her for something.
00:59:55
Speaker
As soon as the call went through, she immediately started asking me questions about something we had talked about in our previous conversation. I remember thinking, oh, Amelia Boo was actually paying attention to our conversation. It made me think, okay, she's like a real person. She's a real person. I've never met her in person, so I only know her distantly.
01:00:16
Speaker
But it made an impression on me like, oh man, she's a really caring, thinking, thoughtful person. And I just immediately had a ton of respect for her for that. And that is what I try to do then when you report on things like that. Some serious personal trauma in the lives of the people you're reporting about is
01:00:40
Speaker
know what you're talking about, admit when you don't know what you're talking about, and just be humble and patient. And in all your exploits as a writer and a journalist, did you ever imagine that you would be training a donkey and running in a race, doing burro racing? I mean, what was that like for you just as a person who does this kind of work? This is the first time
01:01:10
Speaker
I've ever been involved in a story that I didn't realize was a story.
01:01:14
Speaker
What happened with this was, it was all just so out of the blue. Every step of the process was like, wait, what? My daughter wants a donkey? What the hell? Oh, my neighbor actually knows a donkey we can get? Every step was, I didn't think there was going to be a second step. I thought, well, no, we're not getting a donkey. Okay, maybe we'll get this one. Oh, this one's going to die. I just didn't think that the story was actually going to progress at all.
01:01:40
Speaker
And we were so in the thick of it that it was only by accident that one day I was going to the dentist and I was like taking my time because who's eager to go see the dentist? And I can't remember if she called me or I called her, but I was scheduled to speak with Tara Parker Pope, who was my editor at the New York Times in the science section. And she's like, yeah, man, what are you up to these days?
01:02:05
Speaker
And I said, oh, you know, I'm just trying to figure shit out with this donkey. It's this crazy thing. And she said, oh, that's going to be a great book. No, it is not a book. I don't think this thing is going to live till next week. And we're just trying to deal with it. And she's like, that's why it's going to be a great book.
01:02:22
Speaker
And I remember just kind of shaking my head like, no, no, no, I'm a very slow adopter, man. I tell you, man, how many times I am the last guy to figure out what's obvious to everybody else? It happens too often. So Tara saw it immediately and she said the real key to this thing is about animal-human partnerships.
01:02:43
Speaker
showed me where the lane was and gave me pushing the acid to start walking. So no, I did not
Training Donkeys and Writing Process
01:02:50
Speaker
see it coming. I did not see it coming even when it was actually happening. And I was a good few months in this whole experience before I realized that there was something here to write about.
01:02:59
Speaker
And speaking of animal-human partnerships, I mean you cite this great little poem that Jimmy Stewart kept on him with his dog, Beau, and just how, and then of course how that relationship between ancestral wolves and ancestral hominids kind of piggybacked off each other to propel their evolution forward. It's in our blood to be connected to animals, really.
01:03:26
Speaker
that's when it really clicked. When it really clicked that there was some some meat on the bone here was when I started to think that you know for almost all of human existence we were side by side with animals all day every day that animals were
01:03:42
Speaker
a completely crucial part of our lives, you know, and not as pets, you know, it's not as like, you know, the chow chow that you keep in a crate in your bedroom and you take out for a walk. We relied on animals for everything, for food and for security and for hunting and for guidance. And then suddenly like, pow!
01:04:00
Speaker
We abruptly just ended the romance and broke off the relationship. You can see obviously that we're struggling to rebuild that relationship because we've since we lost something by the prevalence of security animals and therapy dogs.
01:04:18
Speaker
the avalanche of studies of the health benefits when you bring an animal into like a cancer ward or pediatric ward, suddenly there's huge surges in improved health. So clearly there is some physiological benefit going on that is invisible to the eye, but it works. And we don't know what it is. And I thought, there's something there, something there that I think is going to be more and more understood in the future. But I thought it was worth recording right now.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, and you wrote, too, citing a man last name Wilson, first name's escaping me, but it was you. Biophilia hypothesis, yes. Yeah, like when we close ourselves off from the natural world, we're messing with forces we don't understand. We're changing our address with no idea where we're going. That sounds pretty good. I like that. It's funny when you think back on stuff you wrote, like, oh, all right, I guess, yeah, you did pretty good that day.
01:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, and in terms of the writing, with respect to how you're starting to wrangle the information and you've got your narrative backbone, how are you setting up your days to approach the writing so you can hit your marks and make sure you're doing the work you need to do to put this thing together?
01:05:39
Speaker
So the real learning lab for me was Born to Run. I went into that. That was like my first real book writing experience. And you don't know what to do. You're suddenly launching yourself from 2,000 words. And I felt like 2,000 words was kind of my sweet spot. Like a 2,000-word story was just about where I like to be. And now suddenly you're doing 120,000 words. So how do you even like,
01:06:07
Speaker
How do you navigate that ocean? Like you can't even see land on the other side. And so for the first year, I just did everything you're supposed to and did everything wrong. So I thought, okay, we got to five in the morning, man, and have the coffee, and I'm gonna sit there until like eight o'clock at night, and I'm gonna crank out 5,000 words a day. And I did that for five or six months and got nowhere. It just wasn't me at all. And I sort of learned a lesson in life that anything that is unpleasant
01:06:34
Speaker
you're gonna postpone it, you're just not gonna do it. And so it's like for exercise, for dieting, anything you don't wanna do, you will find a reason not to do it. And so I think even with all those aspects, with nutrition and exercise and everything, you gotta negotiate a happy compromise. You gotta figure out what's the thing that makes it fun and then do that thing. And so what I realized is that as long as the sun is up,
01:07:03
Speaker
I am not getting shit done. I am not gonna be at my desk. And so I get up in the morning and just blast out the door and just busy myself with stuff.
01:07:12
Speaker
all during the sunlight hours. And then in case around five or six, I'm physically tired, I'm winding down, I eat some good food, and then I'm ready to sit down like seven o'clock at night and just bust it out till midnight one o'clock in the morning. But if the sun's up, I think to me it is pure like some kind of photosynthetic response in my body which says, you gotta fuck around now. And so off I go. So that's what I did. So I reversed the clock. I realized daytime is useless, so I'll just get tired.
01:07:41
Speaker
And, um, you know, I just call it happy hour. Happy hour was like 7 PM. I can sit down and get the work done. So that was, that was the first thing. And the second thing was, I learned this actually from reading John Krakauer books, because when I was working on Born and Run, I was trying to figure out like, what's, what's my closest model? Like, what am I trying to do? And.
01:08:02
Speaker
I might be wrong. I don't think there are many other writers who are doing what I'm doing, like writing adventure books with a literary focus and delivering science and physiology and history. I'm not sure if that combo
01:08:37
Speaker
Your question was about the whole writing process. So that was it, man. I learned that I couldn't do anything by day. I had to do things by night. And so when I finally figured out how to work out that grid chart, figured out where my chapters were, I looked at John Krakauer to see how he handled Into Thin Air. And the big reveal to me about Into Thin Air was the chapters are really short.
01:08:38
Speaker
is out there.
01:09:01
Speaker
So I think of it as one sprawling story, but it's not. You know, each chapter is like 2000 words.
01:09:08
Speaker
And I felt like someone just handed me the combination to a safe. Like, this is how you do it, dude. This is how you do it. And that was it. So my rule for born to run is 2000 and out. No matter what the chapter is, you better figure out how to handle it in 2000 words because at 2100, you're out. And later on, you can expand on that.
01:09:32
Speaker
But if I'm writing about running shoes, the history of the thought of Amada, the evolution of chia seeds as a super food, whatever that chapter is, man, you got 2,000 words to sort it out and then you're moving on. With this particular story with Running with Sherman, what particular transformative element or how did this book and how did writing this book transform you?
01:09:56
Speaker
The one thing about training a donkey is that donkeys are the ultimate self-preservationists. What makes donkeys so invaluable to people in the mountains and the desert is that as partners, they're great because they are super suspicious. A donkey won't commit to any kind of movement until it's very confident that it's safe. A horse
01:10:24
Speaker
You can bully a horse into doing whatever you want. You know, you give it a little smack and the horse will go. You can make horses like jump over fences and you've seen like, you know, Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, you know, horses are jumping off of cliffs. I'm telling you, man, you will never get a fucking donkey to jump off any cliff. It ain't going to happen. Donkeys don't do shit unless they are 100% sure that
01:10:46
Speaker
that they are landed soft. I see it to this day. To this day, Flower will not set foot in a puddle. I'm talking like a wet spot on asphalt. She'll just shy away from this thing like it's a big booby trap. The same bridge, we've taken Flower across this 12-foot wooden bridge. I've lost count. Is it 1,000 times she's been across this bridge? Every time she looks at this thing, oh my God, what is this?
01:11:12
Speaker
Donkeys are the ultimate skeptics and they will only do something if you persuade them that they can trust you and they're going to be safe. I think for me that was the big takeaway is that in my own personal life, I'm trying to get to the point where I have the patience and empathy to deal with people
01:11:36
Speaker
from their perspective and not just from what I want now. Like, why won't you just fucking do it? And so, and that's it with a donkey, man. Like when you, if a donkey's not going across a creek, you're not going to talk them into it. You got to figure out what the problem is and solve the problem to make this thing work. So I guess that's it, man. You know, as a half Sicilian guy from West Philly, you know, you come at things with a full head of steam all the time. And I'm getting a point in my life where I realized, eh,
01:12:03
Speaker
There's probably quite a few bridges I've burnt in the past that didn't necessarily have to be dynamited. Maybe there was another way.
01:12:10
Speaker
And lastly, of course, a little goofy segment I've been doing on the show of late is just asking people for a recommendation of sorts that kind of lets them unplug from their work or maybe something you use to take your mind off of writing or maybe as you're gearing up for book tour, maybe something that kind of like de-stress you from that. So do you have a recommendation of something of any kind for people out there listening?
01:12:37
Speaker
you know the most the best recommendation fortunately is the simplest one what i found is anytime i was jammed
01:12:45
Speaker
Like surrender immediately, like stop. Anytime you're feeling a ball of tension in your neck from emails or you're not getting where you want to go with the writing, just get out the door. And it got to the point where there was a trail on a farm lane near my house. And I knew to the foot on that trail where whatever problem I was trying to solve, it would be solved. Like I can picture in my mind's eye, there's a certain tree on a hill
01:13:12
Speaker
And if I walk out the door and like, ah, Jesus Christ, like, I cannot explain how serotonin works in this chapter. Like, I don't even understand it myself. This chapter, I don't have to cut it from the book, blah, blah, blah, blah. Once your ball, your head's a ball of spaghetti, I'm out the door and I'll just go for a run. And there's something about putting yourself in a state of physical distress, which just takes your mind off of the other stuff. Like physical distress just clears
Book Recommendations and Podcast Wrap-Up
01:13:36
Speaker
your brain. So I go out the door, I start to run up this hill,
01:13:40
Speaker
I'm out of shape, it's hard to run the hill, it takes my focus off the work and then after 10 minutes, bam, whatever I'm looking for suddenly shows up. That's amazing. Well, Chris, what a thrill to get to talk to you about your work. I've been a big fan of your work for a long time and to be able to dig in to get it real granular about how you go about the work was an honor to get to talk to you and I wish you the best of luck with this book and maybe I'll see you in Portland in a few weeks.
01:14:06
Speaker
Hey, dude, I'm gonna make you a recommendation too. Have you ever interviewed Susanna Cahalan on your podcast? No, no. So she wrote this amazing book called Brain on Fire that you got to read it. First of all, it's amazing. But secondly, she did something really hard. She did
01:14:25
Speaker
Third person reporting on her first person narrative because much of her entire year was gone from her mind. She had an acute virus which was basically she was diagnosed as acute schizophrenia and was going to be institutionalized.
01:14:43
Speaker
And at the last second, they actually re-diagnosed it as a virus and they were able to cure her. But that entire year was gone. So she'd like pull up videos of like her incarceration and mental health facilities to find out what the hell happened to her. Anyway, she's got a new book coming out and she's a killer storyteller. But when you would talk about narrative challenges, man, like brain on fire, it was insanely hard. I don't know how she pulled it off.
01:15:06
Speaker
Cool, well I'll definitely dig into that and reach out to her and get her on the roster, on the CNF roster. Right on. Awesome. Cool. Well thank you so much, Chris. Like I said, this was awesome. And best of luck with the book, and yeah, I look forward to meeting you in person someday.
01:15:25
Speaker
damn damn damn that was some tasty CNF wasn't it big thanks to Christopher McDougal at Chris McDougal on Twitter great Twitter follow running with Sherman get this book it's book buying season holiday season around the corner this is one of those books you're gonna want to
01:15:43
Speaker
you're gonna want to wrap that sucker up give it to a cnf and buddy of yours and be like you know what let him take you away take you to a good place with donkeys thanks to bay path of course and river teeth for the support be sure to subscribe to the show and consider leaving a kind review on apple podcast i hope i've made something worth sharing so if this means
01:16:05
Speaker
anything to you. Pass it along to a CNF and buddy. Keep the conversation going, of course, on Twitter at cnfpod at Brendan O'Mara, Instagram at cnfpod. I think that's a wrap, friend. Remember, if you can do interview, see ya.