E081 - Give Me 90 Minutes and I'll FORCE You to Lock in This 2025 | William Goodge

0:28During that UK run, I destroyed myself so much physically. with that yeah running was your therapy for you yeah the gym is also my therapy i can't use what i'm going through now as an excuse to fuck it up i have to use it as an excuse to do something that's bigger and better and there's too much wishy-washiness around just fucking do it i want to try and do a marathon i want to like challenge myself what advice do you have for those people who are thinking about doing it and they haven't really done anything like it before that's the time to do it man you don't want to be doing it when you're what's up guys and welcome back to first things first we have the international man of mystery in the building william gootes that's fair good description i'll take it you're you're like a nomad ultra marathon runner slash model slash does other things as well so yeah i kind of i don't really model anymore but it happens from time to time you don't know i thought you were hanging out with mr armani the other day i was but that was just i was invited to hang out with the geezer he was nice actually how does that happen okay i used i used to do modeling and then i was never that like into it i never did it that much it was just a thing and it was okay for a while and then yeah now if i get booked for something it's more about my story and who i am rather than you're six two yeah skinhead and look a certain way so yeah it's few and far between now it's more like working with brands rather than yeah it's a for them it's a weird weird world it's well weird none of this is planned just keeps happening well i i i had a little taste of modeling when i was i think i was like 21 22 yeah and i just it was a weird it was a weird thing i thought the whole modeling industry and like the photographers and like i bet you got a few stories from your probably probably yeah um yeah it is a weird it is a weird industry um some people take it way too seriously um yeah and it's a bit we talk about like the guys like the models themselves yeah i think there's everyone and it's a very small pool of people that actually make it and earn really good money there's a massive pool of people that just don't and kind of get a job here and there or so yeah i kind of took it for what it was and never i never thought it was going to be a long-term thing but it's like smash and grab like take what i could get when i could and then try and find something else to do yeah well one thing i never liked about it was the fact that you were not really in control yeah because it was basically the fashion labels or the scouters that would decide like oh this is what's fashionable this is what's in or like if you if there's something wrong with your nose or you in my case i was always a little bit too big same they were like you look good but if we put you in this t-shirt you wearing this t-shirt is not how the t-shirt is supposed to look yeah because your fucking tits yeah like completely changed the shape of the shirt itself so it doesn't make any sense so like if you want to do this you have to lose size and I was like what I worked so hard to get lose size why don't you fucking busting my balls so I grow yeah you just don't fit sample size and that's that and also I wasn't ever that good at posing so oh really yeah I didn't have the blue steel look I just okay I just did I I didn't enjoy it either.

3:52Yeah. Like, Ecom, I will never do that ever again. You've got to try on like 500 different outfits. Yeah, yeah. I remember doing one for Gymshark in the early days before they got massive, massive. And I think I did like over 100 looks in a day. But they wanted the hench guy, so. Yeah. Surprised you didn't get the job. I am, no. I'm surprised as well.

4:16Well, I think if I'd gone back in time, they did talk about getting me on board. Oh, yeah. but I always had this vision of wanting to start my own clothing brand. So I thought if I did that, it would like hold me back or get in the way of doing that thing. But when I look back, I think it could have been something good in terms of just collaborating and meeting all these other Gymshark athletes, particularly when it was like on the rise, it was, it was peak. Yeah. I did some amazing shit. Yeah. It's a beast. What else? I mean, back in the day, how did you, how did you get into doing what you're doing now?

4:50Um, Interesting story, really. So I was playing rugby at the time and modeling. And also just like grafting in general, I'd always have like some laborsome job, helping a mate who's property developing. I did landscape gardening. I did that as well. Yeah. Anything that big people that are good. My main talent is picking stuff up, moving it somewhere and putting it down. So yeah, I was always I was always doing something and running for me was coming from a rugby background I was semi-professional so I was getting paid but it wasn't great that's why I had to supplement it with other work but running for me was always a punishment like if you fucked up in the game if you played badly if you spoke back to a coach you'd end up they'd tell you to go do laps of the pitch which basically sucked so in off-season my version of like getting fit for getting back into pre-season and wasn't going for for runs it was doing anything like team sport or uh competition based like fitness stuff like i enjoyed winning or losing well i didn't enjoy losing but you know i mean i like there to be a goal to the exercise i was doing and running was you start off doing it it gets hard it continues to suck and then you finish and it's like well i'm glad i did it but fuck that sucked yeah how old are you at this point um i stopped i got into running when i was 23 yeah yeah seven years ago been around the block a few times since then but yeah running started for me like the origin story was i was i was dating this girl at the time she was in la and i'd met her early that summer so it was this perfect catalyst it was off season And I was going back to see her.

6:35We ended up becoming like boyfriend and girlfriend since ended. But I was going back there after meeting her. I was dead excited about it. Went to Santa Monica, stayed in the Fairmont hotel. When I arrived, we went to bed, whatever. And I woke up, it must've been like three or four o 'clock in the morning. And I'm there like, she's asleep. Like, what am I going to do? So I was like, okay, if I'm ever going to maybe enjoy a run, I'm on this like vibe. so I'll go out the hotel and I'll just run along Santa Monica Beach which I did I didn't take shoes with me either and it's it's changed now they used to just be like um slatted boardwalk all along the beach so I was running on these wooden panels and I was like I'll just run until the sun comes up because then maybe when I get back she'll be awake um and I was running towards Malibu and I just kind of kept going and I got to the end where you'd have to get on the Pacific Highway to carry ongoing the sun had come up and then I ran back and on the way back there's this there's this tarmac bit that goes uphill as well and the competitor in me there was like some other guy that had been that was running near me so I like sprinted up next to him beat him I was like yeah got back to the hotel I'd handed my shoes in I had like blood blisters on my feet but I already all of a sudden had like this I felt like that was really good and I didn't know why it's probably the first time i had run as high basically yeah but the fucking feet not bother you did you didn't even think no no i didn't um and yeah i got back i was in this good mood she was awake had a nice morning she left and then my mum called me and at the time she was going through she had cancer but she called me and said i've got some news i've just been to see the doctor and she got told she was in remission so upon reflection like the the best mood the happiest moment of my life of like being like all amped up and like life is amazing everything's good security blah blah blah was that moment then new love mum's beating cancer i'm in california I'm from a small town in fucking Bedfordshire in England.

8:51I'm in LA, blah, blah, blah. Like, this is sick. Life is great. Unfortunately, nine months later, she passed away because the cancer had come back and was really aggressive. So that was over the Christmas period that followed. And then unbeknownst to me, when I was like angry or upset, which was actually quite a lot of the time and could be the middle of the night, I would just go out on a run in my local town, still lived at the family house at this point so I just did the same route like over and over again come rain or come shine and when I got back from those runs I'd feel a little bit better I'd dealt with that initial like surge of emotion so sometimes I'd be out there like sprinting and like breaking down crying other times I might suddenly be happy about something or get like a nice memory but yeah running for me was my version of an escape in therapy and it helped me deal with that period yeah I had um similar thing I lost my mom when I was 11 to breast cancer okay so I it was it was weird because I was so young I didn't really have anything that I could do to deal with that yeah and then I think I found that thing when I was like 16 17 when I started going to the gym like the same thing running was your therapy for you like for me the gym was also my therapy like if i'm having a bad day or because you know something when something like that happens you just pissed off with the world like why why'd it have to be her so you know i probably should have gone to therapy when i was younger but i never did yeah i just dealt with it my own way which probably wasn't the healthiest way but for sure going to the gym and using exercise and a way to kind of release aggression was uh my way of dealing with it yeah my my main thing is like what i've learned through my own journey is like emotion is energy it can be channeled towards something sometimes you don't have control of where that goes like sure i've been a fuck up and i sometimes do it still but like in that period it was it was it could could go it could go one of two ways right it could go like i've got this white flag i can wave and anything i do everyone's gonna be like well you just lost your mom like we understand it's okay but i was like i can't use her memory or what i'm going through now as as an excuse to fuck it up i have to use it as an excuse to do something that's yeah bigger and better and i didn't really know what that was I was just running and it felt good and then I obviously uh ramped it up a bit yeah it can be very easy if someone does lose a loved one or family member to go down the wrong path yeah and you know get addicted to drugs or alcohol I think I never really knew if because of the the way the British culture was especially back in the day I used to drink a lot yeah but then so did all my friends and i don't know if regardless of what would what happened whether i would have still drank the amount that i drank because yeah i was like drinking to the point where you kind of like black out and not remember anything and i feel like part that was partly due to the fact that i just wanted to yeah you want to numb yourself yeah yeah you want to you want to stop almost stop remembering what is reality i guess yeah it's fucking heavy shit yeah but after that you i imagine you start to take the running seriously yeah the first thing and i guess the catalyst for why i do what i do now was the christmas day after she passed away was not looking forward to it whatsoever the happiest moments all of a sudden become like one jewel not looking forward to it at all birthdays mother's day obviously christmas and christmas revolved around my mom wrapping presents doing the tree like i'd go help her buy it and like put it up should be decorating it uh cooking the christmas lunch etc so i was not looking forward to christmas whatsoever i was like how the fuck do i get out of this without raising any concerns that i wasn't i was as unhappy as i was what have you got uh other siblings one older brother yeah yeah yeah he was he was doing his thing he didn't start running he was doing his thing um and yeah on the christmas day after she passed i decided that i'd run my first marathon i'd done like a half but i never really knew how far i was going out to run i just kind of went and did it what is a marathon like that's 26.2 miles okay and in kilometers 42 point 42.2 might even be 26.1 shows how much i know about running done a few it's 26.1 no it's 26.2 because 13.1 is a half well then there's a marathon 26.2 miles 42.195 kilometers there you go i've just got off of a flight overnight yeah by the way guys yeah respect to will because he's just he's done a red eye flight from london probably tell absolutely shocking sleep and he's just rocked up with all this luggage to do this podcast correct so i respect that it could have very easily be like you know what um i need to go and have a little nap before we do anything no no i'm uh i'm well versed in doing shit when i'm yeah not peaking yeah in fact i excel when i'm not peaking um so yeah christmas day marathon made a route up around of like starting from the family house and then going to places around that made sense like she worked at the hospital she was a nurse not at the time she passed away but she also had a treatment there macmillan cancer support who helped her through a treatment as well have a base there um and then like the first house she was born in which was i think she lived in a pub actually with a mom and dad and then back to the local town and serendipitously it kind of worked out to be a marathon anyway um and in doing that i raised nearly 20 000 pounds for mental and cancer support i had all my like friends and family there excuse me and what was like a almost like a negative expression for me of like trying to avoid christmas etc became something that had a really positive impact on something external to myself obviously there was some internal joy from running my first marathon etc but it kind of flipped flipped the switch for me have been a super negative thing so wait can I use what I just did running can I do something much bigger and better and continue like a path to helping yeah and so yeah eight months after and what would have been a 53rd birthday I started running from John I Groats up in Scotland to down to Land's End in England so I went very extreme very quick and since then I've done a few other bits I guess.

15:50Yeah I've done a fair few things by the looks of it. I wonder how much of this endurance running is more of a mental thing versus a physical thing. It's probably 90 % mental 10 % fitness. Because obviously people can be put together and their genetics makes them more suitable for endurance-based activities. For sure. But that alone is not enough. No it's it's so mental because it's always going to get to a point when it even in a marathon, even in a half marathon, if you're pushing, there's always a, like a crux point where you're either going to. For me, it was halfway to a 5k the other day on Kite Beach.

16:31This is the one, this is the one where I did it with, uh, George Heaton and Hugh Mantra. Okay. This was a year ago, just over a year ago. We did it on Kite Beach and because they, their squad of people in the running club, they're all fucking good runners. so they george invited me along it was like 6 a.m start i was like all right yeah we start off obviously i'm trying to keep up with everybody yeah bear in mind i haven't done any sort of 5k you're feeling meant yeah yeah you're feeling great it's just like this is i know why everyone's doing this now it's like amazing the view's good like having a little chat with everyone and then halfway through i was like oh my god like this thing i'm gonna die right now and i'm like i i I can't keep up with these guys anymore.

17:14So I'm like slowly making it back. Everyone's overtaking me. But I actually managed to, I think it was like 20, it was 22 or 23 minutes, which was like, that's not bad at all. It was okay. Yeah. But that was me really pushing it from having no experience at all. Yeah. But I've noticed the more that I do it, which I've been doing this month, your body just gets better at it. Yeah, for sure. It gets accustomed to it. Anyway, as you were saying, I thought I'd just drop that in there. Yeah, you're a runner. Basically, hybrid athlete. We're the same. I just can't do as many push-ups. But yeah, you do get adapted to things.

17:50Like your level of normality adapts to whatever you're doing, right? Like I can do a deadlift. I can probably do many deadlifts actually, anywhere near what you can do. But if I did it for long enough, then I'd get close. But yeah, running, you just – I went up real fast. but then also that's a it's a skip that's also a skill because during that uk run i destroyed myself so much physically that nothing has actually got i've got close to that but nothing has been as bad as that which is for me like a mental note of when it starts to suck i'm like don't worry bro you've been through worse like fucking crack on i don't have i don't have an excuse because you've already done something yeah why was that one so bad because i just was i wasn't ready to start it was 875 miles I think I started out trying to do it in 14 days which is ridiculous I can't remember what average that had been it was 60 something miles anyway I ended up doing it in 16 days which is 55 miles average a day so two marathons and a 5k basically um and yeah I just totally destroyed myself physically also for the first I think it was eight or nine days my genius mind saw my mom's codeine pills that said may cause drowsiness and i was like i should probably take those which is wait whilst you're running or on whilst i'm running yeah i'd just taken the maximum i think was eight pills a day so i was doing all this is like to numb the pain a bit yeah because i was but i didn't i didn't want to numb myself from the experience is what i ended up doing for a large chunk of it you don't remember anything yeah no i do remember some bits like key points but it was I was just like I was naive and also so was the team around me because they were just giving them to me like willy-nilly but it was my fault because I was I was in charge so if I said I wanted something they'd do it but it was it was an interesting experience to be a crackhead for a few days yeah um and I was yeah I was pure zombie mode but it was also really good learning for me because I was taking them naively as I said and my thing was it says may cause drowsiness from the outside I'm gonna be tired anyway and I'm in so much pain that I think it's gonna help but I was going more and more into like glazed look small pupils I wasn't sleeping at night I didn't sleep properly for the first like seven days and in the build in the build up as a prerequisite after I did that first marathon on Christmas day I did two ultra marathons one was 60 miles one was 63 and I did two other marathons but I'd never ran the day after doing any of those things and then I was trying to do two marathons in a day every day for a period of time so the combination of not being not being prepared and taking these pills for a while meant that I went through some wild times.

20:53Wasn't sleeping at night. I was having, I was dreaming whilst I was awake, like having night terrors and stuff. And when the team would come in and wake me up or just, you know, nudge me in the morning, I'd either feel like I did a good job or a bad job, which doesn't make any sense because I was in the back of a van stationary. But ironically, my girlfriend at the time, the one from LA, she messaged the team one day and she was like is will taking painkillers these bitches know don't they it's well taking painkillers and it almost like immediately clicked with them of like they were like no and they were like we probably shouldn't have done that and then it was my older brother's job to tell me that i couldn't take them anymore yeah and also how does she know how do they know i don't know they just know but i started off did like uh i think i did like a 60 mile day and then it went down to like 45 and then it was like 38 and then it went back up a bit but i was just i was totally destroyed could could barely move let alone run and it mad when you're like i imagine you're halfway through something like this and you're like i've i've committed to this so i have to do it now yeah you're stuck but also it's a it's a cool thing to be in because my learn my learning from that and what i've taken forward into other shit is it's like my version of prison the only way i can get out of this prison is by finishing yeah so that's my that's my time inside of suffering or whatever and not having the usual things to do in a day like maybe sit down um so yeah it's you you learn so much by going through tough times whether it's losing someone or choosing to destroy yourself or locking into a training program for a certain amount of time like when you sacrifice things and you see the result at the end it turns into a savage yeah it does and you kind of you're like hey you're doing it again let's what else can i take on yeah i guess for because i think a lot of people they like the idea of doing something like this obviously not as extreme yeah but like hey um i want to try and do a marathon or i want to do an ultra marathon i want to like challenge myself what advice do you have for those people who are thinking about doing it and they haven't really done anything like it before just fucking do it yeah yeah there's there's too much wishy-washiness around there's too much I think when people speak things it's almost like they've done it already if I say I'm gonna do this like if if I say I'm getting up early to train tomorrow you've almost told your brain that you've done it already yeah so you've given yourself a reward because you've seen or dreamt of yourself doing something yeah so true but nothing is better than action and actually you just have to do it when when I did that first marathon I think I decided a few weeks before there was no training program I never had a training program for basically anything I've done I've made up everything along the way I now actually have a coach for this next one because I'm going for a record but just you just have to lock something in like book whatever event is make sure it's scary enough that it's close that you should give yourself some action and if you don't do the training beforehand still go and do the event yeah because you can't you can make it through if someone put a gun to your head and was like if I was like might go and run a marathon right now or put it to someone you love said and I was like go and run a marathon right now you do it so why do you need all these perfect things to happen and the nutrition plan alongside the training plan and 12 to 16 weeks or whatever to do it ignore all that shit if you can do it great well done but just you have to do a little bit of practice before right yeah I mean I did some runs before I did a marathon but also to do a marathon distance basically anyone can do it I believe.

24:44You might not run every step, but you can get a distance out. You've got 24 hours in a day. Most people that probably do their first marathon, maybe five hours, six hours. They might've trained for it, but give you, give anyone 12 hours and you can walk a marathon. If you walk in three miles an hour, what's that into 26? I can't think. Cause I've just got seven hours, seven hours would be 21 miles. Eight. So you're like looking at eight and a half hours of walking you can get marathon distance you didn't run it but yeah to say you've achieved that marathon that everyone thought was the biggest human endurance feat around other than i guess iron man before these psychos came out of the woods yeah with their granola bars being like i've just run 100 miles you know what i mean like yeah don't don't give yourself an excuse before you've uh before you've actually probably the worst part about it is just the aftermath because the body is in such shock because it's never experienced something like that before yeah like even for me um just doing running for the first time some of my legs were sourced in my calves yeah and i had never had calf doms that bad before that would last for like five six days can imagine the same as me like if i haven't done any lifting for a while if i try and go do some squats even air squats like my inner thighs will will be lit up and i'll start cramping by like set three so yeah it is it is all about what you're used to but you obviously don't want to start off too hard too fast but also those bits afterwards i'm always like you've earned feeling that way and the only way to earn that feeling is to do the work first yeah doesn't matter how this is why i do this is one of the reasons why i do ultra endurance stuff for myself is because it doesn't matter how rich i am or in general how rich someone is how intelligent they are family background any of these things don't matter a thing the only reason i'm feeling that this way right now is because of what i've just done over the past 12 hours 24 hours three days one week etc and it's a very it's a very individual feeling and it's yeah it's it's your own and it's it sucks but i can see the beauty in it but a good thing is as well i remember growing up i played rugby for nine years obviously you experienced the same thing it's very much a team sport and sometimes you can feel quite helpless like you're there like you're trying to do everything possible to help the team win but sometimes you know the other team members don't have the same mindset or they don't care as much or they're just not in the zone and it's just like frustrating because you're like fuck i want to win this but they don't want as much as you do but with the running it's all in your control you're not relying maybe of course you probably have your team that's going to help you out but yeah it's really you it's all you and that's why i like the gym because it's like it's i'm in complete control of the outcome yeah and it's all me yes it's obviously very different in terms of the mindset but there is that discipline which is required to outside of the gym to get yourself to look a certain way yeah which a lot of people struggle with yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts but the only person that's going to do it is you yeah and yeah even if you've got also in a team sport you can also kind of let off if you're the other other way inclined of being like well my other teammates are going to bring me up so it doesn't matter if i'm slacking a bit but yeah depends if you've got the dog in you or not exactly so list off for me all the the big runs that you've achieved because i know i think that one of the most popular videos on youtube was the you did 48 marathons in 30 days oh yeah people are most impressed with that one i'll list off them first so i kind of do something big every two years outside of like normal races so joggle john and great salan's end was the first one in between that and 48 30 i think i did marathon de saab might have been after that don't remember john and great salan's end marathon de saab 48 day the 48 marathons in 30 days um in america ran across the us la to new york that's the longest one at 3076 miles i think it was um i've done moab 240 which is the most recent big and probably the biggest race i've done um 240 miles yeah with a shitload of elevation i think it was 23 000 feet or something it was mad how do you decide these things the cool thing is like i'm not on the circuit like i'm not i'm not a professional ultra runner i can't i am but i'm not in i'm not in that pool i'm in the pool of just doing it for fun making shit up that i want to do which is a big blessing and i do want to get into more of the race format stuff like doing moab and finishing 11th in like a big marquee race made me think well if i dedicate more time to this or and do more races like could i podium one of these things could i go to utmb and actually perform i'm not going to win that race there's some freaks out there and some people that are super super dedicated to it as their only thing and i do other stuff isn't cohesive with just being a beast so yeah but it did um it did tap into my head of like what i could actually do on the circuit or at least choosing choosing some of those bigger races but yeah getting back to 48 30 people are impressed by that it was 48 marathons in the 48 counties of england in 30 days because you can wrap your head around what it is it's 48 marathons in 30 days well you did more than one marathon a day but on all the all on the other ones like the uk has run in two marathons a day for 16 so not quite as much but then the us was i think it was 121 marathons in 55 days but you don't call it that not calling it 121 55 but it's just people can understand what 48 30 means and ironically i was disappointed by 48 30 because it wasn't hard enough and the last marathon i did was the london marathon so we did every single county london actually has two it has uh greater london and city of london city london is very small it's where all the suits go yeah talk about banking and shit but then sunday was a london marathon and i'd actually pb'd my marathon at the time i did i think it was a 306 having run 47 marathons the 29 days before so that shows what kind of mood i was in i wanted i wanted more destruction and i wanted to see what i could do in the last and people were like, what the fuck?

31:51And I was like, I know. I thought, what the fuck too. We'll get back to the podcast in a second. But first of all, I want to say a massive shout out to Bionic. I have been using their supplements for the past four years. I never knew what supplements I needed to take. I'd always go into the pharmacy and buy a load of random bottles and end up popping pills all day, every day, not having a clue if I was consuming the vitamins which I should be consuming at all. But Bionic came to save the day. They are a tailor-made supplement company that will put together your own specific formula based on your activity, your gender.

32:28I have Bionic Pro where I get the blood test done every three to four months and based on that blood test I get my own personalized formula. For those people who don't want to do a blood test or don't have access to that then you can go with Bionic Go where you just have to fill in a short questionnaire and based on that questionnaire you will get your tailored supplements with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy so stop the guesswork sign up to bionic and ensure that you remove those deficiencies and build up your immune system you know um obviously hardest geezer who did that the run through africa yeah do you reckon you could do that yeah i reckon yeah definitely yeah yeah that's that's uh i mean russ is a beast and we actually ran together in cape town before he started his africa run it was before i started the u.s run and we're both out there so we met up for a run and we've we'd spoken before that we've obviously spoken since and yeah he's he's my kind of guy yeah i was watching that and i was like i couldn't think of anything worse i think just because it was africa and there was so many logistical nightmares not being able to get in certain countries having to avoid certain spots because it was so dangerous and just that access to food yeah and just good nutrition yeah if i was going to do it then i'd do it on like a vip tour bus yeah that'd be my version like yes sure I would still try and do it in a good way.

34:03But fair play to him because outside of just running that far every day and running that far in general, the logistical side of it would have been totally fucked. I don't have the patience. He did one before anyone knew who he was when he ran from Asia to London. I think he started in Turkey. That would make sense if he was at the bridge that borders Asia. but yeah he just went and did that with a backpack on his own yeah yeah fair play and he buried himself alive for seven days yeah there's he's done a whole load of shit that people don't know about yeah because he only really started to get the momentum on social media when he was doing the african yeah which makes sense yeah but yeah fair play he's he deserves everything he's getting the plaudits etc so it must be weird though when you you do something that big and there's that pinnacle when you finish yeah it's the peak what the fuck did you after that the drop-off is real and i experienced it on uh the uk run i was afterwards i was like i was sad i was like it's like what's what's happening i've just done something like really big and really cool and now i feel sad but it's because you have this very intense period of time where your soul your soul mission it's not like day-to-day life where you got emails to your sole mission is to run every day a certain distance you also have a lot you also have people around you helping you so you've got like a bigger team or like a family that are there and you also get high and like interest in you and what you're doing and why so you have all these all this all this stuff going on people talking about you blah blah and then afterwards it you have the pinnacle and then it falls off as it should do yeah but if you don't recognize that that's going to happen then it can suck so i had it on the uk one 48 30 wasn't as bad as it was coming and then the us one i didn't have it at all and the us was the biggest one but i gave myself grace before i started that challenge i was like this is going to be a fucking mission bro like it's a big thing you're going to be thrashing it i was trying to actually do it in 64 days but we got ahead by whatever 11 11 days yeah um just because it was something new and i didn't know how well i was going to adapt but whatever afterwards i was like you're finishing in may may or june i was like for the summer afterwards you can do anything you want i was like giving myself a pre-agreement of go enjoy yourself yeah and so after i finished that thing i was just like traveling around on holiday partying whatever and i never the next day regretted what i'd done yeah because i'd given myself grace beforehand to yeah to just enjoy life for a minute and not put pressure on saying what i was going to do next or training for the next thing it was just like go do whatever and he had no like fall off blues i was like life's sick yeah i can see that on in instagram i'm like fuck this guy is living a good life he's doing like you've got the balance right like you're doing the challenging running stuff but then it's not like you go home and stay there like you go and actually go live life and no doubt doing some very fun stuff a lot of which probably doesn't make it to social media yeah true no it doesn't because you're just trying to actually enjoy it but no it's um I don't know there's part of that thing of loss of like trying to make the most out of everything and I've definitely kind of got that bug I always like traveling so when I created enough freedom for myself to do that and being like the nomad and you can kind of work wherever you want I was like wow I figured that out so let's lean into that more running's going well lean into that more i'm like i'm trying to i'm trying to do the most with my time and not regret not doing something yeah so do you get the chance to when you're running these different places you get to see the places and really explore and experience it or is it something which i mean obviously when you're running i guess visually you see it yeah but then once the run is done then you go and yeah a lot of the time i'll stick around and yeah before i was even running like when i was when i was 18 when i was a kid i wanted to move to australia we went when i was 11 and even before we went i was like i just want to be like a surf kid on the beach i want to be outside i don't want to be in rainy england so i saved like two summers before i was putting up marquees at my local pub the guy had a business with uh it was like everyone was a polish guy other than me and they were all adults and i was 17 well actually i started doing 16 no this was in the uk i was doing that and i was also working at holistair which was an ironic combination i used to be a manager there did you i was in the uh the newcastle store i was the uh assistant manager sick yes i kind of i didn't get i didn't start off as the model i just went straight to the manager position because i think you needed a degree to do that oh really so yeah you did yeah so i scraped a degree just yeah and one of my friends girlfriends uh she recruited me when i was a club promoter just working the doors and she was like you ever thought about working a horse i was like why would i want to work there and she goes she goes oh there's actually like a a good position for graduate yeah i was like oh that would be a hell of a lot better than what i'm doing right now because i hated doing the club promoting stuff because it was like horrible hours the money was inconsistent you just dealing with drunk people all day so i just wanted like some form of stability it was actually it was a very good experience at least for the first year yeah because you you're working around people who were all young and pretty hot which is like an added bonus and then you just you know you learn the basics of kind of running obviously it's a massive business yeah but um you don't have much freedom of changing anything it's like here's the orders yeah do what we need yeah do what you need to do yeah this is how you say hey hey what's up at the door welcome to the pier welcome to the fear i remember the worst one i do remember the worst one hey did you know our jeans could win you the perfect ride yeah something around buying some jeans and like winning a trip to california or some shit and i was like i don't have to say that yeah the thing is you had to because you'd have told me i did my my job was to make sure that the models were saying that the ones that working in dudes one and betty's one oh fuck yeah that was what it was called yeah oh shit yeah blast from a pass i thought i was like a pig in shit there i was like this is sick other than getting like five pound an hour yeah you know the store i was working at in newcastle was the most robbed store in the world yeah well we this was back then when it was now they've lit it up a bit more yeah back in the day it was super dark so you you couldn't see what people were doing the cameras couldn't even catch what people were doing and we had um we'd already had staff cut because the numbers weren't doing as good as previous years so we had to have fewer people on the shop floor we don't have any security so people just come in and robbing stuff and it's like how do you expect a 20 year old kid to try and stop somebody from stealing we also got told that you're not allowed to you can't chase someone out of the door and also the person that was robbing the most was actually someone on the overnight shift yeah they were doing some serious numbers yeah fuck it yeah fuck it was i had some funny stories from in there yeah interesting times did you do the topless stuff no i was in milton keynes we didn't have that as an option okay yeah we had i think sometimes we we had it but i feel like all the attention went to abercrombian fitch yeah people were up there dancing at the top yeah yeah if you got that job working in london on the front of abercromion fish like you were top dog yeah wow times have changed that they've gone they've reversed that business model yeah and the the former was he the ceo mike jeffrey's using some shit now yeah he basically got your body and was like can i get that implanted on me yeah i had a guy who one of my friends actually I won't say his name but he he was like one of the top guys that Abercrombie and Fitchy got flown all around the world to do these openings and I'm pretty sure he had some weird encounters with a Mike Jeffrey 100 % I mean I don't know about the bloke but you hear things yeah yeah how long how long are you working there for 16 to 18 yeah yeah so I just saved up enough money to go live in Australia for six months did a bit in Thailand beforehand but that was all that was always like i was never like pushed in any real hard direction like my parents were like weren't exam season being like no you need to be in your room you need to revise i actually did all right but that was never i was never pressured so i always felt the sense of freedom my grandma traveled a lot she was always like she'd go to japan or she'd be in canada and she'd come back with all these stories so i was like wow the world is is bigger than my little town of amtel so i wanted to experience that and then also having this almost like safety net of freedom of like parents have a house i always get fed there so maybe i can like take risks go and travel and do stuff come back with nothing and i'll still have this security thing so yeah i felt a wild sense of or a big sense of freedom from being young it's the best time to do it as well in your 20s because there's this there's really any risk and you can afford to just start again yeah many times you got the energy to do it yeah that's basically yeah well i see some people they do the opposite where whether they finish school or university they just get straight into the work and work their ass off like take it to the extreme for like 10 years and then they get into their 30s and like i have all this money but i've not lived life yeah so then they just kind of have a bit of a midlife crisis and go on a mad one yeah which is it's kind of okay because they have the money so and they have that money coming in but it's quite hard to go on a mad one when you're in your 30s yeah because you're the old i'm trying to and this is the recovery time is uh a lot longer yeah and it's just it's it's fun when you're young it's loose and also like scraping the barrel or like i ran up a load of credit card debt yeah into my mid-20s but i don't know that's the time to do it man you don't want to be doing it when you're i'm not saying don't try if you're 35 and thinking about it still go for it do whatever the you want but yeah there's something there's something about that thing of being like early 20s and making it happen and figuring out along the way like getting a bar job for a week and then being like well i've got 300 quid what am i gonna do with it i'm gonna backpack to taiwan or some shit i don't know but that's i think it's exciting i remember when i was after university i worked as a club promoter in marbita and i had i just remember never having any money at all i managed to as soon as i got there wing this job but i remember i got there i was like i'll figure everything out when i get there because at least i know i have some money coming in and then i got there i was like fuck i don't have anywhere to stay and i was like uh i'll just go stay in a hotel and then i realized i can't afford to stay in hotels it's like i need to find someone to share a place with but i didn't know anyone so the first few days of me working on the strip or whatever i was like trying to get to know people i was saying like if you go anywhere i can stay yeah and then this one person was like hey you just stay on that sofa for a bit so for the first two weeks of me being there i was living on someone's sofa yeah and then they were kind of like you need to fuck off because you're not paying rent and you just all your shit is everywhere in the living room and you need to go.

46:29And I remember this one time I brought someone back. Oh, yeah. And they were like, oh, where's your room? I was like, I don't have a room. This is it. Does it fold out? No. So, yeah, still did the job. And then obviously after that, I had to go find another place. I think I was sofa hopping at this other place for like another week or so. And then I found somebody who also needed an apartment, got an apartment, but all the money I was earning was just going to that apartment and just getting the essentials with food. And like, that was it. And a bottle of vodka from time to time. No, but all alcohol is free.

47:08Ah, sick. So, I mean, if I'd had to pay, it wouldn't have been possible because I was a club promoter. Basically, we would go to the club, which were like the two hotspot clubs, which was, I think it was Funky Butter and Opera Room at the time. Okay. So we'd go there after the shift finished at like 3.30, go to the club, you have the staff table, all the alcohol's free. You can invite anyone to the table. Nice. Just get absolutely blitzed and then just do the same thing every single day. And then I met this guy who was, he was 10 years old as I mean, he was like the OG of the port. So he just took me in under his wing and he knew everybody at every bar, all the drinks were free and that just made the experience so much better.

47:50Funny how you work things out in it. Yeah. It's life. Like at one point I was, I remember just being there with my luggage thinking, what the fuck have I done? Like I'm here, I have nowhere to stay, I don't have any money, but I know I need to be here because I didn't want to be stuck working in some warehouse in the UK. Yeah. And then you. Living for your Friday and Saturday night. Yeah. Didn't want to do that. Or trying to buy a house and getting a mortgage. I definitely didn't want to do that. Oh God. No. Did Australia live up to the hype? Yeah. So I've still never been. Oh yeah, it's pretty great.

48:24I've been, I don't have, I've been, I've been four or five times, but I haven't been since I was 23. And that was just a trip to Perth on the way back from New Zealand. So, but yeah, it's sick. It's kind of like, no one's impressed if you're up at 4am working out there because everyone is. Similar to Cape Town. I do this Christmas marathon every year. Just did the seventh one semi-recently. and if you're doing it in bedfordshire there's not many people out it might be some people walking their dogs or my cousins are from there i'd have i used to spend every christmas no way wow bidnum bidnum fucking hell that's not too far from where i'm from small little place cozy place though yeah exactly but yeah australia everyone's like health fitness wake up early especially sydney yeah from my experience you know james smith no he's based out there no of he keeps getting he keeps getting to he wants me to go over the annoying thing is just the commitment to so far it's not an easy place to get to and then you're so isolated time zone's fucked like so far away you have to go for a proper trip otherwise you're not going for a week no way well and you this is the place where you've decided to do your next the next one yeah yeah yeah australia is next and that is one side to the other yeah from perth to sydney so i'll finish and bondi beach i think i'll be signing cotterslow beach in perth basically i'm going for the record my version of going for the record isn't logging it with the guinness world records because i don't really give a shit it's just actually going and doing it um but from when i announced it i was going to start at scarborough beach because as a family we went there when i was 11 and the first place we went to was this place called scarborough beach i think it's only like two miles up the up the road from Cotter's Low but then a bunch of people messaged like oh to get the actual FKT which in the running world means fastest known time so there's there's things outside of world records FKTs are just the general term for people going for stuff and you don't have to have I guess as much paperwork to say you did it um and they're like no to get the FKT you have to start from Cotter's Low so I'll do whatever I don't really care we'll figure it out along the way or we'll figure out before we go um but it's it's shorter than the us i think it's 2300 miles which is like 37 3800 kilometers and the reason i'm going for that one is because i feel firstly it's the ease of somewhat knowing the area being english speaking basically people like you and me there makes it easy to navigate i'm not doing africa like russ was and getting visas for 15 countries and trying to run through it the current record is 39 days held by chris turnbull who've actually had a great chat with the other week actually we had a facetime call and he ran through a lot of things that's one cool thing about the ultra community of like helping each other out whether it be in a race and you see someone killed over the side of the road and you go and offer them help like a gel or food or do you need me to like signal someone to come and help you um but yeah it's a record i think i can get and i don't want to beat it by like an hour or day on a annihilate it by annihilating myself yeah so i've gone for 35 days which would be an average of 63 64 miles a day which is a around 108 k's so ramping it up i want something i want to be the best at something yeah for at least a period of time until some serious serious geezer goes and does it but i wonder if he'd get pissed off if he broke his record no i don't think he would i wouldn't get pissed off if someone beat mine yeah i'd just be like fair play yeah because you know i think ultra's ultra's quite different especially on those like massive multi-day things because you know how much effort you have to put in it's not like someone can beat it by getting lucky you get beat because you got beat yeah it's not like an mma fight where anything could happen you're not floyd floyd mayweather's an exception of never getting beaten but you know what i mean he could have got clocked at some point and his record of never being beaten gets annihilated then and there ultra is too long you can get in i could get injured along the way and not get the record or i could fuck it up and still not get it but when you get it you deserve it yeah for the most part Well, no, you do.

53:04I can't imagine what that would feel like. I don't know if I want to know what that feels like. No, probably not. It's boring, too. Yeah. You listen to music or not? A lot of the time, yeah. I listen to music through most of my life anyway. I love music a lot. Always music or music, audio book or podcast? Music or nothing. I used to listen to podcasts and audio books, but then, I don't know, maybe the more seriously I started taking it I didn't like a different narrative yeah like music for me is like rhythm and it can bring up different memories and stuff but listening to a conversation was kind of taken away from what I was in too much and then I'd also just get frustrated what's other genres of music everything yeah I'll put on shuffle you'd have to mix it up a little bit quite a lot yeah because I'm always listening to music in the gym and I'm like even I get bored to my own playlist yeah same but i'll i will often just shuffle all music because i always get asked send me a running playlist i'm like i don't have one yeah i have an angry gym playlist yeah like most bros do and then outside of that i've like curated stuff because i like it but it's not specifically most of my playlists are actually around cooking cooking cooking yeah i just put like i like cooking italian food so i have a cooking italian playlist nice there is there is no better feeling when you find a new song you've never heard before and it's a banger and you're like doing the thing you like to do yeah like whether for me if it's if i'm driving around the top down the sun's out yeah and you hear this song you're like what the fuck is yeah although you're in the gym like doing your favorite workout when you hear it yeah best feeling ever it's the best and then you run it back and it's still as good yeah you can't stop listening to this one song yeah music i wish i could go back and listen to everything fresh again wow that would be you You get asked, what would you want your superpower to be?

54:55It's not flying. It's not teleporting. I'd like to go back and erase all of my memory of music and listen to it again. That's hard, actually. Yeah. I'm into that. Yeah. What's your stats like on Whoop when you do these things? Ironically. How long have you been wearing it for? I actually first got it during lockdown. So was that 2019? 2020. 2020. Yeah. So five years. Oh, shit. That might be a little bit longer than me. I got a 2021. Yeah. I got it when I'm pretty sure when lockdown started. Ironically, pretty good. And when I do stuff like Moab, because that's so extreme and I'm not sleeping, I think I, how many hours did I actually sleep?

55:38I think I did about four hours, four or five hours over 240 40 miles and I think my total time was maybe 83 hours so obviously there you might start at 90 100 whatever it quickly goes down to two to recovery yeah two percent because you didn't you didn't sleep or you slept for 30 minutes on the side of a trail and got up and carried on so that's that's too intense but on the US one I remember that maybe you can bring it up they did they did a report of of it afterwards i think it was something like 75 percent of the time i was in the green how the hell did you do that i was sleeping enough sleep's number one as you probably know well like a day strain would it be like 19.9 yeah i was nearly uh well the max is what 20.4 my average day strain was 20.3 or 20.2 yeah but i'd nap for an hour or an hour-ish every single day in the middle of the day and then I was always getting seven to nine hours at night yeah but I bet your body was like okay ironically when you first start doing these things like even after my first marathon I couldn't sleep very well because you put your body in a state of shock when I did the UK run I was in a state of shock all the time fight or flight mode so even though you're really tired your body can't switch off and you're in so much pain it's keeping you awake so that's a that's a hard thing about doing this but like anything it's a learned skill so yeah once you keep doing it more the doms are less aggressive and crazy and your body's also like i'm doing this again that's what i get that's why i'm doing the japan one before australia because you always have a period of like getting used to it but like muscle memory my body after a few days is like oh shit we're here okay sick we know what we're doing yeah japan will be class yeah really good i've never been there it's it's been my number one destination to visit for well over a decade and um back in the day when mum was alive the only reason i wanted to be successful or still want to is like there's things you can do for the people you love and i was i was always like i'm gonna i'm gonna save or earn enough money so i can take her to japan to see the cherry blossom yeah i'm not going to be there for the cherry blossom but yeah that's why this journey will be a special one and that is from where to where asaka to tokyo yeah it's 500k is basically on the dot and i'm just going to mimic the distances i'm going to be doing in australia so 108k a day or thereabouts so basically five days of uh of living the life that i like to live and then finish see toko for a bit and then get back to cape town um i'll be there for like another three weeks and i'll be out in perth gearing up ready to go it's cape town the home or it's just it's my base for for like six months yeah i moved mid november and then i've got it until april which is when i start why cape town uh it's the first place outside of the little town of amtel that feels like home okay it was the last place we went to on a family holiday so that's probably got ties to it like my mum being there um and it's just like perfect conditions wise it's cape town is actually very small but you have ocean beaches obviously residential cafes bars mountain another residential bit mountain vineyards yeah you can get to the closest vineyard i don't know why i'm talking about vineyards i like vineyards they look good they're really good you can get to the closest one in like 20 minutes but the amount you can do in a day there from paragliding off of a mountain to cycling along the atlantic seaboard run in food quality is really good people there are really nice like super welcoming and coming from rugby background, I don't know if you played with any South Africans, they were assholes, actually.

59:52Most of them in rugby, well, unless they're on your team, were like nasty, which I respect actually, because I was, I guess the English version, but them in South Africa, they're so, they're like overly nice. So anyway, it's just like the, it's the perfect place for me to be, to live well and train, train even better. that's still a place i've always wanted to go to it looks stunning you should definitely go and it's like the way especially this time of the year in the winter or i guess it would be their summer yeah it is weather's perfect yeah it's uh the only thing gets a bit windy and the it's the atlantic atlantic ocean so it's the sea is actually cold but other than that it's cement i love it should be on the tourism board because i've been going every year for i think six years for like a month or two and this year was the one where i was like i need a i need a base to train for yeah where should i do it and i was like cape town's the obvious option is it a safe place yeah well it is and it's not like it's like anywhere there's certain places you just you don't go to at night yeah but there's this there's this area called the atlantic seaboard which goes from like i think it's the the vna uh like shopping center and like moulet point and it goes all the way around to camps bay and they call it like the monaco of africa so the food is amazing it's still it's still really cheap um but i've never seen anything go on there i think my friend left yeah my mate left his phone in an uber and then we followed it and find my iphone and it went to an area that you don't really go to.

1:01:35So we got out and then decided we shouldn't pursue any longer, but it's just like, have your wits about you a bit and you're absolutely fine. How do you finance things like this? It's all like, it's all brand deals really. Yeah. Um, yeah, I've become lucky enough to, to have some partnerships that help pay for this stuff. You do, I know you're doing stuff with Represent. Yeah. Have you got your own line with them or was it? Yeah, we did a line for the America run, and then we did one recently for the Moab run. And then I'll be with them this year. I'm with Vuri as well. They're based out of San Diego.

1:02:16They're another athletic clothing brand. And it's quite cool having those two as none competes as well because it gives me some freedom to wear more, I would say, quote-unquote, like your normal stuff. Vuri is very unbranded for the most part. And then having the freedom to do stuff with represent, do a mob collection, put holes in stuff, do really cool design work. So that's a nice balance. And with Whoop, I have been, I guess, three or four years now. And yeah, I was wearing it before I got that contract. And then... You're like the perfect candidate in a way because you've got like the look, the height, the face, personality the quality of the content is is good as well it's getting better yeah yeah it's i feel very i feel very lucky that i can do all this stuff i'm sure you've obviously started your own companies and whatnot and that's that's something on my mind and i invest now because i've actually got some fucking freedom of finances to actually do that so that's been an interesting interesting thing in the past couple of years um any success stories well the biggest success recently is selling nvidia last thursday before it tanked hard i sold all of it so yeah fucking wiped yeah it did wipe wipe so why did you decide to sell last week um well i didn't actually know anything about this whatever it was what's the chinese one that's come out soonest seek geek or something yeah geeks i mean like well because obviously trump's just come deep seek deep seek there you go trump's just come in and there was always going to be a lot of movement and i don't know i just i just sold a bunch of stuff i was like i'm i'm i'm up on all on all these things so i was just like i'm gonna i'm gonna clean slate it i'm gonna take it out and just see what happens for a minute fortunately for me like jesus i bet a lot of people have make a course on training here's my perfect pitch do you want to be do you want to be an influencer and make money on the stock market follow my plan yeah shit online coach let's go now people would read through my bullshit too quickly yeah yeah but it's it's good though to be in a position when you kind of you can do a lot of different things yeah and i was as i kind of hinted loosely earlier i was in like 20 i think i had 25 30 grand on credit cards when i was 26 and i slowly paid that off till like i was 28 i'm 30 now so the ironic thing is i said i'm a maximizer right so everyone has seen my life well not everyone sorry people have seen my life since instagram kind of begun but from being 21 22 and splitting my time between london la new york everyone's always been like wow you're doing so well you're doing amazing how do you do how do you do this and it's one of those things like you've been on my boat you figure it out and i was always maximizing but for a large period of time i had imposter syndrome because people assumed i was doing really well but i wasn't yeah so i'd be like i don't know how to interact with this this conversation because you're telling me how great i am and i'm doing really well and you're jealous of my life but i don't actually have the things you think i do yeah i'm going for the world of social media yeah exactly it's a shiny exterior and i guess once you've now experienced life a bit you can you can be honest so yeah i've i've people ask me like even now like how do you how do you do this like run fluencer space thing and i'm like dude before anyone gave a fuck about running.

1:06:10I was doing this UK run. No one knew what ultra marathons were. And then lockdown happens. And for some reason, now everyone's super interested in running. So they're looking for someone that's doing what they do that's on the platform so they can learn or just enjoy the content because now they're into running. Because I had done it before, I was a natural choice for some people to follow. So my profile rose with the interest in running. so I was lucky to ride that wave so there's no formula to what I did and also there's still not really a formula to what I do I just go and do what I want to do and somehow it's still working out and people are interested and I'm following my passion so I don't feel I don't feel obliged to go and do anything like I'm generally doing what I want to do and the outcome for me is not more followers or more money in the bank whatever it's I'm exploring life and doing these incredible things that I can only experience by pushing myself to the absolute limits.

1:07:12There's no, there's no cheat code to get there. And everyone's, everyone wants to know like a, a play by play thing to get to that point. But there's not really a play by play thing for basically anything, unless you want to be college educated and become a doctor or whatever you need to be college educated for. Do you know what I mean? Like this is all made up. This is all, this is all new like there's certain things i guess you can do to get there but yeah it's it's it's made up and i'm just fortunate enough to be dancing along the line and continuing to go whatever well being passionate about something like the running and then trying to become one of the best at it is a good goal yeah who do you look up to or who inspires you main ones my i call my yoda robbie robbie ballinger so he's an american guy before i ran the length of the uk he was running across across america i was at this cryotherapy place in just outside of la like in the valley i think and they were letting me go there for free to do cryotherapy because i was doing this uk run and when i was there the manager was like you should follow this guy robbie robbie belenga his name is ballinger but we all thought he was he's running across america and i was like holy shit i didn't have any any touch points or i didn't know anyone that did it so all of a sudden i had this i had this like anchor point and i watched him every day i'd when he told me i think the guy was on day seven so i followed him from day seven to i can't remember how long it took him i think it was 70 72 days that might be wrong but whatever i was obsessed with watching this guy every day on instagram running across the u.s thinking like this guy is the dog's bollocks he's looking at his he's an absolute machine we somehow well actually i just bothered him on instagram whilst he was going across like you're doing amazing blah blah i waited for like a week until uh and a week after he'd finished because I knew there was like all this interest around and he might be busy like doing podcasts or radio interviews or whatever and then I basically briefly told him what I was going to do which is the run of the UK and would he mind like answering some questions via email or jumping on a call or whatever and he was like yeah let's get on a call so I was never interested really in meeting famous people yeah like Goggins I would have thought yeah for someone who really likes running yeah i would think that naturally he's the guy you would look up to he's a beast i love the guy can't lie but i don't know i think what i've been through with robbie just makes him stand out and yeah we ended up meeting up i went to his place in denver and then he said he was going to help me with my uk run so he came out and did the whole he didn't run it with me he ran a lot of it with me he did the uk run with me he came out during 48 30 he helped me do the como run that's one thing i forgot to mention i ran around lake coma it was my first hundred lake coma was freaking huge yeah it's sick isn't it it's a hundred and i think mine was 104 miles ish got it tattooed on my head oh i wonder what that was he came out and helped me with that he was there for the whole of the us run and he's always he's always like led the path for me so he ran across the us when i did the uk i got to the end there's a sign that's like pointing to new york los angeles tokyo and because of what i'd just done i was like shit maybe i could do the us thing so he get he almost gave me like the belief that i could follow in his footsteps and i have the first time he did a 200 mile race he did this thing where he raced a tesla and by race the tesla he basically had to outlast its battery life so it went 200 i think it was 272 miles or something and he just had to get past it in how he i think it took what's the tesla going up well no it just took off and drained its battery and then just parked somewhere okay um that was sick so i helped him with that but when he did that i was like i'll never do a 200 mile race fuck that and then i ended up doing moab he did 100 mile first i ended up doing that so yeah he's he's my guy it's it's mad isn't it really it seems like these kind of things after you you set yourself a challenge and you accomplish it it's like okay let's do another one but let's make it bigger yeah more extreme is that just the way it goes or does it come to a point where it's like no i don't know with me i could just feel like you know that's it um yeah i think it's it's like chasing the dragon it's like chasing your first high you'll never actually get it again but you can get tastes of it yeah so yeah i'm i'm 30 now will i be doing this when i'm 50 probably not but i actually don't know because i still have like there's still things that i would do and want to do there's still big races i want to take part in so yeah there's there's still a big desire there to explore the world through this median of putting one foot in front of the other quite slowly over and over again for a long period of time antarctica stop being a pussy just run across antarctica as you can probably tell i don't really like the cold have i done anything in the cold no so yeah maybe maybe i need to do something in the cold yeah that'd be a good challenge everything i do like i love deserts yeah i've done the marathon obviously in the sahara i've done the atacama desert in chile moab's technically a desert australia would be largely a desert i've ran through the mojave quite a lot for some reason that's on the way across america and also the that tsp races there the speed project what month did you do Abu Dhabi um when was that that was around this time I think okay I didn't actually make it to Abu Dhabi because I didn't get sign off from the powers that be so I ended up just running what was it 82 miles out that way what do you mean they didn't let you well there was a way of doing it basically we were talking to the some tourism board or something where you needed to get it sanctioned and then it's on the dubai side or the abu dhabi side i think it was abu dhabi because we were trying to i was trying to end it at the f1 track and do a lap to finish that'd be sick yeah oh god i bet there's so much like red tape and yeah there was so it ended up not not happening i did it kind of on a whim so then i was like fuck it i'll just kind of really long run yeah and i got bored after i think it was 83 miles i'm like i'm done i hate that sometimes when you have to get all these permissions just to film something yeah well we weren't even really filming it i was using the porn i call it a porn cam it's a handy cam it's one of the first things we got could definitely sit up somewhere but um was it give off like retro vibes yeah or was it like 4k quality that is 4k but it's i don't know it was just the first one i got because i saw someone else using it yeah yeah when the vlogging life started kicking off yeah it's mad now like when you see um obviously i met jake did and and just i love that guy the the sort of shots he has like he he must have to i don't know what how he does it but he must think oh let's go run in this crazy place and then he has like a camera set up maybe on the back of a car yeah and it's like kind of zoomed in on him running but it's really steady and you've got this really nice sound yeah yeah jake is a legend i really like that guy and he's he's such a performer like training and getting every squeezing absolutely everything out of it is his bag and i fucking respect him so much yeah mine's a bit different to that but yeah that guy when he said he was going to run a sub 230 marathon which by the way is a hard thing for basically anyone to do i can't i don't even know what the percentage of people are that go sub 230 this is the guy that comes from high rocks is jacked and everyone was like he wouldn't he can't do that no way and then he does a 228 at berlin i remember crossing the finish line because i was pacing george and he's such an he's such a sweetheart he just comes over like happiest happiest like how'd you get on you're right like asking us all these questions like fuck that jake i was like what what did you do?

1:15:57He's like, ah, two 28. I'm like, what? You didn't lead with, I got two 28. Nice. He's so humble and so nice. And yeah, he's a, if I could train like him, if I could have that dedication. But what, what is it? Is it just, he's so dedicated to the training? Yeah. And I think he's actually very smart with his training as well. Like he has more calculated. Yeah. He's very calculated. He has all the tests and like the interesting thing about him. And we talked about the marathon is, I don't, I don't even know this shit, but he's like, there's something that says you can only consume this amount of carbohydrates in this time.

1:16:34And he was like, I think you can consume more. So his fueling strategy is insane, but he can hold it down as well. But that's also through a repetition of doing it. Like a lot of people will turn up to a marathon having not tried gels before, and then they try them and their stomach's all over the gaff. It's natural. It's not like a peanut butter sandwich. It's multi dextrose, fucking whatever else. but yeah he's calculated and trains like a savage every single day of the year and it pays dividends but yeah i don't know anyone quite like that because you're treating it more of like a little bit more casual and you want to enjoy it whereas he's like this is i want to be the best yeah exactly yeah and i've shifted for for the australia run to be more like that but then i've just come off of a flight from london which i spent one night there before that i was in paris for a week for fashion week and then it was milan before that so i was there for four days and then before that i was in london for i think four days so what are you doing at the fashion week if you're not modeling you're just going to shows and presentations and more like that i've never done a fashion week but it like seems to be the place to be for a lot of celebrities and models um yeah it is um and the parties people yeah there's a lot of parties as well people take it a bit too seriously there's one just like when you're there there's like this real aura of like self-importance and climbing climbing some kind of ladder to be seen somewhere or everyone wants to get into this pie or everyone wants to get into this show it's like i went to a can film festival oh yeah reminded me of that yeah everyone's just trying to is you get like there's two types of people yet the people who are there obsessed with celebrities and are there just like filming everything and then you get the celebrities themselves half of them aren't even celebrities but they think they're celebrities yeah just they think they're so important yeah it's mad and they want to show everyone like i am here yeah it's what i am somebody that's exactly what it is it's exactly what it is um and i just basically oh yeah i'm so important so important now i've actually i find it like a little bit i don't know it's a little bit awkward like i'm like some things i'll go to i'm going i'm going to see stuff because i want to but i don't like the parade around it like even with um the armani show was amazing and i was there with the team i got dressed like that kind of shit is crazy and i know it isn't it's sick and the thing is like afterwards they did the post of like the very important guests or whatever and it's like I'm friends with Rocco Ritchie's this the son of Madonna and Guy Ritchie and then it's one of the actors from there was the Menendez brothers oh yeah yeah yeah and then I can't remember who else but it's this lineup of like actual people and then it's me and I'm like what on it like what like the imposter thing of like what the fuck am I doing here why is the oversized runner here but also like in the in the after bit so we'd watch the show it was amazing and I've always love fashion so i'm actually wanting to be there i love going to shows but in the after bit it's like there's pr and there's like agents and it's the it's your time to have the photo of georgio and it's like people like pushing to get past and stuff and i'm just like holding back i'm like if i'm supposed to have a picture with this guy because if someone has pulled me through from the team then I'll do it but there's just like this jostling thing of like trying to really try and I'm just like I can't I can't do it I can't I can't bend the knee to be cringe enough to be like oh no it's my it's my time it's my fault I'm just like if someone tells me to do it I'll gracefully go and do it and like meeting a legend in the game who I think he's 91 like I find it really cool but I'm not going to be the one trying to beg my way and all and then someone grabbed you and was like hey yeah yeah so that was nice of them to do it and i guess i was i was supposed to i didn't really know what the deal was at the time but yeah yeah yeah i mean the the networking opportunity of those things yeah that's the thing that interests me the most yeah because you just put in a room full of people who have are somebody they've done something yeah and you can just chat to them yeah and it's all and they're probably pretty interested in what you do they're like hey what are you doing like i was fucking doing these really long runs yeah people are like what do you do i'm like i run really far i don't know i don't know how to package this for you i haven't come up with like an elevator pitch of what i do yet i'm just like i run really far how do you actually introduce yourself someone's like oh what do you do yeah i literally laugh and say i run really far okay yeah and they're like like how far and i'm i then i then i don't know if i want to go down the rabbit hole too much i'm like I do ultra marathons if I want a quick exit but then sometimes I come with like talking about running and you're like yeah and it's the same thing over and over again for me which I'm not bored of my own story but you know when you go around and say the same shit to 15 different people it gets it gets boring and there's often similar there's often the same reaction but yeah most people are surprised which does make sense but yeah it's a It's an interesting world and I fluctuate between two very opposing things.

1:22:00I'll be in Moab asleep on the side of a trail and then I'll be at the Armani show in Milan. Like, what the fuck? How? It's good life. It's cool. And I feel very blessed that that's how it's kind of ending up and what's going on. But yeah. What is the dream? the dream to have like a have my own farm in Tuscany and live off the land yeah olive grove make my own wine well I wouldn't make my own wine but have like a have a team of people that are working the grapes and yeah have pigs chickens ducks yeah loads of dogs loads of kids and grandkids running around probably smoking cigarettes drinking wine having like leathery skin yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly like that's i love i love cooking and i love the romance behind like growing things like we were i always had gardens a garden as a kid well my parents did whatever and mom would like grow vegetables and shit and we'd had chickens and i'll go down the end and grab them out fresh and then start cooking stuff so yeah the romance of like making your own stuff or growing your own stuff and then cooking it yeah was is yeah that's my that's my version of i see myself having a spot somewhere in the mediterranean yeah yeah exactly like big family animals around yeah dogs cats yeah i'm not quite quite near to the sea needs to be definitely yeah somewhere where it's sunny a lot yeah i'm not I'm not actually scared of aging.

1:23:38Yeah. Not at all. Like I see some of the coolest people in the world, to me anyway, are old people. Like De Niro. The older he gets, the cooler he gets. Didn't he just have a kid as well recently? There you go. There you fucking go. Still working. Yeah, but like, also there's that guy that did the rounds on social media, the old Italian guy that's got Tutapasso tattooed across his stomach. Okay. Who's he? I haven't heard of him. uh he's some old guy and he's quite famous in his town just put tuto t-u-double-t-o p-a-s-s-o guy we'll come up with a great picture t-u-t-o i can't find him look what i'm getting up tuto pasoga wait one second i'll show you here oh is that that guy that's who i want to be what gee exactly i love when you when you go to these places in especially spain you see like these old guys just sitting around a cafe they're all they've got the canyers at like 10 11 in the morning yeah just watching people go by talking about god knows what yeah just a very simple chilled life yeah it's like almost a polar opposite to kind of what we're doing now yeah that's what i that's what i want to get back to and there was i think did you did you hear of the prophecy that chris williams i remember chris williamson saying it about the uh the mexican fisherman i'm gonna absolutely butcher this by the way but uh this american guy from wall street goes on holiday to let's say he goes to baja he's in mexico whatever and there's this there's this Mexican fisherman there he sees him go out every day kind of just watches him isn't intrigued by the guy goes out in the morning comes back with a few fish and then kind of disappears then he sees him again in the evening with his family eating one of the fish he's caught he goes up to him as a very business-minded guy and he's like he's like sir I've been watching you for a few days you go out for a few hours in the morning you come back you disappear and then And I see you with your family at night eating one of the fish.

1:25:56She's like, why don't you, why don't you sell all the fish? In fact, why don't you start earlier fish all day and then go and sell your fish to the local thing. And then you can expand business site. You'll get enough money to buy another boat. You can hire someone else. And then that can expand to having a fleet of ships. And then you can fish in other towns and other areas in the world. And then you can be like John West tuna and be on wall street and be worth like a hundred million. and then think of the freedom you'd have when you when you decide to call it quits and you sell out and you get a hundred million he was like he asked the fisherman he's like what would you do if you had all this freedom and had all that money he's like i'd wake up late i'd go out fish for fish for fish to catch something for me and my wife that dinner i'd come back i'd have a nap in the day siesta and then he basically it's the thing of the simple life is almost so beautiful what we're trying to attain and there's this middle part of life where we think we have to acquire acquire acquire work our asses to the bone leave it all out there just to get the simple life that you always kind of wanted anyway it's weird because i do a similar thing over the over the summer months obviously i leave here because it's too too yeah so and i just float around europe to wherever i want to go and especially if i spend a lot of time in spain i just kind of absorb the spanish mindset yeah where i just i chill out i try and keep up with this productive rhythm which i have here yeah but it's just a different a completely different environment and with each day i just notice myself becoming less productive caring less yeah and just doing the things which i actually care about the most wake up late go somewhere have a coffee outside by myself yeah sit alone for an hour just watch people and go to the gym and then go to the beach hang around some people that i want to hang around with yeah and just be in nature and it's like i love it it's simple yeah obviously but also people i notice when i'm in those places i sleep so well yeah i'm just peace i'm not anxious about anything yeah i'll get like 10 hours some nights 11 Yeah.

1:28:11But it's, it's interesting. I'm not saying like, get away from like the, like the hustle of trying to make shit, but also don't, don't hold so much stress and worry about doing all this shit. Because if you think about what really makes you happy, it's actually more simple than you think. And people are like, well, it's easy for you to say, cause you're successful, whatever you could go and do that. But if you're from a Western country, the uk america australia whatever even france isle you're probably doing you're doing better than most of the world right you can even go how cheap is bali yeah you can you can find your spot it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg in fact it probably is not going to cost you a lot at all but are you going to be happy there or are you going to be happy complaining about how you have a nine to five and you're working too hard and you're stressed all the time and you've got a mortgage and all this other stuff that we get channeled into telling us this is what you do in life you go university wherever you get a job you buy a house you get a mortgage you're paying that off for the next 25 to 30 years if not longer you have kids you then have to support them do their lives and then before you know it you've retired and you're like now I want to look go and live that life and you probably can but why can't you do that earlier or do it all the all along the way yeah i think i i kind of dabbled in the materialistic world of buying things because it was like especially here it's like yeah people do yeah i saw the car park downstairs yeah it's just like for me at least these things which you thought would bring you happiness once you either buy them or experience them end up being a bit of a letdown yeah anti-climax most of the time agreed so i think as long as i i still always like to travel nice like if i can travel business class if i can stay in some nice places doesn't have to be the fanciest place ever but like it's a nice place yeah and if you know if i have a family i can bring them along with me i think i'll be pretty set with that same like i don't need to accumulate all this unnecessary stuff and when you do it just ties you down to one place too much yeah agreed yeah so yeah you can get some cool shit like it's nice to have a nice watch and as any young man kind of does like thought of buying your fast rolex you're like wow this is sick to be able to do this and it is and it is a cool thing to be able to do like i was well excited when i got mine i was like wow I've actually done something that's allowed me to do this but it's just a thing I don't have anything in my life if I lost it right now other than people obviously I have no physical possession that if I didn't have it now I would be remotely bummed around after about 10 minutes because I just give myself that conversation of does it really fucking matter and it doesn't yeah it's the best when you can go on these trips with like the the most basic things like especially when you go to places like bali all you need is like shorts t-shirts and bests nobody cares about materialistic stuff nobody cares really about like wearing fancy clothes and i just i like being as naked as possible to be honest that's why i like uh especially spain and ibita like i literally just walk around in shorts the whole time nobody cares i can go to the supermarket topless people like how nature intended yeah just a little loincloth on a leaf yeah ever since adam made the apple we've we've leaped it up haven't we yeah awesome man um sweet i know you uh you probably need to rest up so i appreciate you coming on after that uh long red eye flight where can people find you uh i think everything's just william gooch my name yeah it's hard one to spell but if you google it i'm sure you'll find it not gooch gooch yeah yeah that was a fun one as a kid gooch well done genius so the youtube you've got a load of youtube videos and obviously instagram's fascinating to watch the journey you're on yeah we'll be doing a lot over the japan and australia trips and there's just stuff in the build-up so yeah yeah if you're interested take a look if you're not thanks for listening anyway awesome man i'll be watching cheers cheers boss