The Choice Is Clear (But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy) | Ryan Holiday Ran The ORIGINAL Marathon

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0:55The choice is clear, but that doesn't mean it's easy. He desperately needed the help. He desperately needed the money. Ulysses S. Grant was at rock bottom. personally, financially. He had just pawned his watch to pay for his children's Christmas presents. He had acres and acres of forest he needed to clear if he was going to claw a living for himself off the land. Yet in 1859, as I tell the story in Right Thing Right Now, Ulysses S. Grant walked into a courthouse to free a slave named William Jones that he and his wife had been given by their father-in-law. Slavery was wrong, and he wanted no part in it.

1:37Just that you do the right thing, Marcus Aurelius writes in meditations, the rest doesn't matter. But just because they don't matter doesn't mean they're painless. The choice was clear for Grant, but that didn't eliminate the consequences. It didn't lessen the load he had to bear. When it comes to doing what's right, the timing is rarely perfect. The bills are always due. The pressure's always mounting. The sacrifice is always painful. Grant knew this. It's why he didn't wait for a more convenient season to free William Jones. He didn't weigh the pros and cons. He didn't calculate the cost-benefit.

2:21He simply did what was right. Because the time to do the right thing is always right now, no matter how inconvenient it may be personally.

2:39We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone, and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

3:16Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

3:57And daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

4:40There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

5:18And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

5:44It all comes down to marathon. Had the soldiers not come in time, had they not made this race, Perhaps there would be no such thing as Western civilization. I've always been fascinated, I've always loved this exact story. I am doing the original marathon from Marathon to Athens. I just threw up in the Olympic Stadium. That's an experience I didn't expect. Fuck.

6:15When you're a runner, the question you get the most is, are you training for a marathon? And for me, the answer has always been, no, not really, or not the way that you think it is. I say, this is the marathon. Like, life is the marathon. The day-to-dayness, that's what the discipline is. And that's how I've thought about running basically ever since I left organized sports as a kid. I do long distances all the time, but I do it for me. And that was true up until right now, because I am doing the original marathon. from Marathon to Athens. And doing this has been in my mind for a long time, actually going all the way back to 2007 at the earliest when I was reading Robert Greene's The 33 Strategies of War.

7:04I remember exactly where I was. I was in a pizza restaurant on La Cienega and Olympic when I was working in Hollywood. And during my lunch break, I was reading The 33 Strategies of War. And he tells the story about the battle of Marathon. One day in early August 490 BC, the citizens of Athens received word that a massive Persian fleet had just landed some 24 miles to the north along the coastal plains of Marathon. A mood of doom quickly spread. Every Athenian knew Persia's intentions to capture their city, destroy its young democracy, and restore a former tyrant to the throne, and sell many of the citizens into slavery.

7:41The Athenians head to Marathon about 10 ,000 infantrymen. As far as the eye could see, a long strip of land filled with tents and forces and soldiers from all over the Persian Empire. They're overmacked. At the last minute, the Persian fleet disappears and heads back towards Athens, leaving a holding force of 15 ,000 soldiers on the plains of Marathon. The Athenians begin to panic, except for one commander. What are the Athenians to do? This commander understands that they can't allow this to happen. They can't split their forces. So the Athenians charge, even though they are vastly outnumbered.

8:16The Athenians push the Persians back into the marshes at the north end of the plain where thousands drowned. The waters reddened with blood. By nine in the morning, the Athenians had control of the plains, having lost fewer than 200 men. The Athenians now had only around seven hours to make the 24 miles back to Athens in time to stop the Persians. There was simply no time to rest. They ran as fast as their feet could take them, loaded down in their heavy armor, impelled by the thought of the imminent dangers facing their families and fellow citizens. By four in the afternoon, the fastest among them had straggled to a point overlooking the bay of Salarian.

8:54The Persian fleet sailed into the bay to see thousands of Athenian soldiers caked in dust and blood. The Persians rode at anchor for a few hours and then headed out to sea. Athens was saved. And thus, this is where the word marathon enters. The lexicon enters legend forever. When we think of a marathon as a distance, this is why. I've always been fascinated, always loved this exact story. Pivotal for me for two reasons. Number one, what I remembered is loving this storytelling. And two, because I was working for Robert, I called him and I said, hey, Robert, I'm reading your section on the Battle of Marathon.

9:34And I just wanted to know, what did you read? How did that come together? What did you do? He went over to his shelf and he told me there was a book by Peter Green, which I immediately went on Amazon and bought. I start to read. I have a chapter about this exact passage in Ego is the Enemy. This is the breakthrough moment for me. So I'm reading Robert Green's story. And then I go to the source material. and I see for the first time, this is how it works. This is how a researcher and a writer takes a collection of different sources, puts it through their own style, their own lens, and something comes together.

10:09I didn't know this was a thing you could run until I read another book. Let me get it. It's all, you're starting to see how books have shaped my life. This book here, Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he does this exact marathon. This has been sitting in my mind for at least 15 years. I've been wanting to do this this whole time. One of my favorite lines in the books, he says, I didn't come here to walk, I came to run. I gotta think about that when I'm in the middle of it. Even Stoicism itself as a philosophy is rooted in the battle of marathon, not just because it saved Greek civilization, but the Stoapokile, where Stoicism was founded, Stoapokile means the painted porch.

10:54It's not the porch itself that was painted. It's a series of famous paintings hung above that porch. And one of those paintings depicts the victory at Marathon. And its main architect is shown there at the front, exhorting his men.

11:15It is 4 p.m. in Palm Springs. It is 105 degrees outside. My wife says I have a mental illness, but I am training for this marathon. It's going to be hot in Greece. I'm going to do it early in the morning. But the idea is you do it when you don't want to do it. You push yourself when it's hard. You try to keep it within reason or bounds. Maybe this is beyond that, but it's the only slot I have, but we just flew in from Texas a couple hours ago, and then we have dinner, and then I have a talk tomorrow. So I'm gonna do this run. I've done it before. It's beautiful. It's gonna be very hot and tough, but you challenge yourself, and it all leads you to where you want to go.

11:52I just hope I don't get heat stroke, and I hope I can make it back. It is 5.42 a.m. on June 16th, 2025. I just turned 38 this morning and now I'm going to do a 19 mile training run for this marathon which will be the furthest I've done so far. That's the idea. It keeps you young. I'm pushing myself. I'm up early before it gets too hot like I'll have to be in Greece. My father-in-law he's driving me down. I'm going to run along the Santa Ana River and hopefully I won't embarrass myself because I've dragged a bunch of people into helping me this morning and we'll see how it goes. So it's roughly one month to the marathon and I am doing a very steep uphill run in Utah and I've just been warned that there is a very protective moose and two babies on the trail I have to look out for.

12:51So you know danger is everywhere I guess. I thought I was going for a peaceful run and now I'm on the lookout for this but I thought training on the incline would be good training for the marathon. The idea is you do hard stuff. The whole point of stoicism, Epictetus said, was to be able to say, when you meet a challenge, this is what I trained for, and so this is what I'm training for. I just happened to get to do it in front of a very lovely waterfall.

13:21And then we flew to Greece. I trained at the Acropolis. I trained in Ithaca. I trained running up Mount Olympus. I went on hikes with my family. I swam in the Aegean. Zeno, one of the founders of Stoicism, would say that well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. I think the same is true for conditioning. We build up our endurance. We build up our muscles step by step, mile by mile, session by session. So I just made it here up to the top of the hill across from the Acropolis, trying to do some hill training. The marathon is in less than three weeks. I've been doing some good runs.

14:07It's been hard to get the speed that I need to train on this thing, but it's going all right. It should be fun. I think I'm doing all right. It's crazy. You can sort of see out here the ocean there. We toured the Acropolis yesterday. I got to see what the Persians did when they destroyed it the first time. I got to see what the stakes of this whole thing were. I saw statues to some of the major figures. This is going to be cool. This is going to be the first run that I've ever done that's got this whole history attached to it. This whole storyline attached to it. And you realize, yeah, this wasn't just a 26-mile-odd distance.

14:40This was an existential fight, right? The whole of Greece hung in the balance. What mattered was could they come together? What mattered was could they put differences aside? Could they push through and do this thing that they desperately needed to do? Well, tomorrow is the big day. Today was my last day of training or last day of running. I would have liked to go for a long run, which helps me sort of regulate and get my head right. But I was thinking about this thing that Kate Courtney, one of the great mountain bike racers of all time, she's an actual Olympic athlete. She said that one of the things she thinks about from her coach all the time is, do you want to be fast now or fast later?

15:17It'd be wonderful to bust out a nice run today, but that would affect performance tomorrow. So I'm going to do 2.25. And now I am going to do a little swim just to get in that cardio space, but not put so much wear and tear on the body. So when I was starting to train for this thing, I read this article about these carbon fiber shoes, which is what marathoners are using these days to post these crazy times. I emailed the people I know at Hulk and I asked, do you guys make a carbon fiber shoe? And they said, actually, yeah, we just came out with this shoe called the Rocket X3, which has a carbon fiber plate on the bottom and it's got this extra cushion in it.

15:56And so it sort of bounces off the pavement. It makes you go much faster. It takes some of the load off of it. I really liked them. I did a lot of my training in this shoe. They were great. You've noticed in the video, I'm not just wearing Hulk's shoes. I've got a Hulk's shirt on. I've been running in these shirts. They had a great running hat. I actually trained in a pack that they had. They carried my water bottle, carried it all around Greece as we were walking around in our family. Hocas are lightweight, they're responsive, great colors, easy to keep clean, but the Rocket X3 was awesome. That's what I have on right now.

16:25There's a reason Hocas are in my running rotation. You've probably even seen me interviewing guests on the podcast or walking around the bookstore and check them all out at Hocca.com. We drove the course a few days before. That's when the reality of it sets in. It's a long way by car and then you're gonna have to do all this on foot powered by foot and you've got only a few hours to do it.

16:55It is 5 30 a.m and uh I'm with my crew and driver in the tiniest car that you've ever seen and we're on our way. We're here at the start of the original marathon. It is 6.51 on Sunday, July 13th and I'm about to do it. It's 26 miles. Weather is amazing and I'm feeling good. I'm not nervous. I'm a little nervous that I'm not nervous but I think that's the result of the training. I'm in a good spot. I'll tough it out regardless unless something catastrophic happens. If something catastrophic happens, something catastrophic happens. No goal, no outcome, just want to finish, just want to do it. And I want to experience it.

17:41So I'm going to try to be present for the whole thing and enjoy it because that's what it's about.

17:50You try to get in the right headspace, you do your stretching, try to focus, try not to extrapolate, you try to stay present.

18:03So I will disagree with one little part in what I talk about when I talk about running. He says, as those who have watched the TV broadcast of the marathon at the Athens Olympics, after the runners leave marathon, at one point they go off to the side of the road and run past some less than distinguished ruins, and then they return to the main road. I would not say that these are less than distinguished ruins. I would say these are some of the most impressive and meaningful ruins in the entire world and I was struck by them. Right behind me, this giant mound on the other side of this grass, are the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon, to whom we owe basically all of Western civilization, as we do to the 300 Spartans.

18:44You know, theirs was not to reason why theirs was but to do and die. Or as the Spartan monument says, tell a stranger passing by I hear obedient to their laws, we lie. That's what I'm thinking about three and a half miles in. I know I can do the distance. You know Epictetus' thing is you should only enter competitions where winning is up to you. My thing is as long as I don't quit, I'll probably make it to the other side. That's one of the other things that the Stoics talk about, that you undergo a hard winter's training. You practice physical discipline or challenges so that when life throws you physical, spiritual, mental challenges, you have an experience on which you can draw, that you know that you're someone that doesn't quit, that you're someone who can get through things.

19:28You understand how you have that feeling of limitations or that you're at your limits, but that you can push past it. I'll be better for the training that I've already done. I'll be better for putting myself out there, trying something that's a bit beyond my grasp, maybe.

19:47A little over halfway done. As they say, halfway is 90 % left. And there's a blue trail, a blue line. All I'm thinking about is Joni Mitchell's line about being prisoner of the white line of the freeway. 14 miles, 12 to go. Whenever it gets to the hardest part, is there going to be a specific bit of advice that's going to go through your head? When I interviewed Courtney DeWalter, one of the great ultra marathoners of all time, she said when she starts to come up against those limitations or she starts to feel it, she says that makes her excited. She calls it the pain cave. And instead of stopping and going, oh, this is painful, oh, this hurts.

20:30It's about exploring how far back that cave goes, what's inside it. You know, the Stug's talking about everything has two handles. You can see something that's hard and painful and that's why you shouldn't do it. or you can think of something as hard and painful and that's why you should do it and you should learn from it and open yourself up to it. And so I can imagine, and I know I've drawn on that in different sort of challenges I've done in my life before. It's like, yeah, let's see what's in there. Let me see what I'm capable of. One of my all-time favorite books about running is Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

21:04And he has this passage. For him, running is both an exercise and a metaphor. He thinks this is why so many riders like to run. He says, running day after day, piling up the races bit by bit, I raise the bar. And by clearing each level, I elevate myself. At least that's why I've put in the effort day after day to raise my own level. I'm no great runner by any means. I'm at an ordinary or perhaps like a mediocre level, but that's not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running, the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

21:44I intended to do the last lap around the stadium. They stopped me and had me put my shirt back on, which I probably shouldn't have taken off, and if anything, it contributed to the sunstroke that I think I obviously had. I would have loved to finish so much stronger, but I just ran into a complete wall. There's about three miles left. It's like that line from Kipling about every nerve and sinew, except the will that, the will that says, hold on. So I gutted it out, destroyed my time. But not bad, I fucking did it. I'm here. I made it, which was the main goal. Everything else was extra.

22:43It was a long drive back from Athens and I was just so out of it. I could barely remember the name of my driver and cameraman. When I got to the hotel I threw up several more times. It would be a few hours before I could hold anything down, even water. I started to worry that I had heat stroke or sunstroke or even rhabdo. I ended up just getting in the hotel pool and just floating there. My entire body exhausted. It took a while to recover. Okay, so I did it. What did I learn now that I am somewhat back in command of my faculty? Preparation is everything. I did lots of training. I could have handled the nutrition side of things better.

23:26I could have started a little bit earlier, it's not all about discipline. I mean, obviously discipline is incredibly important, but without the virtue of wisdom, which is understanding the right place to apply that discipline and how to support that discipline, you can get yourself in some very rough spots. When I did my run up to Cerro Gordo, which is one of the other hardest physical feats I've ever done, it was the same thing. I've been on a plane all day. I could drive four hours. I hadn't altitude trained, I hadn't adjusted to the altitude and I passed out at the end. I woke up several hours later and it was good, just like I am now.

24:02And so discipline is something we have to moderate with wisdom. What is the best nutrition? What is the best plan? How do you stay out of the sun? How do you take care of your body? I thought my feet were going to be in horrendous shape, but I think I did a good job training up until the race. I got the blisters not from running, but from all the walking through all the historical sites in Greece and carrying my kids and whatever, I handled that well, so I didn't have any foot issues, so I handled that one. But then I just got my ass kicked by some other things. Seneca talks about how he pities the people who haven't been through adversity or difficulty because they don't know what they're capable of.

24:40And that's one of the things we learn when we do endurance sports, when we do feats of strength or whatever, is you get a better sense of what you are capable of, where your limits are, where your pain cave is, are you going to courageously explore that? Are you going to turn tail and head the other direction? I think the thing I was struck most by as I did the race is just all the people that have come before me that have traveled that very distance and the stakes that were there when they did it. I was lucky enough to get to follow in those footsteps. I was lucky enough to spend a couple hours by myself in my head.

25:15In what I talk about when I talk about running, and he talks about how you run to acquire the void, to get to the place of nothingness and stillness. And I had that. I had several hours of stillness and peace totally to myself. And it was wonderful. I'm gonna bring that home with me. I'm proud of myself. I have a sense of what I'm capable of, what I can do, and that I'm not a quitter. That I push myself and I do hard things. Like, what I took from this is that I'm a person who can do hard things. I did a hard fucking thing, and I take that with me.

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