William Goodge - #25

0:00William Goodge, welcome to the podcast. Great to be here, Mr. Jake Dearden. How's things been? Pretty good, intense, moving around a lot, but all for like really good reasons. So yeah, you were located in Dubai, right? I was, yeah. Obviously, you had to move out there. Where have you been last couple of weeks? So obviously, it kicked off in the Middle East. So I had to be in Japan to go do a factory visit for my eyewear company, Riskier. So when it was all kicking off, we basically just went to the podcast. took the opportunity to get out so we went to bali for two weeks which also for what i've got coming up was a really good move so we left two weeks japan for three and then i was in the us went out to la and then had an event with one of my sponsors goodwin arizona so yeah i've been moving around a bit but i've been home like back in amta where i grew up for a week now so it's been really nice sick it's good to have you back in a way and it's good that we've actually obviously wherever we meet i feel like i meet you everywhere around the globe yeah berlin la yeah monaco yeah it's like we just bump into each other at these crazy locations and it's it's cool um like i say we don't really see each other in the uk that much i don't know if i've ever seen you in the uk no i've seen you in manchester yeah manchester yeah um so for the people that may not know who you are um obviously you are one of the coolest ultra runners on the planet that's what i'd refer you as uh you've done some incredible achievements uh the first time i actually heard of you is when you did your amazon documentary i think oh that was 48 30 right 48 marathons in 30 days yeah which back then no one had ever done anything like that no well they had but yes it wasn't as like trendy as it is now for sure um what have you done obviously let's start there so why was the reason you kind of like did that well i was looking at doing that because i had this idea to run a marathon distance in all of the european countries but then covid happened so this is in 2019 um I realized that would be problematic trying to get around as much as I'd have needed to so I was just I was just looking around I was like what else can I do that's like a similar concept like a marathon in a bunch of different places in less time than the amount of or less days than the amount of marathons I was doing no one knows really I do there's 48 counties in England we're not like the US we don't have 50 stars on the flag no one's like oh I'm from Bedfordshire I'm from Lancashire I mean people do say that but it's you know people are less bothered about it so I googled that saw there was 48 of them and then I was like okay that makes sense and did it in 30 days so it was over a month and then I finished at the London Marathon which was like a real epic finish so that's how it came together basically that genuinely like when I watched that on Amazon because obviously that's where it got released uh that was one of the most inspiring documentaries i've ever watched jt did a good good job of that it was um yeah i really enjoyed it like it's obviously um quite a few people have seen it now i think it now sits on youtube but yeah it was a hell of an adventure and yeah i look back on it and it was it was a really good time and then it's just like a it's just like another step up the ladder to then trying to do bigger and better things so since then uh what other kind of like crazy things have been doing so i do something i call it something stupid so something big every two years so two years after that i ran across the u.s from la to new york which is still my longest ever run it's 3076 miles i think that was like one of the most well they've always got like more and more impressive but again that was something crazy yeah because i went i went into it not really knowing like i was shooting for 64 days to try and get the word out and make it sound interesting i said I was going to be the fastest British person to do it which isn't a record if I was from a very small country I could be the fastest person in that country to basically do anything but look to get interest in it that's what we did so I was shooting for the British record which I put in quotation marks because people only care about who's the fastest which is Pete Koselnik I think it was 42 days so yeah that was a mad one we ended up averaging 55 miles a day and it's just it's so vast the u.s you go through every different condition there was there were thunderstorms the highest peak was at 9 000 feet in new mexico ran through snow obviously the heat of the mojave desert so yeah it's it's an incredible country to run across and most of the time you're on the old route 66 so i was just thinking about the movie cars to be honest but it's it's interesting how desolate it is along that road because it used to be what connected basically Chicago in Ohio to California and LA um but as the car movie depicts there's not a lot there there's a lot of like little towns that are totally run down and you can see like the infrastructure for what was there and then it's nothing so how how did you even go about that like say um if we were to do it again I don't know you've done it since um with other countries and stuff like that but like you had an RV right yeah you had a team like how do you go about even like deciding what you need uh the team like do you look to anyone in the past that had done it and like just copied like their setup or did you just kind of like free ball it so i'm very lucky because one of my closest friends is probably ballinger so the first thing i ever did was running the length of the uk in 2019 so that's land's end to john and i had found robbie on Instagram earlier that year I started in the August and he was running across the US and then through some small bit of fate I got into contact with him he thought I was all right and then he came on the UK run so when I was planning to do America we basically used his route because the fastest way to do it is actually from San Francisco you can knock it off to about 2800 miles I think but I wanted to start in LA.

6:16Robbie had done it that way so we already had the route. The interesting thing is you think the planning is like super super tight but it's actually really really loose. A lot of the time we're on Google Maps looking at our phone because there might be a road that's changed since he's done it and you just click the walking guy and it will take you the the best route so you might do that over a day. So firstly yeah I've got Robbie who's done it before with a crew of his own so he's already been there done it I'd already ran the length of the UK in a similar fashion so two of those things are already ticked off which I guess is the major thing and then it's finding a crew that can handle being together for the best part of two months and will add to what you're doing and I've been so fortunate in having very close friends that also run maybe not to my level obviously Robbie does um but like Peter John for example former military guy one of the funniest people I know like he was there and then uh yeah we just uh we just planned it out based off of what Robbie did so I'd see the crew every 67 miles you pull over at the side of a road after you finish the day if there's a campsite nearby which there generally wasn't on the US you'd go to it so the crew can share and whatnot but it's it's more simple than i would say people would think and with this obviously you're you're running how how many hours are you running a day up to 16 that's kind of the that's kind of the end point to be able to actually recover because you kind of need an hour to get started because you're in bed like i can't believe i've got to do is there a lot of like procrastinating obviously when you saw and you literally feel like you can't move yeah there is there's a hell of a lot of procrastination the interesting thing is on these things I feel lazy which is hard to comprehend because you're putting in so much every day but you notice and you'll notice as an athlete even those little moments like when you wake up in the morning you could have you could have left five ten minutes earlier you get to a rest stop after running 30 miles or whatever and you lay down for longer than you should have even when you're out there running you might walk for a bit and you're like oh if I ran it'd have been better so it's crazy how your mind still plays into I guess more normal life thinking you're lazy when you're pushing yourself harder than you ever have before.

8:39One thing that blew my mind was like you said you're you're moving for anywhere between kind of like 13 to 16 hours a day I think on average you was you're sleeping I assume for like six yeah I think I don't I didn't have data for that but we'll get on to Australia obviously when I was I think it was five hours just below or just above. Yeah, so five hours. How long was it in total? 50 days, was it? 55. 55 days in total. So you're doing this day after day after day. And the thing that struck me was you was obviously documenting all this. You had the YouTube going. You had your stories on social media going.

9:15And you looked fresh as a daisy. And I was like, how the fuck is this guy doing this? How can he even speak? yeah uh do you feel like you're just wired differently maybe maybe i am but i don't like to outwardly show that i'm struggling in any in any part of my life i think if i start talking about it i don't like complaining complaining for me doesn't solve any issues it just lets other people know that things suck and sure there's like little conversations you have here and there like there's arguments along the way or I'm definitely feeling some type of way but for me to internalize it and use that as fuel helps me more than whining and moaning to be quite to be quite frank so yeah I get that I get that quite a lot from people like oh how are you making it look so easy and I'm like well I'm not trying to make it look easy but also I'm not trying to like be entertaining by saying oh how hard it is and this sucks and this hurts like it does but i just i don't see any any gain from from bitching and moaning really no i i agree like it you might be feeling that on the inside but like when it just was so inspiring watching you and you was just cracking on every single day like you say you would have been hurt you would have been struggling you would have been limping but you weren't showing any of that yeah and you also you also get it's all also normalized when it becomes your every day that's what you do yeah that's just that's just the way it is and the only way to get out of that being your every day and it being somewhat of a nightmare is to finish that's what's in my head there's no two ways around it i'm not going to stop here i can't stop in three days like the the finish line is at the very end so once i've ticked that off sweet i can enjoy myself when life's good but until then just embrace the suck what kind of like food was you eating mainly was it kind of like really like structured and scheduled or was it just anything you wanted kind of anything i wanted but from learning and all the other events i've done the more whole food based the better so i'm not really doing i'm not doing gels or anything like that it's like what you'd eat for breakfast lunch and dinner but like nine times a day because you're burning so many calories over the day.

11:34So for me, like whole food base is the cleanest energy source and what gives me a steady amount of energy. You learn from doing other races, even in like a one-day event, 100 miles. If you hit caffeine too hard too early, you have the spike, but then you're always going to have the drop-off. The same as like just banging packets of Tangfastics, like really high sugar. Like these are really useful tools done at the right time. so it might be towards the end of the day i've got 10 miles left i'm really like hanging on for dear life that's when i'd implement like a a higher boost of caffeine or sugar but throughout the day try and keep it try and keep it healthy-ish like i'm still smashing panes chocolates and crispy creams and a slice of pizza here and there but it's not the bulk of the diet and i know a lot of people see ultra races and see people hitting quesadillas and burgers and stuff and sure i'd eat that from time to time but the main thing of it is like rice bowls pasta always some kind of protein in there as well interesting and like when you was eating these would you stop and eat or would you kind of carry on moving so would you like just pick up a bowl and then carry and walk with it for a bit yeah usually especially on america i learned that like if i'm stopping every six miles that's nine stops over the day so if you're taking 10 minutes each stop that's an hour and a half you've kind of wasted so yeah the more i could get into a stop and they just give me stuff and i walk with it and eat it and then obviously replenish my bottles and i've got a high carb mix in there which was a major key for me in everything i've done because from that alone i'm getting two and a half thousand calories a day i'm burning all right from like having calories within your fuel yeah because it's just like drinking water right i can take it down pretty well but I'm I'm burning eight to nine thousand calories a day very hard to very hard to just eat that from food so yeah the high carb mix is a big one and then yeah just it's basically an eating competition at the same time interesting and how did you like switch off after every evening like you say you've been non-stop for 16 hours like was there kind of like a routine that you did yeah it was always I always had a shower which I was lucky to do because my little camper van we did that so the crew had an RV and then there was a van that was pulling um like a small caravan thing so that was my space my area so if I'm rolling around in pain in the middle of the night I'm not keeping anyone up likewise if someone's snoring next to me they're not keeping me up so I'd always have a shower um usually before the shower became it's become quite a thing of doing like the bmr which as a high performing athlete is not i guess normal but what i'm doing isn't normal so the reprieve for me for doing a bmr and it's not every night is a celebration of a good day's work it's like if it's like back in the day when i was landscape gardening or i was doing labor some jobs like thursday friday whatever you've worked hard all week you have a beer through like job well done after any race i'm always going to have a beer or a drink and celebrate it so yes we did it on some other days but let's just say i needed the carbohydrates the little buzz i got from the alcohol was great go for a shower and then it's like a team meal so obviously there's a crew of us and it's nice to all sit down and have dinner together and again it's like that camaraderie thing of everyone's work working hard now we can sit down have a laugh have some food and then get into bed and try and sleep so you're with these people like say for 55 days was there any times where like people got on each of us nerves was a like was it was a struggles was there like any kind of form of disagreement there there probably was but a good crew doesn't bring you into it because you're out there doing i'm out there doing the stuff and look it's four five six blokes in tight tight confines doing something quite stressful and everyone's like max out i'm getting the guys are running with me every day so they're not just running they're trying to figure everything out doing the washing if we can find a place to do it so they're constantly working all day and obviously it's being shot so there probably were I was not let into that there was only one day where I had like a little a little blow up and sometimes along the way I'd send some like short text messages but the good thing about Robbie is he's been in that position before and also at the beginning of any challenge I say to the whole crew like I'm sorry at some point I'm gonna be an arsehole I know all of you are here to like help me get to the end I know we all have the same objective objective at hand and I'm so grateful to all of you for being here and helping me but there will be a time along the way where I say something stupid or short the only thing that I think helps me in that sense is when I do blow up I'm very quick to apologize afterwards or say thank for thank you and I'm grateful like I'm very quick to drop drop her an agenda I have because I know how hard people are working but on day I think it was day 19 there was all this there was all this heat that I hadn't actually had before of people calling me out saying I'm cheating because my heart rate's low and it started before the US run had happened because I said I was going for this record and And a guy didn't like it.

16:58And he was saying, he basically told me what he thought I could do it in. And he was like 75 days. I was like, I don't know where you're getting this information from. But he looked at all my history of running. He was like, this is how good you are. And this is what you should shoot for. So obviously in my head, I'm like, fuck you. I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do. And I ended up going a lot faster than I thought I was going to. But it's affecting the team as well because they're hearing it more than I am. And they're kind of having to manage that situation. and day 19 my original goal was 50 miles a day this day I was at I think it was like 40 miles whatever happened I had a nap and when I woke up I just was struggling pretty hard I think I was probably at 30 miles at this point wasn't really holding down food was definitely in a mood and Robbie was trying to push me to go to go further than I wanted to you need that by the way you need someone and i'll i basically will always listen to him he's like my running yoda so whatever he says you do kind of pretty much and it's hard to it's hard to like i've been on other challenges like my dad and my brother and friends it's hard honestly to take them seriously when they're saying i should do something because they don't know what they're talking about yeah just straight up whereas when he says it comes with a lot of weight and i'm like yeah okay i'll carry on i'll do this but it got to the point where I was just like zombie walking and it was at like 47 and a half miles and he was so conscious of me not hitting my goal and thinking that the days after it might go downhill and I'd lose the challenge or whatever so he was basically like you can't you can't give in you can't give in because these people are going to start saying like you're falling off or whatever and I was like I know tonight I'm done and I got emotional about it as well I was no tonight I'm done I gave him like a you've got two options the the two options were I'm going to stop right now we're going to do one more leg so we can stop right now because I'm done or I'm going another two miles or whatever I'll make I wasn't eating at the time I was like I'll make sure I eat a lot of dinner and tomorrow I'll make up the mileage which he didn't like but again it's an emotional situation and then afterwards like we hugged cried as you do he said he was proud of me and I was like I'm sorry we have to go through that little back and forth um but yeah you both learn something in that situation I also learned that to trust myself at certain points I still need someone to be driving me when I'm kicking up a fuss or saying I can't do it actually I don't say I can't do it but you know I mean um so it's useful but then there was like I then slept like six or seven hours that night and then I think the next day I did maybe 60 miles or something yeah so i shot straight back but i didn't see the point in dragging myself just another two and a half miles which at that rate was going to take me half an hour maybe 45 minutes because i was going that slowly where i could wake up fresher the next morning and get that first two and a half miles done in 12 minutes or 15 yeah that makes sense uh the crazy thing i saw on the america trip was you actually sped up towards the end like you yeah you did more miles yeah and it was almost like you was getting better yeah yeah the trip went on which was crazy yeah because you don't you don't know until you do it it's obviously the biggest one there is a period of like acclimatization to what you're doing i've had periods on some challenges where like the first nine days have been horrendous and then it's almost like yes your body gets in with it but you're like your mind is so jacked up and so against what you're doing because you're you're pushing yourself really hard and then it kind of relaxes um i didn't know how quickly i could do it it's over 3 000 miles so the scope in which you could go five days less or five days more is crazy and you in these things you can't start off at 100 of your daily rate because then that's when you're not going to recover and you can start to slip down if you kind of go into it a distance you feel that you can do and keep it comfortable and then towards the end you almost have room to play like how how much quicker can we do it if we do an extra three miles a day over the last what 10 days that's an extra 30 miles that's all that's like halfway half of a day so can we push it up a little bit more and i'm always going to try and do a little bit more than what i've said i'm going to do just so you've got you know a little gap in space that if you have a bad day you get injured and you have to reduce the mileage by 10 20 whatever it's not going to derail the entire challenge you mentioned there about you have this number in your head where it's kind of like comfortable whether that's 40 miles 50 miles 60 miles whatever it is how do you even decide that because even if you run 40 miles in my mind like you're still gonna be fucked the next day yeah so what what determines whether you do 40 or 50 or 60 or whatever i think everything's everything began when I ran John O 'Groats to Land's End because I did that eight months after running my first ever marathon so I went hard no way yeah so you ran one marathon and then eight months later John O 'Groats yeah which is what average of what a day it was 875 miles and I did it in 16 days so it was an average of 55 miles a day so just over two marathons so that for me is just like a like a litmus test of what i can do in a position where i was not ready hench i was like 96 kilos when i started that thing maybe 94 yeah i was still pretty because your background uh rugby player right yeah he was a bit bigger than 100 kilos yeah he's still pretty big now to be fair yeah i'm a bit big i'm salute big for running but now i'm sitting at like 84 right okay so yeah in relative terms you're a lot lighter a lot more nimble yeah so like i say that's like that's the tester for me of what i know i can do and that was that was max every day i think my worst day did 30 miles and the best day did 70 but it was all brand new so i i know i can do that so in my head whenever i did the the future stuff I was like I've done that before so I can do it again obviously the US was so much longer so I was like it was so intense on the UK run let's bring it back to 50 miles a day and the other thing I consider is time so you know I said that like 16 hour limit yeah what can you get done in 16 hours a day every day and on the US there was times in Oklahoma it was definitely one or two days where it was like 70 mile an hour winds in my face and like 45 degree rain just straight straight at me and i power walked two days of that and got over 50 miles and that was in 16 hours you just just walked power walked no stops i went that is your little secret like you are fast as fuck at walking yeah on australia i didn't really walk too much at all but that's on australia there's 32 ,000 feet of gain over the entire country when i did mob there's 30 ,000 feet over 240 miles the us you're going over mountain ranges so you have to be a good power walker and i only learned how to do that across the challenge i wasn't good before but obviously doing it over two months you get pretty attuned to walking fast yeah that's crazy moving on to uh one of your more recent challenges uh australia uh how did that differ from the us um from kind of like statistics you did a lot more mileage per day yeah um what was that about australia was one i looked at like all of these runs i've done it's always a place i'm interested in or somewhere like i have an attachment to um the first place we travel to is like a family outside of europe was australia my dad used to live there or went emigrated twice I think went there first to play football then he was back there as a carpenter so he always loved the country so he wanted to like show us around so I've always loved the country I really like Aussie people like I think Brits and Aussies get on really well and like I say when I have an attachment to somewhere I want to see it more so I was looking around shopping about for my stupid challenge every every other year and of the success of the other ones I've never been the best at anything I've performed well but I've never been the best so I obviously did some research on um on Australia I obviously watched Ned Brockman when he ran across it and he was shooting for the record I think it was was it 42 days at the 42 days at the time or 49 whatever whatever it was I was obviously dialed into that um and then another gentleman beat it I think after Ned attempted it and so I looked at Australia and looked at what the mileage would be every day again you don't have so much evidence but I've ran further so can I up the mileage and do it more intensely and uh yeah decided to make it a thing and then it became one was a reason you did from Perth to Sydney yeah was the reason you did it that way around that's because the the record that I was going for they did it that way I think you can go on the fastest known time or whatever you can go either way so there'll be a fastest known time from west to east and east to west um I wanted to finish in Sydney because when I was 18 I went traveling for six months and I spent most of my time in Sydney and also Perth is the most isolated city in the world so you're in Perth it's an amazing place i love it but there's not much else around and finishing on bondi beach is about as kind of iconic as a finish to a run can get so that's why we went that way yeah no i i obviously watched all of it um kept up to date with it and let's say impressed with one how much like media you put out like say you was on the stories you was putting out a youtube every couple of days was it yeah there was quite a lot of them yeah quite a lot of youtubes um keeping up to date with all them shout out diego shout out diego and dean that wasn't me but um how how when you were actually doing that challenge like how did that differ was it a lot tougher or did you find it in terms of that compared to like say the the america one which one was harder yeah australia was harder because it was it was so much more intense and from like a a mental point America is kind of an unknown how would I perform perform better than I thought I was going to I wasn't going for a real record so a lot less stress also less people knew who I was when I was doing the US compared to Australia so you put something big out there and I wasn't trying to beat it by like an hour or whatever I was trying to beat it by like five days what reaction do you have from people online when you say that you're going to go for these outlandish goals like you say that that's crazy be it by not just an hour but for by a couple of days yeah how do people like take that some people are like fuck yeah and a lot of the a lot of aussies are obviously like i love how they look at life and how they receive things because they're always like yeah go for it if someone says they're going to do something mental whatever they really get behind it um i'd say british people like us well not like us let's just say brits in general a bit like why would you do that which i find funny so it's just like uh sounds that sounds hard why would you do that um so mostly it's positive but then you get some people going like oh you can't why are you saying you're gonna do it at that rate so it just comes with the territory man like like on your on your youtube people are always commenting dumb shit and i'm like you have no idea they have no idea they don't see what you're doing every day just because you're an incredible athlete people want to find a way to shoot you down because they can't do what you do it's just a it's just a natural thing within human beings to do it and now people have keyboards and phones to write whatever they want they will because i bet you've never had someone say it to your face i've never had anyone come up to my face and say you're a cheat not once but yes on online you'll get things and obviously media will pick it up like press because it's a good interesting story to tell more interesting than oh this guy's doing this amazing thing how positive is that like clickbait and did he really do it i mean it's yeah it's actually crazy that it's like it was a thing for yeah for like so for america just just for the people that don't know for america someone came out yeah he did someone did he fly out yeah he flew out from the uk He flew out from the UK to come and witness you run.

29:42What the fuck? Yeah, he was on his blog or whatever he was saying. He was like doing this amazing, amazing thing that he was going to come out and basically shoot me down and catch me cheating. So he came out to Oklahoma and he was there for like, I think, four days or whatever. And I was obviously pretty pissed off when I saw him. But I was like, well, you're here now. So my only question to him was, if you see me now run for however long you're here, if you're here to the end, you're going to see me take every step every day. If when you leave or by the end that you've seen me take every step, are you going to go back on all the shit you've been saying?

30:17And he didn't answer. So I was like, well, that's great. What's the point? And then when he got back, he wrote in his blogs or whatever. Yes, I did it every day on that. When he was there, look at these fucking stats and heart rate, how it's normal. And then when I left, they were cheating again. so you can't win because you can like turn it on and turn it off like if you weren't fit enough to do it then you wouldn't be able to do it for four days straight and also bro like the amount of people that involved in this apparent lie it's my closest family it's my friends it's other athletes it's brands coming on board so the amount of people that would have to hold on to this lie is crazy it's not like your team's small like you you have six people like you say you have about six people following you around for the full thing yeah and then i've always they don't have to lie and then like get out if it was if it was uh if it was a lie yeah someone would have sold the story by now and also like the reason the reason i got into this thing is on the back of a tragedy of losing my mom so i everything i've been able to achieve is because of the pain of that and the love and respect i have for her so if people are saying that i'm cheating they're saying i am gaining something whether it be a claim fucking social media stuff money whatever on the back of lying about well not lying about her but using her using her death to basically improve my career which i will just i just don't accept yeah you'd never do that like that would make me a really fucking horrible person by the way oh and for your potentially your dad to be on that as well exactly because your dad comes on all the trips that yeah he'd have to witness you doing that as well like it just doesn't make sense yeah it'd be a hell of a netflix documentary yeah the googes yeah horrible bastards no but uh like i say it's crazy uh that people think that and i've done i've been lucky enough and fortunate enough to be able to do a couple of challenges with you yeah uh the first one that i uh got pulled on to was uh the speed project yeah big w yeah yeah yeah it was cool it was will's team uh you was looking for someone else to join your team and fortunately i was just out in la and he was like oh do you want to come run from utah salt lake city in utah uh to vegas next week i was like what what on earth is this thing that you're just about to do um took a bit of persuading because uh emily was with me she would just have to stay in la on her own um so i basically left my girlfriend to come run with you it was a store opening of represent everything was going on that week but we decided to go and run instead in the middle of nowhere and it was genuinely one of the best experiences i've i've ever had so thank you for that mate that's why i like you and my my pleasure i owe you all the thanks for coming because it's my crew of like friends and obviously you know them all now and you know a few of them before but you're by far the most professional out of any of us it was great it was great i think we had a team of six or seven people but they were half english half american yeah and it was just incredible i'd never been in that situation before it was pretty funny wasn't it when we overslept because the americans took the first night night shift oh yeah and then they arrived banging on the rv because we were still asleep but yeah we were pretty successful i think we won by like three hours or something yeah and it was it was further than the original speed projects the original one is 350 miles is that correct yeah i think it was like 450 yeah 440 or something yeah that's why i think we set off 24 hours before to kind of make that make it i guess as even as they thought they could make it i don't know what the elevation changes was other than we started quite high because salt lakes uh 2 000 meters out of there yeah 6 000 feet yeah and obviously you're starting at sea level over there so it made it pretty interesting but um yeah it was called the secrets and uh we won but we didn't have the team that the organizers wanted us to put in so no one ever knew other than us talking about no no yeah they they like it to be like an even split uh of boys and girls no rules if you tell me no if you tell me no rules i will do i will do it no rules yeah obviously to a to a moral limit but yeah just put a team in together i want to i want to run with like people i love and people i know i'm gonna have a great time with i'm not saying that's i'm not saying that's always dudes by the way but it's quite hard to organize six or seven people in the us to get to salt lake city like i don't have my usual crew of london i'm we're in like in america yeah no it was cool and the genuine thing was it was just all your friends and that was the coolest part i did it the year after uh the og way yeah so it was uh four males two females and it was great don't get me wrong but it was completely different yeah well you also all got sick norovirus is not a fun thing to be doing when you're trying to do this project no it's crazy um what other kind of things have you done because obviously like you say you've done these multi crazy multi-day events yeah but you've also uh been doing quite a few just like regular races yeah and not normal races which i love by the way because you have this balance of doing the things that you kind of make your rules for if that makes it obviously the the rules running across america there's certain rules that are in place but it's kind of you do it on on your own terms yeah it's made up whereas you also compete in races as well and that's what i love about you because a race does you kind of proving the point of like you're you're not faking this shit yeah you're showing up and you're doing it in an official race as well um so so which has been kind of like the the toughest races that you've done uh the first the first big one i did was um mds marathon de saab i think that was in like 2018 maybe it was after that i probably quoted that wrong but that was a cool one to do i was still relatively new to ultra running anyway but obviously running through the Sahara Desert for five days is pretty unbelievably amazing.

36:43So that was a cool one to do. Didn't perform particularly well, but got that one done. But the big race I did where I kind of, as you said, like showed that I could do it in an actual race scenario was Moab. So that was, I did it two years ago. Um, I ended up finishing 11th overall, which is insane by the way, because that field is stacked. Yeah. It was a year Max Joliffe won. so it was it was really cool because again you don't know what you're going into because i've i'd ran 100 miles before but not in an official race i ran around lake como um so going from 100 miler to 240 is kind of crazy obviously i know i can run thousands of miles but at 55 60 70 a day i'm okay for but yeah doing it there on trail at elevation it was it was an unbelievable race and I took it pretty seriously like I was in Colorado for three months before the race is generally around 5 ,000 feet I'd say but I was living at 10 ,000 feet in Colorado and training usually at 12 and a half and then climbing 14 ,000 feet mountains so I acclimatized really well being up there and then when I got down to Moab um yeah cardiovascularly I was pretty good and then I I don't know if I don't think it's been broken still but on the they call it like the road marathon section um i got the the fastest time over that ever but it was what i'm used to i'm not that great at going up hills i'm pretty good at coming down but when it came to like the road marathon bit i can't remember what mile it would be at maybe like 130 or something definitely halfway through yeah i went from 35th place to fifth what what changed like mentally something must have switched um i had had a nap just before the last big climb of that bit there is one further down the way but the sun had just come up it was kind of in the morning i got down there and i didn't tell the team explicitly not to tell me what place i was in but i was just like if i can get it done in under 100 hours i'll be pretty good if it's like double figures rather than three i think you've got 120 or 130 hours to complete it i was like i'll feel pretty good about that it means I've been moving not sleeping too much and when I got down to that bit and saw the crew it was just like a it's just like a nice vibe and a really cool atmosphere and then a guy from the running store in Salida who was pacing someone else was there so it was like I knew the guy already he's like oh well you're doing really well and I was like oh how well and he was like you're in 35th place I was like fucking hell that's actually I was like that's pretty good actually so i i was like g'd up from that the crew were having like a laugh which i really love when i come into a rest stop of any description if there's like energy there's some music playing people are having a laugh drinking a beer smoking a cigarette like i get i get off on that so there was something about that and then it was like this road marathon is like my bread and butter it wasn't like it's still trailed there was some tarmac on it but it's like running on tiny rocks or whatever so i was like okay i can make up a lot of time here this is what i do let's go out and just see what happens and then i just when when you when you're running sometimes you catch a vibe and i caught a vibe for for quite a while and uh yeah when i got to the next aid stuff i remember my my head torches both of them had run out of battery so i was i was just running in the darkness which i also love another thing that just gets me off and then i got to the aid stop and yeah I'd got past quite a few people and speaking on that geezer that came out to Oklahoma he then said that I cheated Moab too that on that section I somehow cheated it so that's the kind of people we're dealing with on on that level but yeah Moab was amazing and after that I did the next climb like halfway up to it really strongly I carried on that vibe and Robbie was with me and then I got to the aid station was like it's time for a nap and I couldn't because on these things and ultra even on marathons like after you've raced especially if it's like your first ones i get pain like deep within my bones it's a really fucking horrible feeling um couldn't sleep a wink and then was basically moving at one one mile an hour on the on the climb afterwards so yeah i lost some places towards the end but yeah kept going and you finished yeah 240 miles mate what does it actually feel like doing that like you say was that like one of the hardest things that you did like in a single effort yeah yeah for sure like on the on the multi that is multi day technically but you're really not you try not to sleep at all I think I got four or five hours over the entire thing so yeah it's you have an end you have an end finish line so it's easy to get over somewhat mentally um but yeah it was it was pure destruction that one and afterwards was unfortunately my grandpa was in was in hospital my brother didn't tell me but he didn't he passed away short after I got back but I had to I had to fly home I slept over that night and then he called me in the morning then we had to go straight to Denver airport fly back and then I was with him in the hospital for for a few days until he passed but I was I was using a wheelchair at the airport and then it was lucky I was going to a hospital well not lucky actually but I was in the hospital so I was wheeling myself around in the wheelchair there that's kind of crazy the the lengths that you go to and it crazy like that that's what you put yourself through out of choice yes there's got to be some kind of condition there and that moves me on to kind of like quite a deep question but like what does drive you now because obviously you've kind of got the success you've uh i assume that you're you're kind of doing oh okay yeah that makes sense you don't need to do these things anymore where like you're you're hurting yourself that much i'm not saying it was ever for that but like why why do you keep doing these crazy events and crazy challenges there's some of the most amazing moments of my life you you go and experience things and see things that you would never do in normal life even if you were just like traveling around to like amazing locations yeah it's hard it's kind of hard to put into words part of it's like chasing the dragon's tail like once you've had that high once it's very difficult to retract from that and not seek it again even though the only reason you get to feel that way is through your own physical self-destruction and the other thing it gives me a lot of like self-confidence in normal life knowing that I can do these things like I feel I feel like I can walk pretty tall I've obviously somehow over my life got into some pretty interesting rooms considering like where I'm from, just from a small town.

43:29Like mum, mum was a nurse, dad was a carpenter. It wasn't luxury. There was always food on the table, but I can go into those rooms and usually, I guess back in the day, I'd be nervous. I'd be like, have the imposter syndrome, like kind of what am I doing here? But now if I'm in those rooms, firstly, I see everyone as a human being. Cause obviously everyone's, everyone's human at the end of the day. They will have their own challenges just because they're successful or famous whatever doesn't dictate who they are so there's that and then also on a flip note i feel like if that entire room was suddenly in a zombie apocalypse or in a trying situation i'm gonna be the one that gets out i'm gonna survive i love that that's kind of like being serious though like that's the confidence been that confidence has been built by you doing these crazy things and realizing like you probably just think like nothing is as bad as what you've been through yeah for sure like it makes normal tasks in everyday life a little bit easier knowing that you've like you've been through some stuff that's why ever since like doing john and great saline's when I was I did completely destroy myself that's why I can always lean back to that that point in time when stuff sucks later on in another challenge I'm like and I'm not done because I've pushed harder before I've got over I've got over that so it's evidence it's evidence that I can so I will again and one thing that has always struck me with you is whenever there is a problem you're the first person to ask well what can we do about it yeah right you're a problem solver more than anything else you think that helps on like these long tasks that you're doing because obviously you're going to come into problems yeah definitely there's always i really like that jocko willink um quote where he says good i don't know if you've seen it was a big video back in the day but obviously he's from military background and in his squadron or whatever there was i don't know if it was him that said it or someone else, but whenever a problem came up, that individual said good, because there is now an opportunity to overcome an obstacle.

45:48So stuff doesn't go to plan good. How are we going to get over it? You learn, you get better. Everything that was a negative was a good. And it's like, when you hear it, it's, it's pretty powerful. So yeah, in those situations, again, it's, I just see things as opportunities and I like, I like problem solving like it keeps me going even during a normal day you love chaos don't you love chaos chaos is where i'm comfortable the thing the place i don't like is the middle or average or comfortable i like high end stuff like being with you at the moniker f1 amazing and then i love sleeping on the side of a trail in utah for 20 minutes with an alarm while other runners run past and i'm hiding behind a rock so they don't see me and think i'm like in trouble and wake me up and then going out and running for another 100 miles like i love both ends of the spectrum you don't like being in the middle no the middle that does kind of sum you up like when you like i always whenever anyone uh talks about you uh i always say like you've got the craziest lifestyle in the world um one thing that you you've mentioned to me i think you've said it over text but you're like i never do anything twice yeah you try not to do anything twice whether it's visit the same place or do the same challenge i think it was actually i asked you do you want to do the speed project and you're like no i've done it yeah i want to do something else i would i'm i'd never say never but like obviously the record across america would be one that would make sense to maybe eventually go for it's sickening i think it's like 77 miles a day or something pete kosanik did what did you average across australia i did 69 69 yeah 111 kilometers i think it's just below 69 so long but still longer um obviously i feel like i get better as an athlete every time i do one of these things but again i'm i'm an ex i'm an explorer first like going and doing new stuff is what excites me and also with now having risky in my brand it's like i'm so excited to find the younger version doesn't even have to be younger but other versions of myself because i've been so blessed to been helped or sponsored through pretty much everything i've done and we're also at like the birthing place of this thing of like ultra running and doing all these really big challenges like anything that's a record now is going to get absolutely ruined we're like the godfathers of what's happening because there's now younger people getting into it when i got into it it wasn't really it wasn't really anyone doing it yes there were but no no one no one knew like if you said ultramarathon people like what's that now pretty much everyone that's in kind of fitness or health will understand what that is so it would be cool to find people that need support and i can be their crew in or making sure they can get it financially off the ground so i'm excited about that shift however i'm still obviously interested in in doing things myself but there's the like the the longer term goal of still being in the space but maybe not doing it all the time interesting do you uh talking on kind of like next goals yeah what you got well it's kind of like your calendar looking like the end for from now until the end of the year all right so we've got london marathon on sunday which i'm excited about nice and i'm going to re-watch your uh your boston boston video because i've got to speak at the uh the excel on the main stage about the final 24 hours of william gooch i'm like i don't know what i'm gonna say so i'm just gonna i'm gonna figure out what you said about your last 24 hours and just regurgitate that so I sound intelligent like I know what I'm talking about um so I got that shooting for a 245 is that evidence-based no is anything I do evidence-based no but I've been working with a really good training platform called Cooper it's it's like some of the top level coaches one of them is one of the team GB coaches and then they use AI as well but I've never hit a marathon block like I've hit this one and like all the key sessions in terms of speed um and doing the pacing i need to has been on like i've done them all basically you've stuck to all the paces everything exactly so it's been good so there's more confidence that i can do it from that but my pb is like 257 which is in london i think two or three years ago so yeah 12 minute pb is quite a lot but i don't like the whole thing of when i set a goal it almost being too much is i don't want the comfortability of like saying i'm going to do 250 and i'd prefer say i'm going to do 245 and get 249 and say i'm going to do 250 and get 249 i'd prefer put it out there that i'm going to try and train towards going faster than i actually do no i i agree like setting big goals like say it's something that thrills you yeah excites you and it kind of like scares you into training i don't know about you but if you said that you was going for a 250 i don't think you would have trained as hard as you've trained i've probably been on the beers more and i've hardly been drinking jake you wouldn't believe you wouldn't actually you wouldn't actually recognize me i've been what like this is a question that i that goes through my head if you sacrificed everything like we all know you like to travel you like to party you like to you know have a beer enjoy nice food if you just kind of like locked yourself away let's say 12 months yeah which would be impossible to tie you down for 12 months like like you said the travel schedule over the last month has been crazy yeah stupid but if we were to tie you down for 12 months what do you think you could do like it's a pretty open question because what would we be doing at the end of those 12 months you'd have to you'd have to come up with are you gonna do okay moab again or something like choose a race and could do you think you could win it let's go yeah let's go moab um I think I could well the issue is with that I tried at the start of the year I was like super locked in I was watching you a lot I was watching Truett a lot I was looking at people like I admire in the in the space like doing amazing things but maybe not well actually you are actually a proper professional but you know what I mean um and I tried to do that like no drinking tried to get on a routine of like sleeping eating really well and meant the mental part of doing this stuff is so it's the majority of anything right your body can take you so far but your mind your mind is going to be the one that pushes it and i didn't have a breakdown but i got close to one like i just i couldn't handle it and i don't think that's just because it was so in the middle like we mentioned before like everything's just monotonous like you you you've got no excitement in your life it's just kind of like this strict training yeah nothing else kind of and yeah it just it got to the point where i was putting so much pressure on myself to be a version of myself that maybe doesn't exist yet the what what i do in my excitement for life and living is how i've been doing things for a while and i've found success in it and it's obviously not normal and i totally appreciate that and maybe i could be better if i did lock myself in for 12 months and was highly, highly, maybe it might be worse.

53:12Exactly. That's what, cause I did the first two months like that. I failed that a hundred mile race in, in Vegas, although I did have a staff infection. Did you? I went and saw my skin, skin doctor the other day and I messaged her about it and she was like, that's a spider bite. And I was like, okay, great. I don't really know what that means. And then yeah, I had a, I had a staff infection. So I did some chat GPT and, and it told me that running with one of those is not really a good thing. I was pretty much sick as a dog and trying to run 100 miles but that also might have been why i say that i can't do the whole locking thing because that was kind of the the event at the end of me being so dedicated and then i didn't perform yeah you've kind of not got the proof that that works maybe if you did it again and like you saw the results yeah exactly so it's not it's not something i will never explore and I think at some point I need to because like the fear of not knowing what is possible will probably piss me off when I'm when I'm older because you know it's like it's short-term sacrifice now even for a year like when you're 60 looking back you'll be like it's just a year mate you should probably do it but if you look at your average year and see all the opportunities is that you have and do like you have done things that people could only dream of doing like beyond their wildest dreams you've probably done like you've probably visited every single country you've been to with the the biggest names biggest people been to the craziest events like you say how many times have you been to the f1 like you've been to the f1 quite a few times all these things you'd have to potentially turn down yeah and that's kind of a bit of a trade-off because some of these things as well like you're inspiring people by you doing these crazy things people like i i want to be william gooch and they work harder in their day-to-day because they want to be you so like you're you're kind of doing a good thing and you potentially have to turn that down to then dedicate it for this thing that may not actually pay off if that makes sense yeah i'm sure it would and maybe at some point i will I don't know.

55:21I like to squeeze the most out of life. So especially after what's coming next, like I'm going to take, hopefully I can take a year to enjoy a little bit more and not have such a huge event coming up. Let's move on to that. Can you just explain the next challenge that you've got? Yeah, so it's coined Mission America. So following in the footsteps of a guy called Dean Karnazes who, when I first got into running and said I was going to run the length of the UK, his was one of the first books I read. he ran a marathon distance in all 50 US states in 50 days. So he toured around the country and then finished at the New York City Marathon.

56:01He's like the godfather of ultra running in the US. One of the first people that was kind of doing it and built a name for himself. Very fortunate that I got in contact with him. We had a call. Actually, we've had a couple. So it's amazing for me to speak to someone like that. I get more hyped up about that than, say, meeting Justin Bieber or something like that because I'm impressed. I'm really impressed by him. So we've taken that concept and I'm partnering with Goodwin who are a private aviation company. They don't own any jets. They're a tech business, but they work with a lot of the brokers in the U S sourcing planes for their clients.

56:36And the founder of that earlier is an amazing guy loves running, obviously has become very successful. And he wanted to find someone to do a challenge in the U S around aviation, airstrips, brokers and across the country or something like that. But they gave us basically free reign to come up with an idea. So following on from Dean Karnasas, it's like, that's a really cool concept. Love what he's done. Really cool to follow in someone that I really admire's footsteps. But with the private aviation thing being a part of what we're doing, how quickly can we do it? Because I reckon I could run three marathons a day every day for 16 days and get 50 done basically but america's pretty big and we've also got hawaii and alaska so how quickly can we do it and we've worked with them their team on the um on all the logistics we've run it through loads of programs figuring out if it's better to drive or fly etc etc um and we landed on i think it's achievable in 20 days so 50 marathons 50 states 20 days that's two or three marathons a day every day other than the last day which we hope will be the new york city marathon and it'll be one one to finish that's crazy man yeah and you're talking about me being in like rooms and the f1 and stuff like that i've explained like where i'm from not i'm not like highly connected in any which way form whatever so most days in what i'm doing like even talking to you now if I if I look back at when I was like 16 17 18 and thought I'd be doing something like this with a Red Bull athlete talking about shit I've done I would be like nah mate you gotta be joking like I was playing rugby at the time maybe that would have been my way into finding some kind of success but I didn't go to university worked labor some jobs until I was like 25 whilst I was still like starting this running journey so the fact that I'm here with you now talking about doing 50 marathons in 20 days around the US, sometimes using private jets is fucking insane.

58:42It does, it still doesn't make sense. I know I'm doing it, but it's again, just mental in it. Are you, you're living your dream? For sure. Yeah. Because I've always wanted, I always wanted to travel like from that first trip when we went to Australia, when I was 11, We also went to Singapore. And the thing that my parents instilled in me, which I absolutely adore and love them for, is I have always felt free. There's not many better feelings than feeling free. So even when I was studying for exams, they were like, if you want to do well, you'll study for them. There was not like, oh, you need to go into your room and revise.

59:21when I when I was playing rugby and had to have a job on the side it wasn't like oh we think you should do this we think you should do that it's like go ahead when I wanted to travel to Australia for six months if you can figure it out go and do it they weren't like handouts or whatever but they were like if you want to do it do it so I've always felt free to make choices and also obviously with my mum passing when I was younger, when I was 23, that kind of exacerbated that out of knowing that time's limited and trying to get the most out of things. So I've always just lent into what I've wanted to do and how I've wanted to do it.

59:58And somehow, some way it's now become a career. Like there was no, there was no fucking plan. I ran the length of the UK. It was not like I'm going to do this again. I was doing that to raise money for charity and to try and destroy myself physically because I was emotionally struggling and now it's like a career I'm bouncing around like it doesn't it doesn't make sense um and I'm just like super grateful that first I had that from my parents and secondly I've always just stuck to stuck to my way of doing things or you know leaning into things that I wanted to and not feeling outward pressure from people saying oh you should do this you should do that you shouldn't show that you smoke cigarettes every now and again you shouldn't drink you should lock in for you should just be a really great runner and you just be you and i think that's just be me that's why you're so cool and so many people look up to you in my opinion because that's my authentic that's my message for people like i don't expect anyone to live the way i do it's hard it's hard to get to and also it's not going to work for everyone but my message for people is find something you love and do it your way don't try and read a step-by-step instruction of how to get there be inspired by other people but don't cop don't try and copy exactly how they do it because it won't work for you like all these coaches selling coaching plans of like we're going to get you rich and all this shit i'm just like it's a shame because a lot of young men are looking for an anchor in their life someone someone to follow and they think they can get all the answers or there's a step-by-step process and if you sign up to their program you're going to get it whereas most people won't you have to you have to do the work yourself and like i say be inspired by other people i'm inspired by you and how you live your life and how you achieve things i'll never get to your to the level you're at but would you want that like yeah exactly i don't know but i take things from different people that i look up to like george in business everything he's done is incredible for representing 247 so i'm so lucky now that my like circle of people is just like all achieving and i feel like when we're older we're gonna look back and just be like wow we were really all doing that like and we knew and we knew other people so it is crazy and it's like the golden era like we're living in like the golden era of our lifetime exactly for you like i've looked up to you for so long and like it's funny how you say like you have different people that you look up to in different aspects exactly you can't look up to me and when you see me smoking a cigarette and take that into yours but you take it for what it is yeah i look oh well if will can enjoy his life and travel this much and uh create these opportunities and like i see you as like you're living your life better than anyone else like if you want to do something you go do it yeah whereas other people that ah well i might not do it because it might affect something else and that you just jump straight in and that's what i love about you like you like you say you're free yeah you can do that you you're like a nomad like yeah do you have a place a home if that makes sense or just travel around the world it's like no i don't that's what i want to do in 2027 because this year it was actually supposed to be like locked into dubai for like six months and then go colorado for altitude camp for you said cape town the year before right i was there for six months was you there for a full six months five and a half yeah and i traveled a bit in between but yeah like my lust for life and obviously like we talk about opportunities that come up it's pretty hard for me to to turn them down but there is times where it is like proper locking like before australia it was cape town for five and a half months i think i only traveled twice in that period and then this one i've got the build-up races so i've got keys 100 100 miler in florida three weeks after london and then i've got denali 135 in alaska the first time in alaska which would be amazing and then i'm in colorado for two months uh august and september back where i've trained before for moab so there are definitely key points where i lock in and shut out the noise and don't do any of this expansive stuff but then outside of that where are we going is there is there anything to kind of like on your bucket list uh for all the things you want to do maybe maybe we might not be able to even talk about them on here because people might uh steal them uh is there anything that you're like thinking oh i want to attack in the future no it to be honest no like um people always ask me like have i thought of my next one even when i'm doing one before and no i haven't i haven't thought of anything yet of of any merit um again it will just be hopefully seeing somewhere new it could be more races like it would be good to get to a point where i where i podium at one of these bigger races be it a cocodoma a bit of moab i think i'm definitely better suited to two 300 milers than 100s because people are still fast over that distance when it gets longer where you need some rest it's like the uh tortoise in the hair i'm the i'm the tortoise that's just going to keep chipping away so what makes you different what makes me different um i don't know the the thing i struggle about with that question is i I feel like I'm not that different.

1:05:18I feel like I've just been brought up a certain way and certain experiences in my life have made me see the world in a certain way that is maybe unshackled from like this matrix theory a lot of people have. I've always like questioned things, even like buying a house and getting a mortgage. I was like, I asked my parents what that was when I was a kid. And they're like, oh, so you put some money in and then you rent the rest from the government or the bank or whatever. and then you gradually pay it off over 40 years i was like so that's renting they're like no because you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna own it and i was like yeah but 40 years is a really long time what if you want to like go away so i've i've always questioned the way society says we should do things i'm not always looking to do it another way but i find my course of what i think is right for me and i kind of follow that um but yeah in an athletic sense it's just going through something so so painful emotionally and and trying to make it mean more than a sad story so i'm not i'm not using it to destroy my life i'm using it to lift my life and when the going gets tough whether you know you're 30 days into a 50 day event and you think oh i can't do it anymore like where does your mind go uh there's a very simple question it's very straightforward and you get a very straightforward answer can i take another step and that's all the answer is always yes unless you've broken your leg or seriously done some proper damage you can always take another step and you just do that a million more times and you'll be where you want to finish a million trillion more times yeah yeah and again it's just like looking back when you've seen someone fight for your life like i did with my mom it really puts it into perspective you choosing to be somewhere doing an event you're not gonna die so it's not it doesn't come close to what a lot of people are suffering through every day it's a privilege to be able to be there in that position so suck it up don't bitch and moan and keep going do you have that mindset do you have that mindset as like i'm i'm i'm gonna finish this no matter what like because obviously over these extended uh you know multi-day events like there's probably times where like sometimes you might or you should go to hospital because you've got something or has anything been that serious where like you've been borderline oh i should go to hospital and you're like nah fuck it i'm just gonna carry on going i've never had a surgery in my life i've only been to hospital because i've been knocked out playing rugby um but i ruptured some ligaments in my ankle when I was running John O 'Groats to Land's End but again ignorance is bliss I've never had a physio or anything on anything I've done so no one can tell me what's actually wrong and you just run through the pain the amazing thing about the human body is when it's pushed the way it can be pushed it will work for you you think of any life or death situation so people like how do you run a marathon how do you run 100 miles I'm like if someone put a gun to your head or someone you love said and said go and do this you're gonna do it so it's within so it's within basically all of us if we're able-bodied doing these things is within us but very few people are willing to put themselves put themselves out there even start let alone finish so i feel like i'm an ultra realist in what i'm doing yes things hurt but i don't let that like egotistical mind come into it of all we should stop so you just kind of block that out yeah and it's always and it's always there and i have to fire every single day i don't have i'm not like a like a single like a cyborg mind of like no i can terminate move forward i still have to have those battles in my head but that conversation always ends with the truthful view of what's going on yeah which is i can which is i can carry on if i had i remember the last day of donna gets the land's end my my toe was rotting i'd we'd wrapped it we'd wrapped it up it was it was it was horrible it just looked horrendous we unwrapped it in the bath it had been wrapped up for like four days and i was looking at it i was like this probably isn't good um but in my head i was like well i'm gonna finish tomorrow and if i have to get it amputated because it's so fucked i'll do that and it also in my head is if i'm getting to the last day and something's really wrong i will get on crutches or crawl the last day if i had to you just you have to be unrelenting and willing to so willing to get to the end that you will i think that is one thing that does make you different yeah maybe i saw you in uh iceland so this i think this was off the back of australia so you'd not recovered properly from from australia and you was like yeah yeah i'll come to iceland uh basically a bunch of us i think it was six or seven of us went and ran it great crew yeah went and ran the length of iceland and you wasn't feeling the best going into it and i think it was like 12 hours in you pull your back yeah and you are shaking i thought that you was having a fit i thought william gooch was dying in this race and somehow you still get up and start running it's like it's a sunday wasn't it you you were shaking having a fit on the floor you was like i don't know what's up like it's my back i'm about my back i think you you slept for a couple hours maybe three four hours and you got up and started running and you was running faster than you'd ever ran before yeah like i i don't know what it is but you are just built different the context of that is it was two weeks before I think I was in um I was in Italy on a small island called Ischia and I basically crashed a moped and I'd I'd broken my clavicle at the back I didn't even know that at the time I thought they said collarbone I thought it was up here so I didn't know I'd broken my big toe and I had like I had bruised ribs that's why my back seized up so the thing that was causing me the most most pain was my ribs like even breathing like for the week after kind of sucked and I've never actually broken a bone other than like fingers and toes so that was the first time I'd done something I was in a I was in a sling for probably not long enough but yeah the Iceland thing was always going to happen because it's an adventure and I get a kick out of it and also doing it in that team environment George is there Russ is there Lucy's there Hercules is there like it's it's a fun adventure for me I'd never been to Iceland before so I'm going to go out there and like give it what I can so the first night we obviously kicked off and it was fun and then yeah it got to the point where I came on came in on that last stop before I basically seized the hell up I could feel my hamstrings really tight but yeah after I had crashed that moped I went to the hospital the next day I actually slept in my bed which was a bit mental but yeah I was basically seized up I couldn't move so from running however many miles we had done at that point trying to run fast after Australia already meant that I seized up but I wasn't going to give up that opportunity of like being there for the team and also because Alfie was struggling as well wasn't he so it was all it was getting to a point where the team of six or seven was going to be like three and I'd give myself the rest of the year off so if I'm gonna ruin myself or injure myself then and there that's fine because I've given myself grace there's a period of like seven months where i don't have any plans other than the sydney marathon which was was that two weeks afterwards or something or did i do it first i think it was afterwards anyway yeah opportunity i got up stretched a bit felt better and running actually just like eased things off so it was like it that kind of thing for me is like a party we're in the camp like drinking beers like say that that's the time where like uh i feel like free from my everyday yeah that makes sense like every day it's so routine yeah i'm gonna go to bed at this time and then you're just running no bedtime yeah you can eat whatever you want yeah yeah it's like it's kind of like uh yeah like like you're young again if that makes sense yeah it's a trip you only have to concentrate on basically running that's what i really like in the whole freedom thing of when i'm doing this thing you don't have emails to answer you don't have calls you have a very simple way of living in an extreme but you wake up you run all day you try and eat you finish you go to bed there's no outside stresses there's a lot obviously going on but yeah it's it's freedom from normality i think people can take a lot away from everything that you've said one other thing i want to touch on is your kind of recovery routine because like you say you are one of the best people at recovery and sleeping i've ever seen like sometimes i see your whoop scores you're put you post them online you've got this hrv that is normally in like the 140 what's the highest hrv you've had uh like high 180s i think 180 like i've never ever seen anyone with a 180 yeah but the good thing is jake you know what that means i just i just do shit and look at it i mean i do i do so i do somewhat know but sometimes you sleep for 13 hours yeah after after big things like australia you have to because it's your body's gone through trauma and shock it's like i'm not going to say it's like having a car it's like having an accident where your body has to then shut down afterwards it's like a mini coma day after day yeah i was sleeping for after after we left monaco because i had to go there straight after which was obviously unbelievable but that was also a little bit intense especially given what i'd just done but then for a week afterwards i was in that same island italy not when i was crashing the bike i slept for 16 hours a day every day for a week like 11 or 12 overnight i'd wake up like hobble down to the the sun lounger fall asleep there wake up have some lunch go to sleep get woken up for dinner so like struggle through dinner and then go to sleep again you just anybody just knows like this is rest yeah turn off you're in fight or flight for so long that's that's how you look at these things even in a marathon like you're under high stress so when you're doing that every day you're pushing yourself so far physically and mentally when it's time to to shut off it's like everything falls into line your brain's like okay we can rest now so your body's like okay we're gonna almost take the mick here we're gonna be sleeping for as long as possible yeah no i i find it like crazy even like on the events like you said the speed project yet you're if you have half an hour to sleep you're sleeping 29 minutes out of them 30 minutes yeah like you're you go off like this yeah and you wake up you're ready to go and like you're so efficient with your recovery yeah i think it's just like when you've been there and done it before obviously sleep when you're stressed is always hard to do but i don't know i think i'm just kind of lucky with the with the whole sleep thing that i can do it and to be fair honestly now having a business to run as well outside of what whatever the will gooch business is now i sleep worse because i'm thinking about that so i've added like a level of normality into my life so now i'm getting i would say more more normal results of like being stressed like the next man yeah moving on so you get quite a bit of hate offline online should i say uh from the running community yeah probably say and i think this is because you run really far you run really well uh you're bigger than the average runner like in terms of like muscular and you're good looking um they're the things that i think people hate on which i don't think i think it's absurd that people do that but I feel like uh you do do that have you got any advice for anyone that is kind of looking to stay in shape whilst doing crazy challenges like yourself because you do stay in shape all year round well I think firstly I've when I was training for rugby I was trying to be as big as I could and as muscular as I could so I always had like a bodybuilding strength mindset so i had a big fucking basically hench stacked body to trim down into a into a runner um when it comes to like staying in some kind of shape whilst you're running you still have to you still have to do weights like i have stopped doing weights for this entire marathon block i haven't actually i did three push-ups the other day with george when i was at the gym with him in la they're three push-ups i've done i've done nothing and i actually took that from truett because obviously he's going for Olympic trials and he's quite a jack dude.

1:18:35So I followed his suit of like, okay, I'm not going to be doing any kind of weights. And I've even given up doing like strength work on my legs, which I never usually do, but it's almost like testing out for this London period. But to stay in shape and to, you know, look a type of way, you should be doing like two strength sessions a week and then some beach weights will always help. I've always done like core like two, three times a week. it's just something i've always done and it's always going to maintain no matter how much i'm running unless it's in a challenge then that's all i'm doing once you've got like the muscle bulk there once you start running and then losing weight then it's probably going to show off more yeah no that makes sense i've actually took one of your pieces of advice you was like when you travel you always have an ab roller yeah so yeah it's so easy in it hundreds so you do 100 of them 100 push-ups yeah that's what i i have obviously haven't done it this year but yeah i think the ab roll ab roller basically gets everything and especially like the way i've always trained is people think about doing core they're like they're always going to hit the main body or like chest flat bench press everything i've done in like an aesthetic point of view has always been doing the smaller muscle group around it so on chest i'm always doing something this upper and i'll be doing fly so i'm trying to hit the top of it and the fly and then also something like dips or uh decline so you're going to hit the lower and the the middle of it is going to take care of itself likewise the core it's so easy to work the main body but how do you work the how do you work the um the obliques how do you work the serratus how do you work the lower abs do you think that's like a bit of a secret why you can run so far and not get injured because yeah you have this really strong core that you've built up over years and years and years yeah i think so i think holding a little bit more muscle mass especially for if it's the really big multi day stuff like the cross-country stuff having more muscle mass is going to protect your ligaments bones joints a little bit better i've had a dexascan i know you've had those i have big heavy dense bones so i think there's something in there where genetically i'm i'm lucky that my bones don't break down and they're not brill but like i say i think the the muscle mass thing and also having a very strong core is always going to help you across basically any activity you're going to do unless you need to be super lightweight like a actual olympic athlete yeah no so do you think the the dense bones are just from probably playing rugby all the impact from that and then just the weight training and impact of running and being a heavy runner yeah yeah probably is i mean i don't know the science of if bones get bigger or stronger but yeah they do they do under load yeah they get bigger denser stronger well i've got the coming soon the the dense big bone program i will go

1:21:26no but it is really interesting like say the little things that you do like i've done a gym session with you in the past and people think that you just kind of like wing these events but like everything is calculated every exercise you're doing in the gym has got a purpose yeah whether it's a split squat in a certain way that you know you have a runner's form when you're doing the split squat or whether you're training your calves specifically for the event that you're doing or like you say you're going to altitude to train like everything has a purpose yeah and I think that's what people probably miss a little bit they just think oh Will's this guy that just goes and runs these crazy things surely he just can't do that maybe he's cheating maybe he's that but like you work so fucking hard and I don't think people realize that yeah I mean it's easy it's easy to miss and also it's there's there's real structure within a very unstructured way of living so I'm getting the sessions done but I don't have a I'm waking up at 6am and this is exactly what my week looks like I'm I'm very lucky that with moving around and even my business I can choose a time in the day where it's my most important time to do the workout or do the run but something for my my mental ability and this is why I'm so impressed by people that are one structured and two especially have a nine to five and then still get after it and train like if I was in that environment I would suck because I need the freedom of the 24 hours maybe let's call it 18 because I'm gonna sleep to choose when I want to do the run because I will procrastinate i don't wake up in the morning people assume the amount of run i wake up in the morning i'm like oh yippee you can't wait to run fuck that no way i don't i don't wake up enthusiastic about much much at all to be honest i still have to have that little struggle so the way i obviously do that is i give myself the day to choose when i'm gonna do the workout or do the run as long as it gets done everything else around it will fall into place like i might wake up and do emails uh have calls or whatever i might then run at midday it's not run at 7am every day or and then lift at some other time it's yeah pretty free have you got any advice for someone who does travel a lot like say you're you're the king of traveling in my eyes uh how you stay on track because for me especially that's the thing i struggle with the most is making sure that you're hitting everything feeling great when you're traveling because with jet lag yeah everything now it's like it's so easy just to either palm the session off or think oh i'm not really feeling it today like let's push it to tomorrow like what what do you do uh i have that same freedom of like the 24 hours of like you're gonna do it at some point so choose a time especially when you come in fresh off a plane like it's really actually not a good idea to do anything too tough i did that when i got to la last time um i did my fastest session on the block it was like uh 10 times two minutes and some of the two minutes were at 3.11 per k which I've never probably ran in my life outside of playing rugby so that's like seriously fast for me and then I was sick for two days afterwards I don't know if that had anything to do with it but putting your body under so much stress after being on a on a plane not sleeping probably probably isn't a good idea so there needs to be a leniency around your travel days can you wake up earlier before your flight and get a tough session done or do it the day before.

1:25:00But everyone looks at a week and what you've got to do. You just have to work out what day you're flying on and maybe do the key session before that. But give yourself like 24 hours when you arrive to try your best to get onto time zone. But again, just like alleviate the pressure too much because if you do then push too hard as soon as you arrive, then things can go wrong and then you've ruined all of the training you've done beforehand. So yeah, it is a tough one. practical methods like i'm not big on pharmaceuticals i prefer to take melatonin which kind of is one anyway but trying to get on time zone by using a sleep supplement it's probably going to help staying super hydrated on the plane because it's dry you're at pressure so you're losing a lot of water um and yeah arriving and yeah giving yourself 24 hours and then hopefully getting back into it but not not worrying if it's at 3am because you've woken up really early or he's still awake or if it's at midday whatever yeah it kind of is what it is just make sure you get it done yeah and it's hard obviously if you're traveling for work it's it's going to be really tough and i don't i don't have the answers for you like i say i'm we're lucky that we're obviously going around the world to either do an event or for work and we have the freedom of being able to train whenever we want so yeah what do you see the next kind of like five to 10 years looking like for you yeah tough one finding some stability i do want to i do want to have find a home and have some level of where do you think that'll be i still don't really know because you've traveled the world that you've been to how many countries would you say i don't know i mean i love i love cape i really love cape town it's the first place outside of amta where i grew up that feels like home i feel very at peace there i have some really good friends there it's ocean mountains vineyards uh and then great food game reserves yeah great food south africans are so nice and hospitable um love it there i really love italy every time i go i feel like my soul kind of is from there in some kind of weird way um but yeah next five five years i'll be what am i 32 next week so 37 hopefully i've had some kids by then i want a squad i want like four or five four or five yeah for sure i need to find a wife and a missus first so sorry wife or a missus or a missus that becomes a wife i'm not saying i'm

1:27:29part of the monastery all of a sudden i've started my own cult

1:27:35yeah i would love to have kids like growing up and i feel like i had a very i had the best childhood i could ever imagine like i say always feel on the table went on a holiday once or twice a year parents got on really well I had a big brother I love that feeling of family and since mum passed it's it's been hard to feel that again we have lots of like close family friends but my family's really small it's me my dad my brother my grandma and then my auntie and one like first cousin so it's very small I want to feel that Christmas family vibe again so yeah there's that and then like hopefully risk is a success finding athletes so I can pass the baton to some other people and help them achieve things because one thing I've really loved I've been helped so much in what I've done when I've gone and helped like Robbie do his thing or I'm gonna go help this guy in Japan soon run from Osaka to Tokyo like I did I get a real kick out of being able to help people and I feel like I'm experienced through doing it and i really love it like even on iceland like at the beginning i was always driving because let's be honest it wasn't planned no no very well was it you were you were planning it all in the last 24 hours of like it wasn't planned at all was it but like even the whole thing of like when we're going to cross over like setting the the clock in the car to zero so you know that you've gone you're just so experienced with it all yeah exactly so i know that stuff i feel like i have value but for me I also get a lot out of doing it because I feel like I can make people more efficient I can help them achieve something and like like you say when you help someone achieve their goal it's a really amazing feeling you must get it from even coach even coaching people at the no yeah it's some of the the best things ever like being able to like you say uh coach someone and they achieve their goals and you kind of change their life in a way um is is one of of the best experiences i'm like say it's so funny that you say that because um when we did do the speed project the second time the biggest difference probably was there wasn't a figure like you that was like the leader if that makes sense we were all kind of like oh well inexperienced and you kind of like filled that role when we went to ice and you was like right this is what we're doing i'm driving we're doing this we're doing this we're going to go in this rotation we're gonna run this many k's each and then we're gonna change over like you were just there to direct and it was that was is what it is rather than everyone like discussing stuff it's it's weird how you need that kind of person yeah you also don't know when when it's new to you don't know what you need you just kind of making it up and also on our speed project there's robbie who's done it before there's jason who's a he's a marine there's peter john who's a former paratrooper so we've got two elite we've got one elite ultra runner that's done so many things and so many environments you've got two special forces officers you've got me who's done a few bits too yeah you i felt like i was in good hands yeah i was pretty confident we were going to be all right yeah if anything goes wrong whereas like we did the speed project and not to to bad marvel because it was one of the best experiences still it was just different and we we were doing the speed project and the the tire burst yeah and no one knew how to change his tire and i'm in that as well because i've never fucking changed a tire in my life and we're all like oh what do you need someone very practical yeah yeah so it's just it's just funny like all fun and games we we end up getting someone called pancho to do it yeah like yeah was owned the nearest garage shout out pancho Yeah, Pancho.

1:31:27If you listen. I'm sure he's not.

1:31:32But yeah, imagine we get a DM after. Hi, I'm Pancho. But yeah, that's interesting. That's kind of cool. That's what you see, like you said, the next five to ten years, going into more of that coaching role because it's almost like you're giving back. But like you say, it's so fulfilling for yourself. Yeah. It's pretty sick. It's pretty sick. Yeah. No, that was sick. Thank you, Will. Thank you. And I don't, I honestly really don't like doing podcasts. I try and shy away from them as much as possible. You fucking great. Because, because firstly, a lot of the times you're going to get the same question over and over again that you've already done.

1:32:11Secondly, there's a type of pressure that I feel like I have to answer in a certain way. Like I'm doing an exam, like there is an answer to this question, but I highly respect you. I love you as a friend. and I knew this was just going to be like a cool open conversation I don't feel like I have to say anything in particular I just I can have a conversation with you hopefully it comes out well but yeah this is actually a nice experience for me rather than I'm feeling forced into to like doing an exam but with my mouth thank you man I appreciate that that might come across weird casting couch I love that thank you Will thank you for coming on what an end yeah best of luck with the marathon this weekend thank you Father I appreciate you big love