Bonus Episode: Jake Dearden On Why Hyrox Is Booming & THAT Marathon Time

0:00Welcome to this quick bonus episode of Untapped. This is a preview of a conversation that I had with High Rocks doubles world champion Jake Dearden, who's featured in a fantastic documentary by Red Bull that you can watch right now on Red Bull TV. We have a full interview recorded live in London coming up soon, so please subscribe now if you haven't already so you can catch that when it drops. For now, enjoy this quick bonus conversation with the incredible Jake Dearden. what were you doing before high rocks so obviously you're you're the world champion doubles uh high rocks champ um you can run a sub 230 marathon which makes you just you know an incredibly elite athlete when did you begin because you're only 26 right when did you begin to want to be a professional athlete and what steps did you take to get to where you are so as to be like for me wanting to be a professional athlete it's not like i'd always dreamed of it like i was a personal trainer and i people thought i was stupid really because i don't know if you remember the days where like people you go for a run and if you lifted and ran at the same time people thought you were stupid just counseling out your games like people like but hyrax came along and it showed that you yeah you can be good at fitness but you can also be stronger and you know you can hold the physique whilst running and and so on as long as you get back to your point if as long as you get your nutrition like nailed in and dialed i think you can do it so i was just a personal trainer that loved lifting weights in the gym and loved uh running and we kind of we i started at a gym that was it was called the hybrid performance sensor so it was this hybrid i probably call it scaled back crossfit you know crossfit but inclusive and we we used to do a lot of sessions there where it was a mixture of these ergs a mixture of running and uh lifting weights and i just kind of grew up doing that what does that entail being a being a world champ obviously you're the best in in the business in that in your age group so as doubles we're officially like overall world champions um within kind of like doing the singles category on my own uh i've currently got the fastest time uh in england uh and i'm going to be competing in the elite 15 world champs at the in chicago in six weeks time so what is your time uh so for our pro singles it is uh 56 44 so 56 minutes 44 seconds isn't that that so so that's not a bad 50 55 minutes 55 minutes 44 sorry that's that's not a bad time for two people i think sub hours strong for doubles so it's to me i think it's because it's so inclusive and the community is so like inviting and everyone kind wants the best for each other so uh first of all the aim is for everyone to complete a high rocks like if we look at take the marathon for example the the dnf rate of a marathon is quite high by the percentage of not finishing is quite high for a number of reasons it might be nutrition it might be because you pull up cramping might because you get injured within your training block whereas a high rocks it's less time it's less taxing and the weights uh like everyone can do the weights if you train for them if that makes sense most people can do them i'd probably say 95 of people of the population could do it if they train for it um so that for me that's one reason two they give everyone an opportunity to get to world championships so we have this big kind of finale at the end of the season and because they have so many categories so they have male category female category they have then mixed doubles then they have age groups now yeah it's really inclusive i think it's addictive as well because as soon as you do one you're like shit i could have gone faster here i could have gone faster here there's so many little factors that you don't even think about before you do one and like it does piss you off a little bit because you're like i know i can get a faster time before you know it you're five deep the actual split between male and female as well is about 50 50 amazing generally it's incredible there's probably not many spots out there that is like that so so equally spread this marathon effort um your your sub 230 can you take us through the kind of doubt that maybe you had in your mind and just how you achieved that phenomenal time yeah I did I uh I put it out there and I'm not gonna lie I didn't actually and I said this within the video that I put it out I was like I don't know whether I can actually do this but I'm going to try and attempt to run a sub 230 and I think it was on YouTube that I got the most kind of hate back I think that's because it's anonymous uh compared to kind of like instagram do you know people there's a lot more trolls on youtube i think but um you know i was having people that were saying you know they're professional running coaches and they've been that all their lives and i'm three to four years away from running a 230 marathon so other people are saying you know this is impossible you'll never be able to do this uh and i think that can send a person one of two ways you can either agree with them and think right actually i was out of order for putting that out or you can help you can make it be kind of like the fuel to the fire it's hard just to say you know just to pass it off and just to say um no like it's you know this is what i can do like i had to ask coaches and it was kind of i think i trained a lot harder because i then went on to ask professional professionals around me can i actually do this i went to a running coach well a gb cyclist and i was asking him um who's now into running and i was asking him his name steve uh and i was asking him uh how i can get better uh running and how i can improve this time and he was you know talking about little things that i could do like drafting so running behind someone that that's one that like is a key just like literally running behind someone imagine you're a cyclist and you sit behind there was another uh coach that's used to he actually went to the 2012 olympics called stuart stokes um and he was a steeplechaser and i actually went he was putting on sessions for his son his son's 15 so a group of 15 year olds but they're all like rapid runners they're all like 15 minute 5k i was going right down to the session once a week in my marathon training block just to run with fast people because you know it's so hard to find people like like-minded people that are running in the same paces so i was running with a lot of 15 year olds within my training and like you know that you know is a bit weird but it's things that i've got to like you know the opportunity to be coached by literally an excellent pick athlete was incredible these are a couple of things that i i did but i probably wouldn't have done if i didn't get that criticism because i was like i need to back it up i can't let these people win i need to what did it feel like when you crossed the line in sub 230 so you knew you'd done it you must have you must have understood it must have been quite the experience right yeah definitely like it was a sense of relief more than anything uh one because i proved a lot of people wrong but i'd achieved this time that i trained so hard for uh i think it's more relief than anything but as you all know like you know the day after it kind of it's what's next it's what's what's next and and you know it never lasts but like for that day you know i felt on top of the world and i was so happy and relieved so i actually put a post on saying that i've done it and then i put a story on of all the screenshots of all the hate and i put don't let anyone say you can't do anything sometimes you need these people to say the positive stuff um you know like people say don't they like you know for like every 10 comments if you get one bad comment um and that's quite hard at times and i think you know social media can be quite toxic in that way but it's so nice when people are actually nice and they're you know they're happy that you've done well jake um we can't thank you enough for coming in and honestly so many people are running at the moment and um i'm sure they'll find it as interesting as we did no honestly thank you and keep doing what you're doing because it's inspiring