Inspiring a Global Running Movement with Mina Guli

0:03As a surfer, I feel most at home in or near the ocean, and I know I'm not the only one. Many scientists suggest that people are drawn to and comforted by water because it's vital to human life. Hiking to a waterfall or sitting on the bank of a river can reduce your heart rate and lower your blood pressure. But it's easy to lose sight of how precious this resource really is. Water advocate Mina Gulli runs marathons all over the world to raise awareness about the global water crisis. Mina has logged thousands of miles across deserts and along rivers to change the way people, companies, and governments think about water.

0:43I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

0:57Mina Ghoulie, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. So glad to have you on. Thank you, Shelby. It's great to be here. Have you always been a runner? No. No, Shelby, when I was a kid, I hated running. I was like the little kid in the corner that would never get picked for sports teams, and I avoided doing sport like the plague. Sometimes I look back and I'm like, what happened to me? The truth is nothing happened except that I got suddenly motivated by a mission that was much bigger than myself. And now I find myself every day going out and doing these crazy runs. And the irony is I'm really bad at it.

1:33Like I'm really slow. I'm not naturally a runner and I don't really like it. It just makes me, I should not even start this podcast saying this, but like, I don't actually really like running. I love that you don't like running and you run like ultra marathons. Yeah, I had run a little bit before. And so when I was at university, I had a really bad accident. I got pushed into a swimming pool, hurt my back really badly. And the doctors told me I never run ever again. And I was like sitting on the couch like, cool, I've got an excuse not to run. I've got the best excuse ever not to do sport. I always had to make up excuses, but now I've really got one.

2:16And then I went, like, I was sitting there one day and I just thought, wait, who am I to let someone else start to create limits for me? Who am I to let a dude in a white lab coat start to tell me what my future is going to look like? Like, no way, no way. So I decided I would start swimming. My idea of swimming was to go to the local pool and I would swim two laps. And I was like, cool, I'm a swimmer. And one of my friends, who it turns out is a triathlete, comes one day and she goes, I heard that you're a swimmer. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm a swimmer. She goes, so we've got triathlon training tomorrow morning.

2:57Why don't you come? Like, sure. She goes, 5 a.m. I'm like, who goes to the pool at 5 a.m.? It's dark. Like, that's home time. That's not like pool time. Anyway, she goes, oh, I knew you would say no. I'm like, no, no, I'm not saying no. I'll be there. I'll be there. So I turn up all these people in the pool, like swimming lap after lap. I'm there like at the end of the pool, I'm going to die. They're all like, cool, let's go for coffee. I'm like, okay. And you know what? It was actually really fun. So I started bike riding because they would get on their bikes once a week on a Saturday after swimming.

3:30And they're like, Mina, come. I turn up on my really clunky bike. But the more I turned up, the more I could ride and the more I could persevere and it was fun. And I saw that I was improving and I was like, this is not horrible, right? It's actually not horrible. And then one day someone said to me, hey, Mina, why don't you do the Ironman? Like, I had my back, I can't even run. Ah, you'll figure it out. So nine months later to prove to myself and everyone else that I could do whatever I set my mind to, I did my first Ironman. I came like second last. Like, let's call a spade a spade. I am not speedy.

4:08I just have a huge amount of grit and determination and a desire to say, I said I was going to do this. I am going to make this happen no matter what.

4:23When Mina completed that Ironman, she was 23 years old and about to finish university. After she graduated, she went on to work as a lawyer and later started an investment firm which focused on developing climate-friendly projects. As Amina learned more about sustainability, she started to understand just how essential water is to every part of life, from our health to our food to the stability of our climate.

4:53I think that there were two aha moments that made me kind of realise water is a much bigger deal than I realised. I grew up in Australia. I had seen when I was a kid, the taps being turned off. I saw the fountains in shopping centres being replaced by plastic potted plants. I watched as our dinner table conversations shifted from like, what are we eating to how are we going to jerry rig our washing machine so that we use less water. So I knew in my head that there was a water problem. I knew that water was incredibly precious, but it was two bigger heart moments that really shifted that from being this thing that was in the back of my head to being something that was really in the forefront of my mind that was going to propel me to do all the crazy things and have all these wild ideas that I've had, not only had, but executed on over the last couple of years.

5:43The first one was sitting in a conversation at the World Economic Forum, talking not about water in the water that we drink, but talking about water as the base of the entire economic system that we rely on. Because the truth is that water goes into everything we use, we buy, and we consume every single day. Whether it's the amazing stripy shirt that you're wearing today, the watch, the food that you ate for breakfast, lunch, maybe the little bevy you're having on the side just now. All of those things took water to make. And if you want to quantify it, just the outfit that you're wearing, all of those things took more water to make than all the water you drink before you're 40 years old.

6:30One outfit. Now you stop for a minute and go, well, how many outfits are in my closet and how many outfits are in the closets of all my friends and all the billions of people that live on this planet. And that is a massive, massive a heart moment when you combine it with the fact that on the other side of this, our water supplies are dwindling. And the vast majority of water that gets consumed is not the water that we use at home. 70 % of water is used in agriculture and 20 % in manufacturing. So the places we need to really target if we're like the all in, agriculture and manufacturing, and that means companies.

7:14Companies, governments, people outside our home. That was my first aha moment. When was this? It was back in 2012. And I thought, this is crazy. Either I'm the most stupid person in the room that I didn't know any of this or lots of other people are like me. So I did a whole bunch of surveys and analysis and went, yes, turns out I'm not the only one that doesn't know this. So did a kind of like brainstorming with a bunch of friends. Always be aware of your friends. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes they encourage you to do things that are a little wild. And then one of my friends was like, you should do something really crazy.

7:50Like what's really crazy? And my friend said to me, well, I run naked around New York City, but takes mom look at me and he goes, I don't think you're going to do that. I'm like, no, that idea is way too wild for me. But he goes, but running, running, running's a good idea. Why don't you run? I'm like, I'm not a runner. Never run. Not really into this, the whole running shenanigans. Terrible. Look at me. Look, not a runner. And he goes, I think you should go running. We're in a group of people. They all go, yes, you should run. I'm like, hello, I'm here. Anyone listening? No, Mina's going to go running.

8:22So we cooked up, when I say we, it's mainly them, cooked up an idea that I would run across seven deserts on seven continents in seven weeks. Why seven continents? Because we wanted to show that water is everywhere and that it affects all of us, no matter which part of the planet you live on. Why seven deserts? Because the idea was we need to be able to show what the future looks like if there's not water available. We need to go into these communities. We need to share their lived experiences and we need to make it very clear that this is reality. And then why marathons? Because the forecast gap between demand and supply for water by 2030 is 40%.

9:02And it turns out that the number of kilometres in a marathon is 42.2. So we said, what if I run every day? I'll run the gap between demand and supply for water, 42.2 kilometres.

9:21In 2016, Mina ran seven marathons across deserts in the U.S., Spain, Jordan, Chile, South Africa, and the outback in Australia. She also ran over a stretch of polar desert in Antarctica. Running in Antarctica logistically is a whole different ballgame. Water bottle sprays, because of the way that the light works, it's very hard to differentiate the levels of the snow or the ice that you're running on. Once you put your foot down, you're like, oh, didn't quite get that. And probably the only place in the world where it's so quiet. When I ran, I could hear the sound of my own heart beating. It's the most incredible sense of beauty and isolation.

10:08You just feel far from everywhere.

10:15Before setting out to run marathons across seven deserts, Mina thought she would just complete this challenge and return to her old life. But what she witnessed out there changed her forever. While I was out running, I had my second big aha moment when it comes to water. When I was standing on the banks of a river, it's the Orange River, and it runs basically between Namibia and South Africa. The river levels were incredibly low, lower than they've ever been, not just because of a drought, but because, as one of the rangers told me when I said, why is the river level so low? He turned to me and he said, Mina, I've never seen it this low in my life.

11:00And it's low not only because of this drought, but because of all the use of water up and down the river for agriculture. I'm like, cool, agriculture, we all need agriculture. And he said, it's agriculture to grow grapes. These farmers are growing grapes that get used not for wine, but for export to the tables of people all over, particularly Europe. They go on the backs of trucks along bumpy roads for hundreds of kilometres to get to a port that then gets shipped up to Europe. and I stood there on the bank of this river, looking at the marker meters above me of where the water used to be, and I thought, how many times have I looked at the bottom of a bag of grapes and been like, yeah, that's a bit soggy, I'm not going to eat that, I'm just going to toss it away, and never once have I thought about where this came from, what water was used to make it, and the lives of the people that got it to me, and at that moment, I literally felt my life change, And I thought, it doesn't matter what it takes.

12:06I am going to solve this problem. There is no going back. There are no more high-heeled shoes and nice suits and commercial offices. There is only solving this global water crisis because what I am seeing is so completely outrageous and so absolutely solvable if we had the intent, the grit and the determination to do some things that are incredibly hard, if we had the courage to set a big, bold, audacious goal and to be confident enough to say, we can fix this problem in our lifetime, imagine what we could do. And I'm like, if not me, then who? And if not now, then when? Someone has to stand up and I'm going to stand up now.

12:53And no matter what it takes, no matter the sacrifices for the rest of my life, this is what I'm going to do.

13:10Every year, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard program proudly donate$2 million to the REI Cooperative Action Fund. The fund supports hundreds of nonprofit partners that are creating a more equitable outdoors for everyone. You've even heard some of their stories on the podcast. In addition to supporting the REI Cooperative Action Fund, Capital One and REI have partnered on the REI Co-op MasterCard, bringing card members excellent card benefits that inspire more outdoor adventures. Find out if you're pre-approved for the REI Co-op MasterCard with no risk to your credit score. Go to rei.com slash mastercard dash podcast to learn more.

13:52That's rei.com slash MasterCard dash podcast. Terms apply.

14:09Mina Ghoulie has dedicated her life to raising awareness about water scarcity. She does this by running in places where the impact of the global water crisis is most evident. In 2016, Mina ran marathons across deserts on every continent. Her next project was to run 40 marathons along some of the most famous rivers. After completing both of these projects, Mina's efforts began to draw global media attention. In 2018, she set out to pursue her boldest idea yet.

14:43In 2018, after you ran 40 marathons in 40 days down six of the world's greatest rivers, you attempted a wild idea that you weren't able to finish. Curious what it was. Yeah. So when we did the deserts and the rivers, we saw this massive uptick in media. And we started having conversations with companies and governments about, you know, we need to, you need to move. We need to do things differently. And despite all that I'd done, we heard excuses. And I'm a big believer in the hashtag no excuses. And especially when it's something as big and significant as water. And I thought, what do I need to do to show what it takes to be 100 % committed to something?

15:27In this case, water. Why don't I run 100 marathons in 100 days. So I set out and I started at the New York City Marathon, actually, bringing this back to America. It was pretty amazing. But I knew from about marathon number 20 something that I had a problem. And one of my best friends was with me at the time. And I said to her, if I was at home, I'd go to the doctor. I think I've got a major problem. But here we are in the middle of nowhere, no doctor. And so we made the decision obviously to keep going because I'm not giving up. We can do hard things. And I kept running. Um, and I ran all the way to marathon number 62 through the process.

16:13I had gone from running my kind of running, like kind of like shuffle. I don't from running to running with my poles to walking to walking with my poles. And by the time we got to the end of 62, I could barely walk and my team had to lift me into the car. We go to the hospital, day 63, we do a scan and the scan shows that I have a 15 centimeter fracture in my femur, which is huge and it's one of the biggest weight-bearing bones in your body. And it is so bad that the bone is literally hanging together. And the doctors said to me, if you kick, if you trip, if you do anything, your bone will completely sever.

17:01It will be a flip-flop. And I sat there in the wheelchair and I cried my heart out. and I said to them, okay, how long is it going to take for me to get better? Can I go tomorrow? And they all said, no, this is like career ending. This is it. This is the finish. Like will you ever be able to walk again? That's right. I would be wondering. They were like, you should be worried about being able to walk. This is bad. and I think at that point my whole world collapsed and at that moment my team came in and they said you know Mina before we started we had no idea about water but what we've seen has fundamentally changed us and we've realized this is not your problem to solve it's a problem for everyone everywhere so today day 63 we're going to run your miles for you and they went out and they ran my miles.

18:05They took a video and they said, Mina can't run, she's in a wheelchair. Today we're running her miles, who wants to come tomorrow and run her miles? Day 64, we had a whole bunch of people from across Cape Town, which is where we were, who turned up to run. Day 65, we had people from around the world starting to run. Day 66, day 67, day 68, every single day more and more people turned up not only to run, but to share their water stories and to become part of what was becoming this incredible global water community. And by the time we got to a hundred marathons, we had not just run a hundred marathons.

18:41We had run thousands of marathons with thousands and thousands of people stepping up right across the world. And it was that community that got me through some of the deepest, darkest moments of my life. And I'm like, okay, may not have done 100 marathons in 100 days. But what if, what if I could run 200 marathons in a year? What if I could use this global fledgling movement to build into something completely epic? So I said, I'm going to do this. Everyone thought I was crazy. I was completely broken at the time. And you know what? 18 months later, I set out for my first marathon, not just me running alone as a crazy person in his desert, but surrounded by thousands and thousands of people that had stepped up when we did the hundred and had become part of this movement.

19:30And I think for me, like being able to realize and appreciate that sometimes you end up in a far different place to where you thought, but it can be way better. Sometimes the power of demonstrating that we can create these big, wild, crazy, audacious goals. And when we set our minds to it, we can do it. That's pretty awesome because it means that I can sit in boardrooms and when companies say to me, oh, that's really hard, I can look them in the eye and say, really, you're telling me that this is hard? I'll tell you what's hard. And the truth is that they usually turn around to their people and say, okay, let's do it.

20:10Mina's 200th marathon ended on the steps of the United Nations in New York, time to coincide with World Water Day and the opening of the first UN Water Conference in 50 years. There, she shared powerful stories from people she had met on the front lines of the global water crisis. Many of those stories were bleak, but there have been some moments of hope too. For example, Mina's most recent run highlighted a success story in France.

20:39So your most recent wild idea, you ran 800 kilometers, which is about 497 miles down the Seine River. and that was right before the Paris Olympics. So people had to pay attention. Like, I'm curious, you know, how long did this take and what was it like? So the actual project took a month. We'd chosen the Seine because I'd seen so many bad examples of rivers that were mismanaged and broken and I wanted to see how we could resurrect a river that was declared functionally dead. So in the 1960s, the Seine was declared functionally dead. They had less than three species of fish living in the river.

21:20It was not a nice place. It basically was a sewer. And what I wanted to see is like how you could take this incredibly poor, broken river and build it into something that could be the home of the Olympic Games with people swimming in it in a very public way. They had to allocate$1.5 billion out of the budget to this river to clean it, to rebuild infrastructure under one of the oldest cities in Europe, which they had to redo all of the sewerage systems so that sewerage no longer went straight out into the river. They shut down a whole bunch of big roads that were adjacent to the river. They moved the cars back and they enabled ordinary people to start having picnics and socializing and having events and getting onto barges and doing all kinds of things actually on the river to appreciate and understand the value of the river to their daily lives.

22:13And over this period of time, we're not talking ages, like we're talking like 1960s until now, they have completely transformed this river system so that when we were running, I saw these enormous fish swimming in the river. We saw like the swans and the little cygnets like hiding underneath the feathers on the back of the mama bear swans. And we saw like huge numbers of people just enjoying the river. Barge owners who told me, Mina, like, you know, 20 years ago, this river was a cesspool and now look at it today. And it has not only transformed the lives and the happiness of people around, but also completely transformed our operations and the business and the opportunities that exist now in and around this river system because it is healthy.

22:59And it's not only healthy now, but it's going to be healthy for the future. That's like the first really positive water story I've heard. I'm sad to say it's one of very few, but I think sometimes we need beacons of light on the horizon. We need to demonstrate to people the power of what can be by showing them what is. And I think that means like being able to say, here is an example of a river that they fixed. This is how they did it. Here is the blueprint. And now you could do the same thing for your river. What are some things that listeners can do to conserve water? Yeah, so I think that there's two elements to this.

23:32The first is the things that you can do inside your home. That's super easy. It is about like, how can I recycle and reuse my clothing? How can I reduce my food waste? Also saves a lot of money. So there's a movement to think, eat, save. Think about what you eat before you eat it. Eat what's on your plate and then save the leftovers for tomorrow. So I think that there are some easy things that you can do at home. Obviously, turn off the tap when you brush your teeth, take short showers, all of those things. When you are outside the home, you have to remember you have a vote. You have a vote if you're in a democracy where you can take a vote at the polling booth.

24:08but you also have a vote in where you spend your money. And you can choose whether you spend your money to endorse and support companies who are doing things in a water-smart, water-friendly way. And do not underestimate the power of that vote. I know that it seems really small and insignificant, but the truth is that change is not made by any one of us. Change is made by all of us working in a concerted effort. So if we can find a way to move everybody to start to make smarter decisions, companies will listen. And we know it works. Companies do listen.

24:46One of the things that I've heard way too many times is, I would love to do what you do, but I've got a sore knee. Or I am old. Or I'm whatever. And I'm like, I look at people and I go, first of all, you've got the financial resources. You live in a place where you've got the physical resources to be able to get a broken knee fixed. and the second is age is just a number. Yeah, I definitely don't recover as well as I used to. I definitely feel the worst for wear. After a lot of my runs, I get up slower off my chair, but is that going to stop me? No, because the only limits any one of us should set are the ones inside us.