Tony Riddle - The Natural Life-Stylist: How To Reconnect With The Human Body

Full transcript: Tony Riddle on London Real

3:41 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tony Riddle, the British natural lifestyleist, barefoot running pioneer, and endurance athlete. Your work seeks out ancient practices to reconnect us to our human biology, and your natural lifestyle coaching program teaches the necessity of breaking free from what you call our zoo environment in order to rewild our movement. You just completed running the entire length of the United Kingdom, Barefoot, an incredible 874 miles in 30 days with a grueling 57 miles on the final day. Tony, welcome to London Real.

4:14 Thanks, man. What an intro. Wow. Great to have you here. Big one.

4:19 You know, I figure we might as well jump into this because this happened like nine days ago. Yeah, still raw. Yeah, you’re still raw. Barefoot, maybe before we get into the details, why do this in the first place, and when did this idea come to you? So, firstly, I was born the longest baby on record in Reading Hospital.

4:43 Boom, that’s the start of it. Okay. Which meant there wasn’t enough room in the womb. I was late, really late term, and then just human adaptation, I’d managed to curl my feet up underneath my armpits, and they’d taken on a deformity in that space of time. So I was compromised at that stage being born.

5:05 So I had to have plaster cast boots for the first 12 weeks. So it’d have to be changed every week through that process because of course growing would have cut off circulation. So there was that. My mom then was traumatized by that. This thing, she had to keep going, getting it done.

5:22 My dad was busy at the time. So there’s a kind of that. There’s a weave of that in there. And then I had to wear boots of a brace. So they would prize my feet open and then do the brace ups that will start to turn my feet out into position.

5:34 That’s in the trauma of the event, I believe. It’s kind of steered me where I’ve been, coaching, I guess, and part of the lifestyle. But being barefoot, I think trauma kind of guides us along a certain path where he takes us by the hand. Where are those boots and that whole contraption? I don’t think it’s long.

5:51 It’s really just until I guess I was up to the stage where I was standing, I guess, and then it was just in the growth stage of it. So it’s not like I had to have a frame or anything. It was just really early stages. Wow, but that’s, I mean, that’s, so your whole relationship with standing and being on your feet started with a bunch of artificial devices. I saw the real Forrest Gump, right?

6:13 But my mom would say I had such strong legs. She said it was just ridiculous. I was there, and I say I was lying on my front. I was doing hamstring curls with this brace, you know? She said you were incredibly strong.

6:26 So that’s, I think that’s in the real seed or the acorn of the event. Okay. And then I’ve always talked about, I’m not ready for endurance yet. I’m not ready for endurance yet. I’m not ready to do a really big thing.

6:43 You know, I never got old enough, do you know what I mean? How old are you now? I’m 44 now. And then I know in my 40s, I’d already thought, you know, I think I’m going to run for Land’s Engine on a Gross, but we already had stuff developing. We had another child on the way, which was Tallulah.

6:57 It’s always, you know, you have another child, you have another child. And we’ve got three daughters already. And then, December, I just said, you know, I’m gonna go and do this. I’m gonna run, I know what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna run from land’s edge to a great spot. I’m not just gonna, I’m gonna do it barefoot.

7:14 And there was a series of ceremonies that I did. And what flagged up for me was the boots that I wore as a child. And then this- What type of ceremonies? wasca ceremonies and yeah so around about that time so plant medicine okay and then within it one of them is very clear as I saw my boots and it was this message of lose the shoes so I then put it out there I can do this run and it’s gonna be like losing the shoes and then what are the shoes and what is being barefoot as a platform I’m gonna create a platform what am I connecting to and I’m running barefoot and connecting to the earth so I can’t need to there’s a bigger picture that’s that’s that’s to a sustainability run that’s make it about the environment and raise awareness for sustainability issues and the environment and raise funds for, I think, six organizations and charities that we could put it out there, this bigger picture, bigger message.

8:03 So at first it was to explore physicality and I think demonstrate human potential because there’s so much untapped there. I’ve worked with whims work and breath work and ice baths and just, it’s always surprising where you can go and where you can take the mind. And in movement, it’s always been, I’ve been in movement coach for years, and then we went down this path of living a natural lifestyle, and then the more I could connect to nature, the more I started to feel like I was unraveling this innate system.

8:33 And I think barefoot running just became there. It got to the point where I could literally run over anything, and people were like, what, how are you doing that? And it’s like, oh, I’m just tuning into what I’m doing. The more I expose myself to it, the more compliant and softer I became over terrain. So that’s where it went, it went, let’s explore the physicality and now let’s also raise awareness.

8:51 That’s kind of the, that’s where the depth that came in. When did you start barefoot running? I mean, you know, any kind of distance or playing with that hole. Well, I think as a kid, again, was the main part of it. Like all, we lived in a concrete existence.

9:05 We lived in a village and punctuated in amongst that, we’d go and play in a wreck. Gravel pits, it was called, you know, shimmer, we had to get across a bridge. It was like, literally, you’d get across with your nails and stepping across a ledge to get across it with intercity trains blasting underneath. And then we get into nature and it’s like, yeah, we kick our shoes off and we go climbing trees and get into streams, again, exploring our physicality. So that has always been a connection to me.

9:31 It’s punctuated in amongst the concrete existence nature. So that’s like rewilding in a way to an urbanite experience, which I think is wrapped in what I do again today. And then in my school, again, even on a tarmac playground, I’d be running around barefoot. If we had races, I’d run barefoot, entering my first 400-meter race. I won clearly by 150 meters.

9:53 I always had some things. And you did it barefoot. And I did it barefoot. And they let you. And they let me.

9:57 But that was in really early schooling, on grass, on a grass running track, you know. And as it started to progress, then it was no longer cool to behave like that, you see. Right. It was now cool to wear Nike’s Air Max. Then it was cool to smoke weed, and it was cool to do this, and it was cool to do that.

10:13 So suddenly all that stuff about the physicality, or being boys and lads and being a tribe. We were being that somewhere else with a different kind of normalized behavior. So that natural connection to nature and thirst to be connected to nature was taken over by a social structure. Exactly. And you wanted to conform like any adolescent does.

10:33 Because that social structure is your lifeline back in the old days. That’s what kept you alive really. So you kind of put that on hold while you became a social young man. Exactly. Okay.

10:47 Yeah. So that’s kind of, that’s again where I think I probably started barefoot running then, years roll on. And I had a Pilates studio, I had six practitioners in there, and then suddenly this guy rocks up on the scene around where we were coaching, it was a mentor of mine, which was called Dr. Nicholas Romanoff, who developed a system called the Pose Method. In the pose method, he discovered there was a track and field coach in the Soviet era.

11:16 So you can imagine they were like mega film stars, those guys at that point. They were like creating super humans, right? But he discovered a specific shape that everyone had to go to when they run, which is when the head, the chest and pelvis is aligned and the foot will literally land underneath you and then there was a certain, the pulling leg was underneath the body. So it was like if you looked at a track runner, they’re closer to it compared to to say a jogger, which is like heel to toe, head forward, hips back, like a K shape.

11:46 Whereas all the best runners were really aligned, they were like upright beings and their foot would always land underneath them never so far ahead of them. So when you analyze that, it was like, wow, this stuff’s amazing. So he started teaching him about these different running styles. Yeah, he kind of had this pose method and you do his certifications in it, like you have a pose, level one, two, three, four. We got to level three and then he exposed me to a movement system.

12:11 So Pose was never just about running, it’s a whole lifestyle thing in a movement system. So I became like one of the six people in the world to become a Pose movement specialist. And then you would look at every movement and you could apply a kind of almost a natural filter to it in the sense when you understand the posture and the shape that you should be making due to the forces, you would become more efficient and minimize risk of injury. I’m just gonna stop you for a second.

12:37 This is kinda interesting, because last year I did my Ironman 70.3, and I got a swim coach to show me how to swim, which makes sense. And I kind of got some tips on how to cycle, and I got the bike fitted to where I was. But it always struck me that I didn’t get a running coach. And I never got a running coach. It was like, go run.

12:57 And it was tracked on my Garmin and all that stuff. But I always thought to myself, I should really get someone to teach me how to run. and then I saw your video with Rich Roll out in Malibu. First, the first part when you’re at his house where you’re walking through all these different gates where at one point you’re like kicking up your leg and pulling your hamstrings and you’re walking Rich Roll, a guy that’s obviously ran some major distances, through all these different interesting techniques.

13:20 And it always made me think like, wow, that stuff is really interesting because no one ever taught me how to run. No one teaches anyone how to run. And yet, it’s really complicated, right? Yeah, well, he connected with it immediately based on swimming, so Rich was like, yeah, you know what, if this is swimming, there was almost the same language that was applied to it. Right, because he used to do butterfly.

13:40 Yeah, he kind of immediately connected to that. And it’s the same, like, you want to play golf? What did you do? You get a golf coach? You want to play tennis? You get a tennis coach.

13:48 But yeah, running is just seen as, oh, it’s a natural thing. But it is a natural thing to natural beings. So if you grow up in a tribe of influence, I call them a tribe of influence. So the tribe is who you observe the behaviors that become your behaviors. That’s the normalized stuff like me and my childhood going to nature and then suddenly what was normalized later was smoking weed and wearing Nikes, right?

14:09 Whereas the tribe of influence that you grow up in if they’re all natural born runners born to run like the Talahumara or the Hadza persistent hunters They all run the same and the characteristics are they have amazing posture and physiology They have a pulling cycle and they spend minimal time on the ground Which makes them more efficient minimizes the risk of injury because they’re not exposed to forces for so long But it also means the muscles and the tendons understand their role within that biomechanical system Yeah, so it’s like the muscles and tendons almost slave to the biomechanical shape The pattern that we offer right does this pattern look like I know the Ethiopian runners have a very You know certain type of gait and the way they run is that even more different than some of the tribes you mentioned again And if you look at Nicholas’s pose method, it’s almost like it’s textbook, right?

14:58 So it’s like a textbook thing. And what we’ll mess it up is a sedentary culture. So if you sit for periods of time, like we are now, right? If you don’t then unravel that posture by doing something that would return it back to you being bipedal, we would be walking in a different sling system or biomechanical system, because we’ve been sitting, right? So that would mean hips are stagnant, head position slightly forward. If you then walk or you run with your head forward, because of the weight of the human head, you have to put your foot out further in front of you or as you fall over. So jogging is very similar to that.

15:33 So most people when they’re jogging you see their head chasing. It’s like the head’s forward, the hips shoot back and the foot lands ahead of them. Yeah and it’s like the cave. Jogging is almost like a hybrid movement somewhere between running and walking. So one characteristic, one thing that will compromise it is sitting, and the second one is simply compliance, like rubberized footwear.

15:55 Okay. So in your, in the foot one foot is 33 joints, 26 bones, 100 muscles tend in the ligaments and up to 200,000 receptors, which is the equivalent of what you have in your hand. We just tuck them away, right? So if you were to then, Brian, if you get a piece of paper and you put your foot on a piece of paper and you draw around it with a black marker pen, you should hope that the toe box, the toe area of your foot is wide and the heel is narrow. If you were to get your footwear right now, and you put that on a piece of paper and you draw around it, the heel is now the wider part and the toe box is more narrow. So if you imagine function follows form, but footwear, modern footwear, is creating deformity because it’s getting all the toe box of the toes, squashing them in place, and then you understand forces.

16:41 So we then take, in running two times your body weight in ground reaction forces. So what happens when you add more force to a muscular structure? It gets stronger in the adaptation to do with the forces, right? So if you shape it like this, you make it stronger in that shape. So that’s the foundation of your superstructure.

17:00 That’s the first stage with compromising running shoes. They’re too narrow in the toe box. The second stage is the rubber itself dumbs down the transient impact or the signal that your movement brain should get to tell you which shape you need to make due to the forces, which is kinematics in a way. Kinematics is the forces, kinematics are shapes that you make due to those forces. So that then will enable you to land on areas of your feet you’re simply not designed to load and in running really is the heel.

17:30 The heel is for walking, you have three rocking actions in your ankle, you have a heel rocker, you have an ankle rocker and then you have a forefoot rocker, it’s like one, two, three. When we run, we should be using two actions, which is an ankle rocker and a forefoot, so you land flat foot and then go onto the forefoot. And when you sprint, it’s more forefoot. So it’s like, and it just so happens that there’s ground reaction force that’s involved with running.

17:53 There’s like one times your body weight when you walk, two times your body weight when you run, and three times your body weight when you sprint. And there’s like three rocking actions, it’s like. Why shouldn’t you hit your heel when you run? because you’re not designed to take forces there. It’s a rocking action that’s available for walking.

18:10 And incidentally, it just means that then you’ll spend longer time on the ground so the ankle joint isn’t designed to take force in that shape and you redirect forces elsewhere. So I’d say the injury that’s available from that is the knee, so the knee’s the joint that will take the forces. So if the ankle can’t offer its role of absorption, which is kind of the Achilles tendon and the planty surface of your foot, if that’s wiped out by heel striking, you have to redirect that force somewhere else.

18:41 The 50% comes from the knee, 50% comes from the lower extremity. If I can’t offer that from the appropriate angle, dorsiflexion that’s available at that moment in loading, it will go into the knee, so, yeah, major knee injuries caused through running. And if you have a- Jogging. Jogging, okay. And if you do run in a K shape, I’m guessing that shape by definition has inefficiencies as well.

19:04 Well yeah, so if I’m, if my head’s forward and my hips back, we’ll identify that the foot has to land ahead because otherwise you’ll fall over. Right. So if I’m in a complete straight line like that, it means that it’s the difference between my foot landing here and my foot landing here, right? So the time that I spend on the ground there is the inefficiency, from going from the heel rocker to get to a flat footed position then coming off, when I could just be going and flatten off, flatten off.

19:33 So I’m literally just an object that’s falling, and then I’m just changing support underneath it. The closest example would be like a unicycle. Imagine you got one foot at the top, one foot at the bottom, and you just got to go on top, and you just keep going in that direction. So all you’re doing is just with your feet, you just keep pulling your feet, and you just keep falling. It’s the most efficient thing there is.

19:52 And that’s what was enabling me to go and do 30 miles a day. I’d just be upright, and just keep pulling my feet underneath me. Okay, which made it much more efficient. Yeah, you’re much more efficient. And again, because you’re aligned with nature.

20:05 So you align yourself with the correct shape, which helps you deal with the forces, which then helps you deal with the right muscle and tendon actions. So it has to be more efficient. But the other thing was breathing. So I’d work a lot with breath work. So I’d started taping up my mouth and just nasal breathing.

20:23 And which meant to start with in training, I’d go from like eight minute miles, and then I started taping and that went to 10 minute miles. And then over time, the aerobic threshold changed again. And I started to then, that started to creep in, so I got back down to eight minute miles by nasal breathing. And I just stretched that aerobic threshold. I was told that nasal breathing was kind of an old way to train different cardio zones before you had like a garment.

20:50 Because you know if your nasal breathing, your heart rate has to be in a certain range. Exactly. Is that kind of what it was originally used for? Yeah, because if you start pushing your anaerobic and you know you start mouth breathing. Then you’re using other stores again.

21:01 So if I wanna remain aerobic, my primary source being oxygen, I just nasal breathe and just keep it there. And taping just stops you from going beyond that. Yeah, and for anyone training endurance, they try to really push you in the aerobic zone and build that up. That’s what I was told to do for the Ironman. Yeah, so like Lydiard’s work, Arthur Lydiard was a great, well Lord is one of the great track and field coaches in New Zealand coach.

21:27 And so he was taking, just in the 50s and 60s, he was taking average track guys and turning them into Olympians, like Peter Schnell and people like that. And it was all aerobic running, so it’s like volume, but he had other programs in there about out and back, so it was about intensity. But he would have people doing like what Mo Farah does, he’d do like 100 miles a week, but all aerobic, right? And you’re stretching the aerobic zone. And that’s where the term jogging came from, so he coined the phrase jogging.

21:54 But it wasn’t jogging, we know changing the shape, it was just you basically keep it as an aerobic work. And then you put that out to the masses. So everyone picked up then this term jogging, it was about aerobic running. And for people that don’t know, how do you explain the difference between aerobic and anaerobic? Well aerobic, again, using your primary source, which would be oxygen.

22:18 And if I start going, so imagine one’s oxygen and one’s starved of oxygen. So this is, I remain, I’m efficient. I use oxygen. The other one, I’ve now stopped using oxygen. I’m gonna start using other systems.

22:31 So I have to start using other fuel, which is great short term. So say at the end of my runs, if I wanted to finish, then that’s okay. I’ll just burn off my stores and I’ll do a sprint finish. That’s now, I’m now like breathing’s like up here and it’s almost like a form of fight and flight I’m gonna go into and I’ll blow off all my stores. It doesn’t matter, I’m done.

22:50 But if you start blowing off stores too early, You know, then you then you’re in trouble aren’t you that’s nice like you hit the wall within your training. So things like sprinting Fighting these are all anaerobic anaerobic Whereas these endurance sports should be more aerobic if you want to have any chance of competing and I think in Rich’s book. Yeah Finding ultra he said that in the very beginning he struggled to train his aerobic He would go out there and like try to run and try to go up a mountain and he would get into anaerobic And he had to really like slow himself down and pace it to build the aerobic zone Yeah, as opposed to not just go into the anaerobic exactly and that’s that’s the endurance Okay, being able to stretch that and then you can be out there for longer. Why don’t top track athletes take their shoes off Why doesn’t Usain Bolt take his shoes off?

23:39 Well track shoes are different anyway track shoes are pretty minimal They’re like there’s nothing to them and spikes right what I’d like to see is the shape of them change, right? Okay, where there’s the heel change not the heel just the shape of the toe box because they’re still quite narrow Why are our toes? Is it just an aesthetic? It’s aesthetic. It’s just a meme Somebody built a shoe that way and we kept on actually I think because I work with Evo barefoot Which like a shoe brand that they’re about return. They’re about creating foot shaped shoes. So we have a foot shaped foot Unfortunately shoes over time create a shoe shaped foot That makes sense. Yeah, and I’m one with a foot shape foot and then you become exactly what’s really interesting when you look at There’s a shop in Hampstead, they sell kids’ shoes right around the corner from the tube station between that and Artichoke.

24:20 That’s kiddie shoes in the window. Have a look at the young kids’ shoes, the really young kids, like the toddlers, they’re wide. And you start to see, as the kids get a bit older, the shoes get more narrow. So we’re actually conditioning the kids, which is no different to what the Chinese are doing by binding fit. We’re literally just, and we have Vivo Barefoot, they say they, you looked at shoe lasts, the lasts are what they, the molds to make shoes.

24:44 And they deliberately get more narrow as you get older, like for children. And it’s acidic, so it makes the shoe look, the foot look more elegant within that pattern. That’s strange. I know, I just bought a pair of Gucci shoes the other day and I looked at them and they’re really narrow because it’s that Italian look, but it’s not very comfortable again. Well, if you wanna create a superstructure, what do you have to do?

25:09 You have to look at the foundations. And you’re an active guy, right? So we need to say, well, for me, it’s not about what I run in. So a lot of the time I say to people, look, for me, it was never about running in Vivo Barefoot or Barefoot shoes. It’s about living in them.

25:26 Because 80% of my day will be in footwear. So it’s what I do throughout the day. I can’t just, imagine hunter-gatherers or the Tarahumara, they’re like wearing compromising Gucci’s throughout the day. And then they go, well, we’re gonna go Barefoot running in persistent hunting now. Let’s take them off, let’s go Barefoot running and expect a natural outcome.

25:43 So it’s almost, it’s throughout the day, it’s that everyday habits within habitats that will either be nourishing and enable you to thrive or more compromising. That’s the way I look at it now, you know? Okay, and the extreme example of that is women’s high heels where it’s even more restrictive. Calf muscles aren’t working. I mean, you know. Absolutely.

26:03 I mean, like, you know, my missus, she’ll want to wear her heels for about 20 minutes. It’s over. It’s crazy though, isn’t it? Yeah, but again, that’s all. But again, that’s what’s normalized.

26:12 Yeah, it’s just normal. So, for people listening to us, I mean, a lot of people listening probably enjoy a run every now and then. Yeah. What’s the most important thing they need to know about all of the IP you’re talking about here, especially if they wanna learn more or try something new, you know, or try to, I don’t know, try to normalize their feet, whether it means running or anything. Is there something you have your students do?

26:35 Yeah, there’s an assistant called Toga, which is like toad drills, yoga, foot yoga, That’s about understanding the leverage and balance points, loading points of the feet, and getting that toe that’s been pushed into a shoe shape, the great toe and bringing it out slightly. So the great toe is like four times denser, thicker than all the other little toes. So it’s designed for load and pivoting. So we need to get it out slightly in line for where it should be.

27:03 And if you look at a natural foot or a wild foot, or my feet, for instance, that big big toes in one straight line, it doesn’t deviate. That then, beyond that, is to just keep the mobility and strength within the feet. So as often as you can, just get your shoes off, start moving them, playing with them, falling back in love with them, and understanding that try and use a keypad with rubber underneath your hand and your fingers pulled together. You can’t, but again, there’s the same mechanics in the feet.

27:33 So it’s understanding that, yeah, if we start to mobilize them, rewild them in that sense. So there’s the tutorials I have where we can put some links in for stuff like that. Yeah. What about going barefoot? We have a mutual friend, Timothy Sheef, and he took me up to Mount Snowdon about a month ago, and of course he picks me up at the train station, Barefoot.

27:49 He used to roll up to my studio back in the day, Barefoot, on the tube, Barefoot, walking around London, Barefoot. Do you do that? Do you encourage people to do that, or is that an extreme? I think, you know, for most, it raises too many socially extreme eyebrows, you know? 30 feet, and it just.

28:06 No, I go wherever, if I feel like being barefoot, I’ll be barefoot, but at the same time, you might as well wear a footwear that’s a barefoot design. Okay. That’s wide enough in the toe box that has a casual, smart wear, training wear. It’s never the same as being barefoot, but you have to remember that what I discovered on my run, see, as much as I promote being barefoot and I love barefoot running, you know, there’s debris. There’s stuff from the zoo culture that doesn’t exist in nature, right?

28:39 So the glass and the, God knows what else is sometimes out there. You split your foot open, didn’t you, on your run? And if you, yeah, and you know what, it’s never on the, that’s the road and the tarmac. I’m always, I do that all day. It’s just, that stuff gets pushed into the grass verd.

28:53 You’re going in the grass verd, you don’t know what’s lurking in there, do you know what I mean? So there’s- That’s what’s dangerous. That’s what can be dangerous. But there’s certain things that are said for being barefoot grounding. You’ve got microbiome.

29:03 There’s a sensory system, there’s a microbiotic system there, and there’s a grounding element to it. There’s so much more available from it. I think, get out in nature, if you’re on the heath, why wear shoes? There’s no debris around that place, around the bins maybe. But then you’re exposing yourself to something that’s much deeper, which is, again, microbiome.

29:26 There’s the grounding experience of it. But we’re a sensorial being, right? So our senses come alive from that. So if we look at, let’s say, sensory genomics, which is a field about neuroplasticity in a way, we live in linear boxes. We survive in a linear box.

29:45 Every experience is the same. We’re going to go from this linear box into another linear box on a linear piece of transport into the next linear box, go and lie down on a bed, get up again, go and repeat the same process. So there’s no new sensorial experience within that. or we’re not neurologically rewiring or wiring the brain, which hence would be stagnation. If we look at that for neurological diseases, I think there’s a big problem that amounts through that, which might be dementia, it might be anything that can come through that because you’re not in a state of taking on new sensory information.

30:18 Even down to our hands, everything is flat. You use screens, we use phones. Everything is the same linear surface and we’re becoming even more and more sensory deprived. So sensory deprivation can lead a neurological disease, right? So just getting out into nature.

30:32 Firstly, it’s just seeing. Nature is forever changing. It’s never the same scene. Never put your foot in the same stream, right? It’s always changing.

30:40 But it’s the same as even the leaves on the trees. It’s forever changing. Nature never remains the same. So one walk on the heath will never be the same. So that’s a new experience.

30:50 I often believe in that. So I think getting the shoes off and just experiencing everything through that sensory system. Now you can bring like Zach Bush’s work in by looking at microbiome and what you can be absorbing through that as well. Okay, do you suggest that people like go slow? Like so I’m on the heath like every weekend, but I’m in my shoes.

31:08 Yeah. So I can’t, if I just throw them off and go a mile in the heath, am my feet gonna get all busted up and I’m gonna make, am I gonna be like, you know, tip toeing along? Or should I start with like a couple hundred meters and then do another hundred the next weekend? Or should I just dive all the way in? The really interesting thing would be, because I want to blindfold you, right?

31:26 Okay. and walk you around on the heath because you take away the visual aspect which just looking at the ground is enough to create that kind of experience which creates more tension. So imagine if there’s rock and there’s you, who gives? Rock or you? I guess it’s me.

31:49 It has to be you. But the visual stimulation of that rock, if there’s spikes or something on it, will create more tension. So instead of you giving, you start to become hard on hard, therefore it hurts more. On top of that, the average foot, because it’s been contained within a shoe shape, all has rubber underneath it. Because of the rubber, you actually become a stiff component.

32:12 So if you were to wear a conventional running shoe that’s soft, and you went for a walk on hard surface, the hard surface is hard, the rubber gives, and you become stiff above it. There’s the compliance and stiffness within it. So when you take that rubberized footwear away that you’ve been conditioned into, domesticated into, there’s a process you have to go through to be able to understand how to become compliant again. And I think that becomes like breathing, mindfulness, maybe choosing terrain to begin with, it’s like grass and impacted earth, and then tarmac’s really lovely.

32:47 Tarmac is really surprising. A really smooth bit of tarmac, it’s beautiful to walk on and run on. And then you learn how to become compliant again. The thing is learning to become soft and compliant. Like if you work on hard surfaces, you’ve done a bit of Edo’s work, right?

33:02 If you become, if you have a hard surface, how do you become compliant on that surface? You keep working on the surface and you have to become soft and it’s the same with being barefoot. You can literally run over anything if you can trust that innate system. We look at, you know, we think the Range Rover is sophisticated, right? Oh, it can calibrate.

33:21 We can work. Suspension can change over anything. Okay, go and run on sand, go and run on concrete, go and run on mud, go and run on any trail, and we have a far superior suspension system available. Once you surrender to it, or you understand how to rewild that kind of nature, that innate stuff, I think we have so much that human potential is untapped. So I think you have to go through a process, which for me is always I call it rewilding.

33:47 It’s like, how do we get from that stage to that stage? I think first one would be to go to, firstly is to rewilding exercise, toga for the feet, wear barefoot footwear to allow your feet to open up, everyday wear. And then when you are in nature, just say the soft stuff, right, let’s start with that because that’s compliant, you know, and then you can start trying to, and then start to just play with different surfaces. And I think play, you know, play is like we lose sight of it, it’s like, you know, reps, counting reps and whatever, just stay within a playful state.

34:17 Look at my kids, they just play all day, right? They don’t go to school, they’re unschooled so they just literally play. They’re in a state of play and they learn everything they need to learn from their environment through a state of play. So I think keeping it in that playful state will help as well. I look at running as not a physical, not even a physical experience, it’s way beyond that.

34:36 It’s like a spiritual, social, playful, I enter other realms of it. I don’t see it as, alright, okay, it’s reps, miles, heart rate, blood pressure. I haven’t worn a heart rate monitoring. I don’t know how long don’t wear a garment. Just go and play That’s an interesting way of looking at it And again, you did a great video with rich roll where you were out on the trails And I think rich looked at your feet afterwards and he’s expecting to see these big calloused like bare feet and they’re not They’re actually quite these soft because they’ve had to soften right, you know, it’s counterintuitive. It’s complete. Yes You know you you Become desensitized by wearing footwear. It’s the opposite isn’t it to what we think you create more sensitivity Which then you learn the skills to deal with the terrain through the senses And so even now like my feet have developed through that run there. There’s like pads It’s because they become like jelly and there was a moment when the between the big toe and the second toe started to wear a bit thin And then you see a bit of the blood vessels and it was looking it wasn’t looking gray But again, the adaptation again, it’s like a whole new pad and it’s soft again and my feet just heal very quickly you know, but it has to be Again, I think it’s exposure. You have to expose you have to expose them, right?

35:56 Okay, and so just to talk about this run you had never really done anything like this endurance wise before I was in the military So we did a fair bit but not Not to this degree. No, this is kind of like right. This is what I’m doing. So it’s all mined for me It was like I had to commit to doing it. Ross would have said, you know, like Ross said, naive enough to start, stubborn enough to finish, right?

36:21 This is Ross Edgley who swam around the UK. So people would say to me, you know, how do you think it’s gonna be? You’re not worried about, no, no, I’m not worried. It’s a marathon a day for 30 days. More than marathon, right?

36:33 So I’ve been working on my physiology, my techniques down, I’ve got really strong form. I’m not concerned about the physicality. I’m more concerned about the itinerary, the logistics of it, right? You know, being where we needed to be, accommodation. My wife and kids are traveling with me.

36:50 Katerina’s like eight months pregnant. It was like, oh my God, we gotta get all this right. But were you running a lot before you did this? Well, I trained a fair bit for it, because I started, and the seed kind of was planted in December. So come already January, I was just going out.

37:06 I’d start, from our house to Regent’s Park running track was two and a half miles. 10 laps for Regent’s Park, it’s a small track, that’s two and a half miles. A lap of the outer circle Regent’s Park, it’s two and a half miles. And I’d run home two and a half miles. So I’d do that barefoot, right?

37:21 So that was like 10 milers. So I was doing 10 milers and I’d get to 100 miles a week. So I was putting in 100 miles a week, going on half Liddyard stuff. Then I’d do out and back. So I’d go out and I’d get back in a certain time, try and get back in the same time.

37:34 And then it became, I’d do 10 miles, I’ll pause, I’ll do 10 miles. So I trained everything into 10 mile segments. And that’s how I set up the run. I basically just said, I’m just basically gonna run 10 miles. I’ll do 10 miles, I’ll pause, a little bit of fuel, gonna do 10 miles.

37:51 A little bit of fuel, gonna do 10 miles. But I also, because I wanted to make this run about sustainability in the environment, I then set up interviews with sustainability experts, right? Podcasts, I thought I’d start a podcast, this is the platform too. not really appreciating the level of what you have to do to hold space for an interview, right, to be present in that moment after doing 20 miles, it’s mainly 20 miles, and some of the days I had to run 20 miles flat rather than my 10 milers to get to a point to be able to sit down and get the mics out.

38:25 Okay. So there was, you know, there was a fair bit going on. So were you able to, were you trying to podcast every day or every few days? No, we lined it up so there was certain, If some of them didn’t work out, there’s a few that just didn’t work. It just wasn’t happening, timing-wise.

38:41 But we recorded a fair bit of content there. And then James, who was supporting me, was basically recording the content, and then he put it out. So yeah, it was. Okay. What was the biggest realization or observation from doing this?

38:54 Was it tougher than you thought it was? More doable? Where were you at? At 10 days? Where were you at at 20 days?

39:01 And where were you at at 30 days? So there were moments in it. I there was day four was an interesting one. I kind of I was expecting it to happen But maybe not so soon was the moment the realization when you wake up guys what we’re doing today But everything was just perfect. It was like I There was there was nothing to it. It was like oh my god. It’s great And I felt like I’d become the process so I have this saying which is trust the process respect the process be patient whilst in The process and when you finally figure out that it’s all process just be, right? That’s all we need to do, right? And it all came together. So what I did, I then grabbed my phone and I shoved that out into the world on Instagram stories, right? So what did I do? I stopped being the process, right? And I’d immediately gone from being in divinity of, like, on the process, actually feeling it and just going, right, I’m now become the run to dictator, right?

40:00 That’s that was the moment for me. It’s like yeah, look at look at me everyone I’ve suddenly become the process right and there’s only one way to go from that and that’s the victim. So he thorne entered my heel like within minutes of that exposure and It went right in the medial part of my heel, which then it was so it’s so paper. I couldn’t get it out. So It meant I started to load the outside of my foot when you understand the behavior of the foot and we know that the big toe is four times denser and thicker than all the other toes, which is the smallest, the little toe. And I’m loading the outside of my foot. So 120 miles later, my foot starts to balloon on my left side. It starts to look quite inflamed. And I’m like, oh, shit, this is like, this is a moment. So this is like, we’re at day eight now. And my right side, it overcompensated for the left side. So the pad got really thin. And it almost got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t put my feet on the floor, it was too tender.

41:03 And this realization of, oh shit, this could be over right now, we’re only on day eight. Never planned it out. There’s no way I thought this would happen because my physicality was strong, my technique was down. I’d just become the process, right? All this stuff is lined up.

41:20 And what’s going through your mind? I mean… Adversity. It’s like the true level of adversity. my whole philosophy and everything I talked about was now on the line.

41:29 So is the ego in play here? The ego is in play the moment I’ve gone from being in divinity, being the process, to being the dictator. Is the ego in play a little bit when you say, I’m going to go do this in 30 days? I mean, at some point you have to now do what you say and people are going to potentially judge you and you’re all your work on that. Yeah.

41:50 So that’s also being a little out of the process. Well, it is a little bit out of the process, but there was an honest belief system within it. And it was a belief of… But it does raise the stakes. I can do this.

42:00 There’s a belief that I had so much… I would have put money on it. There’s so much within me who had said, I am this process, this is what I’m going to be doing. I just never in my wildest dreams thought that in all the barefoot running I’ve done, I’ve never had a thorn like that in my heel. that it was just that, it was perfectly timed.

42:23 It was everything it needed to be. And I arrived back home and my kids were there, and it was the first time Milly saw me crying, as I had a proper soul. I was like, oh my God, this is like, and it was just, it was like the end of me at that moment, you know, when you go into that real dark, and I call it the pain cave. And I went into the pain cave, and I always said, there’s a grizzly bear at the back of the pain cave. And the grizzly bear’s really, really wise, and you sit down with them, And you get the most profound lessons in adversity.

42:53 People are so fearful of it, but it’s the place to go because you learn so much about yourself. Or what I discovered is just process. Again, it’s just about, I have to get back into being the process. So in this particular moment in time, the pain cave was my process. And then my daughter, Lola, got me out of it and she said, you’re not gonna quit, are you, Papa?

43:13 And it was enough for go. Okay. She came in the cave and she just took my hand and she pulled me out. Did the grizzly bear say anything to it? was just cool with that. It just brought me out into the light. The dialogue I had with the grizzly bear was, the grizzly bear said, you’re far more powerful than I am. You have a choice. You can go in and out the cave. I’m stuck back here. So it’s basically we have all the tools we need. So I then went into the stuff I know, which is the breath work, the meditation, and was to get my mind into the process of what was healing rather other than, oh no, what if I can’t do this?

43:50 So it was just the flipping of the switch of understanding what it is I needed to do. So that was all in the first week. So you pushed through that and got back to a normal gate? Yeah, I did. We took, I think, two days out for that and then I had to make up the mileage.

44:07 So we then started to do extra mileage each day. So I then went back out on the road after that. Second week again, I started to feel amazing. What I started to see was the process and the path, and I understood procrastination and procrastination and time. So we would get up in the morning, and we were always living in a location for four days.

44:34 So my catarina and the girls wouldn’t have to keep moving every single day. We would be 60 miles each side of a location. but because of this two-day blip it meant that we had to really work to get back to start to build the mileage in again to get closer to what was the accommodation and we’d leave super early but someone is like 5.30 in the morning we get to the start point and I would start procrastinating I’ll be sitting there I’m like I don’t have a tea any food you have a bit of food and James is looking at the watch and he’s getting frustrated he’s like come on tell me we left this side I said I go when I’m ready man I go when I’m ready and then I get my feet out and I’d put them out and I’d stand up. And this one particular day all came together.

45:15 I walked across the road and there was a farm across the road. James had driven off. I’d spent probably an hour going through this, what I thought was just procrastination. And then the farmer’s suddenly there, waiting for me. And he’s like, what are you doing?

45:29 So I start to explain. I’m saying, half an hour talking again. And I have no concern with time at this point. I said, whatever, you know, I’ll do the 30 miles whenever. He’s way heading, and I said, oh, here’s my coordinates.

45:40 Here’s the next 10 miles. I don’t really know. To be honest with you, I just get sent these 10 mile coordinates, and that’s where I’m running to each stage. Oh, there’s an amazing Tibetan monastery up the road here.

45:52 Have a look at it. It’s nine miles up. Now, had I not procrastinated, that farmer would not be there, I wouldn’t have gone to the Tibetan monastery. And then day by day, I was seeing things like that, because again, I started to go into what was the process of the event, rather than domesticating myself into time, right, I need to be here at this particular time, I need to leave at this time, and the more and more I let go of that and surrender to the process, the more and more things I got to see, the more and more people that were available, and the more and more people that were available when I needed them to be there, and the conversations were available when they needed to be there.

46:26 So that’s a, is that a metaphor for life? You know? So you have a process, you have a goal, but you didn’t want to be too rigid in the accomplishment of that goal. So governed by time right and I think because we have these tight restraints of time How much are we strengths as well? You’re missing, right? You still have 30 days I don’t have 30 day but within that allowing yourself to have less structure. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, just team Did you know I’ve had people on here before David Goggins comes to mind where he pushes his body so much that at some point the body Realizes that oh, this is the new normal and it kind of gives up trying to protest and resist yeah do you ever have an experience of that where the body understood oh we’re gonna be doing this for the foreseeable future so kind of get used to it. Well that’s what came in as I say I think it came in on day day four but it was really early for me okay you know and I wasn’t expecting it to be this really caught me by surprise and that’s I immediately put it out there I’m really surprised that this is happening I wanted to I wanted to blog the whole journey and be out there at every part of the process rather than it be, I’m this superhero, this is what I’m doing and I wanted people to see every part of it, how grueling it would be and here’s me sobbing in my hands, here’s me this, this is what it’s actually like and it delivered 100% the whole experience.

47:50 I got to see a multi-faceted personality at yourself, from moment to moment, internal dialogue It was just incredible, the learning, the wisdom, everything that was coming through about the process, which is about the path again, you know? Yeah, I mean, so I started- So it’s, again, just to go there, it’s beyond a physical thing for me. Right, no, and I get that. It’s a rite of passage. I called it a pilgrimage, I think, by the time it got to the latter part of the run, because I was seeing so much and feeling so much and really just surrendering to everything, that it became the pilgrimage.

48:28 I just felt like a different being. Fascinating. One of our neighbors in Hampstead, Rupert Sheldrake, is big on pilgrimages, and in his age, he’s walking them now, but he’s, it’s something we used to do from a religious context, but he believes that a lot of these spiritual practices that we’ve thrown out the window as we’ve given them at our religion are still important to us as humans. Pilgrimage is important for many reasons, so anyways, good to sit down and talk to him about that as far as why that was significant for you and a rite of passage and…

48:58 Yeah, again, I think they’re rites of passage, like we talk about plant medicine and stuff like that, and some of the ceremonies, they’re rites of passage, aren’t they? Yeah. I think they’re really valuable. But I often look at, I’ve often in the past looked at them as, I’ve taken, they’ve been from a spiritual context for me, right? So I’ve worked with the Sonoran Desert toad, massive just awakening of kind of a rite of passage for me, it felt exactly that what it needed to be.

49:24 But this was beyond that because it was a daily breaking down, daily breaking down that physiology, daily breaking down of the mind, just showing every bit of emotion would come up. There’d be days when I’m just, I was just basically running along and everything stripped. I felt like I’d stripped everything that wasn’t serving me for that purpose, right? Physically, emotionally. And to the point I could be running along and I’d just start sobbing, right?

49:47 I’m just running along and crying, but not sadness, not anything, just everything, just whatever it was, it would just come up. Yeah, you know, yeah, we just deep And so look I had glimpses into this last year when I was I was training for the half Iron Man and I was I would Just do these you know Weekly 22k runs out on the heath and I had never really done this before but I found the same thing happening I would go through these whole emotional processes first I would bargain with myself in the beginning like oh my knee hurts. We better stop at 5k Oh, I didn’t get my nutrition this morning And once I got over that con man, I would make it through to the 10 the 12 14 and then I would start having these deep Conversations and usually around 18 20 kilometers tears streaming down my my face But like you said not like in this mortified sad way victim. Yeah, I was just like beauty my joyous Isn’t it joyous release?

50:44 Emotion but like a beautiful emotion like a cleansing thing to where I was just like wow and that happened a lot when I was running and I was processing a lot of darkness from my past and things that I went through and people I let down and it was so important and you know I kept running after I did the Ironman because I really treasured those runs but my problem was and unless you have a real need to do the hard training as in you have a goal you will maybe not do it as often so I did that for a while the 20 kilo runs, and then they kind of slowed down to 10s, and every now and then I’ll do a big one, but I didn’t necessarily keep it up, but it was definitely cleansing emotionally, and I didn’t feel that on swims or bikes. Yeah, that’s what I feel when you hear about Taro Humano again, and they’re talking about that it’s such a spiritual thing, isn’t it, running, and it’s about their technique, and they’re always refining it, and I think rather than looking at training for needing an event, it’s trying to refine that technique.

51:47 How do I make it better and better and better and better? More efficient. How do I really work and keep going there? So I think that’s where the work can be as well. I’m not training for the event, but just refinement, trying to make it really refining, honing a technique.

52:03 Well, I’m gonna have to just see if I can get some of your time for some actual infield training, because I saw what you were doing with Rich, and it looked really fascinating, and I’d love to play with that because I do this with my swimming. I kept swimming now, and I love refining my technique in the pool. That’s sometimes the only way I can actually get my get through it is because I’m just thinking about all these different motions and how can I be more efficient and that would be, I’d love to bring that to my running because it’s something strong.

52:28 So the last couple days you had some observations. What was the penultimate and ultimate day like for you? And at that point, could you see you were gonna make it and what did you see? What were the emotions? I’m thrown out again on day 26.

52:45 So day 26, towards the end of the day, you know, already we’re 26 days in, I’m fatigued. And I go off-piste a bit and I end up in the woods and I have to get across a stream. And normally, in my technique would be, I just keep pulling my foot from the ground. So for trail running, it’s amazing. You can literally just literally get, you’re thinking about getting your feet up rather than loading them.

53:05 Okay. So you literally just ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, keep pulling. Okay. Pull them off, pull them off.

53:10 Pull them off. There was like a rock there on the stream, and I’d gone from this one to this one, loaded this one, didn’t get it off, rock moved, inked in my ankle. So I created an upper ankle strain on the left side, carried on, you know, didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t know it was an upper ankle strain for starters, just carried on running. And then suddenly it was like, wow, this is tender.

53:35 And then it felt like my whole shin was just screaming and just going under tension. So I was going into breath and relaxation, it was like, no, I have to walk for a bit. And then walking become too painful, I go back to running. Running would be okay, then it would become too painful, I’d go back to walking. And I tried to get through mileage that way, and just working with breath and trying to relax it.

53:54 And in the end it was like, I can’t move my ankle, it’s just horrendous. So James, James, you’re going to have to pick me up, we’re going to have to quit for today, and we’ll go back out tomorrow. And then it just became more apparent again, so my ankle, I called it a can-call, my angle are just, boom, it’s ballooned. And then my whole foot had ballooned. And then so I looked like I had, like the film The Nutty Professor, it looked, or a Hulk foot, it just suddenly the whole thing, like my toenails a little, they could pop off.

54:23 Wow. It’s like, wow, this is nuts. So then I went into again, okay, this is like, you’re kidding me, it’s like day 27 tomorrow, right at the end, and I can’t even stand on this thing, you know? So then, then it was adversity moment again, Back in the pain cave, how quickly can I get out of it? So straight into breath work, straight into meditation.

54:44 And I’d set up three baths that I’d try to, I’d do hot with apple cider vinegar, boom, in there. Then ice, then epsom salts, it was like potassium, ice, magnesium, and I’d keep looking at it, got the inflammation down, drinking loads of turmeric teas, CBD oil, rest. Everyone had gone out, that it was realized that we have to go. And so that was day 27 was taken out again. So then I’d lost to make up 30 plus whatever was over, I think 45 miles we’d lost, I had to make that up.

55:19 And there’s two days left, you know? About three days, 28, 29, 30. So already the next day, I was like, I’m just going, no matter what. And then I wrote a post about it just saying, this is happening. But if I have to crawl it, I’ll crawl it.

55:37 I’m doing this in 30 days, this is my challenge, right? So then it became down to time, and then time became something within the run. So day 27 I went off and I did, day 28 I did 30 miles, and then I arrived back, and the same thing, the ankle started to creep up again, the information started, back to ice, back to this. And then it was the realization, Well, with an upper ankle strain, I had to basically tape the tibialis and the fibula together.

56:12 So I did that. So I used K tape and just taped the upper ankle together. And then went and did 47 miles the next day on that. But all mined again, it was so interesting. I think it was just off the back of not being able to run up.

56:27 People say, what was the hardest part of the run? Well, the hardest part of the run was day 27. forget what had happened at the beginning. This was like so close to the end. That was the hardest day because it was so close to finishing.

56:41 And the realization was we all need to be running, you know? It was the hardest day because you didn’t get to run. Because I couldn’t run, right? Just could not run in it. And so the best day turned out to be day 20.

56:56 It was the best day out of the whole thing was day 29, which was this 47 mile. Everything was just amazing. I was seeing the most insane things. At one point, firstly, I felt like I had ancestors with me. So I went down this thing of, oh, my ancestors were me.

57:10 And it gave me goosebumps. And then I looked, and there was this wind, but none of the trees were moving but one tree. I was like, what the fuck? You know, it was like one tree moving and amongst all of this. And then this thing about my ancestors, and then this internal dialogue about Nordic Celts and all kinds of stuff going off.

57:25 And it just felt present, something was there with me. And then I reached another area, And then I started to think about my grandfather. And my grandfather had just a terrible upbringing, come from Newcastle. His father committed suicide post First World War, PTSD. Wow.

57:47 It had just a really hard upbringing. It was part of a, they were barefoot kids. They had no money for shoes or anything like that, can you imagine? Right, there’s a link there, I guess. Yeah.

57:57 And they were part of a gang of kids that were still coal from the coal trucks. they were branded as well, right? So this, I mean, proper hardship. And he walked from Newcastle down to Slough Trading Estate, like a satchel, just a change of underwear in it. That was it, had nothing.

58:13 So his strength and just that courage and everything, I felt was with me. That was how I was doing what I was doing. And it felt like he was with me. And again, this ancestor kind of goosebumps came with me. Literally felt like he was on my shoulder the whole time.

58:29 And then I looked across and there was a sign for Glamorangi distillery, and that was my grandfather’s drink. He used to drink Glamorangi, like subtle things like that occurring. Other times there’s internal dialogue was, well, you didn’t think we were gonna make that, make this that easy for you, did you? You were taking the easier, you were just doing 30 miles a day. That’s, you know, but it doesn’t mean it’s not gonna come of its rewards.

58:57 And I looked across and it was just this incredible rainbow at that moment. And then Katerina had messaged me because she saw me on my story saying, look at this, just look at this rainbow, it’s incredible. And she said, in her message, there’s your reward. You know, there’s just certain things are just aligned along that last day. So day that 47 miler, it’s an ultra, but it was just beautiful.

59:21 There were moments in it. If that was the last day it would have been, that would have just been perfect. You got to the point where James was waiting for me the end because it got dark and I wasn’t geared up for the dark because we weren’t sure how long I was going to be out. And that was kind of the main roads that was just coming into real highlands kind of thing. And you would see the signs then for John O’Groats. And I just felt I needed, I could keep going. I think we should keep going, James. It’s not going to be safe, man, running as you ask. But, man, I feel amazing. I almost felt I could complete it in that moment, and the disappointment of getting back in the car.

59:58 And then waking up the next day, it was almost like the come down from that. It took me so long to kinda get into the process of the run. But we also left on the penultimate day, that 47 mile, we thought we had 55 miles to go, but we didn’t. The next morning we discovered it’s 57 miles. And getting through that process of that mileage, The last two miles were quite possibly the hardest miles of the whole run.

1:00:25 How bad? Just brutal. It was like the terrain,

1:00:34 Basically, what do we have? Dark, do you mean darkness? Like pitch black, or in John and Groats, there’s nothing there. Just you had starlight, that was it. And Sonny James wasn’t there, so I didn’t realize he’d gone back to pick up Katerina and the girls to come and meet me.

1:00:48 The other interesting thing, Because I was saying I was running in 10 mile markers. When it got to 100 miles, I programmed in John and Groats and it was 100 miles. And that 100 miles felt like the 10 mile markers. The 65 miles felt like, oh, I’ve got the 10K to go and do. And you could see it chipping away.

1:01:10 But again, the last two miles felt like almost like the last two miles of each day. The last two miles are always very interesting for me. And then I get to the last mile, and then it was the last mile for the last mile. This is great. And then the kids did the last 500 yards with me.

1:01:25 Okay. But the very last two miles were hard. They were harsh. I mean, coming into three miles because there was no one there, and it was just dark. It was really dark.

1:01:32 I had a tiny little head torch on, which was more about alerting traffic. That’s what I’m doing. Yeah. So you’d have these cars just tearing past. But going into the conversation about the compliance and stiffness and wearing a blindfold, the incredible thing is you have no idea what you’re running on.

1:01:49 And so I was just pulling my feet, pulling my feet. But then James arrived, and so he’s behind me those last two miles, and then I started to see it, and then you could see what I was running on. And then it changed, it became, oh, this is brutal, like interesting. It was like almost every part of it hurt. The ankle started triggering, the mind games, the conversation again, and then it was like, okay, I’ve been here how many times for 30 days now?

1:02:18 You know, and it’s still there, you know, and then it’s how quickly you can get out of the cave, how quickly you can resolve that, I think, which is all mind. I think the body’s simply a vessel for the mind, that’s the way I see it. And again, once you understand that, then it’s a far easier journey, you know. How did it feel when you finished? It felt, well, I was with Katerina and the girls.

1:02:43 So it’s a beautiful finish, really, because they’re with me, and they’ve been with me the whole trip, really. And I’ll call it a trip, because it was a trip, right? But they, for them, I think it was an amazing journey for them more than anything, I think, because they got to see adversity, they got to see everything. What do they think of you, of Dad? Well, we recorded it, but we said that we build a little bit of a documentary that we’re gonna call Smile for the Last Mile, right?

1:03:10 So they’re in that. So I don’t know what they’ve recorded, but there was a point in there when Lola and Millie, because Toulouda, she’s three and a half, so she’s kind of, where’s Papa? I was out running, okay. Whereas Lola and Millie were more, have you thought really why you’re doing this? You know, it was that kind of conversation dialogue.

1:03:33 But then when they ran with me at the end, they were like, we’re really proud of you, Papa. Nice. And what’s the media reaction, Denmark? What do people make of you doing this whole thing? It’s been a bit mixed, Brian, you know, because initially it was about, you know, physicality and then for me that’s about human potential really.

1:03:53 And then there was the sustainability in the environment, fundraising, interviewing experts. So that side of things was the message for me. The Sunday Times picked up on it and they did an exclusive on the Sunday, so that was the 47 miler day, so that came out. And it suddenly became, this man doesn’t believe in running shoes or something, doesn’t believe in wearing running shoes, doesn’t believe in footwear. And then all the press changed, right?

1:04:24 It suddenly became about my message of you shouldn’t be wearing shoes. I’m grateful, I’m still, I’m really grateful for the press because it’s then opened lots of other stuff up. So suddenly I found myself on BBC Breakfast or all the radio channels or more articles have come off the back of it. It’s interesting how that was the message that they picked up on and not the physicality and not the sustainability. It was more about, oh, this man doesn’t believe in running shoes.

1:04:52 Right, but that is what makes it unique because some other people have done that run before, but you’ve done it without shoes, so I guess maybe that’s what picks up on it. Yeah, of course, and there’s also the space of time. So my thing isn’t, I don’t believe in running shoes. I believe in running shoes, but I believe in running shoes that are foot shaped and give you feedback, right? Do you know what I mean?

1:05:16 So you still do run with shoes, but you can also run with them? I run in Vevos and that’s all my casual wear and everything because it’s just… But you also run without shoes? I know I also run without shoes. You just decide on how you feel.

1:05:28 Just, it all depends on you. Just go with the process, man, whatever it throws up. And can we talk about also your house because this isn’t just a running thing. You take your whole environment, I mean this is an ethos of yours. This whole rewilding and back to our natural habitat, I mean you live this in all aspects of your life.

1:05:51 From the birthing of your kids, which you’re gonna do at home, to the fact that you don’t have furniture in your home. Tell me about what does that look like? Well firstly it’s like barefoot running, being barefoot, they’re just, they’re modalities aren’t they? So they’re like micro elements, like barefoot running is just a micro element of natural movement. So with natural movement, you should be able to balance, jump, lift, carry, throw, defend, quadrupedal movement, you’ve done all the locomotive stuff, right, the balancing’s in there.

1:06:19 So that’s like a natural movement system. And if I observe people in nature, they will perform it somewhat one way, which is aligned with our biological norm, which will minimize the risk of injury and be more efficient because that’s all they’ve ever done and that’s all their tribe of influence do, so they have the perfect template for that. We have then the zoo experience of that. What does that mean, the zoo experience? It’s almost like we are so disconnected from what a natural being is.

1:06:47 It’s like looking at a zoo animal first as a natural animal, right? So we have false environments, linear surfaces, sensory deprivation, microbiotic deprivation. Right, so we’re animals in our own zoo. And we’re sedentary. And we’re the only animals to put ourselves in the zoo.

1:07:01 Right. So you look at that animal in the zoo. I mean, you go to the London Zoo and you go look at the lion in there and they’re just sitting in the- They’ve got OCD. Yeah. Yeah, they’re pacing up and down.

1:07:10 Right, because they’re sitting in this confined environment that never changes. So you remove an animal from its natural habitat and the further away it gets from its physical, social, spiritual needs being met, the more it suffers. So movement is like, barefoot running is a micro-element of movement system. Movement is a micro-element of your physical system. Physical system will be sleep, rest, play, movement.

1:07:34 Water, food, digestion, sex, all those things, sunlight, they’re all your physical needs. Social system, let’s say if we’re a social species, I have the three Cs, the big Cs, like contact, community, and connection. And then within that tribe of influence would be your family, friends, and stuff like that. And that would help you establish a role within a community or whatever, which then feeds into dependence. So if you were just left to figure out what your role is rather than being indoctrinated into what your role should be and left just to freedom, we probably find out that we all have these amazing skill sets that when you put them together creates an amazing skill set that’s even bigger than that.

1:08:14 And then you have a spiritual self which is then the one consciousness, the plants, the rocks, the animals and even deeper sense of what connection is. So if you align all that then you get emotional well-being, you know. So for me even down… We’re missing a lot of those elements you just described. So then more further and further you get away from that the more disconnection you have the more suffering you have the more pacifying you use So I think the was it the rat Park study picks up on a bit of that doesn’t it because it’s like saying Rats that are in the zoo rats laboratory rats first is the rat Park where they’re released into the rat Park, right?

1:08:47 So when they’re in the laboratory environment They keep hitting for the cocaine thing and when they’re in the rat Park the amusement park They don’t they don’t medicate, right? They occasionally medicate, but the best thing about that trial is they then show the addicted rats that they reintroduce to the rat park, and they go through self-withdrawal in that process. So when they start to get their needs met, they don’t use a pacifier. So you can kind of relate that, and then you can bring Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in, right?

1:09:16 So what blew my mind with that whole process is that through Maslow’s, it’s like saying food, water, whatever your physical needs are, if you get the physical, social, spiritual And then we reach self-actualization, become these amazing empowered beings, let’s say. But most of us aren’t getting our food and water met. We’re eating and we’re drinking water. But if you understand epigenetics and the petri dish of how cells behave, and you were to put toxins into a petri dish, the cells naturally go into a state of protection.

1:09:47 If you add nourishing information, cells grow. They have two mechanisms, growth and protection. That can be triggered by a signal, which would be like perception for us. So we’re a petri dish, say, 47, 50 trillion cells, right? And all cells behave the same.

1:10:03 So if you add toxins to your environment now, what do your cells do? What do you do? As a cellular organism, you go into a state of protection, right? So that’s kind of, you can bring epigenetics into that. So if we’re talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and we say, right, water is water water, right?

1:10:19 Water is the biological normal water that we would consume versus water from a tap that might be laden with chlorine, estrogen, God knows whatever drugs we have to then understand that what reaction is that gonna give the cells. If it’s food, food in nature, wild food, foraged food. Foraged food, very different experience. You feel the food, you have an experience with the food. You have a movement practice that involves getting the food which might be low gate walking, it might mean climbing.

1:10:49 If it was honey, it would be a ridiculous climb for that amazing experience at the end of it. So that then helps nourish a digestive system that produces sliver enzymes, which then means that the food and nutrients that I am eating get distributed to the cells, the 50 trillion cells that need the food. So I can be underfed, but overnourished, right? If we go over this side to the human zoo in the Petri dish, it’s then processed foods, right? I have no relationship to them.

1:11:13 I just rip it out of a pack and eat it. My digestive enzymes aren’t even prepared for that. So I’m then overfed and undernourished, right? So it’s just looking at different ways of existing. So my home environment, we remove the things that don’t exist in nature in terms of the sitting furniture.

1:11:32 Yeah, so we ground it, right? And to some it’s like, wow, that’s like, but it’s only because that’s your normalized behavior where if you go to Asia, they still ground it. If you go to, if you go to tribes, they still ground it. It’s just not normalized. For us, it’s not socially normal, but it doesn’t mean it’s not biologically normal.

1:11:49 But because it’s not socially normal, we see it as socially extreme. So it raises, again, socially extreme eyebrows. It’s a bit like my run. It raises socially extreme eyebrows, but that’s great for me, because it enables me to then create a platform that I can go and do something bigger with. Okay, so if I walked in your house, what do I see?

1:12:06 It’s very open, it’s quite minimal. You’ll see the kids climbing off things and balancing on things. Because you’ve got things they can climb on. So if bars they can hang on, we’re quite happy with them being on the table, whatever they want to jump on, climb over, because it’s just a habitat. It’s basically if you think of a shelter in nature again, most people who have a shelter in nature, they spend most of the time outdoors, that’s the whole point, it’s just a shelter.

1:12:32 And 83% of the UK live in urban environments, we spend 90% of our time indoors. It’s a complete reversal. So what is it we’re doing in those environments and how do we make them more nourishing? For us, it became obvious, I had a Pilates studio, people would come to my Pilates studio, crumpled up with posture, in there to try and, in 10 sessions like Joseph Pilates would say, feel the difference, 20 see the difference, and in 30 have a whole new body, that was the whole philosophy really, and a repertoire of movements that would help unravel and get back to a particular posture.

1:13:06 So I was sold on that, I thought it was a great system, until I started to understand pose method and being barefoot because most people would come from their car, from their sedentary home office into a car, motor transport that’s sedentary in the compromising footwear to come in the studio for an hour to unravel it, to only put the shoes back on, to go back in the car and go back to the same sedentary lifestyle. So why keep offering symptom relief? It was obvious to me that I had to go to the cause and the cause for me when I had kids was becoming really blatantly obvious because my thing as a parent really is to to create, like the tribe of influence, the appropriate environment for my child to keep or withhold, preserve their innate, wild, connected, empowered self, their divine being, right?

1:13:58 Something happens along the way that removes all that. What is it, right? So how are we doing that? You know, if we’re born these amazing, just plasticity, they’re just these naked, amazing beings, right? So it was to try it for me, it was like, how do we get as many of those needs met for our kids as possible?

1:14:16 And so, firstly, it was, right, well, schooling’s a big thing for us as well, so that our kids are all there with us the whole time. And they will be, they’re gonna be at home with you. Well, whenever they decide, sorry, they go to, they do forest school every Thursday. But that, again, is out in nature, they’re out there all day in all the elements. There’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing, whereas that’s concerned.

1:14:39 And that’s an integration process with other kids that are all unschooled. It’s not a schooling one And unschooling is set again is a essentially removing domestication from that process. So they kids are incredibly absorbent Like if you’re excited and want to learn something how quickly do absorb it and so kids are like that So they have absorbent moments You just have to create the appropriate environment for them at that moment to nourish it it, and so that means you have to be available to do that. So if you put 30 kids in a classroom, one of those kids is having an absorbent moment at that moment, and the other kids around them are, that you create inadequacies within it, but you also can create negative connotations towards a subject if you’re trying to force-feed a subject to a child, right? Then you have to get past that to be able to educate them in something, and I went through that process very much so for me through learning, but with my kids they’re just unbelievable, they just keep sucking in information, keep learning, keep learning.

1:15:40 Are you homeschooling them or are they just at home? Don’t really call it homeschooling because we call it unschooling. I think Peter Gray wrote a great book, Free to Learn, and he asked ten leading anthropologists about what education or what’s childhood look like in tribes, ten leading anthropologists, And they all said the same thing kids just play. They play from really infancy through to teenage years, but they learn everything they need to learn from their environment through play.

1:16:11 So they literally have been everything, with no adult intervention. So they’ve already learned how to hunt, track. They learn the weight of the animal, the scent of the animal. But they’ve also been the animals, so they play out everything. So they’ve been the plants, they’ve been the rocks, they’ve been the animals.

1:16:27 So what does that also mean? They’re also, they’re just one consciousness. they understand what it is to be everything. So in terms of process, they are literally the process. And I think, unfortunately, the moment we start trying to teach kids things and give them things, it takes them out of that process.

1:16:43 That’s what it feels like for me. Interesting. You know, I said earlier, you know, I did a plant ceremony and in that ceremony, I went in with this kind of, the intention going in was to talk about freedom. And I wanted to really deeply understand what freedom was And immediately, the medicine was really strong for me, and immediately what came in was this female dialogue of, well, freedom is innate in all of us. But again, we get handed all this stuff, bit by bit by bit, and it keeps dragging us out.

1:17:18 So instead of what should be, I’m born with all the gear, but I have no idea. If I’m born with all the gear, it should be the environment just enables us to understand what that is and what that human potential is, what I’m actually capable of. And if I don’t access it because I’ve handed all this stuff, I look to the external world and I keep getting given more and more stuff from that external world. So that’s what freedom came up for me in that session, in that ceremony.

1:17:46 And then the incredible thing happened was that the thing about freedom tone, it can be just gone in a moment like that. And then it became about attachment, because at the moment that happened, the medicine had gone. It had worn off. So it was not to become attached to the medicine. So I then sat in the rest of the ceremony and watched everyone off in their ceremony doing deep work.

1:18:10 And I was just there, just boom, in the room. So it took the medicine away from you? The medicine away from me. And I haven’t done a ceremony since. Interesting.

1:18:17 When was this? I think June last year, maybe. Were you doing a lot of them before that? I would do them in the earlier part and the latter part, like early, late spring, early summer to autumn. Okay, and they gave you a lot of knowledge, so you’re really happy you did that.

1:18:36 Huge, huge amounts of- Is a lot of what you do today from those ceremonies? Yeah, I think, because I kind of had a, I went from a Pilates studio, having a Pilates studio, and understanding what was a movement practice through Nicholas, and then Erwin LeCoultre from MoveNet, we were hanging out with him, a company called Wild Fitness, who were running retreats in Watamu in Kenya, which is about turning zoo humans into wild humans, this process. But yet, they were still teaching zoo kind of experience, exercises, but in nature and calling it kind of wild movement. So we’re teaching boxing on boxing pads and Swiss balls and stuff like that. No criticism, it was just what was available at that time, where the kind of foundation’s knowledge was. And then Erwin LeCoultre, we were hanging out with Erwin, and Erwin kind of brought us, Oh and has a natural movement system, but if we apply pose to that we could have this and then we opened up a gym And it’s like a nut we styled it like a 1950s boxing gym But beneath it we had a natural movement discipline because if you looked at those 1950s boxers They were doing everything climbing trees. They were into carrying running lifting They had it was almost like a modality of natural movement because that was what gymnasiums or gymnastics or gym was at that point So we had that, then another coach came on board, Ben, great coach Ben Meddha, and he bought more of kind of a parkour kind of influence to that.

1:19:59 And what happened was, two of the guys who I set it up with, they jumped ship and I was kind of left in this space. And my ego at that time was, I can do this. And my dad had been the same with his business, for many years I watched him with his business, he stayed in there. And it’s almost like that naivety and stubbornness again to stay in. And I stayed in too long.

1:20:21 And I remember presenting to a team of personal trainers, other practitioners, people that are there wanting to understand movement, I was teaching the fundamentals of human movement. And so within that was about locomotive patterns and barefoot running, it was gymnastic rings and stuff like that. And we were kind of ahead of the game, like way ahead of the game, because no one had heard about what we were doing, yet so ahead of the game that you needed more people to know to make it successful really, let’s be honest, that was what was going on.

1:20:56 And a tube blasted past the building this one particular day and I’m standing in the boxing room presenting to the guys about the benefits of living a natural lifestyle, right, about getting your physical social spiritual needs met, except I’m working 16 hour days at this point, trying to make the rent for the two guys that have bailed. I have two young daughters at that stage. We’re living, I’ve then moved out, I’m living in Windsor so I’m commuting in and out. It was just a financial disaster and so all the pacifiers are coming in. I’m doing drugs, I’m drinking, but yeah, I’m standing there promoting the benefits of this lifestyle, I’m just not living it. So the moment this train blasted It went through my soul, kind of shook the whole building and I had just a eureka moment of oh my fuck, I’m a fraud, I’m just a fraud, here I am, I’m granting the benefits of this.

1:21:50 And then within a month I was bankrupt, closed the gym, done and had to go through a rather like the process but spent a hell of a lot longer in the pain cave because I didn’t know how to deal with it. How long was this? 2003 or? So really early on, wasn’t it, wow. Okay, so quite a long time ago.

1:22:13 Hold on, not 2003, no, not 2003. Where are we now? 19, what, is that maybe? No, it’s not, so it’s probably about, Lola’s now 10, so can’t we, what am I talking about? I’d say probably seven years ago.

1:22:28 Okay. Yeah. 2013, there you go, that helps, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, that helps. And I’d say, I then went into, yeah, so I’m back at the pain cave and that would’ve been my, it would’ve been like a, at the time a breakdown is a breakthrough and you realize, I had to go through all of that.

1:22:49 I mean, literally all of that up until that day to then understand I have to be what I’m preaching. You know have to be the process again coming down to the process. Yeah, which is finding the authentic self within it, right? But I found that through medicine you know, I did I went through it took a year out basically pop to a proper bit of time out and With a young family as well, which is tough. We had no money with nothing. Everything had been eaten up by the business. So it’s proper Well broken down right? Yeah, and then you did and then who do you go to right?

1:23:26 We’re just this young family and so we I then started to do I sense like to see stuff people then If you heard of this, I was good. You heard about this I can you pronounce it, right? Okay So I started to then and then I started to research it and I was looking at it Some friends about had a house in the Cotswolds that I looked at I wasn’t quite 40 yet, I think was 38 and I I was thinking about using their house to have a fortieth years on. So I put it way in advance, how about we do a party at your place.

1:24:05 And then within this period where it was all completely broken, I then thought, you know, I think I have to go to Peru. I think I have to go and I think I have to go and stay with a shaman or something. I mean, I could see that was what I needed to do. So I contact my friends and I say, oh, this is what’s happening. No, no, no, you don’t have to do that.

1:24:27 We’ve got someone. And it’s on us. So I get invited to my first ceremony. I think within that ceremony, the obvious message was just honesty. It was all about honesty.

1:24:43 And then the next phase of it, I then got to see. They almost appeared as wheels, like the physical, social, and spiritual self became like wheels for me that were turning and then with that turning created this emotional wellbeing. I saw things very differently, like visually. And it was like, the more I align with those, that’s what I need to become. So I had to be, yeah, be the change again.

1:25:10 Sounds so cliche, right? But be the change that I needed to be. Wow, that’s powerful and the medicine was a big component for you in making that change. Yeah, I did a few ceremonies after that But then one of them, a friend of ours was showing me a video of this experience he’d gone through. I was in Ibiza and I met this guy called Octavia and I was like, okay, let me show you.

1:25:38 It starts off with him inhaling this, what looks like a crack pipe, right? He’s inhaling the smoke and then the next thing he’s out of it, he’s like on the ground. and it’s curled up in a ball and then he starts to come out of that it’s all on video and then he starts clawing at the earth and he’s scratching at the earth and then the next thing he’s just like chest open head back screaming like primal screaming up at the sky what the fuck what is this and he said well this is what it felt like so he said I basically I went to this complete kind of open space and I’m being pinned down by tribesmen of all the years, men just holding me down and I had to throw them all off and then be accepted into the circle.

1:26:27 And he said it was like a full on just rite of passage. So that’s what his experience is. In terms of the physical self, because I’ve worked with him through movement and natural when it was one of the guys that was actually on my course, the fundamentals of human movement, way back in that light bulb moment. And he had like a kyphosis in his back that’s so difficult to crack, right? You do the mobility work, you do the overhead squats, you could do active arches, all the things that we needed to do to create space in there and the strength in there, but there would still be something.

1:27:00 But within that ceremony, it’s gone in a moment. You know, so something within a much deeper layer that you’re accessing through though is what I call the, you know what I’m saying? Now the run was a kind of a rite of passage for me. This is the real, yeah, there’s something else in that medicine. And so I was immediately drawn to that.

1:27:19 It was like, yeah, I need to go and do that. So we went, we went, I think three months later we’re in Ibiza with this guy and again inhale the medicine. They’re like, who wants to go first? And I’m like, I’ll go first, you know. Up I went, inhale the medicine.

1:27:35 And with this experience is very different. It’s not you know, it’s not like I was great and that’s the most you’ve inhaled It’s like five in me or five in me or DMT. Okay, DMT Yeah strongest DMT experience, but again off of this toad so it’s like this natural thing that’s naturally occurring again And the moment I inhaled I was off just in a complete white space nothing like literally nothing. No me Nothing just a universal sound that’s all there is and then slowly start to unravel and I went through evolution, went through every little detail of it.

1:28:08 And it’s only a 12-minute experience, but it feels like I’ve gone through everything. And eventually I end up with like this, I feel like a man-bear. Like a bear, like a man, but a bear man, right? And I have shackles on my wrists, and I have to break the shackles free. And then I’m out, I’m back in the room, kind of thing, and I look around, everyone’s like, what the fuck?

1:28:35 And then you, and then off I went in my shorts. I’m off into the woods and I’m grabbing trees, like, ugh, like this. And I was like, oh my God, that feels so good, like, ugh. And just roaring. And imagine you had a little bit of indigestion or something, you have a satisfying burping, oh my God, that feels so good.

1:28:53 That’s what that felt like. And immediately it was connecting to something like we have this thing about masculinity, finding vulnerability and finding all these things, but we’re not tapping into finding other stuff. And for me that was like finding something within my voice. Suddenly it was okay to roar like that, and to be that, and it opens something. I cracked a code within my masculinity that day, something else changed.

1:29:22 And it wasn’t enough, I went back, I went and did another ceremony somewhere else after that, which was very different, that was like, To look at it, it looked like the hacker. It looked like I was doing a hacker. My tongue was out, my eyes were crossed. My spine, my shoulder blades were rippling. My spine was doing things in the video that I can’t replicate to this day.

1:29:44 And I turned into a dragon. I turned into a dragon in the experience, this huge dragon that every time I opened my mouth and roared again, I had the same roar going on. People that were in the house like meters away We’re like, Tony, was that you? Yeah, it’s just incredible to listen to. It’s the wildness that’s coming out.

1:30:04 And over time, that’s been my thing. It’s about finding my voice and about roaring and just letting stuff go, which I think is, again, domesticated out in a way. Yeah, it’s really fascinating. Everything kind of ties together. Powerful experiences.

1:30:18 Yeah, for you as well. Edo Portal, how did he affect your journey? Did you watch the things that he did? It’s funny because someone said, because we were doing because of running and barefoot running, we had to squat practices and we had stuff and overhead squat practices and locomotive stuff and then Ben, the coach said, oh, you need to have a look at this guy. And we’re like, wow, this stuff’s amazing.

1:30:44 It was, I think that was maybe some that. I mean, when did I go on that? That’s probably about five, six years ago, maybe seven years ago now, I guess. Probably seven, maybe eight, even eight, I guess, I don’t know. You need to have a look at this video and it was like a flow, a fourth floor sequence.

1:31:06 He started showing me some Capoeira videos of Edo. I was like, that’s great, man. And it was before Movement X had started. And I could see Ben was slightly getting influenced by it and he said, oh, I’m thinking about doing some online tutorial with him. And it was really early days.

1:31:22 And so he started to bring some stuff in that was helping with the muscle up, simple like progressions that we could do and we were like, ah, this stuff’s good. And then we sat down and we listened to an interview with Edo with, I think it was a very, very smart movie, had an interview with a CrossFit guy. And suddenly, I think Movement X kind of exploded from that moment, something happened within that time frame. And so I went over to Denmark and I did a Movement X, one of the really early ones in Denmark.

1:31:55 Two-day event that he used to do. Yeah. Maybe he’s done this. Yeah. And they were big. There was a lot of people there. Yeah. Really early days though, which I thought was great. I thought it was a great workshop. He’s great in person, isn’t he? I find him really funny and charismatic and intense. Because there’s the intensity. I think intensity is quite profound there. It’s quite funny too. I think it’s good. And Odilia as well, I thought It was amazing.

1:32:22 There was Johnny there as well on that particular one. Yeah, I met Johnny. Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. Really well organized, made sense. I loved the progressions of it.

1:32:40 Yeah, I think it’s great work. So that planted a lot of ideas early on in your head. Kind of because we had, for me it was still, there was, for me there was natural movement And I didn’t really see, I never really saw Edo’s work as natural movement in a way, because I felt that it was still, it was almost within the gymnastic realms and CrossFit world to begin with in that beginning stage. Whereas because we’d been kind of moving around in a natural sense with Beth at running and balancing and ways of lifting and quadrupedal work, which was, and then blending that with what Erwin was doing and people like that.

1:33:18 They were, it was a bit like that for me. I’d see a bit of Edo’s work and think, yeah, that’s great. And then we could start to see how that would work over here and how even the hanging progression, some of that work would benefit in climbing. And because my brain has always worked, like, okay, that’s the macro skill, what are the micro elements of that? And I could see a lot of the progressions over here would really help that.

1:33:38 So there was always like a blend for me. Yeah, that’s how I felt with it. Yeah, I think we first spoke with Edo. I did it in 2013, maybe. And then we had a lot of conversations with him and obviously made a movie with him.

1:33:51 I saw it, I was there with Tim. Okay. So I came to the film. Oh, you did, okay, fantastic. Yeah, I was there, it was great.

1:33:57 That was great, yeah, Ido’s a fascinating dude, man. Really smart guy and has very serious opinions and he’s a great charismatic guy as well. I think it needed that. I think it was so interesting to observe because the personal training world is always a bit weird. I started out like 22 years ago, personal training.

1:34:19 But person training was different, it was so different, whereas person training became like you were a fitness instructor eventually, that’s what it kind of felt like. People weren’t really learning their craft. I was lucky enough to start in a person training studio that had nothing, it was a studio. And there’s a woman called Linda Mosley, and she had like premiership footballers and people like that. So it meant, she brought in things like core stability, she trained with the American College of Sports Management, the American College of Sports Medicine onboard.

1:34:46 You could do a sur, and people who came, it wasn’t about resistance machines, it was none of that, you know? But you had to learn your craft. You basically had to be able to negotiate a room and get people moving. So it was a very early kind of seed for me there. And that helped in the foundations of Pilates and everything else that I went with.

1:35:07 But I think personal training for me, it felt like it was becoming more and more diluted. And I think EDO’s injection changed that. So you don’t really hear people, from a personal trend, they’re going to movement now, right? You hear more about movement coaches than you do about, I mean, I’m in a bit of a bubble, but I hear more about movement coaches or people now taking up opening movement studios, as opposed to becoming personal trainer or personal trainer coach.

1:35:31 Yeah, thank God for that. What are you doing in five years? In five years, well, I’m just, I’ve just, basically, a proposal of my book goes in now. Okay, this would be your first book, I guess. Yeah, this is going, this goes in on Friday, I think.

1:35:44 Okay, that’s exciting. And we’ll see what happens with that. It’s got to be accepted first, but yeah, we’ll see what goes. I’ve got, I’m positive about it, I feel like I’m there with it, and I feel the profile’s big enough, and you know, I’m being seen more of an expert in a field now, and I think that really helps with a book. So that’s a layer.

1:36:05 We have a sun coming, so that’s another layer, so that’ll be a certain amount of five years playing within that. Congrats, a little masculine energy. Yeah, man, it’s going to be great. I’m also doing a co-working kind of space with a developer, which we’ve got the first one going near Great Portland Street, Clipson Street. That’s exciting.

1:36:25 Which is like a well-being lifestyle past co-working. We’re not labeling it as that, it’s just going to be building you go into it and you go, wow, okay, I feel this. That’s coming, so that’ll be growth. I then see us, I was at a festival recently, exhale it’s called. Very small, intimate thing, probably about 100 people. It’s Fair Oaks, it’s out near Haywood’s Heath. Easy to get to, really simple. On a farm, a field of bell tents, a couple of barns where you could coach in, there’s a movement thing going on with Will Brown who’s a real disciple of Edo’s, he was great. Yoga influence, music, stuff like that, and it really sparked something in me that our kids go to a forest school, right, we have this whole unschooling philosophy, we have a natural parenting philosophy, we have a natural lifestyle philosophy. My first thing was to rewild urbanites so that, you know, you don’t have to go and live off-grid. You know, you should be able to do this in whatever arena you’re in, you should be able to get your physical, social, spiritual needs met for emotional well-being. Depression on an all-time high, it’s obvious we need something’s missing, how do we, and the more and more I can align someone’s needs with being a natural need, the happier they become. I train millionaires, billionaires, doesn’t matter who they are, if the fundamental physical, social, spiritual needs aren’t met, they’re pretty unhappy, but yet they’re successful, right? And the more nature I introduce into

1:37:53 Their lifestyle, the more successful they become, authentically successful as a human being I say become happy right so then it then it’s become like well okay if I can do that in the city I think we need somewhere to take people away and I feel like we’re in the next five years we’d be out somewhere like maybe hey which is not far for people to go I think we do a forest school three days a week and then Friday Saturday Sunday Monday we’d be available to do and full Immersions for people they can come do half day full day or full weekend with us and just live a lifestyle That would have helped them tune in to ways of living that are more in sync with human biology That’s why I think I like that. Yeah, what it becomes a family can becomes that becomes You know people say I need to retire and he’s going holiday You know why create a lifestyle that you need to retire from or go on holiday from well, just B. I feel that’s what I want to become B in the next five years and I think the process is already underway.

1:39:01 Yeah, so the guy that creates that lifestyle for people where they don’t need to run away from it all and finish what they’re doing in the city and go do something else, they can do it all the time. Yeah, it started a while back. I held a journalist retreat and the journal has arrived and it was like the first night and I said, look, the retreat’s not started yet, we just chill out and have a bit of dinner together. So they started then, you know, tell us about how you got to all this, and we just chatted and we had this conversation.

1:39:29 They were all around and said, you need to write a book. And it wasn’t about my philosophy, it was about how I got there. You know, it was the first time I ever heard people say you need to write a book, but this was about my life. It was like, really? What?

1:39:42 Really? You want me to write a book about my life? I didn’t feel old enough, like taking up endurance. And so then for the next duration, next two days, they were kind of saddling up to me. I can always help you write your book, and the other one was like, I can edit.

1:39:56 And then the thing about the retreat was always this, that when you return home from a retreat, you walk straight back into the very environment you needed to retreat from. It’s a bit like people in recovery, right? They never really dealt with the addiction. They keep recovering it, you know? So in theory, the addiction controls them in a way, isn’t it?

1:40:13 They haven’t actually dealt with the addiction. mechanism. So I then that the retreat became well I need to go to your home after the retreat that’s what needs to happen I come to your home and then within the home we then look at introducing what you’ve learned in the retreat at home and then the book obviously became that it just became I can’t go to everyone’s home but the book will literally become what happens in this space is the tool that you need for every environment so that’s that’s the book.

1:40:46 Okay. Yeah. Sounds interesting. I think it’s going to be popular. And I think your story would be interesting too.

1:40:52 What scares you? Well, it used to be that conversation about addiction that was in there. Really? But… Talking about it.

1:41:00 Well, no, because of the control mechanism a little bit, right? So I always felt like, you know, I gave up alcohol, gave up drugs, gave up just anything that…and it happened in those ceremonies. So in one of the ceremonies, but I never felt like I’d given it up. it up. It’s gone. There was still an internal conversation of, well, if I have a drink, I might have another drink. I could go on for days until I then pluck up the courage to decide not to have another drink. So you’re still controlled by the mechanism, I think, of the addiction. So that was scary. But then I went on another ceremony, like an African plant which they work with addiction. Okay. Mariboga. Yeah. Oh really? How’s that? Death and birth, right? But it’s so different because it’s not, you go, I went in with the expectation that it was maybe going to be like, Oh, what’s going on? Someone like that. But it’s not, it’s not, you don’t ascend. That’s the incredible thing. So because you don’t ascend, it takes you internally, it’s about going inside and grounding. And it literally just turned your subconscious up and up floats your trauma right so I got to see stuff in there that I’d intellectual eyes made a story how I thought the trauma was but within that ceremony I actually got to see it play out it’s like literally just so visual right I saw and like an eyeball would turn into a head I got to see the head then I got to see my sister then I saw me and then I see it

1:42:30 As me and then I see it as the third part like consciousness looking at the and that very moment and all my traumas came up like that. Wow. And then since then, everything’s been different. I’m literally so different and I would almost say that there’s almost like a, rather than going and doing ayahuasca ceremonies and going and doing toad ceremonies and going off and doing all this stuff, I think you have to sort out the internal world first. Okay.

1:43:00 Otherwise, the trauma is still guiding the ayahuasca ceremony, the toad ceremony, and everything you do. It’s about going back into that innate stuff again before the external world has taken over, before the traumas have taken over and everything’s taken over. Go in and press the reset button on that. So since then, it doesn’t scare me. Okay.

1:43:23 Would you recommend it, Boga? I think again, I think firstly you have to go, the responsibility was with all this stuff, isn’t it? Firstly go and do breath work, get a great breath practice going, you know, go and do meditation, get a meditation practice going, clean your house, get your physical body, nurture the body, get the nutrients in, get out in nature more, do all the things that you can access today, right? So just get the physical vessel strong enough to sit in a ceremony.

1:44:01 I don’t know about you, but I sit in ceremonies and I’ll sit there, boom, in posture. Won’t collapse, won’t be lying all over the floor, throwing up. There’s a vessel to that. And I think if you want to go and ascend, do plant medicine that makes you ascend, you have to have the physical body to get back into. And I think that’s where the physical work comes in. A bit like yoga, any pose is about preparing the vessel and I think you need to get the vessel strong enough to be able to go and ascend into wherever you want to go, have that to go back to. And I think that the aboga is part of that vessel is the grounding of it, the real boom in the room. I’ve gone and done the internal work so that you remove trauma. I think the trauma is the thing to remove because otherwise we’re all just is being guided by that, and then that should be done.

1:44:57 You should be done after that. But I think you have to go, I think someone’s explaining to me about ayahuasca, even though not everyone would be doing ayahuasca in the tribes, right? It used to be just the shaman. Or the chosen one, right? Yeah, they would just read you while you were there.

1:45:11 Exactly, they were the ones that now it becomes like the spiritual care, then everyone goes off drinking it, right? But it’s, and I think there’s a danger there because you have to go, I feel you have to do the work. I think you have to get that physical, social, and spiritual foundations in place. And I wonder whether a bogan maybe plays, that plays that part in that. Just the stability and the grounding effects of that.

1:45:34 I think breath works quite powerful for grounding. I mean, I’m a real big fan of the modalities of breathing. Get you back in the body or you could be doing transformative breath or transformational breath, inspirational breath, that kind of stuff that you can ascend with it or you can go deeper into the body, you can play around with different modalities of breath. Yeah, I think for me a boga was the one, I think that just really solidified it and just, so now my internal conversation is I could go and have a drink tomorrow, you know?

1:46:11 So I can vary different, so it’s obviously dealt with something that I needed the alcohol to pacify. And what was that? Yeah, someday I will join, I will go check that out possibly. I mean it’s brutal though, right? Some of it’s like, it’s not, there isn’t anything that I would say I could promote other than post ceremony.

1:46:33 Okay. You know? Because it’s pretty brutal. It’s just horrible. Okay, it’s a good 48 hours potentially.

1:46:39 Yeah, and there’s like, there’s this drum that they, the drum would be like a diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity and then there’s a harp, diggity-diggity-diggity-diggity and it’s dumpt and it goes in and it’s constant. And you’re like, oh my God, it just would stop right now. And when you get past that, then you’re away. Are we gonna make it as a species? Are we gonna make it as a species?

1:46:59 Well, it depends on what we make it. I mean, I’m not arrogant enough to think, well, are we gonna become something or another thing or another thing or? Are we gonna survive? Again, who knows, man? We could have some kind of meteorite hit us in the next three days, right?

1:47:14 Yeah, we could. But barring that, are we gonna make it on our own? I think, well firstly, nature’s way of punishing us for a bad skill is unfortunately disease and injury. So if we keep moving further and further away from nature, no, it’s not possible because already fertility is one in four, right? Obesity is like 67%. Addictions are through the roof, depression is through the roof, suicide, more suicides than homicide.

1:47:41 So it shows the level of suffering that’s there which occurs, right? So no, if we keep moving away from nature you know it’s great having climate strikes I love all this stuff but how many of those people are actually out in nature understanding what exactly is there protecting because I don’t see them right you know I’ve just ran from Lands End to John O’Groats most of that was a lonely experience it’s not lonely because I’m I’m connecting to something bigger I mean as in the amount of the the numbers of people out there in that incredible nature was minimal. Most of them are in a car or on a motor transport or in a house or in a building like this, right? But how many people are actually physically going out and connecting to something? Because if you don’t connect to it, how can you basically save something you have no connection to? If you were driving along in a vehicle and you saw someone that you had a relationship to and you connected to or a complete stranger and you had to make a decision because the car was swerving, where are you going to go? So if you want to protect something you have to reconnect to it and I think if we can do that we stand more much more of a chance so hopefully but that’s not the trend no but I feel it’s I feel like the bubble so I think with Edo’s work right it was it’s it was the bubble to begin with right and then what you do is you blow the bubble up more people can get in it it’s been like the people say about the bus right you

1:49:06 Got to get people on the bus well firstly you have to get them to the bus stop and then you can get them on the bus right so we’re at this transitional phase where I feel like there are more voices now there are more voices talking about getting into nature you’re hearing more and more about even nature scenes and you know putting just a screenshot of nature up will put you more into a parasympathetic state a down-regulated state than an up-regulated stress state there’s forest bathing you know there’s more and more stuff coming through and I think the more and more voices within that arena and I think social media you know we have our negatives but I think it’s actually a great platform for social change if it’s in the right hands and we take responsibility for it you know because then you can start to say well I use it a lot now I think it’s a great tool for that and then I’ve gone from having like two and a half thousand people in the bubble to nearly forty 50,000 people in the bubble. And then again, the more people that connect with that, the more they have a voice. And suddenly, I’ve got people messaging me, oh, we’re now grounded and we’ve taken the legs off our table. This is us barefoot walking in nature. So do we stand a chance of survival? Look, 60% of the wildlife population has gone in the last 50 years, but how many of us are talking about natural beings and wild beings?

1:50:32 This is the only problem I have right now is because the more and more removed we are from seeing wild natural beings, the less understanding we have of what’s biologically normal for us. So we only ever keep normalizing this experience. Peter Kahn’s model is environmental generational amnesia. So my child, my new child that comes into the world, that’s 60% of the wildlife population that went in 50 years, their new norm is now that 50%. Next year it might be 49%, 48%.

1:51:06 That just becomes everyone’s new norm, you know? So I think that’s where it’s an issue and I think, you know, we need to, I think start to respect what nature we have left to be able to honor it and then be able to connect to it. If we stand a chance of survival, it will be if we start to raise more and more awareness for nature to protect it so that we have something to connect with and save ourselves with, yeah. I agree, and I do think that a lot of people protesting to save the environment don’t necessarily spend time there, and I think it would be powerful if everybody did, to really know what you’re really trying to save.

1:51:49 I think that’s a really important point. Yeah, reconnecting to something. Yeah, Tony always ask a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you if I give you I am if I give You a a magic phone and you can call up the 20 year old Tony and give that young man some advice I don’t know if you’re in the army then or what you’re doing. Yeah, but um What would you tell him based on everything you know now? I would say Take your time Don’t worry about what others are doing at all because we have that we can start to observe our peers or people around us and we might see them being super successful at something way beyond where we were or where we are.

1:52:34 Now I understand that it’s all experience and the experience is it could be good or bad right could be anything it’s still experience and they may have got there 10 years ago but they’ve lost 10 years of experience. Do you know what I mean? It might take me 10 years to get where they are, but I’ve then got 10 years of experience to just take your time because there’s so much learning to be had along the path and there is no rush. It’s just like, you know, whatever you’re meant to experience, just surrender to like my run.

1:53:04 Now it’s all about just surrender to the process. Cliché again is just living flow, but I think it’s, I think process and flow, almost they’re different, they feel like different things to me now. Okay, yeah, yeah, I like your mantra on the processes. That’s nice second part of that best advice you’ve ever received could be from a parent or a Coach or anyone there’s a really cool guy his name is Uri and Uri is a was is a film producer Israeli film producer And he’s about I suppose probably 61 as a friend of mine and we were driving back from Somerset and Uri’s super cool. I mean it’s just ridiculous for someone that I would say is 60 to be that cool. It blew my mind really about how a 60 year old could be so cool. So I just said Urie, can you, how is it man? Why are you so cool man? What is it?

1:54:00 And he just said, just keep evolving. Don’t stagnate, just keep evolving. Keep learning, keep evolving. And my whole thing’s about evolution and moving so So it just really just struck a chord in me, you know? Don’t stagnate.

1:54:17 Yeah, it’s very good. Last thing, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us and listening to us out there, what’s the single piece of advice you can give to them? Now? The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real Tribe, where you get exclusive access and insights from our high-performance guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health, and well-being. To join our tribe community, go to londonreal.tv forward slash tribe.

1:54:49 Now, let’s continue with the show. And what about movement and environments and would you ask people to try some of these ideas, to look at the world from the perspective of, does it need to be all of these things? It can be overwhelming, right? So if you went, oh, you’re kidding me, I’ve got to sort all my physical needs out, sunlight, food, sleep, whatever. I would basically do it this way.

1:55:16 That this month, I’m gonna look at my sleep and I’m gonna try and rewild my sleep. So rewilding your sleep doesn’t mean turn to all the sleep studies and get obsessed by eight hours of sleep and worry about sleep deficit because in nature, no one sleeps for eight hours. Studies of three different groups of tribes, different geographic locations. And they follow them, I think it’s a 1,165 days. They’ve got 99 members and they’re not asleep for eight hours, right?

1:55:52 They follow the Hadza, 33 members, they look at them for 220 hours and they’re only asleep for like minutes together, 18 minutes. In the sleep-wake cycle, they’re actually awake and then they go back and sleep. The difference is the habitat, right? So they don’t have the ability to create sunrise sunset, they have no light bulb. The temperature’s cooler, they have fire light, and they have to look after the fire and they look after the young. So they have this rotational thing where they do that and they keep it going. They don’t have a sleep debt, because a sleep debt is basically the accumulation of chronic diseases, inflammatory response, down-regulatory digestive system. And when you start to understand lighting and melatonin, you understand that melatonin’s role is that regulation of your dietary system, your digestive system.

1:56:45 It suppresses ghrelin and picks up leptin. So ghrelin and leptin being those two dietary processes, digestion processes. They can call temperatures a temperature. Temperature also plays a role in melatonin. So you can just go off and do things like that, right?

1:56:59 Okay, I’m gonna become an expert. I’m gonna move how nature intended. So for this month, my 30-day challenge, I’m gonna choose to sit less. If you go on the tube, refuse the chair, you’re probably gonna sit down all day anyway. Squat and hang and surf.

1:57:18 So you can hang on the bar. You can surf just by standing there not holding onto anything. When the doors open, squat. When the doors close, stand up, get on the bar. Just mix things up.

1:57:27 Choose the stairs rather than the escalator, you know. Walk to the next stop. Do whatever, just move. And in your office environment, chair care, you know. Sit for 20, we were talking about this earlier, sit for 20, 25 minutes.

1:57:40 Get a timer set, ding, timer goes off. Move your chair back, hold the edge of your desk, and squat, but just allow your heels to pop up. Don’t be strict, so you actually keep a posture. Reset it, go for a walk around the office. Food, but I’m not gonna eat any processed food this week.

1:57:56 I’m just gonna turn, let’s just see how I feel eating real food, stuff that’s been picked by hand, grown, that your grandmother would recognize. Do you know what I mean? That kind of conversation. Water, let’s not drink anything out of the tap. Let’s try and go for spring water this week, right?

1:58:13 Or let’s filtered water or something. In the home, I’m gonna do a Netflix binge, right? Refuse the couch, take it to the floor and just see what different rest positions you can play with. And each one of those is a micro element of the macro skill of standing up. There’s like a hundred different rest positions you can choose in nature.

1:58:35 Each one of those is a micronutrient of the macro-skiller standing up. We have one, right, which is the sofa, which is completely compliant, like this chair now. And going by compliance and stiffness, what happens when you go on a compliant surface? You become more stiff. So in a way, the upright Victorian type sitting is far better for you than what the couch would have been, which is quite a modern phenomena.

1:58:58 Okay, sure. Air purification, you have one in here. The bedroom, so eight hours sleep. It’s eight hours in the same room with the same dimensions. You’ve probably been in there for some people for 20 years, breathing out the same air.

1:59:13 So air purifiers are really beneficial. There’s some studies that show that the quality of air is two and a half times more potent inside the building is out. So plants help with air purification systems or plants. Look at the materials in your room, change stuff like that. just, you know, just have a play with it.

1:59:32 And then community and connect, the three big Cs I think are really, really important. Human contact, that community, and a connection, like make proper connections. So hugging, Virginia Satir, four hugs for survival, eight hugs for maintenance, 12 hugs for growth. Try and hug 12 people each day. Phew!

1:59:54 You know? People aren’t talking to 12 people each day. Well, maybe a couple. And as you go around, you actually make a, you know, make a, do it for a month And just, what you start to see is, this is how it works, is that, ah, okay, I feel amazing from doing this thing, this thing. And you start to normalize the behaviors, yeah?

2:00:11 You might drop things off, it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you. Breath, so breath works, I think is the most important but modality, I think nasal breathing, try and return everything to nasal breathing. My daughter now, she’s 10, Lola, why do you breathing for your nose? Well, nose is a breathing pub, her mouth is for eating. So return back to there.

2:00:29 Before you’re about to eat, prepare your digestive system by breathing. So down-regulate, parasympathetic state through breathing is called rest and digest really. So three minutes before your meal, start breathing in through your nose and it will start to prepare your digestive system. So then what food you are eating, you go back to that conversation, you could be, you know, you want to nourish the body rather than undernourish the body. So you can be underfed and overnourished that way because you’re absorbing more.

2:01:02 And then before bed as well, same method of breathing before bed. And then one last thing. The first seven years of life, the recordings you make will tape you record that become the templates that you play out for the rest of your life. So you and I have had to go through processes based on those first seven years that we’ve had to unravel, rewild, ceremonies, God knows what else, to try and get back to the divine, innate, empowered being, right? So just be mindful of all the kids that are around you that are up until the age of seven because they’re observing your behavior and your behavior will become their template.

2:01:44 So you may not have kids but still be respectful of those younger generations because you’re their template. You’re gonna become their normalized behavior. So just be mindful about that. more than anything, I think is really important. Well, that’s quite a list, because I think everything you do is very holistic.

2:02:04 And so, first of all, congratulations on the run. Thanks man. You know, it sounds like you really went through some adversity out there, which is all part of the process. And you’re definitely more than the barefoot guy, to say the least. And so I really appreciate all of your stuff, Tony, because for me, it’s very holistic.

2:02:21 Like everything is congruent with a similar philosophy. And it all makes a lot of sense when you talk about it. And I hope all this stuff is in your book because I think it’s really powerful stuff, really. I mean, a lot of people on here that have one thing they talk about or this one thing, but I don’t usually see a theme through everything. And I do see that with you.

2:02:39 So nice to finally have you in here. Thanks. I’d love to get out on the heat sometime and get some knowledge from you. We should do it, we should run, we should do a bit of breath work, do a bit of cold immersion. We should swim anyway, don’t you say?

2:02:50 Yeah, I jump in the pond and stuff, but it’d be nice to see your take on it. And I’m definitely gonna be thinking about my running from at least the next few months and just being more conscious of it. Because I like to practice that skill and use that as one of my metrics as opposed to, you know. Yeah, refinement again, right? Yeah, I think I just find that stuff fascinating.

2:03:11 So yeah, so there you go. But thanks a lot, man. Really appreciate it. Keep doing what you’re doing, man. Thanks for having me on.

2:03:18 I think it’s fantastic. My pleasure, man. Sounds like it’s all coming together for you right around now, you know? Yeah, it’s kind of something that’s quite like the funnels, like everything kind of comes in and then it’s the refining process again, isn’t it? But it’s super exciting, man.

2:03:32 I think this is gonna be big. I think this is, I think a lot of your IP’s really gonna blow up in the next few years and I think that’s awesome, so. Well, that’s great, man. That’s good to come in for you. I love that, man.

2:03:41 Thank you. I think it’s true. So, looking forward to the book and all the best. I’ll see you on the heat. Beautiful.

2:03:47 All right, man. Thanks so much. Yeah, I’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching!