3100 Miles: The Longest Race On Earth - Sanjay Rawal - #116

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Well, hello, friends. welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Sanjay Rawal. He is the filmmaker behind 3100, Run and become. This is a documentary about the longest race on earth. You might think it was across the United States or on the plains of Africa, perhaps, but no, this is a square block in the middle of New York City in the middle of summer. 52 days, 3100 miles, 3100 That would take you literally across coast to coast of the United States. And it's just the maddest experience I've ever heard. Sanjay talks us through the history of distance running, why we are built to run anthropologically, biomechanically. Recently, we had Eliad Kipchoge's sub-2-hour marathon performance. But in comparison with the 3100 race, that marathon seems quite a lot like a sprint. So yeah, get ready for this one. Please welcome Sanjay Rawal. Oh yeah, PS. upcoming guests include Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale, Aubrey Marcus and Brian Callan. The next few months are going to be awesome.
I'm joined by Sanjay Rawal. Sanjay, welcome to the show.

**Sanjay Rawal** (1:36)
Chris, it's great to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:39)
Absolute pleasure to have you on. Before we get started, even for the listeners at home, behind Sanjay in wherever he's filming is a series of like mannequins, slightly sullen, sad looking mannequins, and a really epic, is that a painting of some falconry? Like where are you? What's that backdrop?

**Sanjay Rawal** (1:59)
I'm in my edit studio in New York City, and I have a garden right outside, and a friend of mine made a series of sculptures, which aren't finished yet, and they were all sitting in my backyard, but the weather has turned here, and I had to bring them all inside, so I don't know if people are familiar with the terracotta warriors of Jian, a farmer discovered in his field thousands of clay statues all pointed in the right direction. I kind of feel like that's where I'm sitting right now. I've got these replica statues of the Indian meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, meditating, and it feels like I'm in a temple.

**Chris Williamson** (2:37)
It's pretty epic. It's pretty cool. As backdrops go, man, that's not bad. So for the listeners who don't know who you are, how would you describe yourself and give us a bit of background to you?

**Sanjay Rawal** (2:50)
So number one, if there is a listener who knows who I am, oh my God, I want to meet them. I'm nobody.
I'm a jack of all trades, master of none, but I make a lot of movies, but my most recent one was called 3100 Run and become. It's out on Amazon. It's going to be out on Amazon Prime in the UK in a couple of weeks. It's about the world's longest running race. I would say that my expertise has just been cleaned by spending a lot of time with people who don't just look at running as performance or look at running as fitness, but look at running the way that humanity did thousands of years ago. That running is in fact a pathway to self-transformation, to self-realization, and if you believe in something higher, to the divine.

**Chris Williamson** (3:39)
Why running?

**Sanjay Rawal** (3:41)
Well, this is interesting because there's a famous book by a good friend of mine, Chris McDougall, Born to Run, and he explored the anthropological connection between human evolution and running. And evolutionary biologists suggest that the advantage, the only advantage that early men and women had on the savanna amongst massive predators, amongst massive herbivores, was the fact that we could move on two feet. Now physiologically, that means that when we walk, our breath is not coupled to our gait. If you can imagine a quadruped, you know, when they extend out, their lungs inflate.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
Is that when they breathe? Is that how their breathing cadence works? No way. I never knew that.

**Sanjay Rawal** (4:32)
When their forelegs collapse, their entire torso collapses and the air is expelled. And so they are not good aerobic runners because they have to, to, they can't regulate their breathing.
We can breathe a lot more. We can breathe two or three or four times per step if we need to. They can't. So even if they're going slow, they can't breathe a couple of times. So they're not good slow runners. So we were great slow runners. And in 3100 Run and become, we actually went to the Kalahari Desert to live and hunt with the San Bushmen, who have been around for 125,000 years. And you and I don't look like San Bushmen, but and not to say that they're the root tribe of everyone, but they were perhaps the most eager tribe because every single human being has markers in their DNA distinguished only by the connection to San Bushmen. Like we all have a piece of their DNA in us. So they've been around for a long time and people have gone and studied them. And Chris McDougall looked at them in Born to Run and said, well, we were born to run because our evolutionary advantage on the savanna was our ability to chase animals down for 24, 48 hours, totally exhaust them. With rudimentary weapons and no weaponry at all, we could approach dehydrated animals, kill them, take them home. But the reality was far more interesting. You know, when we kind of presented these outside Western theories to the Bushmen, they kind of looked at us with just, and they were incredulous. They say that humanity evolves because of consciousness, not because of form. They said that their ability to track and catch large game was not due to the fact that they were endurance maniacs. It was due to the fact that human beings can pray. They can pray a lot more deeply than lesser evolved primates. They said that they understood prayer. They understood how they could gather energy from the earth, and that is what carried them to catch animals. And so they say the cosmology developed before the actual practice developed. They got the energy. They realized what they could do with it. And so from the very, very beginning, running and human spirituality went hand-in-hand. So in that sense, running was the first religion of humanity.