Running, overcoming challenges, and finding success | Ryan Hall

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Ryan Hall. Ryan is a retired American long distance runner who holds the US record in the half marathon at 59 minutes and 43 seconds, where he became the first US runner to break the one hour barrier. He also holds the American record in the marathon and is the only American to run sub 205, running 204.58.
Ryan is generally regarded as one of the greatest American distance runners. He retired in 2016 after a really difficult four year period following the London Olympics, which was plagued by lots of injuries. And he's really transformed his body in a way that is almost difficult to imagine without looking at a picture of him then versus now.
Ryan now is a coach. He coaches his wife, who is also a professional runner. And he coaches runners of all categories and talent levels through his training program called Run Free Training. He's written a book called Run the Mile You're In, which we talk about a little bit in this podcast, but probably not as much as I would have liked to. We spend so much time talking about things here that this is one of the few podcasts where I really felt like I came into it with kind of a sense of where I wanted to go. And I completely came off that. I never really come into podcasts with a list of questions, but I usually have a sense of direction. And here I deviated from it completely. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it just speaks to how much I couldn't stop wanting to get into details of his training and how just intrigued I have been by his transformation. When you look at Ryan today, he's an enormous physical specimen, probably over 190 pounds, power lifting, going on carrying all these extreme feats of physical strength, some of which we talk about, but many of which you can see on his Instagram account. And I can't recommend that highly enough. It's just amazing to watch. For example, his last one was doing a 500 pound deadlift and then immediately running into a five minute mile. He didn't succeed in that. I think he went 522 or something, but he's going to take another shot at it. We'd also talk about what I think is the most crazy of all of his fitness challenges that he does for himself, but I won't spoil that here. I wanted to talk with Ryan basically because he's one of the few people who has achieved remarkable success across two seemingly opposite disciplines, which is extreme distance running, extreme aerobic fitness, and then obviously extreme strength training. And we talk a lot about the toll that the former took on his body. In fact, I knew before this interview that Ryan had suffered from really low testosterone during his running days. I didn't realize how low it was. He actually revealed during this interview that it was in the 100s, meaning it was below 200 nanograms per deciliter.
That would be below or in the first percentile. That is so incredibly low. It's amazing to me that he could function, period.
Today, he says his testosterone is about a thousand nanograms per deciliter, which places him at about the 90th percentile.
Obviously a testament to how he's changed his nutrition and the fact that he's not running 110 miles a week. In this episode, we talk about his career, but not necessarily in the most linear way, his amazing successes and his epic failures and what he's learned through these experiences. And I think this is just kind of an amazing interview, even if you're not a runner, but I think it really talks a lot about the mindset of what it means to be successful. And you'll get the sense when you listen to this, that Ryan is just an incredibly optimistic person. He's the kind of person who really never seems to let failure get to him in a way that maybe some of us certainly myself would. And I think his optimism is kind of what's allowed him to bounce back from so many setbacks. So without further delay, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ryan Hall. Hey Ryan, looking very forward to having this discussion with you today. I've been a fan of yours for a long time actually. And running is kind of like, I don't know, it's sort of like F1. It's not really that popular in the United States, although it's becoming more so. I mean, obviously Netflix's Drive to Survive series has made F1 very popular. And I think also people are starting to become a little bit more aware of runners after, well, I don't really know what it is, but I think Kipchoge's two hour sub effort kind of got a lot of people in this country excited about it. But I think for me, the interest in running started, cause I used to swim with Alan Webb.