hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today we have a running episode I am chatting with Gary Cantrell who is better known as Lazarus Lake he is an endurance race designer and director as well as a former Runner himself he does ultra marathons his races include the Barkley marathons Biggs backyard Ultra Vault State 500k a
race for the ages and much more Lazarus is also star of a 2014 film the Barkley marathons the race that eats its young Wikipedia States and I quote his races are known to be especially grueling Trail Runner magazine called him an evil genius the Leonardo da Vinci of pain a master of sadomasochistic craft yet his
races have developed an almost cult-like following my view of course as your podcast host is much more positive than that since lazarus's event at Frozen head State Park began in 1986 only 17 people have finished it in most years there are no finishers at all within the 60-hour time limit entrance pay I believe one dollar and
sixty cents to face the challenge Lazarus also has worked as an accountant and a city treasurer Lazarus welcome uh how's it going all is going well I have some very simple questions about what you do what is running 100 miles tell you about yourself that running 26 miles does not I guess it probably tells you four times as much about yourself it's a uh
not really an extension of the same thing it it's a whole day instead of just a uh a morning and people come away and they report what to you about what they learned well I think every each time you step up a level you find out that you can do a lot more than you thought you could do do you think that's true in most human spheres of endeavor
I I think it would be true in all of them I think that the experiences people have improve them across the across the sphere of their lives why are there so many stem professionals doing your Ultra marathons why are they so well represented um because the the races that we have the one like Barkley is it's a problem-solving exercise
there's a there are a lot of different variables that you have to be able to master in order to be able to complete it and they like challenges and what would some of those variables be of course you have to be able to use a mapping Compass you don't have to be the world's greatest orienteering expert but you have to be
competent you have to be able to find your way around in the woods you have to be able to um to monit manage your own physical well-being because there's no aid station so you have to pack and prepare for for what you need to maintain your run and then in addition at Frozen Ed you have a highly variable climate where that you could encounter
it could be 80 degrees and 15 degrees on the same Loop and how do the the runners manage their water supplies they uh they have to carry it with them and we uh we put a couple of water drops out on the course so that they could re restock but if it's below freezing that water might be Frozen and they might have to uh find
some in a stream somewhere or or a spring and of all of those skills which is the most scarce which holds people back the most apart from just the you know the running and the endurance what do people are what are they most likely to screw up navigation is a bigger problem than it used to be just because come dependent on GPS
and if you don't use part of your brain it kind of Withers so if you're not accustomed to knowing in your head Where You Are and just listening for a little voice to tell you when to turn next it's something of a problem because they don't get to take GPS and so they literally end up lost in the woods some people it happened
and what happens to the men they just they stay there for the rest of their lives they wander slowly back to civilization or What Becomes of them they send out a call for help if they don't find their way out in a couple of days we'll go look for them but usually they will so far they've always found their way out we wander around for an extended period
of time lost but that's that's what they signed up for they're on their own with all the electronics and and all the things that the conveniences of Modern Life are gone and they just rely on themselves and if someone sprains an ankle eventually you find them or they try to hobble back we have a 100 self-extraction including a couple of
broken ankles uh dislocated clavicle um a fractured kneecap the the people that do this are kind of a different breed that they're physically pretty tough and they get themselves out how many military people are say former Navy Seals do this or are they not a major clientele um you do get special forces not just
from the U.S but from other countries I I it's it's the kind of thing that that appeals to them and you had some ukrainians recently is that correct um I we've had peop we have people from all over the world I know we've had ukrainians in the past I'm not sure we've had one in in the last couple of years and if you think about the motivations
of these people how much is it they're bored with their old goals or how much they want to show status or are they wrestling with inner demons or all of the above how do you think about what brings them to do this there's different people would do it for different reasons but for the most part they're really seeking the freedom that
comes with being totally dependent on yourself and then on top of that is the the challenge of doing something that they it's it's about a one percent finish rate you have selected the best of the best and out of those only the one percent make it and everybody would like to think that they're one percent of the one percent
and before your health interfered you used to run Ultra marathons what were your goals uh I was never more than a mediocre Runner so my goals were to do better than I had done before I I set lofty goals and didn't always achieve them I actually thought at one point I could finish the Barclay did you try oh yeah I got my fi I tell people I got
my hundred miles but it took five years which is not a bad time at the Barclay you've designed the course right so in terms of when and where to turn you would know that more automatically than the other participants I I definitely had a big leg up on uh finding my way but I actually did take a wrong turn once that cost me about four
hours let's say a friend of yours went to you and said they wanted to train their kids or their grandkids in resilience sticking with it durability what advice would you give them based on what you've learned I think being in any any uh sport helps you develop those characteristics I would I would recommend for kids that
they play sports that are appropriate to their age with with people their age if they were a runner that they should run track and field and and run on the the school team or the club team with other athletes that are the same age the ultra marathons are more more of a place where older older people are involved when you say older you mean in their 30s
or much older or from their from their 30s up we have the after race a race for the ages we'll have 35 or 40 runners in the field every year that are over 70. with the oldest Runners up into their 90s how well do you think is the oldest finisher of the 17. oh that's easy David Horton did it when he was 50. it was his 11th attempt
do you think it's possible to do it at 70 no I bet it's not really possible to do it at 50. but someone did it someone did it but I think that's what we like to do the impossible what's special about that guy who did it at 50. David Horton is a uh he's one of the great Ultra Runners he's considerably older than 50 now but he
was through his career one of the better Ultra runners in the country and he just he was good at all the skill sets and he kept trying and and honing it down he had a several near misses before he finally got it why is it that it's running as a sport that is correlated with the endurance mentality so I never see like endurance
tennis matches or endurance basketball games not even endurance podcasts why running I guess because it lends itself to it you want people want to see how far they can go the people who want to do that if you think of the evolution since 1986 how have those people changed as a group or a class of participants uh humans humans have kind of a
collective a collective ability I guess that's unique among animals that we can compare what we've learned and learn from each other and the skill sets of the people that tried it first in 1986 were not comparable to today and the equipment is a lot better in 1986 state-of-the-art lighting was a carbide lamp because your old
flashlights with the bulb you'd have to carry 10 pounds of batteries to get you through through the night with good light and now they have those little Li LED bulbs and it just takes a battery for the whole race and as for the people themselves what's the main Dimension along which they've improved just all of the fine skills of finding
their way using the map uh how to how to prepare the map there how to what to carry for nutrition of course they have their clothing is improved as much as their lights have you don't have to carry as bulky of clothing but you have to be you have to carry a light enough pack that it doesn't destroy you to carry it up all those up and down all
those big Hills but you have to be able to cope with it being 80 degrees or to be 15 degrees now I read one source online it suggested that the going up and down the hills was basically the equivalent of twice the height of Mount Everest is that true it's a little more than that and that would be from sea level I I don't know why that's an important
distinction to me because it doesn't mean anything to to most people but you know the from from the base of Everest to the top is not 29 000 feet that's how high the peak is from sea level okay and all this is taking place in Eastern Tennessee is that correct it is they're they're little puny mountains by Western standards they the
the highest peak is 3 380 feet uh it's only about two thousand feet from the bed from the bottom of the mountains to the top you just do that distance repeatedly and they're extremely steep because of the geology of the area and would you describe it as fairly Rocky or what else would you say about the environment
it's pretty Rocky but there's a lot of there's a lot of undergrowth I don't it's it's not as Rocky as the Western mountains which are newer and don't have as much soil and undergrowth on them plus they extend higher into the atmosphere what's the chance you run into a bear not very good because you're making too much noise you'll probably be around a
bear but they'll hear you long before you get close and which are the elements of those races that most often break people when they break I think it's the the cumulative climb the the race is a hundred miles and the time limit is extremely slow by 100 miles for people who run distance they're thinking 100 miles in
24 hours is hard this one gives you 60 hours so they perceive it as being a extremely extended low-level effort but because that the pitch is so extreme it's actually a really slow time which requires you to have all of your all of your gauges we like to say on the red line you're pushing it as close as you can get to blowing your motor
but pacing themselves is one of the skills they need to have is that correct so yes you have to they have to be physically in the best condition of their lives the the training takes people right to the edge of injury just training for it and then you have to be able to push your body to its maximum extent without something breaking down
are you ever worried about government regulation intervening and stopping what you're doing would they allow this in Massachusetts is one way to put it I I think that we're greatly aided by being kind of grandfathered in I know I look when people try to set up similar events say in Europe they make them put a tracker on everybody um
because the government wants to protect you from yourself and but we've we've always done it and they'll say well the tracker wouldn't make a difference because it doesn't tell the runner where they are but it tells the runner someone knows where they are and when they get out there to make these decisions on how to to approach different things
they have to bear in mind there's no tracker on them nobody knows where they are if they do something really stupid they're going to end up being somewhere that they have to wait till someone finds them and it it does have an effect even if it doesn't tell you where you where you are in today's world being totally separate
from your electronics is in 1986 it wasn't that big of a deal because you're a light you weren't constantly uh in contact but now people are they're wired all the time so they have a kind of withdrawal some of them like oh my goodness where's my email um now they have plenty to occupy their mind probably if you just took all their
Electronics away and sent them on an average day it'd be a struggle it would be a struggle for me without my email to check what am I going to do you think it's easier when people say oh I'm just going to take this race one step at a time or is that a mistake in any of the endurance events you really have to have things in your mind one is that
you're that you're focused on finishing you can't do a hundred Miler any hundred Miler and say I'm going to run 50 miles and then evaluate because I can save you a lot of trouble at 50 miles you're going to decide to stop um but at the same time you have to live in the moment you can't think about how much is ahead of you because your mind
just can't wrap itself around all of it at once if you're in a lot of discomfort right at this moment in in your if the the races have a trajectory you'll you'll have up periods and down periods and up periods and down periods and when you're on the downslope your mind just projects it to go down forever and you think oh I can't go that
low but if you just stay in the moment in a while you'll find yourself in in a better place does a researcher named Ethan cross and he's argued that if you keep on saying to yourself you can do it you can do it a kind of self-talk that helps do you agree hmm I for myself when I'm involved in something like this there's not really
time to give myself a pep talk I'm totally absorbed with doing doing what I'm doing I actually prefer to approach things with with a little bit of doubt a couple of years ago I walked across the country and people would tell you when I was I walked from the east coast to the West Coast why was could still smell the ocean and people say you've
got this and I think well then why go through all this discomfort if I already know I can so I believed I could make it to the Pacific Ocean when I topped the last mountain in the in the Coastal Range and I could see it so you didn't just walk along interstates no it was I walked some interstate I walked open range I cut across parking lots and and uh
I was committed to having a continuous set of foot string of footprints from coast to coast but I was not committed to them going any particular place the easiest way I could get through the better did you listen to music or podcasts while you were walking um no it interfere that would interfere with the voices of my head
and what do they tell you actually I spent most of the time between days I would would read about the geology of the area I just seen and read about the history and uh and other things of the area I was going into and then local people would tell me things about the places I was that otherwise you wouldn't know it was
it was an intense educational experience that really kept me mentally fully occupied all the way across for Ultra marathons how much do shoes make a difference I know there's people people barefoot but uh shoes are better why do they prefer Barefoot that seems odd to me I I won't speculate because it's it's whether the whether that it's a real
some real benefit to it or not but um she's greatly reduced the number of injuries you're going to get to the to the skin on your feet how prevalent is doping when people do ultra marathons I don't think it's really prevalent because there's not there's not a lot of real motivation to do it there's not nobody's making big
bucks as an Ultra marathoner I but I suspect you see it to some extent among people where you would you would wonder why you know you're you're an age group competitor you're not running at the front but people people about anything there is that people could do somebody does it what are some possible ways people might try to cheat
ah the most common one is to cut part of the distance off you you do occasionally have people who who cheat I know you read about them in marathons and you would have the same have periodically the same thing in ultra running but you know I I can't um I don't think anybody except them really understands why they do it because he
ultra marathon performances don't mean anything to anybody but you and you have a book page method to stop that correct I in the uh in the Barclay it's pretty effective we have checkpoints that are paperback books everyone tears out the page of the book that matches their bib number so we count all the book pages when they get back and if they don't
have the page you figure they cheated or somehow they just don't win well no if you don't if you don't have all your pages you don't count it doesn't matter we don't really correlated that you cheated usually people have lost a page forgot to get a page they've made some kind of other mistake and they don't count as having one if
they're missing a page that's it right no go if they're missing a page there's no go how do you choose which books to put out uh that's a lot of fun people we appropriate titles such as uh my favorite one was was the last book on the loop that was if I can it wasn't always easy but I sure had fun and but we we kind of have a theme every
year one year the theme was uh the Barclay marathons where dreams go to die and another year it was the only thing that buckles here is is your knees buckling is a runner's term for finishing within a certain time and winning a belt buckle so we take that year's theme and we try to pick books that kind of fit with the
theme and then we go through the course and since we know when it starts and we know where it goes and you have an idea what Runners have been through what they're what they're coming to what time of day it is a little bit of a peek into their mind about what they're thinking or how they're feeling you try to make the book titles match
that ninety percent of the people they don't ever notice but some of them they they catch on and and they think we're really messing with them with the way the book titles are laid out why don't you charge more than a dollar sixty for people to run because uh it's it's a um it's only a small number of Runners and we don't want it to be a
feat of Finance you have a you have a lot of things that people do but it's really like going to the Titanic uh going down on a submersible to see the Titanic doesn't require skill or dedication or effort just money so we won't don't want money to be the deciding factor for the Barclay we want it to be a test of a physical test not a not a financial
one why don't you charge less than 1.60 then well then I wouldn't uh I wouldn't have money to buy Dr Peppers with the early history of your races how were they influenced by the experience of James Earl Ray say uh that's a connection that that seems to be popular with the media because they're they're you know this is where
that he escaped and and certainly it was a big National story it was a bigger story in Tennessee than anywhere else and it was really interesting to me because I had been hiking all through those mountains for years and I since I knew the terrain he was on I was quite interested in seeing how he did and but I think any comparisons we make
to James Earl Ray are kind of belittling his escape attempt more than more than anything else how did he do he only he didn't even make it the equivalent of a loop and that was with his supposed Freedom at stake uh the admission the sign up process for the Barkley Marathon it's often considered opaque how is it you
decide who gets to run and who does not even though we try to make it a little bit difficult to even submit an application we get way too many we picked through they write an essay and you look at the essays and try to pick out people who are going to get something from the experience you don't want you don't want people who only are
coming to post on Facebook that they came or to get on the entry list so they can post on Facebook that they were entered and then drop out before they have to hurt so you still end up with a huge number of people in there there's a whole complex process of how we divide them out into different groups because we don't want to have an impact on the
the Wilderness Area where the the race is held so that's really dependent on not on the number of people but the number of laps so you select people of different levels of ability so that the total number of laps will come out to a spec around 180 life 180 90 laps and we can nail it pretty well but then you get down to the people in those
groups and you just have to draw I use the Excel random number generator everybody's putting a number that's within a group and I'm going to pick so many of them and I just have it pick a number in that sequence and that person gets in and you think your process is working pretty well and we get the right number of Loops
every year even even like this year when we had three finishers which is really and really unusual we still had just about the same number of total laps that we always have it was fewer actually total laps than we had last year with zero finishers and people need letters of recommendation when they apply is that true no they write an essay
even if even if someone's not particularly if they write their essay they they reveal themselves they show who they are you want people that are going to get something out of the experience not people that will hate it and not people that really aren't going to immerse them they're just going to dip their toe and then
post that they were there and leave and you have staff who help you with all of this um I'm transitioning it over to a guy named Carl laniac because I won't be around forever and we just had to I you know get rid of the the non-productive qualities you had like empathy and other things that serve no purpose in a race of this nature the people who
help you they're volunteers or you manage to pay them or how does that work how do the economics of this hang together uh they're all volunteers the the race actually is not cheap to put on and people donate you know and the biggest part of your donations come from entrance and the the races kept a we have a
Barclay fund where we put the donations and use it to pay for the race and it's maintained a positive balance since 1986. it says something good about the people that run it and then we get some donations from people that just follow it on the internet and and think it's important something like this exists are you at Liberty to say what running
one of these might cost for the for the individual Runner no no for the whole aggregate Enterprise all expenses oh God I should be able to pop up a number right off the top of my head I want to it I want to say it costs like eight or ten thousand dollars to put it on but we do a lot of stuff that's that would not necessarily be necessary
you know we we bring all the barricades and hang the hang the flags of the countries and states where the runners come from and and having all these supplies requires us to rent a truck when we first put it on it was just there was nothing people showed up and we ran and you light a cigarette and you blow a conch shell right
yeah we blow a conch shell to tell them that the start is an hour away uh there's a uncertainty is built into the Barclay everywhere because uncertainty is the most difficult thing for an athlete to deal with so they don't know where the course exactly goes until the day before the race they don't know when it's going to
start until an hour before it starts they know it'll start between midnight and noon and if it doesn't start until after day break there's a lot of sleepless nights because people are afraid they'll miss the and you can't just Google online like what time and place the next one is right that's somewhat of a mystery or how does that work yeah we don't tell
what day the race will be run except to the people that are entered and of course nobody knows the starting time Nobody Knows the starting time for next year's race and now right now except me and Carl and do you have media that show up they somehow find out or it truly stays a secret we kept it a secret up through 2 000 and then we had some elements in the
park system that didn't want the race to exist and we we realized in the struggle to keep going that we had to exist so where we had been turning down media requests we started accepting them and strangely enough especially in Ultra marathons where you would kill to get media exposure we have to select the media that we let
in at Barkley because the the play The Venue is is small and limited you have to keep the number of people down or there's no place for the runners themselves and which media do you choose and why first come first served so it could be just a freelance photographer or Sports Illustrated it was just a matter of which one we
heard from first it seems fair putting aside your own events do you feel that Ultra marathons have become too commercial they're more commercial than they used to be you know everything changes I I think that there is still plenty of places for people to have the same experience and the personal experience is not driven by the commercialization of it
the commercialization the the slower time limits is one of the bigger is a bigger change than commercialization when I started running Ultras the time limits were really pretty strict and everybody who ran was was young and in the prime of their career if you had somebody run into their 40s or even 50 they were this rare
exception and now a lot more people can run and for a long time it extended my career because they didn't have the strict cutoffs they used to have eventually you get old enough you can't make the cutoffs anyway all of these are just the things that happens things either change or they die how close do you think we are to the
ultimate fundamental limits on human performance in running I don't know I think that's what in a in a global sense that's what the ultra running is is all about certainly at the top level is looking for what are the limits we're learning that um people can learn and adapt to become better and then there's this ability of the mind to
drive the body beyond what seems to be physically possible that who knows where the real limb where the real limit lies if you if we look at all sports as a whole what is the individual sports performance record that impresses you the most oh so I might say Joe DiMaggio's streak right 61 games in a row with a hit you can't miss once
that to me seems really quite hard but what would you say I would have to sit and really think about that a long time because I'm I'm an overall General sports fan and there's so many uh excuse me so many amazing things that people have done in and then to try to compare different sports you can't even compare all the different
running Sports very easily have you ever seen the YouTube video where Steph Curry is shooting three-point shots and if memory serves he hits 95 in a row without missing hahaha I've seen exceptional High School shooters that can shoot pretty close to that um but so I I'm on the on the one hand I think you can't have too much respect for people who
develop that kind of consistency in in their shooting but it seems totally possible are there conditions under which you would stop a race we we haven't hit them yet but there would there would be there would be conditions where you would have to stop a race they had a backyard in uh Finland this year it was their National Championship race
and this huge storm went through with 100 mile an hour winds and it strewed power lines all over the course they had to stop only a fool runs through live power lines on the ground put aside the 17 people who have finished Barkley and just look at American society as a whole do you see overall a shortage of
stoicism and Inner Strength a decline of Manliness or how do you view where we're headed as a country well up until just a couple of years ago I was an assistant coach at the on the high school basketball team and today's kids are great um I I go out and do these Journey runs where I'm just exposed and out there with people and people are good we just
had an event where we took 82 people and we put them on buses and we bust them 350 miles away from they parked in a in a in a hay field on top of a mountain in North Georgia we bust them 350 miles away and put them on the side of the road with a map they had um 10 days to get back to their car and so they they set out the first few
people that went through the towns on the way they would think that's a really fast homeless guy and then they would ask what's going on and uh the next thing you knew people were putting coolers of drinks out by the road outside their house they were loading up stuff and taking it and driving down the road to see where the
runners were the um the race is called the heart of the South and it's not about the physical location it's about the people and you go through what is supposedly a um you know the rural South doesn't have a great reputation as a humanitarian area area but the support that people got along the way and and the help and the things that
everyone did for them and no one was asking who was a Republican or who was a Democrat there was people helping people being being out on the road as opposed to just watching The Selective stuff on TV and working with the kids instead of just reading about them this is a great place and it's full of good people I think that if we just
don't lose our confidence in ourself that this country is going the right way but say I read in the newspapers well the military complains that some fairly high percentage of American kids are not in good enough shape to even join the military should I dismiss that or is it correct what do you think um I think that we we probably aren't
aren't raising a generation that's that's as in as good a physical condition as they could be uh it doesn't mean they can't get in shape if necessity requires it ironically that was a complaint of World War II that the recruits they got were not in good physical condition but you know that's not something that's written in stone and can't change
do you think disciplinarian coaches are still possible in 2023 America or the parents undercut them the parents get too upset everyone's too much of wallflower how do you see this laughs um pants parents very often don't make a don't make a positive input into the sports for their kid I think people of course I'm looking at
High School coaches I've not coached on the college level so I don't know the people I think they really under appreciate the High School coaches that I knew and I've known a lot of them over a almost 40-year period the two things that you look at that you want your kids to come out of your program with are character and integrity and
you're proud of the games you win and you're there to win but you're really teaching the kids lessons that you hope make them better people and I don't see that that's really changed maybe the manifestations of it maybe some of the stuff that that you couldn't do now you probably never should have done but you can disa you can have discipline
without putting your hands on somebody when you walked across America which was the place that surprised you the most ah no place really surprised me that I got asked a lot what was my favorite place and I always told them it was the place I was at because I like to say the next place that's coming sure I would make
I I think if I hadn't been doing Journey runs for a long time I think someone that comes into it it's the first time they do it they're shocked by how how good people are you have hundreds of human interactions they're all good um you you have numerous law enforcement checks because sometimes you're doing things that don't look quite right
of course when you're crossing a mountain pass in the desert and the nearest house is 50 miles away the law enforcement is checking to see if you're if you're safe and sane sane being a good question but you know you you've got things under control I got stopped walking through um a really ritzy part of town at four
in the morning looking like a homeless guy what city is this um I don't remember what city it was it was in Ohio and the policeman he would be derelict in his duty if he didn't ask why I was there because it didn't belong but after we talked a few minutes he got out and took a selfie with me and that kind of that kind of says it then I walked through some
what were considered really terrible parts of big cities and um you know talk to people they um a smile and a wave works the same in every neighborhood so if you want to renew your faith in humanity and you want to renew your faith in the country walk across it and put yourself dependent on the kindness of strangers how did carrying bodies to the morgue
influence your subsequent life um I it was how did you know I did that oh I read it somewhere one of my jobs I worked the the 11 to 7 shift the the graveyard shift ironically and it didn't really bother me to carry bodies to the morgue because the person was gone and just the body was left it's um I I don't think it probably
influenced me I was already Maybe maybe lacking that part to start with what did accounting teach you about Ultra marathons and running laughs well everything is numbers I really enjoy the county your accountant knows more about you than anybody except maybe your doctor you can look at the numbers and see what's going on in places that you've
never even physically been it's um I know I wasn't really a math person who likes the pure math but I love numbers for the information in sports and business in in everything numbers tell you everything where did you work as City Treasurer Bell Buckle or somewhere else now a city called Shelbyville that's in Tennessee
right yes yes it's in Middle Tennessee was that fun I I enjoyed it greatly I worked with a fella named ed Craig who was a really good city manager and I felt like we did a really good job for the city I always looked at it that you know you're hired by the elected officials but I think as a government employee you work for the
taxpayers and I came away feeling that I did really did good service for the people who paid the taxes there so it was a satisfying a satisfying stint how does East Tennessee differ from west Tennessee how should I think about that I don't know since I live in Middle Tennessee they're both slightly inferior to Middle Tennessee
what makes them worth um they're not Middle Tennessee yeah hard to see how they could be East Tennessee is Hillier and um West Tennessee is is more used to it's more it's got a great deal of the Mississippi alluvial plane it's more Rolling Hills but the the people are a lot have a lot in common people everywhere have a lot in common
what Nick's Bell Buckle a special Town that's where you live now right yes uh well I live near Bell Buckle it's a it's a small country place and people know each other I really live in an area I would call short Creek I go out I went out before I came on here and and did my morning three hour walk I usually see only a couple of vehicles
if I see somebody I wave because I either they either know me or they're gonna stop and ask directions because if you end up here you were trying to get somewhere else and uh it's just it's pretty and it's green and it's not real densely populated and and I know all my neighbors for miles around because I walk every day
it's special in the way every in someplace else would be if I lived there and had been there a long time do you have good barbecue there um I I kind of lean towards the Texas style barbecue but they have good barbecue in Tennessee do you have good Waffle Houses in central Tennessee 24-hour schedule and there's something else about Waffle
Houses people would know walking across the country and looking kind of derelict I'll stop at one just because they have an indoor toilet and then I buy something I on my travels I think if I go to a business and use their bathroom I should buy something something so I might stop and just buy a glass of chocolate milk and I've had the waitress think I was
down on my luck and asked if I needed them to buy me a meal because that's how people are so if you go out to eat at a Waffle House do you order waffles or you order something else very they I like their hash browns with everything pretty much everything in it a omelette but I'm not much of a waffle eater because the syrup is too sweet for
me what are the books that have influenced you the most ah now I've got to try to think of the name there's a I think the guy's name is McPhee and he wrote Tales of a former Earth John McPhee yes absolutely great books that's a great book um I read mostly non-fiction and tend not to not to remember the authors and the names of
the books what topics you read about sports or running or what else I like to read about sports and I like to read about geology history fascinates me science paleontology archeology just kind of almost anything not not chemistry or pure math or are not not really in my in in my Realm who's going to win the NBA title next year hahaha
the team that comes closest to running a real offense is that Denver always wins Denver looks good now but you know that it's like AAU they'll redraw teams between now and then and uh but it's it's funny the NBA game the rules are designed to make it as much as possible a game of athleticism run and shoot but and I've I guess you'd call me a
basketball purist I like the the passing the offenses the defenses the teamwork the the skills um really like the high school girls basketball is the most beautiful basketball you see play it's almost an art the way that they that they play it but at every level when you look it's still the team that comes that is
best at those aspects of the game is still the one that wins do you have a favorite player uh okay jokic I believe is his name correct a tremendous pass or maybe the best passer ever yeah best since Larry Bird when you were talking about the guy hitting uh 95 three-pointers in a row there's a video of Larry Bird called 50 assists
and those are infinitely more impressive because of what they tell about the Players Court awareness knowing where everybody is ask you questions first over the last 10 years you've become a lot more famous how is that changing what you do how do you cope with it I'm lucky it didn't happen when I was young and would think that it really
meant something I'm still just an old hillbilly that lives in the woods and some combination of circumstances have led to all this notice and attention but it's not like I really deserve it there are exceptional people all around who have done a lot more than I have so I you know you you if if it gives you the ability to maybe
do some things that are positive or or people will listen to you and you can can give a positive message then that's a good thing but it's just it's just a combination of circumstances unfortunately not reflecting something I've done last question what will you do next ah whatever I can get away with what will you try to get away with a new
a new kind of race or a memoir a documentary uh you know I can't get away with much because I'm old and slow and I would be quickly caught but I'm really putting a lot of focus on this thing called the backyard Ultra which is where that it's a just kind of a different sort of running sport and I think it it um emphasizes the aspects of competition
that are more positive uh say a little more about that say uh you run a 4.1667 mile Loop and you do it once an hour you have a start every hour and you have to be there in the starting Corral and start every hour and finishing time to be in the Corral next hour and it just goes on until there's only one person left
so it's not that hard to run four miles in an hour but to do it on and on and on and you only have this short time in between and there's it's as we did the first one in 2012 and now there's over 400 of them in like 70 something countries but it the winner is the last person left and he can only go one lap after the after everybody else is gone
once you finish a lap by yourself the race is over so people who want to achieve big performances have to have other good Runners out there with them there's one winner everybody else is a dnf because the dentist the distance of the race is defined by how far the winner goes so everyone else didn't finish but people of all levels can go the
furthest they've ever gone it lends itself to that it's really more about the individual achievement and then the person who's the last person who dnfs is called the assist because he's really the one who decided how far the winner went and without a good assist you can't have a big performance where having the world championships in October here on
my farm and we've got Runners from 30-something countries and and a lot of really exceptional athletes it's going to be and I got to set it up where you remove the politics from Sports everyone is there because they qualified and uh I never liked Beauty contests and sports when you're picking picking all stars or whatever
you like to get it down to to be purely objective and no subjectivity in it at all but I think it uh it's a it's a version of running that has a way for a place for people at all levels to to succeed and to accomplish something and and it uh it just seems like a worthwhile place to apply my time that sounds great Lazarus Lake thank you
very much I appreciate you talking to me hopefully uh I've seen the impressive list of people guests that you've had and I I thought oh I'm being lined up as a change of pace I really look forward to this one coming out you put many of them to shame oh well I appreciate that I don't believe it but it's still nice to hear