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The Rich Roll Podcast

The Ultimate Test of Human Endurance: Conquering the 4 Deserts Race Series

The Rich Roll Podcast

Rich Roll

Education, Society & Culture, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 13.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2015

⏱️ 109 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Futurist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said, the only way to find the limits of the possible is by going beyond them to the impossible. An apropos theme for my conversation with Jennifer Steinman, a documentary filmmaker who spent well over a year following four seemingly normal, far from professional athletes as they prepare for and undertake one of the most grueling, backbreaking endurance challenges on the planet — a collection of ultra-distance adventure footraces teetering on the absurd dubbed the 4 Desert Series. WHAT IS THE 4 DESERTS? Named by TIME magazine as one of the world's Top 10 Endurance Competitions, the 4 Deserts is the world's leading rough-country endurance footrace series. A unique collection of world-class events that take place over 7 days and 250 kilometers in the largest and most forbidding deserts on the planet. Jennifer has a more poetic take on this lunatic fringe: Imagine you’ve been dropped off in the middle of one of the largest, driest deserts in the World. Over the next six days you will have to run, jog, walk or crawl 155 miles through incessant heat, across soft sand and hard-packed gravel, over sand dunes multiple stories high and down razor-sharp rocky cliffs. You must do this carrying everything you need to survive — clothes, food, sunscreen, emergency medical supplies, sleeping bag — in a 20-pound pack on your back. Now imagine doing this not just once, but four times in one calendar year, through the driest, windiest, hottest, coldest and ultimately the most treacherous four deserts in the world: the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Gobi Desert in China, the Sahara in Egypt … and then, the final stage, a 150-mile footrace across the single most inhospitable landscape in the world: The Last Desert in Antarctica. Any single race in RacingThePlanet’s 4Desert Ultramarathon Series is an extraordinary, life-threatening challenge– something we would only expect the most accomplished, elite athletes on the planet to try. But most of the courageous men and women who come from all over the world to compete in these Herculean events are not professional athletes at all, they’re ordinary people—people with families and day jobs and mortgage payments– people like you and me who have decided, for a variety of personal reasons, to take on this extreme physical challenge. Why do they do it? This week's guest set out to answer this question. The result is Desert Runners– a feature length character-driven documentary that follows a remarkable collection of brave souls on an extraordinary year-long adventure, racing to the four corners of the Earth.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The thing I really learned was the difference between the people who made it and the people

0:08.4

who didn't make it had nothing at all to do with fitness.

0:12.4

It had purely to do with the belief that they thought they were going to make it.

0:20.3

That is Jennifer Steinman and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

0:34.4

The Rich Roll Podcast.

0:37.6

All right everybody, you can breathe a sigh of relief all as well in the world.

0:42.1

My name is Rich Roll.

0:43.1

I am back and we are here again for another awesome episode of the podcast, episode 133.

0:50.0

Thank you for listening, thank you for subscribing, thank you for spreading the word,

0:53.0

your friends, to your colleagues, to your family members, to your coworkers.

0:57.6

Maybe you even sent an email to your aunt saying, hey, aunt, guess what?

1:03.6

This is a great podcast.

1:04.8

Check it out.

1:05.8

Listen to it.

1:06.8

I appreciate that.

1:07.8

Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter.

1:09.8

Thank you for clicking through the Amazon banner at at www.retroel.com for all your

1:13.8

Amazon purchases.

1:15.7

What do we do here?

1:17.3

Well, we, and I say we, because this is not about me, I'm just the steward, this is about

1:23.5

us, this is about this collective experience that we are having as a community, we unpack

1:30.1

the tools necessary to live our best lives.

...

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