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Brian:    Hello.

Jon:    Hey, Brian.  Jon Gilson.  How are ya?

Brian:    Good.  How ya doin’, Jon?

Jon:    Good, man, good.  I’m calling today, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the CrossFit Running and Endurance Certification, what you’re doing there and where you’re going to go with it, but I thought we might start today by talking about how you came into athletics and how you found CrossFit from that.

Brian:    Okay.  My mom threw me into swimming at the age of four.  I took to it like a fish, and I was actually doing competitive swimming at the age of four.

Jon:    That’s scary.

Brian:    Basically – I know.  It is pretty scary.  Well, there were other kids my age doing it but my mom just didn’t know what to do with me.  I was just hell on legs, I guess you could say. But I followed competitive swimming for about twenty years.  I also played soccer, baseball, water polo, I actually took to really well as well.  
   
Inevitably ended up in the personal training world as I had been a coach/athlete most of my life. So I thought that it was a good set after trying about everything else.  I worked in the insurance industry.  I was in the restaurant industry.  I was, I mean, you name it, I pretty much did it.
   
The found the personal training thing and I found what I was passionate about.  At about the same time I got involved with Endurance sports.  I actually found Pose Running after successfully overtraining and developing shin splints for sprint triathlon.  It was a horrible experience as I was passed my several overweight people and people that I felt were much, much less fit than I was, being a competitive athlete my entire life.  I was actually encouraged by a gal who was probably, I’d say, thirty pounds overweight to just keep going after she passed me on the run.  And for some reason, I was humbled enough for the first time in my life to continue on with something but to actually pursue doing something correctly.
   
So, I found Pose through a friend and understood –got to understand running through mechanics and how to run injury-free and how to be efficient with running and applied it kind of to the personal training gig, although I was doing a lot of functional training, per se.  Not exactly CrossFit.  It morphed into a CrossFit-esque type training and then inevitably ran into CrossFit online after the kettlebell gig.  You know, I fell into the kettlebell gig and I was doing kettlebells and all that stuff.  And then CrossFit popped up one day and I stuck one foot in, pulled one foot out.  Jumped in, jumped out, and then finally dove head in, and here I am.

Jon:    Very cool, man.  You know, Brian, for folks who haven’t met you, you’re not the prototypical endurance athlete.  You know, we can’t see any of your ribs.  You obviously came from a background where you’re doing things other than running and so the incorporation of those things affects your running.  Can you talk a little bit about lifting and then the role of weight training in Endurance as well?

Brian:    Certainly.  Yeah, absolutely.  The tail end of the ’90s I got involved in powerlifting a little bit.  So I had a – I was doing a little bit of competitive power lifting.  I ended up wrecking my back in a really horribly done deadlift set.  I can – so I had somewhat of a background in powerlifting and overtraining for that triathlon I kind of – I decided thereafter I wanted to do an Ironman, which is kind of the general thought process in the endurance community, at least in the triathlon community.  Is you do one, you know, you do the shortest distance.  The next goal is, “Let’s go as big as we can.”
   
So, I did the Ironman and I was breaking under in training.  Couldn’t figure it out.  You know, my running form was pretty good.  I shouldn’t, I was still deteriorating a lot and it came as a suggestion to maybe throw some squats into my weekly routine.  I had not been doing any strength and conditioning.  And this is in my infancy in Endurance sports.  So it came in a suggestion that I do squats at least once a week from a personal trainer friend of mine.  He said, “Dude, maybe you should just start strengthening yourself back up, so you don’t break down as much.”  I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, why aren’t I doing that?”
   
So, I loaded up a smith bar with twenty-five pound plates on it so it was like seventy-five pounds because that smith bar is counter-weighted and I did…I proceeded to squat and it was well above parallel and I think I got five reps out and I felt as though I had torn every muscle fiber from my hips down; you know, down to my foot, feet. I racked it in a low position and waddled back to the trainer room where my buddy was like, “What the fuck happened to you?”  And I’m like, ”Dude, I can’t fucking move right now.  I’m wrecked.”
   
And, at that point, I realized I wasn’t as fit as I thought I was.  And it was a tell tale sign that somebody who could, who used to be able to squat 315 pounds when under, I was under 21 years of age.  You know, I thought, you know, I was decently strong.  I was nowhere near being strong.  But I thought that that would come at a cost, that if I were strong I couldn’t be fast or I couldn’t do endurance sports.  
   
So, at any rate, I started to apply this stuff.  I started to apply more strength and conditioning.   And luckily, you know, with I’d say probably three years of playing with stuff, we finally got it to where we have CrossFit as the primary training program for our endurance athletes, where we are using strength and conditioning as the programming.  And we are supplementing the sport—although we are still training the sport because we’re training for some specificity here.  We primarily use CrossFit as the training modality.

Jon:    That is just turning things on its head obviously for the Endurance community.  It’s not, “go long, go long, go long, go long.  Do three bicep curls, go long, go long”.

Brian:    No, yeah.  We’ve replaced the “go long go long go long” with stamina.  So we’re either doing some tempo type runs where you’re holding somewhere roughly in the range of 80 to 100 percent of what you should be able to hold, to time trialing.  Anywhere in the range of right now – we’re finding 5K is a great place for identifying somebody’s level of stamina, up to about a half marathon.  
  
And it’s doing well.  We implement some interval training and we’re only doing it two or three times a week.

Jon:    And what are we looking to service in the end here?  I mean, you talked a little bit about your involvement with triathlons.  I know that you’ve also done some ultra distance stuff.  To what end are we doing all this training?

Brian:    Repeat the question, please?

Jon:    Are we looking at getting folks prepared for marathons?  Getting them prepared for triathlons?  Getting them prepared to run 5Ks?

Brian:    Getting people to run 5Ks, although I’ve dealt with a few people, there’s not a whole lot that we really need to do, if we can get them CrossFitting at 100 percent.  You know, doing it as prescribed.  We just found the people who can, that are hardcore diehard CrossFitters, usually have a 5K time that’s pretty decent.  And if they just do a little bit of focus during the week, maybe one run, that they’re fine.
  
But what we’re primarily getting are people who are in the half Ironman distance and marathon and above.  So, we’re pretty much on the CrossFit Endurance site, we can program in a way that lets us coach any of those athletes as we will post, four workouts each day for four different sports.  And the athlete is supposed to choose one of those workouts and that’s it.

Jon:    And your involvement in CrossFit wasn’t CrossFit Endurance right off the bat, obviously.  You talked to me about getting demolished by squats and incorporating some strength training.  How did that strength training lead you to CrossFit?  And how did CrossFit kind of yank you into the fold and where did CrossFit Endurance come from?

Brian:    So, I originally was working with Dr. Romanoff who I’ve been educated by for the last, I don’t know, five or six years.  He originally implemented strength and conditioning into some programming ‘cause I asked him to coach me for a 200 mile attempt that I was doing.  And he basically had me primarily strength training and running three times a week.
   
So, he was the first one to kind of open my eyes to doing less running and focusing on my strength and conditioning whereas he indicated that there’s really no issues with aerobic capacity outside 10K, outside the 10K distance.  So, I just kind of started running with it and at any rate, when his training was done with me, I had already been CrossFitting from time to time and I had been playing with it.  I wasn’t kind of – I wasn’t really telling him about it but he – because I didn’t want to mess with his training.  
   
But at any rate, I was already hooked and sold on CrossFit.  I decided that instead of using his strength and conditioning program I was going to implement CrossFit strength and conditioning program into two to three runs a week.  So that’s what we did and I successfully ended up running 100 miles on this training.  And I did it in I believe an average of about 6 ½ hours a week of total training, meaning running, strength and conditioning, you name it.  It was all accounted for.
   
At that point, I approached CrossFit and I approached Greg Glassman, and said, “I think I have something here that might be of interest.”  And he said, “Yes, you do.  Come on up to Santa Cruz and present this to me.  Present this to us.  Let me see what you’ve got.”

Jon:    And for our non-runners, Brian, let’s tell them why this is of interest.  You were doing six, eight hours a week of training as a 100-miler.  Is that normal?

Brian:    No, that’s not normal.  Not even close to normal.  In fact, I think any exercise physiologist or somebody involved in our community would kind of balk at that, but the norm is probably, with my friends who still do it today, I would say upwards of fifteen hours a week of training, and none of it is strength and conditioning.  It’s all running.
   
For the most part, I mean, my training for the Ironman, I was in the vicinity of eighteen to twenty-four hours a week, each week.

Jon:    Wow.

Brian:     Of training.

Jon:    You were essentially cut it by 80 percent and you were running 100 miles.  Were you running 100 miles successfully or were you just making it through, or…?

Brian:    Well, I finished in the top 25 percent.  And for a guy who weighs 180 pounds I was probably in the top 5 percent in weight class in that event which was –

Jon:    And that weight makes you, again, an anomaly in this community, yes?

Brian:    Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, when I started I’m easily the biggest guy.  I’m one of the biggest guys there.  It’d be hard, you know, if the next starting line I show up to, I can bet that there’s no – and I’m not ego-ing out here and all.  I just, these guys don’t do any strength and conditioning so therefore they don’t have any real muscle on them.

Jon:    Yeah.

Brian:    So, I show up and I’m roughly 190 pounds right now and roughly somewhere between 5 and 7 percent body fat.  So I’m not, you know, a small 160, 150 pound guy that just runs.

Jon:    So, you went to Greg and said, “Listen.  I’m hitting CrossFit hard.  I’m only training eight hours a week including my endurance training and I’m kicking some ass over here.”  Is that an accurate synopsis?

Brian:    Yeah.  Yeah, pretty much and I think I indicated that I’d seen plenty of video of people running in CrossFit and it obviously was something that was not looked at as a skill.  And felt that it should be something that should be addressed.  Everything else in CrossFit is looked at as a skill.  And he liked what we – what I brought up there.  And he asked me to come do a few, show up at a few more Level Ones, talk about what we were doing.  He would introduce me to people and let me talk and he wanted to see how the community was receiving it.  And I believe once he was comfortable he asked me to create the Run/Endurance Cert.

Jon:    Very cool, and how did that lead to the website, crossfitendurance.com?

Brian:    I was warned by Greg that I had no idea how big this was actually going to be and you know, I guess I didn’t really realize because I’d say within the first three months, I was so overwhelmed with the amount of email with how well it was received, with just enjoying being part of this community as well.  I was like, “I’ve got to do something different here.”
   
You know, I think maybe six, seven months later, the idea came up about three months into this thing, after creating the Cert.  Then it was just that I didn’t know how to handle it so basically what I did was, “Hey, look.  I need to do what CrossFit did here, just give away the training” because we can’t coach everybody.  We just can’t do online programs for every single person.  I mean, it’s just not time—there’s no time management in it.  I’m just going to be wasting my time writing programs for every single individual when we could sit here and actually put out a pretty decent programming for the masses.  
   
And it has been, so that’s what we did.  And it was very well received, and I believe within the first two, I think in less than two months we were getting about 2,000 hits a day.  We’re somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 hits a day right now.

Jon:    Which is, for folks out there who aren’t webmasters, this is no joke.  You know?  Two thousand hits, unique hits a day, is a lot of people reading your stuff.

Brian:    Yeah.  I’m, you know, it’s still kind of weird to me, even thinking about that number.  But I mean, like I just – I was at an event last night with a lot of people down in San Diego, that are CrossFit related but you know, people I’ve never met.  They were coming up to me and you know, thanking me for the website and say they followed it.  And I’m like, I’m just, I’m so happy to hear stuff like that and it’s just like, “Wow.”  Everywhere I go people are like, “Yeah, I follow the site.  I follow the site.”  I’m just like, blown away.  It’s a really cool thing.

Jon:    Very cool.  You talked about, Brian, the idea that you were bringing technique to CrossFit, specifically to running.  And I would agree with you wholeheartedly that it wasn’t there.  Let’s get into your coaching philosophy a little bit.  Why technique?  Why should I give a shit?  Why shouldn’t I just go run down the road?

Brian:    Well, for the most part, why should you give a shit about how you squat?  Why, you have to, you want to be, I mean, what we’re teaching here is efficiency.  We’re teaching biomechanically how to run properly, which is only going to teach efficiency.  And if I can make your run easier, I can guarantee your Helen time is going to drop.  I can guarantee your Nancy time is going to drop.  Kelly time is going to drop.  All these times with the runs in them are going to drop if the run is easier.  That means you’ve got more gas to do something else, or you’re going faster.
   
If somebody is faster in 400 meters, running the way I teach them how to, than the old way, that would mean more power output, regardless of what it is you’re doing.  Regardless if you’re doing something the old way, or the way that other people have taught it.

Jon:    So, let’s latch into that a little bit.  What kind of technique are we talking about?  I mean, what are common errors that you’re seeing and how are we correcting them?

Brian:    So, the two major rules, and this applies literally to anything we do, is that if you stop a movement or you create too much leverage you’re going to – it’s the continued overuse, either one of those, that will create an injury.

Jon:    Okay.

Brian:    The joint, whatever, it’s just not going to be able to handle it.  Think of, you know, a shoulder press and pressing way out in front of you with 135 pounds.  It’s just not going to happen because your shoulders can’t support it, right?  That’s just creating too much leverage.  Where I’m talking about leverage with running is if you’re extending that hip and you’re extending that knee at the same time, that hamstring reaches the limit.  Yet you’re still driving force out behind you in order to travel in the opposite direction.  You just created more leverage than your body can probably handle.
   
This is when you usually see somebody grab their hamstrings, stop, fall to the ground or hobble off.  And they have successfully pulled a hamstring.  It also can relate pushing off with plantar fasciitis, IT band syndrome, the shin splints; you name it.  Stopping a movement, landing anywhere in front of your general center of mass while in motion is stopping the movement.  It doesn’t matter.  If you think of a ball rolling, would you stick something out in front of a ball in order to get it to move faster? Probably not.  That ball is constantly in contact with the ground underneath that general center of mass at all times.
   
It’s just like when you’re deadlifting.  It’s just like when you’re squatting.  It’s just like when you’re pressing.  The closer that bar remains underneath that general center of mass where gravity is pulling down on the center of that foot, the easier the movement is going to be.

Jon:    It sounds like a very sensical approach to it, and frankly, I’m surprised that we don’t see or hear more of this.  At the top level of the sport of sprinting, of distance running, do you still see athletes striking out front of that center of mass, driving hard out the back?

Brian:    You will.  I’ll tell you what.  If you were to watch a video of same bulk and everybody at the 2008 Olympics in that 100 meter sprint and the 200 meter sprint for that matter, and you were to videotape it, you would probably not see too many guys heel striking.  In fact, I would bet you don’t see a single guy heel striking.  You would probably not see too many guys landing too far in front of them and you probably will think that you’re seeing them drive out the back although you’re not.
   
I’ve seen the video and I’ve watched the video and now I’ve seen so much video that these guys don’t have time to have their foot on the ground that long.  They have to be pulling that foot off the ground up underneath them in order to be moving that fast.

Jon:    So to be achieving these leg cycle times they’ve got to be doing one of the fundamental tenets of Pose Running technique, which is yanking that foot off the ground rather than pushing it in?

Brian:    Yeah.  I mean, think of this.  And you live in Boston.  It’s about to start to getting really cold out there and the ice is going to set in.  How many people do you know that can run on ice?  Not many…

Jon:    Not too many.  I’ve only ever seen one actually.

Brian:    You’ve probably seen that one video, right?  So we’ve got a video that we play at the Cert usually and it’s of Haile Gebrselassie, who’s the current World Record holder in the Marathon.  We have a video of him running when he was doing the 10K.  It shows his form.  It breaks it down in slow motion and then, we show a video of Dr. Romanoff running on ice.  And the form is exactly the same.  
   
They’re doing exactly the same thing, never extending their knee out the back.  Never pushing off.  Pulling their foot up and using gravity by leaning to create torque.

Jon:    I’ve had the opportunity, Brian, let’s see…about two years ago now.  I did a USA Track and Field Level One Certification.  And this is before I ever met you, before I even ever heard the word “Pose”, and we were talking about vertical motion as being important, driving the feet into the ground as being the primary source of propulsion, keeping a very upright torso as opposed to falling forward.  Things that are just about diametrically opposite to those espoused by yourself and those who practice the Pose method.  
   
How do we reconcile the idea that the de facto best Track and Field team in the world is putting out a Cert that’s telling us things that are the exact opposite of what you are?

Brian:    It’s a controversial thing.  But the fact is what they’re teaching, they’re not doing.  And I’ve seen it thousands of times.  Everything they’re teaching about driving that foot out the back, about pushing, you know, using that ground, driving that energy – I mean, there’s a lot of coaches out there that still teach heel striking which we know is a horrible thing to do.
   
The foot was never designed to heel strike.  It was designed to land on the ball of the foot.  But, all this stuff this they’re teaching is all very debatable, okay?   But, in every video that I’ve ever seen of these Track and Field people, none of them are pushing out the back.  None of them are doing what it is they’re telling them to do.

Jon:    Do you have any theories as to, I mean, are we talking optical illusions, are we talking just inability to parse cause and effect?

Brian:    I’m talking perception.  So, basically what, here’s what—people perceive  themselves as doing certain things, which is why at the Run Cert, the first thing we do when people get there is we have them run and we videotape it.  And then we come in and lecture about run mechanics and we dummy down everything, and we talk about movement and what – we open people’s eyes to a lot of things.
   
Then we introduce the video and everybody usually cringes before we even introduce the video because they know what they’re doing is now wrong.  They get a general understanding of, “Jesus, I know I’m heel striking and I know I’m probably pushing out the back.”      
   
You will never see in a top-level runner, you will never see them bouncing up and down, which would be vertical movement which is pushing off, okay?  That’s what the calf muscles are for.  You’re never going to see – you’re going to see them in a straight line just basically hovering.  
   
So, basically what they’re doing is taking what it is they perceive somebody’s doing as opposed to what it is they’re actually doing, where they’re never really reaching that full extension.  And when they do, sometimes, and they continue to do it and they wind up injured.  Why are 65 percent of all runners injured every year?

Jon:    Right…

Brian:    You know, why?

Jon:    Yeah, I mean if we had that kind of injury rate in my box over at CrossFit Boston, you know, if six and a half out of every ten people that walked in the door left with an injury, I wouldn’t have a business.  It’s astounding –

Brian:    Yeah, you damn right.  Why is CrossFit so successful?  We teach a skill, right?  We teach these people how to squat, deadlift, press, and everything that falls in-between, right?  And yet, nobody’s out there, nobody was out there really teaching running as a skill until Romanoff really came around.  Yeah, there are some people that will debate but the fact is is that’s the truth, at least everything I’ve been able to find out.
   
You know, I’ve studied a little bit on Chi Running.  I’ve studied a little bit on the Evolution Running, which with both of those are teaching ball/foot/strike now.  All this stuff, more and more people are coming to like this because they’re realizing that you know what?  Maybe the shoe technology thing isn’t working out, if 65 percent of all runners are still injured.  Maybe that heel striking thing isn’t really working out, because 65 percent of all runners are still injured, okay?
   
It can go on and on, until we look at something from, “You know what?  I need to take responsibility for how I’m moving here.”  Then we start to deal with the issue.

Jon:    Let’s talk about shoe technology, Brian.  I’m wearing my Sauconys right now with an inch and a half of heel on this thing.  I don’t know.  Tell me about this shoe.  Tell me why I’m wearing this.

Brian:    So that you can heel strike.  An inch and a half of cushioning tells you it’s okay to strike that heel.  If you didn’t have an inch and a half of cushioning you probably wouldn’t be heel striking.

Jon:    So, it’s a pain in the ass.

Brian:    When that cushioning wears out then it’s time to get a new pair of shoes.  I’ve been running in, I don’t know.  The same racing flacks for the last, more than a year now, I think, which I may be have a quarter inch of a heel.  They also have a quarter inch right at the ball of the foot.  So it’s pretty much just a protective pad so that glass or rock really doesn’t get into my foot.
   
Carl, same thing.  Most of the runners I deal with, same thing.  You know, you see a lot of the guys who are in CrossFit now wearing the Vibram Five Fingers, which is something we were playing around with years ago when they first came out.  I know several barefoot runners that wear these things to get through 100 miles.  You know, the Tarahumara Indians…

Jon:    Let’s talk about that.  Let’s go to that logical extreme, barefoot runners.  Guys, per my understanding, a lot of these barefoot guys are the best in the world.

Brian:    Some of them.  I mean, some of them.  You know, the Tarahumara Indians, these guys run five days in watchee sandals.  You know, these things cut out of vehicle tires and a leather strap.  They do these five-day races.  They showed up to my last hundred mile run.  And I think the guy took third.

Jon:    They were running on a pair of truck tires?

Brian:    Yeah, pretty much.  Yeah, yeah.  You got it.  They took a tire and they cut out the shape of a foot and then they’d run a string.  They’d run a leather strap up through the toe and start wrapping it around the foot.   That’s what they wear.

Jon:    That sounds a lot cheaper than my $120 running shoes, Bri.

Brian:    Yeah, you might better option them although I don’t wear them. But, you know, Men’s Fitness I believe just did an article on, the writer went down to these Tarahumara Indians down in Mexico, hung out with them and wanted to figure out why these guys can do what they can do.  At the end of the article, basically it broke down their form, their technique.  They don’t have injuries.  Why don’t they have injuries?  Well, they’re landing on the ball of the foot and they’re never extending out the back.  They’re running perfectly pretty much.

Jon:    It sounds like it would have the very good repercussions for the majority of the running public and very poor repercussions for the people that make my foot airbag here.

Brian:    Yeah, well, I mean, how many people have foot issues?  How many people wear orthotics?  What is that orthotic telling you?  That I’m going to support you.  You don’t have to do it.  Your foot doesn’t have to work the way it was supposed to.  

Jon:    So, Brian, you’re taking people and at the CrossFit Endurance Certifications and showing them that they’re running technique is wrong and hopefully making some good strides, excuse the pun, towards making them better at that.

Brian:    Yeah, I don’t necessarily go and tell them what they’re doing is wrong and tell them that they have to change.  What I hope to do is get people to change that weekend and feel the difference.  And there’s always an overwhelming positive response to the whole thing, that what they’re doing feels better.  What they’re doing is better by the end of the Cert.

Jon:    And I can testify to the fact that it is an easier way to run in terms of exertion, in terms of impact.  I had the opportunity thanks to CrossFit and you to go to the first one of these that you held, the dry run out there in Newport Beach.  Tell me about that experience of putting a Cert together from scratch.

Brian:    Scary. Scary.  But I was pretty confident that we could do it.  I was a little overwhelmed with having to basically introduce this to a bunch of people who I knew were pretty educated people, and needed – not necessarily be sold but to understand that what we were doing made sense.  
   
We set it up at my place, my old place, and we had a pretty good weekend I thought.  We changed a lot of people.  In fact, I’ve got, I had Sherry Kant with me and Carl and I out in Chicago helping out and she is a huge testimonial to somebody who was just totally broken down, just experiencing tons of pain.  In fact, she had to stop during the first set of 400s that we were videotaping guys on.  And after working with her for the weekend, she could run all of the 400s at the end of the Cert.  And she ran it pain-free.

Jon:    And fast.

Brian:    She’s smoking fast.  Yeah, she’s a 3-hour marathoner.

Jon:    Which is no joke because she’s about three feet tall.

Brian:    Yeah, yeah.  Totally.  She’s like, she’s like fetus size.  But hey, dude, you know what?  She can lift, she can CrossFit, and she can run, man.  So, she puts up some pretty big numbers for being so small.

Jon:    No doubt, no doubt.  And Brian, when you, and I can only imagine that this added to the anxiety of that first experience:  There were “CrossFit jumped the shark” comments.  There was a little bit of hating going on.  Did that affect you at all?

Brian:    At first it kind of did and I was – you know what it did?  It just made me want to make things better with what we were doing.  Just show them that what we were doing mattered and show that what we were doing was helping people, was changing people and it was right.
   
And, you know?  There’s still a little bit of, you know, banter back and forth about it out there.  And you know what?  I welcome it because it only makes me do my job a lot better.  If it was a cake walk to do, if I didn’t have people doing that, I mean, it wouldn’t challenge me enough.
   
You know, I’m passionate enough about it to give a shit about all this stuff, but, I need to be challenged, too.  I need people to question me.  I need people to want me to prove things to them.

Jon:    Yeah, and this isn’t the first challenge that you’ve had in your life, I imagine.  Again, for those that don’t know you, there are not too many portions of your body that aren’t covered in tattoos.  Speaks to a little bit of a challenging beginning.

Brian:    You want me to talk about the tattoos…?

Jon:    Absolutely.

Brian:    I, like I said, my mom kind of threw me into swimming at four because she didn’t know what to do with me.  So, at any rate, that kind of translates into the punk rock scene being pretty much unleashed at about the time I was like 10 years old and I was heavily, heavily involved in it.  I loved it.  I was enamored with it.  So, therefore, I wanted to be tattooed because that was what these kids were doing.
   
So, I ended up getting tattoos at a very young age.  Did some stupid things with tattooing. And it ended up translating when I kind of cleaned up my ways to me just kind of telling stories all over my body, and using my skin as canvas.

Jon:    Very cool.

Brian:    So, I’ve pretty much got my life story on my body right now.

Jon:    And have you started to tell this story in ink?  The CrossFit story?

Brian:    No, that’s the next saga.  I’m still finishing up kind of the 100 machine, my epiphanies from 100 miles.  I just finished up an enormous back piece that’s taken us probably about a year and a half to do, which goes from my neck down to my ass and was one of the more painful things I’ve ever gone through.  But it was, it’s definitely worth it.  So, I think the CrossFit, this next thing is kind of…

Jon:    Sounds like you’re going to have to do it on the bottoms of your feet, Bri.

Brain:    I’ve got legs and I’ve got some ribs and I’ve got some frontal pieces I can throw in there.

Jon:    Very cool, man.  Let’s talk about that experience, running 100 miles.  I ran five miles once.  That sucked.  Tell me about going 100.

Brian:    One hundred, it’s like experiencing every single emotion you have on, I don’t know.  I’ve done quite – I’ve experience the drug and alcohol thing at a very young age.  And none of it could even compare to the levels of what I experienced out there.  I mean, just deep, deep values of pain and sorrow and extremely high highs of just complete glory, and understanding that what you’re doing is – because you don’t really know when you first run 100, when you first start to run 100 miles if you’re really capable of running 100 miles.
   
Finishing 100 miles, they actually, a photographer, my first 100 mile experience was like they had a cameraman sitting there at the finish line.  He was just snapping photos of everybody.  Hired guy and I guess he’d been sitting there for maybe 30 seconds, 45 seconds and had just been snapping photos of me.  He got one of me just kind of looking up at the sky, just kind of like, “Fuck, thank God that’s over.”  But it was like at that time, it was just like, “I can’t believe I just finished running 100 miles.”
  
I’m by no means somebody who considers himself a runner.  I don’t really enjoy running all that much.  I think I just like going through the pain and suffering of getting through something, accomplishing something.  The 100-mile thing was something I read about and couldn’t believe that people actually did that and the stories that I found that people were experiencing off of it was something that I felt I needed to experience, much like a religious experience or some sort of spiritual experience.
   
I definitely had that with this.  I’ve definitely had the spiritual experiences.  I don’t think you can’t run 100 miles and not have some sort of a spiritual experience, because you are going to get to know yourself real well.

Jon:    I have a t-shirt, Brian, that you gave me when I was out there in Newport Beach and it says, “Pain is my companion” across the top of that.

Brian:    Yeah.

Jon:    It sounds like that’s not just macho posturing.  What does that saying mean to you?

Brian:    It’s seriously, you know?  You make friends with pain, you’ve got no enemies.  You’ve got no real enemies.  It’s the times when I don’t make friends with pain that things become much, much more difficult.  I think CrossFit and ultra running have a lot in common.  It’s just the pain receptors are a little bit different.      
   
CrossFit is like going to a fight at 3:00 o’clock at the bike racks with the school bully. And running 100 miles is more like, “All right, I’m going to drag myself through this painful little experience.”  They’re two different pains but they both involve pain.
   
Those things that don’t involve pain, I just don’t think were worth going through, man.  Everything I’ve experienced in my life has taken some sort of pain.  You know, change, on no level, whether it be good or bad change, is easy.  It’s always something that’s painful about it, and it’s tough to do.

Jon:    Brian, yeah, absolutely, the pain of running, the pain of CrossFit and the pain of change, it sounds on one hand very philosophical and for me, on the other hand rings extraordinarily true.  You talk about epiphanies that you had on that 100-mile journey.  Was there just one?  Was there more than one 100-mile journey there?

Brian:    Is there more than one out there?

Jon:    That you did, Brian.

Brian:    Oh, that I did.  Yeah, I’ve done two.

Jon:    Okay.

Brian:    I’ve done two, and I’m going to do a third in this next year.  I’ve decided to – I kind of took a brief hiatus off and just kind of checked out of the endurance thing, and just focused on work a lot.  In Carl’s in running of the 100 miles a couple of weeks ago I just re-inspired so I’m hanging up and looking to do one of these three that are going, to see if I can get into them.

Jon:    Very cool, man, very cool.  Brian, 100 miles, you’re not doing that on an empty stomach.  I’ve never done it –

Brian:    No.

Jon:    But I guarantee you that.  Your approach to nutrition and what I understand about it is let’s just say it’s not the Cytomax and water approach.

Brian:    No.

Jon:    Tell me about what you’re doing when you’re out there hitting 100 miles or you know, 50K or whatever.

Brian:    After about three hours of running, I eat as much real food as possible, although when you’re in the middle of nowhere and you’re by yourself you’ve got to have something out there.  So usually I’m carrying something in my bottle that’s properly balanced that my gut can handle.   I’ve got a pretty strong gut, and unless I’m just filling it full of sugar and crap, I can handle it.  
   
I usually have protein, fat and carbohydrate mixed into my drinks.  In fact, yeah, I won’t, to this day I won’t do something that’s just straight carbohydrate mix.  But that’s just me.  It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or it can’t help.  I weigh and measure my food usually during the week.  I’m pretty dialed in.  I’m pretty close to a Paleolithic diet.  But it’s kind of Zoned out, proportions to me whatever most effective for me where my body and my performance are optimal.
   
I will have smoothies made up at races that are somewhere in the vicinity of 400 to 600 calories and are nutritionally balanced.  I’ll eat cheeseburgers.  I’ll eat pizza.  I’ll eat cheesecake.  I’ll eat you name it, when I’m racing like that, because it’s all about just getting the fuel in the body at that point.  And I’ve just experienced with too many people in this community, in the endurance community that don’t know a thing about nutrition and they’re just sucking down all the carbohydrate drinks they can.  And they don’t put two and two together as to why they’re having GI issues.  Why they’re getting sick, you know, all this stuff.  I just kind of computed stuff by watching others fail and started implementing it.
   
And not that I haven’t had issues before because I have and I’ve screwed some things up, but for the most part I do not.  I can train. I can race and I can feel myself at the same time meaning I can eat real food.

Jon:    Define “real food”.  I heard a story that involved a pretty unusual piece of race supplementation.

Brian:    What would that be?

Jon:    You know what I’m talking about?  Yeah, cheeseburgers?

Brian:    Oh, the cheeseburgers?  Yeah, so…Carl pulled it off this year, too.  It’s at the fifty-mile mark in my last 100 miles I was wolfing down a cheeseburger.  This is definitely not something that the ultra crowd would eat.  They’re usually trying to stuff themselves full of gummy bears, pretzels, potato chips, maybe some chicken noodle soup, which actually isn’t a bad thing, but these are usually the staples.  There are M&Ms, stuff like that, you know, the staple items at aid stations and I’m there sucking down a cheeseburger and the looks on people’s faces were like jaws dropped.  Like what the fuck is this guy doing?
   
I just finished the cheeseburger, hopped off the back of my truck and walked off and started back on my race.  Yeah, and people freak out about that, for some reason.

Jon:    Yeah, well, change is painful, right?

Brian:    Chang is painful.  You know what though?  I worked on that, man.  I’d go out and do, I would eat cheeseburgers and go out and do a 10-mile run.  First couple of times I did it I wasn’t moving too fast and then I finally I got used to it.

Jon:    I bet.

Brian:    So, it takes training, man.  Takes training.  Maybe Fran was double-doubles.

Jon:    I’ll tell you what, man.  Next time I see you we’ll throw it down.  We’ll throw it down.

Brian:    Yeah, I’d love to.  I actually I think I would like to do that.

Jon:    Hey, I’m right there with you, man.  I’ll do a Cheeseburger Fran.  No doubt.

Brian:    Yeah, yeah.  That’ll be good.

Jon:    Actually, Brian, I think we’ve got a date for that because I see you’re going to be here in Massachusetts on November 8th and 9th up at Dave Picardy’s place in Topsfield.

Brian:    Yes, “The Pilgrim” has asked me to come back out.

Jon:    “The Pilgrim”, I like that.

Brian:    Yeah, you like that?  Anybody who talks with that thick of an accent, it’s better to be called “The Pilgrim”, the original lingo.

Jon:    No kidding.  Up here we call it “born and bred”.  He’s born and bred.

Brian:    Oh, really?

Jon:    Yeah.  So, you got just a World Tour coming up and I’m pretty attuned to the rigors of being on the traveling circuit myself.  I see at least two cross-country flights here, Brian, in the next month and a half.  You’re a busy man.

Brian:    Yes.  I got one tomorrow.

Jon:    Yeah, going to be in Connecticut.

Brian:    Yeap.

Jon:    How are these things going, man?  Where do you see them going in the future?  And how’s it treating you now?

Brian:    I couldn’t have imagined it going this well.  I couldn’t have at all.  It’s going so well and it’s so well received and it’s like every weekend we’re traveling.  I actually I look forward to doing it.  You know, I look forward to going to a new home and meeting new people that I know this community and how it’s going to be.  It’s not going to be a bad experience.  Every experience has been a good experience.
   
The people like what we’re doing.  We’ve had some great feedback from people, some of it some constructive criticism.  Most of it is just like, “Dude, you guys changed my mind.  I came here skeptical and I left confident that this was something that I needed to learn.”  And that makes me happy.  So, we’re happy to continue with the schedule.

Jon:    No kidding.  Definitely, man.  Do you see your Cert evolving beyond its current scope?  Are you cool?  What’s on your mind for the future?

Brian:    I mean, it evolves each time.  Carl is becoming more and more a part of it, although he’s a big part of it right now.  He’s lecturing more now.  We’re implementing newer things, like we’ve implemented the nutrition portion of it.  We’ve implemented a programming portion of it.  It’s just kind of piggy-backing off of what CrossFit’s done a little bit.  We’ve needed to address certain things, and there’s some confusion in the beginning that I guess we really didn’t address that we needed to address with the programming.
  
“Look.  Here.  Here’s how we do it.  Let’s do this together.”  And we just pick out an athlete at that Cert.  “Here, the group.  Let’s pick out somebody.  You pick them.  Tell me what they can do and tell me who they are and let’s do this program for six weeks.”  People get a lot out of that.  They get a lot out of the nutrition, hearing a guy who’s been an endurance athlete, a couple of guys who are endurance athletes, talk about nutrition the way we’re talking about it.
   
Then essentially talking about the whole, how the process happened and what it is we’re doing and why it is that we’re doing it and giving the science end of it and showing the results of it.  Which we don’t really need to do anymore because we’ve got the website which is posting its own results now.

Jon:    That’s great.  Are you doing anything with that data as of right now?  Or are you just kind of sitting on it?

Brian:    Ah, just sitting on, just letting it build.  We’ve been open, we’ve had that website up since April.  We’re just letting all the information build and letting more and more elite-level people come forward.  We still haven’t snagged the Olympic-caliber person yet but they’re on their way.  It’s on their way.  I’m confident in the fact that that’s coming.  
   
You know, not everybody is attuned to utilizing CrossFit, man.  There are a lot of people are still scared of it.  But I wholeheartedly believe that those in the next five to ten years that are not CrossFitting, are going to be left behind in sport and I don’t believe I’m alone in that thinking.  In fact, I know I’m not.
   
And I do believe the endurance community will be utilizing it as well, because the results we’re getting from people who were not getting results before, who were stagnant in their programs, who were getting slower and I mean, especially people who are in their 40s and 50s who are now crushing what they had never done.  That’s a tell tale testament to a program.  That is saying something.
   
So, we’re helping a lot of people and that’s what we want.  That’s what we wanted to do.

Jon:    Very cool, very cool.  I can say that obviously you’ve made a big impact in a very short time here in CrossFit community.  Good luck, man, in the next month.  You’ll definitely be in my thoughts as you’re kicking it every weekend for five weeks there.  Best of luck with crossfitendurance.com as well.  Keep kicking it, brother.

Brian:    Thank you, man.  Thank you.  I appreciate it all.  I appreciate it all, Jon.  I appreciate the support.  I appreciate the community.  I just, it’s been an unbelievable experience.  Unbelievable on very, very, very full foot.  I’m in debt to it.

Jon:    Awesome, Brian.  Awesome stuff.  Hey, thanks for taking the time, brother.

Brian:    No problem, no problem.

Pictures courtesy of Brian MacKenzie and CrossFit Endurance.