Brendan Leonard on hating running, doing it anyway, and How to Run 100 Miles

Brendan Leonard writes Semi-Rad, which occupies an unusual position in outdoor media: a site about adventure whose central premise is that the person doing the adventuring is mediocre, tired and frequently regretting it. That framing has made him one of the few outdoor writers people actually quote to each other.

How to Run 100 Miles

The immediate hook is the REI film How to Run 100 Miles, following Leonard and his friend Jayson Sime through Run Rabbit Run 100 in Colorado. It had gone comprehensively viral by the time of this recording, and for a lot of people it is still the clearest available answer to what a hundred-miler actually is.

They finished with minutes to spare. The interview digs into what that stretch was like: running with a friend when you are both wrecked and on different schedules of wreckage, the specific management problem of a deep bonk, and what it takes to keep moving when the cutoff has stopped being theoretical.

Cameras on the course

The film raises a question the episode takes seriously: what a camera does to a race. Being filmed changes how people behave at aid stations, whether they sit down, whether they admit to quitting. The sport had gone from almost no documentation to a great deal of it in about five years, and nobody had thought much about the effect.

Hating running

The line that gets repeated from this episode is Leonard’s distinction between hating to run and liking running — the activity being unpleasant while the practice is not. Anyone who has done this for a decade recognises it instantly and nobody had said it plainly before.

Sobriety, and staying interested

He talks about getting sober in his early twenties, and about how one turns creative work into something sustainable rather than dependent on inspiration. The reference point is Chuck Close’s remark that inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us show up and work.

And the internet

There is a long and unrepentant segment on funny Instagram and Twitter accounts, which was 2018’s principal cultural activity.