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Ken Rideout

The Most Interesting Man In The World

By InnerVoice

April 26^th, 2019

Balance is hard

The first thing I do in the morning is go for a run. It’s never a negotiation. I’ve never woken up and thought to myself that I don’t feel like doing it today. It’s just never happened. I get up and do it because I know the kind of depression I’ll carry around with me the rest of the day if I don't get that endorphin rush in the morning. It’s almost like a necessary evil. People think I’m crazy when I tell them I run 10 to 15 miles per day, especially when it’s done before I go into the office.

I'm a big believer in telling people what your goals are so you can't walk them back. Once you’ve told people, there's a huge level of accountability and there are no more excuses. Adding that pressure is motivation for me, and when you’re in those dark places in a marathon, you need anything you can to keep you going. Personally, I find the fear of losing to be pretty powerful. I so desperately don’t want to lose, and I don’t want to embarrass myself. However, I love the question “What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail?” As much as I want to win, I lose 99% of the races I enter. I’ve only won around 5 legitimate races in my whole life. But that’s what keeps me coming back. Overcoming fear, never accepting defeat, and never settling. You don’t have to win every round to win a fight so you can look at the next event or race as just another round of the fight.

I ran a 3:30 marathon and thought it would be impossible to break 3 hours, but then I just decided that I didn't want to limit myself to that goal. My times kept coming down in big chunks: I ran a 2:58, 2:45, then 2:33. And each time I hit a new milestone I realized that I probably had a lot more to give, and I would wonder whether I could take another 10 minutes off. I think the biggest limitation for a lot of people is the mental component. You’re in control of whether or not you train, and how much you train. And if you put in the work, you’ll see the results. I think I’m proof of that. I’ve played a lot of sports and was never elite or super talented, I just wanted to win and that has really applied to my life since finding endurance sports. I don’t want my beliefs to be limiting, so I want to try to win the Masters division, or win my age group at the Boston Marathon, or win my age group at Kona.

I think a lot of it has to do with being a kid and wanting to be accepted by my dad, or by my peers, or to fit in. Childhood was difficult, at times. I feel a bit guilty because that feeling of wanting to be relevant can be very selfish and it can impact my wife and kids. I’m super aware of it, but being aware of a problem doesn’t mean you’re doing anything to fix it. I’m aware that at some point I probably have to work out a healthier balance between it all.

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Photo by Aaron Palaian

The Kids

I have four kids, and the thing that I probably struggle with the most is finding a balance between work and spending time with each of them. I try to take time to spend time with each kid once a month. Recently, I took my daughter to New York to see Frozen on Broadway. I took my eldest son to see the Red Sox win the World Series in LA, and I took him to a boxing match the other night as well.

We adopted my daughter from Ethiopia, and that day (along with marrying my wife and having my three other kids) is in the top 5 days of my life. The process took a long time - rightfully so - but it’s difficult. Thankfully, my wife spearheaded a lot of the paperwork and gathering the letters of recommendation, and the notaries, and the notaries for the notaries. We jumped through all the hoops, and then they sent us a message saying that we have a newborn infant girl. She weighed seven or eight pounds, but was deathly sick. We went over to collect her and my wife stayed there for two months to finalize everything and gain custody. We had struggled with fertility issues since we got married three years earlier, but we had always wanted to adopt, and we are actually in the process of adopting another child right now.

During those three years, we’d tried taking hormones which didn’t work, and over several rounds of IVF we’d been pregnant three times, but had three miscarriages. It was devastating. Coincidentally, the week we were in Ethiopia together, we conceived naturally. I went back to the US for five or six weeks and as I was about to return to Addis Ababa my wife mentioned she was feeling sick. She asked me to bring a pregnancy test with me, and when I arrived she took the test - and it was positive. We’d been pregnant three times before so we weren’t overly optimistic, but sure enough, our first son came along. He was actually due on our daughter’s birthday but ended up coming three weeks early. And then on the two year anniversary, we added another boy, and on the four year anniversary, we added another boy. So, all four of our kids have their birthday within four or five weeks of each other.

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

The Fight

I grew up in a really blue collar, working class, inner-city neighborhood. My parents had me when they were 19 and 20 and were divorced pretty early on, so being diplomatic, I’ve learned all the things not to do with my own kids. Sports became my savior and my escape. I played football and hockey in high school, and I boxed a little, and continued all three through college as well. I was a jack-of-all-trades, but never really a star at any of them. To add some more context to my life growing up, I worked full-time as a guard at a prison just outside of Boston, and my younger brother was an inmate at that prison shortly after I stopped working there. When I worked at the prison, there was another guard named Micky Ward. You might remember the name because it’s Mark Wahlberg’s character in the movie The Fighter. It was an awesome experience to work with Micky and then see him fighting Arturo Gatti on HBO - it really grew my love of boxing early on.

Recently, Rob Mohr approached me about the possibility of launching a boxing podcast with Teddy Atlas. Short of being middleweight champion of the world, commenting on boxing is like my dream job. I’m super appreciative of Teddy for allowing me to co-host the show with him. I mean, he’s a Hall of Fame trainer who has trained 18 world champions and was in Mike Tyson’s corner under Cus D’Amato. He’s a legend of the sport, so working with him and getting to speak to all these awesome guests, it’s almost too good to be true.

Ultimately, it’s Teddy’s show, I’m just trying to steer traffic and get Teddy talking because he has really interesting views on life. The motivation behind the show wasn’t just to apply to boxing and fighters but to give examples of how lessons from the ring can be applied to your everyday life. You don’t have to be punching someone in the face to be motivated and prepared like a boxer would be.

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

I enjoy the suffering

When I was boxing, obviously I’d run quite a bit. As I was running, I started to have some knee issues, which were caused by a tight IT band pulling on my patella tendon. Like most people dealing with knee issues, I bought a bike. There was a guy in my office who fancied himself as a good cyclist and he asked if I wanted to go riding with him. I had all the wrong stuff: running shorts, a t-shirt, no helmet. Despite all that, I showed up and smashed my work colleague. Man, either he sucks, or I’m really good at this. It was probably a combination of both. I started to realize that you control your own limitations and the more time you put in, the better you’re going to get. Even better, unlike hockey or boxing, no-one is going to punch you in the face. About a year later - 2008 - I did my first triathlon, and in 2012 I qualified for Kona, which was a huge positive impact on my life.

In 2013 I had Jimmy Riccitello coach me for a year - we had a mutual friend in Lance Armstrong - and Jimmy gave me some structure and nutrition knowledge that I hadn’t had up until that point. I did Kona in 9:39 that year, but that’s really been the only time I’ve had an endurance coach. I’ve mostly learned through trial and error. Even with my running, I have no structure. I just run a lot and I know I want to do 100 miles a week, so I break it down based on that. I’ve always enjoyed the suffering and the training, in cycling, triathlon and running. It’s the technical stuff that starts to lose me, though, like when people ask me what my power is, or what my heart rate and sweat rate is.

Dude, now it’s like a second job. I don’t get paid to do this.

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Photo by Aaron Palaian

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Throwing punches to win

In running, the struggle is definitely the training. Even the elite pros will tell you race day is actually the easy part. It’s the six weeks of running in pissing rain and snow, or the daily grind, that’s the hard part. If you run a marathon correctly, you shouldn’t be running hard until the last 10km. So, if you look at it like a boxing match, from 20 miles to 26 miles is the equivalent of the last two rounds. That’s really what you’re training for. It becomes a question of whether you are throwing ‘get off me’ punches or are you throwing punches to win. They’re very different sports, but the mindset is similar. In a race there comes a time where you might just need to close your eyes and get through the next few miles to make it to the finish.

When things are going well for me, my self-talk is something like: “Oh man, I’m on a good one here. My wife is not going to believe this!” And then when I call she says “Oh, good for you,” and I need to remind myself that no one cares. But getting ready for an endurance event, especially something that’s a personal journey, other people who aren’t involved in it might not appreciate or understand why it’s so significant. But it is. And you can tell because of the kind of manic depression that you go through afterward, being sore as hell and not being able to exercise the way you’d like. When I don’t have that consistency and routine that I need emotionally and psychologically, it’s bad for everyone. My wife and kids get the worst version of me, and it’s a double-edged sword because not only am I being difficult and grouchy but then I beat myself up over it for disappointing them.

Ken Rideout

Ken Rideout

Accountabilty

I’ve had issues with addiction in the past, and it’s not something I’ve ever spoken about publicly. I feel of all the addictions, this is my safest one and the one that keeps me on the right path. The reason I thought of this is because when I first met John Joseph, I was a bit of a mess. I was living in the city, working in finance, making all the mistakes that an idiot would make. I was boxing, and I would see John at the gym every single evening, and that’s where we became friends. I lost contact with him for a few years, and then I ran into him again on a boat going over to the start line of the New York Ironman. We both looked at each other and were like: what are you doing here? Speaking of John, about two years ago I changed my diet to be primarily vegetarian. I try to eat vegan as much as I can, but if the kids are having pizza, I’ll have some too. I think when you tell people you're eating a vegan diet, it's almost like telling them that you've joined a cult. That's why I hesitate to put any label on my dietary habits.

Whether it’s a diet or training plan or something else in life, my biggest tip is to create a routine, set goals, have some accountability. Tell your friends and your training partners what your goals are. I think that a big component of my improvement has been the Strava Effect. Knowing that everyone is going to see every run makes me want to post things that I’m proud of. There’s that accountability there where people can see it all. I just believe in the overall idea of routine, structure, accountability. You can create an addictive habit if you want to, and for me, it’s getting out of bed to run because I know it’s going to be a good day. And I don’t want it hanging over my head for the rest of the day because I know that I haven’t done the work.

Photo by Talbot Cox

Photo by Talbot Cox

Photo by Talbot Cox

Photo by 29029 | Everesting

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Ken Rideout

Footnotes

Words by Ken Rideout, Cover Photo by Talbot Cox, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc.

FootNotes

Words by Ken Rideout, Cover Photo by Talbot Cox, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group Inc.

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