To Be Great Is To Be Misunderstood

So I was a long distance runner back in high school. For whatever reason, somewhere around my sophomore or my junior year of high school, I got into running. It was probably coinciding with the fact that my parents had gotten divorced a few years earlier, and I had been living with my mom from when I was maybe 14 until I was 16, after my parents got divorced. And when I was 16, I made a decision to move in with my dad, who lived about 5 hours away from where I had lived. At that point, I was in Sioux Falls, and then I moved to around Minneapolis, and my dad was getting remarried, and our families were integrating. And I was in this new, strange environment my junior year, going into my junior year of high school, and it was a strange place. And there was something about running long distances and just kind of like escaping into my own mind for hours on end that was very therapeutic, and it was very helpful for me at that period of time. It was because I was kind of a loner.

I didn’t have any friends, and I was also very introverted. So, like, the idea of going out and making friends was so stressful to me. And so I just kind of poured myself and became hyper obsessed with running. And that became my thing my junior year. My senior year as the best runners on the team, by the. By my senior year, good enough to. That I was able to go and run in college. And in college, I had a.

I wasn’t great by any means. It was a division two. I ran cross country and track, did the steeplechase. I was. I was okay, not, I was never going to be a world beater, but I was obsessed with running. I was obsessed with running culture. I was reading everything I could, and, like, I was haunting all of the running forums. I was just a nerd for it.
And at that time, when I was graduating high school, this would have been around 2002. This was a very good time to be a high school running nerd, because there were these three athletes in particular who were dominating the sport in very interesting different ways. You had Dathan Ritzenheim out of Michigan, actually, he was from Rockford, Michigan, and I was from Rockford, Minnesota. And so I always felt, like, this kinship with Dathan. And he was this, he was this great long distance runner who had this ability to dig really deep and grind and, like, break people’s wills. And he was like this wiry little guy. He didn’t have great top end speed, but, like, like, he could just, he could grind it out. He went on to have a very incredible career.
I think he broke the american record at the 5000 and the 10,000. Not the 10,000, but the 5000. At one point I might be misremembering that, but I think he did. I think he was like the second American to break the 13 minutes barriers in the five k. So went on to have a very amazing career. I really liked him a lot. He was dominant in cross country and in like the two mile. The other guy and part of this big three that people would talk about was this guy named Alan Webb.
Alan Webb was more like built like a brick shithouse, just muscular for a long distance runner. And he was more of a mid distance guy. He was like the 800 meters to mile specialist, but he had range and he could reach up and race these five ks in cross country and he could do the longer races, you know, and that made for a really compelling matchup between his speed and strength versus Daython’s strength and endurance. When they met at three five k. And Alan Webb, if you’re familiar, in 2002, he broke the high school record in the mile, which was Jim Ryan’s record from like the sixties. It was a really long standing record on the books. He ran a 353, which is a mind boggling time. The american record up to that point had been 355, so he shaved off 2 seconds.
Nobody had even gotten remotely close to 355. And he just comes out and goes, bam. 353. So those two are very interesting. Alan Webb goes on to have an amazing career. I think he’s still the current american record holder in the mile. Like 347. Yeah, something like that.
He had a great career as well. The third guy in this matchup and part of this big three was a guy by the name of Ryan hall. He’s out of color, out of California, Big Bear, California. And he was good. He was great. He wasn’t quite as good as Dayton and Allen, though, in cross country or on the track. And so he was always just coming up a little bit behind them. It was really like, is Dayton or Allen going to win? And Ryan would be right there.
Then it’d be a big gap between them and everybody else. So he’s in this big three. Very great runner for that generation, but he was always just a tick below. Even through college, it’s always just a little, little bit below. And then something happened. It was probably around 2005 or six, he’s out of college or coming out of college. And in college, you know, you run long distance cross country, which is like a ten k or twelve k, and then you go and you run the ten k on the track. That’s about the longest race that there is.
Well, he gets out of college and he realizes he’s not gonna ever be the best miler, the best five car, best ten k, and he’s reached kind of his limit there. And so he goes to the road races and he starts racing these longer things, starts doing the marathon, starts doing the half marathon. And just like that, this guy rises to these astronomical levels, these atmospheric levels, where suddenly he has found his calling and he is dominating. He breaks the american record in the half marathon. He breaks the american record in the marathon. He’s at this point in his career, he’s having more success. If you were to compare them, Allen Dayton and Ryan, you would say Ryan is probably now at this point because the marathon is such a popular event and so established, it’s probably between him and Alan, because Alan is running the mile, and that’s also a very popular event. But, like, Ryan is achieving things at a level that’s probably more impressive than either of those two.
So he’s kind of a late bloomer to this. Well, he grinds and he grinds and he destroys his body over the next decade. I mean, running long distance is very hard on the body. Well, he just grinds his body to a pulp. He’s like 510, maybe six foot, and he’s like 135 pounds, very skinny, slender guy. And he’s killing his testosterone levels and his body, like in the mid 200. So around 2015, he’s just sliding. He’s not coming back, and his body is just breaking down on him.
So he retires in like 2016, 2017. And Ryan then gets into bodybuilding. Not bodybuilding for like, shows, but just like lifting weights, which is a very funny activity because he was so weak as a runner. You look at him, this is frail, slender body, and he would start going into the gyms and lifting, and he could barely bench press his own body weight and all these things. Fast forward five, six, seven years. To see a picture of Ryan next to who he was as a runner is night and day difference. He is a jacked giant of a human now. And the thing is, a lot of people, I shared a picture of him the other day on social media, and a lot of people took to the comments and they’re like, oh, he’s definitely juicing.
He’s taking steroids and gear. And this blew my mind for a couple of reasons I want to share with you. First, a guy like Ryan is a genetic freak. To reach the pinnacle of any sport, you kind of have to be right. Number two, Ryan hall has a work ethic that the average human simply cannot comprehend. Again, to be at the top of a sport like running, to be an olympian, to be an american record holder, you kind of have to be right. So you combine those two traits, and you get mind boggling results, like that transformation from the 130 pounds weakling to the 220 pound jacked Adonis that he is today. Now, I don’t know if Ryan hall is juicing, if he’s on testosterone replacement therapy, I don’t know.
I don’t really care. He’s never admitted to it, and I don’t think he, he does, honestly. But it doesn’t matter, because here’s why this is, this, here’s why I want to share this with you today. It’s very interesting. It’s very easy to see people who are at the top of the mountain, whether it’s in business, it’s finance, it’s health, it’s relationships. And you can assume that they’re cheating. It’s very easy to say, oh, they got up there because they cheated. They had it handed to them.
Right? And hell, maybe in a lot of cases, you’re right. But that sort of mindset, that easy dismissiveness of greatness is the product of a small mind. It’s the result of that mindset that gives you quiet permission to accept mediocrity. I encourage you to be better than that. Fight, that most human of urge which reflexively discounts the accomplishments of others in pursuit of protecting our own ego. When you look at greatness, I hope that you are challenged and inspired. And instead of looking for reasons to tear them down, you look for reasons to be motivated. And when you someday find yourself atop that mountain and small minds are trying to tear you down from below, just remember these words from Emerson.

He said, to be great is to be misunderstood. To be great is to be misunderstood. So I wanted to share that with you guys. Hopefully, this brings you a little bit of value. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyperfocus, my friend.