Joe Gray, Speaking out on Racism and Diversity | Koopcast Episode 30

what's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host Jason Koop and today's episode is going to be a little bit different from all the previous episodes of this podcast normally i get on the mic here and i tell you great folks all about training and nutrition and physiology and we bring on experts in those areas and we discuss topics that are intended to provide you with a little bit of information in order to maximize your ultra running performance but with the state of unrest that's going on in the united states right now particularly in regards to race relations a lot of that training advice is quite frankly not the top of everybody's priority list nor should it be and so on this episode of the podcast i brought on joe gray and joe i could bring on as a prolific trail runner in his own right he is one of the most successful trail runners on the face of the planet right now make no doubt about it but the reason i wanted to bring joe on the podcast is one he's a fantastic human being he is african-american and he penned this incredibly poignant piece in trail runner magazine this week and i'll link to that in the show notes but he basically called himself out he called himself a coward and he said

i am putting my foot down and i am going to stay silent no longer and it it really touched me because it was incredibly personal and joe was humble enough to admit some of the mistakes that he made in the past and so i wanted to bring joe on the podcast to get his personal perspective on the state of the world today what he is doing personally to take a stand for race relations in this country and what he hopes the future can actually look like make no doubt about it i am not an expert in this area i grew up in a white middle class family in suburban dallas and although i had a lot of diversity growing up in that area i cannot claim to have ever been racially targeted any of these runs that i do at super early times in the morning nobody's ever really looked at me sideways for running around my neighborhood with a headlamp on at three in the morning or anything like that i have no idea what it's like to be a person of color in this country but that's not going to stop me from understanding and i hope that doesn't stop other trail runners from understanding as well and so i want to give joe the floor this is his story to tell it's his to own and i hope we all

take a little bit of a pause out of our busy lives that we're leading day to day and we listen to joe and other people like joe and try to have some empathy and perspective on how they see the world so without any further ado here's my conversation with joe gray i mean i appreciate you coming on first and i appreciate your honesty particularly in light of what's going on in the in the country right now and also in light of this um this op-ed that you wrote in trail runner magazine that i think is uh getting a lot of attention but before we dive into that i i want to know like what have the last several days been like for you um i guess it's a little bit draining um and depressing i guess you could say uh upsetting you know like it's it's almost like a it's really shocking just to see that we are still dealing with you know issues that you know i would have thought we would have been over you know a long time ago so um i guess another word we can throw in there is just frustrated just you know like wow we're still dealing with this and and it makes me especially sad because you know i'm a parent now and i'm like you know i was hoping that you know my children wouldn't know what racism is you know they wouldn't understand it but now i feel like we're still so very much stuck under this cloud of racism that

the next generation is going to very well understand it and and um the fact of the matter is there's a lot of people who still hold racist ideology and promote it and so we know that the next generation of kids will also um hold these same views and keep pushing that forward um that same agenda and so um yeah it's frustrating as a parent and as an american citizen as well so and are you are you frustrated at any particular person or any particular action or is it just the whole weight and enormity of everything that you've experienced through your entire life that leads you to that that emotion i mean yeah it's definitely a lot of my personal experiences that i've had you know the the media um they're focusing on it now i think people being that we're under you know we're in a pandemic and people are home we've been quarantined people are looking at data and research and they're seeing things that they maybe never saw before they're seeing you know news and watching tv and then seeing things that they never maybe never um thought was real or they never uh experienced and now they're seeing a lot of other experiences and they're seeing people that look like them um standing in um in protests and uh for equality and um you know and standing up against you know the injustices towards people of color in our country um so yeah i mean if you say am i mad at anything and one thing in particular not really i'm really mad at the system and the fact that um you know i am mad at i guess

there are individual entities such as i have a big problem with fox news i feel like um you know they're very biased for one and they're biased like just all the way to the other side you know i understand you know that they want to support their party and i get that but sometimes what you see on the show comes off as very anti-black and um so if there is you know one place like an individual entity it's it's it's news outlets like that because then people who also share those same views or maybe people who are uneducated and don't understand what they're watching will grab those same soundbites and just run with them without researching it you know they'll hear there's a lot of unfounded things said on that show or there's a lot of data given skewed you know and you know we can get into that later but you know for example um talking about um police brutality and police death uh or police killings um against citizens and saying oh you know white people have died more than black people and it's like well that's not really putting it into perspective if you're not looking at the percent in population and looking at the numbers when it comes to unarmed citizens and you know black versus white and um you know they avoid the real stats that really paint the picture of what's going on in our country um you know i did my uh my thesis for example on probation recidivism in our country and you know you know after i gathered all my data you know it was a pattern study so i had a whole bunch of different databases that i had to compile my data and um you know what i ended up finding and what

you know it's nothing new many others have found also there's other studies but that you know when it comes to recidivism black people are receiving stricter sentencing and you know that is a big issue that you don't see on fox news for example and and people pushing that agenda that all racism doesn't exist and there is no systematic racism and it's like well we have to focus on things that really matter and you know if you don't ever admit that there's a problem it's just like you know alcoholics anonymous you you can't go anywhere in the class unless you first admit that you have a problem and it's like yeah we can't go forward because we have so many people that deny that this exists that it's an issue and so um yeah i mean there's definitely um there's definitely some outlets that i have a problem with because then it creates people that you know spewing that same the same thoughts on social media and so um people that you don't know maybe say it towards you and direct people that you know it's it's disheartening and it's very anti-american to be honest i think we can all look at the current situation uh across the country right now and we can all be you know upset and frustrated and have kind of and have the same emotions that you've just described but unless you've actually had to experience a lot of what african americans in this country have had to experience it's really honestly like difficult to conceptualize i mean your analogy with alcoholics anonymous is is

i actually think a great one on a lot of different levels because unless you've been affected personally by substance abuse or alcoholism it's really hard to relate to that particular disease but as you mentioned like this this has been going on for a long time since the slave trade right since the train is like since the transatlantic slave trade long long time you've experienced even before that and you've experienced racism personally but what i want to know is is what in particular about the current state of affairs for you has kind of flipped the switch because you've spoken out before on diversity and char running does have a diversity problem let's get that let's get out of that out of the way right now you've spoken out on that before and you and i have talked about that before you've written articles about it before but this is a different tone this is a much different tone like this is hey i want to make this better you're originally you're like hey i want to make this better i want to make this diversity problem better now you're kind of like f all this what what what like what is it that that's kind of flipped that switch for you um not not that it's f all this like i definitely the diversity issue is definitely something i still very much care about and project inspired diversity is definitely something you know once we can have normal distancing with people it's definitely something that i plan to to keep pushing forward

with but um the this this particular last few months what's what's very different for us is that you know i think there was this aspect that we didn't realize and by we i'm not talking about people of color i'm talking about the country and people around the world that technology the lack of technology in the past for situations like emmett till for example right um he didn't have a cell phone to help him in a situation and we saw the outcome of that um and there's been plenty of cases that we could go we can talk about and i don't want to waste your time but there's plenty of cases where technology wasn't around so it was my word as a black person versus your word as a white person in a judicial system that is very much biased and discriminated discriminative so the the last few cases that we've been seeing you know that have been on the media like the arbory situation right it touches home because there's a lot of black people who do go run and we saw in that situation that you know some random dude could just come up to you and say hey i thought you i i think you were doing something wrong confront you and they won't immediately be arrested and if there was no cell phone footage they wouldn't have they probably would still be free and they probably would have uh things to say like oh he did this or he did that and that's why this happened you know a lie could have been made up so black people don't feel safe now and i think we saw

the situation with um the amy cooper and mr cooper in central park we saw the fact that you know she called the police and it was almost like a whistleblower like hey like a dog whistle hey you know this african-american man here is is is bothering me and you know what knowing that those words would draw the police to come and and approach that situation very differently than if she had just said there's a guy here you know give me a problem so it's almost like she knew that had power and so these situations right they've been caught on tape and um you know people of color all across the country are like man um this this is a problem that existed for a while and there's been a lot of people who are probably innocent because the only the only reason they are serving time or the only reason they lost their life is because there was no proof you know or they lost their life and there was no justice is because there was no proof around and that's scary to think that man if i don't have a cell phone or you know if someone's not capturing what's going on with me um i could lose my life or i could you know go to jail i could be accused of something or or sentenced um based on something i did not do and um i think this time for me it's really like it's daunting because now i see myself as uh not safe in my own country and i i didn't realize how much of you know how much that impacted our country um until you know the last few weeks just thinking about it so you know it's yeah it's frustrating

joe that last piece really saddens me a lot because you and i we we live in the same area we run on the exact same trails albeit you're running them a lot faster than i am but we run through the same neighborhoods the same trails and things like that and i was mentioning to you the other day that i'm not once ever in my entire running history here in colorado springs and i've lived here for 20 years now and i've been a runner for over 30 years now i've never not once felt unsafe about my surroundings and that's despite me running it really weird hours of the morning behind people's houses um on trail off trail urban area back country i i never nothing like that has ever even crossed my mind and i bet a lot of the people listening to this podcast has crossed their mind as well is that the reality for you at certain points that not only when you run here in colorado springs but you also travel around the world running are there are there times where you have to do a double take and go man i don't know if this is the best time of day to be running or i better make sure that this situation that you know that i'm in the light that i'm running with a partner or something like that is that is that the reality for you uh to some extent yeah i mean i i feel like you know and the one advantage or i'll even say it's a

privilege right and being in colorado springs is that people are very aware of athletics and and so when they see a black person running even at night it's not weird to them right they're like oh he's probably just a runner you know uh i hope and i think you know i don't know this for a fact i'm just assuming that that's probably how people think you're black or white um but there have been times where i've been in other states where i've ran at night and police have you know come in and stop me you know i'm doing laps in in a town that had um you know i used to work in an area that was you know it's a nice upper class area and i had a job there where i was working and at night and i would go running at night after um after i got done work sometimes and there were a couple times where i would stop by the cops and they were like hey what's going on ask me what i'm doing and it's like you know clearly i'm in running shoes and running clothes what do you think i'm doing you know let me get back to it you know why are you stopping me to ask me what i'm doing and um you know i didn't think much of it back then but now you know that all this stuff is coming up i look back on some of the situations in my past and i'm like huh that's interesting you know um do you remember the first time you were racially profiled while out running um the first time uh no i don't remember the first time was there was there ever a time where like because you just mentioned a couple of really specific examples where you've been out running you're stopped by the cops or somebody

kind of like looks at you sideways and you just really felt unease right um i well i know that definitely like there's been other times where you're asking like do i do i worry about you know time of the day or something like that you had asked you were making mention of it and um i made a mention in my article about being in you know a city where there were a lot of confederate flags and things like that i was in an area where i saw confederate flags i saw people driving with them um and for sure i uh was meant to run i meant to run that night that evening um when i got in and i was like yeah i'm not doing that i'm not here you know i don't want to get uh hit by a car you know i wasn't thinking of the same situation as like ahmaud arbery like i wasn't thinking someone was going to accuse me of something i was just more so thinking you know people throw something at you i've had that happen where someone threw something at me and and called me the n-word and you know i figured in a in a community like that where there's a ton of people with confederate flags more than likely they probably won't like the presence of a black person you know just being in their neighborhood you know out running so i just didn't go running and you know it changed it changed my view in terms of like racing in areas like that like there's some beautiful parts of our country that have some really cool races but they're in areas where i wouldn't feel

very comfortable um eating ordering food or anything like that so i just don't go um and it sucks because i would love to go to some of these places but um you know i put my safety first and my health first and then i realized that's probably not a great risk to take especially right now you went to oklahoma state right yes so that that's an area of the country i'm from texas right we both know the south pretty well and i love the south don't get me wrong but it it's it's it's known for a lot of racism is that anything that you ever experienced while you're in college running around and just being an african-american man in that area of the country yeah most definitely um you know uh i've i've told the story a little bit you know as of recently i've kind of released this story and um and i'm not saying names of the people i was with but um i guess i can share the story with you as well but so we were i was in a car with some friends and um you know i'm the only uh you know black person in the car i'm in the back seat and um you know my friend is driving and he's driving crazy and uh you know i keep telling him like hey man kill yourself on your own time like slow down you know i'm giving him crap about it and we you know we had all been drinking um and you know he gets pulled over randomly and the cop pulls him out of the car um and you know he's he's about to get arrested and the cop's trying to tell us to to get out of the car and i'm in the back seat uh with um

good white friend of mine who is you know very outspoken and very knowledgeable about his rights and things like that so he tells me you know don't get out of the car like don't listen to the cop he's like i know my rights where you know we are buckled up and the cop's going ballistic and um it was kind of one of those moments where you know i speak on my my past dealings with police and how i was raised to handle you know situations with the police and so it was very uncomfortable for me i'm looking at my friend like you know he told us to get out of the car man i'm getting out of the car and uh my friend's like no don't get out of the car you know and you know there was it was at the time where we got pulled over there weren't any people around and you know i'm not sure that's why he was thinking that like it might not go well for us to get out of the car i'm not sure what his reasoning was but he was just basically like you know really adamant about us not getting out of the car and um you know i'm i'm like man let's get out of the car i keep on trying to tell him let's get out of the car and finally i'm like let me call somebody and i'm trying to call a lawyer and ask them you know what are our rights in this situation because you know obviously i didn't want to get in trouble i didn't know if i could get in trouble for you know being intoxicated in the back of a vehicle um and so finally you know the cop says to me he's he's going off and he's like trying to open the door because he sees that i pick up my phone and he's like you know are you trying to call your gangster thug home homeboy or something he said you know something a mixture of those words and you know i'm looking at him and you know i i initially i thought it was comical because i'm like

you know we're dressed like we're going out on date night with our girlfriends and and you think i'm calling somebody to attack you like i mean what i don't look like that you know i don't look like that i don't look like i'm about that type of life you know i don't know where you came up with that except for the fact that i'm black and you want to use the term thug and gangster and all this stuff that people use to racially profile black people especially when it comes to movies and media and um you know finally i get out of the car and he's real aggressive with both of us and he's kind of uh pushing us around and trying to put us on the car and you know um people started showing up there were a couple people that were around other college kids and uh you know and a couple of them had heard what he said and you know a couple people from the background had said wow you know they were just kind of commenting on what he said and i made a comment to him you know you know why did you say that is because i'm black just asking him a question basically and you know he lets me go and he pretty much wants me to get out of there because i think he was embarrassed and you know obviously didn't want to see that go any further than it than it did and um i know it it's like an open wound getting poked because i think about this is the situation recently right like with george floyd it's like if i had a cell phone to capture that you know it could have raised awareness of this issue and you know we could have gotten the bad apples out of that area you know because all police agencies aren't bad but they got bad apples like that guy and they need to go they need to be gone because they are not pushing the agenda of america they're pushing agenda of white supremacy you know

what i mean and so um and and racism you know this is something we don't need in our country it's an interesting story because and i've heard you tell it before it's an interesting story because it it it appears to be that the cop that you're dealing with realized he was being an idiot in the middle of it and de-escalated the situation but that is not always the case a lot of cases they escalate the situation and here's where we are right now right but it shouldn't happen in the first place you know i think that that's where we're all trying to get back to is why does this stuff happen in the first place and you you also mentioned something during that story that i think uh um a lot of african americans are are are going through and they're rehashing now and this is the talk right it's the talk that parents have to have to their kids to handle those situations appropriately you you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that you have a family your father now is is that something that you're preparing for still in this day and age in 2020 yeah you know um and just to quickly point back to what you're saying like how it it usually escalates you know in a situation like that if those other kids weren't around i'm not sure what happened with what the situation i think i would have got jacked up right um it would have been a bad situation for me but yeah back to being a parent um

i don't want to raise my children with the notion or even the understanding um that they'll be racially profiled i want them to just understand that you need to be respectful in the place you're around they ask you a question you know you answer it you know and you know don't incriminate yourself obviously if you've done something wrong or you don't know what to do or or to say then just like my parents said you know you call mom and dad and we come there you keep your mouth shut you be respectful and um you know yeah i'm going to raise in that way even though some people would say well it's important that you should teach your kids their rights and so that they don't get violated when the cops come around and i say to that you know that is sort of like white privilege because honestly like i said if uh in my situation with that police officer had i start you know telling him i know my rights when i got out of that car and telling him what he's doing is wrong and nobody was around i don't think that situation would end the same way you know um so it is a privilege and it's a privilege that i don't want my kids uh to think exist for them um i want them to understand from a neutral perspective be respectful to the police you know um if you know your rights keep them to yourself until somebody gets there and or until you know you have a lawyer present or something like that or you know mom and dad are there or you know if you're an adult understand that just know your rights but you don't have to tell the cop that you know your rights you know um make sure you got

a camera make sure something you know people is being filmed you have witnesses and things like that you know it's it's a new era now i think um black parents are going to be raising their children differently than black parents did when i was a kid you know technology isn't where it is now so they you know your parents couldn't be like hey make sure you turn your phone on and have it recording you know when you get pulled over in situations just to make sure things are are done properly and you're not mistreated well and when your kids are teenagers and young adults the technology is going to be another leap so who knows what it's going to look like 10 years from now right oh man yeah i i've already i've seen you know ironically enough i have a i have a couple friends who've been doing protests and um a friend of mine had like this thing in his car where it like records uh inside his car and outside his car and it has audio i was like i didn't even know you could do that right now yeah it's crazy you know he he's bringing that to protest and um he's capped in some pretty interesting stuff so far okay let's pivot a little bit to trail running maybe this will be a little bit more light-hearted um you know you and i are both trail runners and i i i i i think tremendously of the trail running community i think it's an accepting community they welcome people with open arms doesn't matter your you know your background or your lot in life um we're we're i i like to think that we're a good lot of people but i also know that i don't have

your perspective and i don't have an african americans perspective have you ever experienced any you know any racism or anybody looking at you sideways in the trail running community while you're at races yeah i um and again i've talked about it before but i have been called the n-word at a race before you know while i was running obviously but nothing i could do with um in the midst of the race about it or even ask them why they called me that but um yeah that and then you know after i won the the pike speak ascent um you know somebody thought it was cool to drop the n-word on me from their car as they're driving away um so yeah i mean definitely and those are just like two small examples but it there's been a couple you know and but i do agree with a lot of what you say is that you know trail runners to some to a big extent are very supportive of equality you know you do need a lot of trail runners who like care about equality they do like you look at even you know the issue with um the george floyd situation a lot of trail runners stood up against what happened there and and are promoting black lives matter in our country and and that's beautiful to see so i do think um the trail running world uh for the most part is very inclusive and and supportive i i would agree with that sentiment as well um do you do you find any aspects of like this new of this new position that you're

taking difficult as a professional because i know a lot of sponsored athletes that are in the spotlight they're trying to earn a living via a combination of their race results and their social presence right their media presence and things like that and a lot a lot of times that leads athletes to to kind of walk on eggshells with very sensitive issues because they don't want to rock the boat they don't want to they don't want to seem controversial because they feel that it's going to impact impact their ability to obtain sponsorships and may and maybe kind of like ruffle the feathers with their uh with their current sponsors is is that part of like and has that been any part of your calculus in the past um yeah definitely uh there have been a lot of times where i experienced an issue uh with racism and i knew that i you know being sponsored by a certain brands or knowing certain people within that that had some um power over my contract that i knew their views didn't link up with mine so i knew that okay this is something i can't talk about i can't even have an opinion about it and um you know there's a lot of pressure in that sense where uh the media does uh influence whether or not you can talk or not you know uh or or you can have certain opinions and and sponsorships uh a lot of times will pull out you know if you say something against um what somebody in that organization

believes and so it's very stressful and it's scary it's you know it's risky for all of us especially black athletes right now who you know we are before athletes or or at the core if athletics goes away we are still americans we are still human beings and so to have a problem with racial injustices is is at the core you know like every human should have a problem with racial injustice because you know at the end of the day uh you can't change your skin color you can change your character you can't change your skin color so if someone has a problem with you from a racial perspective yeah you should speak out about that systematic racism is bad it affects all of us and if we're american we're supposed to fight for equality because that's what our country is supposed to stand for and so you know when sponsorships and things like that don't want you to to speak out and and and push back on athletes having a voice against injustices it's a huge problem but it does exist i feel like that now though it's at a little bit of a tipping point where it's kind of galvanizing a lot of the brands and a lot of the athletes and a lot of different voices to to to speak as one where previous you know you took a con like something not controversial because because the the fact that black lives matter shouldn't be controversial right at all but for but for whatever reason um it's it's a hot button topic and a lot of athletes have kind of shied away from those in

the past and now like i said this thing has been this thing has become such a you know such an such an apex type of issue with the current events going on that it truly is galvanizing a lot of different voices to where nobody's afraid to speak out anymore and i and i and i think that that's brilliant i think that's beautiful that that that's going on at this at this present moment right yeah i agree i agree so what what's your hope for the future like you've taken this stance like i'm gonna you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be silent anymore i'm gonna say something i'm gonna make a positive impact have you come up with like what that blueprint like it starts to look like for yourself um in terms of like pushing diversity or everything yeah pushing diversity stand you know standing up against uh standing up against racism like it because it's one it's one thing to go in and and i'm not criticizing you at all joe it's one thing to go in and have an op-ed and say all this sucks because everybody can agree right racism sucks and things like that right it's another thing to take those words into action and take those actions with other people to act as an accelerant in a whole movement do you know do you know what that looks like or do you have hopes for what that looks like no i um so i completely and wholeheartedly agree with you like there's a lot of people who just

write stuff or post on social media just for clout and they actually don't intend to do anything with it and i agree with you like that's we appreciate you bringing awareness to the situation obviously um but action is what makes real change awareness is what makes real change so i do plan on you know you know for me i was just mostly speaking on to raise awareness and also to talk about my experiences because i think a lot of people think it doesn't exist and and and a lot of people know me like maybe i don't talk to you about this so you don't know that i've experienced it so it was just basically to show people that hey no this is a problem in our country it is happening but at heart what i truly care about is making our sport more diverse and so you know project aspire diversity is something that i will continue to do um that's you know my action that's something that i have a um a passion for um and i hope to expand it to to a place where you know i'm helping expose other people of color to the sport young athletes to the sport and giving them motivation and then some drive and and some support um to get into the sport because i feel like you know like we spoke about earlier our sport is lacking diversity and you know that's my initial issue that i came out talking about this you know the the idea of racism you know within our country is you know a lot of it is in sport and uh there's a lot of things that are not talked about and and experiences of black athletes that uh are not mentioned because

again black athletes we are afraid to speak about these things because we feel like we're not privileged enough to get sponsorships so easily in this country because we're not promoted the same way and so we know okay if i bring up a social issue and my sponsors don't like it then the chances of me getting another sponsorship are going to be really tough you know what i mean and so a lot of black athletes feel pressured in that sense to where i can't talk about this because you know my career will be over how can people learn more about project inspired diversity um i mean i guess i i've written a couple posts about it but uh also i um have talked about it a lot of times so i mean they can check my social media out they can see um the video that i did with hoka about it um but yeah i mean i i want to do more and maybe make it more informative for the for you know just the public initially it was kind of something that i want to do to not bring attention to myself i wanted it to be selfless and just i want to help other young athletes i don't i didn't want to like push it back onto myself but i do understand that you do need to promote things you do need to do media with it um because you need people to understand it and um you know i've had a couple people reach out and they're like yeah you know you got to do this and do that to promote it more and it's like i get it now i do you know and it i just didn't want to bring it towards myself i wanted to make

it something that was just for other athletes so i do need to you know create areas for people to get more information about it and i've had other people reach out and offer support for it when i start to recruit more athletes for getting that out to athletes you know products and stuff like that why do you think that this uh this lack of diversity exists in trail running in the first place i mean we you know you mentioned we both mentioned earlier that the trail running community is quite open-armed you know they're they they it's a loving community they they they accept everybody it is all it's inclusive but yet despite all of that we don't see a lot of african-american or other people of color lining up at a trail race i go to trail race it's a bunch of white folk just like myself and i and that's it's always kind of it's always kind of like it's always kind of struck me that um that um that that trail running has a lack of diversity but i've never been able to quite like pinpoint like either how to fix it or why is that the case in the in the first place do you have any thoughts on that yeah i think you know there's a there's a whole bunch of different reasons um uh one big reason is there's a big population of the black community that don't live near you know big open spaces and trails and mountains um however that is not a limiting factor i think the big big big thing is that it's not looked at as glamorous or popular in the black community because

there's no there's no black athletes being promoted in trail running as much um and so it doesn't look hot you know you look at basketball you look at the the big rise of black athletes becoming stars in nba it was because you had a lot of advertisements of you know black and white athletes so you had a lot of top black and white athletes that had people that looked like them doing a sport that they enjoyed or or even exposing them to a cool sport and then they want to try it out you know when you look at trail running you typically don't see the black athletes in magazines or in articles um you know the outdoor sector is is typically white you know that's that's what you envision when you think of of an advertisement it's a white person when it's a trail or a mountain and so it looks very different it's very different from our culture you know like it's not something that we see in our culture or talk about because it's not promoted you know we're not in advertisements we're not in the media for trail related you know projects so i think when that changes you will see more and more coming in you know more color coming into the sport but it's both ground up and bottom down right the pipeline as you mentioned at the at the grassroots level is not conducive for african americans to get into the sport and at the same time there aren't a lot of african americans at the top that are being promoted and so you have the problem you kind of have the problem at both ends yeah yeah definitely

and then also you know a lot of my focus is on you know the elite side of it you know um there are a lot of black trail runners right um but when you look at from a professional's perspective i think that's where when you have like top athletes being promoted that sparks interest in the younger athletes to try the sport when they see stars of the sport yeah that look like them and so you know when you look at the collegiate system and you look at you know there's a lot of um you know black americans who graduate college and they're good runners and they could do well in trails but they're not being given the the same opportunities as other white athletes and so you're not going to see any color diversity when it comes to sponsorships because they're not being given the same opportunities and you look at you know post-collegiate programs where um to further your career just in distance running in general there's not very many black athletes being accepted into those programs and i was the one who was denied to get into one of those programs when i was better than you know a few of the athletes that they did accept and uh you know when we're denied basically your career is kind of over a lot of athletes a big percentage of them it's an expensive sport for one uh to do at a professional level and especially if you're funding it yourself and so when you're not given that opportunity to get into some of those grassroots programs um the sport is done for you and and if it's not done you're not going to you're going to be a shell of your former self because you're wasting so much money to just show up to

places like you have to work so hard outside of the sport to get money to go to places and invest in yourself and so they're you know right off the back you lose a big chunk of black americans because they're not getting the same opportunities was part of that experience that you just mentioned is that a little bit of why you started to steer yourself into trail running in the first place uh no no i was um you know a good friend of mine simon gutierrez kind of talked me into trying outflow running um so you know i can't say that that was the reason for me i just did it because i like trails um it wasn't you know very lucrative in the beginning just because you know you don't have any sponsorship support and you know there wasn't a ton of money and you know i had to learn where to go to get the type of money that i wanted and you had to kind of build a name for yourself and so that you could get the funding and um and even through that um process you know you learn that okay there there's a difference between a black and a white athlete in terms of receiving um funding right because what looks cool in our society and and you know what what the face of of the sport looks like is a white person and so again with me being you know the first black athlete to kind of accomplish certain things in the sport um a lot of that came only because i had to spend a lot of my own money to get to some of those races and there were other athletes who were given the opportunity to get paid trips and things like that and until i made a name for myself like over a

longer period of time was i able to get those same you know privileges do you felt that do you feel that that experience kind of like held the early part of your career back or anything oh most definitely most definitely um there's a lot of things that are easier to accomplish when you have support um as you know like obviously you got to have the hunger anyways to be good but you know there's a few more races i could have went to there's a few um opportunities that i could have had that could have made life a little easier for me in the in the first part and and allow me to to train properly or um you know to have better nutrition or or um you know just get to the races that i needed to get to to to advance myself um we mentioned earlier that the trail running community is is very open-armed and they're they're malleable and adaptable uh to the situation and i am heartened as well as you are to see some of the outpouring of support that uh that people have had for this issue but for the people listening out there which let's let's be honest it's i've got a predominantly white audience it's a trail running audience so it's going to be a lot of white folk listening listening to this but they're going to want to know like what can they do how can they make things better what tangible steps can they take what do you what do you say to that like what do you tell them what can i do tomorrow

um i can say from a general perspective not just talking sport um to improve the outlook of our country in terms of equality you know i think the first step is everybody's got to like self-reflect and look at you know question whether they have been a part of racial discrimination have they you know have they taken part in that have they been racially biased you know i think it starts there is understanding that we have all been guilty of these things um i i share many times with people that um experiencing racism creates racism you know when you experience like me as a black person when i experience racism it made me look at white people differently for you know like the first time you're called an n-word for something or you know you look at white people differently because then you wonder wow uh do they you know the next time somebody a white person does anything negative to you you start to wonder was that done because they don't like black people and it's because you experience racism if no one ever said anything racist to you and they just said hey you know um i'm not giving you this or you don't deserve this opportunity just because you don't deserve it then it's nothing but then the problem is it like perpetuates this this negative mentality uh black and white right there's there's black people who've said racist things too and when you

create this this uh racial awareness and you make everyone super racially aware it creates racism and um so like i said it starts with you internally and you have to understand that you are part of the problem to some extent and you have made mistakes in your past and then you have to question yourself where do we go from here and um you know i think the the biggest step is education educate yourself on what racial discrimination looks like in this country the history of it you know don't just look at blurbs on the news or on twitter and just take that as the gospel you know look at when someone says something to you you know look up that stat research it understand what that stat means you know google docs has a ton of information that they just released where um you can read books there's videos there's statistics that you can check out um you know so i think like education is a big part of it because a lot of times the places that i've been where i felt like racism wasn't at an all all-time high you know like like where you see uh black people being treated really badly really poorly or you you have a conversation with people in that community and and the outlook is is very negative when they talk about black people and and where you know where you see white supremacists and neo-nazi type groups uh circulating a lot of it is just the lack of education you know like it's easy to be ignorant if you're not

smart if you if you don't do research you don't ever research anything you don't read anything and you just watch a tv channel or you just someone tells you something and you just take it as gospel then yeah that that's ignorance and and you will be an ignorant person you will spew negative uh racial biases throughout your life because you don't take the time you're too lazy to open up a book or or look at statistics and understand the history of of racism in in our country and and um you know i can't i can't say that enough that you got to do your own research you can't just always listen to what other people say and watch the tv and you know because every news every news station is going to be biased to some extent cable news is not a substitute for education is that what you're saying exactly joe the the first part of that though actually both both pieces of that are beautiful the self the self-reflection piece i think is an aspect that we are all going through as americans right now and i have always considered that the hardest type of work that you can do because it's the work that you do on yourself and it requires it requires insight and humility and patience all of which are virtues that are not easy to come by but if you take the time to self-reflect and dig in and figure out hey where have i at

points in my past been part of the problem that's a beautiful experience to start from because it's the the kindle that lights the fire of the second step that you mentioned which is education and that's a woefully understood piece by many white people in our society right now right yeah i agree man well i hope everybody listening can take those two steps because it doesn't matter trail runner not a trail runner black white brown asian doesn't matter like we can all go through those steps and come to a better understanding for everybody joe i i usually i usually put together an outro um for these podcasts but i'm not going to do that on this one i'm gonna like i'm gonna let you have the last word because this is your floor man this is your stage what do you want to leave everybody with to think about during these times that we're going through right now um i guess you know before you um share a point of view that you have or um you know any idea that you have socially and and on public forums and also even on um even with your friends right people of color you know do some research first and understand when you're being

insensitive i think that's a huge problem right now um with um dealing with these racial issues is that a lot of people are saying things that are racially insensitive and they don't even understand it so it's like if you as a white person do your research before stating opinions you know socially and publicly and um it will make the situation better in terms of like you won't offend somebody and then it also will educate you to be a better person as well to understand that okay that's crossing the line um one example i give of this is i was having a discussion with a friend of mine who is uh you know he's he's still my friend he's still a good friend i love him and he's he's a you know he's a trump supporter and this is a it's problematic for me uh to some extent and we talked about this many times and uh you know and he he plays devil's advocate with me and i love him for it because i think it's necessary right like it's easy to be a black person and say uh what about the plight of a black man and be blinded to the fact that um there are things that black people do to to white people and so we were talking about um the use of the word white trash and what happened was i used the word and you know he's explaining to me how you know that could be offensive to a white person and i hadn't thought about it you know and i educated myself i said you know what did that mean

and and honestly it is uh it's one of those things like when a black person is asked can a white person use the n-word and you say no and they're like well why do you call yourselves that and it's like well because we're black and we understand that term and and we're using as a term of endearment to some extent because we took the word and changed it from what we were called and and now we use that word uh as a form of endearment in a sense um and the same when i look at that word of white trash right i look up that word and i say well it doesn't quite have the same negative history as the term as the n-word um but it could be offensive and i said you know what i'm going to learn from that and understand that it's not okay to refer to anybody as that even if uh you might feel that way and and and and just to understand that like from my perspective that hey i'm humbly i'm wrong to understand that you know that word should not be used to explain people uh white people and um i think the same thing goes with you know like i said right now right you have to self-reflect and educate yourself and understand uh how not to be you know uh disrespectful and insensitive in a time like this you know there's a lot of people who just go out and say you know the kaepernick situation i brought this up many times there's people who go and say oh uh he's disrespecting the flag he's disrespecting the anthem and it's like you know

you're trying to blur the lines here and when you say that it makes me wonder how you you know like i start to look at you differently i start to wonder if you're racist because it's been said many many times if you just did a little bit of research that that's not what this is about he's protesting he's kneeling in a peaceful protest um and when people don't acknowledge that it's like part of me is like okay maybe they don't know they're just ignorant they don't know and they haven't educated themselves but then the fact of the matter is i don't know if you're that person or are you the person who knows why he's doing it but you say it anyway because you're pushing your agenda which would be anti-black in the eyes of many black people and it's insensitive and so again back to what i said is just you know i kind of went off on a tangent but um you got to educate yourself and make sure that you know you're treating each other how you want to be treated despite what color people are treat people fairly in life and um you know i think those things are real important especially right now is that we're not respecting one another um black or white um white on white black on black you know we don't value life like we should and you know life is a gift and we should value that for our fellow human beings and uh you know just boils down to that well joe i i value your take on all of this and i can't tell you how much i appreciate you coming on i know that it's been a whirlwind for you uh personally over the course of the last uh several days you've done a lot of media you've done a lot of uh uh writing and

i i would imagine a lot of soul searching and i hope i hope people out there listening do a lot of soul searching as well because um this is a turning point in our in our times right now and we can either turn for the better or we can turn for the worse and if we listen to people like yourself joe and and kind of learn from those experiences i think we're gonna i think we're gonna turn for the better so thank you thank you for your humility and uh thank you for your honesty and all of this and i always got your back man anytime you want to come back on the podcast and rant about anything you have the floor i appreciate that man thank you so much you