Rich Roll on the transformational power of movement

Words by Mike Stuart. Photography by Lea Kurth.

It’s a warm, tranquil morning, late in the Swiss summer. Conditions are perfect for welcoming podcaster Rich Roll to Zurich with a gentle run along the Limmat river. Roll, who is in town to kick off a long-term partnership with On, is a long way from his California home, but is in his element. 

There’s a poetry to this being the setting for our first meeting. Flowing water is often a metaphor for the relentless nature of change. Rich Roll’s life – and now his work – is defined by constant transformation. Since the launch of his eponymous podcast in 2013, tens of millions have tuned in to hear Roll discuss the power of continuous personal growth.

“There's no such thing as stasis,” Roll says when we sit down to speak later that day. “Change is the reality of our world, from the subatomic particle to the nature of the galaxy. We're in conversation with change all the time. So the question becomes, how much agency are you exercising over that process? And conversely, how reactive are you to it?”

Roll’s authority on transformation comes from his own journey. A promising Stanford University swimmer, Roll’s sporting dreams were derailed by alcohol and drug addiction. He made it into Cornell Law School and, after time in rehab, forged a successful career as a Hollywood lawyer. He met his wife and embraced family life, becoming a father of four.  

But Roll’s physical metamorphosis was still to come. Though he remained sober, Roll’s health was suffering. As he explains in his autobiography, Finding UItra, “I no longer drank, I didn’t do drugs. I figured I had the right to pig out on a little junk food.”

On the eve of his fortieth birthday, climbing the stairs, Roll experienced chest pains. With a family history of heart disease, Roll was concerned. The moment triggered a transition to a vegan diet and reignited his passion for movement. It started Roll’s journey to becoming one of the world’s best-known plant-based nutrition advocates – and an ultra-endurance athlete.

“My journey with movement has led to growth emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and in ways that I couldn’t have predicted,” reflects 57-year-old Roll. “It was all catalyzed by picking up a pair of running shoes and going out the door. It was not because I wanted to someday be a podcaster, or enter a triathlon. The process of moving ignited a chain reaction that expanded my sense of capacity and possibility.”

Just two years after struggling to climb the stairs, Roll finished as the top amateur athlete and 11th overall at the 2008 Ultraman World Championships in Hawaii – a grueling three-day ultra-triathlon. Movement remained a constant as he embarked on new athletic and professional challenges, leaving life as a lawyer to complete other endurance feats, become a bestselling author, and launch one of the world’s most popular podcasts.

Roll lives by the mantra “mood follows action”, which he learned early in his addiction recovery journey. 

“You just have to do the thing,” Roll explains. “Because it's in doing the thing that you experience the state-change that you wanted to begin with. But you have to act because action precedes the perceptions, the emotions, everything. Humans want to think it works the other way around it. But it doesn’t.”

While the action Roll refers to doesn’t have to be physical movement, he is a big advocate of running as a way to trigger a change in mental state and reveal solutions to problems. 

“Many of my better ideas come during or after a run. I frequently have to stop and take notes or voice memos when I'm running. If I don't do that, by the time I finish the run, I’ll have forgotten the idea. It’s like a dream. When we move, we connect with the unconscious mind, the creative mind, where sparks can fly and different associations are made. It's like coming at a problem through a backdoor.”

Challenging preconceptions is a thread that runs through all 800 episodes of The Rich Roll Podcast and, given the show has been downloaded over 26 million times, the message is resonating. Each weekly episode is a one-to-one conversation between Roll and those exemplifying the “mood follows action” mentality – from pro athletes to nutritionists, artists, entrepreneurs and spiritual gurus. 

Finding balance is Roll’s next frontier. He has built a tight-knit team, which is allowing him to share the load. As Roll acknowledges in Finding Ultra, he has always been “a man in search” – of sobriety, of what his body is truly capable of, of how best to fuel himself, and now how to work as a positivity-first entrepreneur.

“The narrative I've historically told myself is that I'm not talented,” Roll says. “It's that I’m just willing to suffer and work hard, and the quality of that output is always correlated with the extent to which I'm willing to push myself. In other words, if I didn't suffer, then it must not be good enough.

“As an endurance athlete, it's especially hard because endurance is all about suffering and how hard you can push yourself. Yet the greatest endurance athletes are the ones who can balance this suffering with the spiritual presence of mind that’s also part of endurance training. I’ve put too much focus on the suffering side. I'm trying to experiment with living more in the other, more meditative state – and that's not easy.”

And so begins the next chapter in Roll’s remarkable story of personal growth. Nothing endures but change. But lasting change requires endurance. Rich Roll is a rare master of both. 

Rich Roll and On are on a shared mission to create connection and positive change through movement. Discover the latest updates from On’s partnership with Rich Roll.