Dakota Jones

Yeah.

Um, so yeah, my name's Dakota Jones.

Um, I'm here in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I've been living the last few years.

And, um, yeah, I've been a, a professional ultramarathon runner for a long time.

Two more things from me.

Dakota Jones has, is, uh, kicking off this really cool project.

I, I believe it's about 10 days from now, and it's called Where the Water Was.

He, over the course of five days, starting and finishing at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City, he's running 256 miles around the perimeter of the Great Salt Lake.

[upbeat music] And welcome back.

We have Dakota Jones joining from Chamonix.

Dakota, thanks so much for taking some time to chat.

Yeah.

we're going to try to tackle this marketplace.

I literally just started working with some people and they showed some success, most notably Dakota Jones and Casey Lickteig.

And we started to see that there might be something there that we might be able to take this coaching acumen and start to translate it into trail and ultra running.

And from the very onset, something that I was crystal clear about was that if we were going to do this, it could not be limited to just me.

Even just in words, it's like... it's such an existential experience.

Dakota Jones just wrote this article that I really liked, and it was basically about how, like, I think nowadays we try to distill these races into into talking about records and winners and numbers and how the sport's getting faster.

And yes, all that's true.

And it's very impressive, but it misses like this human experience of the race and like what it means to be a mom and a working professional and do this thing and also meet other moms and working professionals from around the world during the race.

Yeah.

And we're doing a run around, so Dakota Jones is doing a run around the Great Salt Lake to raise awareness for, like, the lake shrinking and disappearing, and the environmental impact, wildlife impact, fisheries.

Wow.

Like, it's not just obviously runners.

Like, it is dry across.

So I'm like, "Well, this is really unique and really sad, so I'm just gonna run across it," 'cause I hope I'll never get this opportunity again.

But yeah, that, uh, for Dakota Jones project of, like, I've...

There's a lot of things like that that are gonna happen of, like, if we don't get a good snow year, that lake's just gone now [laughs] pretty much.

We return to Mike McKnight's BPC 157 admission in the wake of his most recent race at Tor des Geants last week.

And we talk about Dakota Jones' latest Substack post titled "The Stone Age," which was such a thought-provoking read.

I selfishly hope that he does more like this after these big events.

And then we close with the best stuff we found on the internet this week.

Dakota's piece reminded me of, of like, if you guys are just paying attention to, like, the, "Hey, the goal is to win UTMB and run it faster than anyone," and actually, I didn't get to chat with anyone in that race 'cause I time trialed it, and I did, you know, look back and I didn't see headlamps, so I kept on the gas and my interactions were effectively none.

But I won, I set the fastest time, and, like, I checked these boxes.

Are you missing, like, some of the points of, like, being alive and living and interacting with other people? Um, so one, this is a call to Dakota Jones.

Dakota, I think you should write The Games Runners Play, um, and, like, set these, you know, in the FKT, like, set these kind of, quote-unquote, "rules", um, for each of these activities where it's like they aren't actually rules, they're guidelines, but it's, it's all about ethics and how you approach the sport.