Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Hard: A Memoir - Hardcover

Rideout, Ken

 
9781668087053: Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Hard: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668087057 ISBN 13: 9781668087053
Verlag: Scribner, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the fastest marathoner in the world over fifty—and maybe the planet’s most determined underdog—an inspiring tale of resilience, redemption, and personal transformation.

Born into a broken family in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, Ken Rideout grew up in a household persistently scarred by drugs and crime. At just eighteen, he found himself working as a corrections officer in a prison where his stepfather had been incarcerated, and his brother would later serve time. Despite the bleak expectations set by his family, Ken harbored dreams far beyond the confines of his upbringing.

Ken eventually broke free from the gritty streets of Somerville to the high-stakes world of Wall Street, where he carved out a successful career with top firms like Cantor Fitzgerald and Crédit Agricole. Yet, beneath the veneer of success, he battled a decade-long addiction to opioids, spending his hard-earned wealth on pills. The turning point came with the adoption of a daughter from overseas—a wake-up call to become the father and man he always dreamed of being.

Running became Ken’s salvation. With unwavering determination, he willed himself to run vast distances. In three years, Ken transformed from a “running nobody” to the world’s fastest marathoner over fifty. His mantra: Win—or die trying. In the book, Ken shares his awe-inspiring achievements, including, at age fifty-two, winning the Masters (50+) Marathon World Championships in Chicago and conquering the Gobi March ultra-marathon, one of the world’s toughest races. Through sheer resilience and grit, Ken rewrote his story.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Rideout is the fastest marathoner in the world over fifty and a former prison guard, Wall Street trader, and opioid addict. His life story has been chronicled in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Outside. Since getting sober more than a decade ago, he has won some of the world’s toughest races, including, at age fifty-two, the Gobi March—a 155-mile, self-supported race across the sweltering Gobi Desert in Mongolia—and a few months later, the Masters (50+) Marathon World Championships. In addition to his many running victories, he has completed more than ten Ironman triathlons. In 2018, Ken founded capital solutions firm Camrock Advisors. More recently, he founded talent agency Rideout Sports and Entertainment. He lives in Nashville with his wife, Shelby, and their four children.

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Prologue: Blood and Dirt PROLOGUE BLOOD AND DIRT
I HIT THE DIRT HARD and by the time I came up, I was already drippping blood. Several times while training for Ironman, I’ve crashed my bike and jumped right back up—there was so much adrenaline flowing that I didn’t feel pain in the moment. This fall was the opposite. My exhausted body exploded in pain, and my elbow was quickly drenched in blood.

I was two days into the Gobi March, a brutally difficult six-stage, 155-mile ultramarathon through the steppes, sand dunes, and rock valleys of Central Mongolia. I’d journeyed sixty-five hundred miles from my home in Nashville, and I was here to win. On the first stage of twenty-one miles, I’d gone out super hard. I knew it wasn’t sustainable for the entire stage, but I thought for sure that if I went out at a crazy pace, I’d ditch my competition and buy myself enough space to get strategic. I was quickly stunned by how fast some of the other runners were. Not only had a few stayed with me, two of the guys—a Swiss and an Israeli—had left me behind with four or five miles left. Then an Italian guy passed me with maybe two miles to go. I came in fourth, around ten minutes behind the leader.

That first finish had me seriously questioning myself. I’d made a boneheaded mistake, traveling more than twenty-four hours from Nashville to Ulaanbaatar less than a day before the race start. I hadn’t even considered how the jet lag and sleep deprivation would affect me. And I’d been arrogant. I thought I could just show up, fake my way through my first ultramarathon, and destroy everyone. Forget about winning, now I was going to have to destroy myself just to make it to the top three.

I knew I needed a different strategy for the second day. The Gobi March had drawn elite, savvy ultrarunners from around the globe who’d been preparing for this race for years, and I wasn’t going to be able to just drop them like regular marathoners. For the second stage of twenty-eight miles, I decided to just run at a comfortable pace and not worry about anyone else. I focused on managing the distance and didn’t allow myself to think about others. If they wanted to go out hard and blow up, they were welcome to. I just had to put my head down and run my best race and maybe—just maybe—I’d chip away at that ten-minute lead.

Day two started with single track and jeep trails that meandered through rolling, mountainous terrain. None of it was smooth turf or sure-footing. Hugo Reinhold, the Swiss guy, and David Dano, the Israeli, raced out in front of me early on, but they never got out of my sight. I wasn’t even consciously trying to focus on them. I was just chatting with this British guy and running my race. Around ten miles, the British guy peeled off and I started closing distance to the leaders. I wasn’t even trying to catch them. I wasn’t speeding up; they were just slowing down. They’d gone hard on the first day, too, and it must have taken more out of them than it had me.

Very slowly, I started gaining on them. Then I caught up with them and we shared a few words—no trash talk, just checking in with each other. Then, without really trying, I slowly pulled away. I wasn’t looking at them, I wasn’t thinking about them. I was focused on running my race and nothing else existed.

Finally, I allowed myself a discreet peek over my shoulder. They were ten yards back. Then they were twenty yards back. We were probably twenty miles into the second stage when I realized I could no longer see them. At that time, we were running through rolling pasture and open fields with good visibility. At a minimum, they had to be five minutes behind me, maybe even ten. I started to feel good. Time to turn up the heat. I might blow this whole thing open right here, right now.

As much as my spirits were lifted by eking out some breathing room, I was still deep in the hurt locker and ready for the day to end. I didn’t have a map so I didn’t know exactly where I was, and since I was in the lead, there were no footprints in the dust to follow. I knew the rough distances of the stages and the distance between aid stations, but we were out here for a primal, even savage experience, and sometimes the distances were off. The sky was so vast, open, and empty, I felt as if I were the only person on some distant planet.

When you’re depleted after a couple of days of hard running, seeing something that may indicate your suffering is over is almost like seeing a mirage. At the slightest hint that your ordeal is about to end, you immediately project all your hopes and dreams onto that illusion. I crested a rise and saw a little circle of yurts, and my heart soared. This is definitely the village where this stage ends. My day is done. I won the stage and may have taken the lead. I’m fucking back, baby.

Seeing those yurts on the horizon lit a fire under my ass and I started running harder, doing everything I could to bring my time down. When I finally rolled up, I realized what I thought was the end point was a deserted Mongolian shepherd village. The yurts had been left behind by nomads who’d taken their sheep, goats, or cattle somewhere else this time of year. I couldn’t see another village from here so that meant, what, another four miles? Maybe five? That distance was incomprehensible.

My mood instantly tanked. I’d carried a twenty-pound pack almost fifty miles in these last two days, the first time I’d run with a pack. Between the travel and the exertion, I was incredibly fatigued. I was in the lead and didn’t want to waste a second doing anything unnecessary, so I hadn’t been eating enough. At first it was because I didn’t want to break stride, but as my energy plummeted from lack of calories, it became impossible to muster up the willpower necessary to even reach for a gel pack. I was so dehydrated that my vision had started to blur. And I was so depleted that I couldn’t even think straight. How many miles are left? How many minutes per mile? How much time in total? I kept sending those requests for information, and my brain kept coming up with nothing. I kept running.

Nothing felt stable. My reflexes were so slow, it was like I was underwater. My forward momentum was the only thing keeping me upright. But my body was so fatigued by this point that all the stabilizer muscles in my ankles and feet were lagging. The signals weren’t getting to my brain fast enough, and everything felt squishy. You got to fucking pay attention here because your brain’s not working. I still couldn’t see the next village. The day had suddenly become incredibly long, and I couldn’t conceptualize that, eventually, it would end. Hold fast, buddy. This could go really bad really fast. I kept hammering out of instinct alone.

Around twenty-five miles with maybe only three miles to go, I started descending a small hill. From a distance, the tall grass made the terrain look smooth, but it was anything but. It was hybrid desert pasture, full of rocks and roots and tiny coarse bushes grabbing at your feet. It would have been terrible to run on if I was a fresh, fleet-footed twenty-year-old, but I was fifty-one, totally beat to shit, and still trying to outrun guys half my age.

My pack plagued me with each step. Twenty pounds doesn’t sound like a lot, but I was only 170, which meant I had an extra 10 percent of body weight resting above my center of gravity. With that...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668087057
ISBN 13 
9781668087053
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SCRIBNER
https://www.simonandschusterpublishing.com/scribner/

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