The King of Moab: Ultrarunner Max Jolliffe On Winning Moab 240, Recovery From Heroin Addiction & Why Suffering Is His Greatest Teacher

April 6, 2026·1 hr 41 min·5 clips

Max Jolliffe says when people ask his heritage, the answer isn't English or European — it's alcoholism.

The opening starts in the body. The host talks about spinal fusion before anything triumphant, and the point is clear enough: big performance goals can lose their shine when sleep, recovery, strain, family patience, and ambition all have to live in the same day. Ego gets named, but not hammered. That frame carries into the rest of the conversation, which keeps circling the gap between chasing what the body used to do and building a practice that works now. The guest begins with storytelling. His time around Hurley and Nike sounds like an informal education in how brands repeat, refine, and build a public story around athletes and subcultures. Town halls about storytelling could sound stiff, but here they show how seriously creative people treat narrative as work. John Florence comes up as a marker for that world. The guest describes being near a surf and content scene full of talented people, and those standards seem to rub off quietly. He does not cast himself as the obvious athlete in waiting. The high-school thread is better than that. He loved the water, but he was too small, not good enough for the surf team, and not eager for the hard work waiting in swim season. That honesty gives the later talk about staying the path more weight. Discipline is not treated like something that arrived clean and finished. The host keeps listening for the pattern. His closing appreciation is not plain flattery; it points to documentary craft, public inspiration, and the value of noticing subcultures that can stay invisible. The guest keeps landing on today, on doing the work, and on trusting what repeated effort might open up. The tone is warm without getting syrupy. Even when the conversation moves through recovery-minded limits, corporate storytelling, athletic insecurity, and trail-life ambition, it stays rooted in practice more than performance.

As heard by us

A grounded Rich Roll conversation on Moab, recovery, storytelling, and the daily discipline behind endurance.

Max Jolliffe comes to The Rich Roll Podcast with the headline story already in place: winning Moab 240 after recovery from heroin addiction, and treating suffering as one of his teachers. The episode, though, spends time on the less mythic parts of how that person gets built.

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Why you'd press play

103-pound wrestler who couldn't make the surf team. Now a trail storyteller with a four-word philosophy: all we have is today.

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