Rich Roll: Daily Routine

At 39, Rich Roll couldn’t walk up the stairs without gasping for air—now he runs 70km on Sundays and lives off kale smoothies.

Shortly before he turned 40, Rich Roll was walking up the staircase on the way to his bedroom when he suddenly felt a tightness in his chest. The simple act of walking up the stairs had the corporate lawyer sweating and breathing laboriously, like he was on the verge of a heart attack. That was the moment when Rich knew he had to overhaul his lifestyle.

“That really shook me out of my denial about how I was living,” he told Men’s Health in an interview years later. “I made a very concrete decision in that moment that I was going to change my priorities. That’s how I set in motion this exploration of food and nutrition and ultimately after that, fitness and human potential.”

Back in high school, Rich had been a nationally ranked butterfly swimmer at the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland. He made it into Stanford and represented the university, competing against future Olympian swimmers Bill Stapleton and Anthony Mosse, and nearly winning the race as well. Unfortunately, that was the peak of Rich’s swimming career. After earning a law degree from Cornell University, alcoholism and drugs had overtaken his life.