Knox Robinson is a unique running coach and founder of the Black Roses running group in New York City. His coaching methods, inspired by music, culture, and the urban environment, are unconventional and effective. The Black Roses practice like an elite track team, but instead of high-end facilities, they use urban areas like parks, city streets, and local trails as their training grounds.
Knox Robinson is a unique running coach and founder of the Black Roses running group in New York City. His coaching methods, inspired by music, culture, and the urban environment, are unconventional and effective. The Black Roses practice like an elite track team, but instead of high-end facilities, they use urban areas like parks, city streets, and local trails as their training grounds.
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Knox Robinson:
You have to really change the frame around what we think is hard and what we think is fun and what we think is possible. Once you change the frame, that's a different kind of threshold. We always worried about threshold on a physiological level, but it's really the emotional threshold that you can play with that changes our athletic performance.
Shelby Stanger:
Knox Robinson is one of the most unique running coaches I've ever talked to. He's the founder of the running group Black Roses based in New York City. It's a small club that trains hard and they consistently produce high-performing athletes. The Black Roses practice like an elite track team, but instead of practicing in a high-end facility, they use different urban areas like parks, city streets, and local trails as their training grounds. For his coaching, Knox takes inspiration from music, culture, and the urban environment. His methods are unconventional and they work. I'm Shelby Stanger and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Knox Robinson, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm excited to chat with you.
Knox Robinson:
I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
So how did you get into running? Did you start running as a kid or did you run later in life, like in high school?
Knox Robinson:
The worst way through osmosis, my dad was part of that running boom in the late '70s and early '80s in San Diego. So my dad was running Coronado Bay Bridge half-marathon and running in Balboa Park and I just was around that Southern California, late '70s, super short shorts, mesh top.
Shelby Stanger:
I like that.
Knox Robinson:
Yeah, it was a vibe. And I just thought that that's just what Black dudes did, to be frank, just because that's what... I was around my dad and his friends so much so that I thought my dad was a fast runner, maybe because he was my dad and I'd get upset if he didn't, quote, unquote, "win races." Never knowing until I picked it up as a teenager that my dad was in the back of the pack. But I did learn so many early lessons from my dad.
Shelby Stanger:
So did you start competing in junior high or high school?
Knox Robinson:
Well, we moved to upstate New York. I had the ill-fated first cross-country race in three feet of standing water, rain and snow the whole time. Cross-country to a teenager feels like abuse.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah.
Knox Robinson:
They banned it from the Olympics for a reason because it's so hard. It's barely a sport. I probably started running more ardently at the beginning of high school, my first or second year of high school.
Shelby Stanger:
So you competed on the cross-country team in New York?
Knox Robinson:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
And were you good right away?
Knox Robinson:
No, I was the slowest kid. The slowest kid in the area, the slowest kid on the team, finishing last in races and then still falling down and collapsing at the finish line in this performative way as if that it had been this massive Herculean effort. I was falling down and fainting like it was breaking records. And I just chipped away. I just chipped away over time. And then I guess like a lot of romantic sports narratives, I had a moment where I crossed over to the other side into another dimension and that was a really profound transition in my early athletics career in high school.
Shelby Stanger:
What does that mean? And first of all, hold on, back up. Most people who aren't good at running early on, maybe not most, but many people, they don't keep pursuing it. That's not the story I hear often. I often hear the story of the guy who was number one on his running team. He's really good, really liked it, kept going and going. It felt good. Because when you're a little kid and you're good at things, you lean into it. You're dead last and you kept showing up. So what is it about running that hooked you in?
Knox Robinson:
First of all, you're going to hear... We always hear from the people who are good at stuff, right? There's a lot of people who are in last place in the cross-country team, you know what I mean? And I think it's what we're seeing now in this current running boom. The challenge, there's a little prompt, there's a little nudge there to running when you're not good at it to try to figure out how to get better. There's so many different ways to improve that I think the promise of something that was just outside of your grasp but could be pursued, I think that was incredibly intoxicating to a young teenager.
Shelby Stanger:
You just said a moment ago that there was this moment where you crossed into this vortex, to the other side. What does that mean? What did that look like? How old were you?
Knox Robinson:
I was probably 15 or 16 and I ended the school year with a terrible, terrible race, was about to throw in the towel and quit. And was in my feelings there in the beginning of the summer. And then this coach from a tough school across the tracks, shall we say, reached out to my mentor and was like, "Hey, what's up with that Robinson kid? Can he come out and run with my guys?" This school called Frontier High School outside of Buffalo, New York was just churning out incredible athletes from tough circumstances. One of the guys still has a New York State record for an eighth grader. Ran like a 4:14 mile in middle school. This is not a posh privileged school, this is a tough school in a tough part of town. These kids had incredible talent but they needed that training partner, they needed that consistency for a summer instead of getting into trouble and taking time off.
And so every day for this one summer before my senior year, I met up in this park in between our two towns and I ran with these guys in the woods every day. And it was just the most exhilarating time to be running with some of the best runners in New York state who were ferocious but also didn't take it that seriously. We were pushing each other into trees or into creeks, teaching me the dark arts of competition. Not just double nodding your laces, but the strategy behind racing. And then just on a physical level, we just did things that I just never really knew to be possible before that point. At the same time in my own life, I was really getting into East Asian religio-philosophy and meditation and Taoism and Zen Buddhism. And so to spend an entire summer in this deep running practice in the woods, those two disparate experiences really came together and changed me as a person and definitely changed me as an athlete.
Shelby Stanger:
That summer was transformative for Knox. He spent the mornings running and the afternoons reading about philosophy. During this period, Knox became a faster and more focused athlete. When he came back to his school's cross-country team his senior year, Knox won the first race of the season without having done any speed work. This was the beginning of a new phase in his running career. What was it like to start winning? Coming back your senior year, you're winning.
Knox Robinson:
Well, I wasn't very good at it. I was into the practice and the pursuit and so I wasn't very good at winning and maybe having a killer instinct. And then folks who have experienced, quote, unquote, "runner's high" or whatever. Some of my best performances were in such dreamlike state that I was just doing the thing and wasn't out for championship glory.
Shelby Stanger:
In college, you decided to pursue running or no?
Knox Robinson:
Yeah, I walked onto Wake Forest University and it was at a previous high point. They're having a great moment right now, but there was a previous moment when on the first day of me walking into the locker room, half of the United States junior cross country team was in that locker room. That's how good these guys were when I got there. And it was rad. I think that it's not that my running stalled out, but certainly, I wasn't advancing to national class running on an NCAA level. And then I had an incident with a teammate in a second year that precipitated me leaving the team and then hanging up the running shoes. Because in that time, if you weren't running for a team or a school team, college team, running didn't really exist. It wasn't like now where there's run clubs or... It wasn't like, I'm 20, I'm going to run a marathon. I can honestly tell the youth of today, I can tell Gen Z that that wasn't not a thing.
Shelby Stanger:
When Knox stopped running competitively in college, he turned his attention to creative pursuits like writing essays and poetry. After graduation, he moved to New York City and soon he started working as a music journalist for the Fader magazine. Knox was inspired by the artist he was interviewing to further explore his own creativity so he dove even deeper in music and fashion. Eventually, Knox wanted to connect these creative pursuits with the physical satisfaction of running. When did you get back into running?
Knox Robinson:
Right after the birth of my son in 2003. The experience of watching my son come into the world there in the delivery room really caught me so off guard because it was such a display of this body coming together with mind, coming together with spirit. And it really shook me out of my reverie of interviewing OutKast and going to Strokes shows and really think about when was the last time that I really had that experience with my body and my mind, everything together for a purpose. And the only thing I could think of was running.
And so the day after my son was born, I went out to the park across the street from my house in Brooklyn and ran a loop around the park. And then the next day, two loops, the day after that, three loops. And things took off quickly from there in an opposite way from my teenage running that took forever to get good. I can't really explain it, but I qualified for the New York City Marathon in my first race and was getting top 10 in races in New York. Again, pre-running boom. But I was just going out there and all gas, no brakes, and fell back in love with it.
Shelby Stanger:
What year was this?
Knox Robinson:
This was 2003, 2004.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, amazing. So in 2011, you ran the New York City Marathon and I read that that was a turning point for you. I think maybe you were the hundredth runner.
Knox Robinson:
Yeah. I mean it's been 20 years of marathoning so I'm glad you're putting a date to it. Yeah, I was still in the music business. I had left the magazine writing, but I was managing an upstart backpack rapper. We were in Paris Fashion Week and it was wild. Again, no running was had. And I came back and I was like, "Oh man, I got to run the marathon." And I don't know where it came from, but I just said that my goal was to get into the century club, get into that elite club that's reserved for the top hundred finishers of the marathon. Well, it was one of those weird days, I went out and I just jammed out with one of my training partners and I got hundredth place on the nose. But the thing about New York is The New York Times publishes a special section every Monday after the race with everybody's name.
And what New Yorkers do is they read the front page because they want to confirm the top 10. Like, "Ah, see. Yeah, I saw that one, I saw that one." They want to look at the last name on the first page. They print the first hundred and then they flip to the last page and they want to see how long it took the slowest runner to complete. That's New York behavior. In every office, every subway. So they do that and then there lo and behold, 100th place is Knox Robinson from Brooklyn. And everyone's like, "Yo, my man said he was going to do that. He said he was going to get in the century club. Yo, Knox Robinson is in the century club."
And so then when I was walking around Brooklyn for the next weeks, everybody was like, "Yo, my man, congrats. Yo, I heard you did it. You got in that century club." I was dapped up, saluted, and all that. And I'm exaggerating only a little. But the thing is, I had totally made that up. There's no such thing as the century club, it was just something that I was putting around to brothers in the hood, but now it's real. Now I'm in there and now every marathon season people are in my DMs like, "Yo, I'm trying to get in the century club."
Shelby Stanger:
At the time, the top 50 finishers of the New York City Marathon tended to be Olympic-tier runners. So being in the top 100 meant that you were extremely talented. Knox's success in that race caught people's attention and he started getting a lot of questions about how exactly he broke the top 100. All of this interest sparked a new wild idea called the Black Roses.
After Knox Robinson finished 100th in the 2011 New York City Marathon, his community in Brooklyn took notice. At the time, Knox was already part of a run crew called The Bridge Runners, which infused New York City Street style into the sport. The group was pretty casual, meeting weekly for runs around the city. But Knox saw that some members were interested in more intense training and tangible results. He decided to start a new group, which he called the Black Roses. How did you end up starting this run club, the Black Roses run club, New York City? It's such a cool name by the way.
Knox Robinson:
I thank you. I appreciate it. Black Roses started as a group of 30 people who came out of New York City Bridge Runners and I brought a more regimented program. This is about getting better and running, we're focused on running and everything else to the side. You can do that in a generative and a holistic way. You can do that in a susta inable way, in a nontoxic way, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to be muscle soreness and hard work, and long runs out in the country getting rained on, or snowed on or whatever. So I was bringing that old school trials of miles, miles of trials kind of mentality to it to folks who hadn't really had that experience and bringing them along slowly.
Shelby Stanger:
What was a typical workout when you started?
Knox Robinson:
This first workout for Black Roses was in January on the track on the East River in Downtown New York. So just to set the scene, it's 25 degrees, there's snow on the infield, there's a stiff wind coming off the East River. And I just remember my feet crunching across the snow and I'm like, "Man, these folks are huddled out here on this track. I better give them a return." I mean, the idea of Black Roses early on was, all these things are going on at a time. There's art openings, there's your friend's birthday, there's tickets to a show at the Garden. And so I had to give them something that folks could go home and could brag to their friends about or brag to their partner about. So that first workout was 12 by 400 meters with a 100-meter jog recovery. I mean maybe 8 by 400, but I just had to give the workout and then stare people in the face. There wasn't a pitch or let's try this, there wasn't holding hands. I had to-
Shelby Stanger:
Is there music? Is there anything in the background?
Knox Robinson:
No.
Shelby Stanger:
No, it's just you and running-
Knox Robinson:
Nothing.
Shelby Stanger:
... and people.
Knox Robinson:
Folks really wanted to run, figure out how to get better at running.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so workout one is crunching snow, 25 degrees, East winds, 8 to 12 by 400. And one 400 makes you feel like vomiting. So 8 to 12 of them, but you're going to feel amazing the next day if you survive.
Knox Robinson:
Yeah. Early on with Black Roses, what kept it going contrary to popular belief is not my own vanity or megalomaniacal tendencies, but it's about the people. The people kept coming back, the people keep showing up, not for me, but for themselves. And we went out for ramen after that first workout. And it was happy hour, so beers were half off. So there's some perks to it. But I think that it's that curiosity and folks' commitment to themselves to investigate and explore hard things.
Shelby Stanger:
How did folks know about practices? Did you send out a newsletter or an email?
Knox Robinson:
It's also Black Roses was inspired by insurgent guerrilla movements of the 20th century. And so the email correspondence would be like BCC in all caps and cryptic writing like Guerrilla revolutionary communiques. All caps, directions, maybe a quote from a Zen monk or a rapper who shall remain nameless or something to think about, and then the meet time and location in very stark quasi typewriter language. And it drove people crazy, but they kept coming.
Shelby Stanger:
These guys are pretty fast.
Knox Robinson:
Yeah, Black Roses, I think that there's some folks with some decent PRs. They can scrap with people in New York City, but there's also people who are getting ready for their first marathon. There are also people who are training to break a four or five-hour barrier, which is rad. As a coach, I love working with people who are around the four-hour barrier in the marathon because that's a conversation that is just the same as around breaking three hours or breaking 2:30 in the marathon.
Shelby Stanger:
Everyone in the Black Roses trains really hard and some members have become highly ranked runners who travel for international races. One of them is even the world's fastest female marathoner in her age category. When they show up to practice, the Black Roses have no idea what kind of workout Knox has in store, but they trust in the process and show up ready to train their body and mind. What sets Black Roses run club apart from other run clubs today and how has that vision of what you had for the run club evolved over the years?
Knox Robinson:
I love that question. I love how you built up to it. Because the answer is, I really don't know, and I stopped trying to figure it out. I think that the folks who come to Black Roses are how Hunter S. Thompson described God's own prototypes. These are weird folks who are incredibly diverse, come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but for some reason, they have something inside them. A curiosity, but also a drive. I think to be frank, I think that a lot of folks also are in search of healing, and I think that a certain kind of long-distance running practice has a redemptive healing energy that I think a lot of broken-hearted and a lot of broken folks can find really redemptive. A lot of folks want to be found and a lot of folks want to be seen, and I think that the small number of people who have come in and out of Black Roses want to get lost and want to disappear for a moment before they come back and they go back to face life's challenges.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you incorporate the urban environment into your workout?
Knox Robinson:
I love that question. That was something that I was preoccupied with in the early days of Black Roses. Because New York City is amazing, but it's not necessarily the most running-friendly environment. And then at the same time, how can you sidestep all of those distractions and how can you find the locations for good training grounds? And so when I was living in New York, it was a tireless effort to always find a weird undiscovered park or a one-mile stretch in an industrial district where the road's all torn up so cars can't go down it to train. And so I was always having these weird, bizarre, undocumented training locations that we could have a focused workout, a focused conversation without a bunch of distractions. And that also was cool as part of the lore and the storytelling of Black Roses, having these weird meetups in these weird locations. Because coming out of that '70s inspiration or when you think about these storied running culture elements like the Hash House Harriers meeting-
Shelby Stanger:
I was going to ask you about that. That was a cool run club in the '80s.
Knox Robinson:
Yeah, in the '70s and '80s. The Hash House Harriers meeting in a bar or wherever around the world, whether it's in Beirut or Paris or Shanghai, those are the kind of things I read about as a kid and I was like, "That's so cool." So it wasn't that Black Roses always needed to meet at a posh athletics club or needed to meet at a well-manicured track. It was how can I find environments where people can show up, drop whatever they're doing in their busy life, and then just focus on training and then go back to that life.
Shelby Stanger:
Knox's training methods work. He's seen people go from being middle of the pack runners to making the podium. These days, Knox coaches spinoff groups in LA and London. He also travels internationally to places like Ethiopia and Mexico to learn running techniques that he can bring back to the Black Roses. What are a few tips you have for someone preparing for their first marathon?
Knox Robinson:
If you're preparing for your first marathon... I don't know who needs to hear this, but take it easy. I mean that on two levels. Don't judge yourself too harshly. Relax off having a goal for your race four months in advance and just appreciate the journey because the journey is going to inform the experience on a very literal level. Also, this is the coach speaking, take it easy means calm down with the pace, calm down with the intensity of every run. 80% of your running should be easy jogging. If you're a first-time runner, that can mean walking and jogging. That can mean just moving. That can mean yoga, that can mean cross-training, cycling.
Take it easy. What's happening when you're doing that low-intensity training? As they say, it's lit, L-I-T. But low-intensity training is simultaneously promoting recovery from your harder efforts, but you're also constantly recruiting red blood cells, and the oxygen-carrying capacity of those red blood cells that's the bedrock of performance in the endurance activities that you've signed up for. So your easy days and your 80% easy jogging efforts are actually making you a better marathon as much if not more than this or that hard workout. And really embrace curiosity. Be open to all the possibilities that are blooming and blossoming on the journey rather than the deliverables at the end. And that happens every day of training, that happens in every workout. I think lowering the threshold for judgment and analysis, that's something that we can practice as a verb. That's something that when our workout is going bad or going poorly or going unexpected, we can check in, we can lower the judgment on ourself, and can embrace the openness for what's actually happening.
Shelby Stanger:
Knox's current running practice is pretty holistic. He meditates in the morning before venturing out to a park near his home where he runs for an hour or two. A few times a month, he still does a long run to keep up his endurance and speed. For Knox, it's all about the balance between speeding up and slowing down. If you want to learn more about Knox Robinson, check him out on Instagram @firstrun. That's F-I-R-S-T-R-U-N. You can also learn more about the Black Roses and the London-based group Hot Boys on Instagram. Their handles are spelled exactly how they sound, and we'll link to them in the show notes.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show. Take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.