Yassine Diboun is a Portland-based ultrarunner and coach who found endurance sports during recovery from addiction. After signing up for his first triathlon in 2004 to bring structure to his life, he discovered a talent for running that quickly evolved into a career in ultramarathons. Since then, he has become one of the sport’s most respected athletes, with top 10 finishes at Western States 100, multiple course records, and a place on the U.S. trail running team.
Yassine Diboun is a Portland-based ultrarunner and coach who found endurance sports during recovery from addiction. After signing up for his first triathlon in 2004 to bring structure to his life, he discovered a talent for running that quickly evolved into a career in ultramarathons. Since then, he has become one of the sport’s most respected athletes, with top 10 finishes at Western States 100, multiple course records, and a place on the U.S. trail running team.
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Yassine Diboun:
Sometimes you have to really hit this rock bottom place in order to make these types of changes and that's what happened to me. I started going to 12-step meetings and one of the guys from the meetings used to see me working out at the gym a lot and then he saw me running around town and he said, "Hey, you should do the YMCA triathlon." I didn't really even know what a triathlon was, but I was curious. So I literally was six months sober and I said, "I'm going to sign up for this YMCA triathlon."
Shelby Stanger:
When Yassine Diboun signed up for his first triathlon in 2004, he had no idea that it would lead him to a career in endurance sports. He took up triathlon as part of his recovery from addiction, working out in order to give himself some structure and stay busy. It turned out that Yassine was an incredibly talented runner. Within a few years of that first triathlon, he was introduced to ultramarathons where he really found his stride. Since his first ultra in 2007, Yassine has finished in the top 10 at the coveted Western States 100 set ultramarathon course records around the country and joined the USA Trail running team. Nowadays, Yassine is considered a leader and a legend in the ultra running community.
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.
Yassine Diboun, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Tell me where you are right now.
Yassine Diboun:
Thank you so much for having me. I am sitting here in Portland, Oregon with my little puppy on my lap.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. It's the town of runners. How do you describe yourself? Are you a professional runner?
Yassine Diboun:
Technically, I am a professional runner for Columbia Sportswear and I do ultramarathons, which by definition is anything longer than a 26.2 marathon. I do feel a little funny sometimes saying I'm a professional runner because I prefer to say amateur because if you break down the word amateur in Latin, it means something to the effect of for the love. And so I love doing what I do. So regardless if I got paid or not, I would still do this thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Thanks for teaching me that. That's really cool. I didn't know that, for the love. I'm an amateur in a lot of things then. So where did you grow up? Were you always outdoorsy as a kid and were you into running?
Yassine Diboun:
I grew up in the city in Pennsylvania and I was very active as a kid. I played team sports, mostly soccer, basketball, baseball. As I got into middle school, my mother had moved us to rural Pennsylvania, which was a huge culture shock for me going from the city to the country for various different reasons. I still was playing basketball mostly and really loving the basketball. And unfortunately I started getting into trouble, started acting out a bit in 10th grade, not a bit, a lot. And my mom who was raising three kids by herself couldn't quite handle me anymore. I hit puberty. I was 15. I was bigger, stronger, and just acting reckless. And so she had arranged for me to go live with my dad who had been living in Orlando, Florida. So I had moved to Orlando, Florida from rural Pennsylvania, which was another huge culture shock for me. The land of Disney World and Daytona Beach, spring break. And so in a lot of ways it was really fun. I had a great time, but it also kind of fueled the fire in terms of the party lifestyle.
So I played basketball somehow a bit through high school, but my senior year, I think the party lifestyle took over and that's where I kind of just went straight into that sort of lifestyle where I wasn't really exercising much. I wasn't working out and I was out of school now. I was 19 and I started getting into really some harder drugs and daily drinking and going to South Beach and Miami and into the rave scene for quite a while, which I always say I don't regret what I did. I had a lot of fun. It opened me up. It taught me a lot of things, but it was a synthetic sort of high and eventually things got bad and I had to retreat.
So I retreated back up to Pennsylvania to my mom's when I was about 20 and tried to clean myself up a bit, started working out a bit and training for basketball, which I love so much. And I ended up getting into a division three college to play basketball, which I will say that our team was more known for throwing beer drinking parties than our basketball prowess. And so eventually that just took me back to that lifestyle of destruction and binge-drinking.
And my brother was living in Colorado at the time and he had sold me on the west. He said, "Oh dude, it is so awesome out here. It's so beautiful. The mountains and people are so cool." And I packed my van and drove from Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado. When I got out there, I was blown away by the beauty of the mountains in Colorado and just the nature, but this thing just kept following me. It was like, wherever you go, there you are. I eventually just started getting back into my old ways of abuse of substances and it took me about four years in Colorado, mostly snowboarding, to realize that I needed some serious help.
Shelby Stanger:
In the late '90s and early 2000s, there was a major party element to the snowboard scene in Colorado. I know because I worked in Breckenridge around the same time. There were certain ski resorts that gave employees cheaper room and board, meaning the rest of your paycheck could go toward whatever you wanted. For Yassine, that meant he had a lot of spare cash to spend on partying.
Yassine Diboun:
I just made great tips every night. So I was literally just partying every night, snowboarding every day. So that was great if you have habits like I did. But I saw the writing on the wall with, there was this bartender that I knew in Winter Park and he was like 60. He's like, "Oh yeah, I came here in 1983 and I never left." And I just was like, "I don't think I want that to be me. I don't."
Shelby Stanger:
Even though Yassine knew that he didn't want to keep partying forever, it was hard to give up his lifestyle. He reached a point where he was getting blackout drunk on a regular basis and his life started to crumble. As much as Yassine tried to hide it, his family and friends were definitely aware of what was going on.
Yassine Diboun:
I actually had an intervention by my family. And so my mom just kind of started it off, we didn't have an interventionist, but she must have talked to some people or something, but she basically just said, "We're so glad that you're here. The real reason we all wanted to get us together today is to really to talk about your drinking and using. Even though you're thousands of miles away from us, we're worried about you and we just want to go around the room and just tell you about how your actions have affected us." And so each person took their turn to tell me how my drinking and using affected them.
And that's the selfishness and self-centeredness of addiction is like, I had no idea that I was affecting them. I'm like, "This is my life. I'm all the way out in Colorado. How am I affecting you?" And I just had the blinders on. I just didn't realize how much I was affecting them until they told me. And it was hard to hear and I didn't deny it. I knew I had a problem, but it affected me a different way when I heard my loved ones tell me these things. I was like, "Yeah, I'll get help. I'll move back here, but I can't right now." You know what I mean? That's what a lot of people do. I used to watch the show Intervention where they have to go right now. And I was like, "Well, all my stuff's in Colorado." So I went back to Colorado, ended up partying for a few more months extra, extra hard because I could probably subconsciously tell that my time was coming to an end.
And then I moved from Colorado back to New York State in April of 2004 and that was something that really profound happened for me at that time. I didn't realize that once I made the decision to stop that I actually couldn't, that I can't stop. I'm addicted. And so from April 2004 to July of 2004, it was what I call white knuckling it and it was just horrible. It was such a struggle and it was just episode after episode where I would relapse and it was so disheartening for my family and it wore on their patience with me. I went to a wedding reception in July of 2004 and I told myself and others that I was going to try some controlled drinking and it ended horribly in a blackout and I did some really horrible things in that blackout that I don't remember still to this day, but that's when my brother dropped me off at my mom's and was just like, "I'm not helping him anymore." And that's when my mom gave me that ultimatum that, "I can't help you anymore either unless you get professional help."
And so that's when I checked myself into that 28 day rehab and that's where my journey began. So that was the start of me fundamentally changing my life. And we're not just talking about like a geographical change and setting up, it was fundamentally changing the people I hung out with, the places that I put myself as well as the way I think and talk and everything had to change. And so sometimes you have to really hit this rock bottom place in order to make these types of changes and that's what happened to me. And it wasn't just the outside stuff, it was an inside job. It was like I was 25, almost 26 years old. I realized I'd been struggling with this for many years now. In a way I was grateful that the drugs and alcohol took me down pretty quickly because I know a lot of people that dragged that out into their 30s and 40s or longer. So I was grateful that I kind of hit rock bottom at 25 and that is when I started going to 12-step meetings.
I was in Ithaca, New York and one of the guys from the meetings used to see me working out at the gym a lot and then he saw me running around town and I was trying to quit smoking. I knew I had enough of an athletic background that I knew I needed to substitute something cardio-based. So I started running. Instead of going to lift weights and then smoking a cigarette after the gym, I decided I was like, "I'm going to go for a run." And so he saw me running around town and he said, "Hey, you should do the YMCA triathlon." I didn't really even know what a triathlon was, but I was curious. So he said, "It's swimming, biking, running." So I literally was like six months sober. I quit smoking cigarettes and I said, "I'm going to sign up for this YMCA triathlon."
Shelby Stanger:
Yassine did a quick Google search and he found a training plan to improve his swimming, biking, and running. He thrived on the structure and discipline it gave him. As Yassine strength and endurance developed, his drive to improve as an athlete took on a new dimension.
Yassine Diboun:
I started changing. I was going to meetings. I started changing the way I think, the way I look and things started flowing into my life and I loved it. I did that first triathlon. It kind of wrecked me and I remember just having a headache all day the day after the finish of the triathlon, probably dehydrated, and I just was like, "Man, my head hurts so bad. I want to do that again." That's the weird thing about our sport. It's like sometimes in the moment you're just like, "I'm never doing this again. Why did I do this?" And then afterwards you're like, "That was awesome. I can't wait to do that again. I think I can do better." So that's what lit the pilot light for me was that first triathlon and part of it was like me getting out to these spots, like riding the bike in the Finger Lakes region of New York where you could see the lakes off in the distance and you're connecting with nature, you're getting fresh air, going for runs ,and I started getting better on the bike. I started getting better on the run and swimming.
And a year later I was feeling more confident, more comfortable and I said, "I'm going to go back to that same YMCA triathlon and I think I can win this thing. I want to win. I don't want to just finish. I want to win it." So as I'm out on my final bike ride a week before the race, I literally can still remember it. It was May of I believe 2005 and I just remember looking off at the distance and seeing one of the beautiful finger lakes and just thinking like, "Oh wow, the leaves aren't on the trees yet so I can see the lake." And next thing you know, boom, hit by a minivan, completely out. I tried standing up and I felt like the most immense pain shoot through my body and I fell back down to the ground and the lady got out of the car and she started crying and said, "I'm going to call 911." And next thing you know, I'm getting stuffed into a helicopter and airlifted to a trauma center.
I didn't know what was going on, but I ended up having a helmet on, thankfully, but the helmet cracked and styrofoam was coming out of it. So I had a concussion and swelling on the brain. They thought I had neck and back injuries. I had a broken scapula, lots of road rash that needed skin grafting, and I got banged up pretty good, but all things considered I was alive and I was okay other than my shoulders. So that was a big turning point for me as well because I was sober now, I had a spiritual awakening and sobriety, but now I almost just realized that life is so fragile and so short and it can change so quickly. I wasted so much time in my early 20s. I was like, "I am not wasting any more time at all." And I literally got out of that trauma center. I was like, "I'm doing a marathon because my legs are fine."
I still remember I was running up this dirt road with a sling on because I had to immobilize my scapula fracture, but my legs were fine. So I was running up this hill because I needed to get some exercise and my sister-in-law pulled up next to me and rolled down her window and she's like, "What are you doing? You need to rest." And I'm like, "I can't. I need to get out. I need to get moving." And so that's where I started uncovering this love and talent for longer distance running. And I started running marathons and I went back to Miami and I was literally running the Miami Marathon in the top 20 of the race, running past the clubs that I used to stumble out of and just goosebumps over my whole body and finishing with a huge smile on my face and fists in the air and that was my new drug.
Shelby Stanger:
I just want to take a moment to pause here and acknowledge how impressive it is that Yassine kept running after that accident. Many of us have been motivated to start a new lifestyle when something unexpected happens and sets us back. It's hard not to get discouraged in those moments and throw in the towel. And for people who struggle with addiction, big injuries can be especially challenging because they don't want to go on any pain medications, but Yassine refused to let his injuries get in the way of his new life and thank goodness because the best was yet to come.
In 2005, shortly after he became sober, Yassine Diboun took up endurance sports. He discovered that he was an especially fast runner and eventually he was entering races all over the country. As he dove further into the sport, Yassine was introduced to ultramarathon running and that's where he found his sweet spot.
Yassine Diboun:
I remember training for the Boston Marathon and I started reading these books about trail ultramarathons and people that are doing these mountain races in the trails and they're going all night long and all day and covering all this ground and I'm like, "What?"
Shelby Stanger:
What books were you reading?
Yassine Diboun:
I read... Man, I don't actually remember the name of the book.
Shelby Stanger:
Born to Run or...
Yassine Diboun:
Yeah, so this was even before Born to Run, but eventually Born to Run was one of the books. One of the books that really inspired me was by Dean Karnazes called Ultramarathon Man.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah.
Yassine Diboun:
And so it's funny because I've met Dean through the ultra running circuit and I've told him that his book inspired me to get into ultras back in 2007. And so I remember thinking that, "I can't wait till I'm done with this Boston Marathon so I can try one of these ultras," because that, for me, is what really excites me. I had done enough big city marathons where I would train and I kind of know pretty much where I'm going to finish. And you have the security blanket of being in the city and people around. I was like, "I want to try one of these big time adventures where you're doing like a hundred miler through the mountains where there's so many variables you have to control and there's so much unknown and so much mystery," and that it wasn't long until I tried my first 50K, which is 31 miles. And I ended up winning that race and setting the course record and then it just went on to the next thing, 50 miler, 100K, 62 miles, 100 miler. I did my first 100 miler on my 30th in 2008.
I just kept going. I just kept going and I just was for the love, for the love. And I literally still to this day, I love it. I absolutely love it. Nearly 20 years later, I'm still competing. I'm still getting out there doing races. I've been able to travel the world doing it and I've taken in so much beauty with these two eyes.
Shelby Stanger:
Good for you. I'm curious about that first ultra you raced. What do you remember about it?
Yassine Diboun:
The very first ultra I did was called the Finger Lakes 50s 50K and it's near Ithaca, New York. And I always tell people your first on has a special place in your heart. Because I do remember I was running really well. I mean, it wasn't like a super competitive race, but I was running really well and then I got past... Because I only had done 26 miles. So I remember getting to like mile 28 and just being like, "I'm okay." You know what I mean? You don't know what to expect really because I'd never gone that long, but I was like, "I'm okay." And then I started even just almost feeling stronger the longer I went. I still remember when I came in and they're like, "You broke the course record."
Shelby Stanger:
Yassine's talents quickly propelled him to the elite ranks of ultra running. In 2019, he became sponsored by Columbia Sportswear and started competing internationally. He ran the legendary Western States 100 on four separate occasions securing a top 10 finish in 2013. A couple of years later, he joined Team USA as they won silver at the Trail World Championships. Yassine has also set a handful of fastest known times for FKTs. Most notably, in 2016, he set a record for the fastest crossing of the Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail. Whether he's racing alone or in a crowd, Yassine's skills are undeniable.
I'm just curious how you got so good so fast. What was your mindset? What was your training like? Are you just naturally gifted? Is your VO2 max incredibly high?
Yassine Diboun:
I think a large component is genetic. I was good at soccer. I was good at basketball growing up. I was good at lots of different sports that I played, but it was always kind of cloudy with alcohol and substances. So it was still pretty good, but then once I took that stuff away and I started recovering and I started eating well and I started sleeping, it was just the perfect equation I think of having those past experiences as well to fuel me too. It's just kind of like they say in 12 Steps, it's a simple program for complicated people and I just found out that I was pretty good at it as well. And so that makes it more fun when you're good at something, but it's humbling. It's humbling. That's what I love about it too is it always humbles you no matter what. I've done upwards of 20 100 milers in my career and I still get humbled by doing like a 50K or something and that's what I love about it.
And there's always going to be people faster than you. There's always going to be people doing more than you. That's not the point. The point is just trying to maximize your potential and do your best.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have a race that's the most memorable?
Yassine Diboun:
I would say probably the Hard Rock 100, which is a single 102 mile, single loop through the San Juan mountains of Colorado at high altitude. It's very difficult to get into. It took me many years to qualify and then get picked in the random lottery. The average elevation is 11,000 feet above sea level and it has 33,000 of cumulative elevation gain over the course of a hundred miles. At mile 30, I suffered a super bad high ankle sprain and I just kept going. I was just like, "I'm finishing this damn thing." And I just kept visualizing my daughter waiting for me when I popped out of the forest and I just was like, "I'm running it in with her. I just need to get to her." And 35 hours later I arrived back in the town of Silverton, Colorado. It was middle of the afternoon and from a distance I could see her silhouette waiting for me at the bottom of the trail and I'm just getting a little emotional right now thinking about it and getting goosebumps because it was surreal.
I couldn't believe that I had made this full loop through the mountains on a sprained ankle and I was back in town and I'm about to run it in with my beautiful daughter and we ran the last mile together all the way to the rock that you kiss when you finish and I was ugly crying and I told her, "It doesn't have to be running, but dream something up and do it." As simple as that.
Shelby Stanger:
In addition to competing, Yassine owns an endurance training and coaching business in Portland, Oregon called Wy'east Wolfpack. As part of his work, he leads group runs and mentors fellow athletes. You can learn more at WyeastWolfpack.com. That's W-Y-E-A-S-T-W-O-L-F-P-A-C-K.com. If you want to keep up with Yassine and his adventures, you can find him on Instagram @YassineDiboun. That's Y-A-S-S-I-N-E-D-I-B-O-U-N.
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 Pierce Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motola and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. 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.