**A BEFORE AND AFTER CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD BOWLES**

Who is Richard Bowles I hear you ask? A Brit living in Australia and an inquisitive endurance adventurer with a few world records to his name. Although he grew up in Leicester, Richard has lived in Australia for many years and was the first person to run the longest multi-use marked trail in the world; Australia’s Bicentennial National Trail. This trail is a monster 5,330 km along Australia’s Great Dividing Mountain Range, and Richard made it through the rugged wilderness in just five months, after crossing crocodile-infested rivers and coming face-to-face with a gun-wielding farmer. He's also run the length of Te Araroa in New Zealand, Israel’s National Trail and around the base of an erupting volcano in Indonesia, after the Government evacuated 80,000 people.

Right at the tail end of 2019 Richard took on something different. He left for Calcutta in India, to live on the streets as a rickshaw wallah, mirroring their daily working lives of extreme poverty. Hauling people and goods for 18 hours a day in the heat and the rain, he lived on $2.00 a day and learnt first-hand about the lives of the wallahs.

This episode is a before and after with Richard; we talked in late 2019 before he set off for Calcutta and picked the conversation back up in January 2020 once he’d returned and had time to reflect. We get into Richard's mindset on adventure and endurance, the comfort zone, fear and risk, how he gets up on stage repeatedly to speak publicly, reflections on India and what it's like to live in Melbourne during the bush fire crisis in Australia. Be sure to check out the blog post on ofmountainsandminds.com for more on Richard and the show notes on our conversation.

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