Day 111: Karl Gruber

January 19, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“… you have to take your biggest dreams and goals and believe you can accomplish it and have faith that you can, and then put the time and the effort and work into it to accomplish it.  Whether it’s making a quilt to honor AIDS patients or skydiving or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or running 52 five-kilometer races in 52 weeks; just believe you can do it.  You really can.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Karl, for agreeing to be part of our Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Karl Gruber: Hi, I’m Karl Gruber.  I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I just like to inspire people myself.  I do that through my running and my writing and speaking, and I have a website now that I try to do that through.

Toni: Well that’s fantastic!  Well, let’s go back and drill that down a little bit.  When you think about that word inspiration, who do you inspire and how do you go about that?

Karl: Well, you know, my personal motto is “ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things,” and I did that through running a marathon a week for 52 straight weeks to raise money for leukemia research and awareness.

Toni: Wow.

Karl: The funny thing is, even though I’ve been a runner for years, I’ve never been real fast, and I’ve never been an elite runner.  But my thought was that I could accomplish this, and I’m a middle-of-the-pack runner.  And the way I look at it is if Karl Gruber can run 26.2 miles once a week for 52 straight weeks, then anybody can go on and accomplish their own dreams and goals.  At the time I did that, people said “Oh, that’s impossible.”  Well, I went on to become the ninth man in the world to accomplish that.

Toni: That’s amazing!  So you ran 26 miles every week.

Karl: Don’t forget the 0.2.

Toni: Oh, oh, okay!

Karl: Believe me, when you’re out there, that 0.2 is important.  I did one marathon a week for 52 straight weeks.  I did that from May 5, 1996 through April 27, 1997, and I did it for the Leukemia Society’s team and marathon training group.  And the whole time I was on the road, I did radio and television interviews to raise money and awareness along the road.  And it was an amazing year and amazing from every angle of the spectrum — from astoundingly exciting to incredibly lonely and defeating and ultimately victorious — and I met fabulous people along the years … along the road, I should say.

I ended up writing and publishing a book about the year; so I had do that.  There was just so much inside of me from that whole year of incredible running and meeting people.

Toni: And so, the people that you inspire are, one, I would imagine the foundation that you ran for, and then others that have learned about not only your accomplishment but the motivation behind that must have been an amazing inspiration to people.  When you inspire people like that, Karl, how do you think that it also then helps them to explore their potential?

Karl: Well … and that’s a great question because, you know, I actually — it’s not a surprise — I actually work full-time in a running specialty store, so I run into a lot of people.  We sell my book there.  A lot of people come in, believe it or not, in a running specialty store are not runners and even just people I meet casually when I’m talking or they just find out what I did, you know.  I tell them “You don’t have to be a runner; you don’t have to be a walker.  You just have to have dreams and goals.”

The biggest thing in the world is 95% of the people say when they think of their biggest dreams and goals they’ll say “Oh, I’ll never do that,” or they get to the end of their life and one of the worst things, I think, that anybody could say at the end of their life is “I woulda, I coulda, I shoulda” … and it doesn’t have to be that way.

You honestly … you have to take your biggest dreams and goals and believe you can accomplish it and have faith that you can, and then put the time and the effort and work into it to accomplish it.  Whether it’s making a quilt to honor AIDS patients or skydiving or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or running 52 five-kilometer races in 52 weeks; just believe you can do it.  You really can.  That’s where my motivation and inspiration from people is.

Toni: Well, that’s amazing.  You can hear the passion and enthusiasm in your voice.  When you think about the word inspiration for you, what inspires you?  What do you need to be inspired?

Karl: Well, you always have to have some goal or dream out there.  I can see how so many people … I mean, I have a regular job, too.  You go to work in the morning and then you eat lunch and then you come back home and you sit, and you’ve got a football game on, and you drink a beer.  And then you do it over and over, and weeks and months and years pass by.

It’s easy to become uninspired, but I always try to have a great goal out there.  For me, it was running the 52 marathons as a runner.  And again, you don’t have to be a runner to be inspired.  But for me, I always have at least one to three marathons a year laid out weeks or months ahead of me so that it focuses me and motivates me to train so I can get to the finish line.  I like to eat, so I have to do that to maintain my weight.

But also, as I mentioned, I wanted to get my book out there.  So writing my book was inspiring me to try to inspire others, and now I just created a website, which I’ve had this idea for 10 years and I just launched it.  It’s called the Positive Possibility Power Thinking Institute, and the website address is www.3PTI.com.  It was a no-brainer, really.  That website, working on it, really motivates me and inspires me to touch the people of the world and get the information out to them about being … well, I just call it 3P thinking — positive possibility power thinking — and I love it.  It’s great.

Toni: When you are … if you ever reach that point where you are, you know, “I have to fill myself back up” or “I’m in the need, I need to be inspired,” are there things you reach for, things you look for that are outside of what you’ve already spoken about?

Karl: Yeah, you know, again, that’s another great question because, just like anybody … I mean, as much as … and I told you I believe before we got on the interview here that I’m a disciple of what I call positive thinking.  It started with Norman Vincent Peale, and there’s Napoleon Hill, and Robert Schuler, etc., etc., all those wonderful people.  But like anybody, it’s a day-to-day struggle to fight your ego and the crazy junk of every day — personality conflicts with your coworkers, etc. — and it’s hard to stay on line, so it’s really a lifetime mission of staying on it.

For me, I honestly always come back to another book.  Like right now, I’ve actually got it sitting here next to me, Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now – Seven Steps to Living Your Full Potential. I’m always reading a book, and if I’m depressed or down about something, I pick it up and I read that.

But I’d say right now in my life, the biggest influence is something called A Course In Miracles — which was a channeled work that was given to a lady in New York in the early seventies — and some people call it the Christian vedanta.  It’s written in Christian tone, and it’s just … if you want to know what truth is and forgiveness and love.  Every morning I meditate before I go for a run, and I usually go through one of the lessons in The Course of Miracles.   So if nobody’s ever heard of it, just go to the acim.org website, A Course in Miracles website.  It’s awesome.

Toni: Well thank you for that.  Now let me ask you, when you are continuously exploring your own potential, what do you do?  What do you reach for?

Karl: Oh boy, can you be a little more explicit about that?  I’m not sure I understand that.

Toni: Absolutely.  You have a way about you of being inspired and what you need to stay inspired, but what do you do to explore your own potential so that you can keep moving forward, so that you can keep doing the work that you’re doing, you can keep getting up and staying positive?  What do you do to maintain and then explore your own potential going forward?

Karl: You know, I’m still working on that.  I think we all are.  Again, really, it is a lifetime job.  I’m going to go back to my running.  I certainly realize that probably the majority of people who listen to this are not runners.  But for me, I’m 58 years old now, and I’m in fantastic shape for a guy my age. I weigh the same I did in high school.

I find that keeping myself in good health allows me not to be distracted by some type of ailment or injury.  A lot of people now have diabetes or obesity or high tension, stress, and by keeping myself healthy it allows me to enjoy a better life and also be able to have clarity to focus on things.  And really it sounds … I mean, that may sound too simple to some people, but at least for Karl Gruber, that’s what works for me.

Just quickly, if you even look at icons like Anthony Robbins, Tony Robbins; I mean, that guy is a famous motivator and life coach.  The same thing, he preaches that.  You gotta be healthy.  You gotta be in shape in order to accomplish your greatest dreams and goals.

Toni: Karl, did you always come to the table this way?  There’s certain people that I ask this question, and you’re going to be one of them.  You know, have you always come to the table in such a positive manner?

Karl: You know, I guess I’ve always had kind of a happy-go-lucky attitude, one of the lucky things that I was graced with when I was born.  And it’s not always true.  But when I come to, like, certain people who are grumpy or challenge you in a certain way or a certain situation, a lot of ways I’ve been able to be like water off a duck.  I allow it to roll off me and not change me or unfocus me.

But when I was younger, honestly, I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.  My self-image wasn’t the greatest.  You go along in life and you mature a little bit and understand.  You become a little more focused on what you want.  I guess ever since I was a little boy, I did have a little bit of this.

Toni: Well, that’s fantastic … go ahead …

Karl: Nobody’s has ever asked me that before.

Toni: Well there’s always the first, right?

Karl: There you go.

Toni: Karl, you have been very inspiring in this interview, from what you did for the Foundation that you ran for and what you’ve accomplished, the fact that you positioned it in a way that it wasn’t easy, that it was hard and, at times, lonely I think was very honest.  I would think that that would be incredibly inspiring for those who are just trying to get up in the morning and make it through the day.

Karl: Thank you.

Toni: Sharing your perspective of how you inspired others and continue to do so, plus what you need, that’s what this Project is all about, and your interview was infused with enthusiasm and passion and for that, we thank you.  And thank you for being part of the Get Inspired! Project.

Karl: I appreciate it, and really my enthusiasm is as genuine.  I really want to make the world a better place and be happy myself.  If anybody is interested in my book, Running For Their Lives, it’s from Xlibris Publishing.  You can find my book either on Amazon or Borders or BarnesandNoble.com.  You can order it right from Xlibris, and my website is www.3PTI.com.

Toni: Well thank you very much for that, Karl, and we will put the links at the bottom of the interview as well on how people can get a hold of you.  We thank you very, very much for taking part of this interview today.  Take care of yourself.

Karl: Thank you, Toni.  It was a blast.

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For more information about Karl Gruber:  www.3pti.com, karl@3pti.com

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