In this episode, we talk about the amazing feat of walking across Antarctica solo, and how the Flat Earthers think about it. We also talk about Game of Thrones and the theory that the earth is flat, and why it would be cool if there was a giant wall at the edge of the earth. We hope you enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to keep going no matter what you're going through in your life. XOXOXO - P.S. We apologize for the audio quality in this episode. We had some technical difficulties at the beginning of the episode, and we re working on fixing that, but we promise it will be fixed in the next episode. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. We appreciate your support and look forward to hearing from you again soon! - The Eaters Crew xoxo - Pervy - PBR - PSA: It's not the first time someone has crossed the entire continent by himself. - Pravy - It's the first person to do it solo. - PARCY - PRAISE! - Alyssa - PARA: PBR: PRAY, PRAYS, PBRY, SONGS, AYO, PARA, PPRY, GRAVY, AND GRABS, PABY, BABY! - POOCHEAT, POOO, GOOG, PAAAAY! PRAH, PAAH, BAAAAAAH! PAAAAAAAAH PRAHAH, GAAHAAAAAH PAAAAHAAH? PRAHAHAHAH -PRAY PAAAAAAAAH? - PAAAAAHAHAHA - I LOVE IT? - GRAAAH HAAAAAHAH! - I'LL TAAAAH, I'M SOOOOO MUCH? , PRAAAAAH - PAAHAHAAAAAAAH, SOOOOOOH, MEEEEEEEH? (PAAAAH) (SOOOOOAAAAH?) - SOOO (PRAHAAAAH (AY) (I'LL MAH) (AYYY) (POOOOT) (THEEEEEH?) (SORRY? )
00:01:53.000Wow, so you were at the South Pole and then you trekked over to the ice shelf on the other side.
00:01:59.000It's funny you say about the Flat Earthers though, because all jokes aside, I've been getting a lot of trolling on my Instagram page from the Flat Earthers.
00:02:05.000I've got guys going like, oh, I was doing this speech the other day.
00:02:10.000People are super nice, come up in the Q&A afterwards, want to shake my hand, take a picture or whatever.
00:02:14.000And this guy walks up with this real earnest look on his face and he's like, so I really wanted to ask you, how was the hole?
00:02:55.000Well, I'm sure there was probably somebody who believed it before that, but it started off, people were trolling on 4chan, and then eventually people just started actually going, hey, I bet it is flat, and then they started believing it, and videos, YouTube videos popped up.
00:03:08.000There's another YouTube video someone linked to me the other day, and I thought it had a few hundred views, but it had 28,000 views, and it was all these guys debating, like, Colin proved that there's not a wall.
00:03:18.000Like, the wall, there would be Game of Thrones at the edge of the world, there's this whole I bet there's another 28,000 people.
00:03:24.000It's proved that Colin never actually went.
00:03:30.000Well, the other funny one was that we got a bunch on the Instagram page.
00:03:34.000I'm out there alone, completely by myself, but I wanted to share the whole story through my Instagram to share the journey with people, inspire others to do whatever they want to do.
00:03:41.000And I kept being like, well, I mean, he's not out there alone.
00:04:22.000So people have tried this, you know, going back 100 years to Ernest Shackleton saying if it was possible, and then the last few years some really experienced polar explorers have given it a shot, and one guy actually died less than 100 miles from the finish line because of, you know, lack of nutrition and some challenges with the weather and things like that.
00:04:40.000But people called it, you know, people after that were like, it's impossible.
00:04:43.000And the reason people thought it was impossible was because, you know, You can't get resupplies, meaning if you fill your sled with food, at a certain amount, you actually can't drag the sled anymore.
00:04:51.000So the whole math equation really was figuring out just how much food and fuel I could put in the sled.
00:04:55.000The fuel melts the water, so it melts the ice into water, essentially.
00:05:38.000So I'm one hour into a thousand mile journey pulling a sled, told everyone I'm going to do this and I'm already having those doubts pull up.
00:05:45.000But fortunately I was able to get a little bit further that day and 54 days later made it to the end.
00:07:24.000I had raced triathlon professionally for a number of years and realized I needed to be a bit bigger because I was going to lose so much weight.
00:07:30.000And I found an amazing coach in Portland, Oregon, where I live, this guy named Mike McCastle.
00:07:35.000I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but I know you've had David Goggins on your show, I take it.
00:07:39.000So Mike actually surpassed David's pull-up record.
00:08:54.000He basically fucked with that record so hard.
00:08:58.000He could die and like come back to life and live a whole nother life and no one's ever going to do it.
00:09:04.000Yeah, so anyways, my training, he was the guy.
00:09:07.000I went to him, trained out of this gym in Portland, where he trains out of, and he got me bigger, he got me stronger, but he also did all sorts of badass, crazy stuff.
00:09:16.000I mean, this is a physical challenge, but it's more of a mental challenge than anything.
00:09:20.000So he had me, you know, my hands in ice buckets, doing planks to get my heart rate jacked up, and then he'd be like, get out of the water!
00:09:26.000Then I'd pull my hands out of the ice buckets, do, you know, a seated squat against the wall, but then he would hand me Legos, And so my hands are frozen.
00:09:34.000My feet are in ice buckets now in a plank.
00:09:36.000My heart rate's, you know, 190. And he's like, put this Lego set together.
00:09:39.000So the dexterity of my fingers, the mental acuity to pull this all together.
00:10:04.000So he's the man, but like this crazy training he came up with for me that was like the ice, the water, the mental acuity, all of this was like, he was like, yo, you're going to be in Antarctica.
00:10:14.000If your tent blows away when you're pulling it up, you're dead.
00:11:25.000So, average temperature is about minus 25, minus 30 in Antarctica.
00:11:30.000But like I said, when the wind jacks up, I don't know if there's that other clip of me setting up the tent, but if you get a chance to see that, it can be about minus 80 outside.
00:11:39.000It's hard to wrap your mind around that, but I've tried to put it in perspective by saying I could take a cup of boiling water and throw it in the air and it immediately turns to ice.
00:11:46.000That's the temperature we're dealing with.
00:11:49.000Yeah, this is me trying to keep the tent poles together.
00:11:52.000Usually you'd have someone else to hold on to it, but I'm alone.
00:13:09.000So even when I'm in my tent in the middle of the night, eye mask, earplugs to kind of pretend like it's nighttime, but 24 hours of daylight.
00:13:15.000So solar panels, keeping everything charged, cameras, phone batteries, all that.
00:13:21.000Are you using GPS? Yeah, so I had some waypoints, the GPS waypoints that kind of led my path to the South Pole, etc., but mostly actually using a compass.
00:13:31.000So I'd look at my GPS maybe once every week or something like that, just to get the bearing.
00:13:38.000So I basically had like a harness in front of me that would have my GPS or my compass kind of off my chest, more or less, because some of the clips we saw, the sun's out, but actually more than half of the time, the clouds would come in.
00:13:49.000So it'd be just complete and utter whiteout.
00:13:51.000I couldn't even see one step in front of me.
00:13:54.000And so I'd actually have to just stare down at my compass, keep it on this bearing.
00:13:58.000And so imagine you can't see anything, can't see one step in front of you.
00:14:01.000I'm pulling a 300-pound sled 12, 13 hours per day out.
00:14:05.000Not listening to anything really can make dead silence and just staring at this compass bearing all day long.
00:14:15.000I mean, the mental side of it was by far the most interesting side of it for me.
00:14:20.000You know, I have a lifelong endurance athlete, but really kind of an exploration into the mind is what it was for me and why I was curious about it.
00:14:27.000So spending all this time in silence, I've done...
00:14:33.000So I've done a couple of these 10-day silent meditation retreats before this, which is 10 days, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, kind of dove into that piece of it, but 54 days alone in Antarctica in complete silence was next level of that,
00:14:50.000Damn, dude, that is so fucking impressive.
00:14:54.000I just can't believe that you did that.
00:14:56.000Now, when you're looking down and it's an utter whiteout and you're looking at your compass and you're dragging this shit behind you, are you doing anything in your mind?
00:15:12.000There's a couple different things, but really what ended up happening is I started to be able to trigger these flow states.
00:15:16.000So, you know, as a lifelong professional athlete through different capacities in my life, you know, I've tapped into that.
00:15:23.000You know, I was a swimmer when I was a little kid, so swimming laps in a pool, sometimes I would, like, kind of just tap into this, like, timeless space where, you know, maybe 30 minutes would go by in two minutes or something like that.
00:15:33.000But I never really knew how I got there.
00:15:35.000I just would sometimes tap into it, sometimes not.
00:15:37.000You know, the zone, flow state, whatever you want to call that.
00:15:39.000But in Antarctica, I went in with this sort of intention of exploring that space in my mind.
00:15:45.000And so as I got more and more into these whiteouts, into these compasses, staring at this compass, staring at this expansive landscape, I started to find ways to actually trigger that flow state in my mind.
00:15:55.000And so it got to the point where I could, for several days at a time, be in this deep flow state.
00:16:01.000You know, my day was about 17 hours every day between getting up, boiling my water, getting out of my tent in those crazy conditions, packing my sled, dragging it for 13 hours, setting my tent back up in these storms.
00:16:10.000But I got into this sort of sequence of being so present with each step, each next sequence, that it ended up being in this really timeless, spaceless place in my mind of true high performance that was almost like the most deepest, peaceful, meditative state that I can possibly imagine.
00:16:26.000It was very profound and beautiful to get there in my mind.
00:17:33.000Yeah, so this gym that Mike and I train at is called Evolution Healthcare and Fitness in Portland.
00:17:39.000They actually have an altitude room there.
00:17:41.000So it's not even a tent, but they actually have a full room where you can, you know, it's got rolling machines, it's got treadmills, it's got all that simulated up to about 14,000 feet.
00:17:56.000I've been in some of those tents before.
00:17:58.000When I was racing triathlon many years ago, a lot of people were starting to sleep in those tents, but a lot of people have a hard time in them.
00:18:04.000I know a lot of fighters use them as well.
00:18:07.000But yeah, it was pretty cool to have a full room that you can actually be in and move in properly to simulate some of the high-intensity stuff.
00:18:48.000In 2016, I did another world record project where I climbed the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents, the seven summits, as well as went to the North and South Pole, but much smaller polar expeditions, a week basically crossing the last degree of latitude.
00:19:01.000And so in those expeditions, I was on Everest during that time, Denali, etc.
00:19:24.000So my final push, I actually, I woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve, 24th of December this past year, and it looked, I was 77 miles from the finish.
00:19:34.000And I'd been going at that point, at the beginning of the trip, I was only going 9, 10 miles per day.
00:19:38.000Towards the end, I started going about 20, 25 miles per day.
00:19:44.000And then I thought to myself, maybe if I could push really hard these next two days, I could do it in two days, like two 15 plus hour days, like really get into it.
00:19:52.000And started looking at my fuel and food supplies and like they were pretty low.
00:19:56.000I had enough fuel, a few liters of fuel, but I actually only had about a day or two of food, like real substantial food left.
00:20:03.000And so I woke up, and I was like, alright, let's go for this.
00:20:06.000And in the actually deepest, talk about flow states, that was the deepest flow state of my life.
00:20:11.000I woke up, and one hour in that day, it's Christmas morning now, I wake up, and I'm just locked in.
00:20:16.000And I just came, I didn't tell anyone back home, didn't tell my wife who was tracking me, they had this GPS tracker where they could follow me, but I was just, in my mind, I was like, you know what, not three days, not two days, I'm going straight for it.
00:20:27.000And so I did a final 32-hour continuous push on day 54, and 77 miles straight, dragging my sled all the way to get to the finish line in one continuous push.
00:20:38.000No music, no nothing, just like in my head in this crazy flow state of, I don't know, high performance.
00:20:45.000And it was a crazy final push to get there, but made it right before the food and fuel ran out.
00:21:25.000And it just so happened there's a really specific season when you can attempt this, but another guy was attempting this at the exact same time as me.
00:21:32.000A British guy who's equivalent of a Navy SEAL, you know, British Special Forces.
00:21:37.000The living most experienced guy in Antarctica has actually pulled 3,000 plus miles in Antarctica now on various expeditions.
00:21:44.000And so we got dropped off one mile away from each other to begin this thing.
00:22:03.000And Bo, by the way, this Navy SEAL dude who knows more about Antarctica than me, he's off and going.
00:22:08.000I can see him in the distance just like leaving me in the dust.
00:22:12.000But fortunately, after day six, I caught up to him.
00:22:14.000You know, I waved to him in this weird like passing of the torch moment like I was passing him and then I never saw him again until I finished and I finished about 70 miles ahead of him, about two and a half days ahead of him.
00:22:35.000But still, that's got to suck for him.
00:22:37.000Yeah, so I actually, even though I finished and the first thing I could have kind of wanted to do, I haven't had a shower.
00:22:43.000I haven't, I actually, to save weight so I could get as much food and fuel in my sled, I brought no extra clothes, no extra pair of underwear.
00:22:49.000Like, literally, no extra pair of underwear, no extra pair of nothing.
00:23:05.000If the wind is calm, I get out of my tent, dig a hole, and go shit in a hole, basically.
00:23:11.000But when it's real windy, like those storms I just watched, you're going to get frostbite if you try to bend over and pull your pants down when it's minus 80 out.
00:23:17.000So in the vestibule of my tent, not the side I'm cooking on, but the other side where I'm still inside covered, I dig a hole in there.
00:23:32.000Actually, to me, this is very cool, but also not glamorous.
00:23:35.000Within one degree of latitude of the South Pole, so the last degree of latitude, 89 degrees, the South Pole is at 90 degrees.
00:23:41.000It's basically 69 miles or 60 nautical miles circumference around the South Pole.
00:23:46.000Antarctica being as pristine as it is, they have all these laws about environmental conservation, which to me is amazing, being someone who just loves and is a great steward of the land.
00:23:53.000They actually say you can't even leave your human waste in holes here.
00:23:57.000Even though there's nobody out there, they're like, we want this to be a completely protected area.
00:24:01.000And so, yes, usually my sled was getting lighter most of the time because I was eating food every day and burning fuel.
00:24:07.000But in that last degree of latitude to the South Pole and crossing it, I was shitting in a bag.
00:24:12.000Wrapping it up and putting it in my sled and having to carry it with me.
00:24:31.000It was tempting, but I grew up going out in the outdoors.
00:24:35.000It just says leave no trace principle that I really love, and particularly Antarctica.
00:24:39.000One of the things about Antarctica, it's one of those places where, imagine you've traveled far and wide in your life, and there's a few places, at least in my mind, where you can't put it into words until you've stepped off of it.
00:24:48.000And for me, this is my second time in Antarctica.
00:24:51.000Both times, you know, this big cargo ship basically lands you on the continent and then you get in a smaller plane to get dropped off to where I needed to start on the edge of the continent.
00:24:58.000But both times stepping off the plane, I'm just shit-eating grin ear-to-ear on my face because I just am like, whoa, what is this place?
00:25:06.000Even the second time seeing it, I felt like my cheeks were sore because I was just smiling so big of just the pristine beauty, the blank canvas.
00:25:15.000I mean, you look out on the land and you're like...
00:25:17.000Human footprints haven't touched 98% of the continent, something like that.
00:26:33.000And they're like, well, we have 20 of the top doctors, nutritionists, food scientists on our staff in this innovation center around nutrition come in the lab with us.
00:26:42.000They'd never done this with an athlete before, but they were intrigued, and so I actually went and did a years-long worth of, you know, 100-plus blood tests, VO2 max tests, all this fitness testing all around my physiology, and they created, ultimately, a custom food solution as a bar form, essentially, called the columbar that was all whole food ingredients.
00:26:59.000It was no, you know, chemical derivatives or anything.
00:27:01.000It was, you know, coconut oil, you know, seeds, nuts, you know, all these different pieces of macronutrients as well as micronutrient blends that I needed, but custom-tailored to my physiology.
00:27:36.000Now, when they did this and they made these custom bars for you, how did you know how many calories you're going to be burning while you're pulling this 300-pound sled?
00:27:48.000Was it dependent upon the conditions, like if the snow was more packed or icy?
00:27:58.000So, I mean, we had to use our best guess, honestly.
00:28:01.000We had to just say, let's use our best guess.
00:28:03.000Like I said, a bunch of smart people, smarter than me, were in this room, all these doctors, these PhDs around this, and we had to make some assumptions.
00:28:09.000And ultimately, they were like, okay, you're going to burn 10,000 calories.
00:28:12.000Let's get you 10,000 calories in these bars.
00:28:14.000And we started running the weight on the sled, and we're like, that'll be a 500-pound sled.
00:28:38.000The first thing I ate when I got back It was a big burger, but you might call me lame for saying this, but I'm just going to say it because it's the truth.
00:28:47.000What I craved was just something, because I'd eaten this, you know what I mean?
00:28:50.000I've been eating this freeze-dried field, this chunk of columbar, which got me through, but it was something green and alive, and so I had this big salad with avocado and salad.
00:29:00.000I had a big burger, too, but then, of course, I eat, my stomach is shrunk, right?
00:29:04.000I eat this big meal, and I'm like, oh, my stomach kind of hurts.
00:29:07.000But emotionally, I was like, I'm back in the real world, baby.
00:29:11.000So it was like, I ate everything I could get in my hands.
00:29:13.000I went to a buffet, it just was like, my stomach was hurting, but I was like, I'm not going to stop.
00:29:16.000And I just started eating like, whatever, croissants and bread, just all the things.
00:29:22.000I would imagine your body would, like, you're probably craving all that life, like, live things, green, leafy vegetables, fruit.
00:29:32.000It's weird to say, I mean, like, I'm from Portland, Oregon, you know, it's a pretty green part of the world up there in the Pacific Northwest, and not even just the food component, but...
00:30:10.000Kind of coming back to reality in that way.
00:30:12.000Man, so when they're constructing these bars for you, and this is all based on your body and what burns well with you, how do they, in terms of how many calories, what's the best food in terms of weight versus calories?
00:30:30.000And is there some foods that are heavier but don't have as many calories?
00:30:34.000Yeah, so I think, I'm going to get the numbers pretty close to right here, but I think fat, of course, of the macronutrients, we got protein, fat, and carbs, right?
00:30:45.000Fat is the most calorie-dense of them all.
00:30:47.000And you have to make sure these things don't freeze solid, right?
00:30:50.000So that was one of the, it was minus 25 in my sled every single day, so it had to actually be edible while frozen, essentially, because it would be too hard to re-warm them, because this was the food I was eating outside of my sled.
00:31:18.000Which ultimately, you know, if you see coconut oil on the shelf, it's not a liquid, it's actually a solid, but it doesn't freeze like rock solid.
00:31:25.000So having that much coconut oil in it allowed it to, we actually had to get it shipped down frozen because if it didn't freeze, it actually kind of got like flat.
00:31:32.000And so they put it in these freeze-dried packs, shipped it down to Chile, had to do this whole customs thing to import it.
00:31:37.000It was like a whole like crazy logistical mess.
00:31:39.000But got that done and it actually held up so that it was enough fat in there that I could actually bite off chunks of this rather than, you know, there's plenty of stories of guys in these cold places breaking teeth on cliff bars and things like that.
00:31:50.000So the column bars were good while frozen.
00:32:05.000And then the other thing is that they, like I said, their bread and butter at this company, Standard Process, is they're a supplement company.
00:33:17.000Because, I mean, there's nothing out there.
00:33:18.000And are you, were you concerned about that?
00:33:20.000Because, like, I would imagine, like, the anticipation leading up to it is a little stressful, and sometimes your immune system can get run down.
00:33:28.000You know, of course, it's fun to recount the epic parts of these journeys, or my other, you know, world records, climbing Everest, or this summit day, or this push, or whatever.
00:33:38.000But anything that's this long duration, this was 54 days, the world record I did in 2006 was 139 days.
00:33:44.000Like, the boring answer is, like, how did you do it?
00:33:46.000It's like, well, like, I washed my hands really good when I went to the airport and I didn't eat this food off the street.
00:33:51.000Staying healthy, if you can't get that right, it doesn't matter.
00:34:04.000When I raced triathlon many years ago, I raced in something like 25 countries all over the world, different places, and there were three or four times I can remember.
00:34:10.000I remember one time I flew to the Philippines, this place called Subic Bay, gearing up for this big race, and sure enough, the night before the race, just like...
00:34:18.000Diarrhea like crazy, puking my brains out.
00:34:21.000So I jump into the swim, swim in the ocean.
00:34:54.000Plus with the one pair of underwear, that makes it even more.
00:34:59.000So, yeah, staying healthy was super key to all of this.
00:35:03.000But, you know, all things considered, I mean, my body, of course, got banged up some, but, like, I came back, you know, relatively healthy, and I think the food and nutrition was a key part of that.
00:35:10.000Oh, it has to be, but it sounds like you really did it wisely.
00:35:13.000Like, I mean, that's so cool that you had that company behind you that organized the food and nutrition.
00:35:22.000Now, were you trying to put fat on before you left, as well as muscle?
00:35:25.000Yeah, so with Mike, you know, the goal was to put, you know, I put about 10 to 15 pounds of muscle on, and then another 5 pounds of fat on top of that, just knowing that I was...
00:35:35.000Total was 20 pounds total, but, you know, between fat and...
00:35:39.000The last few weeks, I was, you know, basically, I'd been lifted, you know, I'd gotten strong and all this, didn't want to wear myself out too much, you know, stressing my muscles, because I was about to undergo this.
00:35:48.000And it was where I was just putting calories in.
00:35:50.000So I'd, you know, eat dinner and then Jenna, my wife, would be like, what are you going to do now?
00:35:54.000And I'd be like, should I be sitting there just eating like a pint of, you know, coconut bliss ice cream, whatever it was, you know, putting calories in just to put some fat on there because that just burned off me immediately.
00:36:10.000I don't know if I'll pull it up, but there's a photo on my Instagram that kind of shows a little bit of the before and the after body shot.
00:37:10.000And like I said, I started out, I started out about 165. I put myself up to 185 to leave, and I finished at 165. So I actually finished way more near my sort of natural, fairly lean weight for my height.
00:37:23.000There's plenty of things that went wrong, but that part of it, yeah.
00:37:25.000It seems like you kind of planned out for things going wrong.
00:37:28.000Yeah, I mean, this was in one way as a solo effort.
00:37:32.000I mean, I was out there by myself walking across this, but this was a massive team effort from these guys getting behind me, all these doctors, you know, all the different people I have supporting me, you know, my wife and then what she does with all the media and our non-profit news of many things.
00:37:46.000A lot of pieces go into making this thing happen, so it was a team effort for sure, big time.
00:38:03.000Yeah, so what was kind of crazy was that crazy last push, right?
00:38:07.000It's this 32-hour, you know, non-stop push.
00:38:11.000And so what happened is it's Christmas Day when I start this push.
00:38:15.000And so my whole family, I'm actually, I have five older sisters, big family, you know, I'm the baby of the bunch and they're all together in Hood River, Oregon at my sister's house.
00:38:24.000And they're thinking, cool, Colin's like getting close to any of his project.
00:39:41.000Like, hour 16 of this push, it was nice.
00:39:43.000Just this ground blizzard, which is it's not actually snowing, but it feels like it's snowing because it's so windy that the snow is blowing around everywhere.
00:39:50.000But I was locked in such a deep flow state in my mind that even setting my tent up in this crazy storm, even getting inside, 18-hour push, I was just like...
00:39:59.000And it felt like for me when I reflect on that moment, Jenna even says this, you know, she talked to me every night and there's clips of me crying, there's clips of me having doubts, you know, there was ups and downs to this whole thing, but she was like, you sounded the most lucid I've ever heard you.
00:40:13.000And she's watched me high perform and other things.
00:40:43.000All of these moments, the meditation practice, the family, the support.
00:40:47.000All of these things were stacking on each other to kind of lead to this final culminating moment.
00:40:52.000And I had to pull on lessons from each phase of my life to be that locked in.
00:40:55.000But I found myself just kind of in that moment, in that flow state, being able to get up out of that Hour 18 and say to them, actually, I'm going back out in this crazy ground blizzard.
00:41:05.000I got another 14 hours to go to finish this thing.
00:41:07.000And so that was 32 hours and 77 miles later, the final push to the end.
00:41:13.000Now, what did you wear in terms of like a base layer?
00:41:17.000Was there a concern about you sweating while you were pulling all that weight, especially initially when it was 375 pounds?
00:41:24.000So, you know, one of the famous lines that, you know, people who have been in the polar environments will say is, if you sweat, you die.
00:41:31.000And, you know, it's maybe a little bit of hyperbole, but it's not far from the truth, which is you start sweating and you stop for even 30 seconds, your clothes are literally freezing to your body.
00:41:41.000And so it was this crazy kind of balance of being able to pull the sled, get your heart rate elevated enough to keep your body warm.
00:41:48.000But not too warm that you were sweating.
00:41:50.000And so any second I would start sweating, I would strip layers off.
00:41:54.000So there was times, especially when there was no wind, it'd still be ambient temperature, minus 20, minus 25, but I would just have like a thin Gore-Tex jacket on and one base layer.
00:42:34.000I was using Mountain Hardware Base Layers, and then actually my outer layers was this Norwegian company called Bergens of Norway.
00:42:41.000They don't sponsor me, but they actually, believe it or not, the Norwegians know a thing or two about being in the polar environment, and so they've designed a really good jacket and pant that's actually really breathable and really good, and then I sewed a fur ruff onto the edge, so a wolf fur ruff on the outer side of the hood.
00:43:18.000What is the material that it's made out of?
00:43:21.000The base layer is, yeah, it's a synthetic, like a polypropylene, something like that.
00:43:26.000And so when it sweats, it dries quickly, is that the idea?
00:43:29.000Yeah, so as it dries quickly, but the idea was just to not get it wet, so basically strip down as much as possible.
00:43:35.000But literally, I'd go from that, and then of course I needed to eat and drink every, whatever, 30 minutes or whatever, actually more like every hour, so I'd stop.
00:43:43.000So I'd stop, and the front of my sled I had a huge puffy down jacket, like a massive Michelin Man, huge puffy down jacket.
00:43:49.000So even if you're stopping for a minute to drink water, before even trying to do that, boom, put the big jacket on, because that's how cold...
00:43:56.000Or how cold you can get immediately from stopping.
00:43:59.000I mean, it's just so much colder than when pulling the sled.
00:44:01.000Your heart rate stays up and keeps you pretty warm.
00:44:03.000I would imagine, like, your hands and your feet, too.
00:44:26.000And that's because I started getting tiny little bits of frostbite on the bottoms of my nose and on my cheeks because I'd wear a full face mask, buff, everything, but even, you know, tiny little, you know, one, you know, needle prick of wind on your face throughout the day in that cold, it's going to turn into a cold injury.
00:44:43.000And so I started getting a few cold injuries on my face, nothing, you know, too bad.
00:44:47.000Do you grease your face up or anything?
00:44:49.000Mostly the tape and then I had a little bit of like Vaseline or like chapstick type of stuff on some of the bad areas.
00:44:55.000The one thing actually that I did that I'd never done before would actually worked well was a tip that I got which was my fingers started cracking really really bad from the cold and so they were like really painful and I actually was pouring putting super glue into all of those basically little micro cuts on my fingers which when someone told me that as a trick I was like really but It turns out it's actually a really good trick,
00:45:16.000so it's kind of super gluing these cuts on my fingers back together, and that actually worked reasonably well, all things considered.
00:45:22.000I mean, all things considered is the operative word, but it worked.
00:47:32.000I love finding the edges of my own potential, all that kind of stuff.
00:47:35.000But I also now really enjoy building these projects that I can share with other people.
00:47:39.000I do this nonprofit work where there's 30,000 school kids tuning into this project and using this as curriculum in their classrooms to learn about climate change, to learn about weather, atmospheric pressure.
00:47:49.000That's a really cool project like that.
00:47:50.000And then just sharing it with the world at large.
00:47:52.000People going like, this is impossible.
00:47:53.000I mean, how many guys do you know that's like, one day I'm going to do this cool thing, but they like never do it, right?
00:47:58.000Actually going after that and sharing it away was like, you might not want to walk across Antarctica, but you probably have some hope or some dream or some goal that you want to accomplish in your life.
00:48:08.000And so, for me doing this, it's funny, I've started to think of myself less as an athlete and actually more of as an artist.
00:48:14.000And my canvas really is just endurance sports, but creating these art projects in the world that I can create and share with people through storytelling to hopefully inspire them to do that.
00:48:22.000So, what was I thinking in that first hour was, you know, I don't want my art project to blow up right in my face, but more so, this was bigger than myself.
00:48:32.000And that's really what kept me going forward.
00:48:33.000It's like, I can't let these kids in these public school classrooms think that I quit after the first hour.
00:48:38.000These are other people that are driving inspiration from this, hopefully.
00:48:41.000I want to do this for this larger purpose.
00:48:43.000And honestly, that's what really kept me going forward through the really hard times, was that connection to a larger purpose of what I want to put out in the world and that ripple effect of positivity.
00:49:30.000I still experience the ups and downs, but I have a way of actually being able to repurpose or refocus that energy into positive forward momentum.
00:49:37.000I think that's what the difference is.
00:49:58.000I've met a bunch of people that have done some fucked up things and they all have some weird darkness.
00:50:04.000Yeah, you know, I hear what you're saying.
00:50:07.000I think for me, a lot of this strength comes from a dark moment in my life.
00:50:11.000You know, right after college, I was traveling around the world.
00:50:14.000I had no money as a kid growing up, you know, working class background, painted houses every summer, but always dreamed of traveling the world.
00:50:22.000So I was like, one day I'm going to travel the world.
00:50:24.000So I finished college, buddies of mine are getting like real jobs and Whatever, Wall Street and things like that.
00:50:47.000So you're familiar with how much fire and fire dancing and various crazy debaucherous things that happen over there.
00:50:53.000So I'm on a beach in rural Thailand and I decide to jump this flaming jump rope.
00:50:57.000And unfortunately it goes terribly wrong for me.
00:51:00.000The rope wraps around my legs and ignites my entire body on fire to my neck.
00:51:06.000And, you know, in an instant, my life changed.
00:51:08.000You know, fortunately for me, the water's edge, the ocean, was 10 steps away, so kind of instinct takes over, and I dive into the ocean, which extinguished the flames.
00:51:17.000My body's on fire to my neck, but not before.
00:51:19.000About 25% of my body is severely, severely burned.
00:51:52.000Yeah, and basically, there's a cat running around my bed every time I come out of their quote-unquote ICU. There's a cat running around my bed and across my chest, and the doctors are literally saying to me, in the broken English, they're saying, hey, you'll probably never walk again normally.
00:52:07.000You're probably never going to walk again normally.
00:52:36.000I thought of myself as a physically active person.
00:52:39.000And here I am, like doctor, saying, hey, you know, 22-year-old kid, like, you'll never walk again normally.
00:52:45.000To me, the hero in this story, which is maybe why you don't see the darkness in my eyes and it's more the light, but my mother is really the heroine of this tale, which is she arrived to my bedside around day five, flies all the way over to Thailand, finds me.
00:53:00.000Do you have Yeah, I don't have kids yet, but I can only imagine as a parent what it's like to walk into a hospital room and see your kid halfway around the world in this state, nothing you can do.
00:53:09.000And she admits now that she was crying in the hallways, you know, pleading with the doctors for good news, like he's going to be alright, right?
00:54:03.000I said, my goal is to race a triathlon one day.
00:54:05.000And instead of her looking at me going like, well, I said set a goal, but maybe something more realistic that doesn't require you to be running, she was like, great, let's learn about it.
00:54:13.000Pulls out her computer and just literally starts reading me like, triathlon races are this.
00:54:27.000I literally have this photo of me with a Thai doctor.
00:54:29.000My legs are bandaged to my waist, and the Thai doctor is looking at me like crazy, but I'm lifting these 10-pound barbells in my hand going, I'm training for a triathlon now.
00:54:38.000The guy's like, you're in Thailand in a hospital, and I'm telling you, you're never going to walk again normally.
00:54:43.000And so, you know, flash forward, you know, two or three months, I finally get released from this Thai hospital.
00:54:55.000I got carried on and off the flight back to Portland, Oregon, land back home, and, you know, still bandaged up.
00:55:01.000And my mom, you know, says to me, I wake up the first morning back in my parents' house, my mother's kitchen, the house I grew up in, and she looks at me and she goes, Alright, Colin, now I know you've got this big triathlon goal, but today your goal is to take your very first step.
00:55:13.000And so she actually grabs a chair from our kitchen table and places it one step in front of my wheelchair, and she says, today you need to somehow figure out how to get out of that wheelchair, take one step, and step into the chair in front of you.
00:55:25.000And I'm looking at it like, I don't know if this is possible.
00:55:28.000But three hours later, four hours later, I'm still staring at this chair and I finally work up the courage and strength to get out of this wheelchair, take the one step, and get into that chair in front of me.
00:55:36.000And is the problem that because of the burnt skin, it's not flexible?
00:56:03.000They're not saying you'll never walk as in you won't be able to stand up at all, although that was like extremely painful, but they just didn't think, you know, be imagine walking around without being able to bend your knees or your ankles with like full mobility.
00:56:14.000So it just was like, you're not going to be able to have that back, basically.
00:56:18.000So sure enough, I take that first step, get in that chair.
00:56:20.000The next day, my mom doesn't take it easy on me.
00:56:22.000She just moved this chair five steps away.
00:56:39.000Like, yeah, I got to get, like, a real job, get out of my parents' basement, you know, move to Chicago, take a job in finance, and, uh, Try to get my shit together, basically.
00:57:08.000And sure enough, through that process, I trained at this gym, signed up for the Chicago Triathlon, ended up racing the race, crossed the finish line.
00:57:15.000And to my complete and other surprise, I didn't just finish the race, but I actually won the entire Chicago Triathlon, beating 4,000 other people coming first place.
00:58:08.000And literally for a summer, I just kind of asked people some questions.
00:58:11.000And what's funny about triathlon, I don't know how familiar you are with this sport, but In a race like the Chicago Triathlon, there's more than 4,000 participants.
00:58:20.000And so, unlike a marathon where everyone just starts at the same time, you actually have to start in waves, like 100 people every five minutes.
00:58:27.000And I was the 39th wave of 53. And so, I dive into Lake Michigan, and there's people that already started like two hours before me, and there's people starting two hours after me.
00:58:36.000And so, when I finished the race, you know, I swim, I bike, I run.
00:58:39.000It was Olympic distance triathlon, so it was a mile swim, 25 miles bike, 6.2 mile run.
00:58:46.000I don't still know I won the race because, like, people started before me, people started after me, and they take the cumulative time at the end.
00:58:52.000And so I, like, my grandma's there because she lives in Chicago, like, gives me a big hug.
00:59:28.000It was just this surreal, surreal moment in my life.
00:59:32.000I mean, it was wild, but for me, in that moment, what I thought back, I was like, it was cool to pat myself on the back, like, holy shit, I just did this crazy thing.
00:59:42.000But it was more so, going back to your initial question about the darkness versus the light, at least in my journey, was I was like, wow, this was a sliding doors moment.
00:59:50.000What had happened had my mom not Come in with this air of positivity and force me to set this tangible goal.
00:59:56.000Like, I'm certain my life would be nowhere where it was today.
00:59:59.000But then it's not, I wasn't like, oh, wow, I'm some superhuman freak that can do these things.
01:00:03.000I was like, wow, humans, all of us, we all have these reservoirs of untapped potential inside of us and can achieve extraordinary things when we set our minds to it.
01:00:11.000And so what it did for me is just spark this curiosity, like, well, what else can I do if I set my mind to it?
01:00:16.000So sure enough, it was a Sunday when I raced the Chicago Triathlon.
01:00:20.000I coincidentally met, who became a huge mentor and influence in my life that afternoon, a guy named Brian Gelber, who ended up being my first sponsor.
01:00:28.000And he said to me, you won the Chicago Triathlon today?
01:00:31.000Do you think you should maybe do something about that?
01:00:33.000And I was like, yeah, but I've got a job and I don't have any money.
01:00:48.000And two weeks later I'm living in Australia training triathlon full time and ended up racing triathlon professionally for the U.S. national team all over the world for the next six years.
01:01:00.000And what happened ultimately with the injuries that you sustained from the fire?
01:01:04.000You know, all things considered, that was January 14, 2008. So it's just over 11 years ago now.
01:01:11.000And I, you know, I ultimately have been pretty all right.
01:01:16.000I mean, I've got some scars, but it's pretty faint.
01:01:18.000I was able to gain back most of the full flexibility in my legs.
01:01:22.000If you look at my left foot, it's where the worst, worst burns, but where the rope really just like sat on my foot for a long time must have.
01:01:29.000That's still pretty thick with scar tissue.
01:01:31.000When I'm in the mountains, when I'm in places like climbing Mount Everest like I did, pulling across Antarctica, all the things, I have to be really aware because my skin regulates heat not in the best way.
01:01:40.000Heat and cold, it's still not like normal skin.
01:02:15.000I mean, the things I've done with my legs and body in the last 10 years, I think, prove at least that my body's doing all right.
01:02:21.000So I feel extremely, extremely fortunate to have recovered as well as I did.
01:02:25.000And, you know, more than anything, I attest that to, of course, the physical ability for my body to recover in the way it did.
01:02:31.000But I think that, at least for me, started with the mind, started with that positivity of my mother and the duration of the many different things I've done since then.
01:02:39.000And you said you sustained ligament damage to your joints and your knees?
01:02:42.000Yeah, so there's basically, again, I'm not, my anatomy, I have other skills, but my full anatomy is not, I'm not a doctor, let's put it that way.
01:02:52.000But yeah, basically the ligaments, particularly on the backs of my knees, so I don't know exactly what that ligament is that goes through there.
01:02:59.000That was really jammed up with the scar tissue.
01:03:01.000So I wasn't able for a long time to fully bend my knees and flex them in the full way.
01:03:06.000And the same thing in the ankles, whatever that ligament is that goes sort of basically, not your Achilles, but the other side of your foot, basically.
01:03:13.000That part was just so much scar tissue had formed where the skin was healing around that.
01:03:18.000And from the damage to the ligaments, it wasn't sort of being able to fluidly flex in the way that you normally would see a foot.
01:03:24.000Imagine not being able to point your foot, basically, if you're putting your leg forward out, back like that.
01:03:48.000I haven't thought of this story in a long time.
01:03:51.000I don't know if I've ever told this story, actually.
01:03:53.000So when I got burned, I'd been traveling by myself in Thailand or around the world, but I actually met up With my childhood best friend, his name's David Boyer, who actually married my sister and they have two kids.
01:04:04.000So my childhood best friend turned into my brother-in-law, which is pretty fun.
01:04:09.000But anyways, he had actually been with me when I got burned.
01:04:13.000So those first five days in the hospital before my mom got there, he was with me.
01:04:18.000You know, we're both these scared little 22-year-old kids, and he's, like, trying to do his best to, like, look after me, and he's freaked out.
01:04:23.000But when I get back to Portland, his mother, who was kind of a second mother for me growing up, her name's Kate Boyer, she obviously was like, wow, this could have been my son, just as it had been, you know, her son, you know, it kind of felt, like, protective of me.
01:04:35.000So, she comes over to my house one day and she goes, you know, I've been doing some untraditional healing work.
01:05:01.000I'm in Portland and I meet this guy and he's sitting there with a bucket of salt in front of him and he starts, he doesn't touch me at all.
01:05:09.000He's just like waving his hands in front of like my body and my heart and he's like looking really intensely at my foot and I sit there for like an hour.
01:05:24.000And he was telling, I opened up this chakra, I opened up that, I did this, but what I mostly did was I put this force field of white light around your left foot.
01:05:32.000And I'm like, I mean, I'm down with some untraditional stuff, but I was kind of like, uh-huh.
01:05:41.000And he was like, this is the salt bucket that takes the negative energy away from your foot and your leg and puts the negative energy in there as I'm bringing in this light.
01:06:38.000I don't know what you're talking about.
01:06:40.000So that part, I don't know if it worked or it didn't work, but the combination of the amount of people in the hospital with the physical therapist, with my mother at home, with Kate Boyer taking me to the pranic healing, a culmination of all of those things somehow did work.
01:06:56.000Unlock the scar tissue and allow me to make a full recovery.
01:06:59.000I mean, it was a lot of hard work for, you know, a year plus to get back on my feet, but I got there.
01:07:04.000Well, I'm sure there's something to be said for believing or at least having positive thoughts about your healing and making sure that you look at it in terms of like, this can be done, but...
01:07:47.000Like, we all have this capacity in our minds to unlock all sorts of things.
01:07:51.000I mean, if you want to paint pictures, compose music, start a business, you know, sit in a warehouse and do a podcast, whatever it is you want to do.
01:08:01.000And having that belief does add up to that.
01:08:05.000I mean, that's step one, in my opinion, is visualizing that and believing it.
01:08:08.000And on the flip side, having a negative self-worth or a negative opinion of what you're about to do or a negative thought about the future can also manifest all sorts of terrible results.
01:08:52.000The human mind is such a slippery thing.
01:08:54.000I mean, and I'll go back to my own experience, and again, I don't know how ephemeral or out there you want to get, but I'm out there in Antarctica, 54 days, alone.
01:09:03.000Like, I'm telling you I'm doing this for this bigger purpose.
01:09:07.000And like, legitimately, there were moments, at least for me, whether I'm manifesting that in my mind, whatever you want to call it, that I am actually feeling energetically uplifted by the people pushing me on.
01:09:17.000Like, there were days that were incredibly hard where I would sit there and I'd be like, oh my god, I don't know if I can do this, and I'm done like, boom.
01:09:23.000Like, I would get over, I would hit with this sort of larger purpose, this larger outcome, and Again, I'm not a super religious person.
01:09:30.000I was actually raised on a hippie commune.
01:09:32.000I come from a pretty untraditional background, but the energetic field, whatever you want to call that, or if that's just the belief in something, the power of that, I felt the strength from those moments.
01:09:42.000There was moments when my body switched from kind of being negative, oh my God, another hard day out here, oh my God, it's minus 25, to tapping into those flow states.
01:09:50.000Again, I don't have perfect words for that.
01:09:52.000You know, I'm starting to try to build my vocabulary around that.
01:09:55.000But that energy, I think it just derives from what you're saying.
01:09:58.000If you start to believe it, if you can believe like, hey, there's a larger purpose in this, or hey, this blue force field's gonna heal my foot.
01:10:05.000There is something that if you can originate that positivity in your mind that I think can give us incredible amounts of strength and then we can tap into something greater.
01:10:12.000Well, I think there's definitely something to what you were saying about the untapped limits of the human potential and that there's most people barely scratch the surface of that and if you really firmly get into that zone and believe you can do things that people just...
01:10:28.000They really don't have any idea what they can do if they have to, because people are rarely pushed to their actual limits.
01:10:36.000Yeah, I mean, you know, it's been said many times before I say it, but that idea that growth happens outside the comfort zone.
01:10:41.000And one of the things that I've personally thought about a lot in this space is, you know, I got severely burned in this fire.
01:10:48.000Well, I chose to jump the rope, so I chose to be a knucklehead 22-year-old kid on a beach in Thailand, but I wasn't like, God, I want to get severely burned today.
01:10:57.000Which forced me through this intense, tragic moment.
01:11:01.000But from that, I was able to learn of this sort of untapped potential inside of me because of the outcome, because of winning this triathlon.
01:11:07.000But what I realized is that it's hard to choose that path often.
01:11:11.000It's hard to push yourself outside of those boundaries.
01:11:14.000But things that are, you know, quote-unquote forced on you, I mean, let's look at something that half this population essentially does.
01:11:20.000Give birth, like childbirth, natural childbirth.
01:11:22.000It's been happening since the beginning of time, and that's an incredibly intense physical manifestation of the power of the human body.
01:11:29.000I mean, I can't even imagine, obviously, what that would look like, nor will I ever be able to experience that, but that's incredibly powerful.
01:11:35.000Or times when people, you know, are forced to go through a cancer diagnosis and have to go through radiation and chemo and, you know, facing the mortality and all this sort of stuff.
01:11:44.000People get through those, but oftentimes these tragedies have to be forced upon us for us to do them.
01:11:50.000And so my exploration now with my creative artwork, I call it, with these expeditions, these world record projects that push my body and mind, it's me choosing to step into those moments.
01:12:00.000It's me choosing to put my body and mind in these intense moments because of a deep curiosity of like, what are the limits of human potential?
01:12:11.000And can my physical expression of this inspire other people to innovate, create, and do amazing things in the world and in other modalities and canvases?
01:12:18.000Well, that's one of the weird things about people doing extraordinary things like what you did is that you absolutely will give other people fuel to accomplish things in their life.
01:12:27.000Inspiration is so critical for human beings.
01:12:30.000I mean, I draw upon it from so many different sources, from David Goggins and a bunch of my other friends, my friend Cameron Haynes and a lot of other people that are endurance athletes and different people that I've interviewed on this podcast.
01:12:44.000But there's something that happens when you realize that people can do extraordinary things that makes you believe In the potential, not just in that person, but also in yourself.
01:13:16.000That I can't voice comes up, and he's proven it so as many other people of actually when you say I can, actually when you don't stop, you get stronger.
01:13:25.000And for me, in my own story, in my own journey, I think that final day, that final 32-hour push proves it.
01:13:32.000Three days before that, you know, I'm videotaping all this.
01:13:34.000I'm trying to capture as much content to be able to share with people of this crazy, weird place that's in Antarctica by yourself.
01:13:39.000And like, day 49, day 50, like, I'm literally crying into my GoPro being like, I'm running out of food.
01:13:55.000That's that moment when I wanted to quit or I should have quit.
01:13:58.000But then the strongest, most amazing moment of my entire athletic career that spans decades happens three days later because I kept pushing.
01:14:05.000It's not like I rested for three days and pulled that off.
01:14:37.000Like, when I first set off my first world record in 2016, 2014, I sat with Jenna in my house, one-bedroom apartment with a whiteboard, and we're like, I'm going to see if I can set the world record for the Explorer's Grand Slam, something fewer than 50 people in the world have ever done, and I'm going to be the fastest.
01:14:51.000Climb Everest, climb Denali, climb Kilimanjaro, North Pole, South Pole, back-to-back.
01:14:53.000I hadn't climbed a bunch of mountains.
01:16:20.000I think we had to clip up a second ago of something on Everest.
01:16:23.000But yeah, I mean, to do all of that, it started from this place of not, of believing I can.
01:16:31.000And then, you know, again, it's fun to talk about the epic adventure, but for me, it's actually fun to talk about what happened behind the scenes of that.
01:16:38.000Because what actually happened, like, people applaud our success now.
01:16:44.000Walking across a ladder that's about a 300-foot hole of crevasse on the other side of it that you have to go through on your way up the Mount Everest climbing route.
01:16:53.000And so your crampons are clicking and you're hooking them on the ladder as you walk across, and if you fall, you die?
01:18:13.000When I, yeah, when I, so, to set the, I mean, to talk about Everest, I mean, for me, it was major setbacks.
01:18:19.000It was the eighth of nine expeditions in this sequence, so I'd done a hundred days of other expeditions leading up to Everest to do this Explorers Grand Slam world record.
01:18:43.000And we climb up into Camp 4. So Everest has, you know, four camps.
01:18:46.000There's base camp and then there's camps progressively higher on the mountain so you can get your body acclimatized.
01:18:50.000And we get up into Camp 4. Have you read the book Into Thin Air by John Krakauer or anything about No.
01:18:55.000There's a famous book that's written about it where 11 people die and right in this moment it's called the death zone where you enter above 26,000 feet the human body basically can't survive for long even with supplemental oxygen and this massive snowstorm and windstorm blows in like kind of out of nowhere and we're trying to push for the summit it takes us two and a half hours just to set up our tent and get inside and we know like it's over like we're not we're not going to summit Everest like in this storm there's no way so we just survive the night and Wake up the next morning,
01:19:21.000still getting pounded by this weather and actually have to climb back down the mountain.
01:19:24.000So climb back down the mountain all the way to camp too.
01:19:27.000And they're like, well, that's probably it.
01:19:28.000You don't usually spend a night out in the death zone and make a second attempt.
01:19:32.000And you've already tried all these other mountains.
01:20:26.000But this crazy thing happens, which is, you may have read about this or heard of this if you know much about Everest, but basically, no one climbed Everest in 2014 or 15 because a huge avalanche killed 16 shorepers in 2014. The mountain was closed.
01:20:38.000And in 2015, there was a huge earthquake in Nepal that shut the climbing season down.
01:20:41.000So no one's even climbed the mountain in two years.
01:20:43.000But all of a sudden, because of these weather delays, I end up there and there's 100 people going for the summit on the exact same day.
01:20:50.000So basically, traffic jam on the worst fucking place to be in a traffic jam possible.
01:20:56.000So Pasang Bodhi and I, we go, okay, let's figure out how to climb this thing.
01:21:50.000And so, I mean, I'm walking maybe two steps every 30 seconds, but I'm like Usain Bolt, like, flying past these people.
01:21:57.000Yeah, this gives an example of like, so you're in it, like the world, the worst place in the world to be, you know, in a traffic jam, as you can see here from this photo I posted that day, but But anyways, I get up to this edge and finally it's too steep.
01:22:11.000It's too dangerous for us to be unclipped from the rope any longer.
01:22:14.000We're like, we're just going to have to clip in and settle in behind.
01:22:16.000You know, we'd pass like 50 or 60 people, so we're in a much better place than ever.
01:22:28.000And so, I take my jacket off, I undo my gloves real quick to put this big jacket on over me to warm myself up, and I look down, and my right hand is black.
01:22:44.000Same thing, we've got school kids following along, we've got family fun, the whole thing, and I'm like, oh my god, I'm going to lose my right hand.
01:22:54.000And then, I don't say anything to Pasang Bodhi, I jam my hand back in these big gloves, and I go, okay.
01:23:00.000And I don't recommend this thought process, but I go, well, if I'm going to lose my hand anyways, wouldn't it be cooler to lose my hand but also have summited Everest?
01:23:45.000And I'm thinking like, just in this dark place.
01:23:47.000But I also haven't taken a single photo, basically.
01:23:49.000And I'm like, well, I got to get like a photo or a video of, you know, the famous Mount Everest Summit.
01:23:54.000So I pull up my GoPro to shoot a video.
01:23:57.000I shoot this short little video which kind of shows this crazy exposure that I'm on, like one side 5,000 feet down into China, on one side 5,000 feet into Palm, this tiny little knife-edge ridge.
01:24:07.000And of course, I have to adjust my gloves again.
01:24:11.000And I pull my GoPro out, have to mess with my gloves, put it back in, and I look at my hand and I start going, waving my arms in the air and go, Pasang Bodhi, my hand's back!
01:24:26.000It just so happened that the glove warmers in my gloves, the chemical hand warmers, had broken open and the charcoal and the copper filings of the chemical hand warmers had dyed my hand black.
01:25:59.000Yeah, so unfortunately that day, the weather actually did get pretty bad later in the day.
01:26:03.000So fortunately, I was able to get down before the weather got too bad.
01:26:06.000But the people that died that day, one slipped and fell down these ropes over on Lhotse, which is the adjacent mountain, but sharing some of the same ropes on the same route.
01:26:16.000And then two people died from altitude sickness.
01:26:18.000So basically, either running out of oxygen up there and not being able to get back down to their tents.
01:26:22.000I think those people actually did get carried back down to their tents that night and then died in the tents that night.
01:26:35.000And one of the crazy things about being up there is you read about it, but you really can't rescue somebody very easily up there.
01:26:41.000I mean, to carry a human body down to rescue them is nearly impossible.
01:26:46.000And I kind of always thought in my mind, if I saw somebody lying on the ground, I would summon the energy to pick them up.
01:26:53.000And I was actually coming back from the summit And I was on the South Summit, so just below the Everest Summit, you know, at 28,800 feet or something like that.
01:27:01.000And this Brazilian woman who I'd met in base camp named Tice, who I've, you know, become friends with here in Nepal for a couple months.
01:27:08.000You start talking to people, getting friends with other climbers, whatever.
01:27:10.000And I see her lying on the ground with her head, like, leaned back and her oxygen mask off to the side.
01:27:15.000And I'm like, oh, my God, like, this is the moment that I most feared.
01:27:18.000Like, somebody who I know is lying here on the side of the mountain.
01:27:21.000And I think to myself, I've got to pick her up.
01:27:23.000I've got to pick her up and somehow, like, carry her down this mountain.
01:27:26.000And I lean over to grab her and I try with all my might to do anything and I realize I can't move her six inches.
01:28:10.000I mean, this person might be a friend, but if any human being is lying on the ground in the snow, you're like, I want to help this person get down this mountain.
01:28:17.000And I was just so close to on my limit up there in the summit, there was nothing I could do.
01:28:21.000Fortunately, she was not one of the people that passed away that day.
01:28:24.000Her team did get her oxygen mask on her, and she actually made it to the summit and back down safely.
01:28:30.000She ended up going up from there, which to me is like another whole crazy part of that story.
01:28:34.000But it was an interesting lesson for me in like, you know, you hear these stories, you can't move bodies up there, there's nothing you can do to rescue.
01:28:41.000And people have been criticized for not, you know, doing these crazy rescues when things have gone wrong up there.
01:28:47.000But it really hit home for me how hard it would be to move somebody down that mountain from that altitude.
01:28:52.000And so when you're up there, unlike Antarctica, I was actually alone, and Everest, like I said, was a pretty crowded day.
01:29:00.000If you can't keep putting one foot in front of the other up in the death zone, there's not a whole lot that you can do.
01:29:06.000So the three people that died up there, did they leave them there?
01:29:10.000I'm not sure with those specific people, because sometimes you can get a large team of people to slowly lower people down.
01:29:17.000In a weird way, it's actually easier to lower a dead body than it is to lower a live person, because a dead body, you don't have to worry about breaking bones and things like that if you're lowering someone over rocks and things like that.
01:29:27.000So I actually believe those bodies are no longer there.
01:29:30.000But there are quite a few bodies still on the mountain, and particularly the north side, the Chinese, so you can climb it from two sides, the Nepal side...
01:29:52.000And I'm thinking I'm going to sleep for the night rest and come back down the mountain.
01:29:55.000It usually takes a few days to get back down the mountain.
01:29:57.000At this point, you know, I've only got one more mountain to climb to finish my world record, the Explorer's Grand Slam.
01:30:03.000And I was about two months ahead of schedule.
01:30:05.000So if I had climbed Denali in the next two months, North America's tallest mountain up in Alaska, I was going to set this world record that I was.
01:30:11.000And so I called back home to Jenna and I was like, I made it.
01:32:02.000So I was in disbelief, but knowing better than to disobey not only my amazing wife, but the planner and logistics expert in running the background of all this, I sure enough put my boots back on, wiped the slate clean, and found myself, you know, just 100 hours after standing on the summit of Everest,
01:32:18.000I found myself over in Alaska trying to push up to the summit to try to set the two world records and not just the one.
01:32:49.000The one benefit, I would say there is one...
01:32:50.000Most of it's not a benefit, but I'll keep it in the positive.
01:32:53.000The one benefit is usually in the high-altitude mountaineering, you need to acclimatize.
01:32:57.000So your body creates more red blood cells when you go up into the thinner air to allow you to breathe oxygen better at the higher altitudes.
01:33:03.000A mountain like Denali normally takes three weeks to climb because you're coming from sea level and to get up to 20,000 feet, you can't just get dropped off there.
01:33:09.000If you or I right now got dropped off on the summit of Denali, we would pass out in a matter of minutes, right?
01:33:14.000But because I'm coming from Everest at 29,000 feet...
01:33:47.000I ended up summiting in three days and setting, so the Explorers Grand Slam was the seven summits plus a North and South Pole, but the second world record was just the seven summits by themselves.
01:33:56.000So even though I went to the poles, I still set the speed record for the seven summits as well.
01:34:27.000I love pushing my body but the cycle of high performance is also knowing how to recover, recover well, good nutrition, all that and it takes a long time.
01:34:35.000That one took six months and I would imagine this Antarctica recovery is going to take a long time as well.
01:34:39.000Now when you say it took six months, are you monitoring your physiological levels?
01:34:45.000What are you monitoring and how do you find out where you're at?
01:34:48.000Yeah, so I started to do a lot of blood work actually early on in my triathlon career.
01:34:54.000Actually early on in my professional triathlon career, I mentioned I moved to Australia not long after turning pro and coming out of the gate with this win.
01:35:01.000And I had the opportunity to go train with some of the best triathletes in the world.
01:35:05.000There's actually, you know, a couple of world champions, a group of 15 of us, a couple of world champions, a female Ironman world champion, a couple of Olympic medalists, I mean, some of the top people in the world, and I'm this, like, up-and-coming professional triathlete.
01:35:17.000I think it's so cool that I'm training with the best guys.
01:35:20.000It would be like a guy that just gets into the UFC and all of a sudden he's training with the top contenders, the title guys.
01:35:26.000I wanted to really roll hard with them.
01:35:27.000So I was training super hard to try to keep up with the best guys.
01:35:55.000Learned that lesson the hard way, and that was one of the darkest moments of my athletic career, but it's also been a net benefit for me as I've gone, that was back in 2011 or whatever, and these world record projects have been in the last couple of years.
01:36:08.000And so I learned from that, taking it way too much and not learning how to recover.
01:36:20.000As well as certain blood levels, of course, around the whole endocrine system, the testosterone levels, the, you know, different hormone levels and things like that.
01:36:29.000I do blood work ahead of time, then come back, just with standard process with the nutrition company, they did all this blood work on me.
01:36:35.000So, when I left Antarctica, before flying home, you know, the next place I had to go actually was to New York to do the Today Show, which was a whole weird thing after being alone in Antarctica to have those type of TV cameras in your face.
01:36:45.000That's a whole other, like, weird Twilight Zone moment.
01:36:47.000But before I even did that, I flew to Charlotte where their Nutrition Innovation Center is and did all my blood work.
01:36:53.000And so we can have basically this longitudinal study of my blood work to understand it.
01:36:56.000And so I monitor all that and figure out what I'm deficient in, what I need, where my heart rate's at, and basically a lot of inflammation in my body and needing to kind of rid my body of that and fully recover.
01:37:07.000So when you're coming back from all these summits and all this time at altitude, what has actually happened to your body that causes you to be really depleted for six months?
01:37:19.000What's happening other than the fact that you were at high altitude, low oxygen?
01:38:01.000All I know is you're getting less oxygen.
01:38:04.000You're getting less oxygen in your body.
01:38:05.000So what ends up happening is your muscles, of course, need oxygen to perform.
01:38:09.000So normally, when I'm in my most elite physical shape, I have a resting heart rate during a professional triathlon career of like 35, getting out of bed, 38. Low enough that if you weren't a professional athlete and you went to a doctor with a heart rate of 35, they'd be like, oh my God, you're going to die.
01:38:30.000What happens is your body's getting so little oxygen, even as your blood is acclimatizing, you're sleeping with a resting heart rate at altitude on Everest at like 90, 100 beats per minute.
01:38:39.000So, you know, that's pretty elevated heart rate 24 hours a day, and in my case, for 139 days straight.
01:38:46.000So essentially, your heart is just like, even at rest.
01:38:51.000And so, what that does to your body in terms of, you know, it throws your hormones around.
01:38:56.000Obviously, you lose body weight, body fat, body composition changes.
01:38:59.000All of those things really shift and happen in a pretty intense way.
01:39:03.000So, coming back, like actually just getting your heart rate back down, getting your, you know, parasympic nervous system to just relax and stress-free and all that kind of stuff, it takes a while for sure.
01:39:13.000So what do you do to help yourself recover when you come back?
01:39:16.000Is there specific kinds of food that you eat or supplements that you take?
01:39:58.000I'm a huge believer in massage as well as chiropractor.
01:40:01.000I've been going to a chiropractor since I was a little kid.
01:40:04.000And to me, that makes a big difference just to have everything in alignment, everything kind of, you know, working well, efficiently in my body.
01:40:10.000And then, yeah, supplements, you know, definitely reducing inflammation.
01:40:15.000So, getting those probiotics, getting the right stuff in, you know, it's easy to have, you know, that leaky gut or things where you're not getting your nutrition absorbed properly.
01:40:24.000And I think we all in various states, you know, deal with that.
01:40:26.000You know, the standard American diet for sure leads to that for a lot of people.
01:40:30.000So getting that nutrition clean and right.
01:41:08.000When you say eating clean, do you have a particular way of eating?
01:41:13.000I'm recently doing more of a pescatarian diet, so I've mostly cut out meat, although I was raised that way.
01:41:21.000My parents have been vegetarians forever.
01:41:24.000Well, I should say pescatarian, so they eat some fish, but no chicken, no beef, none of that.
01:41:30.000For me, I've actually, even in Antarctica, there was some, in my freeze-dried meals, there was beef and chicken and stuff like that, so it's not something I've cut out of my diet.
01:41:38.000Oh, so you brought freeze-dried meals as well as bringing those The Columbars was the main thing, but at every dinner I had one freeze-dried meal at the end of the day that was an extra thousand calories.
01:41:46.000So you poured boiling water in a mountain house?
01:41:48.000It was Alpine Air, but same thing as a mountain house, basically.
01:41:51.000So it was rice, noodles mixed with chicken or beef.
01:41:54.000But when I say eating clean, I mostly mean just eating whole food stuff.
01:41:58.000Not eating processed crap, refined sugars, that kind of stuff.
01:42:03.000I mean, I'm a normal human being, so I'm guilty of that as anyone from time to time.
01:42:07.000I'm just grabbing the easiest, closest thing.
01:42:09.000But, like I said, my dad's an organic farmer.
01:42:12.000My mom and my stepdad started a chain of natural foods grocery stores when I was a kid.
01:42:15.000So I was really raised around, you know, in the sort of hippie co-op days of the natural foods movement, which of course now with, you know, Amazon owning Whole Foods has tipped a lot more to the mainstream.
01:42:25.000But, you know, that was what I was raised around.
01:42:28.000And, you know, eating, you know, quinoa, rice, kale, you know, those kinds of things.
01:43:43.000But some forms of it have a small amount of THC, and I think there may be some sort of synergistic effect that happens with the THC combined with the CBD that helps people even more, because a lot of people that have pain...
01:44:00.000Particularly chronic pain, they experience a lot of relief from THC, from just smoking it or vaporizing it or using edibles.
01:44:08.000So I think that the CBD with a little bit of THC might have a better effect.
01:44:28.000I think it's alleviating the inflammation.
01:44:31.000It's a very healthy thing for your body to eat.
01:44:35.000Obviously, there's a bunch of different oils that will alleviate inflammation.
01:44:39.000Different essential fatty acids and fish oils are very good for inflammation.
01:44:43.000I think anything that you can take that helps your body mitigate inflammation.
01:44:47.000Inflammation seems to be a gigantic problem with just...
01:44:50.000Not with pain, just with pain, but I think also with anxiety.
01:44:53.000I think it's entirely possible that feelings of discomfort, you know, like when you see people that are anxious, they often look bloated to me.
01:45:03.000I think it's just an overall sense of unwellness, you know, and I think that a poor diet exacerbates that and a good diet can alleviate some of those symptoms and I think that CBD is a big part of that.
01:45:18.000I mean, yeah, I'm interested to try that for sure.
01:45:21.000I've definitely, that inflammation, even for me coming back from Antarctica in this quarter of recovery phase, what's weird is like you saw how lean I got then, but my body, I think, because it was so depleted of food source, is now actually almost trying to put fat back on my body of kind of storing that.
01:45:36.000So actually, my body composition feels weird to me right now because my body's just trying to figure out where the hell I'm at, and I think a lot of that comes from Yeah,
01:46:30.000I've messed with like the cordyceps and the ashwagandha as well to kind of reduce some of the cortisol like emotional or hormonal balances type of stuff.
01:46:38.000Cordyceps is fantastic too for endurance.
01:48:09.000Yeah, it's, you know, there's so many benefits.
01:48:10.000I mean, Paul Stamets, who's been on the podcast before and I can't wait to get him back on again, but he's a mycologist and it was one of the best podcasts that I've ever done in terms of like really explaining the benefits of different fungi.
01:48:31.000Just the whole food nutrition from many different levels, whether it's mushrooms, turmeric, these full plant derivatives, I mean, to me, they go a long way in their pure form, for sure.
01:48:59.000Another thing I put in there is I've been using this stuff that...
01:49:03.000Actually, the company's standard process is just coming out with it, but they let me try it ahead of time.
01:49:07.000It's going to make this slow-release glucose, so it's a protein powder, but instead of giving it that glucose spike like you would from a refined sugar or something like that, it's kind of a long-burn, long-chain glucose.
01:49:17.000I don't know the full chemistry of that, but I find it makes a big difference.
01:49:21.000Rather than kind of just getting that sugar spike early in the day, it actually kind of gives the slow release of energy, and that was actually in the column bars as well, and I really like that, particularly for endurance, because If you start taking the goo packets or something like that, you get that spike of 100 calories.
01:49:35.000You get that quick, boom, burst of energy replenishes your glucose source.
01:49:39.000But this, I feel like, just is a much slower, cleaner burn and it lasts longer.
01:49:44.000For anaerobic stuff, maybe you need that more explosive power or whatever, different things for that.
01:49:49.000But for some of the low heart rate, zone 1, zone 2, long grinding type of stuff that I do in the mountains or pulling this sled or whatever, I find it's really good for stuff like that.
01:49:58.000Now, what scares me about people like you is, how old are you now?
01:52:30.000Having an ability to pass this on, because for me, as fun as it is for me to push my own limits, what really inspires me, what really fires me up is when I get emails or notes from people like, hey man, I watched you cross Antarctica, I haven't been to the gym in five years, and I've gone every single day since then,
01:52:48.000I never said I was going to star or whatever.
01:52:50.000And so having an ability to have a moment in time when I can share some of my learnings with the world and meaningful different contents, that really excites me.
01:52:59.000But man, for sure, there's some other events on the horizon as well.
01:53:04.000But yeah, it's not just about one-upping the next thing.
01:53:07.000I think that that's a losing proposition in the long run of always trying to do the bigger, badder, craziest thing because When the stakes are, like you said, the razor's line between life and death, you keep one-upping yourself enough, you don't make it to the end of a long life, unfortunately, and I'm not trying to have that be the end.
01:53:22.000Well, it sounds like you've already broken world records.
01:53:26.000You're in this weird place where you've accomplished so much that in order to accomplish other things, if you're going to take it to the next level, it really has to be truly life-threatening.
01:53:58.000If you were whispering in the ear of your 33 self, what would be some advice that you would give yourself that you'd be happy that you lived out over the next 20 years?
01:54:05.000Well, I mean, obviously life experience, when you have life experience, learn those lessons, become a better person, be better at communicating, be better at everything you do.
01:54:15.000But the problem with what you're doing, and it's not a problem, but in this context, is that you're pushing these incredible endurance records in nature, and particularly in cold weather.
01:54:29.000And this is, what's stunning about these things is that you're risking your life.
01:55:10.000You're in this very strange sort of stratosphere of one-upitude.
01:55:15.000Maybe it's, you know, we take a page out of the Bruce Springsteen Glory Days song and just, you know, kick my feet up and talk about the glory days for the rest of the time.
01:55:33.000You could apply this sort of mental fortitude that you've demonstrated and this ability to push through things, you could apply it to anything.
01:55:41.000It doesn't have to be these physical feats of risking death in frigid cold temperatures in the middle of the fucking nowhere, or literally at the bottom of the planet Earth.
01:56:52.000As I do a ton of public speaking now, write this book, the things that I'm doing, that's super fun to share those with the world.
01:56:59.000I'm having a lot of fun doing that and actually sharing the universal truths and the wisdom that I've learned that I think can be applied different ways.
01:57:05.000It also goes to, now I get to have the fun of applying those in all of those other different ways of my life.
01:57:12.000You know, for me, I think that the future is bright, particularly if I don't, I don't really think of myself as this endemic core outdoor athlete.
01:59:34.000But the reason I was there actually was when I first started training for triathlon professionally, I started training with this guy named Phil Claude who was training a couple of UFC fighters at the time.
01:59:45.000You remember this guy named Mike Pierce who fought in this?
02:00:49.000Like I said, I think that if I only thought of myself as a professional athlete, and that was my identity was tied up in that, I think we see that across the spectrum of professional athletes in general, of people just going, hey, I'm a pro athlete, and the second I'm not, even if they banked millions of dollars as an NBA player or something like that,
02:01:05.000their whole identity disappears with the feet of athleticism.
02:01:09.000I read a really interesting article today that I was really compelled by, actually, which was a story about Kevin Durant that was on ESPN.com this morning, and it's about him and his business manager and a couple other guys that have kind of gotten around him and like, dude, you're like one of the best, you know, basketball players in the world, MVP, but he's already thinking about all the various things that he's doing,
02:01:28.000And what I loved about that article is they were like, you know, SportsCenter back in the day used to be guys, you know, hitting home runs, dunking basketballs, which of course it still is that, but they'll intersperse that with like, Kevin Durant just made a venture investment in this company, or they're growing this watermelon water brand,
02:01:44.000And so, I think sports, particularly with the growth of social media, with story time, with media, with content, with all the other ways we can share the insights, which isn't just the game, which isn't just me in the arena pulling the sled, But it's actually a way to connect with people, whether that's in the sense of Kevin Durant making incredible venture investments in companies,
02:02:00.000or that's with storytelling that actually reaches universal truths with people.
02:02:05.000I've got a single mother from Nebraska reaching out to me and saying, hey, I don't care about mountains or the outdoors, but I'm going through some hard stuff in the middle of the country being a single mother, and your story connects with me.
02:02:16.000Thank you for giving me the inspiration to keep pushing forward.
02:02:19.000It extends beyond just this athlete in this arena because we have all these other ways to storytell, to create content, to be involved in businesses and things like that.
02:02:30.000It hasn't fully crystallized into the most concrete of plans, but the ability to explore all these different mediums and just having sort of the sports be the catalyst for growth in that way is what I'm really passionate about.