The Joe Rogan Experience - #1244 - Colin O'Brady

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

Colin O'Brady is a professional endurance athlete, motivational speaker and adventurer. He is a three-time world record holder, and just became the first person in the world to travel across Antarctica unassisted. In 2016 he set the Explorers Grand Slam and Seven Summits speed records.

four three two one all right we're live what's up man what's up dude what's hilarious folks i have to tell you this i did a podcast earlier today and he said wow is your second for the day he goes impressive endurance do you know how fucking ridiculous that is for you to say this is a guy who walked across antarctica how many days did it take you 54 days by yourself by myself trekking across the fucking frozen tundra that was an endurance feat of its own yeah just that's a real endurance feat i'm just sitting down talking to people oh my god you talked already for two hours how do you do it two more hours here we go yeah crazy yep yep dude what the fuck were you doing

just just getting back actually still uh still practically have the snow on my shoes yeah i got back about a month ago 54 day journey first person in history to uh cross the entire continent solo unsupported so no resupplies throughout the thing no no aid no wind kites nothing just me dragging a 375 pound sled across antarctica i can't believe it only took you 54 days yeah yeah but that's it's so big like look at antarctica on a map like how long do you think it would take you to walk across america well you got so we usually look at antarctica on a map this hilarious i have showed people a picture of antarctica you're a smart guy you probably know this but usually people usually people see it on a map projection because then it gets flat, right? Right.

It's actually circular. Yeah. So I went from the edge of the Ron Ice Shelf via the South Pole to the Ross Ice Shelf. So basically kind of a diagonal across through the center and then back to the other ice shelf. What do the flat earthers think about your traversing this area? Look, this is what you did. This is how you made it. There it is.

Exactly. Yeah. So you went to the center of the fucking earth, what you did this is how you there it is exactly yeah so you went to the center of the fucking earth basically there it is the top of the pole yeah bottom of the earth you know standing down there holding everyone up on my shoulders wow so you were at the south pole and then you trekked over to the to the ice shelf yeah side it'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 i've got guys going like oh i was doing this speech the other day people are super nice come up in the q a afterwards want to shake my hand take a picture whatever and this guy walks up in this real earnest look on his face and he's like so i

really wanted to ask you how was the hole and i was like excuse me he was like you know the hole at the center and i was like, give me a little more. He was like, you know, like when you got to the edge and I was like, oh man, like you're really asking me this question right now. Like we were talking about this. I didn't quite know where to go with it. I was like, yeah, there's actually,

at least I didn't see the edge and the curvature kept going and I made it to the other side. It is such a strange thing to believe, but people do. People think people are trolling about that. You know what? It actually started out. It's another 4chan thing, you know.

Did you know that? Well, 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, yay, I bet it is flat and then they started believing it and videos YouTube videos popped up there's another YouTube video someone linked to me the other day and I thought it had like I thought it had like 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 like the wall like there would be like Game of Thrones at the edge of the world there's this whole conversation I bet there's another 28,000 people it's proved that Colinin never actually went of course he's a new world order shill well the other the other funny one was that we got a bunch on the instagram page i'm out there alone completely by myself but i want to share the whole story through my instagram to like share the journey

with people inspire others to do whatever they want to do and And I kept being like, well, I mean, he's not out there alone. He's taking pictures. I was like, the film crew. I was like, guys, have you never heard of a tripod and a timer? Have you ever watched Survivor Man? Exactly. So, some funny comments along those lines. So, your sled was 300 and how many pounds? 375 pounds to start.

So, basically, food and fuel was the main weight. So people, I called my project The Impossible First. That's sort of what I named the project because several people had tried. That's it right there? Yeah, there it is. Oh my God. So not only are you walking, you're dragging this big ass heavy sled. Yeah, yeah.

Fuck, dude. So people have tried this, you know going back a hundred years to earner 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 um because of you know lack of nutrition and some challenges with the weather and things like that um but people called it you know people after that were like it's impossible and the reason people thought it was impossible was because 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.

So the whole math equation really was figuring out just how much food and fuel I could put in the sled. The fuel melts the water, so it melts the ice into water essentially, and that equaled to 375 pounds. And to be truth, I could barely pull it on the first day. Like I, one hour into getting dropped off, I'm dropped off completely alone out there in Antarctica I planned this project for a year you know uh and I get dropped off and after about one hour pulling 375 pounds sled through the snow it's minus 25 degrees out I'm crying I'm literally crying and the tears in my goggles are starting to freeze and I'm like like, oh my God. So I pick up my satellite phone. I call home to my wife, Jenna, who also creates and plans all these projects with me.

And I'm like, babe, I think we named the project the right thing. The impossible verse. Yep. It looks like it might be impossible to keep going. So 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. But, you know, fortunately, I was able to get a little bit further that day

and 54 days later, made it to the end. How far did you get in the first day? Well, it's funny because we just show the map. I actually, you know, it starts on an ice shelf, which is basically the frozen sea ice.

And there's an edge of that that's where the continent starts. And so I have a waypoint on my GPS that marks that. So the plane that drops me off actually dropped me off on the ice shelf before the continent starts. And my first waypoint was kind of like the actual start. And so one hour in, I haven't even hit the real start.

So when I call her on the phone, she's like, because she knows the route. And she's like, well, how far are you from the first waypoint, which is where the actual start is? And I'm like, it's 0.63 more miles. She's like, it's half a mile. You have a thousand more to go, like get to the first waypoint, you know? And I was like, okay, okay. So I, you know, rallied myself, got to the first waypoint and then finally got in my tent that night and just kind of took a deep breath. I think I was just overwhelmed by the magnitude of it. I mean, imagine being a speck in the middle of Antarctica alone, these crazy temperatures, you know,

all the excitement, but fears of the journey ahead and and 375 pounds on my back. When the sled's, you know, when the snow is deep too, and loose snow makes 375 pounds even heavier than if it's like light, you know, icier, consolidated. So, yeah, it was a rough start to say the least. Did you do any sort of test run pulling the sled anywhere else? Yeah, so the training element of it was pretty cool. So I actually set a few other world records previous to this in the mountains and things we could talk about if you want. But the last year as I really committed to this project, I decided to obviously start training specifically for this. I needed to put on about 20 pounds of muscle. I'm usually six foot 165, pretty lean. I'd 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. And I found an amazing coach in Portland, Oregon, where I live, this guy named Mike McCaskell. I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but I know you've had David Goggins on your show, I take it. So Mike actually surpassed David's pull-up record. Mike did 5,804 pull-ups in 20 hours. I think Goggins did about 4,000, which are both insane to me because I can do like-

So he did another 1,000? And Mike was wearing a 30-pound weight vest, too. No! Yes. Just to add insult to injury. Mike McCaskell, absolute legend. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. He did 5,000 fucking chin-ups with a weight vest on? Dude, I barely can do 10. I'm right there with you, man. Pull-ups are not. I've got some other physical strengths, but the pull-up department is not my strong suit. That is fucking insane.

Get this, too, just because I've got to big up my band for a second. That's his fourth road record. He also pulled an F-250 truck 20 miles across Death Valley in a harness. So I'm trying to look for the best guy to teach me how to pull heavy shit. Oh, my God. You got the guy. I found the guy. I was like, damn.

Fuck. This is the guy. I just love that there's people like that out there that just make you feel like such a pussy. Oh, my God. people like that out there that just make you feel like such a pussy uh oh my god and the greatest thing about mike you know big strong jacked dude but like super soft-spoken she's like he's like yeah i did those poems it was cool like so anyways i went basically fucked with that record so hard he could die and like come back to life and live a whole nother life and no one's ever gonna do it. Yeah.

So anyways, my training, he was the guy. I went to him, trained out of this gym in Portland where he trains out of. And he just, he got me bigger. He got me stronger. But he also did all sorts of badass, crazy stuff. I mean, this is a physical challenge, but it's more of a mental challenge than anything. So 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. Then I'd pull my hands out of the ice buckets, do, 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. Then I'd pull my hands out of the ice buckets, do, you know, I'd be a seated squat against the wall.

But then he would hand me Legos. And so my hands are frozen. My feet are in ice buckets now in a plank. My heart rate's, you know, 190. And he's like, put this Lego set together. So the dexterity of my fingers, the mental acuity to pull this all together. There he is. Look at this guy.

What a fucking savage this guy is. Yeah. And he did that for veteran suicides? Yeah, exactly. So he's got really, really important missions behind all of his projects. He calls them 12 labors. And over his life, he's trying to set 12 world records in various things. Jesus Christ.

There's people that are just, they're just designed different. Yeah, yeah. So 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. If your tent blows away when you're pulling it up, you're dead. Like the stakes are that high. 50, 60 mile per hour winds. Right.

Absolutely crazy. Did you ever have an issue like that where you thought the tent could blow away? I think, I don't know if you have it. There's a clip on my Instagram I posted a few days ago of me setting up the tent in a minus 80 degrees out, 60 mile per hour winds. It's pretty gnarly. But yeah, I mean, there was one time when the tent almost did blow away for me. There's this one.

There's one other one. This is me getting in the tent looking like an absolute disaster when I get help with audio. But that's me. That's me. Whoa, you're pulling ice out of your eyelashes. I got caught out in a massive storm. And I just... It was so hard to get the tent up. I didn't know if i was going to be able to get

it up or i was gonna have to just keep walking i'm in the tent now hoping these tent poles hold man that was really intense how do you stay warm in that tent? So, average temperature is about minus 25, minus 30 in Antarctica. But like I said, when the wind jacks up, I don't know if there's another clip of me setting up the tent, but if you get a chance to see that, it's, you know, it can be about minus 80 outside, which it'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 immediately turns to ice like that's that's that's the temperature we're dealing with yeah this is me trying to uh keep the tent poles together usually have someone else to hold on to it but i'm alone i'm completely alone out there

so this is me struggling with my tent just trying to keep it up i've got it you know tied down to my sled there um just battling battling the winds and the state like i said the stakes are high if that blows away i don't have a spare tent i've got no extra weight in my my sled to hold spare stuff so it's it's it's do or die quite literally uh in a moment like that you have a patch kit i had a couple things repaired a sewing kit a patch kit stuff like that but if the tent itself or the tent poles, you know, ripped apart, pretty much. Fuck, dude. And also, you have to set up your tripod and film this and then press stop and go back inside. And how are you keeping these batteries juiced up?

No, this is the film crew, man, that was following me around. That right of the flat-eyed film crew. Yeah, near the ice wall. No, it was basically I had to keep the batteries warm by keeping them right against my skin. So I'd keep the batteries right against my skin. My body weight would keep it warm. And the second I wanted to take it out, I'd pull it out real quick, hit play. And then it would usually last a minute or enough to get a little clip or something like that. You couldn't just let it run, but then it would completely freeze.

Even a full battery would be on zero battery by pretty quickly. Were you using solar panels to charge it? Yeah. So one crazy cool thing about Antarctica that time of year is it's 24 hours of daylight. And so the sun never sets. So even when I'm in my tent in the middle of the night, I mask, earplugs to kind of pretend like it's nighttime, but 24 hours of daylight. So solar panels, keeping everything charged, cameras, phone batteries, all that. And are you traveling with, are you using GPS? Yeah, so I had some waypoints, the GPS waypoints that kind of led my path to the South Pole, et cetera,

but mostly actually using a compass. So I'd look at my GPS maybe once every week or something like that just to get the bearing. Because of the juice factor? It was actually just easier. So 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. So it'd be just complete and utter whiteout. I couldn't even see one step in front of me. And so I'd actually have to just stare down at my compass, keep it on this bearing. And so

imagine you can't see anything, can't see one step in front of you. I'm pulling a 300 pound sled 12, 13 hours per day, Not listening to anything really Can make dead silence And just staring at this compass bearing all day long Damn dude Are you going crazy at all? I mean the mental side of it Was by far the most interesting side of it

For me 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. So, spending all this time in silence, I've done, are you familiar with Vipassana meditation? So, 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 and complete silence was was next level of that for sure god damn dude that is so fucking impressive i just can't believe that you did that now when you're looking down and it's an utter white out

and you're looking at your compass and you're dragging this shit behind you. Are you doing anything in your mind? Are you singing songs? What are you doing? There's a couple different things, but really what ended up happening is I started to be able to trigger these flow states. So as a lifelong professional athlete through different capacities in my life, I've tapped into that. 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. But I never really knew how I got there, just would sometimes tap into it, sometimes not, you know, the zone, flow state, whatever you want to call that. But in Antarctica, I went in with this sort of intention of exploring that space in my mind. And so, as I got more and more into these whiteouts, into these compass, staring at this compass, staring at this expansive landscape, I started to find ways to actually trigger that flow state in my mind. And so, it got to the point where I could for several days at a time be in this deep flow state. So, 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. But 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. It was very profound and beautiful to get there in my mind. Wow. Now, are you boiling this water in your tent? Like how are you doing? Using a jet boil? Yeah. So, kind of a slightly different white gas fuel stove. So, not the canisters where you could throw away, but like

gas that you could refill the stove, but a stove with fuel. Basically, the way my tent was, you saw the outer layer of the tent there. There's actually an inner part that's a tent so that there's a vestibule where basically there's snow inside the doorway but not outside outside. So I would shovel that snow from inside of the tent vestibule into my pot and be able to melt the water that way. I drank about six liters of water every single single day um when i was out there which no it's a lot of snow a lot and takes a few hours to melt that but people don't realize this antarctica is actually the largest desert in the world um so it's actually very dry it doesn't snow

very often but when it does it of course never melts and the south pole is at 9 300 feet so not only am i in this desert but i'm at altitude doing this thing so oh my god did you train at altitude did you use like one of those uh tents to sleep in or yeah so this uh this gym that mike and i train out of is called evolution healthcare and fitness in portland um they actually have an altitude room there so that's not even a tent but they actually have a full a full room where you can you know it's got rowing machines it's got treadmills it's got all that simulated up to about 14 000 feet how big is the room it's about 400 square feet high ceiling it's big i mean it's not like huge but it's big enough yeah it's like a proper room i've been in some of those tents

before when 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 they get warm and stuff like that i know a lot of people were starting to sleep in those tents, but a lot of people have a hard time in them. They get warm and stuff like that. I know a lot of fighters use them as well. But, 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. And so it would take you hours every day to make your water? Yeah, I would say I was boiling water for about three, four hours per day. So about an hour or two in the morning, an hour or two in the evening. It takes a lot of energy to boil frozen snow when it's that cold out um so you had to carry a lot of fuel that was the other really heavy component that's like hundreds of hours of fuel yeah so i

took about uh 17 liters of fuel so that's what i have six gallons or something like that wow how did you know that that was going to be enough uh I did some practicing beforehand. I, I, in 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. And so in those expeditions, I was on Everest during that time to Nali, the last degree of latitude and so in those expeditions i was on everest during that time to nollie etc all of that in 139 days um but i did that and that kind of helped me get a sense of it but honestly it was also best guess based on talking to people different experts in the field you know diving into that but you never know is it going to be enough or too little i aired on the

side of too much when you when you finally got to the end how much do you have left so my final push i actually i woke up on uh the morning of christmas eve 24th of december this past year and it looked i was 77 miles from the finish and i've been going at that point at the beginning of the trip i was only going 9 10 miles per day towards the end i started going about 20 25 miles per day so i said you know what like i'm about three days out. And 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. And started looking at my fuel and food supplies and like, they were pretty low. I 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. And so I woke up and I was like, all right, let's go for this. And in the actually deepest talk about flow states, that was the deepest flow state of my life. I woke up in one hour in that day, it's Christmas morning now, I wake up and I'm just locked in. And 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. And it was a crazy final push to get there, but made it right before the food and fuel ran out. Oh my God. And then there's no one there, of course. You cross the finish line, you're like,

done this. No one in the world's ever done this. Applause. Nope. Audience of zero. And so what do you do when you get to the end you said hey i'm done come get me yeah yeah how long does it take for them to come get you it took me a week to get out of antarctica totally it took actually me four days to get out of there uh but there's a crazy other component to this which is no one in the world had ever done this before and like i said a few really uh talented people some of the best explorers in the world had tried recently one guy died um and 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, a British guy who's

equivalent of a Navy SEAL, British Special Forces. The living most experienced guy in Antarctica has actually pulled 3,000 plus miles in Antarctica now on various expeditions. And so we got dropped off one mile away from each other to begin this thing. And obviously, I was the first. I did win this race head to head. And at the finish line, I waited for him for a few days because I wanted to congratulate him because he did ultimately finish. But you can only imagine, I went back to that first hour where I was like, it's impossible. It was also like, it's impossible. And by the way, this Navy SEAL dude who knows about antarctica than me he's off and going i can

see him in the distance just like leaving me in the dust um but fortunately after day six i caught up to him you 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 uh 70 miles ahead of him about two and a half days ahead of him that's gotta suck for him imagine he's like i got this motherfucker i brought it home for america man you know thank you appreciate that we all we all appreciate that but still that's gotta suck for him yeah so i actually even though i finished and the first thing i could have kind of wanted to do i haven't had i haven't had a shower i haven't i actually to save weight so i could get as much food and fuel i haven't had i haven't had a shower i 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 like literally no extra pair of underwear no extra pair of nothing so where are you where are you shitting out there everyone wants to know this so let's just get it on the table i'll let thank you for asking um basically i i described that vestibule situation so one side i cook in right if the wind is calm i get out of my tent dig a hole and and you know go shit in a hole basically but when it's real windy like those storms i just watched like you're gonna get frostbite if you try to you know bend over pull your pants down when it's minus 80 out right so 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 that was my morning routine get up at 6 a.m start boiling my water on one side of my tent and it's not glamorous it's not a pretty thing and to make um actually to me this is very cool but also not glamorous um within one degree of latitude of the south pole so the last degree of latitude 89 degrees the south pole is at 90 degrees it's basically 69 miles or 60 nautical miles circumference around the South Pole. Antarctica 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.

They actually say you can't even leave your human waste in holes here. Even though there's nobody out there, they're like, we want this to be completely protected area. And so, yes, usually my sled was getting lighter most of the time because i was eating food every day and burning fuel but in that last degree of latitude to the south pole and crossing it i was shitting in a bag wrapping it up and putting it in my sled and having to carry it with me so um yeah wow that shows discipline show something a lot of people have been like Yeah yeah yeah Put it in the bag Fuck you

Crazy assholes No one's up there Who cares if I Dig a shit up there It was tempting But you know So I grew up in the Going out in the outdoors

It just says Leave no trace principle That I really love And particularly Antarctica One 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 just You can't put it into words until you've stepped off there. And for me, this was my second time in Antarctica on both 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. But 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 even the second time seeing it i felt the way like my cheeks were sore because i was just smiling so big of just the pristine beauty the blank canvas the i mean you look out on the land

and you're like human footprints haven't touched 98 of the continent something like that i mean it's untouched and so shitting in a bag if i I had to do that to do my part to keep it that way. How many bags of shit did you drag? In the end, it was about three. I reused the bags. One per day for that section is about 120 miles. It took me, I don't know, a week or so to cover that distance. So yeah, added weight to my sled rather than subtracting during that was the middle part of the journey right around the 30th and 40th day. Now, how did you calculate your nutrition? So, the nutrition journey was actually fascinating. And to be honest, in my opinion, people said, well, how come other people died trying or why did other people not be able to

do it because one other guy ran out of food? And so, when I was looking at this journey, you know, again, we were calling it the impossible first, like, how am i going to make the impossible possible and i thought that the nutrition piece of it was going to be huge i actually my dad's an organic farmer in hawaii like whole food health and nutrition has been a big part of my personal journey and so i found a company um that was really in it with me so this company called standard process they're a whole food supplement company um really involved in chiropractic and acupuncture. And they, I presented them with this and I said, hey, what do you guys think? Like, is there a way to like, figure this out? And they're like, well, we have 20 of the top doctors, nutritionists, food scientists, you know, on our staff and this

innovation center around nutrition, like come in the lab with us. And so they'd never done this with an athlete before, but they were intrigued. And so, I actually went and did a year's long worth of 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 column bar that was all whole food ingredients. It was no chemical derivatives or anything. It was coconut oil, seeds, nuts, all these different pieces of macronutrients as well as micronutrient blends that I needed, but custom tailored to my physiology. And that was the bulk of what I ate. I ate 7,000 calories per day.

I was burning 10,000. So even at 7,000, I was losing about a pound of weight almost to my body. So that's why I needed to get bigger. But these columbars just burned super almost to my body. So that's why I needed to get bigger. But these column bars just burned super efficiently in my body. Like it was the perfect blend of everything. So eating the same thing every single day for 54 days may have gotten a little bit boring, but my body was just, it was actually pretty dialed in. Wow. Now when they did this and they made these custom bars for you, did they know how many, I i mean how did you know how many calories you're

going to be burning while you're pulling this 300 pound sled was it dependent upon the conditions like if the the snow was more packed or icy yeah more difficult if it was soft right 100 so i mean we had to use our best guess honestly we had to just say let's use our best guess i guys had a bunch of smart people smarter than me we're in this room all these doctors these phds around this and we had to make some assumptions and ultimately they were like okay you're gonna burn 10 000 calories let's get you 10 000 calories in these bars and we started running the weight on the sled and we're like that'll be a 500 pound sled like we can't carry that so it's this equation of like can you make the sled light enough to pull if we can get the nutrition right

how efficiently does that burn your body how much can your stomach absorb so you're hungry the whole time more or less yeah fuck yeah i was i was ready for a big fucking meal jesus what's the first thing you ate um this the first thing i ate when i got back uh was a big burger but you might call me lame for saying this but i'm just gonna say because it's the truth what i craved was salad man what i craved was just something because i'd eaten this you know what i mean i've been eating like this freeze-dried field this like chunk of columbar which got me through but it was like something green and alive and so i had this big salad like avocado and salad you know i had a big burger too but then of course i eat my stomach is shrunk

right i eat this big meal and i'm like oh my stomach kind of hurts but emotionally i was like i'm back in the real world baby so it was like it was i ate everything i could get my hands i went to a buffet it just was like my stomach was hurting but i was like i'm not gonna stop and i just started eating like whatever croissants and bread just all the things so uh i would imagine your body would like you're probably craving all that life like live things green exactly vegetables and fruit it's weird to say i mean like i'm from portland oregon you know it's pretty green part of the world up there in the pacific northwest and so not even just the the food component but and there's nothing alive out there there's no

animals on the coast there are but like in the interior i didn't see any animals i didn't see a bird i didn't see you know nothing right and so not only i think as humans we're kind of wired to see things living i mean even here in la a bit of a concrete jungle but like you see trees on the street you see the ocean yeah whatever and sort of not see anything alive for 54 days it it was like, wow, I want to like smell fresh air of the trees. I want to eat a salad. I don't know. Like that's where my mind got to is kind of coming back to reality in that way. Man, so when they're constructing these bars for you, and this is all based on your body and like what burns well with you,

like what burns well with you how do they like in terms of like how many cat what's the best food in terms of weight versus calories and is there some foods that are heavier but don't have as many calories yeah so i think i'm gonna get the numbers pretty close to right here but i think per hour fat of course of the macronutrients we got protein fat and carbs right right um fat is the most calorie dense of them all and you have to make sure these things don't freeze solid right so 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 rewarm them because this was a food i was eating outside of my sled so it actually frozen too frozen too but actually where we where the workaround happened where they kind of their mastermind was they were like you actually need this macronutrient blend to

be about 40 or 45 percent fats because i needed high fat food you know um to stay alive out there and so they basically pumped it full of coconut oil which ultimately you know does 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 so having that much coconut oil in it allowed, it's not a liquid. It's actually a solid, but it doesn't freeze like rock solid. So 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. And so they put it in these freeze-dried packs, shipped it down to Chile, had to do this whole customs thing to import it. It was like a whole crazy logistical mess, but 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. So the column bars were good while frozen.

Breaking teeth on cliff bars. I should have brought you one, man. I should have brought you one to try. I want to try one. So it's mostly like a lot of fats and seeds and nuts. Seeds and nuts. And then the other thing is that they, like I said, they're bread and butter at this company, Standard Processes. They're a supplement company, but it's all whole food derivatives. So organic farm, basically vitamins.

And so they actually intermix like probiotics and magnesium and like beet extract and all these sort of plant derivatives as well to give me the phytonutrients i need that's not giving me the calories but that's giving me the and i stayed healthy the whole time i mean i got super worn down i got super skinny you know all that kind of stuff but i actually stayed you know i never got sick you know i stayed healthy that was my other question like what was the plan if you did get sick was just to wait it out in the tent wait it out in the tent um you know there there's there is not in contact with anything though right so i had i had a couple things one is i had my gps um which i was paying a satellite

every 10 what i mean is uh life forms oh no no bugs no no no yeah so that yeah yeah sorry um yeah so that part of it there's nothing out there so basically if you get a bacteria you've brought it out there so the actual idea was more or less to get out there healthy rather than you can stay pretty healthy in terms of bacteria and stuff of course you can get pretty worn down and sick and the cold or flu like symptoms but any virus you have is something you had when you land exactly because there's i mean there's nothing out there and are you were you concerned about that because like i would imagine like the anticipation leading up to it is a little stressful and sometimes your immune system can get run down oh 100 you know of course it uh it's fun to recount the the epic parts of these journeys or my other you know world records

climbing everest or this summit day or this push or whatever but anything that's this long duration this was 54 days the world record i did in 2006 was 139 days like the boring answer is like how did you do it it's like well like i washed my hands really good when i went to the airport and i didn't eat this like food off the street and you know staying healthy yeah you can't get that right you know it doesn't matter you know yeah man imagine you're on the flight headed out there and some dude next to you sneezing yeah oh yeah mother fuck there was a couple of times uh when i raced triathlon many years ago i think i raced in something like 25 countries all over the world different places

and there are three or four times i can remember like i 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 diarrhea like crazy puking my brains out so i i jump into i jump into the swim swim in the ocean you know it's a milestone i'm feeling like shit but i'm like i'm gonna try i flew all the philippines like i gotta do this race you know sure enough on the bike i get on my bike and my bike the bike course went right next to my hotel and i just had no power and i was like yep i'm turning off in the filipino guys like no no you're going the wrong way of the course and i was like nope i'm going to my hotel room to

shit some more basically so yeah one one bad burrito one bad this can ruin you know any athletic performance i mean if you have diarrhea while you're pulling a 375 pound sled in antarctica oh my god it's not a pretty moment that is not a pretty but plus with the one pair of underwear that makes it even more so yeah staying healthy was was super key to all of this but you know all things considered i mean my of course, got banged up some. But, like, I came out, you know, relatively healthy. And I think the food and nutrition was a key part of that. Oh, it has to be.

It sounds like you really did it wisely. Like, I mean, that's so cool that you had that company behind you that organized the food and nutrition. Yeah, yeah. Good Lord, man. Now, were you trying to put fat on before you left as well as muscle yeah 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 five pounds of fat on top of that just knowing that i was that total was 20 pounds total but you know between fat and the last the last few weeks i was you know basically i've been

lifted you know i've gotten strong and all this didn't want to wear myself out too much you know stressing my muscles because i was about to go undergo this and it was where i was just putting calories in so i'd you know eat dinner and then jenna my wife would be like what are you gonna head out and i'd be like should i be sitting there to eat like a pint of you know coconut bliss ice cream whatever it was you know putting calories in to just to put some fat on there because that just burned off me immediately i mean it was gone so yeah so you must have been shredded by the time it was over yeah i uh i was pretty that there's actually i don't know if i'll pull it up but there's a photo on my instagram that's got shows a little bit of the before and

after body shot but i uh yeah i was i was very lean um but it was honestly it was also scary like in the end i think i held up pretty well but you're out there by yourself you've got no context and so i started looking down at my legs halfway through this journey. Yeah, there I am. So before and after. Not that much of a difference. Yeah, it's a little, the lights aren't great. You definitely look a lot more lean.

Yeah. I wouldn't even say a lot more lean. Yeah. So it's about 20 pounds different, but my mind's played tricks on me more than anything. I looked down at my waist about halfway through and I was like, holy shit, like I'm falling apart here. And I actually started getting in my own head about, am I losing too much weight? Am I not?

But when I actually weighed myself afterwards, like 20 pounds, like we thought it could have been as much as 40 pounds. So, you know, only losing 20 pounds, all things considered. Like, yeah, like you said, I don't look that other than that really cool beard that I grew. So you were ready to get gaunt. Yeah mean we had planned for that we had planned for that and 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 um so a perfect plan but there's there's plenty of things went wrong but that part is like you kind of planned out for things going wrong yeah i mean i'm i'm probably like this this was a in one one

way is a solo effort i 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 my you know my wife and then what she does with all the media and our non- our nonprofit and as a Benny things, a lot of pieces go into making this thing happen. So, it was a team effort for sure, big time. That is so amazing. Now, at the end, you get there, you're done, but there's no one there. So, what do you do? You make a phone call? Yeah. Yo, I'm done. Come get me. Do they know where you are? Because they're tracking you, right? Yeah. So so what was kind of crazy was that crazy last push right it's this 32 hour you know non-stop push uh till the end and so what

happened is it's christmas day when i start this push and so my whole family uh i'm actually i have five older sisters big family you know i'm the i'm the baby of the bunch and they're all together in hood river oregon at my sister's house. And they're thinking, cool, Colin's like getting close to the end of his project. We'll track him. And every day they track me on my GPS. It pinged the satellites every 10 minutes. So people, all my Instagram followers, anyone could actually follow the progress in real time. And they were used to seeing me stop at about 12 hours into the day.

So 12 hours into the day happens and they're like, okay, maybe he's going another hour. 13 hours, 14 hours, 15 hours. They're like, what's going on? 16 hours. My whole family's not normally together, but they're all together because it's Christmas day. Finally, 18 hours into this push, I finally stop and put up a way point because what happened was I ran out of water. Even though I said, I'm not stopping. I was like, I only had three liters of water after 18 hours. I need more water. So I at least have to put my tent up to boil water inside. So what I do, it's now midnight. I started at 6am. It's now midnight. I've been going 18 hours and midnight in Antarctica is what the time zone I was staying on was 7pm on the West Coast. So

it's Christmas dinner. I finally call and it's my mom, my sister, my wife, like everyone's on the phone. They're like, Oh my God, you did 47 miles today. That's your best by like 15 miles. Incredible. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not stopping. I'm actually just boiling water for an hour to continue back out for another like 14 hours to finish this thing. They're like, what? The weather must be really good.

Wow, you're feeling so good. And I was like, actually, it's the worst weather of the entire trip because this massive ground blizzard blew, like hour 16 of this push. It was nice. Just this ground blizzard, which is it's not this push it was nice just 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 but 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 nope i've got this and it felt like for me when i reflect on that moment um 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. And she's watched me high perform and other things. She was like, you were locked in. And so instead of her going like, maybe you should sleep and like get some rest. She was like, I trust you. Like, I believe you like go for it. She could just hear it in my voice.

I trust you. Like, I believe you like go for it. She could just hear it in my voice. And it was a crazy thing. And I, for me, you know, I'm 33 years old now. And it really felt like a culmination of my entire life in a lot of ways, like from the swim practices as a little kid to, you know, I got burned in this crazy fire that I overcame. We can talk about that if you want. I, you know, race triathlon professionally, all of these moments, like the meditation practice, the family, the support, like all of these things were stacking on each other to kind of lead to this final culminating moment. And I had to pull on lessons from each phase of my life to be that locked in. But I found myself just, you know, 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. I got another 14 hours to go to finish this thing. And so that was,

you know, 32 hours and 77 miles later, the final push to the end. Now, what did you wear in terms of like a base layer? And was there a concern about you sweating while you're pulling all that weight, especially initially when it was 375 pounds? Yeah. So, you you know one of the the famous lines that you know people who have been in the polar environments will say is if you sweat you die um and 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 and so it was this crazy kind of kind of balance of being able to pull this sled

get your heart rate elevated enough to keep your body warm but not too warm that you were sweating and so any second i would start sweating i would strip layers off so 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 that's it i mean we're wearing merino um i merino actually itches my skin although it's really good but for me i'm a little bit allergic to it um so i wear like synthetic fabric um do they have a synthetic that completely mimics merino in terms of the way when it's moist you still stay warm yeah so merino honestly merino is amazing fabric for that reason um unfortunately for me like i said it just irritates my skin so funny that you could

suffer through all that but you can't have itchy clothes on little merino wool is gonna make me feel for that reason. Unfortunately for me, like I said, it just irritates my skin. It is so funny that you could suffer through all that, but you can't have itchy clothes on. Like a little merino wool is going to make me feel that. No, but,

so I use a synthetic, but it's crazy. What company are you using? Like what? I was using Mountain Hardware Base Layers, and then actually my outer layers

was this Norwegian company called Bergens of Norway. They 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 they've designed a really good jacket and pant that's actually really breathable and really good and then i sewed a fur rough uh onto the edge so a wolf a wolf uh fur rough on the outer side of the

hood i think it's wolf yeah wolfer wolfer i thought you were saying wool and i was like it sounds like wolf you know more about this than me i'm not the i hope you were saying wool and i was like it sounds like wolf you know more about this than me i'm not the i hope it'll annoy your audience i have nothing i am not a big hunter myself i've never never done that a lot of that but uh yeah that's a wolfer well they they know how to survive in the cold yeah exactly so the base layer is a synthetic what what is the material that it's made out of the base layer is yeah it's a it's a synthetic um like a poly polypropylene uh something like that it when it sweats it dries quickly is of the base layer is yeah it's a it's a synthetic um like a poly polypropylene uh and so it when it sweats it dries quickly is the idea yeah so it sweats it dries quickly but

the idea was just to not get it wet so basically strip down as much as possible um but like 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 So I'd stop in the front of my sled. I had a huge puffy down jacket, like a massive like Michelin man, huge puffy down jacket. So 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 you can get immediately from stopping.

I mean, it's just so much colder than when pulling the sled, your heart rate stays up and keeps you pretty warm. I would imagine like your hands and your feet feet too that would be a real issue right the small digits yeah i mean you know frostbite's real for sure um hands outside of the gloves that's why some of the stuff i was doing in the training of get my hands with the dexterity you know you have to tie all these knots with big gloves mittens on you can't take your gloves off for any sizable period of time uh if you look back on a lot of my photos i've actually got tape on my face over across my nose and my cheeks. Yeah, I saw that.

And 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 tiny little one needle prick of wind on your face throughout the day in that cold, it's going to turn into a cold injury. And so I started getting a few cold injuries on my face, nothing too bad. Do you grease your face throughout the day and that cold it's going to turn into a cold injury and so i started getting a few cold injuries on my face nothing you know too bad you're looking to grease your face up or anything like mostly the the tape um and then so i had a little bit of like vaseline or like chapstick type of stuff on some of the bad areas the one thing actually that i did that uh i'd never done before what actually worked well was a tip that i got which was my fingers started cracking really really bad from the cold and 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 turns out it's actually a really good trick. So, it's kind of super gluing these cuts on my fingers back together. And that actually worked reasonably well. All things considered. I mean, all things considered is the operative word, but it worked.

Wow. So you're wearing, what about your eyes? So I'm wearing goggles, but, you know, funny enough, you know, I had a couple of, you know, fancier, nicer ski goggles with me. But, yeah, there's the tape on my face right there. But, yeah, like that's actually just like the normal K-team tape, like a physio tape that you'd see like athletes wearing. And I just had it in my repair kit.

It wasn't meant for this purpose, but I was like, what do I have that I could put on my face to block it a little bit better? But I had those goggles on some of the time. But actually the goggle that I wore the most was one that you might use for motocross because it has like a plastic face mask over the front of it um because the wind when it was blowing it would just kind of blow around so sometimes i had this fleece stripped over my face but it would blow too much um and so i had this more plastic face mask yeah so that that's the that's when you can see look how frozen it's

frozen it is on the inside that is so crazy oh my god man there and then like this neoprene mask underneath so i had like double face mask double tape like anything to just you know keep me keep me warm i never suspected that it was so high above sea level there yeah yeah so you've got whatever it is 9 300 feet at the south pole so it's basically just like elevated ground but it seems flat right but i started at sea level so i'm not only like elevated ground but it seems flat right but i started at sea level so i'm not only like i'm actually going uphill all the way to the south so for the first 40 some days i pulled that sled uphill uh completely so it was freaking me out the whole thing freaks me out yeah like when you were freaking out an hour in and you hadn't even actually hit land yet

yeah what what thoughts were going through your head like were you thinking man i need to get someone to fucking rescue me i mean it definitely you know that those moments of doubt uh this is on everest this is a different one we'll get to this we'll get to this yeah um the uh you know what's going through my head was was these moments of doubt for sure um but one of the things for me you know to be honest with these projects that i've created i love i love pushing my own limits i love i love finding the edges of my own potential all that kind of stuff but i also now really enjoy building these projects that i can share with other people i do this i just non-profit work where there's you know 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. That's a really cool project like that. And then just sharing it with the world at large, people going like, this is impossible. I mean, how many guys do you know that it's like one day I'm going to do this cool thing, but they like never do it. Right. And so actually going after that and sharing it away, it's like, you might not want to walk across Antarctica, but like you probably have some hope or some dream or some goal that you want to accomplish in your life. Like fucking go and do it, like get after it. And 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. And 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. So 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. And that's really what kept me going forward. It's like, I can't let these kids in these public school classrooms think that I quit after the first hour. Like, are these other people that are driving inspiration from this? Hopefully, like, I want to do this for this larger purpose. And 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.

That's awesome. And then, of course, you have a giant team that prepared and helped you. You don't want to let them down as well. Yeah, you know, it's a lot goes into it. So, getting to that starting line and having that doubt. But I think, I mean, on one level, it's also, it's a human element. It'd be easy for me to come in here and tell this story like, you know what, Joe? Like, I'm the biggest badass in the world. No one's walked across Antarctica. And like, I did it, even though these people died trying, whatever.

Like, those are the facts of the situation. But like, the truth is, man, like, I'm human. Like, I have the wave of human emotions. I've figured out how to tap into my mind in a way to do these things. But like, I still experience fear. I still experience doubt. I 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.

I think that's what the difference is. But I believe all of us, all of us humans have the capacity to do this. Like you're looking at me, I'm like a pretty like regular, like size, regular looking guy. Um, but I think, you know, the muscle between my ears is what separates the difference. And it allowed me to do this more than anything. You don't seem to have the darkness that I usually see in people that do things like this. Do you know what I'm saying? Like this, I've met a bunch of people that have done some fucked up things and they all have some weird darkness. Yeah. You know, i hear what you're

saying i think for me there's a lot of this strength comes from a dark moment in my life um you know right after college uh i was traveling around the world you know i had no money as a kid growing up you know you know work working class background painted houses every summer but always dreamed of traveling the world so i was like one day i'm gonna travel the world so i finished college buddies of mine are getting like real jobs and whatever wall street and things like that and i was like you know what i saved up ten thousand dollars over the past six years i'm going to take a surfboard and a backpack and like go see the world with my life savings and so you know i went and do that i'm 21 years old you know go to fiji i surfed through australia

hitchhiked through new zealand i end up in Thailand. And you ever been to Thailand? Yeah. Yeah, of course. And so, you're familiar with how much fire and fire dancing and various crazy debaucherous things that happen over there. So, I'm on a beach in rural Thailand and I decided to jump this flaming jump rope. And unfortunately, it goes terribly wrong for me. The rope wraps around my legs and ignites my entire body on fire to my neck. And in an instant, my life changed. Fortunately for me, the rope wraps around my legs and ignites my entire body on fire to my neck. And, you know, in an instant, my life changed. You 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. My body's on fire to my neck, but not before about 25% of my body is severely, severely

burned. So, my clothes were on fire um but mostly we got severely burned was my legs and feet and so i'm in a place i'm on a beach there's there's no hospital on this and i'm on an island there's no hospital instead of an ambulance ride i'm on the back of a moped driving down a dirt path you know i'm i'm in a one room nursing station literally like the size of the room we're sitting in they're like this is our sort of hospital it's like one bed and i'm just completely devastated and so they put me under eight surgeries over the next week in the middle of nowhere rural thailand eight surgeries in a tiny little shack yeah and basically there's a cat running around my bed every time i come out of there you know quote unquote icu there's a cat

running around my bed and across my chest and the doctors are literally saying to me you know in the broken you know english they're saying hey you'll probably never walk again normally like you're probably never going to walk again normally um yeah there there's a photo of that i think if you click over on on that to the second one it actually shows um you know there there's what the legs look like um so you know i was and that's that that photo there with those legs that's actually eight weeks after i was burned so that believe it or not that's like it's starting to look a little bit better, all things considered there. So, as you can probably imagine, I mean, just the darkest time of my life. I've been, you know, I swam through college.

I thought of myself as a physically active person. And here I am, like doctor saying, hey, you know, 22-year-old kid, like you'll never walk again normally. I am like doctor saying hey you know 22 year old kid like you'll never walk again normally um and to me like there's 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 you know my mother is really the the heroine of this tale which is she she arrived to my bedside around day five you know flies all the way over to Thailand finds me um are you are you a parent I don't know do you have kids yeah I don't have kids yet but I can only imagine as a parent what it's like to walk into a you know hospital room and see your kid halfway around the world in this state nothing you can do and she admits now that she was crying in the hallways you know pleading with

the doctors for good news like he's gonna be all right right he's gonna walk she's crying but every time she walked into my hospital room she walked in with a smile on her face and there's this air of positivity of being like okay colin like this is Like, what do you want to do when you get out of here? Like, let's set a goal. Like, let's get out of here and do something positive. And I'm like, mom, are you crazy? Like, the doctors say I'm never going to walk again normally. Like, my life as I know it is over, you know, just in this really dark place in my mind. She just kept at me day after day with this positivity, this, that. And I finally was like, closed my eyes. And I just pictured like, what, what am I going to be? And I closed my eyes and I had this visualization of

myself crossing a triathlon finish line, which is not something I'd ever done before. Like I'd swam in college, but I'd never biked or run competitively, nothing. But I was like, you know what? The able-bodied me sometime in the future is going to be not only walking again, but doing a triathlon race. And so I said it to her, I said, my goal is to race a triathlon one day. And 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. Pulls out her computer and just literally starts reading me like triathlon races are this, they're this far, they're this distances. Like I didn't know, I knew nothing about the sport other than just like popped into my mind. It's something I thought I maybe wanted to do.

And so that's what I focused on. I literally have this photo of me with the thai doctor i'm you know my legs are bandaged to my waist and the thai doctor is like looking at me like crazy but i'm lifting these like 10 pound barbells in my hand going i'm training for a triathlon now the guy's like you're in thailand in a hospital and i'm telling you you're never gonna walk again normally um and so you know flash, you're never going to walk again normally. Um, and so, you know, flash forward, you know, two or three months, I finally get released from this Thai hospital. You were there for three months? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. And when I got released, I still hadn't walked. You know, I'm in, I'm in a wheelchair. Um, I got

carried on and off the flight back to Portland, Oregon, land back home and, uh, you know, still, still bandaged up. And 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, all right, Colin, now I know you've got this big triathlon goal, but today your goal is to take your very first step. And so, she actually grabs a chair from our kitchen table and placed 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 and i'm looking at it Like I don't know if this is possible, but 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 and is the problem that because of the burnt skin It's not flexible. You can't move it and bend it. No, it's a good question So basically what happened with the burn is it burned me so deep that two things happened one is there was ligament damage so ligament damage to my ankles and knee joints and then the way that the heat the scarring in the skin is healing essentially over these mobile joints they don't think i'm going to regain full flexibility um at full range of motion essentially in my leg so they'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 a magazine walking around without being able to bend your knees or your ankles with like full mobility so it just was like you're not going to be able to have that back basically so sure enough i take that first step get in that chair the next day my mom doesn't take it easy on me she just moved this chair five steps away the next day 10 steps away you know every day a few more steps of not to go on and on but basically 18 months after you know getting released from that hospital i find myself in chicago i finally you know took a job in finance just trying to get out of my parents basement like get on with my life i'm 23 years old like yeah i gotta get like a real job get out of my parents basement you know move to chicago take a job in finance and uh um try to get my my shit together basically and i i honored that goal i said you

know what i'm gonna sign up for the chicago triathlon i live here now join a local gym knew nothing about the sport still i'm like asking random guys at the gym like anybody here race a triathlon like i'm in a spin class like how do you like like how do you like take your shoes off and like run afterwards how do you know like like how you like take your shoes off and like run afterwards? How do you, you know, like, like how does it even work? Like ask these questions. And sure enough, through that process, I like trained at this gym, signed up for the Chicago triathlon, ended up racing the race, crossed the finish line.

And to my complete and utter surprise, I didn't just finish the race, but I actually won the entire Chicago triathlon, beating 4,000 other people coming first place. What? It's your first triathlon you won? First triathlon beating 4,000 other people coming first place. What? First triathlon you won? Wow. What kind of training did you do to prepare yourself for that? Like I said, I had been a collegiate swimmer, so I was a division one swimmer.

Swam at Yale University. But then the biking and running was completely new to me. Did you have anybody show you how to do it or did you start running and biking yeah i literally walked into this spin class like a spin not like a like i didn't actually ride a bike you like so i went to the spin class and like start like met a guy and he was like oh i've done one triathlon before and he was like i can so he took me out on a couple like rides with his buddies i had this like steel frame bike i

didn't know all these like carbon wheels and a helmet, you know, all these like fancy, like triathlon type of things, like didn't know much about it. And literally for a summer, just kind of like asked people some questions, this. And 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, you know, four more than 4,000 participants. And so unlike a marathon where everyone just starts at the same time, you actually have to start in waves, like a hundred people every five minutes. And 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. And so, when I finished the race, you know,

I swim, I bike, I run, it was Olympic distance triathlon, so it was a mile swim, 25 miles bike, 6.2 mile run. I crossed the finish line. I 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. And so I like my grandma's there. Cause she lives in Chicago. Like gives me a big hug. Like, I'm so proud of you. You weren't able to walk again. And here you are finishing a triathlon. Let's go get lunch. And so I, you know, grab my wetsuit and my bike, my grandma and I sit down to have lunch. And as and as we're walking back to the car she's like do you want to see like what place you came in your age group and i was like sure like that would be cool like let's go see how i did

and we wander over to like the scorers table and the guy's like i'm like oh you know i'm trying to figure out a place what's your name i was like oh i'm calling a brady like we've been calling your name over the loudspeaker for the last 20 minutes i'm like oh why did i like do something wrong and they're like you won like like my age group and they're like, you won. Like my age group? And they're like, no, you won. Like the whole race. It was just this surreal, surreal moment in my life. I 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, like I just did this crazy thing. But it was more so going back to your initial question about the darkness versus the light, at least in my journey, was shit, like I just did this crazy thing. But 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, like this was a sliding doors moment. Like what had happened had my mom not, you know, come in with this air of positivity and forced me to set this tangible goal. Like I'm certain my life would be nowhere where it was today, but then it's not, I wasn't like, oh wow, I'm some superhuman freak

that can do these things. I 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. And 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? So, sure enough, it was a Sunday when I raced the Chicago Triathlon, coincidentally met who became a huge mentor and influenced my life that afternoon, a guy named Brian Gelber, who ended up being my first sponsor. And he said to me,

you won the Chicago triathlon today. Do you think you should maybe do something about that? And I was like, yeah, but I've got a job and I don't have any money. Like I would need a sponsor. He's like, I'll be your first sponsor if it's something you want to take seriously. And so literally that was on a Sunday, Monday Monday morning I walk in and quit my job immediately and two weeks later I'm living in Australia training triathlon full time and ended up racing triathlon professionally

for the US national team all over the world for the next six years so it was a crazy moment What happened ultimately with the injuries that you sustained from the fire? You know all things considered that was January 14, 2008. So it's just over 11 years ago now.

And I ultimately have been pretty all right. I mean, I've got some scars, but it's pretty faint. I was able to gain back most of the full flexibility in my legs. If you look at my left foot, it's where the worst, worst burns, where the rope really just sat on my foot for a long time must have um that's still pretty thick with scar tissue um you know when i'm in the mountains when i'm in places you know like climbing mount everest like i did like pulling across an article all the things i have to be really aware because my skin regulates heat not in the best way heat and cold it's still just

like you know not like normal skin because the scar tissue the scar tissue just is it's just carries the heat a little bit different for some reason i guess i don't know exactly why not as porous because it's not as porous covered over exactly and the um actually in the early days for the first five years i don't get this so often anymore but in the first literally five years of this if i bumped my legs into like a table or someone just you know bumped a chair into me you know nothing like lightly i would usually get a little cut there so it was just super fragile it was almost, you know, bumped a chair into me, you know, nothing like lightly, I would usually get a little cut there. So it was just super fragile. It was almost like, you know, glass skin kind of with not the same sort of flexibility that you'd normally have. But, you know, 10, 11 years on now, I would say it's pretty much 100%. I 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. So I feel extremely, extremely fortunate to have recovered as well as I did. And more than anything, I attest that to, of course, the physical ability for my body to recover in the way it did. But 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. And you said you sustained ligament damage to your joints and your knees? Yeah, yeah. So there was basically um again i'm not uh my my anatomy i have other skills but my full anatomy is not a i'm not a doctor let's put it that way um but yeah basically the ligaments particularly on the backs of my knees so i don't

know exactly what that ligament is that goes through um through there but um that was really jammed up with with the scar tissue so i wasn't able for a long time to fully bend my knees uh and flex them in the full way and the same thing uh in the ankles whatever that ligament is that goes sort of basically turn not not your achilles but the other side of your foot basically that part was just so much scar tissue had formed where the skin was healing around that and from the damage to the ligaments it wasn't sort of being able to fluidly flex uh in the way that you normally would see a foot so a full imagine point imagine not being able to fluidly flex in the way that you normally would see a foot. So, imagine not being able to point your foot, basically, if you're, you know, putting your leg forward out, you know, back like that.

So, yeah, for a long time. And it was kind of, so I was kind of like dragging my feet around in that first year. Wow. And. So, did you have to just push through the scar tissue and break it up? Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of, a lot of, obviously, PT, a lot of. Massage?

Massage. I'll tell you a funny story it's funny i haven't thought of the story in a long time um uh i've never told this story actually but so when i got burned i've been traveling by myself in thailand or around the world but i actually met up with my childhood best friend uh his name's david boyer who actually uh married my sister and they have two kids so my childhood best friend turned into my brother-in-law, which is pretty fun. But, uh, anyways, um, he had been, he had actually been with me when I got burned. So those first five days in the hospital before my mom got there, he was with me. Um, and was, was a saint, you 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. But 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 he said it had been, you know, her son, you know, it's kind of felt like protective of me. So, she comes over to my house one day and she goes, you know, I've been doing some untraditional healing work, would you be open to that? And I at this point was like, I'll take anything, what do you got in mind? And she was like, well, I've been working with this pranic healing shaman. Do you want to check that out? And I literally was like, I was like saying yes to everything at this point. Like I'm looking for any way to recover. And I was like, well, what is it? And she was like, well, they don't even touch you. It's just light healing. And so, I go to this basement 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. He's just like waving his hands in front of like my body and my heart. And then he's like looking really intensely at my foot. And I sit there for like an hour. Guy never touches me, nothing. He's just like looking at me, waving his hand in this. And he's like, okay, I'm done now. And I'm like, okay, what did you do? And he was telling, I opened up this chakra, I opened up that, I i did this but what i mostly did was i put this force field of white light around your left foot and i'm like i mean i'm pretty i'm down with some untraditional stuff but i was kind of like uh-huh cool like thanks i appreciate it and he's doing and i was

like what's this bucket and 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 and this is pranic healing he's like so you have this light blue force field over your left foot right now which was the worst burn part of my body he goes i would recommend not showering for the next couple of days as you might wash off the force field so what jail is that so I tell this story with a total smile, cheeky smile on my face because that's funny. I haven't thought of the story in a long time.

But I will say this. The next day, I walked further than I had the rest of the time. So you want to call that placebo. You want to call it whatever. I emotionally wasn't fully bought in on the pranic healing. Although, like I said,

I am into a lot of alternative modalities. God, I wish it was true.alities god i wish it was true yeah i wish it was true i met a lady at the comedy store once told me she does reiki healing yeah she like kind of rubbed her hands together and and waved him in front of me i'm like what are you doing she's like do you feel that i'm like i don't feel shit i don't know what you're talking about so that that part i don't i don't know if it worked or it didn't work but the the combination of the amount of people with you know 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

unlock the uh the scar tissue and allow me to make a full recovery i mean it was a lot of hard work for you know a year plus to get back on my feet but i got there well 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 yeah no i mean very skeptical the salt man like i said the the salt man take it for what it is like i said i'm telling that story not as an advocate for pranic healing necessary, but I will say, agreeing with what you just said, there is something about that. There's something about being wrapped in the positivity that I was with my mother in that moment of just being like, hey, let's get through this.

Let's figure this out together. Let's focus our mind on something. And a lot of, even as I go through Antarctica, how did you do that? People ask me this question, are you a superhuman? And I'm like, yeah, I'm a superhumanhuman and so are you like that's how i feel like we all have this capacity in our minds to unlock all sorts of things i don't care i mean if you want to paint pictures compose music start a business you know sit sit in a warehouse and do a podcast whatever it is you want to do yeah you can fucking do amazing things like and you know having that

belief does does you know add up to that. I mean, that's step one, in my opinion, is visualizing that and believing it. And 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. Absolutely. Absolutely. You've got to think. I mean, placebo effect is a real thing.

We know that, right? We know that if you really do believe that you're going to get better because of some sugar pill they give you yeah there's a tangible result 100 if you really believe yeah so if that salt guy if the thing about all that stupid shit is if you believe it it actually has an effect i mean there's there's a lot of healers out there that at least on paper are totally full of shit but if you believe in these assholes yeah that can make a big difference it's very slippery the human mind is such a slippery thing i mean and i'll go back to my own experience and again uh i don't know how ephemeral or out there you want to get but i'm out there in antarctica 54

days alone like i'm telling you i'm doing this for this bigger purpose. I feel like I'm tapped into that. And 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. Like 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, like I would get over, I would hit with this sort of larger purpose,

this larger outcome. And again, like I'm not a super religious person. I was actually raised on a hippie commune. Like I come from a pretty untraditional background, but like the energetic field, whatever you want to call that, or if that's just the belief in something, you know, the power of that, like I felt the strength from those moments.

There 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. So again, I don't, I don't have perfect words for that. You know, I'm starting to try to build my vocabulary around that, but that energy, I think it just derives from what you're saying. If you start to believe it, if you can believe like, Hey, there's a larger purpose in this, or Hey, this blue force field is going to heal my foot. There 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. Well, 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, they really don't have any idea what they can do if they have to, because people are rarely pushed to their actual limits. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's been said many times before I say it, but that idea that growth happens outside the comfort zone. And 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. I didn't, well, I chose to jump the rope. So I was chose to be a knucklehead 22 year old kid on a beach in Thailand. But like, I wasn't like, God, I want to get severely burned today. Like that happened to me. Right. Which forced me through this intense, tragic moment. But 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. But what I realized is that it's hard to choose that path often. It's hard to push yourself outside of those boundaries, but things that are, you know, quote unquote forced on you. I mean, let's look at something that half this population essentially does, give birth, like childbirth, natural childbirth, it's been happening since the beginning of time and that's an incredibly intense physical manifestation of the power of the human body i 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 or 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 people get through those but oftentimes these tragedies have to be forced upon us for us to do them. And so, my exploration now with my, you know, creative artwork I call it with these, you know, expeditions, these world record projects that push my body and mind, it's me choosing to step into those moments. It'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? You know, what are my limits? What are our limits collectively? And 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?

Well, 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. Inspiration is so critical for human beings. I 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. But 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. Absolutely. I mean, you know, Gog is a great example that I've never met him, but, you know, I've personally derived inspiration from that guy. I mean, he gets out there, you know, you can't run

a hundred miles. Like I'll show you, I can you i can run 100 miles you know and he's pushing his body to extreme ways or you know i love what he says about the 40 you know i think about a little bit different in my mind but like what are those limits i mean i don't know if it's 40 or 40 people quit you know people quit that i can't voice comes up and you know 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 and for me in my own story on my own journey I think that final day that final final 32 hour push proves it three days before that you know I'm videotaping all this I'm trying to capture as much content to be able to share with people of this crazy weird place that's Antarctica by yourself

and like day 49 day 40 50 like I'm literally crying into my GoPro being like, I'm running out of food. I'm exhausted. I don't know if I can keep doing this. I'm just like worked, right? But sure enough, I don't say I can't. You know, it was at 40%, it was at 50%. That's that moment when I wanted to quit or I should have quit.

But then the strongest, most amazing moment of my entire athletic career that spans decades happens three days later because I kept pushing. It's not like I rested for three days and pulled that off. Like I never took a rest day in 54 days. I pulled my sled 12 to 13 hours every single day. And on the last day, it was the strongest as possible. So I think it proves if we can push through that, I can't moment, no, it's not going to work that you can get there. And unfortunately, you know, we talk about 40% with Goggins. I actually think a lot of people quit at 1%. They're sitting behind their office. They're like, you know, one day I want to travel overseas or, you know, I hate this job. You know, I've got this great

business idea, but immediately they're like, but I can't, like, I've got no money to start this business. I've got no, this, like 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 Explorers Grand Slam, something fewer than 50 people in the world have ever done. And I'm going to be the fastest. Climb Everest, climb Denali, climb Kilimanjaro, North Pole, South Pole, back to back. I haven't climbed a bunch of mountains. It'd be pretty easy to say I can't. Oh, and by the way, we have no money to do this. We have no platform. I have like 200 Instagram followers. Like, I mean, nothing. But we just sat there and we're like, no, instead of saying I can't, let's say I can.

What's the first step to that? We literally get out our laptops and I'm like going to like, we're like, we want to build this big media campaign where lots of people follow and get press. Like we know nothing about, we have no background in this. So we Google, what's the difference between marketing and PR?

I mean, we are literally asking Google like the most basic of all basic questions. But, you know, we continue to say like, literally asking Google the most basic of all basic questions. Wow. But, you know, we continue to say like, let's get coffee with our one friend who knows something about this.

We should probably get a website. How does one build a website? And it goes on and on like this. How long ago did you start this journey? So that, that was 2014 when we dreamed that up.

So the world record was like five years ago. Yeah. So to see if I could set the world record for something called the Explorer's Grand Slam. So it's climbing tallest mountain on each of the seven continents, seven summits. And before that, had you done anything like that

or had it just been athletics? So I grew up in Portland, so I grew up in the outdoors. But to go climb Everest, Denali, Sorbonne, no. The short answer is I climbed a few mountains. It's not like I'd never been in the snow before. I'd worn crampons. I had not zero experience, but like not even close to the experience that you would think one would need to do that.

And to just break world records doing it. Not just do it, but like be the fastest person to ever complete it. You know, like I said, it ended up being 139 days straight through to climb all those mountains. Didn't, you know, I think we had a clip up a second ago of something on Everest, but yeah, I mean, to do all of that, it started from this place of not, of believing I can. And then, you know, it's, 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, because what actually happened, like people, you know, applaud our success now. This is is you in everest walking across a ladder that's

you know about 300 foot hole a crevasse uh on the other side of it that you have to go through to on your way up the uh the mount everest climbing route and so your crampons are clicking on the on the and you're hooking them on the ladder as you walk across and if you fall you die yes okay great so fuck man man. Watch this again. This is so awful. It's so awful to look at because you're basically just walking this tightrope on... Let me hear it.

Listen to that click. Folks, I implore you to go to the Instagram page so you get the full freak out. Look how they're tied together, too, those ladders. Yeah. Tied together. Just rickety as can be. It's a foot cavern over there oh fuck all this jesus oh and you're looking down because you have a gopro on and we cut the sound off at the end there but i go at the very end i go because like there's 50 of those ladders but i was cheering every fucking time i got across i was like yep one more down oh you did that 50 times in the kumbu i actually go through that

section a couple of times it's a very dangerous section of the mountain um but yeah went about 50 of those ladders so when you went through everest did you see the bodies um so i fortunately didn't see any bodies up there fortunately or unfortunately fortunately i mean i mean i'm not like trying to see that but you know but they're they're more prevalent on the climbing route on the north side the day that i did summit um three people died uh on the day that i summited so when i yeah when i so the set that i mean to talk about everest i mean for me is major setbacks it 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 explorer's grand slam world. I'm trying to climb Everest. I'm exhausted from 100

days. I just come from the North Pole before that Kilimanjaro, before that, you know, Elbrus, all these other mountains. And then I make my summit push on Everest. I'm not climbing with a guide or anything. It's just myself and one Sherpa who I met climbing in Nepal the year previous when I was training for this. And so, it's just the two of us and we climb up into camp four. So, Everest has, you know, four camps. There's base camp and then there's camps the year previous when I was training for this. And so it's just the two of us, and we climb up into Camp 4. So Everest has four camps. There's base camp, and then there's camps progressively higher in the mountains so you can get your body acclimatized.

And we get up into Camp 4. Have you read the book Into Thin Air by John Krakauer or anything about Everest? Okay, there'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, wake up the next morning, still get impounded by this weather and actually have to climb back down the mountain. So, climb back down the mountain all the way to camp two. And they're like, well, that's probably it. Like you don't usually like spend a night out in the death zone and like make a second attempt. And you've already tried all these other mountains. You're a hundred plus days in this journey. And I was like, man, I want to see if I can get back up there. Like, and this other guy who I met on another team had some supplemental options. So I had to use some of my supplemental options. So my supply stores are limited now as well and so he uh he says to me hey i'm not going to go up i'm sick but if you get back up to camp four there's a couple bottles of oxygen that um you could use

of mine if you if you somehow get back up there so sure enough pasang bodhi that's the name of the shirt palace climbing with amazing climber himself we get back up to camp four in the death zone and uh we decide we're going to go for the summit we call back up to camp four in the death zone and uh we decide we're going to go for the summit we call back down to base camp what's the weather forecast and they're like well it's the exact same forecast we told you before it might hold in which case you'll be fine or it might turn into what you guys just survive and if you're not near your tent and you're up on the summit ridge of everest like it's going to get like pretty bad and so we kind of go back and forth should we go for it shouldn't we go for it we decide to go like pretty bad. And so we kind of go back and forth. Should we go for it? Shouldn't we go for it? We decide to go for it. But 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. And in 2015, there was a huge earthquake in Nepal that shut the climbing season down. So no one's even climbed the mountain in two years. But all of a sudden, because of these weather delays, I end up there and there's a hundred people going for the summit on the exact same day. So basically traffic jam on the worst fucking place

to be in a traffic jam possible. So Pasang Bodhi and I, we go, okay, let's figure out how to climb this thing. And we leave camp. You know, there's a photo that I took for leaving camp. There's all these lights going up the side of the mountain. And it's because there's one rope that everyone works to put in, so everyone's using the same rope, and all of a sudden, we're behind 100 people.

And if you stand there, wind chill minus 40 degrees, like we're going to get frostbite, like we're going to not be able to make it. And so Pasang Bodhi and I look at each other and we go, let's unclip from the rope. And so we actually decide to unclip from the rope, climb up all the way to the balcony from the rope and so we actually decide to we actually decide to unclip from the rope climb up all the way to the balcony from the the south call the death zone area i was mentioning before um up to about 28 000 feet on rope because we actually think it's more dangerous to climb roped next to all the behind all the people than it is to risk a fall right you don't know those people

right i don't know what they're like and people are i mean you're on everest at 28 000 feet and people are walking i mean one step per minute sometimes i mean it's it is brutal and so i mean i'm walking maybe two steps every 30 seconds but i'm like usain bolt like flying past these people yeah this is this gives an example of like so you're in it like the world the worst place in the world to be in a traffic jam, as you can see here from this photo I posted that day. But anyways, I get up to this edge and finally it's too steep. It's too dangerous for us to be unclipped from the rope any longer. And we're like, we're just going to have to clip in and settle in behind. We'd pass like 50 or 60 people.

So we're in a much better place than ever. I still have this one big puffy coat. It's actually the same puffy coat I use in Antarctica, the big like Michelin man coat. And I'm like, we're going to slow down. I better put this big jacket on. And 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, like just black as black can be. And I'm like, holy shit, like telltale sign of frostbite. Like, oh my God, like the same thing. We've got school kids following along. We got family fun, the whole thing. And I'm like, oh my God, like I'm going to lose my right hand. Is Jenna still going to love me?

You know, what's my family going to think? And then I don't say anything to saying Bodhi. I jam my hand back in these big gloves and I go, okay. And 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? How black was it? I mean, it was black, like black, black.

Like this can of coffee? Yes. Really? I mean, it was black. Did you take a picture of it? So the sun was just below the horizon, so it was like dusk. And I look down at this point, and then the sun comes up. so i jam my hand back in this glove and i don't say anything to pasang but i'm like let's keep pushing for the summit so we go for the next three hours and the

whole time i'm like oh my god i'm such an idiot like i'm gonna lose my hand my hands frostbitten this and that and so we get up and we're about 30 minutes below mount everest summit and it should be a beautiful moment for me like since a little kid i dreamed like summiting everest would be like the greatest accomplishment of my life oh my god and. And I'm thinking like, just in this dark place, but I also haven't taken a single photo basically. And I'm like, well, I got to get like a photo or a video of, you know, the famous Mount Everest summit. So I pull up my GoPro to shoot a video. I 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

this tiny little knife edge ridge. And of course I have to adjust my gloves again. This is from the summit. And I pull my GoPro out, I 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, go, Pasang Bodhi, my hands back, my hands my hands back and he's like what are you doing it just so happened that the 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 oh my hand was completely fine oh god so yeah clip here, if you play it from the top, it's me reaching the summit.

That's Pasek Bodhi right there. So when... I'm on the summit of Mount Everest. Top of the world. No words can describe. Wow. So, yeah. Did you experience any discomfort in your hands before so you're again we're talking

about a lot of this this podcast has been about mindset which is one of my favorite topics and like just like we said you could convince yourself that the salt man is fixing your foot yeah like i'm on everest i'm at 28 000 feet my brain's not working very well i know that the weather's coming in bad, that people are going to get maybe frostbite based on the forecast. And I look down and I see my hand's black. Where does my mind go?

It's like, it's not like, oh, let me think about this. My hand warmer must have broken open in this. I'm like, my hand. And it was weird because I was like, I didn't feel my hand getting cold. My hand like feels fine, but I'm on Everest and my hand's black. That means, you know, in my brain i'm like i have

frostbite so it's just like it's a weird thing where you can take your mind like a lot of this the positivity of this my mom went to the negative immediately like your hand's gone it's frozen off like the end um so what happened to the people that died were they on the rope yeah so unfortunately that day the weather actually did get pretty bad later in the day. So fortunately I was able to get down before the weather got too bad. But 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. And then two people died from altitude sickness. So basically either running out of oxygen up there and not being able to get back down to their tent.

I think those people actually did get carried back down to their tents that night and then died in the tents that night. Wow. rescue somebody very easily up there. I mean, to carry a human body down and to rescue them is nearly impossible. And I kind of always thought in my mind, you know, if I saw somebody lying on the ground, like I would, you know, summon the energy to pick them up. And 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. And 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, you start talking to people, getting friends with other climbers, whatever. And I see her lying on the ground with her head, like lean back and her oxygen mask off to the side. And I'm like, oh my God, like, this is the moment that I most feared. Like somebody who I know is lying here on the side

of the mountain. And I think to myself, I've got to pick her up. I've got to pick her up and somehow like carry her down this mountain. And I lean over to grab her and I try with all my might to do anything. And I realized I can't move her six inches. Like I'm completely exhausted. Muscles aren't working. Brain's not working. So, I do the only thing I can think to do is I just wrap her in my arms and I say, Tice, like if you can hear me, it's Colin. You need to get up. You need to get your oxygen mask on. You need to start moving, like, please get up, please get up, no response. She was climbing with a Sherpa, another guide right next to her. And they were like, look, like, we're having trouble with our oxygen mask, but we're going to fix it,

like, it's gonna be all right. And I was like, just kind of going through this intense moment, like, what do I do? How can I help? And it's as weird as, you know, I'm not proud of it necessarily to say it, but like, there was nothing I nothing I could do like it's just the most helpless feeling in the world where you want to help the common person a friend I mean this person not 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 and I was just on so close to on my limit up there in the summit there was nothing I could do fortunately um she was not one of the people that passed away that day her her team did get her oxygen mask on her and she actually made it to the summit and back down safely wow so she went up she ended up going up from there which to me is like another

whole crazy part of that story but 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 and people have been criticized for not you know doing these crazy rescues when things have gone wrong up there there's nothing you can do to rescue and people have been criticized for not you know doing these crazy rescues when things have gone wrong up there but it really hit home for me like how how hard it would be to move somebody down that mountain from that altitude and so when you're up there you know unlike you know Antarctica I was actually alone and Everest like I said was pretty crowded day like you're essentially alone up there like if you can't keep putting one foot in front of the other up in the death zone there's not not a whole lot that you can do um so the three people that died up there did they leave them there um i'm not sure with those specific people because sometimes they you can

get like a large team of people to slowly lower people down and you know in 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 lowing someone over rocks and things like that yeah so i actually believe those bodies are no longer there but there are quite a few bodies you know still on the mountain and particularly the north side the chinese so you can climb it from two sides the nepal side which is more commonly climb where i climb but the tibet side the tibet side is known for having a lot more of the body still actually on the climbing route um for sure so but for me on that i mean that day in in a crazy way continues on because i got back down to camp

four and i'm thinking i'm gonna sleep for the night rest and come back down the mountain usually takes a few days to get back down the mountain at this point you know i've only got one more mountain to climb to finish my world record the explorer's grand slam and i was about two months ahead of schedule so if i had climbed den And I was about two months ahead of schedule. So 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. And so I called back home to Jenna and I was like,

I made it, like I made it. And earlier in the day when my hands had gotten frozen, I had actually had heated boot warmers. And so I had turned the heat in my boot warmers up as hot as possible. So I'm like, if my hand is frostbitten, what can my feet look like? in my boot warmers up as hot as possible so I'm like if my hand is frostbite and what my feet look like so I crank those up as hot as possible and so Jenna's like hey like how you doing like you all right we've heard some you know reports over social media that's been a really hard day up there like I'm like yeah I'm all right like

no frostbite no injuries like I'm good and I was like well actually um I uh I burned my feet and she's like oh frostbite like how bad is it and i was like no not frostbite i actually burned two like silver dollar circles in the bottoms of both of my feet from turning my boot warmers up too much and she's like wait let me get this straight like you climb everest you don't get frostbite but you burn yourself she was like you your feet fire like just like this is a bad situation um but then she goes on and she was like, she literally said the next thing she said to me, I will literally never forget in my life. But she goes, so you're in your tent, right? You took your boots off and everything. You're curled up in

there. I'm like, yeah. And she's like, well, I actually need you to put your boots back on. And I'm like, excuse me? Like, I just, what? Like, she was like, yeah. So we've been doing some calculating back home and it just so happens that if you can get to the summit of Denali in the next week, you can set not one, but two world records. And I was like, well, that sounds nice,

but like I'm on the summit of, below the summit of Everest, how the hell is that gonna work? She's like, okay, put your boots back on down now. Climb all the way back to base camp. There's no time for you to sleep, but a helicopter is gonna take you to Kathmandu. No time for a hotel, no time for a shower, but an evening flight is going to take you to Dubai, to Seattle, to Anchorage.

And instead of having three weeks to climb Denali, you'll have three days. But if you can do all of that, you'll set another world record. Like, ready, go. Jesus. so i was in disbelief but uh knowing better than to uh disobey not only my amazing wife but the the planner and logistics expert and running the background all this i sure enough put my boots back on wipe the slate clean and found myself um you know just 100 hours after standing on the summit of everest i found myself over in alaska trying to push up to the summit to uh to try to set the two world records and not just the one whoa now what kind of recovery does your body need when you exert yourself like that like yeah

climbing everest i would think that your body's must you had to be in some kind of state of shock or i mean completely there's there's some clips of me on denali in those next few days where i'm just absolutely trash like i'm like like, like barely eyes open. I'm going to try to push for the summit. I'm going to do this. The one benefit I would say there is one, most of it's not a benefit, but I'll keep it in the positive. The one benefit is usually in the high altitude mountaineering, you need to acclimatize.

So 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. A 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. If you or I right now got dropped off on the summit of Denali, we would pass out in a matter of minutes, right? But because I'm coming from Everest at 29,000 feet, it puts Denali into perspective, not from a technical mountaineering standpoint, because it's still a very dangerous and very challenging mountain and in a lot of ways, a harder mountain to climb than ever is technically

but 20 000 feet my body can handle the rapid ascent a little bit better if i can muster the energy to do it the physiology of my body is actually in a better place to climb higher faster if that makes sense no it does make sense but man so you're when you're done with this what how long did it take you to just feel like a normal person again? Yeah, so I was on Denali. I 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.

So even though I went to the poles, I still set the speed record for the seven summits as well. So seven summits, 131 days, and the Explorers Grand Slam, 139, and then I returned to Alaska Slam, 139. And then I returned to Alaska and then home to Portland. And honestly, it was a good six months until I felt normal again, at least. And I'm definitely, like I said, I'm only about five weeks out from Antarctica right now. And I haven't really taken a lot of rest and recovery. I've been on the road still doing various things and I'm nowhere near recovered. It's going to take a long time to get back. So, these exertions, I love them. I love

pushing my body, but, you know, the cycle of high performance is also knowing how to recover, recover well, good nutrition, all that, and it takes a long time. That one took six months and I would imagine this Antarctica recovery is going to take a long time as well. Now, when you say it took six months, are you monitoring your physiological levels? What are you monitoring and how do you find out like where you're at yeah so i started to do a lot of blood work actually early on in my triathlon career i um you know actually early on in my professional triathlon career i mentioned i moved to australia not long after you know turning pro and coming out of the gate with this win and i had the opportunity to go train with some of the best triathletes in the world. It was 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. And I think it's so cool that I'm like training with the best guys. I mean, you know, it'd be like, you know, a guy that just gets into the UFC and all of a sudden he's training with, you know, the top contenders, the title guys. And like I wanted to really roll hard with them. And so I was training super hard to try to keep up with the guys, the best guys. And I had an amazing month and then I completely fell apart because their level of training were true world class level.

And I'm starting out was just too much for me. And so it crashed my entire system. My testosterone dropped to that level of a 90 year old man i mean i was like had no testosterone on my body and you know went through some serious overtraining which as you know like it that's no joke um learned that lesson the hard way and that was one of the you know darkest moments of my athletic career but it's also been a net benefit for me as i've gone you know that was that was back in, you know, 2011 or whatever. And these, these world record projects have been in the last couple of years. And so I learned from that, you know, taking it way too much and not learning how to recover

to implementing things in my, so your question about what did I monitor, you know, resting heart rate is one that I monitored a lot, heart rate variability as well, as well as certain blood levels, of course, around the whole endocrine system the the testosterone levels the you know different hormone levels and things like that so coming back i 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 so when i left antarctica before flying home before you know 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 in your face. That's a whole other like weird Twilight Zone moment. But before I even did that, I flew to Charlotte where their Nutrition Innovation Center

is and did all my blood work. And so, we can have basically this longitudinal study of my blood work to understand it. And 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. So 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? Like what's happening other than the fact that you were at high altitude, low oxygen, like what's taking place? So one of the things that happens at high altitude that you were at high altitude, low oxygen? Like what's taking place? So one of the things that happens at high altitude

that you don't really think about too much, which is your body's not getting, so the air actually has just as much oxygen in it as it does at sea level, but the air is less dense. So that means as you breathe in the air, you're literally getting less oxygen into your blood. It's less dense. It's less dense.

So there's less nitrogen in there? The pressure changes, right? So at the high altitude, it's actually the pressure that's changing. So it's less dense it's less dense so it's less nitrogen the pressure changes right so at the high altitude it's actually the pressure that's changing it's not less oxygen there's just as much oxygen but in a less dense form so in the same volume of breath you're getting less actual o2 into your blood and what are you at the higher altitude i guess it's uh carbon dioxide is that right i'm not a doctor like i said all i know is you're getting less oxygen um you're getting less oxygen in your

body so what ends up happening is your muscles of course need oxygen to perform so normally if i'm in you know when i'm in my most elite physical shape you know i have resting heart rate during a professional triathlon career of like 35 getting out of bed you know 38 low enough that if you weren't a professional athlete you went to a doctor with a heart rate of 35 they'd be like oh my god like you're gonna die there's something wrong with you but like that's also a you know a key marker of you know elite performance you know that of course um but uh what happens is your body can't 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 so you know that's pretty elevated heart rate 24 hours a

day and for in my case for 139 days straight. So essentially you're just, your heart is just like, even at rest. And so what that does to your body in terms of, you know, it throws your hormones around it. Obviously you lose body weight, body fat, body composition changes. All of those things really shift and happen in a pretty intense way. So coming back, like actually just getting your heart rate back down, getting your, you know, a parasympathetic nervous system to just relax and stress-free and all that kind of stuff, it takes a while for sure. So, what do you do to help yourself recover when you come back? Because there's specific

kinds of food that you eat or supplements that you take? You know, I'll start, there's a few different things that I find to work well. One, sleep. I mean, I think that sleep in our culture in general is really underrated. I think, you know, I'll start the few different things that I find to be to work well. One sleep. I mean, I think that sleep in our culture in general is really underrated. I think, you know, if you go in the corporate world and everyone's like, I pulled this all night or I work, you know, 120 hours a week, I, this, I, that, or whatever. Like, you know, I'm telling you a story about pushing through the night and going 32 hours straight. There's a time and a place for big pushes without sleep, but like we are not built to

do that sustainably, um, in any way, shape or form. So in my training, when I'm training for these things, I prioritize sleep. I prioritize taking a nap, the same thing when I'm recovering. So really making sure I get that sleep. It's most for me, the most natural way to recover. On top of that soft tissue work, I'm a huge believer in massage, um, as well as chiropractor. Uh, I've been going to a chiropractor since I was a little kid. And to me, that makes a big difference just to have everything in alignment, everything kind of, you know, working well, efficiently in my body. And then yeah, supplements, you know, definitely reducing inflammation. So for me, gut health is huge. So 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 the nutrition absorbed properly. And I think we all in various states, you know, you deal with that, you know, the standard American diet for sure leads to that for a lot of people. So, getting that nutrition clean and right. So, yeah, sleep, rest, recovery, nutrition. And then, you know, I've definitely been taking a lot of supplements through my life. I err more towards the whole food supplements these days, but I find, you know, things like turmeric that really reduce inflammation and magnesium definitely helps a lot. So there's a few things that I take daily, but really I think sleep and a clean diet will go a long way. I've messed with some cryo before. I find that to be pretty good. I didn't do that a lot, but I've done that in the last couple of years a bit. So various things, but yeah, for yeah for me sleep diet nutrition is is the key to recovery and what kind of foods do you do when you say eating clean

yeah you have like a particular way of eating i'm uh i'm recently uh doing more of a pescatarian diet so i i've mostly cut out meat although that's very i was raised that way my parents have been vegetarians forever um Um, well, I should say pescatarian. So they, they eat some fish. Um, but no, you know, no chicken, no beef, none of that. Um, for me, I've actually, even in Antarctica, there was some, uh, in my freeze dried meals, there was, you know, beef and chicken and stuff like that. So it's not something I've cut out of my diet. Oh, so you brought freeze dried meals as well as bringing those bars? The column bars was the main thing, but every dinner I had one freeze dried meal at the end of the day. That

was an extra thousand calories. So was a company was alpine air but same thing as a mountain house basically um so it's rice noodles mixed with you know chicken or beef but um when i say eating clean i mostly mean just like eating whole food stuff like not eating not eating processed processed crap refined sugars that kind of stuff i mean i'm i'm a normal human being so i'm guilty as of that as anyone from time to time just grabbing the easiest closest thing um but like i said my dad my dad's an organic farmer my mom my stepdad started a chain of natural foods grocery stores when i was a kid so i was really raised around you know 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 dipped a lot more to the mainstream um But, you know, that was what I was raised around and, you know, eating, you know, quinoa, rice, kale, you know, that, those kinds of things, you know, beans, you know, whole food nutrition has gone a long way for me, particularly when I need to recover. Now, do you mess with CBD at all? It's not something I've, I've done a lot of. I hear amazing things. i'm definitely not opposed to it at all uh but i uh i haven't i haven't tried what's your experience been with that i've been experimenting with it for the last couple years it has a pretty profound effect on

alleviating soreness especially joint soreness and uh it also makes you feel good like the the word is that it alleviates anxiety which i don't suffer a lot of but it just makes me feel relaxed did you do you take it orally or do you use it topically i take a like a dropper it's like a dropper i take like whatever they say to take i take like five times more than that yeah do you take it at night like i take it during the morning and i take it at night as well okay i just always feel like i'm running my body at red line and running my brain at red line so much. So whatever they say you need, I just double it for almost everything. And do you feel like, obviously it doesn't have the THC effects of it, but do you feel like in it?

No. No, nothing. No, nothing. Clear headed, clear mind. Yeah. And my THC tolerance is so high. Sure. It doesn't really.

Right. But 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, particularly chronic pain, they experience a lot of relief from thc from just smoking it or vaporizing it or using edibles so i think that the uh the cbd with a little bit of thc might have a better effect a lot of fighters say that sure no i'm interested in trying the cbd for sure something i should definitely try do you find that it gives you like a sustained like is it relief when it's in your body like a masking relief or do you feel like it actually is like

curing the root cause of that inflammation or anxiety I don't think it's masking at all I think it's alleviating the inflammation It's just It's a very healthy thing for your body to eat It's Well you know obviously There's a bunch of different oils

That will alleviate inflammation Sure Different essential fatty acids And fish oils are very good for inflammation I think anything that you can take that helps your body mitigate inflammation. Inflammation seems to be a gigantic problem, not with pain, just with pain, but I think also with anxiety. I 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. They often look like, I 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 a hundred percent i mean yeah i'm i'm interested to try that for sure i'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 like of kind of storing that so actually my body composition feels weird to me right now because my body's like just like trying to figure out where the hell i'm at and i

think a lot of that comes from that chronic inflammation and certainly just those elevated cortisol levels of just being so jacked up and redline like you said just like so wired so finding ways to kind of you know mitigate that i think is is crucial i should try it what what form would you recommend trying the dropper form yeah i like the dry i like it because like there's gel tabs are fine but i think it's unnecessary Your body's absorbing The cover Just go right to the oil I just think it's the best way to do it But I'm a big fan of curcumin And turmeric as well

I think those are really good Have you tried ashwagandha Or any of the mushroom teas I do take this stuff actually That I have right here This wasn't a plant Lion's million mushroom elixir I love this stuff I take this all the time wasn't a plant. Lion's Mane Mushroom Elixir. I love this stuff.

I take this all the time. I make a tea out of this. It's really nice. I'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. Cordyceps is fantastic too for endurance.

Yes, 100%. Yeah, we have an Onnit product called Shroom Tech Sport that has cordyceps, B vitamins and a bunch of adaptogens. It really has a big impact on me in terms of how hard I can push in the gym.

I take it about an hour or so before I work out. Let your body absorb it. It just really has a real effect. It doesn't give me a jittery thing either. It just gives me more energy Just kind of take it An hour before Kind of primes your body

For that More oxygen uptake Is that kind of The idea behind cordyceps That's what I've been told Yeah It came out of High altitude herders

They noticed that Oh really Yeah When the cattle Were eating certain mushrooms They had more energy Huh And so then

That's how they started Experimenting with this stuff. They actually grow it on caterpillars. What? Yeah. How does that work? So strange, man. See if you can find it.

Cordyceps mushrooms grown on caterpillars. I'm picturing like this room of caterpillars with like carrying around mushrooms on their back or something like that. It's real freaky. It's real freaky. But apparently the way they farm it, that's the way they farm it. They actually grow it on caterpillars. Huh. That's fascinating.aky. It's real freaky. But apparently the way they farm it, that's the way they farm it. They actually grow it on caterpillars. Huh.

That's fascinating. Yeah. Fucking weird. It's expensive shit. Yeah. But like, there it is. Oh, wow. Like how fucking strange. So those, at the bottom there, that's the caterpillars and there's a mushroom growing

out of their heads or something like that. I'm like, thank you. I'll take that. And they snip that shit off the caterpillars. Holy shit. That's crazy. Fucking weird, man. Yeah. Well, apparently it works. Well, it does. Yeah. that and they snip that shit off the caterpillars holy shit that's crazy fucking weird man yeah well apparently it works well it does yeah it's you know there's so many benefits i 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 and different mushrooms and how many different nutritional benefits you can derive from them. I mean, I can't agree more. Just the whole food nutrition from many different levels, whether it's mushrooms, turmeric, these are full plant derivatives. I mean, to me, they go a long way in their pure form for sure.

Yeah. What about, what do you drink? Do you drink a lot of water? Do you drink fruit juices, vegetable juices um mostly mostly water to be perfectly honest um i do usually start the day with um a smoothie of some kind so usually it's got it's got fruit in it um obviously fruit another thing i put in there is i've been using this stuff that uh it's actually the company standard process is just coming out with it, but they let me try it ahead of time. It's a slow release glucose.

So it's a protein powder, but instead of giving you that glucose spike like you would from a refined sugar or something like that, it's kind of a long burn, long chain glucose. I don't know the full chemistry of that, but I find it makes a big difference. Rather than kind of just getting that sugar spike early in the day, it actually of gives a slow release of energy and i was using that was actually in the column bars as well and i really like that particularly for endurance because you know if you start like taking the the goo packets or something like that you get that spike of 100 calories you get that like quick like boom burst of energy replies replenishes your glucose source but this i feel like just is a much slower cleaner burn um and it lasts longer for definitely you knowobic stuff, maybe you need that more explosive power, whatever, different things for that. But for some of the low heart rate, zone one, zone two, 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.

Now, what scares me about people like you is how old are you now? 33. Okay, you're very young. I'll take that. This is what i'm worried i'm worried that you've already done so much crazy shit that you have to push past the crazy shit you've already done and you've already been on everest it sounds like you were kind of like you weren't on death's door, but you opened the front gate. Yeah. You opened the front gate.

You were on the lawn. Yeah. Yeah. You were on death's lawn. Sure. You know? No, absolutely. I mean, like I said, the people were literally died that day.

You know, it's an interesting question. What are you going to try to do next? This is the question. Like, do you have some crazy shit in your head right now? You're like, okay, now I'm going to the moon with a fucking balloon. You know, it's funny. It's twofold. It's an interesting intersection i appreciate that that you call me call me young i'll take that all day long i'm 51 so you are young to me but i guess in terms of in athlete

terms right you know you're in the you're in the peak yeah the peak for endurance athletes and it's fun to be here but i also think it's a moment in time where uh a little bit of a little bit, I'll say, I won't give myself too much credit, but a little bit of wisdom meets also athletic performance. A moment in time where I've had enough experience, enough setbacks, ups and downs, and success, of course, with the world records and things I have, but to really take stock of what's important to me. And what I've realized more and more is I'm super curious about pushing the limits of my own potential. A hundred percent. We've talked about that. I love that. But I actually don't think of myself so potential. A hundred percent. We've talked about that. I love that, but I actually don't think of myself so much as a risk taker or an adrenaline

junkie. When I get serious, I'm not just bolstering. Like I really, when I think about it, like these things are, are really methodical. They're sought out,

you know, they're, they're practiced. They're, they're in, and not to say there's not risk. You saw me trying to set up my tent. That tent flies away.

Like I'm screwed. Like I'm in a bad way. Um, what would you do? Would you run after it? I mean, you know, no chance you're catching trying to set up my tent that tent flies away like i'm screwed like i'm in a bad way um what would you do would you run after it i mean you know no chance you're catching up to that thing that thing is gone um yeah you know you hit that you hit the ejector button on the call the plane i hope they can find you type of thing and even that's like in a storm like that unlikely they're gonna get there but for me what i'm honestly most excited about next um yes i have some other projects that i'm marinating in my mind do i have other

expeditions sure i haven't i haven't, they're not fully crystallized enough to announce right here, unfortunately, but you know, I've got some ideas, but more so like I'm excited about, you know, sharing what I've learned. Like I said, that wisdom meets high performance of actually having an ability. Now, like I said, when I started this, I had, you know, my friends following me on Instagram and now I'm starting to have ability to share this story. People are asking for me to, you know, take interviews. I'm writing a book right now. Lots of my learnings going into that kind of stuff of really, really having an ability to pass this on. Cause for me, as fun as it is for me to push my own limits, like I, what really

inspires me, what really fires me up is when, 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 like, I've gone every single day since then, or I'm trail running now. Or like I started that man, I watched you cross Antarctica. I haven't been to the gym in five years. And like, I've gone every single day since then. Or I'm trail running now. Or like, I started that business. I never said I was going to start or whatever. And so having an ability to have a moment in time when I can share some of my learnings, you know, with the world and meaningful different contents, that really excites me.

You know, I love the opportunity to do that. But man, like for sure, there's some other events on the horizon as well. But yeah, it's not just about one-upping the next thing. I 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. Well, it sounds like you've already broken world records you've you you you're in this weird place where you've accomplished so much that in order to accomplish other things they if you're going to take it to the next level it really has to be truly life-threatening do you have any recommendations do you want to come on the next one with me now say i'm moving to the next stage of life that doesn't involve risking your life i don't know you seem like a nice guy i don't want anything to happen to you okay give me give me some wisdom you've got a couple almost a couple decades on me if you if

you were whispering in the ear of your 33 year old self how about this you know you've you've had an interesting path if you're 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 well 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 but the problem with what you're doing and it's not a problem but in in this context is that you're pushing these incredible endurance records in nature, and particularly in cold weather. And this is, what's stunning about these things is that you're risking your life.

It's not that it's just difficult. Like, running in ultramarathon is incredibly difficult, right? For sure. But what you're doing is not just incredibly difficult. You're doing it in these incredibly harsh environments and particularly in antarctica you don't have any relief there's nothing no one's going to help you like you said your tent blows away like you might very well be fucked yes right very much i don't know you are yeah right well i don't know what you could do that would one-up that this is the problem is like your your one-up margin of error is you're in this very strange sort of stratosphere yeah of one-upitude maybe

maybe it's um you know we take a page out of the bruce springsteen glory days song and just you know kick my kick my feet up and talk about the glory days for the rest of the time well you don't have to do that but the thing is i mean don't listen to me man do whatever you want to do obviously you're going to you're not going to listen to me but you could do you could apply this sort of mental fortitude that you've demonstrated and this ability to push through things you could apply it to anything yeah it doesn't have to be these physical feats of risking death and in frigid cold temperatures in the middle of the fucking nowhere or literally at the bottom of the planet earth yeah i know and that's to me that's actually that's why it's exciting because for me yes are

there some other physical expressions that i want to have in the world for sure and i have some ideas like i said but and it's not necessarily trying to one-up the next thing but it's also why it's exciting to me the lessons that i try to learn that i try to share with other people like you said are universal lessons but they also if i revert them back to my own self are also universal lessons in my own life so like you said it's like hey like what's the next thing i'm super passionate about if you i have the confidence to sit with a whiteboard with no money no resources no background an incredibly supportive fiance at the time, now wife, who's like down to like ride or die with me and go into this with me. Like, and we created what we did. We did something that people literally wrote about and said, this is impossible. People have died trying this. You can't do this. And we've achieved

it. It gives me confidence. Not that I can do some other crazy physical thing, but it gives me confidence. Like, cool. Like I want to start a, I want to start a business that makes millions of dollars. Like, cool. Like let's figure out how, I want to start a business that makes millions of dollars. Like, cool. Like, let's figure out how to do that. Let's, let's do the equivalent of writing into Google. What's the difference between PR and marketing, you know, like, let's do that. So, you know, as I, as I, you know, do a ton of public speaking now, write this book, the things, other things that I'm doing, that's super fun to share those with the world. So I'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. But it also goes to now I get to have the fun of applying

those in all of those other different ways of my life. And so, you 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. It's very easy to put me in that box. It's very easy to say like, cool, so you climb mountains, you're a mountain climber. It's but four years ago i'd never really climb mountains but i happen to do something mountains well i've never been in the polar region that's why this british guy was looking at me like oh ha ha ha young boy i've spent all this time in antarctica you'll never survive this and like not only just survive it but like i finished first like i beat him but how many days did you beat him by two and a half days

but like i'm not sitting here going like you know i'm fascinated by antarctica would i like to go back someday absolutely but i'm not like colin brady the polar explorer only you know it's like what else can i explore that actually presses me i mean i love to learn i love to learn about the mind explore that um there's so many different ways to express that that i'm just excited about the future and holds in lots of different verticals well listen i think you could fucking do anything i think it's very clear what you've already accomplished you could literally do anything you want but i want to i want to see you live yeah me too what about how about this how about you break some crazy uh endurance running

feats how about that like break some ultra marathon feet it feels a little bit safer yes yes the worst thing's gonna happen you get really fucking tired but but you could live maybe maybe the next thing is i mean maybe i'm not the funniest guy in the world but what do you think about comedy i mean i know that's a big piece you know should i get back out there on the stage listen if you can communicate and you can make people laugh you can make a group of people laugh you could do stand-up comedy it's just a matter of taking steps and figuring it out and writing stuff out and i mean you've got a lot of fucking stories for sure you know i mean just how about getting on stage in front of people and telling people that you're the first person to cross antarctica on foot 52 days like what in the fuck i do a lot of that i

enjoy that i love public speaking i do a lot of that corporations kids everything but that's too easy well trust me I do it You could do that It's fun No I have to say I gotta give a shout out You definitely don't remember this

But I actually have met you Once before About seven years ago In a tiny little comedy club You did a bit Out in Portland A small little venue I'm sure you do

Way bigger venues now Is that Helium It's called like Helium Yeah exactly Yeah that place is great And at the time It was funny

I was thinking about it When I was driving over. I was like, what was this bit? And you were doing this bit about, hey there, Delilah. Oh, damn, that's a long time ago. Wow. That's what I most remember. But 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. You remember this guy named Mike Pierce who fought in this? Yeah, sure, yeah. Local guy. He's a Portland guy too, right? Yeah, Portland guy as well. And so I didn't know a lot about MMA. I still certainly am not as well-versed as you are.

But I got in this gym. My coach was like, hey, you're going to start training with these MMA guys. And I was like, you know, what? Like, I'm a skinny little triathlete. These guys are like, you know, brawlers. But I was, man, what does I impress? Like, talk about a multi-sport, a true multi-sport, true multi sport right like all the different disciplines i don't have to tell you this obviously but i was blown away by how strong they were became good buddies and mike said to me he was

like hey man i'm going to this comedy show this guy named joe rogan's gonna be doing his comedy come uh listen to him so uh you know you made me laugh back then so uh mad respect and uh yeah it was a fun fun to see into that world a little bit well thanks man i guarantee you could do that but but if you still want to do endurance things like please do something where you're not going to die that's all that's just my request you know i've made it back here safe and sound so yeah the goal i mean like i said the goal is not to keep one up in myself right i mean i think that's uh but is that part of the danger of this kind of endeavor because you you really have one upped i mean? Because you really have one-upped. I mean, you've done some crazy one-upping, man.

For sure. Like 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, their whole identity disappears with the feat of athleticism. I 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 basketball players in the world, MVP. But he's already thinking about all the various things that he's doing, you know, in his life. And 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, you know, venture investment in this company or like they're growing this watermelon, you know, water brand or they're this or that. And so I think sports, particularly with the growth of social media, with storytelling,

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, or that's with storytelling that actually reaches, you know, universal truths with people. You know, I've got, you know, a single mother from Nebraska reaching out to me and saying like, hey, I don't care about mountains or the outdoors, but like I'm going through some hard stuff, like in the middle of the country, being a single mother and your story connects with me. Thank you for giving me the inspiration to keep pushing forward. So for me, it 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. So that's where my mind's at next. It 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. Well, that's awesome, man. And whatever your plans are, I have 100% confidence in you. You're an inspiration, man. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, brother. Really appreciate awesome, man. And whatever your plans are, I have a hundred percent confidence in you. You're an inspiration, man. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks brother. Really appreciate it, man. And tell everybody your Instagram, how to get ahold of you on social media. Yeah. Follow along. It's just my name at Colin O'Brady. Also my website is just my name,

colinobrady.com. Got a list on there. Like I said, I'm working on a book. There's lots of juicy details that I haven't shared yet so if you're interested in that you know pop your email address in there we'll keep you posted when that comes out next year but at calling brady or calling brady.com come uh come say hi beautiful thank you yeah Thank you.