Colin O'Brady - Walking On Ice: The Solo Trek Of Antarctica

Full transcript: Colin O’Brady on London Real

3:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Colin O’Brady, the American professional endurance athlete, motivational speaker and adventurer. You set two all-time records in the Explorers Grand Slam, which saw you climb the seven highest mountain peaks on each of the seven continents, as well as trekking to both the North and South Pole in a record 139 days. Last year you completed the impossible first expedition, becoming the first man in history to cross Antarctica solo and unaided.

4:07 The journey took fifty-four days and covered nine hundred and twenty-three miles of blinding snow, and temperatures as low as minus eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Colin, welcome to London Real. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Great to have you.

4:19 Before we get started, what’s it like being in London? How does this compare to all the crazy places you’ve been? You know, I love London. It’s been a few years since I’ve been here, but I was here for the London Olympics. Was my last time in London, which was a treat.

4:31 I’ve been a big fan of the Olympics since I was a little kid, so it was fun to see it here. I was racing triathlon professionally at that time, and so seeing some of my countrymen racing the London triathlon, Hyde Park, was amazing. And yeah, I love London. It’s a great place. And you just got back from Scotland, yeah, climbing up in the Highlands.

4:49 What’s that like, because you climbed all around the world? Yes, I, I climbed, I’ve never stood at the summit of the tallest mountain in all of the UK. I’m told four thousand three hundred and ten feet, so, you know, lower than the city of Denver, but so it’s not exactly a huge peak. But no, it’s a UK’s beautiful country. Certainly Scotland and the Highlands is beautiful, albeit very rainy and kind of miserable, dreary at times.

5:13 It was enjoyable for sure. Do you feel like you kind of connect with the land when you do a climb like that? I mean, you get a feel for kind of the place or the space or the people when you go climb in different places? All right, yeah. You know, for me, I love being outside, and, you know, exploring nature and the outdoors.

5:29 For me, obviously some of my more, you know, bigger expeditions, to, you know, Everest or Denali, or, you know, crossing Antarctica, or, you know, big epic adventures that I’ve done, are amazing, but I also love, you know, just wherever I am, being outside and exploring the natural landscape. So of course, you know, Ben Nevis, Scotland, is more or less a day hike, but it’s beautiful to be out there and experience the countryside and see, you know, the natural landscape of any place. I love to do that no matter where I am, right?

5:54 And everything is a little different, right? There’s absolutely. It kind of feels different, looks different. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I was having Snowdon a couple weeks ago, which is like Wales but not far, and it was, it was, yeah, it was really interesting being up there.

6:05 Like, in there, I had never been to Wales. I’d never been to a high mountain, yeah, UK, because there’s not many. Yeah, uh-huh. But it was good. I felt like I’m a little more connected to this island.

6:13 Yeah, so fantastic. You know, I want to talk about these adventures, but I heard you say something that I wanted to talk about first, and that’s the fact that for you these aren’t necessarily athletic endeavors, but this is more of an art form for you, and more of a way for you to tell a story, and I thought that was really interesting. And I was wondering if you can kind of expand. Have you always had that philosophy when it came to some of your physical feats, or is it something that evolved over time?

6:39 It’s been an evolution for me. You know, I’ve been a professional athlete for a number of years, and, you know, all growing up I was a swimmer, and ultimately a collegiate swimmer in the United States, you know, nationally ranked athlete, professional triathlete, now these two world records and the outdoors. And, you know, for many, many years, while I lived most of my life, I think I’ve identified myself as an athlete, a professional athlete, or an elite athlete, or whatever you want to call that.

7:01 And it was a few years ago that I kind of had a bit of a mindset shift, ultimately, that kind of moment in time, least I can place it in a moment, would be actually at Burning Man, which I imagine you’re familiar with. I haven’t been, but highly recommend going. You know, Burning Man, you know, big art festival in the desert of Nevada, all sorts of different, you know, things on display out there, but at its core, it’s really about art and art installations.

7:25 And for me, I, you know, never thought of myself as a creative. I always thought, you know, I thought it’s appreciated art, but wasn’t like the biggest fan. I think art, something you hang on your wall and you look at, no, that’s nice, or whatever, but it wasn’t, you know, deeply fascinated by art. And I guess the way that I framed it in my mind at that moment, plus in school, you’re usually the athlete or the scientist. Exactly, the artist.

7:46 Exactly. So I was athlete, and then, you know, I studied economics. Oh, it’s kind of more business driven, you know. This kind of, didn’t, you know, the word art didn’t exactly, not that had anything against it, just in how I personally identified. And you know, being out in the desert and seeing, basically, at Burning Man, there’s all these huge art installations, you know, basically these big art pieces, sculptures and things, but they’re meant to be interacted with.

8:07 You’re actually about to, you know, play on them or climb on them or swing from them, not just sit there and view them. And they’re also ephemeral, in the sense that most of them at the end of the week are burnt to the ground, and so there’s, you know, people may have spent all year, or years, to manure on this big piece, to have it there for a week, and then it just kind of, it just disappears. And there was something about my experience being there, I’m looking at this art, these art pieces, that I realize, like, what I’m doing in the world by doing these expeditions is my own personal creative artistic expression, and I started thinking of myself more as an artist.

8:40 And yes, my canvas happens to be endurance sports or breaking world records in the outdoors, of what that is, but through storytelling, and ultimately the ripple effect of positivity and inspiration that can be you know, raised from that storytelling, that is ultimately the art. And so it, for me, it has become less and less about being the man in the arena, like, hey, watch me break this world record because I’m awesome. Like, I mean, that’s really pretty simple, and I don’t, could care less about that.

9:05 It’s like, hey, I’m curious about pushing the limits of human potential and interesting in unique ways, and I share that with the world, not so I can get a pat on the back or have my name in the newspaper or something like that, but it’s so that other people can watch that and take that into their own lives. So my best piece of feedback that I received from people, that, you know, writes me on Instagram or sends me notes or emails or whatever it is, it’s not like, wow, calling your world record project in Antarctica was extraordinary, people said it wasn’t impossible, and you did this amazing thing. It’s, I watched that every single day through your social media, and now I’m starting that business that I always thought I couldn’t start, or I’m taking this leap of faith in my relationship and diving in deeper with love, or, you know, I’m, you know, creating, you know, whatever that is, where I’m going through this incredibly hard time, my mother was just diagnosed with cancer, and I’m really struggling, but you’ve given me the strength to persevere in the face of really, you know, tough tragedy in my personal life, or whatever it is that to me is what, you know, I try to put out in the world, and ultimately what I think we can all do as humans by sharing our stories and having that sort of resonant positivity.

10:02 And so for me, because of that, I’ve reframed what I do, you know, to be more of an artist than just a pure athlete, right? Which means the story is as important as the feat, to a certain extent. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it’s the, the way in which we can share and learn from one another. You know, certainly my, you know, athletic accomplishments, you know, what I just did in Antarctica, you know, the first person across Antarctica solo, unsupported and unaided.

10:28 You know, the first word, and that is solo, you know, alone. I was out there alone in Antarctica for a thousand miles pulling a 375- pound sled. Many people have attempted that over time. No one had been successful in, I did it, but the word solo in some sense is a misnomer, because, yes, I was completely solo. It wasn’t aided by anybody else, but me being there, there was, you know, an addition of all of these different experiences and inspirations and other people’s stories that I had, you know, brought to inside of myself to be there.

10:57 Instead of your point about sort of the story is great, and the feat is like, yes, like, I’m a component of all of the other people’s stories that came before me. I have great deference and reverence for, you know, the hundred years of history in polar exploration. And I know I’ve written some things that I posted, and, you know, on Instagram and stuff like that, called “standing on the shoulders of giants,” which is people like, wow, you finally cracked this impossible code and you made this crossing of Antarctica, and I was like, yes, I did, but I did so because of the people that came before me and their attempts, and their daring, and, you know, just these extraordinary things that people have done.

11:32 And so I think that that’s true of wherever you are, whatever sort of your medium is in life, that you’ve learned from others, you’ve been inspired from others along the way, and as humans, I think we almost have a responsibility to share our stories, not again so we can beat our chest and say, hey, look at me, but for the opposite, which is you never know the impact you’re having in a positive way on others and there, other, you know, other people’s growth, because that’s certainly been my path, and observing others and learning from other people. Yeah, and we really connect to stories. So I know when you talk about your story, and I want to hear about it, but, you know, that when you got dropped there the first time on Antarctica, the first hour was like a shock to you.

12:06 Yeah, and when you tell that story to people, they get drawn in, right? Because if you just said, yeah, I did it, it was awesome, I’m great, it was easy, right? Then honestly, it’s less interesting to another human being. But if we can actually go through the whole process of what it was like in your mind, and what the struggle was like, and what we can take from it, then it becomes something useful, right? 100 percent.

12:24 Yeah, and I think you know, probably goes back, you know, I don’t know the full psychology, but, you know, thousands of years, not tens of thousands of years, and the caveman and the way that we interacted, you know, I think probably is deep in our DNA through storytelling and oral history and things like that. I think that, you know, I, I always mentioned the Olympics. Before, you know, I love the Olympics and always have, when I was a kid, but of course I don’t, you know, know everything about every Olympic sport, like, you know, fencing or curling or, you know, Greco-Roman wrestling or something like that, but I think that a lot of the Olympic coverage on television, at least when I was a kid up until now, does a great job of captivating it through storytelling.

13:00 So it’s one thing if I was to show, like, this is the Olympic final of the fencing competition I don’t know anything about, and be like, cool, that guy wants a gold medal. I guess, I don’t know other rules. I don’t know how this, right? But if, you know, NBC puts up a, right before that comes on, this five-minute story, this back story of, like, here’s this guy from this rural village in Romania, and this is what he did, the struggle to go through of getting there, and here’s his family, and there’s things he overcame, and all this sort of stuff.

13:23 As a human, now I’m engaged in the human elements of this, and so when he’s out there with his sword, I’m like, I don’t know what he’s doing, but, like, I’m cheering on the edge of my seat, cheering for this guy, because I’m connected through the story of the personal struggle, or the personal sort of journey, to get to that moment of glory on the Olympics. And so to me, that’s just one tiny example. It’s a million examples like that, but the power of storytelling to engage the heart and soul of the audience.

13:49 Yeah, yeah, it’s so powerful. I’m thinking of a beautiful friend of ours, Rich Roll, and, you know, people ask Rich, and he did the Ultraman in Hawaii, and then did you know, the five Iron Men in five islands, but you ask him, and he’s like, I came in fifth. He’s like, I’m not this great athlete, but people love him ’cause he’s got the story. You know, he was an alcoholic, and he came back, and then he changed his diet, and then in his 40s he became this guy.

14:11 And it’s the story. It’s actually not the accomplishment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it’s also the vessel for delivering that. I mean, I, I love Rich.

14:20 He’s a dear friend of mine, but on his podcast a few times, and just, I was with him last week. We’re doing this event called 2029, where you climb the ski mountain. We can talk more about that, but it’s a cool event that I put on. But, you know, he, he is such an extraordinary human being. His story is amazing, and his way of actually sharing that story, in such a humble and positive way with the world, is amazing, and that’s why you’re drawn to him.

14:47 And the guy that came in maybe fourth place, ahead of him, or third place ahead of him, you know, might not have that sort of, sort of, same sort of captivating resonance or energy. And I think it’s a, you know, Rich’s honest, as well, as well, is also very humble in the way that he shares that his accomplishments are extraordinary. What he’s done as an athlete is amazing, but you know, he’s also the first to point out, like, hey, I’m not the best in the world at the thing that I do, but his story of getting there, and what he went through and overcame, certainly through alcoholism, and you know, changing his diet and plant-based diet, and her spiritual growth, and all that, is really, really captivating, and it’s told in a way that seems extraordinary.

15:21 Yeah, and he’s a great writer, so when he tells the story, it connects. If he doesn’t tell you that, then you would never know. So important. You know, you talk about this journey, and I want to talk about it, obviously, going across Antarctica, but you also talk a lot about the journey into your mind. Yeah, because, of course, your soul.

15:38 Oh, so I guess we would expect that, but you’re also, I mean, your whole life has been about going into your mind, and I think I was surprised a bit once I know more about you, and maybe people are surprised when they find out that what you do is very cerebral as opposed to physical. You know, I think that there’s, interesting, you know, we have these archetypes in our mind of, you know, the world-class athlete, and, you know, whether it’s true or not, and I think that’s probably not true in a lot of cases, but we think of, like, you know, the biggest, strongest guy in the room, maybe a lot of sort of masculine energy, of, like, machismo. It’s like, you’re a badass, and you went out there, you know, pulled a sled 375 miles, like, you must be super hardcore.

16:17 And oftentimes when people meet me, it’s funny, I get some responses, and it’s like they’re trying, they’re trying to figure out a way to say this nicely. They’re like, you’re like a normal height, normal build, relatively soft-spoken, like, you know, they’re trying to, like, they’re trying to say, like, you’re not the meathead that I expected you might be, basically. And I think that ultimately, to crack this challenge, which, yes, it is extraordinarily physically demanding, to be able to pull a 375-pound sled consecutively over a thousand miles in the harshest climate in the world, like, obviously takes some intense physical capacity, but there’s no way you’re doing that without mastering the mind.

16:58 Because what’s so challenging about Antarctica is, yes, it’s solid tundra. You’ve also got 24 hours of daylight, so it’s daylight there. There’s nothing living out there, so on the interior of Antarctica you’ve got no wildlife, no trees, no even bacteria living out there. It’s just an endless white desert. It’s actually a desert, people don’t think of an article that way, but it’s actually the largest desert in the world, and with the 24 hours of daylight, you either got all this expansive, wait, that’s endless, or most of the time you’ve got high winds and snow blowing around, so you’ve got this really interior experience, where you’ve got, you know, 50, 60 mile-per-hour winds, minus 80 degree wind chill, and you’re out there alone with nothing to see and no light, even changing the horizon.

17:36 So where does your mind go when it’s just blank, empty white spaces for 54 days? Yes, do you need to be physically capable to pull that sled? Absolutely, but most people, if they didn’t, you know, if I say the most important muscle that any of us has is the six inches between our ears, and if we don’t flex and develop that, then none of the rest matters, and that’s certainly true for something like this Antarctica project, where ultimately, yes, I had to have the physical tools, but the mental, if the mental broke down at any point out there, and it’s game over, right?

18:03 So how do you mentally prepare for something like that? You know, for me, it’s not like I had this Antarctica project, you know, circled on my life bucket list calendar for decades. You know, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a few years, and certainly spent, you know, a good year, you know, so planning, you know, and the build-up to it. You know, I did it this past year, so I spent all of 2018 practicing up towards it. But before that, you know, Vipassana meditation is something that’s actually been a huge part for me.

18:31 So I was a professional triathlete in between 2009 and 2015, and early in my triathlon career a friend of mine, his wife was came to watch me race at Rafa Long’s Turkish when my name a che, and she comes up to me after the race, and she says, you know, I’m not a sports fan at all. I’m only here because Zack wanted me to come see your race, and I’m like, oh, okay, and I’m just getting to know her at the time, and she’s like, but I see that clearly, all of you professional athletes, it’s such a mental struggle out here. As you guys are swimming and biking and running, you know, the best athletes in the world, and endurance sports really competing head-to-head, it’s just this mental intense struggling.

19:08 Like, I can see that on your faces. She just asked me, like, point-blank, so what are you doing to develop your mind? And I gave her some kind of, like, rudimentary answer, like, oh, well, you know, like, I’ve done some visualization stuff, and I you know, I, you know, my work on mental toughness in my training, whatever. Sick. No, but, like, really, like, what are you doing?

19:25 Like, what is your actual discipline practice for doing that? And I didn’t have a good answer, and I was like, I was kind of embarrassed, and she was like, I was like, well, do you have a recommendation? And she was like, you know, I would recommend this, the Vipassana, that I’ve been doing for years. I was like, great, tell me about it. Like, what do I do?

19:42 And she was like, there’s these ten-day silent meditation retreats, you know, it’s ten days. You go, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, you know, you meditate for 12 plus hours a day, and the rest of the time you’re basically in complete isolation. She’s like, it’s extraordinarily hard, but it teaches you the methodology for taking that into your daily life and actually practicing how to develop your mind and your self-awareness of your body. And I’d never meditated a minute before in my life.

20:07 You know, I was raised in a, you know, very sort of liberal environment. I was born in a hippie commune, at home, with Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” playing on repeat, so I was open to these sort of ideas, but I just had never really practiced that in any meaningful way. And I said, great, this offseason I’m going. And so the end of that year, when I, not a few weeks’ break from training my body and racing, I went and did my first ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat.

20:29 And, you know, the first couple hours, you were sitting, I wouldn’t like, what have I got myself into? But ultimately, although very challenging, was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, and taught me so much, and it’s something that I’ve now gone back and done repeatedly, you know, several times. I’d try to go back, you know, every year, if I can, or every other year, but more than anything, the ten-day deep dive is immersive, and the experience of itself, of those 10 days, is really profound, but what it teaches you is how to incorporate that into your daily life.

20:58 And I think that when we think about mental preparation, at least from my point of view, you know, it’s very easy to be like, I need to get stronger, upper body, so I should do bicep curls and bench press, and I should go to the gym. That’s a very common understanding. I want to get stronger, I should work out, but we think, I want to have a stronger mind, but then for some reason there’s this disconnect of, like, great, so you need to work on that every single day, the same way you would, I’m working on any other type of muscles.

21:21 So for me, it has been the Vipassana, a deep immersion of that, and then taking that into a daily practice. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Vipassana, although I would highly recommend it. It’s completely free to go. I recommend it to anybody out there. There’s 275 centers around the world.

21:34 You can find one near you, but whether it’s that or something else, mental toughness, mental acuity, mental strength, grows from actually taking intentional practice towards building that. So, like I said, the six inches between the ears, if you want to develop this muscle, you actually have to build it in the gym, effectively, the gym in some capacity, intentionally, the same way you would if you were trying to get, you know, your upper body stronger, or whatnot. And I think that is a piece that oftentimes people miss.

22:02 Can you tell us, what are some of those struggles were on the ten days? Yeah, and I’m like, what, what was some of the, you know, I think there’s a couple pieces in the Vipassana I think are really challenging. You know, obviously the solitude. It’s something, you know, that was my first ten days, was my first experience. You start going back through your life and you’re going, have I ever spent a whole day since I’ve been able to speak not speaking?

22:25 And for most people the answer is no. Like, well, what context would that exist in? You know, maybe you have some days where you spent most of the time by yourself, but you probably spoke to somebody, you picked up the phone, or whatever. So just that is disorienting. That just breaks your normal structure.

22:39 But I think the biggest challenge, which I didn’t really anticipate at the time, but it’s also probably giving me the best results in terms of, sort of, I guess, athletic stuff. Although the athletic piece of this, interestingly enough, I went there to become more mentally strong so that my athletic, you know, pursuits can be greater, and that has certainly been a byproduct, but there’s probably ten other things more valuable than just in my interpersonal life, and things that are even more valuable than the games there, but the gains there have been significant, but the thing that I think is the most challenging is actually how hard it is to sit still. And so the way that the Vipassana, of course, is structured, basically there are specific times when you’re meditating in the hall with other people, though you’re not talking to anybody.

23:19 Everyone’s there at the same time, and there’s times when you’re meditating kind of in your own, you know, a room or a very small basic room with a mattress, and basically on your own a little bit. But in the times in the hall, there’s these three one-hour periods per day, which I call the sittings of strong determination. And so what you do is you sit down, you know, on the floor, on a meditation pillow, and you can, like, you know, put something under your knees, you can, you know, kind of get, you know, whatever comfortable position you might start in, and you sit there, and basically the one hour starts with a little bit of chanting, and then it’s dead silent, and little chanting, we’ll start at the end of the hour.

23:55 And what’s explicitly told to you is the only thing you can do right now is you cannot change your posture from where you started, which seems simple. I can start in a comfortable position, like, I should be fine, but I don’t care how comfortable position you start in, you don’t move and change your posture at all for an hour. You’re gonna start feeling pretty intense sensations on your body. Like, before you know it, you’re like, oh my God, my knee hurts because I’m sitting cross-legged, my back hurts, or my neck hurts, or whatever that is.

24:21 And the sitting of strong determination, what you’re supposed to do is observe the sensation on the body objectively, to go, like, normally, like, you’re like, okay, my knee hurts, and what we do in our brain is go, my knee hurts, I should move my leg. That’s the initial, like, thought, and the obvious, not trying to injure yourself, you’re actually in yourself, stop. But like your knee hurts, but what the meditation practice teaches you within the stillness is to sit there and just observe it and go, oh, I’m feeling the sensation of pain, but do I have to let that become suffering?

24:51 You know, the pain is mandatory, but I say the suffering is optional. You don’t actually have to equate that to negativity, and then rising anxiety, and then fear, and what if the pain never goes away, and all the things that you can put a fear loop in your brain, right? You can sit there and just go, oh, I’m feeling a sensation of pain in my knee, and if you sit there long enough, what’s crazy, what the meditation practice teaches you is it goes away. It’s ephemeral.

25:14 And one of the great mantras, which is, of course, like, you know, well used in all sorts of Buddhist meditation is “this too shall pass.” This too shall pass, and as you observe that sensation on the body coming and going, you realize you don’t have to put so much attention or focus into the negativity or the positivity. The same thing happens in the meditation practice. Actually, you get into this beautiful flow. Sensations, there’s times when there’s sort of a beautiful, kind of euphoric, you know, at-peace moment, and the other thing is to observe that and go, “this too shall pass, this too shall pass.”

25:48 So remember, the pain in the knee or the back is the same as the euphoric feeling, and this too shall pass. That part is exceptionally challenging, but then you apply that to day-to-day life, which is, you know, say you’re starting a business, and, you know, being an entrepreneur is super hard, right? Like, all of a sudden you’ve got, you know, all these different things you’re accountable for. You’re trying to make payroll, you know, this person, this funding is not coming in, all things are stacking up.

26:09 You feel like you’re in the middle of the eye of the storm, and if in that moment you can say to yourself, this is intense, this is super hard, I need to keep plugging forward one step at a time, but this too shall pass. It’s the same thing, like remembering that whatever moment we are in our life, it’s ultimately temporary, because our fear is often, this is gonna last forever, this struggle, this strain, this pain, this, this, oh my God, or it’s the same thing, like you’re running in a marathon or you’re climbing a mountain and you’re completely exhausted. It’s easy to be like, maybe I should quit.

26:43 Buttons, then you go like, if I just keep running, like, I’m gonna finish this race, and then it’s gonna be over, and I’m gonna be sitting at my house with my feet up, and I’m gonna feel a lot more satisfied giving it my all right now than having given up, because this feels like it’s gonna last forever, and my heart rate’s going to be 200 forever. I’m never going to, you know, it’s like it’s gonna pass. Like, you can get through it. So I think that’s been probably one of the more powerful takeaways for me.

27:04 And did that help your triathlon training afterwards, by having some of that knowledge? Absolutely. I mean, absolutely, it’s helping my triathlon training. It certainly helped in other pieces of, you know, intense moments, like, you know, my Seven Summits world record project, you know, I’m climbing Everest, I’m stuck out in a massive storm, I’m getting beat up out there, all this kind of stuff, or, you know, when I’m crossing Antarctica, there were some storms that lasted eight, nine, ten days.

27:28 And when I say, you know, lasted, I’m saying, for me to survive out there, I would have run out of food if I stopped. So I couldn’t take any days off. I’m pulling this through a 75-pound sled. It’s getting slightly lighter as I go, and I eat my food, but it’s still extraordinarily heavy as I go. And, you know, I’m pulling a sled 12 plus hours per day, that’s the minimum.

27:46 I also have five hours of chores on either side of that, so setting up my tent, melting water, eating food, all these different things. So it’s 17-hour days, basically, and I can’t take a day off. If I take a day off, I’m gonna run out of food. I actually was down to my last bite a few seconds before I finished, as it was, without taking any days off. And so you wake up, 50, 60 mile-per-hour winds are blowing outside of your tent.

28:06 It’s gonna basically knock you over, you know, minus 80 degree wind chill. You can get frostbitten in minutes if you have any exposed skin, and you’re telling yourself, like, I have to go out in that for the next 12 hours, but if you can tell yourself, in your mind, like, this ultimately is temporary. One minute of, if I work, you know, right now, even if I work myself out there right now, because, like, I’ve been inside for a while, and I’m not completely acclimatized to that environment, I’d be like, oh my God, like, I’m gonna die, like, you know, but I got to a place in my mind where I could accept it.

28:37 Like, this is a storm. I am in Antarctica. I have chosen to be here. I knew this was gonna be challenging, and, you know, what, like, this storm will not last forever. No storm does, metaphorically, or, you know, in the real world, like, no storm lasts forever.

28:53 This too shall pass, and that’s been very powerful for me to get through some of my hardest times, as well as, I don’t, I don’t belittle the other side of that, which is big accomplishments. I’ve had mountaintops. I’ve stood on all these types of things. I’ve also remind myself to say in those moments, like, yeah, this too shall pass, and not to not celebrate the moment and be like, so proud and so excited when you accomplish something, but to also realize, like, this moment’s temporary.

29:20 Enjoy the heck out of it, embrace this moment, but realize at some point I’d be, like, ready to get right back into it, back to work, keep moving forward. Yeah, I think a lot of people get to those big peaks in life, and then they realize they’re so fleeting, and that can be really depressing. Totally. Why I tried everything for this, and then now I’m here, and this sucks, right? Oh, it’s probably ’cause, yeah, they’re not taking that in stride as well.

29:41 And that’s the mean. Obviously, it’s a well-worn trope in some regard, but it’s, that’s the point where you realize, like, it’s the journey, it’s not the destination. Like, yes, the completion of the Seven Summits, crossing, you know, what’s amazing, but did I do it all because of the final moment, when I took the final step, and, like, I’m the first person in history to cross Antarctica solo, unsupported, unassisted? No. Like, ultimately, it was the personal growth and the profound insight that I gained from looking inward over the course of 54 days, more than the year plus of the planning, and my wife Jenna, you know, is really involved in the creation of all these things.

30:12 It’s our art and our creativity and the storytelling and the resonant positivity, and a note I get from somebody a year later that tells me about them following this and the impact I had on that. Right? It’s like, that’s actually what it’s about. It wasn’t actually about the destination, but we can be so focused on the destination to not realize that the actual growth and the beauty of it is the process within. We get there.

30:32 Yeah, and it’s easy as humans to get fixated on the accomplishment. I mean, that’s what people first see on your Wikipedia page. Know this guy, they did this. Yeah, yeah, but, um, you know, this resonates a lot, ’cause last year I did that Half Ironman, and, Ritual, said the same thing to me. He said, Bryan, you know, when you’re out there and something’s hurting, just it’s important to realize that that’s not gonna last forever.

30:52 And so that’s one of the biggest things I learned when I trained endurance. Yeah, just keep rolling. So there’ll be highs and lows, and just to realize that it’s not gonna last forever, which is hard sometimes, ’cause when you’re there, and then also to know that your brain is also playing some funny tricks on you as well. So I used to go out for my half marathon on Saturdays, and, like, four kilometres in, might be like, oh, your knee hurts, oh, if you get injured, you can’t run the thing, maybe we should take it easy, and there’s, like, no, no, you’re just with me.

31:19 Yeah, you’re lying to me, and then two kilos later, it’s fine. Yeah, and then it’s like, oh, did you have enough nutrition? Maybe you didn’t. This little game you’re bargaining with yourself in your mind. Oh, you know, they just realize, no bargain, the Dale bargain.

31:29 And so that’s a, that’s a fun exploration, but also growth, a growth, and to know that once I can do that, I can try to apply that in other places. One zipper. So, all right, can we talk about the expedition? Because, like you said, it wasn’t this crazy thing on the bucket list, but it did come up into your sphere of, like, okay, I can, I can do this. It also happens at the same time when someone else was gonna do it, which is a really weird coincidence.

31:50 Yeah, maybe you just talked about kind of the year leading up to that, and then that first hour. Yeah, 100 percent. So Jay, where to start, where to start? You know, I guess a little bit of context would be, I had in twenty between 2009 and 2015, I had been racing triathlon. Perfect.

32:14 I’m gonna back up. Actually, I’m gonna go, we’re gonna go back a little bit further, ’cause it’s important context. So in 2008, I’d graduate from college, gonna work in finance somewhere. I had a commodities program, commodities commodities trader in Chicago, did a bit of an MBA degree, did that first brief period of time, but, you know, I had always also dreamed of seeing, but of the world. You know, I want, you know, I kind of had this adventurous spirit inside of me, that had no money when I was a kid growing up, but always is like, you know, someday I want to see the world and have some adventures.

32:48 But I think it’s probably, it’s like, backing up here, it’s derivative of, like, these, you know, big adventures that I ultimately had in my life. I had no idea I was gonna get there, but I painted houses when I was a kid, like every summer, and every summer I’d sock away, like, a thousand bucks, and be like, when I graduate from college, you know, I’m gonna have this kind of, like, a piggy bank of a few thousand dollars, I’m gonna go see the world. And ultimately, graduated from college, and, you know, how did you, I knew about ten thousand dollars saved up, and I was like, I’m gonna travel for as long as I can, you know, backpack, surfboard, you know, youth hostels, to hitchhiking, whatever that I be.

33:19 It’s an extraordinary experience, living life on the cheap, as cheap as I possibly could, sleeping on floors and hitchhiking and whatnot, but really experiencing the world outside the United States for the first time. Amazing experience. You know, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, a bunch of places, ultimately ended up in Thailand, and you come, tragedy really befell me there. I was, uh, being a foolish 22-year-old kid, and I decided to jump a flaming jump rope on your own, or they were doing it like on a big, big jump rope.

33:48 She’s like, a thing, they’re right. Yeah, it is, it is, is it that you google it? You could see always crazy, you know, drunk tourists doing this, and, you know, I believe it or not, most of that trip I was drinking and partying, but actually that night I was sober, thank God, probably saved my life. But the rope wrapped around my leg, splattered kerosene the length of my body. I tripped on it, and ultimately lit my body completely on fire to my neck, and I jumped in the ocean to extinguish the flames, to ultimately, saved my life, but not before about 25 percent of my body was severely burned, and you know, it obviously led to really, you know, dramatic sort of circumstance of my life.

34:22 One, I was in a tiny little island in Thailand, no, no, no proper medical facilities. I had a moped ride down a dirt path to a run room nursing station. There was a cat running around my bed and across my chest, this makeshift ICU, and the biggest thing is the doctors looked at me, and they said, you know, through their broken English and this small little, like, rural hut, basically they’re like, look, you’ll never walk again normally. Like, you’re never gonna walk in normally.

34:47 Your legs are too badly burned, and they said they thought the ligaments were damaged, and things like that, and it was just this moment of, you know, kind of depth of despair moment. You know, the physical trauma was immense. I mean, I just burned the skin off of 25 percent of my body, and you see some of the pictures, it’s like you can barely look at them. It’s brutal, but more important to deal with the pain at that point. You have salt water in your wound?

35:08 Yes, salt water in the wounds. I mean, it’s just, the physical pain is extraordinary, but on top of all of that, you’ve got somebody laying basically the heaviest hammer of emotional trauma on you, which is, like, hey kid, you’ve been an athlete your entire life, that’s how you identify yourself. Well, forget that for now. You’re never gonna walk again normally. And so just the emotional weight of that, like, I’ll never forget about that, and just the, the downward spiral, just the immediate downward spiral of negativity.

35:34 And I’m, we’re talking a lot about mindset here, just negativity. Mine was like, my life as I know it’s over. Who am I without, you know, Billy Walker always sort of things? And then screaming you know, pain on my legs, and, you know, kind of a, the heroine of the story is my mother now. Well, this will somehow full-circle, we’ll all get back to Antarctica, but to me this is just such a transitional moment in my life, really dictate a lot of things that happened to me in the future after that.

35:58 Which, my mother came to my bedside and she said, you know, calling your life is not over, and, you know, I give a lot of credit to my mother, she’s extraordinary, but instead of her kind of wallowing in her own, stars, around fear. There’s a mother on the other side of the world seeing her kid, and this entirely, you know, no one would blame her for being freaked out, and she admits now that she was, but she never showed me that fear, and said she came into my hospital room every single day with this smile on her face, this air of positivity, being like, calm, let’s dream about the future. What do you want to do?

36:26 Any time you’re 22 years old, like, you’ve got a whole life in front of you. Like, dream, like, anything. What is it, close your eyes, visualize something. And I’m forced, I was like, what are you talking about? Like, life as I know it’s over.

36:37 But sure enough, I closed my eyes and I pictured myself crossing the finish line of a triathlon, which is not something I’d ever done before in my life, but it was just this in my mind, if you know, able-bodied, strong, fit person, being able to do. I hope, my, I say, “Mom, one day I’m gonna race a triathlon,” and instead of her being like, hey, I said set a goal, but, like, I mean, maybe something a little more in the realm, with realistic, she was like, cool, like, let’s do it. So for the next, you know, three months in the hospital, didn’t take a single step.

37:03 I was training, and I was flown back to the States. I was carried on and off the plane, placed in a wheelchair when I got home, back to Portland, Oregon. You know, I’m in this wheelchair, my mom takes a chair from our kitchen table and placed it one step, and from my wheelchair she goes, all right, you haven’t taken a step in three months. Like, this today’s the day you’re gonna take your very first step. Like, figure out how to get out of your wheelchair and take one step in the chair in front of you, and that was literally the first step on the road to recovery.

37:24 Long story short, 18 months after being burned in this fire in Thailand, I moved to Chicago, take a job in commodities trading, but honor this goal of racing this triathlon, and I’d gotten back on my feet, able to kind of walk around and move around enough, trained for this triathlon at this local gym and race the Chicago triathlon, an Olympic-distance triathlon, and I finished the race, you know, kind of honoring this goal for myself, but to my complete, utter surprise, I hadn’t actually just finished the race, but I actually won the entire Chicago triathlon. You know, placing first, I’d have been, a four or five thousand other participants on the day, and it was just this bizarre moment in my, but that’s old tomato. This was in 2009, so it’s over ten years ago now.

38:07 It dictated what, all, everything that’s come next, that of course, you know, culminates in what I most recently did in Antarctica, which is this moment where I didn’t sit there and pat myself on the back and say, like, wow, look at me, like, you’re a superhuman athlete, you’re awesome, like, so cool. It was the opposite of that. It was my mind immediately went back to the Thai hospital, wondering what would have happened had my mom not forced me to set a measurable goal and look towards the future, or, more simply put, like, what would have happened had my mom not forced my mindset to shift towards this positive outcome, with this laser-sharp focus on getting, you know, overcoming this massive obstacle in my life.

38:42 And it was in that moment that I started realizing, not myself, but all of us as humans, that we have these reservoirs of untapped potential inside of us to achieve extraordinary things when we can get our mind right, when we can focus on the outcomes that we want, when we can realize that we can overcome all of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our life. And so for the last 10 years of my life, through professional triathlon, through World Records and Explorers Grand Slam, through the Seven Summits world record, to the 50 I have. Other things I’ve done have been a constant exploration of the limits of human potential in my own canvas, which is endurance sports, but sharing that in a way that inspires others to take that in their own life, whatever their medium is, love, creativity, entrepreneurship, art, you know, whatever that is, and realize that we have so much inside of us, so much inner strength, all of us as humans, to do that, and that’s really been what my full exploration has been about.

39:41 And you know, to answer your initial question about Antarctica, that brought me, you know, as I had that mindset shift around art and creativity, you know, these other world records I had done, which I’m extraordinarily proud of, they had all been speed records. So it was, you know, climbing the Seven Summits or doing the Explorers Grand Slam. It’s a Seven Summit and tallest mountain each, the seven continents, plus the North and South Pole, cumulatively faster than anyone has ever done that before.

40:04 Or I climbed the tallest mountain in each of the 50 US states, all 50 in 21 days. The previous record had been 42. So it’s a speed record, but a true artist, I believe, would create something fully unique, not just repeating what someone else has done, but faster. But the true sort of deep, deeper curiosity became from me, which is a world-first, stepping into the unknown of something that’s never even been, don’t forget the timeframe, it’s been done, but it’s actually just physically never been done.

40:31 And so this crossing, this solo, unsupported, unaided crossing of Antarctica, remained unconquered in the world of exploration, although it has a sort of a hundred-year-plus history of people trying it in different forms, and people have crossed Antarctica now using the use of kites or dogs or other sort of aids, or having supply drops along the way, but never in this super pure form. And so as the shift toward art, artistic creativity, it was like, that would be wholly unique to do, to take this step into the unknown, essentially this blank canvas and paint on it in a way that no one has ever done before. And that’s when myself and, you know, all credit where credit’s due to my wife Jenna.

41:10 I mean, this is her full-time pursuit and passion as well. She’s not out there, you know, walking the Pole in Antarctica, but certainly taking an idea as audacious to that, you know, we write it on a whiteboard, and actually turning that into reality, raising the money, the funding, the logistics, the permitting, the gear, the tests. I mean, there’s, like, I mean, the list was, you know, years-long worth of, you know, lists and processes to get to that place, and she’s, you know, right there beside me in the building and the planning and the creation of all of these, as well as the sharing of that.

41:40 We have a non-profit. It’s all around inspiring kids to get outside with their bodies, of that, closely involved in all that. But I get there and I’m leaving for Antarctica. Doesn’t apropos to be telling the story in in England. I realized as I’m flying down there that there’s actually another very prolific British explorer attempting the exact same goal at the exact same time as me to cross Antarctica solo.

42:05 And when I say the same time, I don’t mean, like, oh, roughly around the same time, we might be out there, like, roughly at the same time as one another. I mean, there’s one company that has one plane that can drop you off in America there. It’s only one season for which this can happen. So the nuts and bolts of that is me, and this guy’s name is Captain Lou Rudd, a very exceptional guy. Actually hung out with him this morning, believe it or not.

42:29 We’re still friends, are jammed together in this tiny little cargo plane, flying to the edge of Antarctica, both of us not only racing history, but to this historic thing that tried this historic thing that no one’s been able to do. And, you know, a little bit of context: a couple years previously, a guy attempted made it 900 miles and died just a hundred miles from the finish line. By the year after that, a guy attempted it ran out of food and had to be evacuated.

42:55 I mean, people have tried and failed, you know, and paid the ultimate price attempting this, and the stakes are really high, and all of a sudden we’re like, wait, I’m not just racing history, I’m literally racing you. And I look over beside me, and who is it? It’s not some, you know, unintimidating guy. This guy’s a 33-year military veteran in the UK. You know, he’s served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo.

43:16 Not to mention, he’s actually crossed more miles in Antarctica on large expeditions than any living explorer. I mean, this guy is a grizzled polar veteran, and he’s staring at me kind of like, like, what business do you have being down here? Basically, what did you find out he was doing it as well? So he, I actually knew about him for several months ahead of time, because he had announced his project ahead of time. I had been working out that entire time, even when he announced it, and was like, surprised that he was also doing it, but knew about it.

43:48 I didn’t announce my project until a few days before I left. It kind of a strategic advantage, but initially it looked like we might be doing slightly different routes from one another, but we realized when we got down there, I met is, actually, we were asking to be dropped off at the same point, the same time, the same day, the same everything. And so that was, like, became real for both of us, like, kind of in that, basically, that day, and what the agreed, you know, is essentially a thousand miles just short of a thousand miles to make this crossing.

44:13 So it’s from the wrong ice shelf via the South Pole to the other ice shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf, and the plane decides to make it fair that they’re gonna drop us off one mile equidistant from each other, equidistant to the first waypoint. So I’ve got this GPS, marking someone, you know, markings on my GPS, has these waypoints along the way, and the first waypoint were equidistant. So literally, plane drops me off, chuck me out of the plane. I’m standing there, minus 25 degrees, and the plane doesn’t even take off.

44:40 It just drives a mile, and he gets out, and it’s me, blank, empty white space. I can, like, see him. He’s just, like, right there. He’s a mile away. I could practically yell over to him.

44:49 He’s not far. More equidistant, starting, like, thousand-mile race across Antarctica, ready, go. It’s his crazy feeling, and I thought I had prepared really well. The first thing I do is I lean down to time-check my sled, to tighten the straps, and the big thing is, the reason the sled is so heavy is, because maybe this is clear, but there’s no resupplies of food or fuel, and so you need to take as much food as you possibly can to get across, and the guy of the year previous had been evacuated because he actually ran out of food.

45:15 And so it’s this weird calculus. If you carry, obviously, if you carried a thousand pounds of food, you would never be able to pull your sled, so you’re trying to, like, cut it, can I just, enough, but that I can still pull my sled, but enough that I don’t run out of food, you know, and die or starve on the other side of the continent. So it’s this weird, you know, thing, and obviously Lou and I had strategized slightly differently from one another. It became clear that he had maybe a bit of a lighter sled and a different, slightly different, maybe better strategy given his experience.

45:40 So I leaned down to tighten the straps of my bulging sled, and in one second, the clip brakes, ping, clip brakes. I haven’t even, like, moved anywhere, and stuff, like, already breaking on my sled, because it’s too cold and fragile for them. Like, this is gonna be the longest journey, and I think I could calm down. You’re, the same thing. I, I told you I’m meditation.

45:57 I’m not, no, I’m not a Buddha. Like, I’m not, like, perfectly always crystal calm in my mind. I’m try and take a deep breath, okay, it’s gonna be fine, whatever. And so I strap into my sled. So I’ve got this harness, it goes over my shoulders, and the rope attaching my sled, and I have to pull it.

46:12 And inside, then skis, jeez, yes, I like cross-country, cross-country skis, but with skins on the bottom, so they’re basically there so you don’t fall in a crevasse, is so it disperses your weight across the snow, and also so you don’t sink down in the snow. You’re not, it’s actually a slightly uphill all the way to South Pole. There’s no glide. You’re pulling it through, in a 7-pound sled, it’s essentially like walking and glorified snowshoes. I mean, you’re walking, you’re slowly plodding along, okay, but it gives you enough of a kind of surface area purchase on the snow, okay, and the skins themselves track to the, track to the bottom of the ice.

46:42 So anyways, so I go along in the first hour. Like, I can’t pull my sled, barely. Like, I can barely move it. It’s too heavy, and so what happened, I start crying, but what happens when you start crying and it’s minus 25 degrees outside, the tears, they start freezing to your face. I mean, this is, like, an all-around, like, all-time pathetic start, plan for a year.

47:04 I’m gonna attempt this thing. I actually named my project Jen, and I named the project The Impossible First, as an acknowledgment that this might be impossible, but actually, in daring greatly to do really challenging things, and I fail, at least I’ll learn something in the process. But I didn’t expect to fail in the first hour, you know what I mean? Like, I figured I’d like make some progress and have you practice with the sled in addition as much as I could.

47:29 I went to Greenland and crossed it before, but not was quite as much weight, and I had filled the sled, but like, the snow conditions, you can’t exactly know. Like, it’s such a, you, it’s not like you can, like, go simulate Antarctica like other places, and so, like, it didn’t have, you know, everything, and there was actually a lot of loose snow, more so than typical America, which created more friction on the bottom to begin, which was unexpected, and so it’s like, it’s not like I was ill-prepared. It was just that, like, a God, for this point was like, oh my God.

47:53 And to make matters worse, like, I’m struggling in the first hour, and I’m thinking, like, you know, misery loves company, right? You’re thinking like, okay, well, this is ridiculously hard. If I look over, this other guy’s probably, like, struggling to, and fixing with his sled, whatever. No, what do I see? Captain Lou, just like, smooth and steady, just like, to, like, military mark, like, no problem, just like, taking off, disappearing across the horizon, and I’m like, this is the worst, like, my nightmare situation.

48:20 In retrospect, though, a great thing that he was there. It, I think ultimately, you know, the end of the story, of course, is that I’ve not only, you know, I’ll go as you would. I, I pull up my satellite phone because I can’t think of anything else to do, and I call Jenna at home, who’s running all the, hop, you know, operators, every difference or not, yeah, oh, we can kind of pick your own random time zone, but I said on Chilean time, and she’s on West Coast time, like us, so she’s five hours earlier than me.

48:50 On the South Pole, you’re in everyone’s day. Exactly. Weirdest thing ever. You walk through every X in one second. Okay, I pick up my phone.

48:57 It’s 24 hours’ daylight the whole time, so it’s just a disorienting place. Technically, you could just not be on a 24-hour day if you didn’t want to exist. Was the same always, but I pick up my cell phone and call him, to Jenna, and she’s like, why are you calling me? It said one hour. Like, what’s wrong?

49:09 You know, basically, and I was like, yes. So, um, I think we named our project the right thing. It appears that it’s impossible. I can’t pull my sled. She’s like, what?

49:20 Like, what are you talking about? She’s like, yeah, I just can’t do it, and Lou’s long gone. And so basically she convinces me to make it to the first waypoint, which is about a half a mile away, and she’s like, just get there, we’ll regroup, you know, you’ll feel like you made some progress. Forget about Lou. And I think one of the more crucial turning points, freeze, a lot of ups and downs this whole journey, obviously, not have time to talk through them all, but is the next morning.

49:47 Like, I’m a big believer, you know, I’m a really big believer in mantras, but I’m also a big believer like, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. You know, that to me, that’s, like, something that’s really rung true for me for a long time. And in this moment, like, I’ve got, I’m piling on, right? Like, I’m like, doubt, fear, and I’m like, Colin, you’re so stupid. Like, you told everyone that you’re gonna try to do this thing, and like you know, it’s one thing to, like, go for 30 or 40 days and, you know, fail, but, like, you’ve been out here for an hour, and, like, you know, the New York Times just wrote this big profile on you.

50:17 It’s just, like, all the things, like, you’re just like, how could I be so stupid? How could I be so, either it’s, like, really piling on. Then I, like, kind of stop, and I’m like, I could either continue to pile on, where are you? So every person, I don’t care how successful you are, whatever, generally it’s kind of hard on themselves. I don’t know, it’s a human thing, but it’s just a shame that we are just really hard on ourselves sometimes, but I believe we’re the story we tell ourselves.

50:37 So I can sit there and be like, you’re a failure, you’re an idiot, you’re, Malone, there’s no one else to bounce ideas off of. All this kind of stuff I wake up the next morning. My alarm goes off, and, chuckle, clean slate, forget about Lou, and I sit up straight in my chair, or might, might, in my tent, and these words come to me, and never said them before myself, my entire life, but I go, Colin, you’re strong, you’re capable, you are strong, you are capable, and it’s like I almost don’t even believe the words that I’m saying, but I’m saying them so loud that, like, just to, like, override this, like, this doubt and this negativity.

51:12 And it ended up being what I said to myself every single morning for the next 54 days, no matter what. My alarm went off, before I did anything, all the crazy chores, all the hard things I had to do every single day. “Colin, you’re strong, you’re capable, you’re strong, you’re capable.” And just starting the day, you know, setting the tone for positive action and positive sort of outcomes made a huge difference for me. I would like to say that I got out of 10th, it was so easy, and I just pulled my sled, four, smoothly, and that’s not at all what happened.

51:41 The next 54 days were stupidly hard. I almost died several times. All sorts of crazy things happened, but ultimately I did complete the crossing. I passed Lou on the sixth day and stayed ahead of him the rest of the time, and ended up being the first person to ever and, you know, history complete this crossing. How’d you pass him?

52:00 Wow. Why do you think that happened? Because on paper, like you said, he had all the advantages. Yeah, you know, there’s a couple, a couple things. You know, one is you know, like I said, I, you know, have the utmost respect for Lou, and there was a really, really intense race element to this going on, and ultimately I think fueled by that race element is in a lot of ways why we were, why I was successful.

52:24 And ultimately he finished two and a half days after me. So he was not the first, he’s the second, but after a hundred years of no one achieving this, he also did achieve the goal, and it should be certainly applauded. I certainly applaud him. I think it’s amazing. I ended up actually waiting for him at the end to get flown out of there, so I could congratulate him on his extraordinary, the accomplishment as well.

52:43 But I think ultimately there was a piece of that where we both pushed each other by virtue of us both being out there. Like, neither of us took an off day ever. We never took a day of rest, which is really a typical of any large polar exploration. There’s just so much fatigue and so much bad weather, and stuff like, typically you’d be like, okay, like, I’ve been out here for 20 days and haven’t taken a rest day, and this storm is like insane. Like, all the things could go wrong: taking my tent up, putting it down, freezing, frostbite, whatever.

53:10 Like, you know, what, I’m gonna take a day off, and neither of us took a day off, because we were all both afraid of losing ground to the other one, but because of that, like, I still pretty much ran out of food on my last day, and so had I taken those days off early on, I may have gotten a situation where I would have run out of food, or I wouldn’t have, you know, an easy, you know, you talked about bargaining before, like, sort of in your own process of, you know, doing your long runs of training for your half Ironman. You know, there would’ve been a lot of times, and there were times anyways, that I was bargaining with myself, but it could have been a lot easier to be like, you know what, the storm’s really brutal today, and I’ve already put in eight hours, like, 12 hours a full day, but like two-thirds, like, that’s pretty solid, and I’ve made some good distance.

53:51 You know what, like, be very easy, like, me, a number of times I wanted to quit out of there, like, thousands every day. Like, I’m in the worst, horrible, although most beautiful, in the same way, the yin and yang of the most beautiful and spiritually connected place that I’ve ever been in my life, as well as the most brutal, in a hospitable, you know, suffering, intense place ever, but wanting to quit, but I’m bargaining with myself, but because although I never saw Lou other than the day that I passed him on the sixth day, for a few fleeting minutes, this omnipresent, like, figure of, if you bargain with yourself, or if you stop, or if you quit right now, this adversary, this competitor is gonna pass you and achieve the goal that you’re setting out to achieve.

54:36 And so this weird thing of that I actually never, I guess I’d, other than seeing him for a few minutes out there at the very starting, on the sixth day, when we, you know, cross paths for a brief moment, emotionally he was riding there right behind me the entire time, forcing me to stay accountable to my goal, stay accountable to myself, not bargain with myself, and keep pushing forwards. Full day. It’s every single day. And I and in him, and I both acknowledge each other for that, which is, you know, it’s possible that we both finished.

55:02 And ultimately, I guess, you know, me first. I’m proud of the fact that I’m first, but, like, that we both, we both finished, because on a human level, we were out there pushing each other to exceed, you know, the edges of even what we thought was possible, and a breakthrough, you know, perceived boundaries that we maybe didn’t even see ourselves before starting. Yeah, what a crazy story. Yeah, what’s something that we would like, we should know about what it was like day by day?

55:25 Like, you know, how do you push for 12 hours a day? Are you repeating things in your head? Are you listening to music? How do you eat? You know, yeah, well, how do you almost lose your life out there?

55:35 What are the things that you really have to keep an eye on? You know, obviously, I’ll get to the 12 hours of pulling the sled, which is obviously kind of the key component of the day, but what a lot of people don’t realize is the five other hours that make up a 17-hour day, which is when you’re out there completely alone. Every single thing that has to be done goes without saying, you have to do. But in Antarctica that’s a hard thing. So you have to drink about six liters of water per day.

55:58 That means six liters of snow needs to be melted into water, so you’re, like, constantly, you know, melting water and melting snow and turning it into water in your pot, which is a whole process that takes hours and hours of every single day, to set up a tent. Like, that’s one of the most dangerous elements. Like, I can’t have extra anything in my sled. I wore one pair of underwear the entire time. I’m not proud of that, but, like, to save on weight, like, I was like, I’d rather have 100 extra calories of food.

56:20 I’m not gonna bring an extra pair of underwear. Fine, I’m gonna wear the same underwear the entire time. So I sure as heck didn’t have an extra tent with me, but 50-mile-per-hour winds in Antarctica, freezing cold. You know, if I don’t set my tent up properly, tie a knot properly, secure it down properly, if I let go of it, boom, tent gone. Like, no shelter, you’re alone, Antarctica, like, game over, over.

56:42 You know, and so you have to be laser-focused on that, and so there’s all these tasks every single day: setting up the tent, managing your gear, fixing stuff, you know, putting the food. Like, I said, I’m, I have, you know, a nonprofit, talking to, you know, kids all over the world, so there’s live storytelling. Opponent was really important for me, so I carried this small little satellite modem, which is, like, MS DOS prompt, basically. You know, slower than, like, you know, dial-up modem, but I could send one image to Jenna’s inbox, and I’d write a caption, and she ultimately then post that to Instagram and social media.

57:10 It’s like I could actually be on the social media platforms, but I could get a grainy image to her that she could get out to the world. But that whole process of setting that up would take, you know, the amount, between, you know, 30 minutes an hour to send one grainy image, and I’ve got these, like, you know, solar panels that can, to charge. I mean, there’s just, like, a process of water and food and set up and take down. And, you know, every day my breath, my condensation, my breath would basically freeze, my mask of ice, to be an ice mask basically around where my breath would come out.

57:43 And but I’d have to melt that every single day so I could start the next day. But it’s not, obviously, you just put it inside your tent, it’s not gonna necessarily melt. So, like, how do you melt that? You know, sometimes against my body, sometimes on the stove, like all these different pieces that you’re managing, all this sort of, like, gear and supplies, on your health, and all these things. So every day was, yes, almost a simple part was pull your sled for 12 hours and look towards the endless white with your compass bearing, not moving, strapped to your chest.

58:09 There’s this whole other five hours of work. It’s like you get done pulling your sled for 12 hours, all you just sit down. I’m here. It’s like, oh, great, now I have three more hours of work, five or six hours of sleep, and then you get a wake up and do it all over again, again, again, again, again, again. It’s like this endless day, but the rhythm and routine of that got so dialed that I was able to tap into these flow states where sometimes, you know, days would go by in minutes, or weeks would go by and feel like days, or, you know, certainly passages of time would just be like lucid and really intense, because it got to the point where that alarm went off alarm goes off.

58:47 Sit up. Colin, you are strong. You are capable. You are strong. You are capable.

58:52 Grab chapstick that’s in the left pocket. Here, put that on the lip. Strike match, match lights, boom, the stove’s on. Two cups of ice into that. Then left sock on, on, bright sock on, right sock on.

59:04 Unzip the tent, use the bathroom, like the process. Like there’s thousands of steps in this day, but without even thinking of what they were. Like I said, the detail of the chapstick was always in this pocket, and this was here in the zipper of the right side, and always with my right hand here, in my left hand here. It was like a set 17 hours in a row of this dialed in refined routine. Got to this point where it was almost like this dance or this flow, where I could almost mindlessly do them all, which created this vacuum of space in my brain where I think most people will be afraid of that, and I can understand why.

59:45 You know, a joke, you know, going in Antarctica and spend all that time by yourself is like throwing a massive party, and all of your angels and demons, like, they’re both invited. Like, anything can come into this, like, sort of empty space. And I actually had deleted almost all of my content off my phone, all my music, all everything, because I actually wanted to embrace the silence, embrace the stillness, to figure out what would come into my brain in that moment.

1:00:10 And there would, there were times where I wished that I could, you know, listen to more music, or, you know, shut the, shut the internal chatter off, but ultimately what became of that was these beautiful reflective moments. I mean, I would you know, trigger memories in my brain. You know, I might say to you, like, hey, do you remember your high school graduation in San Diego, wherever it was? I do remember this, and, like, something’s gonna pop in your brain really quickly, but we’re gonna keep talking right now, and we’re gonna move on from that, but when you’re completely alone, you think, like, hey, call and remember your high school graduation, or hey, remember your first swim race ever, or something like that, like, I’d be a five-year-old kid diving into a swimming pool, but instead of just, like, remember, I care, like, I swam into the pool and, like, it was, it’s like I’m there.

1:00:55 I can feel the wind on my face. I’m diving into the water. I can feel the temperature. There’s my mom with an orange towel over there. There’s, like, the wind blowing there, so here’s the first joke.

1:01:04 There’s a kid next to me in the, in the, you know, black speedo. Here’s a kid right of me with the swim cap that says this. Aren’t, like, rich, lucid detail of every memory throughout my life, and not just these, like, big moments of my life, like a first swim race or a high school graduation or whatever, but mundane moments, like, oh, my sister and I, we drove to school every single day for years, hundreds of times. Well, I could be like, remember Tuesday, September 15th, we’re in the car, yeah, we were listening to that Ben Harper CD, and we stopped at the stoplight, and I can see this, and there’s a brown Toyota in front of us, and, like, all sort of stuff.

1:01:35 Like, I was able to go back into every single memory inside of my entire childhood is like just pull file, for words of our, from it, but actually page through it like I’m watching a live like movie in front of it, and the learning from that. It mean, it’s almost hard to put into words, but what I will say is, like, again, I don’t think that’s unique to me. It’s unique the fact that I allowed myself the space and the time in my brain to have that much calm and quiet, but it’s that we are all the product.

1:02:04 You think you’ve forgotten about something, or that memory is not there. First of all, it is there. It’s just hard to access. And second of all, you are a product of all of the things, yes, the big things, but also the mundane stacking of little events that have occurred in your life. Like, they are all in there, inside of you.

1:02:20 And you know, that was a wild experience to go through, but certainly, you know, really, really amazing. Do you ever think that you would be a great research subject, even for, like, treks to Mars or something, because you’ve done something really rare, to be isolated from humans in this stark environment for 54 days? There’s probably never really been done before. Yeah, Ivan, exactly. I haven’t submitted myself for the NASA program yet, but I am fascinated by space.

1:02:46 I think that there’s a lot of interesting things to be learned I mean, you asked about food, you know, from a more scientific perspective, that the one piece that we really don’t really deep on, which was nutrition. You know, I in researching this project ahead of time, not because I was trying to poke holes at people who had attempted this project previous to me, but, of course, you’re trying to do something that people have ultimately failed at, or died trying. You’re going, like, where did they go wrong?

1:03:09 Like, how is there a way to improve on this methodology? And one of the things I focus on and found was around the nutrition component of this. I looked at it, and I said, you know, I don’t think anybody has fully, fully dialed in the nutrition of this project yet. And so I found this incredible company. Old me came, one of my biggest sponsors, a company called Standard Process, which is a whole food supplement company in the United States, and they got really excited about helping this process.

1:03:35 And what they ultimately did is they have this center called the nutrition innovation center, where they do this, all this research on food and nutrition and supplements and all this kind of stuff, and they wrapped me with the team of, at one point, is like 20 doctors, nutritionists, scientists, dieticians, whatever, hundreds of blood tests on my body throughout this year, all this physical stress, has VO2 max test, all this physical testing, whatever, and what ultimately came from all of that testing is they came up with what they thought, and I agree, was sort of the perfect food for my body given the environment, so the best calories in the most nutritionally dense way, delivered in a way that makes sense for Antarctica, so they could be eaten frozen but not too frozen that you can’t eat, and in the end, all of my food sensitivities and stuff that, like, normally in data, if wouldn’t be a big, sonic allergens, but things that, that 1% inflammation response, we’re not including that, we’re not including that, and so they came up with these bars, which, you know, they called the column bars.

1:04:30 We could probably come up with a more clever name, but they’re called the column bars, completely customized for my body, and that’s what I ate pretty much the entire time, where these column bars all throughout every single day, that was my main source of fuel, completely plant-based. So it’s, you know, basically coconut oil, you know, no crazy chemical derivatives or anything, all whole food ingredients, so nuts and seeds, and the right, exactly right, macronutrient blends of a high-fat, you know, lower carb, so slower burning, no exact micronutrients so, you know, magnesium and beet extract, and always types of things off there, organic farm, all created into this custom food for me. And I ultimately think that was the real key to success for me.

1:05:12 Was it one of the main keys? Was doing that, because traditionally in polar travel, it’s been like, yes, you need high calories and high calorie-dense stuff, and you look at, like, most of the, you know, you know, pioneering explorers eating something called pemmican, which is basically, like, you know, lard and, you know, bacon and stuff like that. You know, more recent times and hasn’t got away a little from pemmican, but it still just been like, you know, salami and cheese, and just like high-fat foods, but also foods that are, like, highly inflammatory and things like that, and you look at guys’ bodies breaking down over month two, months three, months, periods of time out there in these larger expeditions, and I’m like, that can’t possibly be right.

1:05:47 And so it’s been, it was interesting to go through that. We’re actually publishing all this research very shortly here, on all the sort of blood work and everything we did, because I just want to share it with the world, for whatever applications that might stand for, when we, that’s a trip to Mars, but whatever kind of other wild things and then it just goes to show that the nutrition health component, I was, I was raised, you know, what a family that my parents were grocers, you know, in the natural foods industry, kind of on the cutting edge of that industry, but it’s amazing to be able to tell, for me, the, to, true story, people, how’d you do this, what you eat? I’m like, well, like, I, whole food ingredients, not some crazy chemical derivative, anything customized for what my body needs, completely plant-based.

1:06:28 Some people like, wait, what? Hey, Mike, yeah, that’s right, when I work, and it worked. Yeah, so you’re eating like ten of these bars a day, so each one of the bars were roughly the size of, like, like an iPhone, I guess. Okay. And each bar is 1,100 calories, so very, very calorie-dense.

1:06:45 If we were, like, Eric, we’re like, yo, can I get my hands on the column bar? And I’m like, maybe we should make a retail product, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to eat an 1,100-calorie bar unless you’re really trying to gain weight. But me, I was burning 10,000 calories out there every single day, and the most that I could carry was 7,000 calories per day. So 7,000 calories seems like an insane amount of calories to eat, but I’m actually running a 3,000-calorie deficit, so I’m losing weight every single day.

1:07:10 Obviously, I’d put some weight on to know that I was going to lose it, because after our calculations, we realized that to be the case. Okay. but I’m eating four of those per day. It’s about 4,500 of my calories per day are the column bars, and that’s what I was eating the entire time I was moving, so in those 12 hours that I’m pulling my sled, I have them chopped up in all these small blocks, and I’m, every day, say every 30 minutes, eating a bite of that inside the tent.

1:07:33 The beginning of the day, in the end of the day, I had slightly different, basically similar, versions of that, but if I take a fortified oatmeal that had a lot of the same powders and the same nutrients and stuff in it, and a freeze-dried version of that at night, because I could have hot water, like, inside the tent, to just kind of make me a little bit, I don’t know, like how warm yes, yep, hot meal, hot meals inside, the outside, the tent. It was just the column bars and that, so I took the entire time. And, you know, people obviously, you know, an obvious question is like, we must have gotten sick of them, or you must have got, you must have been terrible to eat the same thing every day.

1:08:02 Only surface, I was like, yes, just like any person in a normal, when I’m sitting here in London, I would like a variety of things to eat throughout the day. That said, in this extreme environment, it was the opposite, which is, rather than being like, oh, am I gonna like the meal the day, or not, the meal today, or whatever, it was like, I am burning the cleanest fuel that I can possibly have in my body, and it’s working, so give me more of that. Right?

1:08:27 Okay, yeah, felt good. Yeah, did you miss this routine that week after you stopped, especially this whole chapstick and the thing, because again, it allows your brain to actually expand by having that structure somehow. You know, it’s interesting. Obviously, you know, when you’re out there, you can’t help at times be like, God, I can’t wait to be in diet and doors again, or have a shower, or, you know, sit down at a table for a meal, or, you know, lie in bed and cuddle my wife, you know, any of those things.

1:08:55 I’m, it’s normal. Like, think about that kind of stuff. But I will say that, you know, one of the lasting impacts of this entire experience has been the simplicity and ultimately happiness that I found with so little, right, in a world that’s pretty, you know, certainly the Western world, very consumer-driven, you know, very by this, this come for a bigger house, you know, all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of interesting to go to the, you know, the depth of, you know, stoicism, or the depth of just kind of like Spartan living, and actually find, at the bottom of all that, at the bottom of all the suffering and bottom of his pain, Alton Utley.

1:09:34 My last few days were almost, you know, beautifully euphoric in their simplicity, and I feel like I had kind of unburdened myself of all this unnecessary sort of cluttering of my brain and body and mind and soul. But yeah, absolutely. There’s times when I miss it. Like, without a doubt, you know, sometimes, you know, you know, I have a busy schedule. I’m flying all around the world, I’m doing all sorts of things that I love, but I’m passionate about, you know, I’m writing a book, and I’m working on my next expedition, and all these different things I’m, you know, doing.

1:10:01 I’m sitting here with you. I love doing these things, but there’s certainly are moments in time when although that place, Antarctica, is so harsh and so cruel, and there’s so many ways, like you said, you can die on a daily basis, or just like brutal things can happen there. It was also something so simple about it that made me feel very full and very calm and very at peace. Yeah, the last three days, I think you just decided to go for it. Can you talk about what was going on in your mind just to go through the night and to finish out like that?

1:10:32 Yeah, so I had been battling a really bad storm, I got to the other side of the South Pole, realized that I was, you know, gonna maybe run out of food, and so I actually had to kind of reduce my rations even further, closer to about, you know, 5,500 or 6,000 calories per day, and at this point I’m getting pretty weak, you know, my hips bones are protruding, my ribs are protruding, like I’m really starting to get very weak. How much weight did you lose over the course of the ultimately is somewhere around, like, 30 pounds or so, but some of the projections, and I think Lou lost close to about 50 pounds, and it could have easily lost 50 or 60 pounds, would have been like very easy to do out there, and if you run out of food, you can’t go for more than a day or two with that kind of, not a lot.

1:11:11 Yeah, it’s just, you’re burning so many calories out there. It’s just like the strain is just too significant. Off it out, no, no, no. It’s, it’s just, it’s the honestly like, just because of how cold this, forget everything else, like your body is burning so many calories to try to stay warm, that it’s just eating itself basically at that point, and it’s just you’re so weak, and so yeah, running out of food, just more or less. I mean, maybe a day, but, like, you’re not gonna get very far without food out there.

1:11:36 So, you know, basically I’m getting extraordinarily weak, you know, so much so you know, in this, it’s Christmas Eve. I go to sleep. I wake up, it’s Christmas morning. I wake up, it’s Christmas morning, and, you know, I’ve got this, my duffel bag, it’s got my gear, and I take it out of my tent every morning. I load it into my sled, and I remember that morning picking up my duffel bag, and I could, like, barely pick it up to get it into my sled, and it’s a lighter, and much lighter at this point, right?

1:12:02 Less gear, less food, all this kind of stuff, but I’m just so weak. Like, I’m, like, barely picking up this duffel bag, and I’m thinking, like, whoa, like, and obviously I am aware historically of this guy, Henry Worsley, who died with a hundred miles to the finish. And going, like, this thing’s not over until it’s over. You can come close, and you can literally die because you’re so exhausted, you’ve pushed too far, and that’s in the back of my mind constantly, and no one’s gonna be gonna come rescue you, not in any kind of lean time, not yeah, not with enough lead time.

1:12:28 You know, he ultimately got picked up, and actually, unfortunately, he died in a hospital, but, you know, about a day, he just was so far gone by the time they, you know, got there. That you know, it’s a really sad story, what happened to him, but you know, I wake up, it’s Christmas Day. I can bear them struggling to load my sled. I stand up, and I start pulling my sled, and I realize I’m 77 miles away from the finish, which is closer than any human has ever been to completing this journey, and I start pulling my sled, and, you know, I had experienced these moments, like I said, of clarity or flow, you know, these flow states that I really, the reason I deleted all my music and content was to really find this place in my mind, if, like, peace and calm, because I had this sort of theory or hypothesis beforehand, which is my body is gonna get weak, but if I can stay strong in my mind, or find these places of calm, without fear, without anxiety, without any of this doubt in my mind, that actually my mind can override my body and continue to push much further than my body is thinks it’s capable of.

1:13:31 And so it’s kind of like this decisive moment, and I stand up, like I said, I’m like struggling to even load my sled into my bag, there, my bag into my sled, at this point, and I get up, and all of a sudden, like, I feel completely different. Like, I feel just locked in, like I’m like, whoa, if I found it, like, am I there? Like, I feel just completely different and strong, and so I start going, and I started doing math in my head. I’m like, okay, my average mileage at this point had been like 15 miles, 16 miles, something like that, had gotten a little bit further, into 20 miles per day, because my sled at this point was pretty light, ’cause I was more or less out of food, and so I’m thinking, okay, maybe I’m like three or so days away from the finish, but I do big pushes, you know, maybe I can finish it in three big days, and I start going, Milan, okay, like, well, how many hours is that?

1:14:19 And I’m like, when is that? Like, maybe 40 more hours of pulling the sled, and before I’ve been measuring this trip in you know, months or weeks or certainly in days, all of a sudden I’m gonna point where I can measure the final distance in hours, like 40 hours. Okay, that’s like three plus full big push days, and then I make a decision, my mind, which is, I was like, you know what, I’m not gonna stop until I finish this thing. I’m not gonna stop, which just seems, it’s even hard to say, like, sitting here, it seems kind of crazy or reckless, but I just felt this calm in my brain, and I was just tapped into this flow state, and it been something I got there intentionally by all my meditation practice, by all the sacrifice I made to get there, by deleting all the content, by suffering through these moments of doubt and fatigue, and all these things, I finally had found this moment of clarity where I was just so tapped in, and I was like, I can do this, not to, like, prove to anybody else, but just like, I’ve got this, I’m not stopping, so ten hours goes by 15 hours goes by, 20 hours goes by.

1:15:19 Now I’m not having, still haven’t stopped. It’s Christmas Day, and it’s midnight on Christmas Day for me. My family’s five hours ahead, so it’s 7 p.m. back home, and they have this little tracking device, this GPS tracker, that’s, like, throwing off this blue dot, and they’re like, usually I stop after 12 hours. Then 12 hours goes by. 13, I haven’t stopped.

1:15:37 14. They’re a little bit worried, but they’re also seeing that I’m still moving, so they’re like, what’s going on? And finally 20 hours goes by, and this massive storm blows up. It’s a good, called a ground blizzard. Just, let’s just, crazy storm blowing around.

1:15:50 It’s not snowing from above, but all this loose and unconsolidated snow is blowing around. In any other circumstance, when I’ve been in Antarctica, that’s scary. Like, it’s hard to set up the tent, it’s disorienting, it’s, like, hard to find your way, the route finding is challenging, but I’m just locked in this flow state where I’m just, like, completely calm, completely at peace, despite, like, the storm that is raging on the outside. I’m completely calm and comfortable in my own mind.

1:16:14 So 20 hours goes by, a few more hours goes by, and I realize I’ve run out of water, ’cause I only had enough, join me, for 12 hours a day, and I stretch as far as I can go, and so I have a decision to make, which is, well, I need water. I can’t keep going without water. It’s just reckless, and, like, you’re to dehydrate, to dangerous. I can’t do it. Food, one day, I’m in water.

1:16:33 You just need water out there. Only way to get water in this massive storm is to set up my tent and get inside, which is melt the snow and turn it into water. And so I’m like, okay, but completely calm again. I’m like, no big deal. I can set up my tent in this storm.

1:16:47 I’m usually setting up a tent. The storm is really challenging, really dramatic, and quite honestly, very dangerous, but again, tapped into this place. I was like, it’s no problem, tie the knot, do this, no big deal. Like, well, if you’re watching this on a movie, you’d be like, this is insane, but inside, like I said, the storm is raging outside. I’m calm.

1:17:05 I get inside. I melt the water, make a phone call home. It’s Christmas dinner. My family’s all, “Oh my God, you’ve gone 48 miles, your biggest day ever!” And I’m like, oh, I’m not done yet.

1:17:14 I’m just taking a quick, like, water break, and, like, Jenna’s on the other end, like, she’s going, like, for a second, she’s like, wait, what? But if you talk to her about that moment, she’ll tell you. She goes, she talked to me every single day for 53 days, and she was monitoring my mental acuity, how much food I had, my, she said all these things. She goes, it’s the strongest I heard him in all 53 days. Okay.

1:17:32 And she could hear in my voice that I had found something inside of myself, so she was just like, great, I’ll hear from you in 12 hours when you’re done. Like, go do it. Took my tent down, 25 hours, 30 hours, 32 hours, and ultimately 32 and a half hours, and 77 miles later, without, you know, stopping other than this quick water break, I complete this journey in one last, you know, significant 77-mile continuous push, certainly dictated by not the power of my body.

1:18:01 You look down at my body, time, and it’s like destroyed. I mean, it’s like literally, like, emaciated, destroyed, beat-up at the end of 54 days. But I found this place, this inner place of strength that I believe we all have, that pushed me on, well, well beyond what you think that perceived limits would be. Yeah, you said you had a moment where you kind of, like, extended your arms, and you felt like, I don’t know, all the energy and power from everyone in the world, and they’re coming to you, and can you talk about that?

1:18:28 ‘Cause I thought that was really powerful. Yeah, I mean, the, you know, the great irony, I think, mmm, the great irony, you know, people say, God, you must have felt so alone out there. So, I mean, I, in truth, I was probably one of the most isolated, if not the most isolated individual on the entire planet, in a lot of, around 54 days, completely alone. I guess lose out there somewhere, but I can’t see him, and like, I’m just alone in this endless white landscape.

1:18:54 The ironic thing that happened to me is that I felt these moments of complete connectedness and clarity, and there were several moments, including on that last day, when I was connected in that really big push. We’re in these dark moments, or these low moments, or whatever. I would actually stand out there in the middle of Antarctica. If you’re watching me, you probably look like some crazy person. I’d stand there, I’d extend my arms out, reach like this, completely outstretched, and in that moment, I could just feel this power of what I would say, you know, infinite love, infinite love, infinite love, or this connectedness.

1:19:29 I’m not a particularly traditionally religious person, but it was a connectedness of the energy of people, the universe, whatever you want to call that, filling me with energy. All of these people that were out there cheering me on, supporting me, loving me, my family, my wife, the students across the world. You know, Ultima, there’s millions of people, I guess watching this project, which I wasn’t super aware of at the time, but just in this, just really tangible way, I could feel this positive energy coming into me, and I would actually fill my body up with, at night it would actually hold it in.

1:19:58 I would just, like, almost, like, visually, like, arms out and act like this, and then I’d want to send it back out in the world. I just, like, sending it back out into the world, and sending it back out, love and gratitude, and even Lou, who had been obviously an adversary and a competitor of mine, I started sending that back to him. I sort of a daily practice of just gratitude and love for his passage and things like that. And it’s this weird thing, like I said, I was so alone, but I’ve started a feeling.

1:20:23 I’ve shared, you know, this first on the story in rooms, you know, in London, big city right now, or in New York City, and, you know, sat with friends or very speaking engagements I do, and I say, okay, like, you guys all live in London, or you all live in New York City, like, you know, raise your hand if you know the name of the person you share a wall with in your apartment building. I’m all, certainly, people I don’t know the name of the guy I live next to, right? Like, well, Nate, what’s, let, when’s the last time you spoke to somebody in an elevator?

1:20:47 Going up in an office tower, people, like, quiet, always just look at the ground, or, like, or what about the, when you ride the subway or the underground, like, are you talking to people, or are you on your phone, like, staring at your phone, or whatever? This, and the irony is is that in these massive cities, you can feel so, you can be physically surrounded by humanity, literally millions of people, yet feel completely isolated, completely alone, right? Where I was in the physical space, the most alone person on the planet, yet I felt more connected to humanity, to love, to community, to compassion, to empathy, of the world in this moment, of infinite love, for lack of a better word.

1:21:33 And that was probably the most beautiful thing I experienced. So I know, wow, maybe worth the whole thing just for that. 100 percent. What was the response after you did this? You know, what, what will you, you’re coming back home.

1:21:46 What kind of surprised you, what was good and bad from the response from the world, from all this? You know, as we talked at the top of the hour, you know, it was always generous intention to share these stories with the world, and we’ve done that with our other projects. We certainly couldn’t have anticipated the reaction, you know, to this project, and I was more or less, you know, in my own little bubble, and Jenna kept me hidden, hidden from me from all of this.

1:22:12 She wasn’t like, oh, by the way, you know, you’re on the front page of the New York Times again, or you might have no idea about any of this. I just didn’t know that was happy was tracking you guys in real-time and talking about it. Yeah, and so I had these trackers, and they were out in real time, and then NatGeo, and then New York Times built these trackers of people with this, and it just became this big, ultimately, I guess I’ve been told they were summing around two billion media impressions around this entire project, which is, you know, by far the most, you know, sort of media viewed expedition in modern history, by a long shot.

1:22:44 You know, I get back, you know, I finally, you know, I finish. I wait this couple of days for Lou, well, you know, we share that moment there. We finally, you know, fly back, you know, to what Lou say. What did Lou say? We finish, you know.

1:22:57 He said he was gracious. He was like, wow, you did it, you were first, congratulations, but then I sort of a back head, and I would say backhanded compliment. He was like, he was like, you know, I wasn’t that worried about the race the whole time, because I just figured Antarctica was gonna take care of you at some point, given your lack of experience. Those kind of nice ways of saying, like, somehow you didn’t die out here, kid. But yeah, I literally had coffee with him this morning.

1:23:20 Is the first time I seen him since, uh, since we finished the project, and it was really great to see him. You know, we, you know, out of seven billion people on the planet, he’s the one other person that has experienced, you know, this specific thing. And it would be a shame if, you know, despite the competition, of course, he wanted to be first, and I’m proud to be first, and whatever, like, what he does is extraordinary. You know, those two people on the planet who I’ve ever done this, and you know, I have the utmost respect and love for him.

1:23:43 It’s just fun that we can remain, you know, great friends and talk about this in a way that we both, you know, are speaking the same language to one another. What it likes to be out there. But, you know, we get back, you know, I kind of, a funny story, but I you know, finally rekindled with Jenna in Punta Arenas, which is southern Chile, which is, you know, where I left for my Antarctica. It’s like a closest place to fly from, and, you know, finally get to see Jenna again, which of course it’s amazing.

1:24:05 We rekindle, you know, jump into each other’s arms, and this success, and then like I said, is, is so much her success as well. It’s really her dream as much as it is mine, and kind of most amazing to see her, and she finally says, she’s like, sick, oh god, you must be so excited to, like, go home and sleep in our bed, and, you know, she had actually, she had gotten a puppy when we were away, and meet our new puppy, I’ll, you know, just like the creature comforts of home, you know, she must be excited, and I was like, yeah, I can’t wait, and she’s like, well, we’re not going home, and I was like, right? She’s like, tomorrow we’re flying in Manhattan, and you’re gonna be on The Today Show, and she kind of just opened this door of, like, she kind of has to tell me at this point, ’cause she’s been shielding me from this for the moment.

1:24:50 She’s real. I realize there’s some interviewers and, you know, some articles and things like that, which I’ve done in previous things, but sort of the magnitude of the interest globally in this entire project, and it’s both. You know, your question was about, you know, what have been good, and maybe some of the negative things, or whatever. Both, it’s, it’s a yin and yang, which is incredibly humbled by the reception, and incredibly proud of it, because ultimately, like I said, to have to be able to share stories broadly.

1:25:18 My hope is in the people that reach out to me, but even the people I never hear from, of how my tiny little story may have touched them and pushed them towards whatever it is in their life. Like, that, that is a lot. In that sense, my purpose, and what I’m proud of, and so for the fact that to be viral in this sense, and the way it was, is amazing. That said, you’ve been alone in a tent for, you know, nearly two months, completely alone, not talking to anybody, and then, like, one day later, you’re sitting under the bright lights of The Today Show on live television broadcast, whatever, and Hoda and Savannah are, like, trying the column bar, and, like, whatever, like it’s a little.

1:25:51 It’s a lot. Yeah, it’s a lot, but it’s ultimately been a really, you know, a really beautiful thing, and certainly is an adjustment to, you know, sort of take all of that in and react to it, and all this sort of, you know, ancillary things that come with, with all that level of recognition, and thing, but, you know, if it ultimately, extraordinarily humbling. And yeah, yeah. Okay, now, what’s next? I know everyone asks you, but, you know, I don’t even get your head around that, but you’re a guy that always likes challenges, so you will do something, but is it all about this blank canvas type of thing, and first going forward, or, you know, it’s, it’s, I think it falls into a few different buckets.

1:26:29 You know, the what’s next, I think most people are asking what’s next in terms of the next expedition. So there’s a very short answer to that, which is Jenna and I have started drawing on our whiteboard again, and we have dreamed up the next expedition. Um, and we’ll be sharing that. It’s not public yet. We’ll be sharing it in the next couple months here, and it’s something I’m really excited about, and new and interesting and dynamic, and will have a great live storytelling component to it, and all the things that we love to do, certainly integrated with, you know, all the schools in classrooms with our nonprofit, and, you know, potentially a million-plus educators connected to this project.

1:27:03 So all the stuff I’m really proud of. So that’s the kind of expedition bucket. So for those wanting, oh my, X next edition, that’s it. You know, one of the other things that I’ve worked really hard on this year, which has been an interesting medium for me to work in, which is writing a book. You know, I’ve never done that before, and it’s been, you know, humbling for the reception.

1:27:22 People don’t want to hear that story, which is the story of Antarctica, but it’s more than just a story of Antarctica. You know, it’s the story of my life and mine and Jenna’s journey, and what got us here, and there’s, there’s an entrepreneurial story in there, there’s a love story in there, there’s heartbreak in there, there’s, you know, burning yourself on fire in Thailand in there, there’s of course the crossing of Antarctica, and what it take to get there, in others, Mount Everest, in there, there’s really a lot of component parts in that story that I think hopefully will reach a broad audience. You know, that comes out on February 4th.

1:27:50 You can pre-order it now. The name of the book is The Impossible First, and I’m really excited to share that with the world, and it’s been a beautiful process and cathartic for me to kind of go back through my life in that sort of fine toothcomb way, and I’m, I put that down on the page. It has certainly been a process. And then the other things that I’m excited about doing next is finding different ways to share adventures with different groups of people.

1:28:12 You know, just various different things that I do. You know, you mentioned, you know, Ritual, and I climb in this mountain. You know, 29 oh 29. You know, I started this event series that’s called 29 oh 29, which is the amount of vertical feet for, to climb Mount Everest. Not everyone can go climb Mount Everest, and I understand either why you can’t go or why you wouldn’t want to go, but we’ve basically brought Mount Everest to the United States, and so we basically have this event series where we take ski resorts in the summertime, and we set it up so you climb up them enough times.

1:28:44 So in Utah it’s 13 laps of snow base and ski resort, and in Vermont, Stratton, it’s 17 laps of that, and it takes 30, you’ve got 36 hours to complete the challenge. You climb up, you take the gondola down, and it’s really tough. You climb 29,000 vertical feet over 36 hours. You know, oftentimes we don’t have, about 50 percent, or so, of the people finish the challenge. It’s an amazing event, and the reason I love that event, in the same vein of what I want to do next, is that we limit it to 200 people.

1:29:11 We all camp there. We have a shared experience with one another. It’s not a race, it’s you versus you, and because people are lapping this course at different times, you’re passing each other, and you’re talking to people, and you’re sharing stories, and you’re inspiring each other, and the people that self-select to be at an event like this are extraordinarily amazing people. And so, you know, to put these events together that ultimately test and challenge people in really unique and interesting ways, but at the very base level of that, the answer to what NEX is, it’s creating community.

1:29:41 It’s creating social fabrics. It’s bringing people together under a common thing, and yes, they’re pushing themselves for 36 hours to achieve this goal, but it’s what they take from that into the rest of their life. So what’s next for me in totality, be at the book, be at my next expedition, be at 29:29, my event series, any of these things. It’s how can I foster community and fabric and inspiration in all sorts of ways to make the world a better place. So it’s not just about another record.

1:30:09 No, that makes you very different from a lot of people that have records, right? Okay, so, yeah, I think so, yeah, possible, sure. Well, I’m excited to hear what happens next. I’m curious about just you and your daily routine. What’s something that you do every single day that’s just non-negotiable for you, in order just to live your life?

1:30:26 Hmm. Good questions. Well, I’m an avid reader. Okay, I love reading, so I non-negotiables, you just start the beginning of the day. It’s like the morning routine, very trendy.

1:30:38 Yeah, I’m with my night time here together. I read before bed always, and various things, you know, nonfiction, fiction, but, you know, books, not just magazines, are certainly not my phone, or anything like that. I do enough of that during the day, so to me, I think reading is one big thing. You know, meditation practice for me, trying to have that daily practice. Like I said, putting, putting the, the six inches between my ears, actually, into the mental gym.

1:31:02 Yeah, so that’s daily meditation. Yeah, you know, I travel so much these days that I shouldn’t say I wish, I hope, but, you know, it’s more difficult for me to have the, I always do this, and drink coffee out of the same coffee cup, and walk the same walk, or go to the same gym, whatever, ’cause I’m often in hotel rooms on different time zones, or whatever, so it’s really what are the things that I can take, you know, sort of into my life on a daily basis. But, you know, I have, you know, vegetarian more or less.

1:31:33 You know, I’m not fully vegan, I guess, at this point, but, you know, vegetarian plant-based diet, you know, those types of things are non-negotiable. Then the other thing I fail at, this sometimes, I’m certainly not perfect, but you know, asleep. I’m gonna preach sleep here for a second, but that is, you know, throughout my day, with all the things that I do. I know that there is uncertainty in, sort of, you know, high-performing, high-achieving, you know, circles, entrepreneurship, or, you know, sports, or whatever.

1:31:57 Something’s like bragging about, like, oh, I only did three hours’ sleep last night on this. I just told you a story about not sleeping and pushing 32 hours non-stop, or whatever, and we didn’t even talk about this 50 high points project, that didn’t, know, 15 mountains in 21 days. I averaged two hours of sleep per night for those. Pride for that project is this whole chronic crazy, you know, a different project when I’m talking about that. But I don’t say it to, like, be like, so you don’t need sleep.

1:32:20 The non-negotiable thing for me in my day-to-day life is to make sure that I’m taking care of my health so that I can do all of the other things, so that I can be present in an interview with, it, like you, and actually, like, be here and not make my mind a million places. Entire, you know, it’s that meditation practice. It’s those grounding things that I can do throughout my day. It’s eating properly in this, and as well as, I will also say, out of all of that, I do want to make it clear that, you know, I believe, you know, everything in moderation, including moderation, which is to say, like, there’s also a time to stay up through the middle of the night and have a blast and dance and play and laugh, and all of those things, and so for me, that’s a part of my life.

1:33:00 It’s not so much what’s non-negotiable in any given day, the aperture of the lens of being one day, but is it a week or a month, or what that is, and how can I fill my life and my time with things that fill me up, you know, create healthy habits and lifestyles for me, and work towards my goals, but also understand that inverse moments and times we need to stretch and extend yourself, and you know, you make up for that in other points. Yeah, what scares you? What scares me?

1:33:27 That’s a good question. I think that, you know, to, to part answer one is some people look at what I do and they say, oh my God, you must not have any fears of the outdoors, the cold, or things like that, and I just make it clear that, like, I am normal. Like, I have all sorts of fears, and I think that, obviously, this question’s been asked of Alex Honnold, and also dreads, or your MIG Allah doesn’t fire this or that. Like, I can tell you, like, I think Alex Honnold has, it’s a fair fear of heights, like, the kind of, son, want to fall off a two-thousand-foot cliff, like, he knows what the result of that will be.

1:34:06 Yeah, but he’s figured out how to calm his mind in the face of fear. I’m certainly not trying to pretend like I’m Alex Honnold, and what he’s done is absolutely extraordinary and a league of its own, but in terms of fear, for me, I have those normal, normal fears, like, heights, cold, you know, things like that, but I also have a way of acknowledging fear, and, like, oh, I’m afraid, right now, let me not have this be, you know, paralyzing. But my biggest fear is this.

1:34:37 So I think of life on somewhat of a continuum. So I think of, and sort of, the human experience on a continuum of 1 to 10. So, you know, let’s say 1 being the worst day of your entire life. I don’t know, like, your wife dies in a tragic accident or something, just like the worst thing that you could possibly think of, and 10 being the best day that you could possibly think of, hedonistic pleasure, like the best party of your life, or the happiest, joyous, you know, it’s just sort of like a beautiful day that’s a 10.

1:35:05 Right? And I think that often times, in our sort of human experience, we’re trying to avoid ones at all costs. We’re just trying to avoid, like, the hard moments of life at all costs, but that also ends up happening is we start hedging towards the middle. And so I think what ends up happening is that in general society, and I say this, you know, from a standpoint of, you know, maybe a higher socioeconomic, you know, not like the poorest of the poor, but people have their basic needs taken care of on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, all of a sudden they’re only experiencing between 4 & 5, 4 or 5 & 6.

1:35:40 You’re stuck in this middle-range, bound thing. So maybe you have a normal job, you have an apart, your basic needs are taken care of, but you’re not reaching ten. Like, your best day is like, oh, it’s the weekend, and it’s, it’s Saturday, and I’m gonna watch this football match, and, like, that’s great, and it’s fun. Like, okay, that’s a six. I drank beer with my buddies.

1:35:55 I’m like, your 4 is like, yeah, I don’t really love my job. My boss came and he yelled at me today. It was kind of annoying. The, like, the worst day of your life is a, for my biggest fear is being stuck between 4 & 6 and not feeling the full range. And so instead of thinking about on a linear plane of 1 to 10, I’ve actually sort of bent the curve into a parabola or curve.

1:36:14 I’ve got one here, and 10 here, and 4 and 6 at the bottom, and my fear is being stuck at the bottom of that parabola, because I think the growth happens with the ones and the tens equally, and they’re both worthy of living. I mean, I talked about crossing an article on all the tears that I had flowing down my eyes. I’m not trying to get away from that. I’m trying to feel the totality of that experience. Yes, hour 1 in Antarctica, and I feel like I’m gonna, like, completely fail.

1:36:39 An hour 1, I am crying. I am hurt. I am embarrassed. I am afraid, but I’m alive. I’m alive, and so my biggest fear is being stuck between 4 & 6 and not fully living it.

1:36:53 It’s not a fear of experiencing ones. It’s a fear of only experiencing 4 to 6. Yeah. Now, I, Amen to that. You know, even though the ones can kind of suck, absolutely there’s so much growth there, and we all remember the ones from our life as these great moments, you know, and even though we don’t go back there, it’s gonna happen if you’re gonna hit the tens as well.

1:37:11 Hundred percent. Yeah, I like that theory, Colin. I always ask few questions at the end. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Colin, and knowing everything you know now, everything you learned in Antarctica, if you could give him some advice, what would you tell him? across Antarctica, and it was really fun to listen to, and impressive.

1:37:54 But I’ve, what I find more impressive, as your, as your mindset, real, and the way that you use this as a storytelling possibility, and you want to use it to empower other people. So I was really surprised when I started digging even deeper into your story and just seeing all this stuff. So I just really want to thank you for bringing that part to it. You know, a lot of times when you look at World Records, it does, it end up being about the individual, and sometimes it’s a celebration of the human race, but rarely is it someone who’s like, okay, take what I’m doing and go take it in your life and use it to take your life to the next level.

1:38:26 And I think that’s super powerful, so thank you for that. I appreciate it. And again, the value of story is so massive, because you know you can have someone that doesn’t actually do a world record that has a better story than someone that does, and so it’s all how you can tell it. And if you tell it from a good, a good point, and with a good heart, and you really want other people to get something out of it, it can be, you know, life-changing. Yeah, so thank you so much for that.

1:38:50 Really looking forward to the book. That’s a humbling experience, right? Yes, and a difficult experience, you know, because you have this great story, and people know it’s great, but putting it in a book, it’s difficult, right? So challenging process for sure. So yeah, looking forward to doing that.

1:39:03 I’m sure you spend a lot of time on that, but you’ve got some great mentors and things as well. They can teach you about that. And people follow you on Instagram. The best place, website, at Colin O’Brady on Instagram, Castle Colin and Brady calm, those are kind of the best places to reach me. Go the website.

1:39:16 I have anything about my public speaking and things like that, and Instagram is is all the rest, and certainly where we’ll be sharing the next expedition and, you know, the day-to-day updates and highlights and all that. So yeah, come say hello there. I love, love when people reach out, message, say hello, and I try my best to respond, everyone. So come say hello on Instagram. Okay, good stuff.

1:39:34 Looking forward to the next adventure, the book. Again, congrats on this one. Thanks for really telling us about all those details. I feel like I was there, but I wasn’t there, but, um, thanks so much. I’m wishing you all the best.

1:39:45 My pleasure. Thanks so much.