Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the human performance outliers podcast with Zack bitter all right everyone welcome back to another episode of the human performance outliers podcast I am your host Zach bitter I have an exciting announcement to make I am offering a chance to win a free 30 minute
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Descriptions show notes and transcripts if you’re interested in diving into some of the previous episodes I do want to give a quick shout out to my endurance training simplified series of episodes it’s gotten quite long so I listed them in the show notes you can link to each
One of those there but if you’re looking to start your endurance Journey or just really fine-tune it I have a whole series of episodes that deal with just training principles in general and the different components that go into it between like easy running speed workor with short intervals long intervals long
Run development the mental side of training all sorts of different stuff so check those out in the show notes if you’re interested in refining your endurance training if you’d like a little bit of extra support in your training I’m actually launching a new coaching package so this new one is
Actually a group training process that is online what it is is if you subscribe to it you will get access to my full catalog of pre-made endurance plans which range from 5K up to 100 Mile come in multiple levels in multiple different durations and you have access to that as long as
You’re subscribed so if you decide to train for a specific distance or event all you got to do is let me know and I send you the copy of that particular training program but what comes with it is what is important in my opinion is when you’re subscribed to this new
Coaching group coaching package you will also be able to attend a weekly meeting with me and the other group members where we will cover topics that I find important for your endurance training Journey as well as question questions and schedule adjustments that you have submitted beforehand and then also some
Live questions from the group the group size is going to be limited to 30 though so make sure you sign up soon because I will be starting this program before the end of 2023 to make sure people have access to this by the start of the new
Year you can find information on that by just heading to my website at Zack bit.com or linking to it in the show notes supporting the show this year are my friends at element electrolytes and Delta G ketones I have full descriptions about how I use both of these products in my training
And racing at the end of the show so if you’re interested in checking that out please stick around after this episode for now just some discounts and promotions from both of these products element electrolytes is offering a free sample pack with your first purchase just go to drink LM nt.com
Hpo they have a no questions ask money back guarantee if you are unsatisfied they also just released their warm beverage winter collection which now includes raspberry chocolate I just checked it out it will be in my morning coffee protocol this winter Delta G Ketone is the exogenous Ketone company
That has almost all of the research behind its formula they are trusted by professionals around the world you can get 20% off with code bitter2 just go to Delta G ketones.in fit best in your lifestyle and then you can compare it to mine links to both of these products can be
Found in the show notes as well as the show sponsor landing page which is Zack bit.com hpos sponsors AE Welcome to Austin thank you so much man welcome back I should say thank you brother yeah you so you you lived in Austin for a while right I
Did I lived in Austin from uh when I was in high school I moved moved here when I was 13 from Singapore in India did uh uh high school here and then and left for my senior and came back and did my undergrad in in Southwestern just North
Austin oh wow okay so you actually really lived in Austin for a bit how long ago was that do you mind me asking uh I left Austin after so I was my time in the Marines was here too my reserve unit was based here and after college I
Left after undergrad so I was about 21 22 something like that okay yeah it’s long a long time long enough where it’s a different city almost totally completely different coming here now it’s like a world of a different City yeah I I would imagine so we’ve been in
Austin now for I guess it’ll be two years in January so it’s coming up pretty quick on that but uh I mean it’s it’s it was already hopping when we got here obviously but it’s just kind of continually growing and I guess they just recently there used to be this like
Building like regulation where you could only build so high south of I forget which road it might have even south of the lake okay and they just removed that which was like kind of a big hurdle for development to occur Beyond like malls essentially cuz like malls are going to
Be single story a lot of times and now that that’s gone it opens it up for like apartment complexes and Condominiums and things like that so now there’s a bunch of developers are looking at these abandoned malls that are now down kind of south of the city or South part of
The city as like these great opportunities because you know as people keep coming into Austin that’s what they’re looking for more housing and things like that so yeah it’s a it’s an interesting time to be here so yeah I’ve heard of Austin and even where I live
Phoenix is some of the fastest growing cities in the country from what I understand yeah that’s actually an interesting point because we were in Phoenix that’s where we moved from and when we left it was growing really fast and especially during the pandemic there was a scenario where our real estate
Agent told us that normally the greater Phoenix area which is like you know Glendale Mesa Phoenix Scottdale all these places would have like 35,000 houses on the market any given time that was like average and during the pandemic it got to 3500 so they were doing doing
Like a 10% Supply yeah which as you can imagine the house prices went was CRA went up like crazy so crazy we were lucky we bought in 2018 so we got in before that um obviously coming to Austin we sunk it all right back into stuff here because it’s similar
Situation here with uh you know supply and demand with that but but yeah you’re you know you’re back on the show now I think this is the third time actually because you came on by yourself and then I had you back on with uh Dr Nelson when
We were kind of going over some nutritional stuff about your your project which is starting to form form itself in terms of actual dates and yes sir one one year from now I’ll be actually either in Antarctica or on my way to Antarctica in Chile to training
For right so my whole world right now is training for it to attempt the first ever 110 day solo 1700 mile Coast to Coast ski Crossing of Antarctica so a crossing of Antarctica Coast to Coast has been done with kites or dogs but it’s never been done without that so
Pure man hauling like dragging a 400 lb sled for 12 plus hours a day across the entire continent is the goal wow and that’s skis right Cross Country Skis yep is there a way to do it without skis or is that just like unheard too too long
I’m guessing right it’s part of part of the Chen like you like some you could try with snowshoes but part of the challenge is if you’re not on skis especially when you’re on softer snow you’re just going to be plowing through you know there’s that but there are
Times where I’ll actually be taking off the skis because when you deal with the there’s a um a phenomenon there called cugi where it’s kind of these wind swept formations of snow that can be quite daunting as high as I mean as as a human being sometimes but mostly not that high
But even high enough that and it’s just kind of these little snow Dunes if you will to navigate on skis they’re a nightmare they’re a freaking nightmare to ski on I’ve been to Antarctica before on an expedition and cugi just sucks like there’s no two ways about it so
Often when I’m if I’m dealing with significant portions of that I will take off my skis to to kind of just walk it’s even it’s just better and what did you say those were called cugi a Russian word okay I forget what exactly it means I know what like yeah I know the
Phenomenon what it looks like and I’ve dealt with skiing on it and it’s not fun but but yeah those are and I will inevitably deal with that it’s uh nature of the beast in Antarctica one of many challenges out there so you’re you’re targeting 110 days which gives us kind
Of like a duration to wrap our minds around what’s the actual distance 1700 miles 7 1700 miles and do you know is there because I’m imagining this isn’t just a flat snowfield it is not uh one would kind of think even I thought when I first got into this world but the
South Pole is actually at 9,000 9,500 ft so you’re going uphill like I’ll start on a place called a filner ice shelf which is pure flat then going up a glacier called a support Force so you’re going uphill and then kind of gradually uphill towards the South Pole and then
Gradually downhill on the other side down a the glacier called REI back onto the ice shelf the Ross ice shelf on the other side but even the downhill it’s not downhill where you can kind of you know get gravity and ski down you’re still having to work for every step with
Your sled is it relatively easier than going on the UPS though for sure it’s definitely at that point cuz at the South Pole I’ll be you know distance-wise the halfway mark I seriously doubt in terms of days I will make it there on the halfway mark Cuz obviously your sled’s heavier you’re
Going uphill so um I think it’ll be I’m hoping around day 60 at the latest so then I have another 50 yeah another 50 days to to make it back down but ideally I mean if I can somehow something awesome happens and I’m at the South
Pole on day 55 that’ll be mad magical you know so yeah you probably just know you’re going to get there ahead of time if that happens right that yeah then I mean if if that happens then I’ll be in in I’ll be feeling on top of the world
Because now your sled’s half the weight and you’re going slightly downhill you’re there’s that obviously there’s kind of the cumulative fatigue because doing 100 days 110 days is not twice as hard as 55 days it’s exponentially harder right because you got the cumulative fatigue build up of just the
Workload you’re putting out there not to mention I will be calorically deprived from the get-go mhm cuz I will be eating on the first 5 days I’ll be eating about 4,500 calories five days 6 through 10 55 and then 6,100 calories and then working my way up to 6600 calories because
Initially when you get out there your body just can’t consume 6600 calories so you start a little lighter just to get your body used to putting in so much food uh and then I work up but even at 6600 calories I’ll be at a deficit because I’ll be burning like 8 to 10,000
A day which is why as we were talking the other day right that I’m kind of I’m training fat yeah I have to get fat it’s a really weird thing training for Polar travel cuz you need to train endurance you need to train strength and you need
To do it all while you’re fat and none of those things go together yeah yeah it’s really interesting CU like yeah you just can’t roll up there in your Peak Fitness State and expect to come back or to get to the Finish Line in or or even
Get there you might just end up like failing at that point because you’d be what what do you normally weigh when you’re just kind of in the middle of like a typical endurance training feat when I was in Peak ultr running shape cuz was a long time ultra running was my
Main kind of thing that I was I was doing nothing at your level but uh but the that was my jam and at that point I was 135 lbs 133 so that was skinny right super obviously like ultra running shape now I’m 170 so a lot more muscle as well
As fat definitely just bulked up a lot too uh and my goal I I’ll get because I’m going to Minnesota this winter for a training Expedition is to get to 175 before I get on the ice in Minnesota but and then I’ll lose at least 20 30 lbs
Out there and then I have to bulk up again yeah and my goal is to get to 180 before Antarctica cuz I think I’ll lose at the minimum 40 lbs okay so when you get done you’re going to be back to that endurance ultramarathon 135 140 lb version of
Yourself is going to be really interesting you know i’ I’ve talked to a bunch of different kind of long haulers yeah mostly like transcontinental type stuff yeah and one thing that I got curious about early on was I was asking him about that like what was their approach in terms of weight maintenance
Or you know what was their target do they go in with more running’s a little more goofy I think because it there’s an impact of course versus skiing you’re you have the advantage of it being a little lower impact I think so you I
Mean like I can imagine like if I put on 40 pounds and started running the problems could occur exactly due to the impact so that’s not as much of an option for them I mean maybe 5 10 pounds or so would probably be appropriate uh
But yeah so I was just I was curious about kind of how the body would just respond with one approach this versus the other and it seemed to me especially when I talk to someone who’s done multiple they would say the better they were able to maintain the quicker their
Turnaround after was by a pretty large margin so even if they went in a little heavy and lost like say 20 pounds over the course yeah they it took them so much longer to return to normaly after the trip versus uh like I think one of the examples was the person they they
Finished the transcon was only like 2 lbs lighter so he like wow you know could have just been water exactly exactly so it’s a pretty wild like level of Maintenance and they had done it you know this might have actually been Dean carnosus oh okay because I think he did
I want to say this was him uh but he said he because he’s done it tce he might have done it three times but he did it he did it once where he just kind of like showed up with his normal State and just kind of tried to eat as much as
He could kind of what you would imagine and then the next time I think he did it he intentionally gained weight I think it was like 10 lbs or something like that and he was able to kind of finish at his normal like kind of comfortable training weight so he shed the extra
Weight that he had put on but he didn’t lose much beyond what he would normally kind of like prefer to be at when he’s just going about his day-to-day got you and he said I think after that one he bounced back a lot quicker I think that
Was Dean I’ve had a lot of different long haulers on I got you U I asked uh Christian Morgan he’s been on a couple times he’s done like a lot of Appalachian Trail stuff okay and he he just recently broke the southbound record on the Appalachian Trail and he
Was telling me I think too about just kind of the variance between some of the different guys that’ve done it uh because I think I think Scott jerk might have lost a lot of weight during it and he seemed to have a little bit of a harder time post okay post effort versus
Carl Meltzer who I think lost very little and he seemed to bounce back a little quicker which who know I mean it’s a little bit of a there’s a lot of confounders probably to consider there but uh yeah it’s it’s interesting thought process so it’ll be fun fun to hear kind
Of how you feel after because there’s really no way around losing out that much weight for sure yeah just due to the logistics cuz how big is your sled CU so it’ll be two sleds back that I’m carrying with four about I’m estimating around 400 lb at the most 200 kilos
Which is 440 lb but obviously the lighter the PO the lighter the better I mean it is ruthless with weight cutting like even measuring my food which by the way you were very helpful for and coming up so thank you for all your support along the way as well but coming up with
A food plan to get as many calories as possible to be as light as possible while also getting hitting my macronutrient numbers right because again you’re putting in so much work but unlike like like you said in with uh with the running the Transcontinental run it’s a lot more impact it’s a lot
Harder but you have support teams over there like low impact for me but I’m carrying all my own food so that’s like the you know the pros and cons kind of thing of each challenge so I can’t just as much as I’d like to can’t eat as much
But uh uh but I’ll be dragging all my own food my fuel cuz I’ll be boiling snow for for water and my own tent and I mean everything cutting weight like I’ve cut the tags off clothes I’m not taking any I’ll be wearing the same clothes for
The whole 110 days needs to say I’ll be pretty stinky at the end of it but even like I cut my toothbrush in half I’ve cut the Zips the zip handles off my tent to save more weight and I tie a string because you have to you
Have strings on all Zips CU you’re using mittens with them right so tie the string directly to the zip cut the zip handle off Saved like another 35 40 gram so as much as possible just ruthlessly weight cutting to make it as efficient as possible not only does that have the
Physical element of just being a lighter sled psychologically it helps because now you know you’ve done everything possible to be ruthless with weight cutting including my food to be as weight efficient as possible like on previous Expeditions for example I used to eat some things like uh cheese and
Salami for example and I didn’t know this at the time because on previous Expeditions I didn’t have to be as ruthless with weight cutting it was a shorter trip heavier sled not the end of the world this trip is so big never been done before for a reason that I’m a lot
More more ruthless with my details of of weight cutting so I would realize that cheese for example might have 10 G worth of fat uh fat proteins and carbs let’s just say just a number but for that 10 grams of macro macro weight it might be
A serving of 18 grams so that’s highly weight inefficient right so I looked at foods that only had a 90% or better ratio of macro weight to actual weight that way I’m just being as weight efficient with my food as possible and to find all that to to nail down the
Exact grams of food it was a good amount of work to get that to be even 6600 calories I’ve got it to weigh 1.1 kilos which is very weight efficient by polar standards and that’s your daily intake is the one point one yeah so one one uh
At 66 it’ll be 1.1 so yeah so but when I’m at 61 cuz I’m taking a calculated risk of from day 11 to 50 I’ll be at 6,100 calories just to reduce a little bit more weight on the sled it’ll save me another about 5 pounds by doing that
Uh which again it’s it’s kind of for risk because even at 66 you’re still at a deficit but the sled is just nightmarishly heavy when you’re you know when when it’s that that big so and you’re hauling the extra body weight at that point too so it’s you sort of have
This mobile aid station on you yeah exactly exactly exactly that’s the big reason why now in my training I don’t actually run at all for my endurance work because to the point like I I’m carrying around just so much more fat even and so much more muscle that the
Injury PR you’re so much more injury prone like I’ve notic noticeably feel it’s a lot harder to move so my endurance work purely comes from Tire dragging and Hiking just because they that’s also more kind of applicable to what I’m doing you know so I’ve stopped
Running completely and I only get all my cardio work through that yeah so tell us a little about the the little or the the sled setup what does that look like in terms of like your training you have like a so you’re pulling a tire yeah
What else goes into that in the tire nothing so when I’m I I live in Phoenix right and so to it’s a really comical site to have this giant truck tire that I just go dragging around parks for sometimes hours on end like a couple of
Weeks ago was my 39th birthday to so to celebrate it did a 39h hour endurance week with three backtack 9h hour endurance days so two of them were 9 hours of Tire dragging and then a 9h hour hike and 9 hours of Tire dragging is mind- numbing because you’re moving
So freaking slow you know and you’re just moving painfully slow around this little park so that’s the core element but now I’m going to Minnesota this winter to replicate the Antarctic conditions as much as possible where I’ll be dragging a sled so that’ll be just a very heavy sled I’ll load it up
With tons of weight to try to get to 400 lb not the same sled I’ll be using in Antarctica cuz those two sleds are custom made and I I have them with me but I’m I want them fresh and unscratched you know for uh for Antarctica but it’ll be just a very
Heavy sled that I’ll be dragging for 35 days I’m staying with my fiance at an Airbnb just going out every day and then 35 days going out solo on an expedition like a mini Antarctica essentially and that’ll be kind of loading it up with food my tent my fuel stoves everything
That I’ll be using in Antarctica yeah a total dress rehearsal exactly so you’re gaining a ton of weight now in preparation for this dry dress rehearsal essentially yes that’s going to take a huge chunk of that weight off of you I would imagine so then what’s the game
Plan after you finish the dress rehearsal once I come back start immediately start bulking back up it’s it’s none of this is great for the body right but the way I say it is great for the Mind and Spirit so uh but that’s like I mean right now even to bulk up I
Mean I’m eating I’m other than being gluten-free I’m eating kind of everything but right before I go on Expedition I move to a keto style diet and I actually primarily like right now I’m for example sing carbs it’s just a great way to just get fat but I move to
A keto style because when I’m on Ice 73% of my diet is in fats because fats is nine calories per gram and proteins and carbs are four so it’s more weight efficient to have a heavy higher fat ratio right but to so to get my body
Acclimated and used to using fat as the primary source of energy energy I move to keto a little bit before Expedition so once I come back I’ll just car blow just eat a ton start bulking back up and then alternate between keto cuz my goal is not to be in ketosis I’m not
Trying to lose weight I just want to get my body fat adapted not carb adapted as the primary source of energy yeah once you get out there your body’s going to be burning a tremendous amount of fat off of you and as well as what you’re eating so exactly exactly yeah it’d be
Really cool if they could like hook you up to some sort of biometric thing that could like analyze everything that’s going on out there between just like the feedback your body’s giving and the the just the ratios of carbs of fat that you’re burning along the way and stuff like
That yeah it will be interesting to know yeah so you have it do you have percentages of like fats carbs and proteins kind of figured out that you’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis while you’re out there I do I’ll be taking 300 gram fat 150 gram protein and the fat is
The only one that’ll vary depending on my calorie but at 6600 calories it’ll be about 550 gram fat okay interesting how much carbs are you getting then 300 300 yeah so it’s it’s so funny because the numbers are so high 300 G of carbs still fits within like a a ketogenic ratio
Essentially exactly because the numbers are so high so even at those numbers it’s like 70 I think 70 to 73% calories come from fat so yeah it’s a topic that I I talk about from time to time because a lot of people who are interested in what I’m doing are interested in what
I’m doing somewhat because of the dietary stuff CU that’s different enough unique exactly yeah from what they typically think an endurance athlete would be doing So eventually they get around to asking me the the common question of what are you eating what are your macronutrient ratios and things
Like that and it’s like I always feel compelled to share what I’m doing in training alongside any description I give because first of all it changes like if I’m off season the grams the gram totals in every one of them will look different yeah but you know you
Introduce a 20 hour training week and then all of a sudden like yeah I might have a day where I’m eating quite a bit more carbohydrates than what a person on a ketogenic diet would do but if you would test my blood Ketone levels there’s a good chance I’m going to be
Like well into a ketogenic like therapeutic range of uh blood Ketone levels so um yeah it’s just one of those things where it’s like we have like this dietary approach that has sort of like I guess multiple ways of being defined you know that people kind of gravitate
Towards the the folic kind of criteria of like 50 grams or less which for most people that’s probably a good kind of Target if you’re just going about your life not training for anything specifically 50 grams is probably what it would take you introduce you know training for 100 mile race that number
Shifts yeah exactly put in so much work yeah it is it is funny to think about um yeah so what are you eating like how many calories a day are you eating right now just to gain the weight right now you know my um I’m still at a point
Especially with traveling just like eat anything kind of thing uh but once I go back because I’m about what 6 weeks away from Minnesota heading out I’m going to once I get back from this trip to Austin move move to start moving to keto and I haven’t like currently been measuring
Calories it’s more just eat everything and just measuring my weight to make sure it’s not losing but once I go to keto part a big part of it will be just drinking straight oil because again you have to eat so many calories because not
Only do I need to maintain or not lose I got to keep putting on and putting in that many hours of training while trying to put on is it’s work you know you’re eating like an animal so part of it is just drinking straight oil to one get my
Body used to that cuz I’ll be doing that on on the Expedition as well as part of it is will be just drinking oil is just straight calories right but obviously you can’t eat drink too much of that that’s not really good for digestion to
Say the least so I do do a little bit of that because again when you’re trying to eat so much fats oil is the only thing that’s pure fat so there’s no carbs or proteins in it you know so part of that I’ve gotten used to at one point like
Drinking like 50 grams of oil a day just mix it with some water or in a protein shake or whatever and just down a ton of oil there’s different ways to do it I remember when I when I was teaching actually I had like a jar of olive oil
Like in this cupboard by by my desk that I would just like when I was on like a big training block and it was like I mean you get busy when you’re working a full-time job and it’s like easy to like not eat enough and then realize you you
The hard part is like you get to the end of the day you’ve done a couple of workouts and you’re like dang I’m only like halfway to my calorie goals for the day and now I have to eat this like uncomfortable amount of food so it’s like you do all these weird little
Things to try to make sure you don’t get yourself in that situation in the first place so like when I was kind of when since I was low carbo I wasn’t I was going to you know try to do like oils like you said something that’s pure fat
In a lot of cases exactly and I remember one day so I would I would just take pulls from it like sometimes like in between classes like it wouldn’t be much so it wasn’t like kind of all that disgusting like it would be if I tried to actually physically drink a glass of
It exactly so it’s almost just like a a pallet cleanser type amount of oil um and like and I remember what one point I remember thinking like you know this olive oil bottle sort of looks like a bottle of wine I better like make it known what I’m doing here exactly like
Just getting drunk in the middle class trouble but yeah so it’s it’s interesting stuff but what you got to do yeah yeah because there’s two there’s kind of two components to that there’s the you want to start the event with sort of a dietary approach you’re
Familiar with just so that like you said like you have like the the fat oxidation rates that that may be impacted by the duration in which you’re doing it so kind of going in cold turkey may not be good for that but then it’s just the digestability so there’s probably like a digestability
Threshold in general with certain things like oils that probably ranges from one person to the next but then there’s also going to be like an adaptation I would imagine where like in the beginning your threshold is this but if you’re doing it for 6 weeks that threshold may increase
And get closer to what you’re or hopefully to what you’re going to actually be doing out there for sure yeah I mean I was at a point and I’d kind of stopped a little bit now life’s been a little crazy moving around but drinking like 50 60 grams of oil a day
You know and no issues digestion wise I also moved initially when I first started doing it I drank like 50 gr of MCT oil MCT oil was disastrous on my digestion that was not a good day so I moved avocado oil it’s a great way to lose weight maybe exactly exactly so I
Moved to avocado oil uh so you live and learn through making some mistakes as you go through this process but yeah I moved to avocado oil and and now even like I mean I could easily I’m sure drink 203 no issues and just kind of increase a little bit from there it’s
Kind of a bummer cuz MCT oil would be probably the best option if it could if you could handle it I do have a little bit in the one of my buddies is a supplement formula designer so he made a custommade supplement for me for Antarctica cuz my diet isn’t exactly
Healthy out there right so he his supplement gives me all the micronutrients the vitamins it does have some MCT oils in there as well so I’m getting a little bit through that Source uh and I forget what else I mean it’s a beast of a supplement it’s got like
Shillig and like this that and the other thing it’s an absurd amount of ingredients he’s concocted together together in this mix I would imagine like Explorations and long duration things like this where you’re self-supporting has gotten a bit of a technological advantage food chemistry for sure now you can just dehydrate
Stuff you can get like you in the past you’d probably come back with all sorts of deficiencies yeah now you kind of be on top of that yeah way back when they used to get what scurvy and all kinds of stuff right thankfully we don’t have that issue anymore definitely a lot more
Knowledge since then uh so and yeah I’m blessed with good a good team who makes as possible you know my buddy created like an insane supplement and all the help I’ve Gotten even coming up with a nutritional plan um which has been invaluable and I put it to the test on
Previous Expeditions as well and now I’ll be uh refining it further and further on as I go to Minnesota you know a lot of things like even even like when I’m skiing I’ve I’ve changed a little bit of my lunch diet so I’ll be skiing for the first shift for 90 minutes take
A quick break for water peeing food and then eight shifts of 75 minutes is kind of the goal so after the fourth shift I have a slightly different meal cuz while I’m skiing my my on Theo food is macadamia nuts and chocolates so at after the fourth break I’ll have a tiny
Bit of jalapeno chips and a different kind of chocolate because psychologically that also gives you something smaller to look forward to right you have a break to have to have to think about lunch not think about the end of the day I mean as much as possible keeping your mind present
Staying in the now but as you well know your mind’s going to wander yeah and it’s going to think about what’s next so if you break it up into these mini chunks you have it makes it psychologically easier so that was learning from I was in the Arctic
Earlier this winter doing a couple of solo Expeditions up there as training and it was like all right I need something else to break the length of this day just to make it psychologically easier so just switch the variety of chocolate and jalapeno chips a very small amount for my lunch because most
Of that I’ll eat when I first come into the tent that is Heavenly that’s my morale food is at the after I after I finish the day of skiing I set up my tent I go in there and while the snow is boiling for water which takes a little
Bit of time the first thing I eat is jalapeno chips and Divine M Divine yeah the mental side is really really interesting to me and I’ve always been working I’ve got like a continuous goal of refining how to describe the mental approach of these longer effort I I’m working mostly a
Single day ultramarathon stuff but it’s a similar idea of like scaffolding your goals and things like that so one way I’ve been trying to describe it to people now most recently is like if you think of like your mind your mind is kind of like a magnet where it is going
To get attracted to whatever kind of Target or goal that you set out for it yeah so the easy part is the end goal that sort of presents itself and that’s usually the draw in the first place so that’s good to have that like attention and that draw towards that because it’s
Going to draw M you’re going to draw motivation from that and things like that but it’s almost too far off so whether you’re looking at it yeah whether you’re looking at it from the lens of I’m going to do this big training program to get ready for this
100 mile race or you’re actually on the starting line of 100 mile race and you’re going to go through the paces of getting from start to finish you you expend way more mental energy in my opinion when you have that goal too far out so it’s like that attraction that
Duration of the attraction actually like physically drains more mental energy than if your mind can kind of attach itself to something a little closer 100% yeah so you kind of got to build in this scaffolding of these different things that your mind is going to get sucked
Into and think about that will supersede what you want to get to but it’s too early to start thinking about it absolutely and I always find that to be like the more of those you can build in the better it’s going to be from a mental energy standpoint but I’m still again talking
About single day stuff granted I guess the training you could get to durations as long is what you’re talking about here but that’s also got a lot of like kind of intuitive built-in things where like you finish a workout you’re done till the next day yeah whereas you
Finish a day and you kind of are just doing more work and then basically sleeping getting and doing it all over and then doing the same thing yeah that’s the challenge and part of the draw for Polar travel because polar travel there’s a polar Explorer from the
1900s and the kind of the OG days of polar exploration who said polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised and I couldn’t agree with more because you know unlike it often got gets compared to mountain
Climbing like Everest or something like that it’s not nearly as dangerous as Alex hul’s free solo or the alpinist right free soing up ice or even mountaineering but it’s far more suffering part of that is you know when and I’ve done a lot of mountaineering as
Well as you go up and down the mountain it’s more Dynamic the terrain is different the days are different the views are different and often the environment forces you into flow like I was on Denali uh early last year it’s a tallest mountain in North America and
You know there’s a 16 Ridge at 16,000 ft where it’s so such a thin ridg line one foot in front of the other in front of the other and you got like a thousand foot drop on each side when you’re in that your mind forces you into flow the
Environment forces you into flow you’re not thinking about stuff you’re not looking at the views cuz you’re thinking about the one step in front of you right right you have to so that’s beautiful but in Antarctica you don’t have that cuz it’s just flat white nothingness every day barring a few sections of
Antarctica where there’s mountain range every day is flat white nothingness and you’re doing the same damn thing over and over and over again that monotony is my numbing and that’s to me is I’m more drawn from The Suffering The Struggle the endurance aspect rather than the danger aspect so it’s not nearly as
Dangerous as some of that mountaineering stuff but it’s a lot more mental and physical suffering repeatedly and that to me it’s not the suffering in if itself that I seek it’s what that suffering gives you access to as you well know right running Ultras you enter the pain cave you struggle you suffer
But it gives you access to that Transcendence and that is the draw but because it’s so monotonous to your point earlier you have to break it down into those like I’m not entering Antarctica thinking about day 110 right so you multiple different ways to do that one
Element is the latitude markers as I move from 87 to 88 to 89 to 9 0° the South Pole another one is every 10 days I’ll eat a dessert so I’ll have a different meal that also adds just a morale element but now you have a thing
To look forward to and outside of that 10 days my fiance is going to write me a letter for every 10 days that just kind of a it’s something really to look forward to to open you know so I’ll have sort of five days will be the letter the
Next 5 days will be the uh the dessert then five days the letter so you have constantly these little things to keep you motivated and keep you going throughout and then even in the middle of the day as I mentioned the lunches and even that first shift is 90 minutes
And then the next ones are 75 so once that first shift is done it’s kind of like in my mind the first shift no longer counts it’s it’s like a nothing shift now you only have four shifts till you got to hit lunch you know it’s all
These little things to keep breaking it down and even just one shift is 75 minutes that’s your whole world your whole world is that shift I just got to go there and and the the the the burden as well as the beauty of of polar travel is during those shifts your mind wanders
Because as I said it’s flat white nothingness right so you can you’re sometimes your mind if you’re not if the if you don’t have Mastery over it it can make 5 minutes feel like a lifetime and I’ve had moments on Polar trips where I look at my watch thinking like we’re
Almost end with the shift and it’ll be like 10 minutes in I’m like God damn it this is terrible you know so Mastery of our mind is is the draw and that’s everything like training for that you know yeah getting ready for Antartica is the Mind Mastery as well it’s an
Interesting topic because I think with my coaching clients one thing I’ll try to do is I’ll try to set separate as much as you can there’s an obviously a exchange here between the physical and the mental but I’ll try to describe in two different ways to give them kind of
Like focal points so that they can actually like com so they can actually comprehend that they’re what they’re doing and then actively do it and acknowledge they’re doing it so that they feel prepared so like one of it is just you get to the start of this race this 100 mile race
And it gets to be this point where you get closer and closer to you start getting nervous anxiety and everything that goes into like I’ve run 100 miles it’s how do you raliz that well you make iter and how do you make it smaller you look at everything you did to prepare
For it so what I’ll tell a lot of my coaching clients is think of it this way like by the time you step on that starting line you’ve done 99% of this project the 100 mile race itself is really just a consolidation of like a
Week or two of training into one day and it’s really just that last 1% of everything you’ve done so far and if you want to extrapolate even further and just think like how long have you been well 10 years so well you’ve technically been preparing for this for 10 years
Then don’t don’t discount the the steps that built you up to the training plan you currently did I love that that one I think people have an easier time wrapping their head around the next one is like how do they actually think about like the the process of mental in terms
Of acknowledging things that they’ve done that have prepared them because I think most people are mentally ready they just don’t know it and if they don’t know it they can’t access the tools available to actually get through it so the way I tell it to people with
This one is like think about anything You’ do in life like if if any if you have a job you’re doing this just intuitively where it’s like you go into work maybe your boss gives you a project that project is going to take you two weeks to do so you start scaffolding
What you need to do each day at work to take the steps required to get there so once you kind of have that scaffolding laid out you stop thinking about the end of the project as your your constant yeah I mean it’s there it’s in the back
Of your mind but it’s not something that you’re burning a lot of mental energy on you’re worried about Monday from 10: until noon I need to finish this aspect of it I can’t even worry about the next step until I finish this aspect yeah so I think really just like knowing or
Acknowledging that in your day-to-day life you’re likely doing these things and it’s just a matter of don’t mindlessly go through that process acknowledge that process so you can actually get the gratification of what you’re actually doing mentally and then place that over the approach that you described in terms of
Kind of adding it to the physical element of doing ultramarathons or in your case Arctic exploration yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and the mental aspect is I mean of course there is a physical aspect but it’s mostly is the is that as you know from rra running but especially out there when you’re
Completely alone you know navigating that Solitude so I’ve learned over time like some of the core virtues that guide me is presence being able to master presence and staying in the now and a very simple way to do that is bring your world back into your five senses so one
Of my many mantras I also use is make your world small kind of like you echoed right uh so making your world small bring it back to the five senses and then courage because every day courage is the I mean Maya Angelou says courage is the most important of all virtues
Because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently you can practice it erratically but not consistently so courage every day I means stepping out in that Battlefield every day it’s work especially when you’re being hammered by Hurricane force winds right brutal winds minus 40 degrees some of the most Savage
Environments on Earth you know uh out there and then and curiosity always having an openness to see what was what will be out there like being out there alone the depths of solitude the depths of suffering I get to open doors into the human soul that are very rarely
Opened you know and that’s part of the draw and so a curiosity to see what will what will be in that you know on the other side of those doors like you have to battle the dragon to find the treasure and the bigger the dragon the
Dragon out there is going to be a big one so the treasures I get to une Earth are huge in curiosity I mean people have asked me you know what next who will you be after this and I said I don’t know yeah and that’s part of the excitement
And then having a sense of humor is an absolute must you have to be able to laugh at yourself laugh at things because things get hard out there you know out there the volume of life is dialed everything is ex you know has Amplified it at a high intensity so the
Highs are so high but the lows are so extremely low and it becomes this kind of microcosm to experience the entire Human Condition in one kind of condensed period of time which is part of the draw but those four virtues I found are not only valuable in on this but just in
Life to navigate the challenges of life you do that and of course there’s many other virtues but I found I found that kind of those four are some ones that Trump the others and a lot of others will spring from them they’ve been invaluable in guiding me through all the
Things I’ve done even to prepare for what’s coming yeah and I and we’ve talked about some of the stuff you’ve done in the past on prior episodes but for listeners who are maybe just going to listen to this one this isn’t something that you just decided to do on
A whim and which is probably good yeah exactly so you you said something that I mean we chatted about this a little bit yesterday too but uh the way I think about just life in general now that I’m older than I once was I guess is the way
To say it is there’s certain like you you hit certain like benchmarks in life where you sort of have like a big change or something is different to the degree where like you feel like you’ve almost entered a different life or a different phase of your life at least and then you
Look back at yourself during those previous stages and it’s almost a different person to some degree and the further back you go usually the less connected you maybe are to that person or the more separate that person is from your current self yeah generally those
Take a lot of time to go from one to the next I think you know you have like some ones that are kind of built into society maybe where like you know High School versus College your first real job out of college stuff like that uh but the
Way you’ve kind of gone about just endurance and Ultra Marathon if we want to call it that is is putting you kind of in a position probably to like you said in a relatively compressed period of Time come out the other end not recognizing the person who went in
Exactly yeah what’s that like given the different experiences you’ve had it’s you know to a certain degree life threw them my way I mean before when I first moved here you know as I mentioned I moved from India to Singapore got very heavily into drugs lost two friends to
Addiction still have all these scars in my arm from cutting myself this was a cigar burn very self-destructive lost two friends got out of that watched the movie Blackhawk Down you’ve seen that one that movie changed my life it got me out of drugs and into the military the
Marines so that’s why you joined that’s why I joined because watching that movie specifically that scene where Gary Gordon and Randy sugar these two Delta snipers they volunteered to go on the ground to set up a defensive perimeter to protect the second Blackhawk that had crashed they knew that they had no idea
When reinforcements would arrive and they knew that hundreds if not thousands of armed enemy Personnel were heading their way and they still volunteered to go down they both died but the guy they died protecting Michael Durant is still alive today because of what they did and that courage man that that it’s awe
Inspiring you know so it made me question this very selfish worthless existence I was living and almost overnight stopped doing drugs join the Marines so that was the the Marines birth the very essence of who I am today the desire to seek out struggle to seek out adversity because Marine Corps
Training was hard you suffered and that was beautiful right it taught me the ability in the human Spirit to trans send suffering to go with to war with the self and win and to do it in service of something greater in the Marines nobody gave a about your well-being
What mattered was the men in the mission incept from all the politics of the war like lot obviously was wrong and all that but on the ground even in Iraq we were there to help we wanted to do some good we were serving helping the people there we were fighting for each other
You know and and even at the cost of your own well-being there was a lot of times we didn’t want to go on missions you go when you’re told to you know which many times it sucked in the moment but it was beautiful so the Marines bir
That and that’s when I like that was one evolution of the self one you know there was a death of one version of me even now coming into Austin because this is where I had my whole drug phase and I was looking at my life and as I was
Driving in here with my fiance and I I told her like I can’t even fathom that version of me I can’t even imagine this version of me looking back the things I used to do and the draw off that even going to frat parties in college the
Amount I used to drink back then you know I can’t even wrap my hand around that version of me cuz I struggled a lot even after the Iraq like Marines got me into Outdoor Sports but then after Iraq I was deployed to Iraq in 07 as an
Infantry marine and when I came back I really struggled with alcohol with I was diagnosed with PTSD depression lost a couple of Junior Marines to Suicide lost a close buddy of mine in the war and struggled a lot I mean I was at a point man drinking like a bottle of vodka a
Day I would drink for 5 days straight throw up drink again you know and until I was on the brink of suicide that was another of those transformational moments cuz coming out of that like that’s what led me to then going deep into study neuroscience studying psychology studying spirituality
Confronting my own demons doing that inner work uh which led me to then writing my book fear ofana to help others navigate Their Fear and their struggle you know all of that was another transformational moment so to some like some of these were thrust upon me but after that especially is when I
Started to because when I joined the Marines I didn’t consciously do it as a as a way to seek evolution of the self it was like this is just what I want to do I wasn’t as self-aware as I am now but since then since kind of coming out
Of that abyss of suicide it was like now how do I Engineer such moments how do I Engineer these moments where one self dies and another is reborn and Antarctica is that expression at its highest level because this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done never been
Done before for a reason if I can somehow pull it off it’s going to be gamechanging right and that’s why even I’ve named the Expedition the Great Soul crossing the idea is that it’s a crossing of the soul from One Life to the next M you know I love this that
Story from uh ancient Greece where they when somebody died they would put coins on their eyes to pay the fairy man to to FY their soul from Death from One Life to the afterlife and it’s kind of like in my opinion I believe in life there should be many debts and many rebirths
So one self dies and another is reborn and these and this happens Through The Crucible of struggle through The Crucible of suffering to putting yourself and this doesn’t just mean physical right it can also mean mental emotional like as you know I’ve done Darkness Retreats where twice I spent
One day one time in seven days and the other time 10 days in Pitch Darkness just complete darkness 24/7 sitting in a room all of these moments those weren’t physically challenging but mentally and spiritually extremely challenging you know so putting yourself in these moments that result in one self dying
And another being reborn and that’s that’s that to me I think is not the essence of just growth and evolution but it’s how you feel more life in in how you feel more alive in this Human Experience that’s it’s a beautiful way to kind of move through life to
Experience that hey folks just a quick reminder that this episode sponsors are element electrolytes and Delta G ketones you can get a free sample pack of element electrolytes by going to drink element.com hpo and 20% off your order of Delta G ketones by going to delt gon.com and entering promo code
Bitter2 I wanted to talk to you a bit about the darkness Retreat stuff because I think that has been something that has gotten a lot more public attention recently I think you Aaron Rogers did his four-day Darkness Retreat between his last season and this season and it
Was one of those things where you know he’s a big enough name where now people who otherwise would have never been exposed to it now we’re aware of what it is probably a healthy bit of humor and lack of understanding too but yeah um I
Also have a buddy who’s done it uh and I think it was actually a similar I think it might have been like the same place that Aon Rogers went to but you actually like introduced this to some people didn’t you like you were maybe one of the I guess maybe maybe the question
Here is how did you find out about Darkness Retreats and is this something that we’ve all been kind of ignorant to and has been around for a long time and it’s just now kind of getting its light yeah it’s definitely been around for a long long time I got into it because I
Went through a very very challenging divorce without going too deep into it my ex-wife kind of got up caught up in this cult and it was a crazy situation I ended up breaking my sobriety and when I do anything I do it pretty hard so I broke hard and I didn’t like that
Version of me so I was like I’d already done a lot of physical challenges at this point but I was like something’s missing so let me confront this fear I have of Stillness and so I wanted to go deeper into the self so I was going to
Go do a 10-day silent Retreat these their thing called vasas they’re much more common and as I was researching it I stumbled into this notion of a Darkness Retreat and I was like this is far more appealing to me because in the darkness we’re shutting off one of the
Primary ways in which we engage with the world your visual sense M so even in a simple way I can look right now and say that’s a white wall but my mind has somewhere external to latch onto in the darkness it has nowhere external to latch onto so you’re forced to go within
So that’s how I stumbled upon it and then I had I was very uh blessed I went on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast shared it with him and then he went on to the same Darkness Retreat that I went to in Germany and then I think he did a
Documentary about it which kind of blew it up so by no means did I introduce it to the world I did help I guess spread it a little bit and I think it’s a blessing like I couldn’t be more happy to have spread it to help spread it
Because it I know it made a difference for Aubrey it’s made a lot of difference and I think it’s one of the most profoundly beautiful experiences to go to because in my experience with The Human Condition I think one of the biggest fears we have is stillness it’s
Not something people like if you ask somebody what are you scared of they’ll say Stillness but we do everything and the world is could not be more evident of that to distract ourselves from ourselves Carl Yung even said people will do anything no matter how absurd to avoid facing
Their own soul and sometimes it’s drinking drugs binge watching Netflix but sometimes it’s even the positive things watching you know a working training often we do that even when I came back from Iraq I went and did that I did a one month uh ski Crossing of
Greenland dragging 190 lb sled for 350 Mi across the ice cap beautiful Expedition but back then I wasn’t as aware and I was doing it just to escape my demons I did not want to deal with the Stillness of the normal world and so it was actually after Greenland that I I
Hit that rock bottom but now I still do these things but I’m not doing it to escape I’m not doing it to run away so darkness is a beautiful way to confront yourself to be still with the soul and see what arises that’s why I think it’s a a profoundly beautiful experience I
Could not recommend enough to anybody it’ll it’ll allow you to open doors within yourself that have never been opened before yeah yeah it’s interesting I I mean the way you described it as like you’re literally turning off one of your senses so you’re you’re you’re shutting off an access point to the
World and then on top of it you’re consolidating yourself into a small room because in order to keep it dark you kind of have to exactly so to some degree you’re probably shutting off other things too like other you’re shutting off such a magnitude of different sensory inputs that people
Have access to nowadays since we have access to so many different opportunities which is both good and bad like you’ve kind of said at certain point you have to hit the reset button exactly and in the you also see lights because they say that your brain releases DMT in that level of
Darkness so you start to see lights that are as real as any other lights and in those lights shapes will form and you call it what you want everybody everybody I know who’s gone to a Darkness experienced this but you can call it God speaking to you to these
Through these lights or the universe Consciousness whatever your Paradigm is and that is very enlightening it’s very profound I even journaled in the dark I had a kind of ruler and it was journaling and the stuff that came through was really really really deep you know it allowed me to find new
Places within myself that allowed me to access new stages of my own Evolution and then bring that to the trainings that I do the people that I help and teach yeah did you I mean minus the journaling I suppose did you have a hard time like recalling what you were
Thinking about or was there certain things the the my my only connection point to something like this is really like I’ll do 100 mile race and one question I’ll get is like what are you thinking about the whole time and I have the hardest time answering that question
Because there’ll be like maybe two or three things for whatever reason my my brain latches to and I I assume I’m kind of going over those over and over again and that’s why they stick in there because there’s such repetition there but there’s also a bunch of stuff almost
Like a if you have like a really Vivid dream and then you wake up in the morning and you’re like wow that was weird weird and then later after you’ve forgotten you’re like there’s elements of it that you were like I I recalled this so vividly when I first woke up and
Now I’ve completely forgotten it yeah there’s I assume there’s that going on as well where there’s a lot of stuff that my mind is running through that sort of just gets kind of lost in the the in the hard drive somewhere totally and I can’t even tell people what it was
Because I’ve already forgotten about it I can completely relate I think sometimes even sometimes interviews like this people will ask me after you know how did it go what questions he ask I’m like I don’t actually remember uh cuz you’re so in it you know you don’t and
The Darkness is very similar I mean even my own journal I came out reading portions of my journal being like cuz I don’t remember writing that right you know and it was so moving to to read that to see what was revealed through me through these messages so there’s
Definitely a lot of that and there’s others that I do remember vividly like I had what I perceived to be as a conversation with god that left me balling in tears and I can vividly remember the lights that I saw this hearing this voice and just you know the
Experience after that so there’s some of that and some that I just just uh are very kind of these like a dream like a very you know weird kind of force that I have a vague memory of and some like some passages in my journal I don’t
Remember at all and that’s so cool to go through moments like that because you’re so in the in the isness of that moment you know the pure isness of that moment yeah I wonder if this would like kind of ruin the experience some degree but it would interesting to have like a voice
Recorder I actually did think about that because the first time I went in the darkness I chose to be silent because when you when when you speak to yourself there’s a feedback loop right I can hear my own words right now so my the chaos of Consciousness is silenced by hearing
My own words so I wanted to be with the chaos of that Consciousness the second time I went in the darkness the 10 days because the the first time I went in it was more kind of to heal the second time I went in it was pure training it was
Training for Antarctica training for the Solitude the Stillness Mastery over mind Mastery over self being with myself cuz I’ll be with myself a lot when I’m in loud one of theol a lot of time studying is method acting are you familiar with yeah so yeah method acting is basically like
Those actors who they live and breed the character So Daniel Le Lewis greatest method actor of all time you know or even Heath Ledger when he was playing The Joker what a Mastery of performance right but even when the camera is not filming Daniel Lewis will stay in
Character so he lives and breathe and and he’ll talk about how they actually dream and sleep and think and feel as the character not as himself so what fascinated me about that is that if you think about that I mean here’s a a being who completely sheds his own identity
One director said of Daniel Le Lewis I’ve never seen anybody come to uh come as close to complete obliteration of the self so he completely sheds his construct of his identity of Daniel de Lewis and becomes something else now think about that in the in the lens of
Personal growth because how we view ourselves is the we we we have these con constructs are our own identity my nationality right that’s a construct of my own identity and let me kind of elaborate on what I mean by that because most of how we engage with reality is a
Construct like even for example if I see with this white wall I look at that and I’ve been taught from a young age that color is white and that thing that I’m seeing is a wall but there’s a pure imperceptible moment between pure experience and the constructs we latch
Onto experience it’s impossible to even notice it unless you’re in these kind of moments that we just talked about where you’re so in the now and that’s why you kind of don’t even remember it but most of how we engage with the world is through these constructs that shape our
Experience of reality and these constructs then Define how we move through life like even when I did my first 24-hour run you know in the ultra world as you know it’s not it’s fairly common in the ultra running world to run a 24-hour run right I would say in ultra
Running but when I told my family in India they didn’t think that was possible they had no idea that one could run for 24 hours so in their construct of reality that’s impossible but when you live in a world where that’s normal quote unquote it changes how you engage
With that experience right because what makes a run long for you 50 miles will be nothing for somebody who’s never run 50 miles could be the longest in the world because it’s a construct of how we view it through and our constructs are shaped by our beliefs our paradigms how
We grew up everything right and those constructs shape our how we engage with the world now the goal here is not to release constructs because they’re valuable they they help us move through life but the goal is to become aware of them so they don’t Define you they don’t
Limit you you know even as an example when I’m out on the ice I often will say things like I hope the weather will be what it is tomorrow when I say that 100% of the time I get what I want if I say oh I hope the weather is not stormy I
Hope it’s not too cold cold is also a construct I can be in minus 10 degrees and I’ve experienced this where I’m warm or I’ve been in 60 degrees and I’m cold right so it’s a construct of how we view it and the more we can become aware of
That we can transcend it to create our own reality and how we experience it so that was a core thing of of what I’m doing in the darkness was method acting was training and creating the person I need to be to ski across Antarctica and I have like a whole series of trainings
Around this because I went deep very obsessive as I’m sure you can relate into studying it so I’ve built like six hours of trainings around it uh and and really went deep into creating the the identity and letting go of every construct that wasn’t serving me and
Creating a new one that would help me do this mission that I need to do you know and that means tapping into every Force within your soul like the darkness the light that’s another thing you know Carl Yung also says one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of
Light but by making the darkness conscious and we demonize the the darkness the fear the pain that we go through as bad you know these things are bad so we avoid them but what was one of the most valuable things in my own healing Journey from the war and now
Using it is is the struggles that I went through you know I when I was in Iraq my vehicle drove over an active bomb that didn’t explode my buddies drove over a bomb it exploded he died who knows why that happened there’s no reason for that and when I came back I
Struggled with Survivor guilt I was told that you know it’s not your fault and I get it rationally bullets fly where they fly in war bombs explode what you know you can’t control that but emotionally I couldn’t change the fact that I had that because the guilt was simply an
Expression of my love for my brother it wasn’t a bad emotion there are no bad emotions they’re just emotions and it’s up to us to decide what we do with them so instead of demonizing that guilt as bad I reframed it and for a long time I
Had a picture of my friend that I lost in the war and it said this should have been you earn this life now my guilt became my Ally my guilt drove me to writing my book fear of an it was The Core Essence of that where I go much
Deeper into like sharing about the the nature of our emotions and our experience with fear and Stress and Anxiety all these quote unquote negative emotions but that guilt became fuel right it was just how I viewed it that guilt wasn’t in in itself itself the problem so I tapped into my darkness and
Now it became a weapon to move through life then everything is a weapon if you choose to the world is your library so even and it’s not like I’m always tapping into that space of you know feeling guilty sometimes it’s pure gratitude it’s Bliss like you’re using
Both the darkness and the light as a tool to navigate but the more you play in all arenas the more you know which tool to use when you need it MH yeah you probably get really good at recognizing when certain experiences draw a certain emotion out of you what tool to pull
Then so you’re almost you’re thinking not just about like what you’ve already connected the dots between which tools respond best to which emotions so then it’s more about identifying like what experience produced that and then kind of moving from there yeah and a lot of it is experimentation like the only
Thing the only way to obain that Mastery is you can listen to a podcast read a book and that’s great that can provide some insights but the greatest lessons are in the doing you have to be in the arena so as an example you know I was on
An ultra a long time ago and I was it was middle of the night I was running on my own it wasn’t sort of a formal Ultra just on my own I think it was an 80 mile run and I decided to put all these audio
Books of very dark things like one was at the Holocaust one was a survivor of sex trafficking child soldiers and the whole point was I would listen to these horrific stories and get perspective on my suffering like oh this is not so bad they have it a ton worse but it sent me
In a really dark place because I just went like the world sucks this sucks everything sucks the humanity is evil and I’m like all right that didn’t work too well you know so you learn and you kind of experiment by doing that but there was another time you know when I
Did this 167 run across Liberia it was about a marathon a day for a week and on day five I had this aching pain hit my shin about 17 miles into the run and I started limping for a little bit and then I just started sprinting and the
Whole time I was saying things to myself like remember Neil Neil’s my buddy who died in the war it should have been you that died and said of him suck it up if you quit now you deserve a coward’s death you know and I was like Liberia
Has been through Civil War Ebola poverty and I was like people are suffering all around you you have no right to complain earn this life suck at the up like saying this very dark things to myself but that was a valuable place to go those last few miles I ran on that day
Were the fastest I ran the entire trip mhm I didn’t always talk to myself like that a lot of the other times it was just gratitude Bliss for the experience but the more you access all these forces the more you know which one has value and this is the point like we’ve all
Been through hard times in life part of The Human Experience instead of running away from it use it as fuel like I actually I firmly believe in the core of my soul that there is a death I a Deb IO for this life that I’ve been gifted
Beyond just the times I should have died in Iraq and many other times you know I’ve been blessed with great parents who gave me a good life I’ve I’ve volunteered in um leper colonies I’ve seen people in extreme poverty worked with former Child Soldiers with survivors of sex trafficking these
People born into hell on Earth just by being born where they were born they were in and thrust into hell simply by being born where I was born I was blessed with a million times more opportunities than most I didn’t do anything to earn that so in my Paradigm
I believe there’s a debt I owe for this life I’ve been gifted now I’m not saying that’s a right way to think a lot of people are like that’s unhealthy and that’s okay the point is not to say that my way is the way it’s to say that whatever struggles you’ve experienced
Your Darkness your pain find a way to turn that into a frame into a construct that serves you that drives you forward like I love my life I couldn’t be happier and I’m not always thinking about this debt that I owe but there are times where that is the most valuable
Place to go especially when I’m in the suck out on Expedition I’ll be really in the suck and like people have it a lot worse you owe a debt for this life suck it up keep going MH so turn yourness into fuel yeah yeah it’s interesting I want to I want to go
Back cuz you said you were kind of looking into the method actor stuff to kind of like you know draw from that I suppose yeah did you what what’s the deal with those guys and gals when they come out of that do they have a hard time returning to their former self or
Do they even want to or what is I guess Daniel de is maybe the yeah as you said the best I wonder if he is purposefully not returning to his former self or if he goes into that thinking once this is over I need to like kind of refocus and
Get back to who I was before he really struggles he really struggles he talked about after Lincoln which again epic performance right he talked about after that how much he struggled because in a way you are you’re you’re creating a death of an identity you have built you
Know and so that’s why he’s does he does a very few movies he’s now retired from acting but throughout his career he’s done like 10 movies 11 not that many you know even being what I would argue is the greatest actor of all time and he would really struggle because he’s he’s
He’s shedding this entire identity he’s built and there’s a death that is now happening so there’s a kind of mourning that happens of that death in order to then step back to Daniel Le Lewis but I would argue too and he kind of says this it’s not like he’s entirely stepping
Back in Dan Lewis because he’s he’s he’s taking in each identity he’s built and it’s affecting how he’s now stepping back into the the the identity of standard Le Lewis right but there’s definitely a challenge in letting go of that construct letting go of those that
Identity I mean even now you know when I when I go I’m training for Antarctica of 110 days of solitude so I actually kind of struggle in crowds a little bit now that’s a useful uh useful mechanism for what I’m doing when I come back from Antarctica there’ll be a lot of course
Correcting to readjust to normal life you know right now I don’t care about course correcting that I don’t care about fixing that I know I could cuz I did even after the war I really struggled in crowds I really struggled with loud noises I’ve addressed a lot of
That but I kind of rebuilt it in a way because of what I’m doing in Antarctica so you create an identity and then you can let it go and yes that is challenging but I think it’s still so valuable because you can create whatever you want whatever you need and the
Malleability of our identity is what’s so valuable you know everything within us like neuroplasticity the brain is plastic it can change it can be rebuilt even our memories I go deep into this in fana so without going too deep into now the the way we think about our past is
Not real like when we access our memories we’re not accessing kind of like a video camera on a screen every time we access our memory we’re accessing the last time we access that memory so every time we enter into X memory let’s say I ask you what did you
Do on your 25th birthday and I ask you that every day for the next year every time you access it you’re actually reang the neuronal structure of that memory based on how you accessed it last so if every time you access it in a let’s say in a very disempowered state feeling
Really sad the actually content of that memory will change and they’ve done a lot of studies on this one researcher did a study where she asked nine people after 911 where were you and asked him a bunch of questions 5 years later asked him the same questions and not only
Small details shifted but huge details like even where they were when it happened so when you recognize the malleability of our memory the value of that is you can essentially create whatever you want you know cuz nothing about how we approach the reality is quote unquote real it’s a construct and
The malleability of that has value to one one degree it can create a kind of apathy like if nothing is real then who cares right like we can kind of get nihilistic but I don’t think that’s that’s the answer there I think the value of knowing that is if my memories
Aren’t inherently quote unquote real I can create them to serve me in whatever way I want I can find new meanings to them I can alter the structure of that and I can even use memories like this was one thing I started doing when I was
In the Arctic is using the how memories work to alter how a future version of me will think about this this this experience like I’ll give you an example so when I was in the Arctic every day I would sit in the tent I was on a solo
Expedition I would I was knowing that a future version of me like the version sitting here today is going to think about this event a certain way and our memories shape how we engage with reality like why do I know to pick up this bottle and drink it because I have
A sense of you know this is how a water bottle works I open it because there’s a memory around that memory shape everything about how we engage with the world so in my present self in the Arctic I was sitting there and I was going I was remembering all the awesome
Things about this experience I was smiling I was sometimes listening happy music so I was quote unquote infecting the memory with positivity with joy knowing that future version of me is going to think about this a certain way I’m going to control how I want future version of me to think about this
Because that future version will then look back on the Arctic and then determine how I view the next thing so even with running for example if every time I step in the run I’m like this really sucks it’s going to shape my memory but you can manipulate that right
That’s the value of the malleability of the brain is that you can iate and create however you want to serve you and method acting is kind of that on steroids if you will CU they’re literally building entirely new even memories they’re creating a memory around their character and that’s kind
Of what I was doing to to build who OE needs to be in order to ski across Antarctica yeah yeah it’s interesting I I I like to think with running it’s like stage one is looking at it as punishment or something that you have to do and
Like you got to graduate from that you got to graduate to that to like what a lot of people probably call like type two fun which is the gratification you get when you finish you want you want to recognize that as the focal point that’s the target not the you know don’t look
At the discomfort that you may experience at certain stages during the run as the point to kind of attach the emotion to but rather the hard work that you’re going through there is going to produce the type two fun that you experience afterwards and it’s the the latter doesn’t come without the former
Therefore you should appre apprciate it not look bad at look negative I should say on it yeah absolutely yeah it’s really interesting stuff um I want to get into kind of the logistics of this project because it’s just insane yeah uh I I’m familiar enough with Logistics of
Planning some longall stuff just from talking to people who’ve done it I was planning a transcontinental project that got derailed due to an injury yeah eventually I’ll get around to doing that again but you know I went through the phase of like kind of trying to plan
That thing and and one thing I recognized during that was there is an infinite number of things you could try to account for so at a certain point you have to sort of step back and just start itemizing what are the things that I can’t neglect that I need to make sure I
Have accounted for and what are things that will probably pop up or may or may not pop up but there I guess just acknowledging there’s going to be things I can’t prepare for perfectly and I’m just going to have to be okay with that and then be ready to respond to them
When they come yeah so is how do you look at the planning process for something like this I mean it’s it’s like a transcontinental project on on steroids essentially yeah you know a lot learning from wiser people than myself I have a lot of polar friends and mentors one of my kind of
Biggest polar Mentor guy named Eric Phillips a great polar Explorer polar Adventurer and he’s taught me a ton so I’ve also studied kind of every expedition in modern history that’s how I even came up with the number 110 days I wasn’t arbitrary right so how do you so looking at previous expeditions to
Study the data of them and then obviously being in the arena a lot I’ve spent a lot of time in the polar realm myself learning from that experience taking into account all the factors because as you said you can’t prepare for everything but I want to be as as
Conscious as possible being ready for anything that’s going to throw my come my way you know and a big part of that is what like what they call negative visualization you don’t it’s not framed often in the in in like the world doesn’t talk about this because it
Sounds quote unquote negative but even astronauts will look at everything they could potentially go wrong so you can prevent that you know one of my many mantras is fear propels you to prepare so I’m terrified of Antarctica so I will look at all the things that could go
Wrong and I’ve made a few mistakes on smaller Expeditions I made a mistake with my stove that sent this giant Fireball that could have burnt down the tent you know thankfully it didn’t but but learned from that so studying that taking my experience and now mapping out
Every little detail and then Al who has a wealth of experience Al is Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions they’re the ones who do who manage the logistics for every Adventurer on in Antarctica and they of course are the ones who are organizing all the logistics of getting
Me to where I need to go and they’ve have a wealth of experiences in this Arena so my job is to plan the Expedition alone with the help of mentors and Friends taking my own experience they’re planning all the logistics of getting me to where I need
To go picking me up I mean I’ll have a satellite phone out there to call if something goes wrong you know I mean when I was in Antarctica 2 years ago I lost two fingers to frostbite and we had to call through the satellite phone so
That’s it’s I mean it’s but to your point you know every little detail the smallest detail has to be taken into account so gear lless triple checking 10 times checking my gear list you know the food plan the weight every little detail is measured and even practicing I’m
Practicing at home doing everything with mittens on because in Antarctica every little thing is a challenge peeing is a challenge how do you do all that with mittens on you know so practicing that even eating my food of a bag of of nuts and chocolates you can’t just stick your
Hand in there to to grab that you have mittens so having a ladle my friend Eric was the one who who enlightened me to that idea you know taking a ladle and then stuffing that in your mouth or I met these other uh Travelers polar Travelers when I was in the Arctic they
Came up with the idea of putting a a tent a poop hole in your tent so you actually and I never thought about that and so on previous Expeditions I had to go outside to poop and when you’re Inus 30° and a wind is hammering you it is
Absolutely a nightmare like I’m all about the suffering but that was not a suffering I enjoyed that sucked you know so they taught me put a poop hole in your tent so I sewed like a uh like cut a little hole in the tent with velcro
One side sewn in and you become a flap so now you could poop inside the tent and you just dig a little hole in the snow all those little details make a huge difference and at home I’m practicing eating putting on my polar gear peeing the the position of pooping
I’m practicing sometimes you may go have to go while you’re skiing you know hopefully not that’s not fun but uh or also like like even unzipping my sled to get the water bottles out you make want to make sure your water bottles don’t kind of slip at the bottom of your sled
How can I do that as efficiently as possible cuz if I lose even 5 minutes a day over 100 days that’s 500 minutes that’s 500 minutes of skiing time to cover this massive distance I need to cover so I need to be as perfect as possible and that comes with practicing
All those things till I can do it blindfolded setting up my tent with mittens on can I do it blindfolded you know when you’re being hammered by Hurricane force winds that’s a challenge to do you know so doing all of and if you let go your tent you’re in a world
Of hurt so you cannot let go of that thing you know all of those little details make make a huge difference so are you just like setting your tent up on repeat a ton during this phase when you’re not out there yet yeah uh it’s been we’ve just moved into a new place
In my fiance so now kind of setting it up but yes once I get back I’ll be doing that in Minnesota I’ll be doing that in the winter you know is doing that and and and doing it consistently especially when you’re tired cuz you’re going to
Have to do it when you’re tired out there at the end of a 12-hour day of skiing and you cannot afford to be complacent you know one of the things in Iraq we always used to say complacency kills and it does you know cuz you can
Get compl like in war you could get complacent two months you’re not getting shot at and then youd get a little complacent and that’s the one day something goes wrong you know so even in Iraq like my job was to walk in front of our vehicles looking for bombs before
They could be used to kill me and my fellow Marines that’s a very easy job to get complacent two months nothing happens you’re like ah I don’t have to pay attention you know and I was far from perfect at it at at not getting complacent but I really tried my best to
Not thankfully nothing happened but in Antarctica it’s the same thing right it’s you cannot afford that so practicing all that to make sure I’m on point yeah yeah it’s really interesting to think about the just the planning of everything and then the practice because there’s the training obviously which
Takes a ton of time but then there’s also like the logistics of like yeah the Technic exactly the technical skills that need to be able to be done on on uh just basically cruise control essentially so exactly and then like you said with some extreme weather so I
Guess the stages are learn to do it really really good just at home yeah stress test at One More Level out in Minnesota and then refine anything that maybe needs to be refined based on a little more of a specific uh environment and then that’s probably close enough so that when
You’re out there at the Arctic it won’t be like you won’t be get caught off guard with too much of a difference in terms of what it’s actually going to require to do all that stuff with mittens and everything you kind of describe exactly yeah I mean that’s even
Why I was in the Arctic earlier this year was uh it was spent about 29 days out in the field 20 if that was solo uh it’s just practicing again practicing solo time practicing being out there and then Minnesota will be continuing to refine you know after the Arctic for for
Example one of the Bold decision I made that was I think I think necessary for Antarctica because when I when I was in Antarctica two years ago I got frostbite on two fingers and this finger the the right uh ring finger here it was black
And it had to go the left middle finger it recovered fully mhm but then the point of this is to the importance of training and finding when I was in the Arctic cuz once you get frostbite you’re always more prone to frostbite yeah so this finger it recovered fully but very
It would get slightly colder than all my other fingers you know cuz it had frostbite it was quite bad it was like black and very gnarly and um so after the Arctic I made a call to preemptively cut that finger off cut the tip of this
Finger off because I didn’t want it as a liability imagine I’m 60 days in Antarctica I’m at the South Pole this point and I get frostbite my expedition’s over that’s a huge risk that I don’t want to take so I just I was like I’m going to remove the tip you
Know so all these previous Expeditions and now Minnesota hopefully no more fingers left to go but uh but just learning refining taking doing every little thing possible including the willingness to lose a finger if need be to pull this off you know all those little technical skills the physical
Skills the mental skills to get ready and Minnesota is the last kind of time on the battlefield on the playground before the big one next year yeah well and we were chatting a little yesterday too about like why Minnesota and obviously Minnesota this time of year or
Coming up this time of year is a pretty good playground to practice in cool brutal weather but it’s not the Antarctic or it’s it’s not it’s not it’s not where you’re going to be and one of the reasons why like that is the reality versus actually going out there and
Playing is the logistics and the expenses of things like that like what does it actually entail to put on something like this financially yeah so the uh The Crossing will cost 7 $50,000 it is not cheap that’s not a number I made up Al who manages all the logistics
They quoted me that because you know for for one the flight from Chile to Antarctica alone is like a $50,000 flight then the flight from Union Glacier the main base camp to the other end of Antarctica which is my endpoint Bay of Wales is like a $200,000 flight
From what I understand that’s a third of it right there yeah exactly because it’s not even just like one flight it to get out to Bay of Wales you’re Landing in the middle of Antarctica like in Barren nothingness to refuel you know so there’s a fuel drump out there so
Somebody has to put that fuel drum out there and then even the staff cuz normal Antarctic season for adventurers is 85 days Al goes out there every year this this time of year so antartic season is about to start it’s November is Antarctic summer um and they set up a
Base camp called Union Glacier and then they break it down before the season ends so that season is about 85 days they have to extend That season just for me to pull this off so while they won’t have a full staff they will have a skeleton crew because you have to if
Like a doctor on staff a a pilot a radio operator a logist crew like a little Skeleton Crew to support this Expedition so that that’s that all cost money you know so they’re there just for you essentially no one yeah at that point exactly the 85 days Union Glacier is
Like a really awesome kind of really cool place to be I was there uh two years ago you meet some cool characters right everybody out there doing some wild stuff so uh Union Glacier during the 85 days is pretty packed but after that is done they’ll break it down but
There will be a small Skeleton Crew essentially just for me you know uh so that all cost that’s why it really adds up so even this year I wanted to go to Antarctica like right now I’d be on my way there to do a shorter Expedition as
A training but that costs money so to save money for the crossing I’m going to Minnesota finding the cheapest way to kind of replicate and Boundary Waters region of Minnesota will be sufficiently Savage like one of my polar explorer friends said she’s experienced the coldest temperatures an entire polar
Career more than Antarctica and the North Pole in The Boundary Waters so we’ll be Savage I’ll get that obviously it’s not the same as Antarctica but it’s the cheapest and the most effective way to replicate that so I can save money for the crossing and we’re also you also
We also have a crowdfunding campaign up uh some some some people are really supporting through high high Network donors and our crowdfunding campaign has reached $200,000 so far but we still have a a ways to go and so uh it’s like yeah it’s my whole world right now is
Training Mind Body Spirit and fundraising yeah to pull this off yeah there’s that aspect of it too the yeah The Boundary Waters in winter you know I lived in Min or I’m sorry I lived in Wisconsin for 20 years and like before I moved from there I was doing like I was
Training for I think I yeah I was training for Ultra marathons at the time but I was teaching as well so I’d wake up at 4: 4:30 in the morning to go for a run and we had one winter that was particularly brutal and I think the
Worst it out was a 55 below windchill but my protocol during that was essentially like I didn’t even care what the temperatures were anymore when I’d wake up in the morning I had like a standard protocol of what I knew I had to have like a minimum like base and
Then it just depended on the windchill from there cuz if it was like five below and four mph winds like cool I don’t have to put on that extra shell if it was Five Below but 25 mph winds that is a whole different environment to be in
The wind is the most Savage yeah but talking about the boundary wats I remember anytime and this is kind of like almost full circle you’re talking about trying to like frame in a positive way I’d always think like oh man it’s like say it’s 25 below zero I’d look
Over what’s it in northern Minnesota and they’d always have it much wor like ah those guys are dealing at least that’s not there so I remember one particular day I think this was the record low prob it was probably that like 55 below day I looked there’s
A spot up in in northern Minnesota was like 80 below windshell so I was like oh my goodness that’s just can’t even imagine like the wind is unforgiving so you’ll have all that you bargain for I think exactly it should be sufficiently Savage to to prep me what’s coming yeah
And to some to some degree it may actually be better because it’s logistically easier to get there so you’re not dealing with a bunch of lost like late in time between all right I’m going to do this to I’m actually starting the actual Act of going out
Into it you’ll just head up to Minnesota and a day or two later you can be out in it if you want to EXA exactly much more logistically easier and even the fact like that’s the big reason why you know 35 days at an Airbnb one just spending
More time with my fiance CU she’s putting up with a lot I’m a unique character to be with but also you know other than training I still have a lot of fundraising work so this time at least I’ll go out for skiing for four or five hours every day but I’ll come back
And do work spend time with her and then then the 35 days will be completely Solo in the wilderness so balancing that but it will it’ll be much much more logistically easier to pull that off I mean we get there get an Airbnb we’ve already got that set up next day I can
Be out skiing you know to your point so it’s cheaper easier logistically in every way and uh and she couldn’t theoretically fly to Antarctica right so so this makes it easier to also navigate all that while trying to do the work elements in addition to the training MH
Yeah yeah I was thinking about just something you said earlier and then just the actual like process here to if my math isn’t if I didn’t miss like a zero or something in here you you’ll be going probably around 17 miles a day yes okay
Yeah uh so it’s 17 about 15 to 16 110 days yeah 15 16 15 to 16 and when you think about that’s 12 hours of moving for 15 to 16 miles that kind of gives you perspective of like how slow of a process which is important because there
Is there’s a stimulus to moving faster yes that obviously there’s like a threshold where if you continue to do that then like things tend to fall apart on you but there’s that in the Moment Like stimulus of it being more more fun in my opinion 100% yeah it’s why I like
Kind of like steady state tempo run sometimes because it’s they’re just fast enough where you get like a little bit of an incre like a nose will burst in that stimulus but they’re also sustainable enough where you can do a meaningful amount of time in it on a any
Given run to the degree where like you sort of have like a little bit of a better kind of type two aftermath of that sort of of an experience but you’re just going to be out there like inching along spotting along exactly yeah that’s a big reason why the tire dragging is
Not only physical training it’s great mental training because you’re moving so damn slow around this tiny little Park you know so there’s the monotony element of it uh but yeah to your point it’s very very slow because of just how much weight you’re hauling you know I’m choosing to do this unsupported meaning
Like I’ll have all my own supplies for the entire 110 days as opposed to let let’s say having gear caches or something like that you know and it is uh mind-numbingly slow yeah it’s not a very sexy sport to watch either like we are filming a documentary around it on
The ice I’ll be alone but they’ve came and they’ve come and filmed me in the Arctic in Iceland they filmed me in Arizona training but unlike you know some gnarly Backcountry Ski Sports where they’re flying down a hill this is just an idiot plotting along very slowly so
It’s not a very sexy sport watch Fast exactly you’re going to somebody watching will lose interest very quickly yeah yeah so this is obviously this is unprecedent in the sense that you’ll be the first person to do this if it goes off as planned is there anything you can
Think of that comes reasonably close to it that you’re like all right that’s that’s as far as we’ve gotten so far so they may have at least a perspective that you can lean into a bit for sure there’s definitely a a great polar adventurers that have done epic Feats
Like Bor aland he’s a Norwegian has on one of the most epic polar Journeys uh in my opinion in the in the world where just a few years ago at 57 years old he crossed the Arctic Ocean you know and he was in the dead of winter uh him and
Mike horn did this or another guy run gildess is also a Norwegian he’s him and Tory Larson crossed the entire Arctic Ocean unsupported from Russia to Canada in 109 days I mean they were on the brink of death when they came the book about it is called Dead Men Walking you
Know and to the Arctic Ocean is a very different animal than Antarctica it’s it’s I I would argue and I haven’t experienced it but from other adventurers I know who’ have been both say it’s physically much harder but mentally a little easier because in Antarctica it’s just the empty white
Nothingness and in in the Arctic you’re skiing on a frozen ocean so they’ll have like Open Water leads like just these giant sections of open water or these ice rubbles will crash into each other and then you have to take the sled up and down these kind of rubbles of ice so
It’s a little bit more mentally stimulating to have those kind of constant obstacles to deal with but physically a beast you know and Bor has done part of that in Winter and even Tory Larson and run giles’s Expedition so definitely a lot of great um adventurers to learn from to follow that
Have pushed the very boundaries uh it’s just this is kind of the last great adventure that hasn’t been accomplished but Borg aand was actually the the first person to ski across Antarctica when he did it the feed had never been done so his goal was just to do it so he used
Actually a small kite just for portions of the journey he actually skied a significant a good amount of it without the kite as well but used a kite for portion of the journey and style Evolutions like doing it without a kite happen after the Pioneer like he’s a
True Pioneer right uh and I’m sort of humbly following in his footsteps but he uh my friend Eric Phillips he skied like four new routes to the South Pole another buddy of mine Lou rut has pulled some pretty Expedition uh pretty awesome Expeditions so kind of learning from the
The the great explorers before you know who whove who’ve done some epic Feats uh but this is so that that’s what I’ve taken to prepare for this this just happens to have you know sort of never been it is it is kind of the last great un unaccomplished feat in Antarctic
Exploration and I would say the last other one is to do a coast is to do a land toand crossing of the Arctic through the North Pole solo it’s been done as a group but never been done solo as well these two are are kind of the
Last in the polar realm uh that haven’t been accomplished yet so uh but learning from them to hopefully be able to pull it off yeah it sounds like you’ve done this I know one uh one person I like to listen to talk about preparing for events is Jim Walmsley because he he’ll
Talk about how when he’s like picking like a goal time in a Target he’ll do he’ll go and he’ll run like portions of say 100 mile course and he’ll get like try to get like a good feeling for like what is a range of time that I can
Expect to be able like what’s reasonable here yeah and trying to associate like you know the act of being tired at the end and things like that so like I think he’s probably got like a threshold where he knows on Fresh legs relatively speaking if I can cover it in here then
That’s this is a good Target and he’s just done it enough now where you can probably ballpark things pretty nicely you there must be something with that where you’re coming up with the 15 to 16 miles a day where you know like you’re not going to go to Minnesota and find
Out oh shoot it’s going to be closer to 11 for sure exactly like I mean there theoretically I could I mean the the highest outcome of failure I mean death is a very small possibility because again as I said it’s not super dangerous compared to uh some other Feats uh
Obviously that you can’t eliminate that risk but the highest outcome failure was I just couldn’t pull off the distance so that is there but I’ve T I’ve studied other adventurers to see you know like cuz nobody’s done the full Coast to Coast Crossing but they’ve done portions
Of that Journey from the burner Island to the South Pole or from Bay of Wales to South Pole looking at how long did it take them taking a little bit of that into account obviously taking my own experiences into account to kind of come up with that number but even I mean last
Season there were three teams three three uh adventurers that attempted a partial Crossing of Antartica not a full Coast to Coast a partial Crossing all three failed just cuz they couldn’t cover the distance I mean they’re all still alive thankful everybody made it home safely but they couldn’t cover the
Distance needed to cover so I mean even Steve Jones Steve is a friend of mine he’s the Expedition manager at Al tracked every expedition in modern history has said that anyone who attempts this will probably fail you know when one of the reasons why we had
To move it from this year where I was originally supposed to do the full Crossing this year to next year one is just we needed more money but two was Al was only able to give me 105 days and Steve himself said you know we just don’t think anybody will last even over
100 days so you know there was no point kind of giving anymore and I get it and he’s like I’m not trying to say this to be mean it’s just the nature of this feat so I’m well aware that the odds are stacked against me and I I mean if you
Get like if I get soft snow at the start and it is what it is you get what you get and you have to be with that you cannot that’s a huge thing I’ve seen sometimes adventurers will say things like oh these conditions were worse this
Year than every other year and I’m not faulting them for it like Antarctica is Savage every year but I cannot let myself get into that mindset because then that becomes a negative downward spiral mhm instead of actually just whatever is thrown at you accepting the
Isness of that like when I was in the Arctic earlier this year I got hammered with these two days of massive polar storms so out there alone next day I’m skiing and there’s a lot of soft snow on the ground right which made it very harder to go up and down this undulating
Terrain in Norway with my heavy sled and I could say I wish it was hard snow but instead I just kept saying thank you God for these perfect conditions because everything is perfect in its isness for it cannot be anything other than what it already is everything it can not be
Anything other than what what it already is and therefore is perfect the more you learn to accept the isness of things whether they be external or even internal meaning that even our emotions right like right now if somebody comes into this room with a gun I’ll feel fear
I’m not choosing to feel fear I’m not asking for it but I’ll feel it in response to this external stimuli most of our thoughts and our feelings we don’t control in response to external stimuli instead of demonizing that trying to resist it make it go away because it’s quote unquote a bad emotion
Accept it the more more you train yourself to accept the isness of your emotions of your thoughts of your of the external stimuli instead of resisting it the more you can then transcend it and choose how you relate to it that’s the power right so that’s a big mindset
Shift for me is whatever Antarctica throws my way it is not good it is not bad it is and I will make it at the core of it it just is and I will make it good I will smile in the face of it and hopefully be able to pull off this uh
Massive distance man yeah yeah yeah it’s wild to think about I I’m excited for you thank you I think it’ll be well it’ll be a great story one way or the other yeah either way something cuz even Beyond even if somehow I don’t pull off the crossing just being out there 110
Days alone oh no doubt will be profoundly beautiful yeah you know yeah one other thing I was I mean just thinking of the logistics yeah you fall a mile short per day you’re looking at an additional seven days right so like you can’t I can’t yeah it’s just it so at what point
I know you said earlier you’re operating on a framework of 12 hours of work 4 hours of prepping essentially snow melting for water and whatnot and then 8 hours of sleep at what point do you start carving into the 12 hours that are non-moving in order to maintain the 15
To 16 miles per day it’s hard to say because initially when I first start I will not start right away at 12 hours so you’re at a deficit from almost day one like because you don’t want to uh from every polar Adventurer who’s been out there I’ve studied again from all of
Them you don’t want to start going h because you want to get your body used to that absurd workload and so if you go all in 12 hours right at get- go you’re going to break very quickly uh so started about 8 nine hours and then build but you’re now immediately putting
Yourself in a deficit of mileage you’re also remember I mean initially it’ll be flat on the ice shelf but then going uphill so I have to make up distance on the back end when I’m going downhill thankfully I’ll be going downhill and the sled will be lighter but as far as
Uh eating into that 12 or eating into or extending that 12 hours the only place I can sacrifice is sleep right mm less than ideal cuz even at 8 hours you’re going to be under recovered from kind of the GetGo you know um but it’ll kind of
Be determined I mean let’s say I get the best snow ever and at eight hours I’m hitting the distance sweet you know so it’ll kind of be determined because another guy Ben saers who Expedition I follow he was hitting some massive distances at 9 hour days which kind of
The distances I need to hit with a similar type sled so I was like all right if I get that cool you know I can I can hit nine hours and then maybe on a good day I push a little bit more just a build distance so a lot of it will
Depend on what I’m able to do what the conditions uh make it as um feasible to do and uh and then you know adding more time if need be and then that means sacrificing sleep because the four hours of tent time you can’t really you you the tent time takes What It Takes
Setting up the tent breaking down the tent and then boiling snow for water that takes what it takes you can’t do much to make that more efficient there’s a little things but for the most part you can’t do anymore so the only place I can eat into
Asleep and uh is there a way to track where you’re at for this is there going to be like a GPS unit where you can go on a website like oh yeah he they’ll be a live tracker that both Al will be watching as well uh so they’ll be know
Exactly where I am and thankfully as I said it’s not super dangerous for the most part of entirely the entirety of Antarctica except one Glacier they can pick me up if things get horrible uh uh you know so they that evacuation possibilities there so they’ll be tracking and even people back home can
Kind of follow along a live tracker maybe not every day but every other day I’ll be sending audio updates from the ice as well so on the live tracker there’s a little audio button and you can hear yeah it’s kind of cool the tech is awesome there’s a company 060 that
Does this they’re awesome uh buddies of mine Anthony so they’re they kind of create the tech it’s pretty badass what you can do now yeah it’s co okay so is this all going to be like accessible on your website or it is yeah I’ll have it
Uh you know I share the journey right now preparing at Instagram at fearvana Fe okay f a r v na a uh the book is obviously fearvana and even on the website for irana that’s where uh we’ll have the live tracker and we’ll also right like right now there’s the website
Great soulc crossing.com that’s s o Great Soul crossing right now it’s the crowdfunding page but eventually that’ll also be the um uh the uh uh the the place to follow along with the journey too so it’ll be on both fana and Great Soul Crossing awesome so those are the
Spots to find you is that where you go to to donate if someone wants to help support yeah thank you for asking you know the Great Soul Crossing you’ll find that link even at fana and Instagram but great soul Crossing you can find the donation uh and you know we have
Different we’re offering different like gifts rewards for different donation tiers so for example I touched on the method acting I have like a six-hour deep dive training along with every mindset training I’ve developed over the years of pushing the boundaries on the edge uh on there if you donate like I
Think it’s $9.99 you get access to all of it and every tier even the small donations of $30 there’s a different training on how I did 25 different weapons to navigate the pain cave whether it be physical or emotional pain you know so a different donation we are
Giving away things and I’m not making a dollar of this campaign to be clear like it sounds like it’s all going towards it’s going directly towards this so any contributions are extremely well received even the book fear of it’s on Amazon audible paperback Kindle and it
Is uh we were donating all the profits to charity so constantly like only right now shifted it to the crossing and then after the crossing it’ll go back to to other causes but I’m not making a dollar off the book either it’s all going towards you know something and then of
Course as I mentioned we’ll be filming a documentary so it’s not just while I do get a lot from this journey spiritually the stories we tell through it will be able will I mean I’ve already experienced this from speaking on shows like this speaking on stages it inspires
People to play on their own edges I’m not saying Antarctica is the path to Enlightenment that’s my path but it’s not the path right the goal is ultimately help people find their own edges and play on those edges because that’s where you find the rewards of the
Human Spirit tell stories to help people do that well it’s been awesome to record in person with you this time around hopefully we can do it again after you’ve got hell yeah a massive record under your belt thank you thank you yeah hope hope to pull it off and uh with
Definitely being in St touch man so thank you so much for having me absolutely enjoy the rest of your time in Austin thanks brother take care all right everyone if you’re still here you’re sticking around to hear about how I use the show sponsor element electrolytes and Delta G ketones for
Element they make an electrolite supplement so what I know about me is that I lose 614 mg of electrolyt per liter of fluid loss so what that means is if I go out for a run and I lose 2 lers of sweat then I’m also going to lose roughly
12228 mg of electrolytes with it which ironically happens to be about one packet of element so what I likely will do is if I’m going out for a longer training session or I’m going to be out in the Heat and sweating a lot I’m going to supplement the fluid intake I have
With electrolyte to make sure I have that stuff in balance the way this usually looks for me is I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll have a cup of coffee and I’ll put half of one of those packets in with my coffee it will be one of their chocolate flavors though
Because it’s coffee after all I’m not going to stick one of the fruity flavors in there so that gets me kicked off then what happens is I go out for the workout and then I am drinking basically to thirst but I am also targeting some numbers at times when it’s hot enough
And I know what my sweat loss is but generally speaking for every liter of fluid I’m taking in I’m matching that with 614 Mig of electrolytes to make sure I’m staying on top of that and remaining hydrated throughout that training session if you’re interested in a deep dive and figuring out more about
Your fluid loss and electrolyte needs I actually have a couple podcast episodes that might be interesting to you one is episode 358 with Andy blow where I go over all things hydration and he talks about how I came up with that 614 milligram loss number and how you can
Maybe find out about yours as well as how how much fluid you are losing with some simple atome tests also I did an episode a while back episode 300 which is just titled personalizing workout hydration so check out both of those if you’re interested in doing a deep dive into your hydration and
Electrolyte needs something new I added to my training and racing this year are exogenous ketones the research for exogenous ketones is still in its early stages but there is a lot coming out and it is getting more convincing in my opinion to the degree where I wanted to
Try it out I actually stress tested it during a 15-hour 100 mile run at the Rocky Raccoon 100 earlier this year as a way to confirm whether it was something I was going to include in my racing protocol one thing I was a little nervous about with exogenous ketones
Like I am with anything I’m ingesting during an ultramarathon is what is going to do to digestion I was interested in the recovery research for some time now with exogenous ketones and there are some newer research studies now that suggest it could also Al have some performance applications as well if
You’re able to tolerate it and get it in the right dose so when I decided to try it out I went with Delta G ketones because they are the Ketone eser that basically all the research that has promising effects is tied to and it’s their formula that’s being used in those
Research studies so a lot of times you’ll just go and look for an exogenous Ketone and there’s all sorts of potential issues with that whether it’s a dosage or just an incorrect type and it’s not actually going to do what the research suggests would do so to me it
Was looking at if I want to potentially get the benefits that these could be bringing I need to be using the one that they’re actually showing the research with so that was Delta G ketones they actually received the DARPA funding and Grant to actually put together that
Formul so like I said in the the intro message they have 50 plus published studies and are part of 20 plus ongoing studies my protocol with this right now and this is something where I am evolving as I kind of do more with it but at the moment
I’ll do a bottle of their Ketone performance Delta G Performance and that is their little blue bottle so I’ll take one of those about 20 minutes before a big key training session and that’s it if it’s a race day though I’ll do that same protocol but I will take another
Bottle about every 3 hours after that so if I’m doing something that’s longer duration like that 15-hour Rocky Raccoon effort I just described I would be doing that again at 3 6 9 and 12 during that particular performance so like I said in the intro if you want to chat with one
Of their experts you can actually go to delt gon.com and they have a consultation service there right now where they will help you understand the research and whether your lifestyle is even something that they would would be worth considering it for so if you want to get a little more information on that
That option is available to you links to both Delta G ketones and element electrolytes can be found in the show notes as well as at Zack bitcom /po sponsors thanks for tuning in to this episode of the human performance outliers podcast with Zack bitter
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