Episode 194: Fitness at the EXTREME

Maybe you're fit, maybe you're trying to get fit, but what if you wanted to take that to the extreme? Well, you're going to find about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast where people want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first. You know, those things at the end of your leg, the foundation, the things you stand on, run with and walk on. Anyway, on this podcast, we explore the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, do yoga, crossfit, do crazy things like you're about to hear and do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.

Did I say enjoy it? Trick question? I know I did. I would never leave it out because look if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep doing it.

So find something you enjoy. I'm Stephen Sashan, co-CEO, co-founder of zeroshoes.com. Here's the t-shirt to prove it. And we call this the movement movement because we are creating a movement that involves you more about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it is made to do.

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Ethan, it is crazy early where you are. Tell people who you are and what you're doing here. Yeah, sure. Well, look, my name's Ethan.

I've been I've been running a health and wellness business for about seven years now. But that's what I like to call my full time job. My part time job is what I call suffering enthusiasts, which is pretty much enthusiastic about finding ways to torture myself. Started for me in about 2018.

I had a weird idea. Well, actually, that's a lie. My friend had a weird idea to do burpees for an hour. So pause right there.

This is the way almost all bad things start where someone has an idea and then there's usually a beer involved or a, you know, how hard could that be or but anyway, sorry much. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I remember my friend calling me up and saying, you know, do you want to do any hour of burpees?

And at the time, I've got my, you know, my ego is through the roof when I was, you know, in 2018. And I've got the hour of burpees. Why don't we make it 24 hours burpees? Anyway, that idea turned into reality and then reality turned into torture.

And then I remember when I finished that event, which I ended up doing 11,401 burpees, one centimeter short of the Guinness World Record line because I didn't measure the lines properly. So that was a really good lesson in what you shouldn't do, which was great to have that. But yeah, I finished that. And that was kind of, I guess you could say the narrative of what my life's been since is trying to find these uncomfortable things to do to learn from them.

Well, I want to hear about the other ones other than burpees, but let's back up to burpees. So up until that point, you know, what was the most you'd ever done? A burpees? Yeah.

I don't know. An hour, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Like it was, I was, you know, I was pretty ignorant back then, which actually had its benefits because I think as we get a bit older, we used to into evaluate risks a bit more and that becomes stops us from doing things we want to do. Right?

But back then I just, I remember it was literally what eight week training program, a couple of burpees a week. Sorry, my dog's got his crash into the door. And then we've, you know, after that, it was pretty much day one. Like it was, it was brutal.

Well, yeah. So what did you imagine it was going to be like, or what was your plan going in and then what actually happened? Because it strikes me that deciding to do 24 hours of burpees, once you get into it, it's going to be like that, Mike Tyson line. Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

I imagine there was a number of punch in the face moments. Yeah, there was. And there was, I mean, the punch in the face moments came in about 30 minutes as well, because we had the broad idea of doing it at Federation Square, which in Australia is this big place in the CBD where everyone watching, which was, you know, traumatizing. But we were about half an hour in and we started getting cramps.

It was hard. We were in a lot of trouble, but we had the plan to do it 15 minutes on. And then that sorry, sorry, 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. That was the plan for pretty much the whole 24 hours.

Right. And so now, firstly, he said, we so your friend who came up this idea, he's doing it too? Yeah, so he did. And he was a hospital.

So he went to the hospital with Rob Doemar. I can always forget how to say it. Rob Doemar, I always thought I was on the way. Yeah, Rob Doemar, I like this.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he was in hospital about the 12 hour mark. And holy crap.

So can you explain what that is rather than me doing it? Basically, yes, what Rob Doemar is is that you work a muscle long enough, long story short, the toxins break down. They go into kidneys, kidneys can't actually produce and filter these toxins. kidney failure.

That's pretty much the short version. Yeah, we deal. So he did that at 12. I meant, so man, there's so many things that are going through my head.

So first of all, he's gone at 12 hours. What time of day did you start? I think we started at about 10 AM. Yeah.

So he was about 10 PM. He was pissing out black view, which was pretty funny because the news report the next day, I still give him a bit of crap for this. But the news report is trainer breaks world record forward 24 hours of burpees fellow trainer gets hospitalized. So I still make sure I show him that one every now and then.

So I mean, again, I got so many questions. I'll start with this one. When he dropped out at 10 o'clock at nightish, you know, what happened in your mind? Yeah, I wasn't the resilient person I was back then.

So for me, it was a lot of tears, a lot of sadness. I remember we wrote this, we had this idea about these letters to ourselves that when things got hard, I would read them and it was kind of inspiring. I remember reading it, it just brought me down even more. So that wouldn't work too well.

But I think because of the situation, I was in the environment, I was in where I had so many people watching, I really didn't have much of a choice. And that kind of worked my favor. So that was probably one of the main reasons I was able to finish it. How many people were there through the middle of the night?

Well, if you take it out all the two I am party animals, there was still quite a few. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Don't take them out.

I want to know if somebody comes out of a bar, they're a little wasted and they see you doing burpees in the street, basically. What the hell did they say and do? That was 95% of the people that were coming past. And like, I would be doing burpees, you know, I've been out here for 13 hours doing burpees.

And then there's some guy being like, doing fast on me. And then, you know, he's jumping in with me and it was, yeah, it was a very interesting experience. That's for sure. He's dying head first into it.

That's for sure. That is pretty entertaining. So which actually leads me to questions. So what was the pace that you were doing, Zach?

Can you give me a sense of how fast you or slow you're going? Yeah. So I actually just remember it then when you were talking. So 15, every minute on the minute, was how we did it.

So and that was for 45 minutes and then you'd rest for 15. So every time the buzzer would go, we'd do 15. And then we did that for four hours, then it was 14, then four hours 13. So we had this kind of every four hours would drop a burpee.

Hallelujah. But you know, after 12 hours, you didn't really notice the three burpee difference. But that was the process of how we did it. How did you come up with that idea as a protocol?

I don't know. I think everything looks good on paper and that one looks good on paper. And we trialled it for about an hour or two. And we thought, you know what, this is pretty possible.

But you know, doing something for an hour and then testing it for 24 or two completely different things. And back then I was a broken human before I actually started using things like barefoot shoes movement, like all these other things. Like it was a broken human back then. Broken how?

I just had a lot of problems that I didn't fix. And you know, I had a lot of issues that with my body, I was very much like, if you grind something down long enough, you just turn to dust, right? And I was my approach back then to health and fitness was very much just do more, do more, do more, rather than working out what to do and why you do it, right? So it was a bit of a, the burpees for me was like the top of the problems.

And then after I did the 24 hours of burpees, I was this crumble of a human. And I had to rebuild. Yeah, I was getting, I'm going to get there, but I'm not there yet asking what it was like to recover. So had you done any other prep other than try, you know, that protocol for a couple of hours?

We did. It was literally, it was an eight week prep, but because I was so inexperienced with knowing how to train for, I guess, something like this, it was just like we ran, we did weights and we did burpees a couple of days a week. That was it. And I mean, like, it's pretty obvious that if you want to get good at burpees, you should probably do burpees.

There's not a lot of science behind that, right? There's a said principle and stuff, but just do the burpees. But the problem is, is we, you know, we avoided that naturally because you don't want to do burpees. Right.

So there's two other parts about the record. Was there an existing Guinness book record? There was. Yeah.

So it was about 10,000 burpees. So these were traditional burpees. These were the ones where you don't have to go to just the floor. And the way that I missed out on this record was that, you know, I went and finished.

I was on the news guy breaks Guinness mode record or this. And then when I put the application through it said, what I'm going to say, he said, oh, your lines were too short. So your feet are supposed to go through the line and touch the line. I was going here.

So essentially one centimeter short. So I did a thousand more than the record, one centimeter short. Oh man. So yeah, so there's a line where your hands are basically behind your hands when you're coming in the blind.

Yeah. Now of course, the obvious question, once you, well, before we get to recovery, when you discovered that that you had missed it by centimeter, what the hell went through your brain? I was very disappointed because for me, like it was, you think? Yeah.

I mean, back, well, back then I didn't do those things for internal glory. That's what I would say. I did them from more of an external gratification. I think when now when I do something, it's driven from like an intrinsic motivator.

But back then I was like, I put a lot of eggs in this basket of like wanting to break the Guinness world record. And then when I missed it was really disappointing. And I felt like I laid everyone down as well at the time for sure. Yeah.

I can imagine you might have wanted to trade that for Rabdo. Yeah. At least I would add a reason. So then you finish it.

And again, it's funny. I watched a video last night just almost accidentally of guys who decided to do 100 burpees a day for 30 days. And it started out, one of them could do that do 100 and they broke it down into sets of 25. One of them could do it in about 10 minutes, the other in about 12 minutes, 30 days later, it was about six minutes and seven minutes.

But the one comment they made is over 30 days, it never got easier. They got faster. It never got easier. So just the idea of going through it all and watching them is interesting, because nothing really changed much in their body.

They expected it would, but nothing really changed. But even them was watching them recover from doing 100 over the course of 10 minutes. What was it like when you were done? What happened?

What did you have to do next to become human again? And everything I've done, and I've done some pretty whack stuff that ruined me more than anything, because my hip flexors were completely torn to shreds, because I was just the movement of going in and out for so long. My knuckles were so bad. I'll have to show you where they were fully torn, both of them.

I was going to ask, were you wearing gloves? Were you wearing knee pads? Like, what else were you wearing? Yeah.

So if you imagine doing a burpee, the lower you have to get to the ground, the more challenging it is. So we do them on our fists, because you've got an extra two inches there. Right? Because of that, we put gloves on, we put these little MMA gloves on.

We looked absolutely ridiculous. But we did them on MMA gloves. By the time you took off your gloves after 24 hours, because I was too afraid to test it during it, my hands were the most red raw things you've ever seen. There was no skin across all of my knuckles.

So I had nerve problems in my hands for a while. I had plans to fashionize my feet for ages. God, hip flexors were torn to shreds. I couldn't run or walk properly.

When I finished it, I remember I was at the time I was living with two people and I was on the toilet and I sat down on the toilet and I had to call them to get me off the toilet because I couldn't actually physically get off myself, which was quite demoralizing to have to call you. Your house mates to get you off the toilet. I can still wipe, thank God, but they had to get me off. That was just preparing for your old age.

Yeah, that's it. It was practicing. Yeah. Now that you've done it once, it'll be okay the next time.

Oh, holy moly. And of course, the last question I can think of about burpees, given all of that, did it occur to you? I should do this again. Well, actually, I spent two and a half years training for burpee records after that.

So yeah, I had a bit of an unsettled business with them. I didn't have the best luck with them after that. I tried to break a one-hour Guinness World Record, which I spent like, I reckon nine months training for and I kept missing it while I took two or three burpees at a time, which was very, very frustrating. Ended up breaking a lousy three-minute Guinness World record for them.

But yeah, that's when my journey ended after that for the burpees. For the Guinness Book thing, there are a couple ways of doing that. One is you to do the thing and then you send them whatever documentation to show that you did it. The other is paying them a bunch of money to come out and watch.

Which of those did you do? So I did all the filming and then sent it in, which is by far the most affordable way of doing it. Otherwise, just spending, you know, I think $8,000 in euros. So I did the cheapest submission recently.

And I know that I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to get the record, but I'm pretty confident the moment it's published, someone's going to beat it. So I'm 61 years old and I did a standing back lip on the ground. So just, you know, right now the world record for all the standing back lip is a 94 year old guy, but he did it into a swimming pool. So that doesn't count.

And I couldn't find any video showing how far around he even made it. But I know there'll be some, you know, 62 year old circus geek who will beat me and then we'll be in a competition to one of his dies. And but I'm definitely not going to pay to have them come out and do it. I'll just, you know, show them my birthday, show them the newspaper and send in a film.

Oh, yeah. It's a bit, it's a tedious process. I've spent the amount of hours I've spent spending some of the records is beyond me. Well, so let's go into that phase.

So after Burpees, and then I'm really curious to hear, I'm curious to hear a couple things. Like just what changed for you personally? I don't mean your own psychology. I mean, what happened to your business or whatever you're doing?

What did the attention get you or not get you? And then moving from there to, you know, as you were saying, you were just beating yourself up to do these before. What changed to then become to have this internal motivation to try and do these other endurance events? Well, I think the number one thing that resonated me with after that, and I mean, not the day after, I mean, like three months after in hindsight.

Yeah, when you throw it on your own. Exactly. You don't finish it instantly and go, wow, like you're still suffering. But long story short, I look back on it and I kind of go like, I did that off eight weeks with pretty much no specific training, no idea what I was doing.

And I was able to do that. What else is out there. And I feel like that narrative has kind of driven me for the last four or five years. And that's where a lot of my work now is helping other people kind of find their new limit, right?

Whatever that is to them. And that's the thing that changed for me. My approach now is like, is it possible? Yes.

Okay, then let's try. And yes, we can be as much like prepared as possible for it. And there's definitely better ways of preparing for things. But at the end of the day, sometimes as people we confuse what's hard with what's possible.

So what about that? That's a really interesting distinction. Well, it's like if you think about a marathon, right? Marathon is what a most average person would call the pinnacle of health and fitness, right?

But I would say, not 95%. But most people can complete a marathon. Even if they were just to walk some of it, right? But we don't do it.

And then you ask yourself, like, why are you doing a marathon in the first place? Most of the time, it's not to get a sub three and a half hour time. It's to be happy with yourself that you completed and did something out of your comfort zone, right? So we can all strive for that.

But we don't, because we confuse what's hard with what's possible. That's what I mean by that concept. It's like, I had the amount of times I've heard people tell me, oh, I just can't do it. It's like, we can do it.

You just don't have to believe in yourself. And you're worried about what other people are going to think if you get a bad time. If we can remove what other people would think about it, I think we would do a lot more. Well, there's another aspect that I'm wondering about that I'd love to hear your thoughts, which has to do with the way people perceive someone who has done something versus what led to it.

And what makes me think of this, I heard an interview with a comedian named Leslie Jones. She was on Saturday Night Live here in the States. And she said, the problem when you're watching someone who's done something, you see them now, but you don't see the how. And without knowing that part, it can be either disheartening or confusing or just send you on the wrong path.

Yeah, 100%. It's like, I was describing this about like mental toughness the other day. I run these retrades, I take people away, mental toughness, you can call it, but essentially we just do some really hot stuff. And we were talking about the concept of mental toughness.

If you have two people, right, you have one person who completes a marathon really well, you're like, Oh, yeah, he's a good runner. And then you have one person who struggles through a marathon and you go to yourself, Oh, he's really mentally tough. It's like, well, one person prepared better. Why does the one that didn't prepare better, more mentally talk?

Well, it's funny. I wish I remember who was the person who did this, but there was some world champion marathoner who stayed around after he ran, you know, two hours and just a few minutes beyond that, I mean, like somewhere around 210, 215 probably, and then stayed until the marathon ended, which was like nine hours later and came up and congratulated all the people who finished just under the wire, like nine hours and said, what you just did, I couldn't do. I couldn't keep going for nine hours. And it was a really beautiful and very true thing that people don't understand, you know, what the difference is between someone who's an elite, super fast person, or someone who's just, you know, grinding out for whatever reason.

I thought that was a very, very elegant, something we're looking for, it's easier for now, very elegant thing to do to stay and thank those people and appreciate them. Yeah, absolutely. It's, there's some crazy people out there that stick through some really, really tough stuff. But it's also, I also find it's sad that the people that have paired so well, because all those day, day in, day out, mental toughness, things that you don't see, that's why they're so good.

And that's why they can complete something half the time of someone else a lot of the time, right? Well, that reminds me, I was at a lecture from a ultra runner named Tony Cropicca, and someone said, you know, I've run a 50 mile race, but I've never run a hundred, like you have, what do I need to do to train for the hundred? And Tony says, nothing. Why is what you've already done all the training?

You know, that last 50 miles has nothing to do with the training, it's all in your head. Yeah, 100%. Love it. This is the ultra running world, is just the pinnacle of mental toughness.

It's so fantastic. Dude, I don't like to drive as far as they run. So I mean, but that's because I'm a sprinter. So the idea of that, I mean, I can't think of anything that the whole idea of doing what I the only thing I've ever done, like, is a 24 hour something, like a deliberate 24 hour something was when I was, oh my God, like 15, I went to a summer camp and they had a radio station.

So I did a 24 hour marathon, just being DJ for 24 hours. And I will admit, like, I think around three in the morning, I put on one side of an album and took a 30 minute nap. So that's the closest I've ever done. No, no, I did 24 hour movie marathon to.

Yeah, it's a 24 hour event to something else. That's for sure. They definitely have their own their own waves of problems and enjoyment. Yeah, those are mostly sitting around.

So so post burpees, one of the other things that you've done, and when you're taking people on these retreats, what do you have them do? I want to hear about you first. So I mean, I've done quite a few things, but probably the most pivotal thing that I've done was I after that, I had this series of little things. And when I said little, I mean, like I wrote a bike for a mistake to a state and there's a few other things that were I didn't train as much for.

But the one that I set my mind to and the one that I trained for ages was I planned on dragging a car 100 kilometers, which, which started out, I was like, I'll do a marathon with a car. And then I was like, you know what, someone else has done that. What's the furthest we can go? And I was like drawing lines on the whiteboard, all these different things.

I was like, Oh, 100 Ks, drag a car. All right. You know, what else am I going to do with my time? Let's see how we go.

Hold on, hold on, pause right there. What else am I going to do with my time other than drag a car for 100 K? Yeah, well, I was looking for something I can see went to even giving me a good nine months of training. Well, but where did that even come from?

Honestly, I wish it was this euphoric moment that came to me, but I literally said to myself, I want to have a challenge. And I went on a whiteboard and I wrote down about a ton of disciplines on one side and I wrote down a ton of things on the other side. So 24 hours, 100 Ks, all these different like criterias. And I just drew lines together, to be honest.

And then when I found one, I liked, I was like, Hey, that's the one. And then I just love that you brainstormed to drag a car as one of the activities. Well, it was a, I think it was a sled or something. And then I saw a hundred Ks and I drew a hundred Ks and I was like, I don't want to a hundred Ks running.

And so why does some random reason that a hundred Ks from me sounded more attractive than running a hundred Ks, which in hindsight, I realize now a hundred Ks running probably would have been more enjoyable. Well, and of course, then the question, what kind of car and where the brakes on and did you have to go uphill, downhill or re-on a flat? So I was in an airport runway, which was, um, Oh my gosh. Interesting.

Yeah. So that was a pretty cool experience, but I had a Jeep Wrangler. So it was two tons. Now this was not my choice.

This was, I send in this to get us a record and they said you've got to use a two time car. And then I thought, I've got, I've only trained to even think about using a 1.4 ton. And they're like, well, bad luck. I was like, Oh, life gives you lemons.

So here we go. Yeah, you don't want to be one centimeter short on the car. So now again, I'm just thinking of all these things. Okay, if it was me, I would take the Jeep, that's cool.

But then I would put bald tires on it. So there's almost no rolling resistance. I pumped them up like crazy. Did you do anything to the car?

We did. Yeah. We, like, so the car was 2.5 tons. We had to get it down because I had, it was my own Jeep at the time.

And it was, you know, one of those classic jeeps where it was raised big tires. So we had to strip it all, change it all just to get it workable for the event. Okay. Look, I don't want to be too insulting, but it didn't occur to you to go to a car dealership and have them give you the car and then give you the car.

I know, I thought about that, but I really had my own car. So like I could train with my own car, which I did not because it was and we were in a 5k radius. So the training was a whole different area. But yeah, I just stripped the seats out of the car, took some of the roof off, put the soft top on, managed to get it to 1.999 and then added a small dumbbell in problem solved.

So you're on an airport runway, I'm assuming it was not in use and you weren't dodging planes. Well, it wasn't in use because of COVID at the time, which was really lucky. That's the only reason we were able to get it. There was still like a defense force planes landing and things like that, but like it was pretty much free the whole time, which was great.

It was literally just like up and back. I mean, were you doing a loop? It was like, it was a 5k loop. So you would just do the whole loop.

I would describe it, I don't know if it's possible, but it was a continuous uphill loop. That's what we used to describe it as. Well, I was thinking about that because most people don't know they think runways are flat and they're not. No, they're not.

They're actually designed to catch an airplane. And unfortunately with that is that means that the asphalt of the fishermen is actually really grippy and it sticks to the car. Yeah. So that was probably the number one thing I was not prepared for was the weather and the runway.

Those two things were traumatic and still gives me goosebumps thinking back to what it feels like to do in that one there. Well, again, again, this is the punch in the face moment. How long did it take you until you went, Oh, shit, I did not think about this. I was about three hours in and it was a very, very hot day in Melbourne, Australia.

And when the sun was hitting me and I was sweating, I remember my friend goes to me, Hey, man, if you stay at this pace, three hours in, it's going to take us two and a half days without any stopping. And I was like, thank you for your moral support. I really appreciate it. I'm so going to show you all my support crew.

Anyway, that was the moment where I started to really like, you know, spiral. Like I should have done this. I should have, you know, I'm going to waste everyone's time, like real negative thinking. But you know, like any ultra endurance event, you have your options, you have your downs, you've just got to ride the waves.

Well, so I don't want to gloss over that point too quickly. When you were having those thoughts, when, you know, whether it was early on when you realized oops, or in the middle of the night again, how do you work with those thoughts? What do you do when they're popping up in your brain? I always, I always try to think of them and not give them power.

So like, if they come in, I almost just like kind of like meditation, you know, if you ever try to meditate, you let it come in and you just let it pass. Obviously, it's easier to sit than done in these situations, but I think just not giving it power and not like allowing it to be a real thought but not allowing it to take over your actions. Like, yeah, I want to make those decisions, but I'm not going to make those decisions. Let's see.

I feel an hour every time you do that, an hour later, you feel different. My favorite way of playing with that has to be with hunger, where there's sometimes where I'm hungry, like, and I meet like hit me out of nowhere and I'm immediately thinking I've got to get food. And I go, well, that's crazy. 10 seconds ago, I didn't have that thought that I was so desperate for food.

So what happens if I just wait and it's not like I watch it pass. It's just a few minutes later, I notice, oh, I forgot to pay attention. It's gone. And eventually it comes back.

It's not like I'm fasting for many pre-shelical amount of time. But people often people have never even had the experience of dealing with something as screaming obvious as just hunger and watching that it doesn't stick around or grow exponentially the way that we imagine until we're just chewing table legs. So the meditative version of that is a good way of thinking of it. I like one of my little mantras.

I like to say, what do you care what you think about you? It's like some thought just pumped up and whatever. I mean, this is a thing. Yeah, I love it.

It's interesting. It's like the human body will give us signals that something they want something to change. But the human body and the human mind will also adapt to what your current situation. And there's a fine line between you just having you actually in those feelings and letting them go.

And most of the time, if we let them go long enough, the human body and mind will change for us, which is great. Well, you might get a kick out of this. So one of the reasons I moved to Boulder, Colorado 30 years, almost 30 years ago, was I was doing Zen orchery. And they like to say, it's meditation and motion.

People go, well, how does that work? Well, when you're doing Zen orchery, you basically end up getting like five different thoughts. There's a sort of fear. There's wanting to do it right.

There's wanting to look good. I mean, there's only like five different things to come up in your mind when you're trying to do this thing. And most of the Japanese arts, they're prescribed. So there's a perfect way to do them, but you'll never do them perfectly.

It just doesn't work that way. So and there's also this weird part where you're simultaneously trying to be really relaxed while you're you're holding this really strong bow that if you don't shoot it properly could like cut your ear off. I mean, literally. So what happens over time, if you just get the same five thoughts over and over and over, you just bore the shit out of yourself.

And after a while, you just stop paying attention to them. They show up and say, yeah, whatever that thing again. And that's the interesting thing that's the advantage to Zen orchery versus just sitting on a cushion and meditating is when you're sitting on a cushion, you get an infinite number of thoughts. And instead of just that limiting thing, and I imagine there's a similar thing happening for you with when you're in one of these events, I want to talk about more, where you know that after a little while, it's like that same thing about I can't do it or fill in the blank, whatever that small number of thoughts are.

Before you respond to that, then of course, that leads me to this question. At any point in this, do you find any kind of like mental breakthrough or something where it just suddenly gets really blissful, wonderful, open, because you've just given up on trying to fight against the pain and the agony and everything else? Yeah, probably about 19 times over 24 hours. And then it's followed by 19 depression topics.

I feel like there's a lot of people that will say that they'll do this and those thoughts don't come up. I would argue that those thoughts are still always there, but they're just followed by peaks and troughs. But the thing is, is those troughs, those low points, like you're saying, they just don't have the same impact they used to. Oh, I'm feeling really terrible.

I'm having a negative thought, but you just kind of don't care about it the same way. You just realize it's just going to pass. So when you know it's going to pass, it's fine. But when you don't know what's going to pass, it's traumatic.

Well, and I like what you said about, you know, you'll have the high points and then the valleys that follow because there's a woman who wrote a book, I haven't got it yet, I bought it from a library. That's relevant, called dopamine nation. And one of her premises is that when you have these really high moments, your brain is trying to get back to a baseline. And so if you think about a seesaw, if you've got a really high moment, you've got to get that really low moment afterwards to get back to balance.

So your brain is creating those low moments literally just to get you back into something that feels normal, which is a fascinating way of framing those high points and back to Zen Archery. I remember there was a time where there's a line in Zen Archery, which is at the moment of release, the Archer's true nature is revealed. And it's highly mythologized and doesn't mean anything really. What it really means is that if you know how to look when you're doing this weird thing of shooting this Japanese bow, the way you release, the way you let go, what happens at the moment, just shows some things about your personality.

It's a simple way I can put it. But there's a time where anytime I shot, every time I let go, let the arrow go, I just got this wave of bliss. And the next thought that I had was, God damn it, because I knew that the longer I had that, the worse it was going to be when it went away, either like for real, physically unpleasant, or am I wanting to get that back? And so it was, I just think I'm really just shorting the process where it's like bliss, damn it, bliss, damn it.

And eventually, you know, it kind of evened out. But I think if I had gotten attached to the bliss part, it would have been bad. Yeah, 100%. Everything was borrowed.

Every like height in the motion is borrowed. You know, every low emotions borrowed. Like you always just like, I sometimes have these moments in a challenge where I'm so on top of the world, I'm almost like, you know, a lot higher life, right? You could say, and I'm thinking to myself, Oh shit, because I know that this is usually followed by a complete like in the pits feeling.

So it's just, it's just, it's a perfect way to say it. But here's the funny way, it may be the other way around. It may be that all the struggle and the whatever, and that because actually this is indoponation, one of her recommendations for dealing with things like addiction is to do something like exercise or something that is demonstrably not, you know, crazy unpleasant, but unpleasant enough that when your brain is trying to regulate, it's going to have to up regulate with something pleasant. So maybe, you know, it was all those unpleasant things that led to the blissful things rather than the crash, which if that's the case, in a really reframed the way we think about highs and lows.

It doesn't also make the lows really, you know, bearable because you're like, Oh, I've got a little high coming up in like seven hours. Well, speaking of seven hours. So how long did it take you since it clearly didn't take two and a half days? Well, I did pretty much did.

So it was 48 hours and something minutes, 30 minutes. I mean, probably about seven minutes to sleep. So and yeah, that was pretty much the wall. I mean, so before a burpee, as it was, you know, every minute on the minute and then 50 minutes off every hour, we're just like moving nonstop on this one.

Yeah, this was me attached to a car for literally 48 hours. And I mean, like, besides, besides going to the toilet and most of the time I was going to the toilet on the runway, don't tell them, but that yeah, so it was nonstop. What were you eating during that? Well, I mean, I had back normal nutrition protocols, like I was having salt tablets, one or two of those each hour, depending on the sweat and stuff.

I was having, you know, your jowls, I was having normal food. The perk of doing a car is that your heart rate doesn't peak over 150, 160. So you can sustain it from like a heart rate point of view, but from a body point of view, still breaks down. Yeah.

And so again, you know, once you were done, I mean, 48 hours, geez, what happened in the aftermath of that? You know what's funny? I slept while I literally got in the car and fell asleep. I remember waking up at home.

That was that was pretty much the journey home. So yeah, my body slept straight away because I haven't been I'm slept for 56 hours, I was up for a total. But the body recovered really well from that because I actually spent so long training for this. Now, it's pretty hard to train for dragging a car because you don't drag a car obviously around straight to Melbourne.

And if you do, you're getting arrested. But the what I did is I attached a sled to a park. I just put tons of weight on the sled and I walked around it for four hours, a couple of times a morning. And that was my training regime for the nine months.

So because of the preparation I had and the low impact of the event, I actually recovered well from that one, which was good. I'm required by a lot of answers question. What were you wearing on your feet? This was about six months.

I started doing I started doing minimalist shoes day to day, but I wasn't at the point where I was using them for events yet. Now I use them for every single thing I do. And that means like from thongs to runners to training to events. But back then I was walk around in like minimal shoes and then training like I use like some crappy Azics that cause machines wins to be honest.

But yeah, that's what I use. I think at the time some Azics thing. I had V-Bose from other events, some of my other events and then I've used to play around with the heaps of different brands. Yeah, we're in this phase where people are trying things from every different company and finding things that work, which I'm all for.

It's like all of that is growing the awareness and helping all this anyway back to you for the win. Okay, so we've got 24 hours of burpees. We got 48 hours of dragging a car. So what else has been on your on your endurance crazy list?

I did 24 hours on the salt bike. They know that one. Yeah. I did 100 hours staying awake, which was pretty rough.

I did a just plain staying awake. Yeah, I thought to myself, you know, you're banging on about all these resilience challenges, but you haven't even stayed awake long. So I just like stuff and I'm going to try 100 hours away. That one is...

Look, I did 72 hours on accident when we were on Shark Tank, which in the UK they had dragged us down in Australia. Yeah, so when we aired, I just was up for three days dealing with the website crashing and customer service, etc. And around the 70 hour mark, I had a treadmill desk. I'm walking on the treadmill, talking to someone on the phone, or talking to someone on Skype.

They asked me a question and I kind of look up to try to see if I can find the answer. And the next thing I knew, I was sound asleep standing up. It was horrible. I had to reverse my days.

So during the day, I would somewhat take it easy. And then at night, I would go for runs, sit on a bike. I had to treat it like an exercise challenge or I wouldn't stay awake. And even then, I would...

I would even when I was sitting down, I'd used to... I was bouncing this ball because if I didn't bounce the ball, I would just fall asleep instantly. And so at what point did your mind really seem to crack on that one? Because that's what I imagine happens.

So I was just the first day kind of... I actually came into this. I was going, oh, I've been up for 56 hours before. First 50 hours, 50 hours, I'm not dragging the car.

But without the stimulus of doing something, it was horrible because I was just had so many natural hormones telling me to go to sleep, as you should, that avoiding those was really challenging. But after I avoided it, then that's when just delirious came in. I was seeing... I remember I was driving home.

I wasn't driving, but it's in the car. And I was going down to grab my shoes. And I thought my dog was licking my hand. I didn't even have a dog in the car.

My brain was turning into mush. It was a pretty horrible experience, actually. I probably would never do that again. That was a one and done thing.

No. Yeah. That one, I would never do it, obviously. But I mean, I've just read enough about military training and whatnot, and just be affected that because people have been curious.

Like, why do we have to sleep? It's like, well, we don't know why, but we know that if you don't, you go crazy. And you really do go crazy. Like, I started creating an alter ego for myself called Tom.

Like, I was like going around to my partner at the time, like, I saw my son, my partner, saying, hey, like, Tom's... Eaters not here right now, Tom's here. And she's like, what the fuck are you saying? Like, this is 80 hours.

And she said she came in one night, and she said I was just sitting there staring at the wall. And she's like, out at 80 or something. And she came back like three or four hours. And I was still just like staring at the wall in the same spot.

No phone, no TV, just like blank, just like, blank, lost. Yeah, I was still, I still wonder why I did that one. But the reason behind why I actually did that is I had this idea for another challenge, which would provide a lot of sleep debt. And I needed to know if I could do it.

And the summary was no. Yeah, I appreciate that you have that kind of good sense, at least, which is a weird thing to say after we're talking about the things that you've already done. All right. So wait, okay, so what else is on the list?

I did what have we got. It's hard to remember. I didn't Adelaide right off no training. So Adelaide is a state in Australia, sorry.

So I took a flight with a bike to another state and I just rode home, self supported off no training. That was one. I did 24 hours on the stop bike twice. I had the hours of bike in this world record currently still have the 24 hours of bike in this world record, three minute burpee, Guinness World record, and then the car Guinness World records.

And then the other ones are just weird ones like did a triathlon of no, Dr. Full distance triathlon of no training. Just yeah, do other little things, adventure races, marathons and stuff in between. Again, I'm really curious, you know, since you have this business out of not only doing retreats, but just your professional business, how has this affected your business?

So I can imagine positive and negative. I can imagine that on the one hand, it could be inspiring for people who want to find out what you're doing and how they could do more better. I imagine some people could be intimidated. I imagine some people who are flat out nuts would come and hang out with you.

Yeah. So I mean, I have a business that I started from 2016, which I still run today, but I have less involvement in that business was for the everyday person you could say that business and what I do now is not relate. Like if I'm not inspiring, you know, a mum or two kids or, you know, dad that's working full time to go and do anything. That's not inspiring them.

So in that way, it hasn't helped, but it's great for getting personal trainers on board. That's for sure because personal trainers want to work for you when you've done all these crazy things. But I think the biggest lesson is to talk to me is that like, you know, if you can stay up for 100 hours, you can work hard, right? Like these are, these things are work ethic based still, no matter what.

So there's always going to be overlap there. Well, in the obvious question, what's next? So currently, I'm doing in a few weeks, I've got, you know, Goggins, Kshala, she's got, it's four by four by 48, where he does four miles every four hours for 48 hours. So I'm doing that for seven days.

So on October 14, I'm running 6.4 Ks or four miles, if you guys call it, every four hours for seven days straight. And again, sweet, that's coming up when soon. Yeah, that seemed like three weeks. And what's been the prep for that one?

Running, a lot of running. And I'm not a runner, to be honest, even like I'm like, I'm like a wombat with like slightly longer legs. I look like a a rock wheeler like going through the bush. It's not like I'm not a good runner, but I feel like 6.4 Ks or four miles is very achievable.

And as long as I can get that done and I'm okay with the no sleep, I should be okay. We'll see though. Probably Molly. And so look, so he's got four by four by 48 and what inspired you to just go, let's just go for seven days.

Well, I just feel like what I want from challenges these days for me, like I want learning experiences. And the learning experiences come from not doing the things that I didn't think I could do. So choosing something that I think I could do doesn't really feel my cut the way it used to. So this challenge is something that I'm like, genuinely, I have no idea how I'm going to go after three or four days.

So guess we're going to learn together, right? Like, well, are you going to be, is that going to be streamed in some way? Can people follow and track it? Yes, I've got a driver event group going with it.

But that's where all the times will be posted. But otherwise, I'll just flood the Instagram for seven days with what I'm doing and the tea is in all of the fun stuff that comes with it. Yeah, no, that would be that would be amazing to follow. So when I in a few minutes, when I ask you to tell people how they can track you down, let's make sure we give them that info as well.

Because that's going to be a good one. Holy moly. If you had to, here's a crazy question. Are your parents still alive?

They are. Yes. And how do they think about this? So my mom is very much, I don't want to come to any event because she stresses us too much.

Dad, I would say I need to couldn't give a fuck. He's all right with it. He doesn't care. So, yeah.

It's not likely. I'm not going to say this is true, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's not racist. It's not sexist. I don't know what the appropriate word is for this.

But to a certain extent, everything we're talking about couldn't be more Australian. It is a very obvious way. It's kind of like just a guy that I know, he was a British guy going in Australia and he's a customs trying to get in. They go, you know, what do you hear for business?

What do you know? What are you saying? What are you saying? What kind of this hotel?

And they say, do you have a criminal record? He goes, Oh shit, you still need one to get in. So, yeah, it is there's a bit of like an Aussie thing to just doing hard stuff, but not just having a laugh with it. I think that's the difference in the States.

And I've met some really hardcore guys in the States and a really hard car. Yeah, but in Australia, your hardcore guys, your neighbor that you just like go out and greet him and then he goes and runs like 300k. You don't even know he runs 300k. It's different.

Well, this is like my thing. You know, part of my story is that what got me into the Albertha thing was I say a friend of mine who was a world champion cross country runner, which is when I was looking at Boulder, Colorado, I could have just said a world champion, my neighbor, because it doesn't matter where you live. You're living next to a world champion of some sort. It's really like my training out of all the people I've ever trained with.

I'm the only one that doesn't have a world championship title. It's utterly ludicrous. And I never will. I mean, the guys who are faster than me there, I mean, we're all genetic freaks, but they are the freakiest of the freaks.

My only hope is that at some point I'll live them. And my actual only hope is things like the world championships. I want to make it into a semi finals 100. If I make a semi final, somewhere in the top 16, I'm the real.

There's no or actually I want to be in a four by 100 relay and have the other three guys carry me around. So I'm assuming you're using barefoot shoes then, right? Surely. I train and compete in the sweet fortune that we made.

And we're actually working on a kind of secret non sprinting, non-spike sprinting spot that it's not a secret. Now that I said that, but it's a very interesting design that I think is probably going to be the best running spike ever made for a bunch of reasons. There's some very clever technology or lack there of it. I'll tell you what, I've got your shoes that you've got in the background, the song lines.

I've got those. I get a lot of crap from my wasn't mates about them because they're not in here, but I rock them loud and proud now. Well, if you want to get your neighbors to really get their panties and add some beads or charms or really go for it. Yeah.

There's the minimalist shoe away all just coming into Australia very hard right now. It wasn't around two, three years ago. I was one of few, but now people are doing it crazy here. If you look in the Google data about what people search for and you look at the trend about when people search for barefoot shoes, it peaked originally in 2009 when Born to Run came out and the whole boom started.

But it's a worldwide peak now, both in the US and worldwide. It's never been higher. And it's growing organically and growing fast. And I'll tell you this news, this is something I probably shouldn't say, but I keep secrets.

We're going to really make a change in Australia hopefully within the next year because we're working with some people who've gotten very into this idea. Actually, one of these people got into it about eight years ago, but now the other people that he works with are getting into it and for people who don't know the wheels talking about the wheels. So really, Anthony, the wheel has been a barefoot guy for like eight years and changed his life. And recently they picked up some zero shoes and called us and we got to talk.

And so we're putting something together. And to be honest, to be honest, I changed my life too. My feet were broken. And I'm not even saying this to somebody parked up.

If I didn't like him, I just said shit, because that's not what it's about. But I had shin splints. My feet were cooked. I couldn't do anything without getting feet paying.

And then as soon as I stopped wearing shoes, all these problems went away. And as soon as I had had those changes, I was hooked. And then I only got into running into zero drop in middle of shoes probably three months ago. But that's been a whole other level of change, Ken.

Yeah. It's shocking. I say to people, my wife has a great line. She goes, there's no reason to have another shoe company in the world.

Unless you're shooting people's lives. And the irony is that the only way we're changing lives is by getting out of the way. And people just don't get it. And I'm talking to professional sports leagues.

And I said, all we're doing is going back in time, packing to the 60s and early 70s before you got all these modern athletic shoes where injury rates have gone up, the type of injuries have gotten crazier, the severity of injuries have gotten crazier. So we're going back in time, but then improving what you were doing back in the 60s and early 70s. And they're like, no. And pro athletes, they get it.

I mean, they put on, I mean, some of them are nervous. In fact, we had this one basketball player who he was just watching other players check out a shoe that we made. And so that's not for me. And then when no one was looking a little while later, he put them on and started trying out.

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm low to the ground. I'm getting cut better. I got better balance. OK, this makes sense.

The thing is, when you first put on middle shoes, you freaking out, like because you don't know, like you're feeling all these things. It hurts. It's it's harsh. But like, that's just you actually reaching it again.

It's going to take time like anything. You got to actually allow it to do its job, right? Like, yeah, and it's different for everyone. The transition time, my favorite story, though, good friends of my wife's and mine, we've known them for about 13 years, for almost as long as we've had the business.

And they emailed us last weekend and said, we got into play. We never owned our shoes. And we never pressed the issue because I don't care. And I mean, it'd be nice.

But, you know, I'm not going to force our friends to wear my shoes. They said, we've never owned your shoes, but we got into playing pickleball recently. We needed new shoes. And we got on this website and ordered like 13 different styles to try them out.

And one of the things they recommended was yours. So we ordered a pair. So we tried on the other 12 shoes and just didn't like how they fit and put on yours and went, wow, these feel really good. Like, you know, my toes are spreading and I like to balance.

But we were really nervous about playing in them. So but we thought, all right, you know, we'll just bring another pair of shoes just in case if it doesn't work. And they both said the same thing. It's like, during the game, we forgot we were wearing them.

Yeah, it should be. Yeah. It's how it should be. Yeah, that was a fun one.