Given a 1% Chance to Live – Matt Long’s Incredible Survival Story

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2:07This is the Ed Myron Show. Welcome back to the show, everybody. So, you know, when I do an in-person interview, something big's about to happen today. And so, the gentleman to my right had a 99 % chance of not being here today. and I don't mean in our studio. I mean of still being on earth and being alive. A significant event happened in his life that you're going to hear about in a minute. He was given a 1 % chance to live and you're going to hear the story of what happened to him today and his comeback and the amazing lessons that were taken from that tragic event and the journey that he's been on.

2:43Today's going to be emotional for you, but more than anything, it's going to give you perspective, it's going to give you deep reasons, and it's going to give you some insights of how to make a comeback. Or if you don't need a comeback, just take your life to the next level he's also a tremendous speaker and communicator he has a book that's been out now called the long run and you're going to figure out just in about 10 minutes here why it's called the long run so my guest today is matt long matt welcome to the show ed thanks for having me man i really appreciate it yeah thank you for being here brother and coming in in person too so let's kind of go back to december of 2005 and you have a pretty good life going at that time yeah i would say so i'm you know i was a new york city fireman for 12 years at that point uh an athlete my entire life and i had just completed the new york city marathon qualifying for boston i'm 38 years old and i'm in better shape than i was when i was 21 and that was the big goal you did the new york because you wanted to run in the boston marathon right correct 100 boston is that unique uh stature where you know you meet someone that ran it you say where'd you qualify um when you meet someone who finished new york you ask them how fast they ran did you break four hours but boston is like this you got to qualify to get there at least back then and uh and that was our goal in the group guys i was running with when you were prepping just so i understand the whole genesis of story you had left like a wall street job i think right and then become a new york city firefighter is that right am i right correct well i was an accountant of all things so it wasn't even as sexy as wall street okay uh i was an accountant at one of the big eight accounting firms.

4:16And I knew that wasn't for me. So I wrote it out for two years, the best I could, and got involved in bartending and in the restaurant business and then became a New York City firefighter when I was 26. So you're doing this profession that everybody now looks up to and understands the heroic nature. By the way, just with the fires recently in LA, just watching those guys made me think of you because I knew we were going to be doing this interview. And so sometimes you look at those guys, you think they're supermen, but they're men, right? And so were you. And we can all be hurt and injured or have tragedy enter our life.

4:47So here we go, everybody. So let's take them through what happened in December of 2005 for you. All right, so in New York City, the Transit Authority went on strike. So it basically crippled the city during the busiest time of the year. You know, we have 8 million people that live there. Another 8 million people come there for the holidays. Transit Authority goes on strike. No buses, no trains, nothing. the mayor put in these travel restrictions and i lived in the heart of manhattan i lived in 48th and 3rd and i had a small one-bedroom apartment my firehouse was up in spanish harlem and i was at this point an instructor at the fire academy okay so in order for me to get to work i could have driven my car but then i wouldn't have got back to manhattan by myself if the strike was still on okay so 18 degrees with a wind chill probably of 10 probably about eight nine degree day and i'm not a foul weather athlete you know maybe running but not biking or anything else i'm like you know what it's done for the day i got on my bike and i tried to ride my bike to work and i got four blocks from where i lived and um you know i remember driving up north air third avenue north and this big white bus just coming from all the way to the left and i'm like and i'm like what's going on like it's getting close it's 5 30 in the morning it's pitch black and i'm like And I'm like, holy shit.

6:09He's turning. Now, he was turning down a narrow street, like a one-way street in Manhattan, that the bus would normally never turn down. Maybe 57th or 34th, the double, two-lane streets. Boom. He gets right in front of me, and I couldn't stop. And for whatever reason, I didn't bounce off the side of the bus. I got sucked underneath. Oh, my gosh. So I knew it. So everyone, I knew he got hit by the bus. You went under the bus. I was under the bus. and the bike the bike and me became one basically you know i don't mean to be too graphic but it's the only way to tell the story and um so the bike basically split me open like a can from my anus to my sternum oh my gosh so i i was crushed bone fractures and stuff like that but the worst is i was bleeding to death out in the street out in the cold in the cold are you uh conscious of what's happening or are you have you fallen unconscious or in and out i'm in and out uh i would i'd like to say i was semi-conscious but i think the mind um you know we all underestimate our the power of our mind and our thoughts right so i think that the mind immediately said he doesn't need to remember any of this because if he lives he'll never function again so i started i blacked out like pretty much i don't even remember anything the last word i remember hearing the fireman the firehouse was right around the corner now i've told you i was in the bar business restaurant business i knew a lot of firemen and once they cut the hood off my head i heard one of the firefighters say holy it's matt long from 43 truck oh my gosh so at that moment i knew i was in good hands not that we would not take care of anyone else any differently but i'm a brother you're a and extra care goes into that and the first life-saving act was from a police officer you know our friendly rivals but a police officer said he's a firefighter and instead of putting on the blue glove in that cold weather he just reached into my groin and held my femoral artery you're literally bleeding out bleeding out this man saved your life saved he's the first order of business saved physically with his hand with his hand oh my gosh now i know he wouldn't have done that to an average person because there's too much at risk risk he took the chance because he knew i was a firefighter wow and then that's all i remember before we go to the next step um are you in physical pain maybe that's a naive question or are you such and such shock you're not feeling anything total shock didn't feel a thing okay i know i was screaming because they told me i was anything i could tell you now anything i've told in the past is what recounts of other people's interactions with me from this moment on.

8:52What were you screaming for, do you think? Pain or fear you were going to die? Probably pain. And, you know, I don't think I knew the magnitude of what was happening. It was probably pain. You know, the fear of or the thought of death didn't come into play probably until six or seven weeks later when I was awake and realized what I was going through, you know, pity parties that we'll talk about. I want to just first just stop and think, you're going to bleed to death in this street. Yeah. Because a part of the story, in every story, when someone has a story like yours, there are other heroic things, kind of even like the fires in California that I'm referencing, like of all the tragedy there and if there was arson involved.

9:33But then there's all the heroic things, not just the firefighters, but the people that are donating and showing up every day. So this man, do you know who he is? I have his name, but we've never met. I tried to go a couple of times when I was fresh out of the hospital, and the comeback was on top of me. The comeback was happening, and I wanted to make sure all those people that did something for me knew that it was happening. That's awesome. The comeback wasn't for me only. Yeah. Well, it won't be for you only today either. There's going to be millions of people who are going to be inspired. First things first, everybody, let's just step back for a second.

10:08I know you think you're having a bad day or a bad week or a bad month. You're going through a bad time. I would just say this to you and you may really be but compared to what? And if this man can go through what he went through to be sitting here today on the other side of this and successful speaker and author great family man because we're going to go through this journey if he can come out from under this bus crushed, bleeding to death split in half, about to die tell them 1 % chance to live you can certainly come back from what you're going through you can certainly survive this time and God is in your life as well Okay, so let's walk through what's next from there.

10:44What's the next thing you remember or the next things that happened? So the next thing that happened was they stabilized me, slowed the bleeding, and got me to New York Presbyterian Hospital. There was two options, right? They could have made a right turn down 2nd Avenue and take me to Bellevue, or they went to 1st and made a left to New York Presbyterian. So I think that was the second order of business that saved my life. Why? Why? Because it was just the right hospital with the right doctors and at the right time. Like, I've gone back to tell my doctors, thank you for what you've done for me.

11:19And one of them was brutally honest with me. He says, look, we didn't save your life. He goes, everything happened. Everything was in line. Like, you weren't meant to die. And I was like, what? What do you mean? He goes, your accident happened at 5.38 in the morning. He goes, if it would have happened at 6.38 in the morning, all those operating rooms would have been booked, done, ready to go. and you would have been waiting in that emergency room for another hour. And died. And died. Oh, my gosh. So he says, so the fact that you got here before everyone else, everyone else got bumped and you went from room to room to room to room until we had you stable.

11:53You know what that makes me think, ironically? One, how blessed you are that that was the case, and it was destiny that you're here. But the other part of it is, just it struck me when you said it, is like tragedies are happening daily to the point where there's not even enough beds, and we just go through our day thinking, oh, this person gave me a like that I didn't get on Instagram or said something bad to me or cut me off in traffic or the things we magnify in our life. And as we're magnifying those things, there's people like you that are on the verge of losing their life anywhere in the world right now, at any moment, in any emergency room, at any hospital, at any time.

12:30It's just the things we make a big deal in our life compared to the actual big deals. So, hey, guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And, you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow. And also taking a look at the future. If you want to change your future, you've got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself.

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13:28So go check it out. My friend Brendan's made it very affordable, very easy to get involved. Go to growthday.com forward slash ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save.

14:02Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. You now are there. You've gone to the right place. What ends up saving your life, or when is the decisions made, etc., etc.? What are you faced with? So in the first five or six hours of the ordeal, they gathered my family. So I'm one of nine children. I'm the second oldest, seven boys, two girls. There's three firemen and the rest are different jobs, Wall Street. school teachers, whatever. So they gathered my mom and dad. I was single. So they got my mom and dad. They got all my family members to the hospital.

14:39And this is when the percentage was given out. I always feel for doctors as they have, in this situation, an ER doctor has a tough job. Like they got to go outside to a family member and give them hope. But there's a line between false hope and actual, like something's going to be positive here. So I don't know how they do it. But it's part of their profession. They know how they do it. Doctor goes out to tell my mom and my dad that this is as bad as it gets. We're going to do everything we can. But he has about a 1 % chance to live. And he only went out. Now, again, I'm still friends with him as well.

15:21And he only went out because the nurses begged him to stop wasting blood and to let me expire. So he said, let me go out and talk to the parents. and I'll be back in 30 to 60 seconds, and we'll see what happens. Whoa. So my mom, this is a very pivotal point in my journey because I teach the strength of my mother. And she basically, stubborn Irish Catholic woman, and she told the doctor flat out, do the best you can. He's running the Boston Marathon in April. And the doctor was like, now he was a runner. We just finished the same marathon, but an hour and a half slower than it. Are you kidding me?

16:03So he said. An hour and a half slow. He's like, what? He's running Boston? So he ran back into the room, looked up at the monitors, and my heartbeat was down somewhere at 29 to 31 beats per minute. Good boy. And he said, keep working. We're not dealing with a regular person here. His body is trained to go through insult. Keep working. Oh, my gosh. And 68 units of blood in 11 hours. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Oh, my God. So that's why the nurse was like, hey, we're just pouring blood into this guy. It's just going out. I was like a sieve. Oh, my goodness. But they finally got me to interventional radiology, and a doctor there sealed up all the veins that were cut.

16:44Wow. And they finally took care of it, and I stabilized over the next five to six weeks. Do you remember your first thought when you woke up or what you remember from that experience? Oh, I wanted to get the hell out of bed. As soon as I woke up. Did you not understand the magnitude? I had no idea. So when I talked about the mind earlier being so powerful, I forgot things before the accident. So when they come in to do like a cognitive test to see how bad the head was hurt, and they were asking me if I'd like to travel, and I'm sitting there with like, I had like maybe a fireman in the room with me and my mom, and I'm like, no, I don't like to travel.

17:17And my buddy goes, we just went to Puerto Rico together. We had a big, I went, oh, yeah, yeah, we went to Puerto Rico. So when people told me things, they came back. and I think that was just part of the mind saying this guy doesn't need to know what happened to him wow it's what God's way of protecting us somehow or exactly yeah okay here we go guys and we're going to pull apart some lessons from this as well I'm just uh it's interesting when you hear stories like this you read it in a book it's powerful I recommend everybody read the book or if we do a podcast and you listen to it or we do zoom it's different when you sit right next to someone this has happened to I just can tell you even my own personal experience listening to you that's very different being three feet away from a person who has gone through something like this you just feel something from them something about their spirits a little bit tougher I don't you know tougher is what I would say about you also just listening to you you're a real person you know I mean everyone can hear your family background and where you come from and what your career was this is a real human being I think we always think superheroes are like 6 '8 can reverse windmill dunk.

18:23You know what I'm saying? Or can sing like Adele. Everyday people are heroes. You can't measure the heart of a champion. You can't. So after all of this sort of settles out and now you are alive, then there's this idea of walking. That would be nice to be able to do again. What was the prognosis on that even happening? Never mind ever running again or running a marathon again what about walking i'm just curious was that in the cards from the beginning or was there a concern about that no that was in the cards from the very beginning i i think because of my personality once i woke up i was i was like okay let's you know how do i get out of here you know what's what's happening what are these pieces of metal coming out of my abdomen my leg what's on my neck i was you know i was on a ventilator i had a feeding tube i'm like i need to go so and The doctor was like, my brother Jim and I are the closest of the nine.

19:18He's only like 13 months apart, younger than me. But he had to be there to say, hey, listen, you were run over by a bus. And I'm like, what? He's like, Matt, you need to listen. You're in a good place, and the doctors are taking good care of you, and you need to listen to what he has to say. So I sat there. Well, I was laying there, and the doctor said, listen, you're going to be here for quite a while. and i said okay um and well what's next for me dog he's like look let's not go down that road right now because you have a lot of surgeries we have a lot of things to fix and um he goes we're going to do the best we can he goes but i can't guarantee anything you'd be lucky if you're walking with a cane or a crutch the rest of your life.

20:12Wow. It's amazing. You literally sometimes will say to somebody, kind of joking like, well, what if you got hit by a bus? What would you do if you got hit by a bus? You were literally hit by the bus. Now you shouldn't have probably lived. You end up living metal stuff sticking out of everywhere, ventilator, and probably aren't going to walk. I'm going to give you guys a spoiler alert just so you're about to know the lessons. This dude ran that marathon three years later. I just want you to get this so from that right where we are and the reason I give you the spoiler alert so we're going to fill the gaps in with the lessons but from that bed three years later he runs that marathon yeah just so you know by the way that's badass and you're a stud yeah you're a stud I mean I know it's your story but maybe sitting here hearing yourself like I know you've told it a lot like is that not freaking ridiculous that three years later you end up doing that is that not yeah it's it's insane it's insane no and i accepted the fact that it was insane and and i don't think i knew how badass it was the one one day when i was rebuilding myself i would go from different gyms where i lived and i'm training and some guy came up to me in the gym and he said are you you the guy get hit by the bus and i'm i was like uh yeah and uh he goes hey you got you're one percent and i'm what he goes no he goes the stuff that seals are made of the stuff that rangers are made of those special military people they're made of that's what you're made of and you know what something's interesting i think you'd agree with me on this because you are you won't ever know that about yourself in life until you go through your biggest valley in your life which you like a seal figures out i'm made of this stuff because they went through SEAL training, right?

21:59They know that. Most of us will never know what we're made of unless in some strange way we're given the gift almost of the toughest moments of our life. Would you agree with that? 100%. I may say it all the time. God doesn't give weak people hard things to do. God gives hard things to do to strong people. And I've said this a thousand times, and I got this for my mom but i was chosen because i was strong enough to do it and maybe my story being told by you or john our friend or through the book will help someone not as strong not give up i love that by the way that's a lesson for everybody else what you're going through right now and then your your test becomes your testimony your testimony can help the weaker person go through what they're going through and that's why you need to get through it man i'm loving this right now just So, you know, this is kind of why I did the show, what we're doing right now.

22:53I do a lot of topics, but if we're going to go to kind of the core of why I do the show, it's this right now. He used a term a minute ago that I caught, which was rebuild myself. I want to talk about that. Take us through the different surgeries you had, how many you had. But this idea of rebuilding yourself, I think a lot of people need to hear real close what you're about to say because I think a lot of people, they may not have been hit by a bus, and I don't mean to be too goofy here, but metaphorically something's hitting them like a bus right now their business gone away their relationship went away their a friend's you know hurt them in a way or someone stole or lost a loved one exactly and life's hit them by a bus and they're gonna have to rebuild themselves so what did that look like how many surgeries what did you start to do and what about this rebuilding yourself thing all right so we'll go through the hospital i spent five months in this hospital i did my rehab there and everything after but i spent five months in the hospital had about 43 surgeries in that period of time.

23:4943 surgeries. 43 different surgeries. Most of them were internal. The bones healed. They put bones back together. But I'll start with the left foot up, broken foot. Every fracture was compound, meaning the bone came out the skin. Tib, fib, compound fracture. Femur, compound fracture. Right side of the pelvis, compound fracture. Right shoulder, compound fracture. my doctor would explain to me and i to this day really don't understand how it's possible but his exact words to me was that my right leg was no longer functionally attached to my body i'm like okay yeah i don't know what to say about that now that is the leg that has most of my muscle damage and nerve damage um and then the worst of all was my abdominal wall was cut by the bike and severed my uh my rectum uh i was had a clostomy bag for two years uh multiple skin grafts to close the wounds my gosh yeah i mean you know it was as bad as it gets and and he he he operated on a lot of soldiers and stuff like that and i don't like to compare myself to that at all you know i i hold all our military in the highest regard so i never so do i um compare myself but he said he goes i i've been to war zone hospitals he goes and you were as bad as it gets what about your mind when you say that i thought of you know any ptsd or your spirit and your mind just like going why this you had to had some moments of why this happened to me or i don't want to this isn't fair you must have had some of that i had a lot of it and it didn't get really bad until I left the hospital.

25:32So when I was in the hospital, oddly enough, no, I wouldn't want to be in hospital five months, but it was, there was a safety factor there. I had that little button and if I needed anything at night and I hit that button in the next few minutes, a nurse was coming to see me. When I was sent home, I was still in a wheelchair. My younger brother moved into my house, put his life on hold and he lived on my couch and I didn't have that button anymore. so what I did have was a side table as big as that one in the middle here with about 19 different medications on it and night after night I rolled over and looked at them and said is it enough and the fight with myself was well you just got ran over by a 40 ,000 pound bus I'm not sure it's enough what do you mean by is it enough to kill me i thought that's what you meant but i wanted to make sure was it enough to take wow that would make me go to sleep and end this and jokingly my personality and my my grit that i didn't know i had you know this this this will not to give up that i didn't know i had or maybe some stories in my life before should have gave me a warning and I have it.

26:53But I said, well, if a bus didn't kill me, I'm here now, and I take all those, what happens if it doesn't kill me? What am I, a vegetable? What do I do to my family? Am I brain dead? What do I do? What am I doing? What if you would have, was there ever a moment there, Matt, where if you knew it could have taken your life, you knew it would have worked, would you have partaken in taking it, do you think? Was there ever a moment like that? Yeah, I think if I knew for sure, That I could stop the pain. Really? And the doubt of what my life was going to be like, the unknown, I would have done it. Wow.

27:36Yeah, if I knew for sure. But I didn't. And I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad you didn't. A couple million people are glad you didn't. Thank you. Well, more than that probably. Do you think, wow. And my moments of pity, I call them pity parties, right? So I allow myself a pity party even today. But I don't want the pity party to win. And my moments of pity were not why me, why did this happen, why am I hurt, why I'm in pain. My moments of pity were one question, why did I live? And I remember having a conversation with a family priest about it, and he had asked me. He came in to visit me, and I was very angry.

28:19I was still in the hospital. I was very angry at the time. And my parents said, you know, let Father Jim go in and talk to him. So Father Jim came in and I was rolling my eyes a little bit. Like, here we go, you know. God has a plan for me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay. It's the first time I remember lying to a priest. I'm 38 years old. I felt bad about it. He asked me flat out if I was angry with God. And I should have said yes. And I didn't. I said, no, I'm not angry with God. I said, but Father Jim... I don't need to know why this happened to me. I need to know why I lived. And he said, that's between you and him.

28:59And that was the end of the conversation. Are you convinced that part of the reason you lived is like what we're doing right now? Like you writing the book and us talking about this and the inspirational part of it? 100%. Yeah. 100%. I believe that the first 38 years of my life were great. I was a happy-go-lucky kid running around Manhattan, firefighter you know chasing women doing everything i could jock the first time i had the opportunity to tell my story i didn't think anything of it until i got an email then i got another email then i got another email then i'm getting texts and someone's following me on instagram or someone's doing else and they're saying thank you yeah for not giving up yeah well thank you for not giving up i can tell you that today this moves me fyi like It moves me.

29:44I want to go back to this not knowing thing. You got me a little bit today, bro. I'm a little bit emotional on this one. Was that as hard as the physical pain? I think a lot of people listening to this, they're like, hey, you know what I'm most struggling with? Isn't even so much that this stuff's happened to me or that I'm in this spot. It's that I don't know what's next. I don't know what's coming. How hard was that part of it? and what did you do about that? Just put your head down day by day or what did you do? The mental part of it was the worst, right? That says a lot based on your injuries and 47 surgeries.

30:24Correct, and it is. And it's probably that way for everyone no matter what we're talking about, whether it's the loved one that they lost or a diagnosis they got or lost their job. The mental side of it is the worst. And I remember... talking to my doctor one time, and I was kind of like sarcastically saying, I'm like, hey, well, thanks a lot. You know, I still had a colostomy bag. I was still in pretty bad shape, and I was hoping to get rid of things. I didn't want the colostomy bag, you know, at all. And I said, so I said to him, I appreciate your hard work, but you fell short. And we had that kind of rapport, and he said, listen, our job is not to worry about the quality of life it's about saving your life we saved your life I said okay because the quality of life is up to you so that was the first like little smack I got from someone outside family but pretty much family now as a doctor and I took a long time for that to set in like what does that mean quality of life is up to me I mean, I'm in a wheelchair part of the day.

31:36I have a colostomy bag. I went from 178 pounds, 12 % body fat, to 122 pounds, no muscle tone. And I look like my 90-year-old grandfather. I said, I don't understand this. And that and the conversation with my mother that really made me change my outlook about what was happening to me. Okay, adversity, right? A lot of us in this business or talk that have stories, we talk about the adversity we overcame. And I know for a fact, just from talking to you earlier, that you haven't overcome your adversity from your baseball accident. You live with it. So I had to accept this accident. I had to accept all the injuries.

32:20I had to accept the new body and say, what are we going to do about it? What quality of life am I going to get back? Because I can't go to a doctor for it. So I started plugging away. I'm just picturing you because now I'm doing the math. So if you're two years with a colostomy bag, you're a year out of that and run the marathon, right? Correct. Yeah, that's bananas. So was part of, obviously, we would spend hours on the physical pain of physical therapy and going through the surgeries and the mental pain of waking up with it every day. It's one thing to hear a story. It's another thing like, Monday was this way for you.

32:57Tuesday was this day. Wednesday, the next Monday, the next. It's every day. any of you that have even had the flu for eight days imagine years of surgery pain physical therapy you can no longer also do what you used to love to do which is to be physical and be active was part of what got you through or were you not envisioning this setting the goal to go run this marathon again was that like i got something to look forward to i've set a goal did that help get you through or it wasn't till years later you're like yeah maybe i run a marathon it wasn't to a moment in in in the journey so so no that is not what got me through uh what is it that got you through so the catalyst to get my human spirit fired up and all the burners inside me to start working again was a conversation with mom and i had said to my mother in in in a nutshell i just said to her i'm glad you prayed and i lived i wish you prayed for me to die and that's something you know you don't say to your mom and especially the irish catholic stubborn mom who told the doctor he's running a marathon in four months after this, patch him up, put a bandaid on, right?

34:03And then she said to me, enough's enough. She said, you're not the only person in this world that is suffering. You are not the only one going through a tough time. She goes, we have not left your side for five months, 43 surgeries, everyone has been here. If you want to be a miserable SOB, the rest of your life, do it by yourself. End of conversation. some tough love now that was the spark that I needed to hear it took about two weeks before I got over the pity parties and started to say mom was right there are other people and I listen to the people you have on here when you bring in the real life story like mine and I'm like the woman you had on recently lost her limbs I'm like she's ten times worse than the life I have so mom was right back then she's right today i started plugging away that's when i put my head down that's when i said to myself all right matt what were you doing in your life when you were happiest what were you what was driving you forward as a kid the dream to play high school basketball you played high school basketball what was your next dream to play make it to the college level i didn't care where i played i wanted to play college well so i always had a goal athletic push myself the iron man the marathon because i was confused and i didn't know what i could do next i knew nothing else but to push my body to its limits so i said i want to close the chapter on matt long marathon runner matt long triathlete i wanted to go back and do those two things and then figure out what's next and you know i knew they wouldn't be the same because i've accepted this new body except accepted this adversity in my life so you know i came back and did that marathon three years it took me seven hours and 30 minutes you finished it i finished it yeah it's interesting when you're in person with somebody your whole physiology spirit you just see that steven completely changed once you talked about your mom's conversation like by the way and your intensity level and you leaned in and humans are awesome when humans flip that switch they're the mind the spirit they're capable of so much because your whole bro your your whole being was different and then the goal to actually run but it's like did you see that steven too like in person the switch in you same guy like just different just it's like a switch and my mother did that for me when i talk on stage and we're i'm probably a little older than you but if you remember back in the day the the old stove the white stove i mean if you touch the middle of the stove there was a pilot light that always burned it's not electric like today there was always a pilot light and i my story is that analogy is that's the human spirit we all have this pilot light burning inside of us how do you get the four burners going and my mom did that for me she lit them all up and anything is possible when they're firing up bro that's awesome what was finishing the marathon like finishing was awesome uh it was it was a it was an emotional finish line my family the fire department guys from my house and all my doctors uh well not all but some of my doctors Were they there?