The ‘Ordinary’ Man Who Did 105 Iron-Distance Triathlons in 105 Days

39:59And then I knew it was over. But are you thinking, well, this is kind of what happened to James. Because he was about six in or so when he had his. And he figured it out. So I just have to stay in it or I'm wimping out in comparison. Is that renting space in your mind? Sort of. The way I saw it was there's two analogies in my head. One, I'm on the ship and I've not even left harbor. and we've got a hole in the ship like do you cross the atlantic when you're still in the harbor or you've just left the harbor or do you go back and fix the hole um and so in my head i was like i know i can do this and not get injured i know it i just believe it inherently that i can own this and i felt like i was doing myself a disservice limping it and and i because i just knew i could do it and like thrive on it not thrive because you're never going to thrive because it's miserable um and also i was just so slow that i probably couldn't have i'd already gone over the 17-hour cutoff anyway so that was was only gonna get worse and it was and it definitely it got worse like i couldn't walk i was in a brace for a while but the main thing is i i have this i had this oil painting version of how iron 102 was going to look and you know on day five someone cut a hole in the canvas and i'm like oh let me just go home get a new canvas and start again and work out what i did wrong and as i said i have i really don't care for failure and i really wanted to do it the way i had it pictured in my mind which was going to be difficult yes it was going to be a slog getting up at 4 29 every morning um going all day like all that stuff i was prepared for i i didn't want to just limp through and just scrape by because i felt like i was doing myself a disservice um that said though had it happened on day like 80 i probably would have sucked it sucked it up but just dealt with it but so early on i was like you know what it just wasn't in the car and there was a couple other issues with with crew i sort of had crew rebellion really early on as well which i haven't really talked about um you know caroline caught one of the crew guys looking for a job on day four right on his phone like at home on the laptop like oh what are you doing oh i'm looking for jobs so like they didn't believe in me yeah yeah you know so yeah that's a problem it was a problem whereas james has his really good buddies that those guys were never going to leave his side absolutely um i've said many times and i still believe this to be true that that what james accomplished with his 50 and 50 states and 50 days and then the 101 i think those are two of the most extraordinary examples of voluntary human endurance.

42:47And I feel like they still to this day have not gotten enough attention or credit for what he achieved. And then I see you go out and do it. And listen, I was with James on the 50th day of the 50, and I showed up at the 100th day. I mean, I saw the whole thing. And I was right there when he started to fall apart, like literally less than, I don't know, maybe a mile or a mile and a half from finishing that hundredth day and the strain that it had put on his body and what he was kind of enduring. And I was mesmerized and just really impressed with how he completed all of that. And then I'm watching this unfold with you and I couldn't help but think, this guy's making it look easy and i'm not saying that it was easy or that that was your experience but there was a a difference in tone in the way that you were holding all of this like it seemed not effortless but um there was a sense of ease around it um whereas with james and what he was doing there was uh i i the word i would use i guess would be intensity yeah yeah i think i wonder if it's a british thing like there's definitely the keep calm and carry on attitude in britain where we don't sort of we just you've chosen to do this mate like crack on what don't moan right yeah i guess well i'm thinking of ross edgley like always cracking jokes no matter what there's a there's a lightness yeah and then there's also that this tall poppy syndrome is quite big in britain where if you get a bit above yourself and you know come back come back down to have mate and uh you know all the people that came and joined me who were just randomers you know i didn't have anyone as part of my crew who who came and paced me on the bike or joined me on the run i was just relying on people whoever showed up falling on six every day at the pool and it all was was quite contained i mean with james it just became metastasized and like every day there was more people until you get to the final day or two and there's there's thousands of people there and you're ending up in a high school stadium and there's like pomp and circumstance.

44:58And part of that's fantastic because it was all these people who came from all over the place to celebrate and to also share how much that had impacted them. Like I was running alongside people who were sharing their story of how they were so inspired and lost this weight and started running, you know, like that's an amazing aspect of the social media world in which we live. Whereas with you, it was just like a ragtag group of a couple of people every single day. And it kind of felt like it stayed in that consistent zone. Was that by design or was that just the way that it unfolded? So it sort of unfolded that way, but I was also very aware that we couldn't have too many people join me, especially on the bike.

45:41You had a very narrow lane in which you were riding it was super busy public roads british you know roads um we had 89 junctions on the course 75 of which i could have stopped to zero like so it was a lot of stop start you know on the days where i was maybe 10 i think the most i ever had excluding the the 102 day was maybe 20 riders and even that was too many cars were getting annoyed um there's a couple of close calls with people passing trucks big trucks when they would take one of the corners would you know automatically cut the corner and then you're trying to look over the hedge to see if anyone's coming and we were very nervous that if it got too big something was going to happen and we had three crashes and one of them a guy went under a car in the wet but luckily the car had stopped in time uh and the other two were in front of me just overlapped wheels you know people that weren't fit enough to actually do the course quickly because we were doing a good pace you know we were doing a six six and a half hours really which you know unless you've a good rider i mean that's that's a decent pace and some people would take the chance and go yeah i can do that and then they would just head down not looking where they're going hit a pothole overlap a wheel and then i'd be behind them and i'd have to swerve around two of the crashes and luckily you know i was unscathed but there was certainly an element of nervousness to let it get too big.

47:11So actually, I think even in the 90s, I took down all the information of how you could join and figured that actually if people wanted to join, it means they were super keen and they would go and look at my Strava. Yeah, they're sort of passing a test just to get there. And I think at one point, didn't you rode like a five something and it scared off a bunch of people who wanted to join you? I remember this actually. So I remember James saying, yeah, the first 10 days are going to be horrible but day 10 it's all going to get better and on day nine a couple of riders came um adam and ben and we blitzed it and i was hanging on for dear life and uh yeah we did like a 5 58 ride time and um i remember going yeah took me nine days james you know it took you 10 yes i'm one day up and then for the next week i was ruined but yeah i had to sort of say to people like please come you know come and join me on the bike because that's not our normal pace and um in the whole 12 000 miles or whatever i rode i think i only did about 200 on my own you know the longest time i did my own was day two i did 120k so 80 by 80 miles of it on my own and then someone joined and then i had a few other sections where i did about 30 or 40 miles on my own before someone would just turn up on their lunch break and do a stint and that was the benefit of doing a lapped course so it was sort of 10 mile down a couple of 30 mile loops and then 10 mile back each roughly uh which meant people could do just the morning bit before work or one lap or two laps or come at the end and it's sort of encouraged whereas if i did a long out and back he's sort of committed to the whole ride yeah so yeah what was your communication with james like yeah this was unfolding oh it was great so the first attempt he was like oh where are you i want to come and join you and it was amazing you know like because he inspired me so that there is what would james do oh wwjd yeah yeah i was like because what would he do man you know like he's super well on day six when you you know when you had your thing you would have kept going well exactly i didn't have this printed on that kit um so because the backstory about me attempting the 100 is i when he did the 50 i was just blown away i was like whoa this is amazing i wonder if i could do 100 because it seemed the next step in my CV of triathlons.

49:34So I'm the only person still today who swum, cycled and run Lands' Entry on a Groats, which is the length of Britain. I also then had the record for the world's longest triathlon, 4 ,200 miles, which is sort of like a quad-deca continuous, but the bike leg was shorter. And so this was sort of the next thing. And also, of the four types of world records you can do, which is world's first, furthest or longest, fastest and the most of, it's the one I didn't have a record in. Yeah, you didn't have a most of. I didn't have a most of. I had a record in the others, but I didn't have a most of. So in 2018, I thought, actually, I'm going to have a crack at a hundred.

50:13And I thought of a route. So I was living in the Lake District. I was going to swim in Coniston where I lived. And then I worked out a bike leg down to sort of Barrow and Furnace and Ulverston and that. And then you could run up the quieter side of the lake twice. And it was exactly a marathon and in hindsight it was all would have been terrible all of it but i'd thought of it anyway and then i got married and kids and covid and so i just parked the idea and then when james did the 101 i was like oh yeah it is doable right let me revisit that um and then that's when i revisited it last year and then obviously it went tense up but yeah yeah but you're doing it you're making it look easy at least to an outsider looking in um and you're creeping up on the record you meet the record you surpass the record and you decide to keep going yeah james sneakily snuck in the 101 and didn't tell anyone which was great uh which meant you had to do 102 and then after that feeling good you're like well do i keep going yeah yeah so i part of my process is to go into it believing wholeheartedly it's a done deal like if i just turn up i'm going to do the 102 like that's it and i have to believe that the terrier yeah and and i do things in i put things in place to to make myself believe it so for example i printed numbers up to 123 so i printed caps and and race numbers up to 123 because in my head i was manifesting this concept that not only am I going to beat it I'm going to go way past it and it's just part of my process to go well it's a done deal I just have to turn up and do it um and so I knew I was always going to go longer I knew I was always going to do 103 because I wanted to see what it was like doing it not having to do it like I just wanted to see would my body just go whoa what are you doing I'm giving up and I don't make the cut off or would I thrive would be like oh, the pressure's off.

52:15Am I going to enjoy this? I had spoken to Caroline a week before and I was like, I feel like I can go on. Like I genuinely, I really do. It's horrible and it's hard, but like, I feel like if I just turn up, I could roll this out. I really think I could. And just, I remember the look on her face, like the words that came out of her mouth were very supportive, but the look at her face was like, don't do this to me, man. Like I'm solo parenting here. Or like, yeah. Yeah, they told me this was the guy that I was getting married to. Yeah, exactly. And we sort of had a conversation. She's like, right, well, if you need to go more, you're never going to have another shot at this.

52:50Just go more. And for context, your wife is self-employed. She's self-employed. And you have like a four-year-old and like a - Under two-year-old. Two-year-old. Yeah, just under two. So life was hard. And she's doing it all. She's amazing. Yeah, she was amazing. And she was coming and running a marathon every Sunday with me as well. First time she'd run a marathon since having kids. So yeah, I won the wife lottery, definitely. certainly and uh so then i'm thinking right well i can carry on but then there's other things to consider like i'd be moving christmas day you know and like the crew the riders who joined me everyone's like so focused on 102 and that's what i've told everyone and if all of a sudden you go oh actually no that's not the end the end's like two weeks later everyone's like so invested in this day it'd be like moving christmas day and i was like well i can't do that but i tell you what i don't want to quit either the terror in me doesn't want to be the one that gives up so I definitely will do 103 and then I'm gonna let the internet decide 104 so I did 103 and actually it was such a good day I felt really good the pressure was off um my times were a bit slower but I sort of didn't didn't mind um and then I thought right let the internet so I went on Instagram and did a poll and then obviously 71 % of the internet shark hates me yeah and they said carry on of course and because I thought of maybe just getting the internet to decide but then after it was 71%.

54:09Well, they're always going to tell you to keep going. Exactly. I sort of didn't really think about that. And I thought, right, well, from now on, I'm just going to flip a coin because then if the coin says stop, it's not me telling myself to stop. It's me just, the coin says stop. So that's good. So to do day 105, I flipped a coin and the coin said, carry on. And then on 105, I flipped it again and I would have done 106, but the coin said stop. And yeah, that was emotional actually. yeah i remember flipping that coin was it harder to not do it that day yeah the harder the way i can think about it is imagine having a job that no one else in the world has and no one else gets to have and i have it and it's blimmin hard and it's difficult but it's so rewarding i'm getting goosebumps actually think goosebumps thinking about it it's so rewarding and the community that's being created around it is...

55:07Sorry, that's got me there.

55:11Yeah, I just... Would you give it up? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I just didn't want to give it up.

55:23Because everyone that came and joined me, I think that's the thing. All these people that took time off work and everything, didn't think this would happen um you know it was so amazing and uh yeah i just i didn't want to let go of it yeah yeah so um and that's why yeah just i knew as soon as i gave up gave up i just would be getting you know i wouldn't be doing something that no one else in the world is doing right now gets to do and yeah that was um yeah that was uh that was hard but also it was time to give up because i remember monty my eldest going daddy daddy is your challenge finished can you play with me now and oh that just cut to me you know so um oh excuse me no it's great i mean i think there's there's two two competing things here one is this sense of specialness and this honor of carrying this mantle forward.

56:24Like you were very present and aware of the fact that this is a special set of circumstances. And for whatever reason, you're in this position, you've been chosen or you chose yourself to do this thing. And there's a responsibility to show up for that. But I think if I had to guess, what provoked you emotionally is the fact that it was meaningful for other people. Yeah, absolutely. And then it cultivated community. And in that, I hear and see somebody who understands the power of what these challenges can represent in terms of it being about more than yourself, right? And that's the true vein of energy to tap into.

57:12Like if you wanna keep going, right? That's the energy fuel, the source that will always give more and more and more because it's a benefit to something that's so much broader than you and your goal and like the terrier. Yeah, no, absolutely. And it took me ages to work out why these guys were waking up at like five in the morning and coming and riding with me. And, but then slowly you're right. I heard about each one had their own little challenge. One guy wants to cycle 12 ,500 miles this year. You know, Clive wanted to get white shoes and you only get to get white shoes if you do a hundred miles averaging 20 mile an hour then you can buy your white cycling shoes and he did that with me and and and everyone some you know one guy lost two stone which is what was that 40 pounds you know coming to cycle with me every day james he called him because he came almost every single day either on the bike or the run because he did shift that allowed it at work and uh yeah it was just it blew me away that that camaraderie and we still have a whatsapp group now of everyone and one of the regulars actually did a 24-hour bike ride on my course just this last weekend so i went and i did a shift from 1 30 in the morning till 8 a.m um as he finished that and everyone's got another one of the guys did 300 miles on zwift as well so it it was uh yeah it was really really amazing and and and i just didn't want to give that up because i was feeling okay don't get me wrong it was tiring getting up every day doing those 14 hours a day not seeing my kids coming home and Caroline even though she was super supportive it's hard solo parenting you know shout out to all the solo parents there in the world it's really tough and um but I knew I could just turn up and and do it because like this is what I'm good at and I I like being good at it and I like the reward from it and the money coming in for charity was great and like just everything about this unique experience that no one else in the world could ever do i just it was hard to to let that go really i'm sure you get asked a lot how many do you think you could have done and i did hear you say yeah on another podcast that you felt like you could do 200 yeah yeah yeah i could have in on the route i had in this country 200 is probably possibly.

59:37probably doable with the weather i think once you start so i started in april and that was the earliest i could start it was snowing like two weeks before and the weather was terrible in april it just the wind was horrible like it was the mud the conditions you know you've you've going across loads of farmers tracks with like muck and cow shit why didn't you just go to like ibiza or something like that where the weather's great like the most the flattest most temperate climate like i don't know phoenix or like you know dubai or something no well there was thought of doing it in america so i've cycled as part of my round the world bike ride i did miami up to missouri down to arkansas texas up kansas down oklahoma um where did i finish then then new mexico arizona to phoenix and then stopped at phoenix because i was i got run over in in arkansas so i was a bit delayed on my flights and then i've also done i did the route 66 bike race in 2016 um and i love cycling in america and and i think if you were going to do longer in america and you also wanted to play the tailwind game you could find a town which just had a spider web of roads do the swim in there do the tailwind game run at the end go back each night and i think that would be sustainable to do this more and more and actually because there's two things that people will do now someone will possibly do 106 solo with no outriders or or they'll go longer much longer so 200 or maybe a year because in america you if you wanted to do a year you have to get very lucky with a lot of things like injury and illness and and that sort of thing but you could do two locations so one in the south in the winter one in the summer oh that's interesting it's doable yeah doable and in fact a part of me is like this is the monkey i'm the guy to do it like i'm definitely the guy to do it but it's just the wrong time in my life it just wouldn't be fair um but if no one's done it by continuous time i'll revisit it but um no i think i think you could i think once you get to a stage and you know if you look at all the people who do deckers and double deckers you know the real the really good people are doing 10 hours you know so if you look at so i've done 105 james done 101 there's a latvian guy's done 60 and he was doing 10 hours 11 hours i don't know why he stopped at 60 like if you go online you can see it was dead and then there's a french guy's done 41 there's a bunch of italians who've done 30 and then all the double-decker crowd yeah yeah i think that's an interesting um thing to explore from a scientific perspective because it it it sort of puts to the lie the idea that the people who are good at this are just the real slow force gumpy plotters you know the the 14 15 uh you know minute mile guys but if you're really fast and you're incredibly fit and efficient you're actually in a better position because you're you're going to get like our hours extra every single day yeah and the compounding interest of that is yeah i remember when you did when you did your five around hawaii remember the sec before the last one, you said you had 11 hours sleep or something.

1:02:52Right. And you felt amazing, didn't you? Yeah, we got a little day off. And then, I mean, I felt better on that day than I did on the first day. Exactly, yeah. But on the other things with the flights and the, we were, I mean, we didn't know. It was like, we were getting, I got like no sleep at all. So it felt like we were just pulling all nighters and doing this stuff. And so that's my point. When you don't have the sleep and you don't have the recovery, you're having a rough time. But as you get, if you say, as you fast, you get more sleep and recovery, you're on the front of the wave. um let's say slower people choose a continuous decker or double decker because the cutoffs are a bit more lenient and you can sleep whenever you want whereas if you're really slow and you try a decker you know you've got to be at the swim at 6 a.m you might you know you might only get in at 3 a.m right once you start and then you've only got three hours sleep and then yeah eventually you may just not even make the swim so you're right that you want to get to a point where you can do uh for me with because i had 40 minutes in a car every day i had 10 minutes to the pool and 30 minutes back home from the run.

1:03:48Oh, there's lots of room for improvement there. Yeah. Yeah. Except I live in the hills, so I had to go down to the flat bits. Um, but if you, if you, if you lived right near the pool and you finished your run near the pool, I think 15 hours is your bare minimum each day. For me, it was 14 hours, 14 and a half, but call it 14. So as long as I could do 14 hours in zone one, then it was, it was sustainable. And I didn't crash on the bike and, and didn't do anything stupid and managed all the little niggles. So, you know, of those 10, 10 pillars of endurance, muscle management is one of them. And, and I'm very good at that.

1:04:24You know, this, the smallest thing that's happening, you know, I've got a grain of sand in between my toes. I take my shoe off straight away. Immediately. Rather than just, oh, it'll be fine. Absolutely. And I'm really good at that. And, and if I feel like a little thing in my hip, I'm like, right, go back into my memory. Has this happened before? Yes. Right. What did I do that time right tennis ball here stretch this do that tape that if it's not happened before right physio what's going on and had a couple of new ones where i was like well what's going on here so we we did some stretching and physio and that sort of fixed it but i get on it super early i don't let it get to a point anywhere near tendinitis anywhere near stress fracture you know i try and nip it in the bud um i'm always looking at my technique in my head like where am i landing on the run how's am I stomping on the pedals on the bike?

1:05:11What am I doing with my shoulders on the bike, you know, on the hoods, try and vary between the hoods, the drops and the tri bars. But more important than any of that is what's going on in between your ears, right? And you have some pretty interesting mindset techniques and tools. I own a bunch of spectacles and I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-Roka pair on my indoor trainer. when I was riding my bike indoors. And I gotta tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my glasses back up my nose until I got so frustrated, I just tossed them aside.

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1:07:02as you mentioned earlier james famously says it's 100 mental and 100 physical on the mental side of things this notion of disabusing yourself of any plan b i think is really powerful so talk a little bit about that so when i go into something a i mentioned earlier i go in wholeheartedly believing and i really do believe it's a done deal i just have to turn up um and then it puts me in a mindset of like right well i know i can do it i know i'm gonna do it where does that certainty come from i don't know i've just always been like that to the point of and that's why i fail like my first attempt at running the length of britain got injured failed my first attempt at my across europe cycle record got injured failed first attempt at this um got injured as well um and that's yeah and it's probably because i have this sort of ignorant side to me, I go in probably a little unprepared.

1:07:58You go in completely half-cocked from the get-go. I mean, you're a guy, I want to get into your back, let's just take a little diversion to talk about your backstory a little bit. You are born and spend your early years in Zimbabwe. You then moved to South Africa. Your dad is a big game conservationist. Rhino and elephant conservationist. So you grew up as a little kid with like elephants running around and stuff. I mean, my mom used to get annoyed because every day she'd wake up and the elephant had drunk all the water out my paddling pool in the garden. That's wild. For like weeks, she thought it had a hole and she's like, where's this blimmin' hole?

1:08:34And then it got up early and there was an elephant. So, I mean, that's a pretty unique childhood that connected you with the natural world in a way that I imagine is probably more meaningful than even you consciously know. then South Africa, then you end up in the UK. And I get the sense that you're a bit of a rolling stone. You don't really know what you wanna do or who you wanna be, but you seem kind of content to just roll with whatever, with less than a dollar in your pocket and just figure it out as you go. No, absolutely. I mean, even coming to the UK, I remember the reason I came, I'd done a year at photography college and then they asked me to be an assistant lecturer for the following year, just helping out in the darkroom and various things to helping out.

1:09:20the the because it was only a one-year course and then i finished that year and all my south african mates were coming back after their two-year visa ran out going oh britain was amazing i loved it we got to travel here here here and here and i'm at the bottom of africa oh that sounds cool i can't do any of that from here uh i got an irish passport it's just like a free train ticket um let's just go i didn't need a visa or anything and i think three weeks later i landed i pretty much sold everything i managed to scrounge around to get 100 pounds uh back in 2002 which wouldn't have lasted long even back then i'd found out about a job in a salad making factory in cambridgeshire which is the ones when you buy salads in a bag you know which you shouldn't do but you know it was that factory where you cut lettuces and put them in the conveyor belt and all gets fixed and then i started working in a photo lab i did that for six years cut those days down as the photography grew.

1:10:14And in the early days, the photography was great. I photographed Prince William. A lot of the sports stars had jobs in India and Morocco. I worked on the Harry Potter films in the stills department, helping out the main stills photographer, Murray Close. So it was all going well. Because the dream was to use the camera as a passport to travel the world. So I was going to work for National Geographic. It was the adventure that was calling. It wasn't the art of photography. not that that wasn't important but the real motivator was you had this drive and desire to see the world absolutely and the camera was going to be that unlocking key for all that i remember as a kid taking all the pages out the national geographic magazine and putting them all around my bedroom and and then i got to london and then the reality of paying rent and buying food and i landed up living in a room not much bigger than this with seven of us there was a bunk bed and i was on the bottom bunk a double bed in this corner and then three people on the floor it was so small the one guy's legs were out the corridor like it was tiny we're just like it was almost squatting but the landlord knew we were there and we were paying him rent and he was like well I can't kick him out so I'll charge him like 30 quid a week or whatever it was and um but I just did it and lived out of a suitcase for a couple of years just couch I moved 12 times my first year in London you know just trying to get more photography jobs and then I remember there was a point where i was going to go down from so i was working five days a week and then just thought well i might as well work six days a week earn a bit of extra cash and then i can buy more kits i was trying to save up for more cameras i just got to a point where i got some new kit and was cutting my days down i think from yeah back to five and then my flat in london got broken into and everything got stolen absolutely everything oh i didn't know and i was like oh so i'm back to my boss at the photo lab i was like hey simon can i go back to six days a week please and then it took me another year of working to buy more kit and you know so i was working in that lab for six years cutting my days down but then on the side of that you know i was getting some creative jobs but they really were terribly paid um but they were creative but the 22 year old of me was like well i need to earn more of course because i was chasing the money and i found out that photographing um school portraits at nursery school level just paid quite well you know you sell the pictures to the parents and they all buy the pictures and and i did that i did one school and i was like wow that was quite good earner and then i was like well let's do this and i had a business partner james and him and i just were like right let's go all into this thinking if we earned enough money from the schools and we got photographers and to shoot them and people in the office we would have more time but actually we had less time no then you're just building the business and so then we eventually she had an office we had seven staff we had like four photographers two people doing photoshop um and one sales person getting us and we we did nurseries up in the midlands around birmingham all around london and the channel islands where james is from and uh yeah got to the point where photographing 10 000 kids a year and and that was the goal more just a number like it's 10 000 this year it needs to be 12 000 next year and it just was we knew each kid was worth x amount of money per child photographed and yeah eventually this is a far cry from the national geographic exactly yeah and then you know there's the part of me that goes and it's just like just suck it up just deal with it it's rubbish but you're putting food on the table mate you know well done um get on with it and then i turned 30 and i was just miserable so i went to james i said mate i'm out like i'm out like can you buy my shares like i walk i walk away and then he was like yeah sure and going through and looking doing 10 years of accounts and i'm thinking ka-ching you know you know a little bit here not a lot but enough to sort me out a year or something and he said i'll give you a quid mate let's take it or leave it i was like so you built this i mean that's a pretty robust stable big business yeah and you're a partner with one other guy yeah and you walk away with a dollar yeah and then i bought i spent three quid on a frame so four quid on the frame to frame the pound so he gave me a jersey pound notes the only part of the uk they slug pound notes um i've got in my office at home now so i've spent four quid on the frame for this uh one pound that i gave yeah so i was minus three pounds but you know for me it was to reclaim your life and it was you know what it was it was me going right this is my symbolic gesture of a keeping my friendship because james and i are best mates he was best man my wedding years later even so it didn't ruin that and i'd known him for 20 years such a good friend though he couldn't he couldn't give you equitable is this a guy is he a good friend yeah i don't know i mean part of it he he sort of thought i was dropping him in a little bit because i was mostly the photographer the creative and he was the business guy and if i left he would all of a sudden was like well what i don't know how to do this um so there was a part and we had some loans that needed repaying and he also sort of didn't like it either so he was going to shut the thing down anyway um but then the other part was me going like i'm not doing anything purely for my financial gain ever again like and it was symbolic like i'll take this pound and this is it i'm going to moan about it and talk about talk about on podcast forever um but then so then i had this this sort of like right what am i going to do i wanted to go traveling but didn't have any money to go traveling and also like the traveling wouldn't have scratched the the terrier which i hadn't quite worked out this concept yet but i thought i just needed to do something and then i thought well what if i break some sort of record that has an element of travel to it maybe i'll get a sponsor and they'll pay for it because that's right this idea of seeing other people who were traveling the world on someone else's dime and and and that being draped with this world record attempt and you're like well why don't i go after a world record get somebody else to pay for it in the atlantic climbing everest they all had like logos of companies just like you do you have a lot of logos on your shirt right now and that because all sport relies on sponsorship from every level right but you had zero experience nothing nothing no you were in no position to ask anybody for money or or to back you in any kind of feat i had to cycle given a resume that had zero experience on it Yeah.

1:16:34No, no. Like nothing? Nothing, no. But I got lucky. I found a company that supported a charity and I went in with this sort of idea that, well, what if you support my... So the thing I thought of was the around the world record. Right. Riding your bike all the way around the world. Cycling around the world. Was that like a low hanging fruit record in terms of time? sort of um it was still you had to do 167 miles a day so it's still hard but the current guy who's got the record to 240 miles a day fully supported mark beaumont um so alan bait had the record uh and vin cox so vin cox had the record but only for a few days because him and alan bait were actually going together and then alan bait took his record but vin cox thought of this concept of like well whoever wants to go for the next record why don't you all start at the same time and he made it a race called the global bike race started on the uh 12th february 2012 and the idea was start at greenwich come back in time for the olympics in london it was an awesome idea so i was like right i'm going to enter that so entered that then went to this company who i knew supported a charity in africa i said well if you support me i'll raise money for you for that charity and who knows i might raise more um for the charity and and yeah they would they just liked it uh they liked the idea the oh the ceo loved cycling and that's how i got funny i was like i couldn't believe i mean it's right it was so rare for just a novice to sort of get funding for such a big trip and i i'm eternally grateful but you did did you even have a bike no well so i had a bike so i had cycled lands into john o 'groats oh right you did it in like 25 days like yeah like a very casual it was i remember if i did 60k or something or you know 30 or 40 miles i was like whoa i did a big day today so i had no i had the adventurous spirits i guess but i had no physical ability you know i remember my first bike ride so once i'd sort of got an email from the company saying right i think we're in um i thought right well i'm going to get my bike out the shed which a i then suddenly realized i'd done land's entry on the groats on a 62 frame and i'm a 52 so i was I was like, that's a massive bike.

1:18:52I try to cycle London to Brighton, which is 60 miles. And I got to Crawley, got a puncture and didn't know how to fix it. I had to get the train back home.

1:19:03And yeah, so I was really at a base, but I had the fire. I had the fire. It was something for me to chase. And all of a sudden I knew that if I just put in the hours, I could get to a level because I'd looked at Mark Beaumont and Vin Cox and Alan Bate and James Bothorp and Julian and saraya all these other people who'd done the around the world thing and i'm like they were just normal people with jobs and things um none of them were professional athletes well if they can do it i'm surely i can and i'm just gonna have a crack and then train 40 hours a week right six months yeah how did you ramp up to 40 without getting injured so 20 of that was on saturday i'd get up at 4 4 a.m 5 a.m cycle through to midnight um and yeah just slow base base zone one zone two cranking out i was 30 so yeah 2012 yeah 30 so i was still young enough to not pick up all the niggles that i'm picking up now and yeah just worked really hard and eventually got to a point we're doing something like 200 miles daily as long as not too hilly it wasn't really sort of unthinkable so you set about this attempt to cycle all around the world uh and misfortune visits you yeah in the united states yeah yeah i was uh i was doing really well i'd done so from so the rules are you got to do 18 000 miles and you got to pass two antipodes and because there's so much ocean in the southern hemisphere you've got wellington and madrid or a place in malaysia and a place in ecuador and those are the two i chose uh so i and you can fly in between bits as long as you make up the miles and don't go backwards on yourself so i went down flew to spain so i did a bit in london but i it really started in spain went down into morocco because I wanted to do a bit of all the continents except Antarctica and then flew to Santiago did Santiago to Lima through the Atacama again doing 170 180 miles a day flew to Miami and did Miami all the way up into Missouri and then it started getting a bit cold so I started turning back down and then when I was in Arkansas yeah unfortunately someone just ran me over um they were speeding they admitted speeding and they were on their phone i believe and uh i actually don't remember anything i went to bed the night before and woke up on the side of the road and i remember going how's my bike and they said yeah it's pretty total man i was like what just lie to me you know tell me it's okay because without the bike you can't carry on it was actually one of the rules you had to do it on the same bike for some reason um so the record was off and i was going to come home were you in the lead in this adventure or you you're not racing side by side no no a guy called mike hall um rest in peace he unfortunately got killed sadly got killed in a in a bike race in australia years later and he was one of the best in the world and it took took the wind out of my sail for ultra cycling for a while actually he was in that race as well and he would have i would have beaten the record but he would have beaten me yeah he was he was amazing like he was just so inspiring again just a yorkshireman with a belly and but it was just a machine on the bike he won i don't know if he slurs the tour divide record but he he won the tour divide a couple of times he did he won the trans cont uh across the trans am sorry he set up the transcontinental race now that's just been um yeah really amazing so he probably would have beaten me even though i think we were neck and neck his route was slightly quicker because he went east and i went west um but you get hit by this car yeah and it's not a small thing like you fracture your back like you're in bad shape yeah it was uh you know i i would say to the guy who ran me over like it wasn't his fault like i was on a road you should never cycle on but i'm just following a line on a map you know he's he's a baker i believe he's done this road every day of his life he's probably never seen a cyclist at 5 a.m and then there's this idiot you know and and it was raining and there was some traffic lights ahead so i think my rear red light and the red light reflection off the water in the road so So yeah, no hard feelings was just one of those unlucky things.

1:23:06But yeah, I just woke up with a compression fracture on T11, chipped tooth, concussion, ligaments like knee and right foot because they stayed clipped in. Sorry, yeah, right. Because that's, I must have swerved at the last minute because I landed on the grass and he hit me in one of your big pickup trucks, you know, the ones you don't get here in Europe. I went straight up, hit the windscreen, My helmet did what a helmet's meant to do and compressed and took the pressure. My rear wheel just was trashed. The frame was bent. And it was game over, really, for the record. Even though I thought I could carry on, the doctors were like, nah, it's not happening.

1:23:50And it turns out that the doctor on duty, Martin Carey, was Welsh. And he's like, right, don't stay in the hospital. Come to my house. And the Careys, Martin and Missy, are just, oh, I owe them everything. They just looked after me. So you're in Arkansas and you go to the hospital and it's a Welshman. Yeah, I know. What a child. I mean, I owe them everything. And they took me home and they bought me a new bike. They phoned the bike shop here in the UK and said, remember, Sean, can you send us a new bike, please? We'll pay for it. Yeah, they were amazing. So, of course, before they bought me a bike, I was going to come home.

1:24:24And then I remember going through my kits and I came across this little Olympic torch that some kids at a school near the Olympic village in Greenwich made me. and the idea was we're going to take this torch around the world back to london for the olympics i'm looking at it going oh man these kids are going to be so disappointed um that i don't take their torch around the world and then all of a sudden the terrier had something to chase again and i was like right i'm carrying on but then i sort of had this not for the record not for the record the charity experience experience get this torch back to the kids i had to convince my parents and I was like like this is gonna be a hard sell you know like and then I thought right I've got it so I remember phoning them and saying hey mom and dad you know statistically no one gets run over twice like I've had my turn I'm carrying on see you bye which in my head still makes sense but um it was the only way I could justify carrying on in my head and feeling like right well I'm not gonna get run over again and I've got this torch to get back to the kids so I did slightly less mileage uh I think I was 2 ,000 miles short of the 18 ,000 in the end and a slightly different route in Australia.

1:25:30But yeah, I got back to the Olympics sort of, I can't remember. Completed that. Completed that, yeah. Completed that. So this is a very circuitous route that we've taken for me to arrive at the original point that I wanted to make, which was twofold. On the one hand, back to this mindset thing around no plan B, the terrier. You latch onto something, it's gonna happen no matter what. so much so that you sell your business for a dollar, you talk a sponsor into underwriting this adventure that you have no experience in whatsoever. And despite being hit by a car and fracturing your back, you still find a way to complete this thing, which I think is unbelievable.

1:26:12But beneath that is this minimalist sensibility, like a dollar, I'll sleep in a room with seven people. um you're you've designed your life and it seems like even though you're married and you have kids now you keep your life lean enough such that adventure always remains within your grasp right like it's all about having a baseline so that you can go and do all of these amazing things like there seems to be a lot of intentionality behind that construction no absolutely i tried to lead as simple a life as possible i lived on a boat for three years on a canal um in up near worcester i bought an old world war ii gunboat that that harland and wolf made and they also made the titanic so that was a concern but it was it was this beautiful wooden wooden hell and a lovely arch and it was used um to rescue spitfires in the war and when i took the front paint work off it's leather roundel from the raf roundel i had the engraving with the the the raf in the back um of the boat and and the stern i should say and uh and i love boat life it was super simple you didn't buy that big a telly because you couldn't you didn't buy another sofa because you didn't fancy the current one because i'd have built in one and um yeah it was just i didn't have a garage to do my all my my hobbies and that's and that's probably the biggest reason i moved off the boat and also it actually randomly sort of there's how I met Caroline was just a whole series of circumstances that if one of them had not happened I would never have met the love of my life and one was getting injured on route 66 I then was going home to the boat and it was really flat I was like damn it I need hills in my life so I literally the next week moved to the lake district just for six months to finish writing one of my books and to do some hill training and a friend of mine was going to come and climb Scarfell Pike, the highest mountain in England.

1:28:13And she bailed on me like last minute, which means I had the weekend free. So I went to the Kendall Mountain Festival and met my wife. And if any of those hadn't happened, I would never met Caroline. And then once I'd met Caroline, I sort of knew that moving back onto the boat was never going to happen. So then I tried to keep it, thought I could maybe get it up to the lakes, but it was 60 foot, it was long. So I eventually sold it, which is a shame. But yeah, going back to your point, I do try and live a simple life as possible without too much distraction around what I want to do in life and what gets me going.

1:28:49But it is hard when you have kids and family and responsibilities. Yes. All these sort of things. There's compromises because you have competing values. Yeah, exactly. But you have on your website, in addition to a whole section with all your failures, you also have a section on dreams. Yeah. And one of the dreams that you have publicly announced is to live on a deserted island, basically. So you have this Forrest Gump sensibility, the beard, Forrest never stops running. But here you are like channeling another Tom Hanks character. Tom Hanks, yeah, Castaway. You also want to be Castaway. Like I feel like, yeah, you have the terrier and you have the monkey, but you also have Tom Hanks as like a talisman.

1:29:32I actually have a tennis ball called Wilson. Oh, you do? I feel like you need to meet this guy. There's some kind of energy exchange here. But this idea of living on a deserted island satisfies that part in you that just wants to be connected to the earth and free or liberated of the trappings of the material world, which I think is operating as part of this desire for adventure and exploration, right? It's like, how can I live in a more natural primal way where i'm experiencing the world yeah in the most tactile way possible yeah no i mean caroline and i talk about it all the time you know our oldest is our oldest is just starting school in september and there's we do you know we conflicting with like should we just take a year off and go and find an island and live on it or just i could see you on a sailboat with your family sailing around the world and raising your children like wild animals or what's that Viggo Mortensen movie where he's got him in a school bus oh yeah that's a great film and um until it's not until it goes nutty but anyway go ahead well no it's true we've talked about the boat thing I just get terribly seasick um because I I have the land you have a sailing record I have the sailing record for land sent john groats as well but I was sort of the t-boy like my mate uh two of my mates full sharp Alex Alley proper sailors you know fast boats and everything and um yeah I was just there to help out and but yeah we did an 84 hours I think we still have that record i'm not sure but i was seasick for 50 of it you know um yeah that was terrible i think since swimming britain i've got tinnitus as well and i i was getting into paragliding at one point and i've had to bin that off because i just get really bad motion sickness so the boat thing is just i know that feeling of being seasick for days and weeks and um but no you're right i would it's it's probably going to be the thing that i regret not having a crack at at one point and And Caroline's the same.

1:31:29But then we've got responsibilities to parents. Like, is it a good idea to take a kid out of school and make them leave the life you want to leave? You can play that game all day long. Like, you don't know. You have to live your life according to your values and raise your children in the manner in which you feel is in their best interest. But I think whether or not, however that plays out, nonetheless, you're this person who has been to many places and connected, you didn't just drive around in a tour bus and fly to places like you've been boots on the ground, traveling at a very slow speed through amazing swaths of planet earth.

1:32:11And I think one of the beautiful things is that you can come back and tell the rest of us what you discovered, right? So of all the places you've been, of all the people that you've connected with and the things that you've seen, Like, what are we not appreciating or understanding or what can we learn from what you've experienced that could maybe shift something in how we perceive our own lives? one thing that i whenever i traveled i'm probably not a great person to ask this question to because i'm mostly heads down not talking to anyone and living out of service stations but when i do meet people and chat to people or chat to people afterwards who maybe i cycled across russia and they saw me and then you know messaged me on on facebook is that we're all pretty much the same all over the world we all just want to get up and do a job and have holidays and all these sort of things but also i've realized that how important it is to have some sort of physical goal in your life like anywhere in the world i think anyone should just have something to work towards that has a physical element to it i think we're all way better for it if we do that and i know if i don't have some physical goal that's difficult i'm grumpy and and all the people i meet all the way around the world they're all exactly the same we're all the same We're all humans on this planet leaving.

1:33:34Yeah, we have slightly different circumstances. And, you know, some people live in easier countries than others, of course. But inherently, I think, you know, we're all pretty much the same. And we should treat each other all the same. And we should all have a physical goal. Right. Empathy. Empathy and connection. But as for the physical goal piece, articulate why you think that's so important. Explain that to the person who's working two jobs, who's never done anything physical, but their life is hard enough as it is. why do they need to build something like this into their life because it's you know it's for me it's the same as just breathing oxygen like i think you you have to do it you know you have to just do it because i think you're also just missing out on life because there's a whole aspect of life that you're not experiencing by not engaging in something that that has a challenging element to it on a physical side you know like when you change your diet you've untapped this whole new world right that you just didn't know existed and i think the same thing is is there for having a physical challenge and it doesn't have to be going and doing an iron man it can be literally just trying to do a 5k my my wife's mom has been doing couch to 5k all year she's still doing it um and it's great you know she's just got this thing she's got this drive now she gets up and yeah it's hard um but she's getting there slowly i would also say is don't be in a rush for it because i think that's also and i am i definitely am i fail i fail that one all the time you know have the goal but you know be prepared to do the steps to get there and don't get disheartened when you're not achieving what you think you would achieve because you're just going to burn out or get injured or you know if you push it too hard and do stuff for the fun of it you know i'm into mushroom foraging so i i'll go for a run without my watch or anything why is that not surprising if i had to like draw a picture of somebody who's a mushroom forager probably look a lot like you yeah and actually near me there's porcinis like sure porcinis are like the gold of mushroom foraging and i know we're all there a mile near me so uh you know sometimes i'll just do it for the for the fun of it and i think that's also important to not not always realize that there is a fun element of of exercise and sport and challenging yourself i think it's important to link those two things together and i think beyond just the idea of embracing doing hard things it's the cascade effect that occurs when you put yourself in that position because whether you succeed or fail in the pursuit of that goal you're building self-esteem you're raising uh the ceiling on your own sense of personal capacity and that spills over into every area and aspect of your life beyond just what you're capable of physically yeah absolutely you know like you're just pushing that bar higher and higher you know i've got a 22 month old he tripped on the pavement the other day burst out crying thought he was dying you know we don't cry now when we trip on the pavement because we know i'm you know i'm not going to die if I trip on the pavement.

1:36:47So our bars are really higher. And I think it's by putting yourself through those difficult scenarios and creating a bit of hardship in the form of physical activity will, as you say, lead to all other aspects. Because the next time something else happens in your life, you go, well, that wasn't nearly as bad as running a marathon. I can definitely do this. So I think that's definitely an element in that side of things. Yeah. Back to the mindset stuff. So, this whole aspect of the conversation was kicked off by talking about this no plan B idea, which resonates throughout your life. Like, you're someone who can pick up on a dime and go do something else without worrying about, like, a safety net, essentially, right?

1:37:33and carrying that into these endurance pursuits talk a little bit about in the context of the 105 how this idea of not having a plan b um became kind of a reliable default mantra yeah it was interesting actually a couple of close flat family members actually sort of sit me aside and go sure i'm like what happens if you can't do a full a day will you start doing halves a day like uh no what are you on about they're like well instead of just quitting if you get injured again what if you just dropped it down to doing halves a day and did 102 halves instead i was like absolutely not like and then when that gets hard you can go down to olympic distance and then sprint and then eventually doing a 5k and then it's just running or something um so no it was i was sort of offended i was like it's just never gonna happen i'd rather the fail and go back to the drawing board and start again trying to do the fulls every day then reduce my my bar or make my ambitions lower like i don't get any satisfaction about doing halves a day zero absolutely zero you know i could do a whole year of halves it would be less satisfying for me personally it wouldn't feed the terrier because the terrier wants the fools right so and on some level the terrier is sort of like a mad alcoholic though who's developing a very high tolerance and needs to be fed even more and more and more and more.

1:39:02This is a concern later down in the life. This is the hungry ghost gnawing on your soul. Well, exactly. Because at some point, the terrier will never be satisfied. Right. Because he'll have achieved something. And you attempting to satisfy it is a lost pursuit. No, I know. I know. But I'm like, la, la, la, la, la, la. Of diminishing returns that will slowly drive you mad. Absolutely. And I'm only 42 now. Until your wife leaves you. Exactly. I'm like, yeah. I've got another 40 years of things to fill. I don't know. Keep telling yourself that you're running towards something and start understanding or appreciating what maybe you're running away from.

1:39:37I'm not accusing you of anything. I am obviously running towards and away from something. I don't know what it is. Yeah, I can't answer it. I wish I had an answer. At the moment, I'm just winging it. I'm winging it and see what happens. Because no plan B. No plan B, exactly. I'll just, at the moment, I'm good at something and I'm good at being miserable, cold, wet, hungry, and tired. And I'm good at doing multi-day stuff. And I'm good at nailing those 10 pillars of endurance. And I'm going to keep doing that until I can't anymore. And then when that does happen, then I think of another plan A.

1:40:15That's something else. And maybe it's being a PE teacher at school. You know, I really, I mean, youth sport is high on my agenda now. um since i've had kids i've just noticed how hard it is to to try and get facilities especially in north wales where i'm from and uh so now that's my focus i even got a letter from prince william oh you did i did yeah on day 60 something he wrote we got led through the post with the kensington palace stamp and we're like what is this and it was like demis to conway am i being knighted yeah exactly is this the obe what's happening yeah so it's like demis conway congratulations on your 102 and then he wrote a lovely paragraph and uh on the importance of youth sport and now because he's the the prince of wales of course right and then said good luck with the rest of your challenge and then just a signature and it doesn't look like anything so we were like first we're like who wrote this we're like it must be the janitor who's just got a letterhead and then we googled his signature and it's come up and his signature is just willy it just says willy and um but this is what true venture foundation does right they they all all at the moment it's north north wales based where where they have through the money we raised are going to have a grant system for clubs youth clubs and for athletes and individually youth athletes that they can just apply for so all the money i raise is in a pot at the minute and soon we'll they'll be putting it out and i'm working i'm volunteering with them basically indefinitely ryan lives near me who set it up and we go i went to a youth triathlon event just this last weekend and did the prize giving it was the final event of the year and we're just trying to get more kids because in north wales only 39 of kids do sport outside of school wow 66 000 fewer kids in wales alone do sport outside of school since covid um and then we hope to expand a uh into the rest of the uk split first wales then the uk and then also expand the types of sports we'll support but at the moment it's it's triathlon swim cycle run and a couple of smaller ones like there was a club who couldn't put a youth volleyball earth water polo in together because they didn't have the small balls for the for the kids uh because no one would fund it so we'd like figure that out yeah yeah yeah so isn't uh is garrant thomas from wells he's wells yeah he's south he's from south wales so south wales is different there's a bit of a divide between north and south because south has cardiff and you know they've got 50 meter pool there's no 50 meter pool in north wales for example and the all the other pools are sort of council pools so you have to right there's a slot and things like that and yeah so a lot of the north wales kids were having to drive all the way down to cardiff for a gala that's pretty far isn't it it's four hours plus hotels and everything and it was never never anything up but you live pretty close to wrexham right pretty close to rex so americans know rexham for one reason and one reason all night so talk to me about the ryan reynolds effect on that town like where you live that's amazing so i'm i'm probably half an hour 40 minutes from rexham but yeah since him and rob bought they bought the football club the football club and they've invested good money in it and they're very emotionally invested absolutely and it's been amazing for rexham uh and i've fully i don't i soccer football um but i have jumped on the rex and bandwagon absolutely because they're they're local to me yeah and a lot of the riders that created like just a resurgence of of interest in the football club or kind of oh yeah and they and also are they interlopers from the outside no they've they're amazing because they're putting money into the town and now the stadiums are full and they're selling all tickets and it's good for the community and they've gone up a league as well i think they've got four more if they want to get to the premiership but that's a long way off but still uh yeah it's been amazing so anyway because i cycled down quite close to wrexham on my website i was uh trying to get uh rob or or ryan to tattoo the wrexham football club on my ass for uh 25 000 to the charity that sounds like something they would do though but i don't think i mean he's a marketing genius yeah i thought that would have been great yeah so anyway that never happened.

1:44:22We're sloping, so Rob will... We'll see if this makes any impact on whether we can make that a possibility. No plan B, right? You're all in, you're committed, just like they are to wrecks them. I've got the space on the bum cheek right now already. The other interesting mindset tool that I want to hear a little bit more about is this counterintuitive notion of refusing to celebrate small wins. you would think in the pursuit of goal a larger goal that you have these stepping stones along the way and emotional engagement and staying fresh with it um involves allowing yourself to have those little wins to celebrate along the way yeah you feel differently no very differently yeah for me if i celebrate too many small wins in my pursuit of the the full cake at some point there could be a situation where it's going badly but i go oh well i'm not doing so well but i got xyz from it so for example once i got to 21 i had the british record um i could have gone yeah i'm the british record winner yeah brilliant yeah make a big fuss out of that then once i'd got to which i thought was 42 but it turns out it was 61 i would have got the european record for the most number of continuous uh sorry day day by day uh fulls i could have celebrated that i could have celebrated um oh there's a couple other things that sort of i did and then yeah i don't even remember them because i didn't celebrate them but the worry is that let's say i'd done all those little mini mini micro celebrations let's say on day 80 something bad happened the worry for me was oh well i'm already the british the the european record and the british record holder oh i'm happy easier to quit oh yeah well i can be happy with what i've done um and that was not good for my headspace i needed to be again it's all or nothing no plan b i'm doing the 102 or and if i don't it's the whole thing's a failure like i'm not ever gonna go and start doing the talk circuit going well i'm actually the british record holder no it's who gives a shit yeah yeah for me absolutely yeah a bit the same as like oh well why don't you do the most number of halves because i think the record for halves is less than the fulls anyway um i believe i could be wrong on that but um uh i think it's in 17 there could be you could create a record for anything yeah yeah i know it's like how meaningful are these records it depends upon you know how how um incredible the challenge is i suppose um how does that square with being a leader of a team when you have a crew of people and you're reliant upon the support that you need to accomplish the goal, right?

1:47:07Like you may feel like it's not in my best interest to celebrate these stepping stone goals, but I have all these people and I have to keep them excited about what we're doing. And I can't expect them to adopt my mindset and have them show up fresh and smiling every single day. yeah i think i failed on that yeah if i'm honest i think i didn't quite because i've never really done anything with crew before so i had a crew when i swam the length of britain and you know we were stuck on a boat so they sort of couldn't leave uh and also that really was sort of something you know doing a world's first where no one's even attempted swimming up the west coast that was enough to sort of keep them excited but i and and also i had days off on that one it took 135 days but i had a good 40 days of bad weather where i couldn't swim yeah so we got to go to the pub and you know relax and have days off and things like that so i think that kept them sort of interested but again i failed there i think just motivating them i'm i'm not very good at compliments receiving or giving i feel like i'm very self-motivated and i sort of half expect other people to be motivated enough if you've chosen to do it just be motivated and do it and i think i and i apologize to the crew now i'll openly say that i'm sorry for not potentially coming across visually and verbally as appreciative as i was because i was every day i'd wake up and be like these guys are amazing like so because that's the other thing i did slightly differently to james i think is i think his crew were doing all day with him i can't quite work that out because I saw pictures of both of them at the end of each day.

1:48:48They would come in and out. Right, yeah. You know, I mean, they had different roles. Their job on the bike was to protect James because there were a lot of people riding, especially at the end, and it was very dangerous. So their job was to insulate him, and I think they were taking turns with that similarly on the run. But those guys, I mean, they were indefatigable. Like they could just, you know, incredible athletes, super committed to James. But I think James, to his credit, really understood leadership and team building in a way that maybe, to your own admission, maybe there's some room for growing and learning.

1:49:26Yeah, I'm not very good at going to someone and going, mate, you're amazing. You're doing an awesome job. I love you. I'm just like, I'm bad at that. And I should be better. And I apologize to them. Because what I did differently, I guess, is I had a morning crew and an afternoon crew. You can't be in Castaway and Forrest Gump and also be a CEO. Yeah, well, I should have been, you know, and I wish I'd now, I wish I'd given them more attention and shown them more appreciation. Because the morning crew would do the swim and the bike and then come one o 'clock, which is when my bike ended, usually roughly.

1:50:03That's them done for the day. They go home, they can do whatever they want. They had zero to do with it outside of going, doing a bit of shopping as well and setting up for the following swim, which, of course, took time. and then the so that was the two chrises they did five days on five days off and then phil did everything and he would do all of the run and then he would do the bike maintenance so that's bikes swapped out so that i just had a fresh bike each day uh and nutrition and things like that and then again so he would he had his morning sort of of course he had stuff to do before he arrived and and the bike maintenance and all that um and but you're right i if you're doing something like this your crew will feed off you 100 and if you're like oh i hate this this is miserable why i'm doing it that energy is going to transcend you have to you have to take responsibility for setting the tone you've got to be in a good mood and and tell them that and it's hard when things are in pain because there's there is pain every day all day with with doing a back-to-back irons you know your shoulders are sore on the swim and your back a little bit on the bike it can be neck or wrists um uh knees a little bit on the bike for me and then the run everything hurts you know all legs and everything so it's hard to then be like hey guys good going well done i love you guys thank you so much um and i definitely failed on that and i think if i did it again or someone else is doing it like you just need to really show your crew how much you appreciate them because you know i they were so good i genuinely didn't have to think about anything like the food was there i got i got my nutrition dialed in i nailed it i would do it different all right because i i and you'll hate me but i had almost no vegetables yeah you're like eating yeah so it was full fat cream and eating meat meats milks nuts fruits and grains um and half of i think i'd get 3 000 calories a day i was doing about 8 000 calories a day 3 000 of that was in the full fat cream is like insurance insurance calories just in case which kept me at a okay weight i went from 60 i went from 70 at the start down to 67 um 68 is a good weight for me that 67 i felt like was a bit too light i lost a bit of muscle there and and put my pace went down a bit and that sort of thing but um the crew knew everything you know once we'd had it dialed in i just had to turn up and everything was ready and laid out and they were they were incredible absolutely just the best you know was there a dark moment of the soul in this adventure like what was the hardest piece so it was around day 30 i wrote a piece about it on social media where there's a series of things that happened um so one of them was i got the total that we for charity and i think it was less than a thousand pounds but on day 30 and i'm like what why is it so low like does like obviously no one cares like obviously i've i've missed the ball here no one cares we're never going to raise what we wanted to raise which was 102 000 and then caroline was having a rough time as well you know that just that particular day the kids were kicking off and they were ill and they just were like not wanting to go to bed and not wanting to eat and just doing being kids basically and then so you know i'm coming home and she's having a rough time i'm like well why am i doing this if like we're not raising any money for charity at this point caroline's having a tough time um you know and you it's hard not to look at social media and see how many likes you get and all this because in my head that would hopefully transcend to raising money for charity that that wasn't as as high as we thought by this point and i thought well have i missed the ball on like socially you know what people do now and like does anyone care about you know just this guy who's you know can just go off and you know he's leading such an easy life he has to create this hardship for himself just to feel fulfilled yeah and there's also a sort of point at which oh another guy's going off and doing something crazy like there's always somebody who's going further longer farther you know and you kind of begin to yeah have this immune response to it yeah so and of course it was a personal challenge that i wanted to test myself to see if I could do it.

1:54:19But at the expense of A, my family and B. Like, what are you actually wagering here? And what is the why? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, you want to achieve this goal. Yes, you want to raise money. That's not really the why. Like, what is the deeper why? Well, I have to feed the terrier. It's like, I have to feed the terrier. Right, but let's go beneath that. Oh gosh, yeah, I have no idea. Like, what is that drive all about? I don't know. Maybe it's social acceptance. That insatiability. maybe it's trying to like i wasn't very good at sport at school maybe i was bullied you know i maybe i've just got this inherent need for social acceptance you know i was a bit of a loner and i thought i was happy being a loner but actually you know doing something and beating my chest because all mammals need to beat their chest right maybe i need that more than i thought i needed it um yeah it must be that it must be an element of me trying to go look at me i'm good at this stuff man i'm the best i'm the only human on the planet to have ever done xyz um it's got to be there's got to be a little ego there that's fueling this fire and which i think is fine i think i'm happy that right there maybe you know maybe it's something just trying to be cool for my kids you know be a cool dad although i've reliably been told that that never happens but yeah it doesn't it doesn't happen i also think that's bullshit that's sort of like oh i'm raising money it's it's i'm doing this for my kids i want to show my kids it's like no it's probably not that yeah kids don't care no they don't care your kids are too young first of all yeah and by the time they're old enough to appreciate it it'll just be that weird thing dad did yeah and you'll be like the record's 500 now dad shut up yeah so i don't know but in that on On that day 30 though, and you're, you're sort of confronted with that.

1:56:06Why? Yeah. Cause you know, I wasn't getting maybe the social recognition. I wasn't getting the people going in their pockets and giving money to the charity. You know, Caroline was having a tough day that day. Um, yeah. So there's probably a lot of those little things that it was played on my mind. And then I'm just like, what's the blooming point? You know, what is the point? I'm just, it's just sport all i'm doing is trying to do a few more full irons and one other guy did you know and yeah it hit me that day is it worth cratering your marriage and threatening your relationship with your family yeah all these things and then failing at a potential other goal which is all part of the jigsaw and i know the charity thing wasn't as you say the be all and end all because i needed to chase the record but it's certainly something well some of you cared about and And it also created another layer of accountability.

1:57:00Exactly. Yeah. It's dangling all the carrots, you know, like what are the carrots you've dangled in front of yourself to keep you going forward? And certainly the charity is one of them. And, you know, the ego side is having a cool pub story and, you know, coming on a podcast, you know, all these, being able to write the book. You know, I love, I've written seven. Yeah. You've written a lot of books. There's one we don't talk about. Why is that? It's crap. well these these 10 rules of endurance are clearly your next book i think so so i'm going to weave in the sort of my experience in iron 105 plus all the other stuff i've done into this sort of experience book of of the 10 pillars i think so um and that's part of it i love writing and i love all my books are in the downstairs toilet so whenever i go for a pee they're there and they're reminding me and i just love having them there um it's an ego thing as well i guess um although you do keep the copyright to your written word for like 70 years after you die.

1:57:58So I love the fact that like my great, great grandkids are going to get like two quid one month from dad's book sale, great granddad's book sales. You go to the pub. Books even exist at that point. Yeah. But back to this dark night of the soul, the reckoning with the why, trying to figure out or, or find a, you know, a place to plant your flag and continue forward. How did you get to the other side of that? What did you do mentally? What did you rely upon to, um, to transcend that setback? Um, I don't think I did anything like practically. I just was like, well, okay, this is how I feel. I feel that this is potentially a waste of my time and no one cares, but I've committed to doing it.

1:58:45So I'm going to get up tomorrow and do it. And then I got up the next day and I felt a little bit better and i got the next day i got a little bit better and then within a week we'd had a little bit more money the kids were a bit better caroline was having a good time she came and joined me and ran a marathon because i think it was around then she started doing a marathon a day with me uh sorry a marathon a week every sunday um and then and a couple more new riders came because around day 30 all of a sudden more more riders started joining me on a regular basis um it's sort of a don't quit before the miracle yeah yeah exactly if you stay in it these things and also a bad day today definitely doesn't mean a bad day tomorrow that's one thing i've learned in all the things i've done if anything a bad day today means it's more likely to be a good day tomorrow i think and the same is the other way around a good day today doesn't mean a good day tomorrow right like you've got a both ways well yeah because you can i remember when i cycle around the world i you know bits in america where i'd have a massive tailwind i'm like this is easy and I'd take my foot off the gas and I'd just coast because I was pushing less power and the heart rate was down and I was still floating along and then I'd get to a town and I'd say oh well I've had a good day uh you know I've done 200 miles two hours quicker than normal I'll just rest up I've done a good day and then the next day I'd only do 120 miles I'd be like because I had a headwind I'm like damn it why didn't I capitalize on that good day and just do what I normally do just just do the time and you know on a good day you'll go further so i've definitely learned that as well you know a good day today can mean a bad day tomorrow and vice versa yeah so sean the everyman ordinary guy with the the numbers in the lab that are super unimpressive we have this person right but on some level there is a talent there is a uniqueness what is that talent like what is it that makes you distinct or or or different or um an outlier if you had to identify your strength i mean because is it tenacity is it the terrier i think i think wanting it because i think there's definitely a more there's at least three people who join me who i think can break my record you know local local guys there's a guy called decker dave who had the british record for the most number uh for a double decker and he was doing 11 hours for and he was 57 years old when did it wow um so he had 20 and no one in britain had ever done more than 20 he's 64 now so even he admits that he's he can feel his numbers going down a little bit but you know there's there are people out there who could physically do it but it's whether you want to do it for one and whether you are you know i don't know who said it but someone said be ignorant ignorant enough to start and stubborn enough to finish or naive enough to start and stubborn enough to finish and there's definitely that element of of just wanting it so much that you're just going to sacrifice anything to get there but then there's obviously all the experience that you need that goes with it and that takes time and energy um so i think i don't think i'm an outlier i think there are more people out there than you maybe we think who could do these things um they've just chosen not to or they don't want it enough um or they're not experienced enough to deal with all the little niggles that happen and dealing with the headspace and that and that comes with time there's no way so when I did my world's longest triathlon 2016 that was the last time I've been at my fittest so between 2016 and now I've been almost the unfittest I've been because I did my Europe record in 2018 and that was okay but I was only 25 days and it was cycling only and i lost all my fitness after that but i still think even though i was really really fit after the the the long triathlon i still couldn't have done the 105 then even though i was super fit because i didn't have the experience in all the other things that go around with it so uh i would love for someone to have a crack at the 105 like i have no business in holding this record forever but absolutely not.

2:03:08What's the ally? 10%. 10 % of me goes, oh yeah. Oh, it'll get broken. But I really like the fact that you're encouraging it to be broken and you're holding onto that very loosely. Yeah, absolutely. Send me a message, I'll help you. I'll tell you how to do it. I'll tell you how to do it. And I know you want to set up a woman for the woman's record. What is the female record? So there's someone who's done 25 and 35 days, so in America. um there's a someone in the uk who's done 20 20 continuous not a one a day so i can't i don't know i don't know what the woman is but actually caroline my lovely wife she's um she's interested yeah which would be amazing how cool would that be a husband and wife so i've i've uh i've taken the horse to water with her and she's she because she's a really good swimmer she used to swim competitively as a teenager she can run she's doing a marathon a week with me and and we met cycling so she knows how to cycle she would just need to get a bit quicker on i think the bike and the run certainly the bike i mean i needed to get quicker on the bike as well but i've got the course we've got the crew we've got everyone right where i live and it's your turn to be to be a single daddy daycare i know absolutely so i think i think if a female did a month 31 days i think that would definitely be be a record i think it's probably 21 but i think 31 would be a cool number because you've done a month of them yeah because if you look at all my data i it definitely doesn't favor this record doesn't favor uh a male biologically like the power is when you with a group of riders your power is not crazy high the run doesn't have to be fast the swim the swim's the easy bit like as you know it's triathlon is very skewed away from swimmers and even if you're not a great swimmer it's still a way to recover from the day before and limber up oh if triathlon was the run first multi-day day after days would just be a whole different game because when i woke up in the morning i was like i can't walk down the stairs i cannot do it but i knew once i was in the pool once i was a couple hundred meters in get the blood moving get the blood moving it fixes everything so yeah i knew the swim was my safe space i loved it and even though i wasn't super fast i wasn't slow either i was an okay i was doing about a i did a 107 swim time as my fastest and then a 120 i think was my slowest but i was hovering around 120 total time each day about 1.15 swim time, five minutes stopping to eat.

2:05:48It's nothing in the context. And on a good day and a bad day, you're losing 10 minutes. Whereas on a good day and a bad day on the bike, it was an hour and a half, two hours, same on the run. Back to this notion of what distinguishes you. I think, yes, the desire, the wanting it is important. I think there's this tenacity, this determination, the terrier spirit within you. But I also think there's something to this propensity to action that you have. Like you are willing to leap before you look. Oh, yeah. And that's the naivete piece, right? Like not being intimidated or afraid and not being paralyzed by the unknowns, which I think is something that a lot of people get overly caught up with.

2:06:37so much so that you decide you're going to swim the length of great britain yeah and you have like no swim training no you have no idea what you're getting involved in right like you don't really have a background in this you're not trained up you hadn't swum more than i think i read three miles yeah it was your longest swim in a pool in a pool before doing that yeah yeah so that's And the world's longest ultimate triathlon or whatever you call it, you kind of went into that without really training for it or understanding training. Yeah. No, none of that. So there's a bullheadedness piece to that.

2:07:17There's a stupidity piece, but there's also an audacious kind of boldness to it that I think is the tip of the spear that opens up these doors. and when you pair that with not being afraid to fail it creates an equation that allows you to do amazing things as long as you stick with it and stay in the game yeah no absolutely you've you've nailed it on the head there with the swim especially that one a i didn't live anywhere near the ocean so i couldn't do any sea training i had zero money um i got sponsored but there was an accounting error so the money that was going to pay for it landed up paying for about half of it and then i crowdfunded the rest of the swim i only got it like seven days into the swim so i the closest i had a pool near me but i was so consumed with all the other aspects of trying to pull that swim off because that one really no one believed it was possible you know 900 mile swim up the west coast i was putting stuff on yachting forums saying oh you know i'd like to know about tides and everyone was just hammering me down like dude whatever like sailing it's difficult in a small boat like it's not going to happen waves are too big tides are too strong there's killer whales in scotland like i got everything so people were very cautious of trying to help because they just thought it was a waste of their time um and that took all my time and i knew that actually so i could swim i knew how to swim i'd done have you heard of there's the the biggest open water swimming event in the world i think is called the midmar mile in south africa 15 000 people i didn't know about this it's a mile across the lake 15 000 people do it every year our school did it so when i was i think eight no i couldn't i was about 10 or 11 i swam this mile i've done it twice they do eight eight um uh waves of swimmers and one year i did after i swam britain i did they call the eight mile club where you do all eight so you swim it they take you on a boat back you're swimming back i swam it with kerry ann payne um and lexi kelly she's american um they uh yes so i knew how to swim but i just was unfit and my technique was crap so when i did the cheese rolling in gloucester you must have seen on youtube where they roll a cheese down the hill and people chase the cheese you don't really know about this it's a 200 year old tradition in britain where it's called the gloucestershire cheese rolling they and it's vertical they roll this cheese down you run after it head over tail whoever gets to the bottom first wins the cheese anyway i did that 2009 and just fully ruptured my cap capsule on my left shoulder so when i swim and i get fatigued i drop this shoulder and i push like that and then so i just have a terrible left hand technique and it actually played up a little bit on this because also from when i swam britain because of all the waves i did and because i didn't want to get neck chafe right you want to get rhino neck like uh like ross yeah i know it was crazy and i and then yeah i just again i'm micro managing everything i'm very good at that like i never let it get anywhere near what he got because i nailed it early i started i wrapped a buff in vaseline and um lanolin so i did a vaseline and lanolin mix in the microwave mixed it all together rubbed it all over this buff put it under the wetsuit to stop the little chafe and then it was flushing a bit and cold but at least sudden get chafe but then i eventually got to this technique where i would just over roll like to breathe i would just be doing that rather than doing that and it was terrible but also with all the big waves i'm sort of breathing up in the sky and if you look at all the pictures on this swim now in the pool i'm like my head's up i'm over rolling i'm over rotating my legs are out like this but i knew i would get fit on that swim and because it was there was no time element other than trying to finish before winter i knew i would make it like i just i knew i just swam a mile you know two miles i can do it as long as i did about 10 miles a day i think in my head i was like right i'll get into scotland before winter uh even though i was hoping to do more than that but it landed up being much slower i thought it was gonna take me two and a half months took me like four and a half or something yeah but who cares yeah i did it right this propensity to act Like you threw yourself into this thing and figured it out as you went.

2:11:34And as a result, you've accomplished things that you probably couldn't have imagined for yourself. Yeah. So I'm trying to like mine the lesson from that. And I think it's that courage to kind of liberate yourself from this social,

2:11:56this imprinted kind of social expectation or attitude that we have around safety and security and like always knowing like where each step is gonna lead you along the path. And you're just kind of bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Like I'm sure there's more conscious intention behind it, but I see somebody who's acting on instinct and really driven by this sense of adventure and is kind of just going from one thing to the next and not spending too much time worrying about what the larger plan is here. Like trying to be really in the moment with who you are. Yeah, no, it's true. and i think once i think of something it's just like well that's what i want to do now no i'm just gonna do it right and i'm not prepared yeah and that is like a forest gum thing like i'm just okay i'm gonna run now and then like okay i'm done yeah no exactly and then obviously where it sort of bites me in the ass a little bit sometimes is there's there's weather windows and you know so last for last year's attempt i thought of it in december because i had this other idea which i can't talk about which i was going to do which you know about but yeah that just kept getting delayed and why can't we talk about it well i don't want someone else to do it

2:13:15if i if i go someone else might go i'm gonna have a crack at that they make my i'm sure somebody else has thought of it maybe knowing what it is no one's done it since 1994 so now you're giving clues exactly but um i then in december 2021 i decided right i'm gonna go for the 102 into and then i looked at the training i was like right maybe six months it's cutting it fine but i can't really start later than july because then i'm running into october november and weather and all that sort of thing so that was also partly the issue with the previous attempt and also kit like like getting kit with the supply chain issues getting a bike was possible um you and james both like out doing it in freezing weather and like what are you guys doing just relocate this whole thing well he had more i think he had more variation on temperature but i just had the rain you know just the rain i just made cycling on the roads with potholes you know that all the water just covered up all the potholes and you couldn't see them and luckily you know within a week i knew every pothole by name pretty much so uh that wasn't too bad but it was slippery and taking corners you had to slow down i was on a rainy day i was easily half an hour slower just because it was raining you know because your glasses are covered up with all the muck off the road and things like that um so yeah what was the question i'm sure there was one uh being present with who you are and not getting caught up in the security blanket yeah sort of narrative yeah around how to live your life like the guiding principles around how you're living and how you're making decisions about where to invest your time and your energy as opposed to the 401k or the you know the upwardly mobile career path yeah you're just like well here's what i'm doing here's what i think i'm gonna do now yeah yeah and that's kind of it pretty much i know it's it's gonna and is your wife different oh she's she's terrified of the future um no it's again even sitting here i can't even genuinely give you a reasonable sensible answer because i don't know because it's just not how my brain works but i think the the the bandwidth of your life like the horizon of your life is obviously quite large right now you're writing books you're traveling around you're giving talks or speaking you're doing all these things that would probably really impress the young photographer who had dreams of being a national geographic fellow right so when you think back to the aspirations of that person and reflect upon your life today what is the message that you tell that that young person with a dream just don't be scared to just wait like have a go you know i and i think that's what i do i just think of something that i would potentially regret not doing you know that's quite an important thing and i think that's quite common but to action it i action it to mike i will 100 regret not having a crack at this you know like the 102 when i failed the first time there was sort of talk about yeah well you know james lawrence is pretty impressive guy.

2:16:42Like maybe you don't have it in you, buddy. You know? And I saw him on day 100. And I mean, he was delirious. Like he struggled, man. Yeah, exactly. So who are you to think? I've never done a nine man event in my life. I've never done a triathlon. In fact, I've done three one day events in my life. I ran the London marathon for the scouts. I did a tough mudder and i did a 50k ultra a couple years ago it's literally other than training of course i'm doing one day training and things but actual events that's all i've ever done i've never done any triathlon not once i've not done a proper running race it's just one day events have never excited me um so you're right you know once when i failed last year there was a huge part of me and people i know and the internet going like who's this guy like what's he gonna do right not so easy like come on man like you know and um and of course as i said like i plead guilty to that by the way i was like i remember you mess it when i when i announced the attempt i remember you saying uh we'll see snap shots shots fired yeah shots fired yeah yeah yeah and then at six and you had that thing i was like told you maybe not as no not in like a schadenfreude way but out of like a respect for just how how difficult yeah absolutely yeah and yeah a huge part of me maybe didn't take it seriously enough there was that time window where i sort of knew that six months wasn't enough but i thought i'm just gonna have a crack anyway otherwise i'm waiting a whole another year for the for this would have would have been this year because the sensible part of me would have been like when i thought of it in january i would have started in april the following year which is what i said this year but of course i'm like well i don't want to wait 14 months like i want to now and i think i can get there and i was wrong i was i was wrong you know i the route wasn't good enough i was a little bit down on fitness although even day seven with the injury my all my times are a little quicker so my swim was quicker i think i'd done the fastest bike on that day um that my run was slow super slow so i was sort of on the right track but yeah i wouldn't have made it because i just didn't i i i just winged it a little bit too much this time um and i don't regret it because it became fuel for my fire the next time it was like right well i've i cocked that up what did i do wrong i'm going to do it better uh i'm going to train a bit more i'm going to work on a bit of my by um my speed because i can go forever but with doing the full a day to get the sleep you've got to be fast as well so i had to bring in some speed work into my training so i did that worked on a better route um got you know the crew uh got a different crew uh so yeah everything i just did a bit better that i'd messed up the time before um because let's say i even had got to a physical level i potentially would have still messed up because of other things had i not done the seven right and actually so going back to getting to the start line fully fit there's three things i would do differently if i did it again one is i would still do my three sessions of each thing a week for six to eight months i think that's how long i did it eight months then i would do a week-long uh bike packing ride about two months out morning till night 200 miles a day just cycle find out anything that's weak you know is it you'll pick up all the the little weaknesses and tendons and muscles by going day after day on the bike i then would have taken a week off and done the same on the run and done a week-long run with a backpack fast packing a bit like what i've got here to run uh but i'd have thrown a tent in there as well done that for a week seeing what niggles i picked up because that would have picked up my weak knee for example and maybe my weak weak right ankle and maybe this hip thing i've got now and then i would have done five in a row and i would have done a five in a row about six weeks out and that's controversial because and and the reason i didn't is because i thought well what if i get injured then it's ruining my attempt but then if i get injured doing five i'm getting injured doing 105 right so right you're just you're just yeah you're basically uh you know creating a situation where you can pull out before you begin because you're you're just realizing what's inevitable yeah so let's say i did the five and i picked up this knee thing i'd have gone right why did that happen i need to work on that go work with my physio work with everyone so that it doesn't happen on the 105 and so there's a couple of things that happen not to say that the 105 i love that was going to go easy i love that your training block is like okay i'm just going to do these 200 mile days on the boat i'm not going to do this insane run camp and i'm going to do five ironmans in five days just as just in training yeah to get ready you'd have to like if Just the insanity of that, like in terms of how we think about difficulty and what's possible versus impossible.

2:21:48Like now having done 105, your sense of normal is like so out of whack compared to like the average person. Yeah. You're like, yeah, then you do five and then you do, you know, like so cavalierly, so casually. Yeah, I don't know. It does seem normal, if I'm honest. It's like, I'm trying to right now think of someone else looking at this. And it still feels normal. Right, and that's what I want to, we got to end this, but I want to bring that back to the person who's watching or listening who perhaps is losing the thread right now because they can't relate. So let's get back to ordinary Joe. I love being non-relatable.

2:22:29I don't want to be normal. Yeah, it's like, you're like the average ordinary guy who also did this crazy thing. Like, what exactly is average or ordinary or normal about this? Nothing, right? Nothing, no. I like that. But to ground it in accessible principles as the person who's gonna write this book with the 10 tools of endurance, what do you say to that person who is struggling with committing to the hard thing or trying to access a new gear where they put themselves in a position to struggle and fail and challenge themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. Yeah. I don't know if I'm that sympathetic to people with little self sort of motivation.

2:23:17So, you know, I really struggle when I meet people and they go like, oh, I just didn't want to train. So I'm training for a marathon, but I just couldn't, you know, I didn't train this week. I just couldn't be honest. I really don't. I just, you know i'm i'm not the the goggins who shouts at you and gives you all that motivation like if you don't want to be motivated man like i just come on i i sort of i don't understand it i guess because i'm so self-motivated well also if you're reliant upon somebody else to provide extrinsic motivation then that's problematic because you got to find a way to you got to keep getting yeah Yeah, you have to be able to instill that in yourself.

2:23:58No, but like, so practically is find out why you want to do it. You know, if you want to run a marathon or if you want to do an Ironman, let's say you want to do an Ironman, you've never done an Ironman. Why are you wanting to do it? You know, and - Yeah, but you can't even answer that question for yourself. Yeah, well, I want to chase things. No, so genuinely, I have zero interest in doing an Ironman, a standalone event, zero. Although James is, he wants to do a head-to-head on his starvation trial. You're going to challenge each other? when he's asked me he's like come is there gonna be a day of reckoning yeah more shots fired right um that could be a pay-per-view his fastest is 10 hours he's done a 10 hour i think i could do a 10 i think i could do a 10 what's your fastest iron man i've never done an iron man same thing yeah you've done all the long stuff as well so you get me yeah i understand i understand but if let's say you wanted to do one you've really got to a want it and and if you don't want it don't do it i think you should do it but i'm not going to be there sort of setting your alarm for you and waking up in the morning like but if you've decided you want to do it like really focus and put energy into the reasons why you're doing it and write them out you know write them on a post-it note sticking next to your bed if you're a visual type of person or print pictures out i remember when i swam the length of britain i had a picture of the john o 'groats harbor and i printed it out and i had that as my visualization like that's where i want to get to nothing else matters i've got to swim to that spot and um and you know write them out why are you doing it is it to raise money for charity is it for ego is it for a cool pub story um everything's just as important as as as the other one and try not to forget it and if you you know and take the baby steps and trust the process and get other get advice from people if things if you're getting injured especially with injury that's a hard one of course because there are certain times where injury is you know will stop you and should stop you because depending on what you want to do after that it's being able to differentiate good pain from bad pain yes you know there's pain that's just pain and you just deal with it and then there's pain that will potentially lead to something that will a have a lifelong effect on you or b eventually stop you later down the line and it's about managing that um but for the most part from a mindset point of view yeah you just got to think why and what's driving you what's your motivating factor and for me it's a record and it's trying to do a thing at a certain time you know i'm doing 100k ultra uh at the end of september i know i will never win that race like it's just never going to happen um it's i've not trained for it uh i've not done hills in months uh however i really want to see just what i can do how fast i can do it so i'm going to push myself i'm going to look at my numbers which i normally don't do and and just see so that's i'm chasing this this philosophy of how well i can do once i've set that time then and let's say that time's close to the winner of that particular race then maybe the terry will be like oh maybe you can win it next year you know i've signed up for the 215 mile run across scotland for next august now that's something i think the the last year's winner was 58 hours and i'm sort of going well i wonder if i could do 58 hours as well so that's something that's excites me and that's all i need that i don't need any other external motivation other than a for this this hundred coming up is how how quick can i do that uh and then and then that's what i need i literally need nothing else yeah i'm so i don't care about any of that let me tell you what i want to see from you okay i want to see you and james go head to head in a mr beast type video challenge where you know you each have to do something head to head that challenges you in a way that has nothing to do with swimming, biking, and running.

2:28:07So James famously won that competition where he rode around on the Ferris wheel for however many days when he was a kid. Oh, that's right. That's like his, in the superhero origin story of James' life, that would be the opening scene, right? He rides it, I don't know how many days or whatever, and refuses to get off and win some prize. You have the cheese rolling thing. Like you have this capacity to just endure on the kind of mental capacity level beyond normal people. So in the way that Mr. Beast makes videos, like whoever can have their hand on the side of his boat the longest wins the boat or whatever.

2:28:47Like, I want to see you guys go head to head in something like that. I'd be up to that. I think that would be great. That'd be great, yeah. If anyone has any ideas. I feel like we have to figure that out. Yeah, let's keep in touch. You know what I mean? like just some ridiculous challenge that really is more about your mind than anything else yeah that would excite me that would excite me actually yeah yeah we can figure that out i want to do i'd like to find interesting ways to push myself that don't take three and a half months so and i think i'll need to just to not be away from the family and that's why i'm signing up for a little bit more one day races which i've never done before um but maybe that's part of it maybe there's these psychological challenges that uh i could uh sort of kind of scratch the terrier you know yeah maybe that would also scratch but maybe instead of scratching the terrier let's uh let's uh you know pet him a little bit try to understand him yeah lock eyes with him yeah see if we can get a little communion here a little deeper insight into why the terrier is the way the terrier is you are right i'm still terrified that he then decides to there's nothing to be afraid of uh self-awareness is power my friend no it's true it's true and and and every time i listen to one of your podcasts i sort of go right i definitely need to work on that side of me a little bit more maybe my step into yoga is gonna be a start of it yeah now i'm doing the breathing thing which I poo-pooed for ages and and um but it's it's really revolutionized this last I've only done it this last week I get up at 5 29 I do half an hour of yoga and it's the most transformative I've felt out of all the other things like the ice bath the sauna you know diet changes and that thing this simple thing I feel has changed me the most I sleep better for it um I feel better in the day um yeah caroline was like wow you've you've in such a good mood lately um so i'm definitely gonna but i'm doing the classic sort of boy thing of like right i want to get into yoga right is there a three-hour yoga session i can do yeah more is better more is better right yeah yeah yeah which is such a it's antithetical to the whole yoga thing to begin with right like it's hilarious and i'm so terrible i'm shaking on every pose and i love being competitive yeah In your asanas, yeah.

2:31:14Well, let's also work on maybe getting a few vegetables in you as well. So at home, I'm sort of part-time vegetarian, part-time vegan as well. Don't have a lot of meat in my... And you're growing some of your food and foraging the mushrooms. Yeah, foraging. I've got a big veggie plot as well. The growing season's a bit rubbish, so you get all your vegetables in like a month, one-month window type thing. um but yeah caroline and i we will have a sunday roast on sundays but mostly our weekday meals are pretty much vegetarian and i really would like you know reading reading your book really every i've read it twice now and i'm like damn it i really need to do this i really i really need to just go go all in um but yeah it's on my list yeah you versus uh james lawrence who can sustain a vegan diet the longest oh i think i could no i love it you probably would win that because i don't know james has tried no i think it's habit it's habit more than anything i think if so we do this where they deliver all your the ingredients to a meal every week in a box and so that's all um i don't think they do a vegan option but it's a vegetarian option so we have four meals a week at home that are mostly vegetarian um and i love it i i yeah and i feel better for it uh i also do feel better with with game meat then so i do try and only when i have meat it's either fish or game um but yeah but on on the 105 yeah it just it's just i started stomaching maximize caloric density basically and also i wasn't there to try and do a sub you know sub 10 i knew i needed the calories and i knew i needed to survive the day i needed i needed to not lose weight um but food very rarely changed my my energy levels on the on the one of because i was so fatigued i was so tired i was in so much pain if i ate nothing or everything i was i still felt the same yeah um so all it was is just minimizing eventually going off the cliff from a performance point because eventually at some point i'll just waste away and have no power left and then i'll be doing a seven hour bike and a seven hour marathon and then i'm back on the wave so and once i had a system because i ate almost the exact same thing every day to the and at the same time so i'd wake up out of porridge and chia in the morning with butter and honey and i'd have that very liquidy in a liter and have that on the way to the pool then i'd have a banana and then i'd have some athletic greens and a couple of multi vits then on the bike i'd have small cheeses and small bits of meat um then at the if i hadn't finished the porridge by the pool i'd have that before i got on the bike and then there was three feed stations i'd have a banana a packet of crisps um every now and then i could have some tomatoes and and cucumber uh just to because i just fancy them um i'd have something like a welsh cake i'm either used to welsh cake oh you've not had welsh i should have brought you some it's just like a flowery like cake with some like a biscuit yeah but no it's more crumbly um like a scone a scone if you flattened a scone scone scone um it's sort of like that and then i have the cream and then i have uh some nuts and some fruit lots of fruit right um and i'd have that on each feed station and then during the run oh and i'd also have uh rice pudding i don't know if you get that but rice pudding i'd have one of those at every feed station then on the run bananas and um i'd have a pasta meal two pasta meals on the run uh full meal so walking and eating with a spoon a carbon r or spag bowl and then in my bottles i had carb powders um in the bottle so i'd have about 2 000 calories a day just in the bottles maybe 3 000 in powder form and then yeah that especially with the cream because i'd have two through 2 000 a day in cream which for me was i'd eat eat eat and then literally at the end i just down a bit of cream and then go and then that was sort of insurance right like if i messed up all the eating at least i had that as backup right and then that that kept me as i said i only lost three kgs over the three months yeah i was happy with that i was happy with that because people i could have lost 10 kgs i could have gone down i'm only five foot i'm under five foot eight so i could have been i could have gone on to 60 kgs easily yeah from 70 yeah so i was happy with 67 I think what you've done is extraordinary.

2:35:57It's a testament to the human spirit, your tenacity as this terrier and just inspirational for everybody to know that you've had your blood work done. You've been in the lab and you've been tested and there isn't anything physically extraordinary about you beyond your sheer determination, your force of will, your refusal to give up, your ability to persevere against obstacles. And this proclivity to act, I think, is really powerful. And I think for anybody who's listening or watching who is considering the upper ceiling of their capabilities, my hope is that maybe your testimony will encourage people to rethink that.

2:36:42because I think it's easy, like I was saying before, when you start this new normal around like, oh, 105 Ironmans in 105 days, like whatever, right? Like, oh, we could, maybe it's 200. Like, let's just do a reality check here and appreciate the extraordinary nature of what you accomplished, whether it was 100, 101, 102, 105. This is a feat that I think very few people can appreciate just how extraordinary and difficult it is. And as I said to James and have said publicly, I think it's deserving of much more attention from the broader kind of mainstream media than either of you two guys have received.

2:37:32I think you're deserving of much more attention and appreciation for what you have accomplished because it really is something that as somebody who's dipped their toe in this world i have a hard time understanding or or or even having a taste for what that must have been like yeah thanks thanks for saying that i um yeah i haven't really thought about the external ramifications of where this has gone and where it could go and who's you know benefited from it and who's inspired by it because i'm still only four four and a half weeks out from it so i think it'll take six months to a year for me to probably decompress and work out what actually happened yeah i have no memory of because every day is the same like when i cycle around the world every day was different but this one every day is the same so it all sort of went into one big right and your relationship with time shifts and you didn't know what was going on in the world or so which is strange yeah it'll be a while for what sinks in and becomes.

2:38:37I think once I've written the book and I sit down and I'm - It'll force you to confront it. Yeah. This happened. And you don't have to run to CarFest if you don't want to. I think you earned a little break. No, I want to. Okay, good. Well, I'll see you there then, I guess, right? Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Thank you for coming here and sharing. You are an inspiration. Amazing what you've done. And I can't wait to see what you've done next. Not that you need to top it i'm more interested in in how you synthesize these experiences into actionable wisdom for the rest of us through the book you're going to write yeah thank you very much yeah it's very very kind yeah so um if people are keen to learn more about you they can go to sean conway adventure seanconway.com or their website on instagram yeah those are the two places yeah that's it Cool, man.

2:39:27Awesome. Thank you. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voices of Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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2:41:22Thank you.