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The Scandinavian Arctic Traverse: Lessons and Learnings with Branden Joy
7.6k Plays11 months ago
On the latest podcast episode, Steve and Alyssa welcome Chantelle and her athlete, Branden Joy, to discuss Branden’s self-designed Scandinavian Arctic Traverse. The route spanned nine hundred and eighty-five miles of which Branden covered using a backcountry ski set up and a snow kite, all while pulling a sled full of his supplies. The four discuss Branden’s background in endurance sports and the unique journey he has taken to create his own endurance adventures. Chantelle and Branden explain Branden’s unique training situation of living and working in Antarctica prior to his traverse, and how they adapted to prepare him for the journey. The four dig into the deeper meanings and findings that come from endurance endeavors and explore the why behind what we search for in the mountains.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast. Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House, and I will be your host today, along with Chantelle Robitaille and Alyssa Clark.
Brandon Joy's Arctic Traverse Experience
00:00:14
Speaker
And we are excited to welcome a fascinating guest on the podcast today, Brandon Joy.
00:00:20
Speaker
Brendan has been coached by Chantal for nearly four years and recently returned from the Scandinavian Arctic Traverse, which is a traverse spanning 985 miles, not a thousand, 985, using skis, a snow kite, and a kayak.
00:00:40
Speaker
He did this adventure completely solo and designed the route himself, and we're here to dig into his preparation experiences on the trip.
Identity as an Athlete
00:01:00
Speaker
Brandon, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Steve, for having me.
00:01:05
Speaker
Chantel, well, actually, Brendan, just other than that introduction, like what what would you like to tell people about yourself? Like, how do you go about introducing yourself? Like, you know, I mean, let's let's skip the what do you do for work kind of thing. Like, how do you describe yourself?
00:01:24
Speaker
I think when I talk to other people that don't know me, I tend to really gloss over a lot of the things that I do because I don't really identify as like anything in particular, an ultra runner or a climber or a skier. I feel like very, uh, I have skills in a lot of these different areas, but I'm not like, I don't primarily focus on any of them.
00:01:52
Speaker
So I think I really try to get into more of the endurance side of things and just spending time moving in the mountains. I think that's easier to connect with in general. And if I start just talking about the Scandinavia trip or some other things that I do, people tend to get a little bit confused.
Coaching Insights and Brandon's Growth
00:02:17
Speaker
Chantel, like you've been coaching Brendan for a long time and you know, we all know that
00:02:21
Speaker
after that much time a coach knows their athlete better than they sometimes know themselves. How would you introduce Brandon to someone, as I'm sure you've done? Wow. Well, Brandon to me is the most diverse athlete that I've ever worked with. And when I started working with Brandon way back in 2020,
00:02:41
Speaker
Uh, Brandon was preparing for a running race in, was it in Mexico, Brandon? That race we're preparing for? He was preparing for a running race in Mexico and wanting to get faster. And he was doing the typical.
00:02:53
Speaker
you know, stuff you can get away with in your early 20s, you know, just beasting yourself every time you went out, and then getting a little frustrated because he wasn't getting any faster. But even though he was, you know, in his, in his 20s, and able to get away with a lot of stuff, he was really had a real sense of maturity about him. And he just would soak up and listen to anything that I said. So if I told him to do something, he'd go do it. And it would be exactly
00:03:23
Speaker
the way I asked him to go do it, which was a lot of fun. And so I started coaching this runner who all of a sudden starts telling me about these other crazy things that he's scheming up. So I felt like a little like he pulled the wool over my eyes in the beginning with the real goals that he had. But it's been really fun to watch him develop over time.
00:03:44
Speaker
from planning to do just this running race in Mexico to doing the Bob Marshall Open, which he's done twice, which is a wild 90-mile unsupported traverse. I can't even say route. It's a traverse of the Bob Marshall wilderness in Montana. You figure out how you're going to get across it, but there's no trail. He's done that twice now. He also then dreamed up this
00:04:14
Speaker
this project that he called the Montana Top 50. And so he researched the top 50 peaks in Montana and summited them all completely solo and unsupported. And before that, set his caches, and that was about 80 miles on foot.
00:04:34
Speaker
So he just dreams up all these really amazing things, and those are just some of the small ones. But he's meticulous with planning. He's an environmental engineer by trade, so I think he comes by it pretty honestly. He's really organized. He can somehow handle being by himself for a long time. But at the same time, he's also just a really fun person to talk to. He's a pretty deep thinker.
00:05:04
Speaker
He's a great cook, I will say that. He's made us lots of great meals whenever he's visited and has a pretty fun sense of humor that I think carries him a long way in these solo adventures that he does. So I'm excited for more of you to get to know him a little bit the way that I do.
Cooking Passion and Personality
00:05:26
Speaker
Great. So, Brendan, you lit up a little bit when she mentioned cooking. What sort of things, what's your best dish?
00:05:33
Speaker
Oh, I feel like I have a lot, but it's gotta be that salmon. I got, it's gotta be the salmon. Tell me about the salmon. I want to know.
00:05:43
Speaker
It's a creamy, tuscany salmon. I don't know the proper name of the dish, something along those lines. I call it salmon gumbo because it has a base of heavy, heavy cream and wilted. Then you simmer that with some wilted spinach and a bunch of fresh garlic and sauteed onions and mushrooms. And you saute the salmon separately and then combine it all at the end with some rice.
00:06:10
Speaker
And then it's kind of a wet salmon dish, and it's pretty phenomenal. Some fresh cherry tomatoes as well. So good. Wow. That sounds amazing. That sounds amazing. I mean, you had me a heavy cream, but... Yeah, that sounds great. Wow. It's interesting how, you know, I find that there's a lot of introverts out there that are really good cooks. Does that describe you, Brennan?
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. One thing I've kind of contemplated over the years is if I'm more introverted or extroverted, I feel as if I'm a bit of a hybrid. I think I can excel and get a lot of energy from social interactions, but I also definitely need time by myself. I don't lean one way hard or the other, but
00:07:03
Speaker
The cooking has always been a big part of my life and, and just eating well. And especially as, as train is, I'm more focused and serious about training. I think I'm more serious and focused about just eating high quality food and eating things that I want to enjoy. Yeah. First of all, I can relate to the introvert extrovert. I think, I don't know if it's introvertedness. It's more just the ability.
00:07:34
Speaker
It's like the space to really discover yourself and who you are and to give yourself time to think. I always think of it as that, because I do a lot solo as well. And I did actually, I think later on, want to dig into how you managed the solo-ness of this journey, because that is a long time to be by yourself. But really quickly, I'm curious,
00:08:00
Speaker
How did you take this level of cooking and how do you apply it to a longer trip? What were your strategies for that? Sorry, I'm opening can of worms, but I guess just quickly and then we can go back. We could have a whole podcast on what people eat. It would be fascinating. Yeah. We are.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. And when people ask me what I ate, for example, on the Scandinavia trip, I just preface it by saying that my journey in the food that I ate was not a culinary experience. I wouldn't recommend my diet to anyone, nor would I be at all excited about having those types of meals when I'm back in the US.
00:08:47
Speaker
or wherever I am in society. And that was also the first big trip that I did where I didn't have precise control over my food and nutrition intake like I did, as Chantal mentioned, the 50 peaks
00:09:04
Speaker
I set caches, and each cache had 20 to 25,000 calories of very specific food that I knew I could find here, or I could order online, Cliff bars, goo gels, my favorite assortment of candies, you name it. Whereas, and even the Bob Marshall trips, or I also did a traverse of ski traverse of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park a couple of years ago, which inspired this trip.
00:09:33
Speaker
And all of those trips, I had full control
Arctic Weather Challenges
00:09:37
Speaker
over the food. And I would either bring everything with me from the start or have caches. In the ski trip, it would have been way too expensive to mail everything to myself to strategic locations along the way and hope the hotels got it and there wasn't translation issues. And there were so many resupply spots that it just made sense to resupply at grocery stores.
00:10:01
Speaker
So I looked on Google Maps and on the left hand side when you click on a grocery store, it'll show you the photos that whatever.
00:10:11
Speaker
strange people decided to take photos and post it online of like the fruit section or the rice aisle. I have no idea. But I assumed that they'd have enough resupply more than bananas and sardines for me to be able to load up on. And that was the case. So I was always, I don't want to say a victim of whatever the grocery store had to offer.
00:10:36
Speaker
And I just had to be creative and everything was also in different languages. So sometimes I'd have to, I didn't know if I was holding a bag of oatmeal or flour and I had to walk around and ask people in the grocery store like, Hey, sorry, I don't speak Swedish, but uh,
00:10:54
Speaker
What is this? Can you help me out? So that was kind of the approach to the food and I tried to make it as enjoyable as I could and also focusing on just getting as many calories in as I could in the cold climate.
00:11:11
Speaker
Let's talk about that for a second. I want to hear what, what was your daily like? I mean, this is a thousand miles. You're, you're pulling, like paint a picture. What, what do we see when we see Brandon out there in the middle of the white, great whiteness of the Scandinavian Arctic, you know, last winter, what, what would we see? What if we were flying over you, what would it look like?
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think the day-to-day in general was waking up, it was very cold usually. Towards the end it got a lot warmer and I had some issues with that.
00:11:49
Speaker
and snow melt, but for the most part, it was just wake up, turn on the stove, start melting snow, have some coffee, eat oatmeal was my staple breakfast with an assortment of dried fruit. And I put in, I got protein powder along the way and some other things I could sprinkle in nuts or seeds and whatnot. And then I would pack up camp.
00:12:16
Speaker
pack the sled and then mostly walk. I think 80% of the miles covered was just skiing. So it was mostly that and move throughout the day and get to camp, get to a good place to set up camp in the evening as it got dark or whenever I thought it was a good time and then repeat the process
00:12:43
Speaker
the opposite manner from the morning. Uh, just, I guess it's very similar actually, but set up camp, melt snow, get in the tent, try and stay warm and then go to sleep soon after. And what does it, what, what does the environment like? Are you, were you on snow the whole time? You say cold. What are you talking about? Very cold. Are we talking about, you know, 12 degrees Fahrenheit? Are we talking about minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit? Give us some context.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, I planned the trip for worst case scenario. With these types of trips, you have to go in expecting it's going to be the coldest it could possibly be or else you're going to have a bad time or you're not going to come home. So I set the threshold with the Yellowstone trip and also this trip as just negative 40 Fahrenheit or also negative 40 Celsius to just be the foundation for the equipment that I would bring.
00:13:43
Speaker
And in the beginning of the trip, I started in early March, right after I got back from Antarctica. It was a super fast transition and I flew to Norway. And I think it got down to about ambient temperature, negative 15, but it was also windy, so wind chill.
00:14:06
Speaker
maybe negative 25 for a few days few nights and that was pretty taxing just to be out there for that long and still have to go through the
00:14:17
Speaker
the daily routine. And as you all know, it's just general stove operation and setting up a tent and dealing with a lighter, dealing with ski bindings. There's a lot of finicky things that require finesse with your motor function that you can't do with Sasquatch gloves on. And so the cold eventually turned to be a lot warmer.
00:14:46
Speaker
And towards the end of the trip, it started to get above freezing during the day, especially with the solar radiation. The snow was getting softer. And spring came early to the north. I think if there is a spectrum of like a record spring, early spring, and also like a record late spring, early in late spring, this was leaned more towards
00:15:11
Speaker
the early spring spectrum. And I also was traversing such a large distance that certain areas that I was going through, and I would talk to locals, they would say, Oh, this is the most snow we've had in like 10 years, this is crazy. And then I get another 100 miles, and they'd say, Wow, there's a big warm spell. And this is the least amount of snow we've seen here in the last 10 years. So there's a lot of
00:15:38
Speaker
geographic fluctuation with how the climate was impacting the snow conditions and So two-thirds of the way through the trip the snow really started getting above freezing during the day and so I started traveling at night and At that point it was almost 24 hours daylight. There's only a few nights of headlamp requirement I would say and then I
00:16:05
Speaker
The last big section I did on skis was 180 miles between resupply locations and the snow was it was it turned into I would say dire straits and
00:16:21
Speaker
self-evac situation when you're, I thought it was hard to, I thought the whole, the whole concept of doing this in winter was like ridiculous enough. Right. I think Everett Chantel. We all agree with you on that. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:37
Speaker
I think that no one disagreed with that and no one told me anything of the opposite opinion before I left. What I didn't imagine and what I didn't expect was for the snow to melt and for me to be having to deal with melting lakes and open rivers and really soft snow and crazy snow glop on the skins and my sled trenching behind me like an anchor and
00:17:06
Speaker
for the back just went isothermal and kind of collapsed on you. It just wasn't supportive anymore. Yeah, yep, totally. And or it was just gone. Four is just gone. Yeah, the last. Which is better, actually. Well, not when you're dragging a sled.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it's very mixed on skis. Yeah. Yeah. They're the last most of the last couple of weeks that I was on skis. It was either dry ground or it was say two feet, two and a half feet deep of just pure slush. The top six inches would look like it looks like snow, but then I'm just sinking down like a foot with my skis just wet. And so I take off my skis and then I'm just in
Terrain Diversity and Challenges
00:17:52
Speaker
alpine ski boots and the bottom half of that depth was just water. So my ski boots are getting flooded and it's just two and a half feet deep of slush and it's pushing forward and against my hips and my sleds behind me. So depending on what type of tundra or rocky terrain there was in that area or if it was grassy, it was more efficient just to put my skis on my back or on my sled and drag my sled across the tundra.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, I've done some of this kind of maneuvers in, you know, late winter, early spring mountaineering in Canada. And I'm sure you go crawled, right? Did you try the crawl technique where you like get your, you know, surface area out as far as you can and try to shimmy across?
00:18:39
Speaker
Wow. I didn't even cross my mind. I would have, I felt like I would have been swimming if that was the case. I did not try to distribute your weight and not go into the actual, that slushy wet water underneath all that. That's the worst. Yeah. But were you dragging a sled as well? No, I never had a sled. You know, I was, but we did sometimes take our backpacks off and drag them behind us because to distribute the weight away from our bodies.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think that would be a lot more practical if there was not a hundred pound sled behind me. Yeah. And I was also saying, like, I mean, totally different scenario, right? I was also going downhill because we'd been up and climbed something like going back. So I wasn't like trying to make distance and, you know, you're the different scenario. I was actually going to ask what it, what does the terrain actually look like? Is it pretty flat or is it undulating? Good question.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, one of the most interesting things about the trip and one of the reasons that I gravitated towards it was because it was so diverse. Most of the trips that I've done are siloed in one type of terrain, if it's alpine or forest or
00:19:58
Speaker
I haven't really done much of any water stuff but I could assume that would also be the same in terms of just being isolated to that type of area where this went, it started on the ocean and then it went up into the mountains and then there was a fluctuation in between forests like dense forest and sparse forests and I went through the largest mountain range in Sweden
Journey into Ultra-Adventures
00:20:25
Speaker
And there was a lot of mountains along the way. I tried to stay down low in the valleys. It wasn't really a trip to be doing a bunch of ski mountaineering and I didn't really have time for that. So I tried to make it as minimal topographic.
00:20:43
Speaker
change is possible. And then there was also the tundra. The second half of the trip was, I would say, predominantly tundra. And I thought it was going to be a lot flatter. I had this visual, and looking at topo maps, just like, oh, it's flat. But you get there, and it's just continuously going up and down. You can never get a good vantage point where the snow is melting, and I would want to see where I wanted to go through the labyrinths of snow veins.
00:21:12
Speaker
But it just I could get up a little bit and see like 100 yards and then eventually it ended back at the ocean as well. So what brought you to these ultra endurance? I mean, I guess we can call I actually like to categorize it as ultra adventure because I don't think this is a real endurance event as much as an adventure event. What what draw you to these? What draws you to this?
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that it was really a natural progression in my life over a large number of years. I never envisioned myself doing these types of things. And when I was in high school, you know, I had like a standard like childhood, like playing soccer growing up and
00:22:05
Speaker
doing cross country and track in high school, but I barely made the junior varsity team for racing 5Ks when I was a senior. So I wasn't some like genetic prodigy or really felt like a lot of
00:22:21
Speaker
I don't want to call it ego, but like I didn't get a lot of like validation from really excelling at this. And so I would continue on that trend. A lot of these things just came up naturally in my life. And I, I found particularly in difficult during difficult periods of my life solace in movement. And it helped me to work through.
00:22:44
Speaker
some challenging times, I would say. And during college, I started doing triathlons. And my first triathlon was a half Ironman. And I didn't know how to swim at the time. And I was just watching YouTube videos and eventually did it. And I thought I was going to drown. And it was terrifying. But
00:23:09
Speaker
The that was that was the big first event and then eventually worked my way up to a full iron man I think the next year again very like average or below average for uh males in those races, but I just really found The process of training and moving to be exciting
00:23:31
Speaker
And I was going to school in Montana University and there's all types of things to do there. So I started mountain biking and doing a bit of trail running and climbing and backpacking and doing some winter stuff. But none of it was ever to with this vision of combining it all together in these kind of heroic like multi-month trips.
00:23:54
Speaker
And it wasn't until COVID actually that that changed. And as Chantel mentioned, when we started working together, I was very race focused. I had done some climbing and was interested in pushing the boundaries of, say, lower technicality or, I don't know, moderate technicality.
00:24:19
Speaker
mountain efforts with say like scrambling but also endurance and also ultras and with a definite primary focus on ultras themselves and trail running and at some point
00:24:39
Speaker
COVID happened out of the blue and all my races were extinguished one by one. And I think for a lot of people, COVID was a really terrible thing in general, and a lot of people got sick and a lot of people died. But I think it forced our society to invest more time into themselves.
00:25:04
Speaker
and to take on new hobbies or to think outside of the box to try to not go crazy. And when the races were canceled one by one, at some point I just got fed up with it and I said, I just want to do my own thing.
00:25:21
Speaker
And I don't want any permits, no gathering group restrictions, nothing out of state, no support. I just want to do this totally on my own and no one can stop me. And that's where the concept of the 50 Peaks thing came into place. And yeah, go on.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to want to stop be there because I don't know if I should ask you this or Chantel this but maybe Chantel it should start with you like how do you go about coaching for this an event like an ultra adventure.
Coaching Strategies for Extreme Adventures
00:26:00
Speaker
Well, there's just a lot more that goes into it, right? If you're doing a race, you pay your money, right? You get up, you get a map, you get the course that you can download onto your watch in advance. You know that there's going to be aid stations every however, I mean, could be every five, it could be every 20 miles and you go and you do the thing, right? You train for it, you prepare. When it's just a blank slate,
00:26:26
Speaker
you have to do all of that stuff yourself. Like Brandon had to figure out the route. He had to research the criteria to determine the top 50 peaks of Montana. He had to map it all out. He spent, oh my gosh, only we had tallied it up, Brandon, but had to figure out what some of these peaks... Some of these peaks had no names, they were just numbers.
00:26:48
Speaker
No one, and he's scouring the internet to see, is there any beta? Has anyone climbed these before? And a lot of them had no record of anyone climbing them. So he really didn't know what he was going to experience out there. We also had to spend a lot of time preparing what he was going to eat. So we worked out how many calories he was going to need per day to calculate what
00:27:13
Speaker
where each cache should be and how much food should be contained there. And then because Brandon is Brandon, he wanted to do all of this on foot. So all those caches, 80 miles or so worth, that was all done on foot before he actually started the project.
00:27:31
Speaker
had to introduce Brandon to the Garmin inReach because I was terrified of him being out in that kind of grisly country by himself, as were his parents. So got a Garmin inReach and had to figure out how to use that, help his parents understand how they could track him and check in with one another.
00:27:51
Speaker
So there's just so many small little things that you have to think about in terms of what is it going to look like and also thinking about like what can go wrong and trying to
00:28:02
Speaker
pre-prepare for all of those things and pre-prepare for the different skills Brandon was going to have to use on this trip. So obviously hiking, moving pretty slowly and deliberately, gear selection, like he couldn't carry five different types of shoes, right? So he had to choose shoes that he could move around in, but also climb in. He had to practice different types of climbing for what he might encounter as well. So it was a lot more
00:28:33
Speaker
logistical in terms of planning, but also logistical in terms of training to make sure that he was prepared for the different types of things that he was going to encounter out there. You talked a lot about all the logistics and the prep and stuff, but in terms of the training, like the workouts and the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day,
00:28:59
Speaker
You know, I mean, when you're when you're digging around on the internet, you don't just need to wear your heart rate monitor, at least I don't think. But how did that how did you prepare Brandon for this is such these diverse things? Like, I mean, this this thing in Scandinavia, especially is interesting to me where, you know, it's so long. I mean, I know what these kind of things are generally like. I've never done anything like that, but just what?
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, like how do you even classify something like that? Do you just go all in on base training? Did you do any specificity?
00:29:37
Speaker
Definitely lots of base training. Technically zone two stuff, lots of hiking, but also trail running. Brandon had a fair bit of bouldering and also some free climbing in there as well because those were the main skills that were going to be necessary for that one. The lead up to the Scandinavian traverse, that was a whole other animal because Brandon didn't have access to
00:30:07
Speaker
a regular life, he was working and spent a good chunk of time in Antarctica before that. So that was totally different, trying to figure out he was working super long days.
Antarctica Training and Creativity
00:30:19
Speaker
So we had to count for the time that he was on his feet working and the limited time that he had available to train, but also count taking into account the fatigue involved when he's working super long days.
00:30:33
Speaker
at, on a physical job. So, um, trying to, you know, find the sort of the, the minimum maximum that we could fit in. So Brendan, how you were in McMurdo station in the months, what six months leading up to this Arctic traverse. So yeah, how do you, first of all, what the heck were you doing down there? And second of all, how did you, how did you train? Like actually train, what was the logistics?
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, I had a contract to go to McMurdo Station and that was the decision point for me to actually do this Scandinavia trip in the first place. I knew it was something I wanted to do, but I didn't know when. The contract ended in February, like mid, say mid February-ish. And so I knew that the timing would line up perfectly to then go to Scandinavia.
00:31:31
Speaker
And I was working down there as a carpenter supporting, you know, there's two components. One is, we'll call it the town handyman. Someone's like, my window won't shut or my door fell off or someone, Frankie kicked a hole in that ceiling. So we had to go fix those things. And I, my job in particular was more focused on field support. So, uh, I spent most of the season preparing for a new structure install at
00:32:01
Speaker
a remote science camp called Cape Crozier, where we then were transported out via helicopter. And I spent three weeks out there, basically digging holes into permafrost with a picmatic, which I wouldn't really wish on anyone. But it was cool, actually, very unusual training, because you're like trying to set it like get down so we can put in a foundation or get a pot.
00:32:30
Speaker
get down? What is that? What's going on? Like I'm just trying to so and what's a picmatic? Is that like a hydraulic like chip like giant hammer or something? I don't know what you know what that is. I wish it was a big mechanical tool, but instead it was my weak little arms and back that had to sound like it's any kind of matic. Yeah, yeah. The name is the name is misleading.
00:32:56
Speaker
Also, how many times did Frankie kick a hole into the building? That's what I want to know. That was used as an example. People frequently down there kick holes into buildings. Yeah. There's a limited amount of things that you can do in McMurdo. They don't let you venture out too much. So you have to get creative and maybe have a couple of white claws and then some things happen.
00:33:23
Speaker
down in that station, you know what I mean? So, Steve, to answer your question, digging these holes, so we had footers, they're wood-based footers because it doesn't rain, so they're not necessarily going to rot like they would in Seattle.
00:33:44
Speaker
and they were approximately two feet by two feet. And the foundation for these footers, we'll call them, is on a slope, say five or 10 degrees. So we had to clear, and there was a lot of volcanic rock. This was at a, this is a top four largest penguin colonies in the world. There are Delhi penguins and there's penguin scientists that hang out there during the austral summer to do all things penguin related.
00:34:14
Speaker
And we're building them a new modest mobile home size structure. This was so you got to like hang out with the penguins and like not holes in the ground. That sounds all right. It fixed holes in ceilings. Fixed holes in ceilings. Yeah, that's that's that's kind of it. Everything at Cape Crozier is is Hely supported. There's no overland.
00:34:38
Speaker
way to get there that's not ridiculous because you have it's a heavily Ross Island is heavily glaciated and it's not feasible. So we didn't have we didn't have like a backhoe or an excavator or anything to dig holes. So we just had hand tools.
00:34:55
Speaker
And the Picmatic is one side, it looks kind of like, it's like a flat bill, like a beak of a platypus, or like a spade, a hoe that you go and use in your yard. And the other side is pointy, like, it's kind of like a fireman's axe on that pointy side. And that was the side that we used
00:35:18
Speaker
to dig into the permafrost. So the first six inches was say volcanic rock and it would scrape off. But after that, it was just an assortment of sand, gravel, cobbles, everything you could imagine, solidified together with ice. So we had to dig down to create a flat base for these footers to go onto.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah. And so Chantel, again, as a coach, you've got this guy out there. He's presumably offline for three weeks. And you know he's going to be doing a bunch of manual labor with some bizarre tool. And how do you coach around that?
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was tough because communication was pretty limited. There were times where he was reachable by phone so we could have a phone call and kind of talk about the upcoming weeks and make a bit of a plan. But you can imagine being in a remote place like this and it's also a pretty extreme environment. Sometimes it wouldn't be at parts of the time not safe to go and exercise outdoors because of the cold. So that would mean Brandon would have to
00:36:31
Speaker
go on a treadmill. What did you call it? Brandon, you had a name for the treadmill. Yeah, there are two gyms, small gyms in McMurdo. One of the gyms had the cardio equipment, stationary bikes, and treadmills. That was called the gerbil gym. That's right, the gerbil gym. I couldn't remember the name.
00:36:51
Speaker
So yeah, real quick. The other one I like to had all the free weights and a little yoga studio type thing and bench press and squats. And that one was called the beef palace, the beef palace and the gerbil gym.
00:37:08
Speaker
So he had access to those. However, because he's there sort of in a work camp environment, there's a cafeteria and the cafeteria only serves meals at a certain time. So that would mean Brandon would have, you know, he would finish work. He would have a small gap of time between dinner, between finishing work and dinnertime. And then there would be a small window of time after dinner and bed.
00:37:35
Speaker
But you can't really train well on a full stomach. So we'd have to try to see what can we cram into that little bit of time before dinner so that he could then eat and get a good rest. So a lot of that was in the gerbil gym, on the treadmill.
00:37:52
Speaker
There were a few other times we could, you know, do some things outside like he did. Everest did an observation tower, but also like being out there, it's permafrost. You can't, small things that we think about here that we can't do there is you can't pee outside because it's not going to go anywhere. So you got to, you know, if you either you don't go, you go indoors or you go in a bottle and you carry it around.
00:38:19
Speaker
So, you know, some interesting logistical things we had to think about there. So, it was either treadmill, time on the treadmill, some strength training, mobility work. Mobility work was really key because Brandon was already doing a lot of physical work and he's had a few little injuries in the past. We want to make sure that everything was
00:38:43
Speaker
working well, so we had to keep up with Brandon's PT exercises and some other mobility stuff. Really, a lot of the physical labor made up a good chunk of what Brandon did for his training. The other piece was making sure that really he was eating enough and trying to prioritize rest, not just cramming in a whole ton of
00:39:08
Speaker
additional work on his one and a half days off or not at all days off sometimes.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah, and to clarify, the work there required was on a standard week throughout the season is six days, 60 hours. And when I was three weeks at Cape Crozier, it was seven days a week. And the job, there's no PTO. We had a couple holidays, say at like Thanksgiving and New Year's, but it was very consistent work. And I had to first get to
00:39:42
Speaker
Chantel told me, you know, when we were talking about the training, like, how do we set this up to for me to be successful, optimize success for the Scandinavia trip? But Chantel said, Brandon, just wait, don't don't overthink it. Don't stress about it. Just get to McMurdo, spend the first couple weeks, get adjusted, get in your new living situation, see what the food is like, see what the feeding times are like, see how much
00:40:10
Speaker
Like we'll call it a training load that the, that the actual carpentry, like how physical it is. Are you standing there with the drill or are you carrying lumber around all day? And then from there we can help, you know, we can work to optimize your time without overloading you or without you getting burned out mentally. And it sounds like it worked like we're doing you left.
00:40:35
Speaker
for Scandinavia, did you feel ready or were you a little bit like, oh, I don't know how this is going to
Learning New Skills in Kite Skiing
00:40:41
Speaker
go. Well, we did have to cram in some kite skiing lessons between Antarctica and the trip because Brandon was planning to use kite on this expedition. And, you know, I also like to pick on Brandon when he brings up these new modalities.
00:40:58
Speaker
that, well, Brandon, you better get some proficiency with these and get the help of an expert. So he had a crash course in kiting beforehand so that he could use the kite where it was possible to use it to help him move a little bit quicker where possible on the traverse. We had to cram that in. How long did that take? How long did it take to learn to?
00:41:24
Speaker
kite ski or whatever it's called is that like a day is that like a week what is it what are you talking about yeah i mean when you say learn does that mean to like get really good at it or to like to be able to launch a kite and not have it drag you on the ground for 10 miles or launch the kite into the trees yeah like i mean i can relate this to climbing okay like five six proficiency in kiting how long does that take
00:41:53
Speaker
I would say for me, being a proficient skier was a day. I think most people, if you can ski or snowboard, it's a day. So I took two lessons. After Antarctica and before I flew to Norway, I had 10 days in the United States. I spent five days at my home base in Seattle with family getting all my gear organized. And then I spent five days in Salt Lake City.
00:42:19
Speaker
Two of those days, I had a really good instructor. And at the end of those two days, I was able to put the kite out, clear the lines, make sure they're not tangled, anchor the kite in the snow, launch the kite, fly around a bit. I could also kite upwind. There was a point where I was kiting upwind and uphill at the same time, which was huge. It was very difficult for me having just started, and then I could
00:42:47
Speaker
I could eject the kite, pack it up and put it away. Okay. So now after a thousand miles, are you an expert or are you like a 512 Kiter now? I feel, and the thing is I could have spent the whole, I learned to kite in like the most ideal setting at Strawberry Reservoir, which is Southeast of Salt Lake. We went out with, I went out with the instructor.
00:43:12
Speaker
There was ideal winds, blue skies, no trees, no exposed rock. It was flat. And no sled. No sled. And then I go to Scandinavia and none of those things ever happened. There was blizzards and flat light.
00:43:32
Speaker
Yeah, like in mountain valleys, I was falling, I would fall into just random holes that from, from windblown snow and like river drainages. Was the case useful or not? It sounds like it wasn't actually like, was it a liability or?
00:43:50
Speaker
Yeah, it was a huge liability. It would be, it would have been much safer in a way for me to just walk. And it would have been a much faster trip if I would have just brought Nordic cross country skis, left the kite at home and my big Alpine touring set up at home.
00:44:05
Speaker
But the point of it wasn't to set some sort of speed record. This was an entire self-designed route. And I wanted to be able to learn the kiting component because I thought it was interesting. Like all these other things I did in my life early on was because I was interested in them. And I had other aspirations and dreams of applying the kite to other parts of the world later. Okay.
00:44:34
Speaker
Brandon also became proficient at using a dry bag and some ski poles to kite with as well.
00:44:43
Speaker
Wait, so you like launched the dry bag as a, as a kite in, which are ski poles and then it drags you along and I don't get that. Yeah. There was, when I got halfway through the trip, I was in a town called a Bisco in North for this Northern town in Sweden. Wait, Nabisco, like the cookies, a, a, a Bisco. Yeah. And when, when I was half, so at that point there was already dry ground.
00:45:11
Speaker
in certain areas, like I was dragging my sled up.
00:45:14
Speaker
like through the streets and stuff to get to where I was staying. And there was a couple days of rain. I took a few days to relax there. And then there's a huge lake. There was a 30 mile lake section after Obisco to go east and continue on the route.
Innovative Solutions to Icy Conditions
00:45:31
Speaker
Well, all of the snow had melted off of the top of the lake. And so it was, but the ice was still, I was told by locals, it was still two feet thick.
00:45:41
Speaker
So it was plenty thick for me. And I didn't know it's one of these things like, can you kite on a lake that is just like contoured, glossy ice?
00:45:56
Speaker
I didn't know. I didn't have anyone I could ask if this was a good idea or not. I just had to brainstorm in my head how that would work. And I came to the conclusion that it was a bad idea. Even if I was able to get the kite up, it would have been out of control. And if I fell over, I wouldn't have been able to use the kite, bring it down towards the ground, and then bring the kite back up towards the noon position in an aggressive manner to then pull me back onto my feet, which is what you do when it's snowy.
00:46:26
Speaker
So I got onto the lake and I did it in the middle of the night because that was the wind window for the next several days. And it was windy. It was a strong westerly wind and I was going more or less due east. I'm like, I have to use this wind somehow. There has to be a way. And I took the skins off my skis.
00:46:52
Speaker
It's pitch black. The ice is translucent. I can see all the cracks and bubbles. It was actually terrifying. It was raining out. I could barely see anything. And I took my skins off and just used my poles and pressed forward. And I would glide for like 20 feet just with the wind at my back. It was near frictionless. And I'm like, well,
00:47:18
Speaker
I wonder if there's something I could use. And I had for my for my negative 40 sleeping bag, I had like a 55 liter dry bag. So I took it out and I used a carabiner and clipped it onto the ends like the wrist loops on my hiking poles and I held my hiking poles out.
00:47:35
Speaker
And there I, you know, this was a 30 mile section. So I probably did like five miles with the dry bag just flopping and flopping wildly in front of me. And then the wind died down a little bit. So the dry bag wasn't really working. I had a max speed of like 10 miles per hour with the dry bag. And I'm like, well, I need, yeah, I need more, I need more surface area material to do this.
00:48:05
Speaker
The only other thing I could think of that I had, but I was really hesitant to use, was my tent. And so I got it out. And it's still dark out, maybe sun's rising. And I held the tent in front of me. It's a Black Diamond El Dorado. So it has the two vents at the top, triangle vents. And I grabbed one of the vent covers.
00:48:32
Speaker
And then with my left hand and then with my right hand, the tent door was open and I grabbed the upper, the apex of the zipper point, we'll call it, and then held it in front of me so that the wind could go through the door of the tent and inflate it like a balloon.
00:48:48
Speaker
But then the tent door was flapping around and I was terrified. Holding the tent in front of me, it was almost touching the ice. And my skis are right in front of me with their metal edges. And I didn't have a lot of control, you know what I mean? And the wind would gust.
00:49:07
Speaker
Well, it's not quite what it tends to be for. It was one of those really epic moments where I knew, I was already very, this was 40 days in or something, 35 days, and I was pretty exhausted. And there was very little snow in the surrounding areas, south facing and north facing slopes.
00:49:26
Speaker
And it was a really low dark point. And this section is 180 miles or 190 miles. And I'm like, I need to get this 30 mile section with the wind. So I just held the tent out.
00:49:42
Speaker
And there's like pooling water on top of the ice and like a couple, you know, every once in a while, like pools of just like slush that felt like Play-Doh under the skis. And I just held the tent out rigid, having not really used my arms other than with the ski poles. Probably just about gave myself a hernia in the process. And I was terrified. I was just going to shred my tent with my skis as a gust came by.
00:50:09
Speaker
Or sometimes it would be really gusty. And I also anchored the corner of the tent. There's that loop that you can put in a snow stake or a stake into the ground. I took a carabiner and hooked onto that and tethered it to my climbing harness that I was wearing. That's what I used with the snow kite as well. So in case I let go of the tent, it wouldn't fly away into the abyss of the night.
00:50:38
Speaker
But I made it 30 miles and then I got to the east end of the lake and I was, it was like 8, 8 or 9 AM or something. I'd been out all night, totally wrecked. And I just sat down on my sled and put my meat, my head on my knees and passed out for like 20 minutes. Woke up and both my hands were completely numb. And then I set up camp and took a nap. So Brandon, during a journey like this,
00:51:06
Speaker
You were out there on your own for a long time with very little contact with the outside world.
Mental Strategies for Solitude
00:51:14
Speaker
I can imagine there's a lot of hard moments to work through just dealing with challenges like you just explained, loneliness, repetitive food, cold, discomfort. How do you work through those things?
00:51:31
Speaker
Do you have specific strategies that you can say you sort of use throughout the trip? Or do you just kind of have some magical capability to manage discomfort that some of us haven't mastered yet? Yeah, that's another really good question. And I feel like this one's more difficult for me to answer than a lot of the other ones.
00:51:58
Speaker
I don't have some magic formula that I use to get through these things. And as I'm sitting here a couple months after the trip ended, I think back and I ask myself the same thing, like, how was I able to do that? It sounds
00:52:14
Speaker
pretty difficult and in a lot of different ways. I do think that I come back to oftentimes Reinhold Messner quote, where he says something to the effect of when you stop, the fear is growing. And when you're moving, the fear is going down.
00:52:35
Speaker
And I, I really liked that it's simple. And I just found that there were times where I would be stopped in the middle of the day. And I would just feel like anxiety and the pressure and spring is coming and I don't have much time and I need to get moving, but I'm so tired. And then I would just force myself to get back up. I was very militant with myself, which is also
00:53:01
Speaker
kind of ties in with some of the darker moments. And I in retrospect, I realized that I had a lot of negative self talk out there, even though it wasn't like calling myself bad words. It was it's very subtle, and that it took that militant approach
00:53:19
Speaker
And in my discipline to get this done, but I would just keep moving. And every day it felt like I barely chipped off a section of the entire trip. It was like another 1% basically, maybe one and a half percent of the length, like good big pat on the back for you. But I.
00:53:46
Speaker
I think I just really wanted it. I wanted the experience.
00:53:51
Speaker
There were so many, and I struggled to explain the trip to people sometimes because even now in this podcast, I feel like a lot of it's been focused on how difficult it was, or maybe I wasn't adequately prepared because I was doing carpentry before in a remote location. But the reality is that this trip was life-changing for me.
00:54:17
Speaker
It was exactly what I wanted and I could not have imagined The types of experiences that I would have really
Transformative Journey Reflection
00:54:26
Speaker
learning to kite seeing the transformation of the landscapes And all of the different types of terrain all the people that I encountered the conversations that I had meeting the all the indigenous sami reindeer herders up in the tundra and
00:54:45
Speaker
inadvertently followed the winter reindeer migration pattern were all things that I didn't, I knew that they'd be part of the trip maybe, but as they came to fruition and blossomed, it was absolutely electric. And those are some of the things that kept me going.
00:55:06
Speaker
the dry bagging and tent sailing across the lake. And there was a lot of small victories along the way. I think those things helped keep me going on the trip and just knowing that I was doing this for myself and I had this, this dream or this vision and I stuck with it.
00:55:29
Speaker
I think that's one thing Brandon that I always find fascinating about you, you know, when you go on these journeys that when you communicate things to me, you rarely communicate that you're having a low moment. What you do share with me though are like the amazing experiences like check out the Northern Lights that I saw or I met this reindeer hunter or I had this experience or I had this amazing revelation or thought. And in all the times I've known you,
00:56:00
Speaker
I've never had a message that's negative. I think that's part of your success is that even though you recognize that those things are there, but you don't dwell on them too long. You're like, what's the little fish in Finding Nemo? Just keep swimming. You just keep swimming. You just keep going.
00:56:23
Speaker
just such a great thing that I as a coach have taken away from you is your ability to appreciate the small amazing things and the big amazing things and that you don't focus on the things that other people might think are uncomfortable or challenging.
00:56:45
Speaker
And yeah, and I agree with that. Although sometimes the things in my mind feel like negative, maybe they're not quite described to you in that manner. I also want to note that I designed this trip as
00:57:02
Speaker
as a structure to kind of break me. I didn't go into this thinking that I would be successful getting from point A to point B. I designed this to have an experience and to go for as long as I could until my body or my mind or my equipment failed.
00:57:23
Speaker
And having that opportunity to embrace the isolation, the whole thing was terrifying. I didn't really know how to snow kite going into it. I didn't have the most optimal buffet of training grounds available to me going into it.
00:57:43
Speaker
And it was 10 times longer duration and distance than my one and only ski traverse. It was horrifying. And the first day I was out there, I was like shaking in my little Alpine boots, like what am I getting myself into?
00:58:01
Speaker
And just basically going into this type of trip, similar to the 50 Peaks thing, I thought there was like a 1% chance that I would actually do it. But just accepting that the point of it isn't for this grand success, but the point of it is to
00:58:23
Speaker
to open up an arena to operate in for understanding yourself in your position in this world to contemplate life and death and what's worth living for and what's worth dying for to think about my relationships and my past and my future. And as I'm moving throughout the day, it's a lot of, I'll call it meditation. It's a lot of zone one, zone two, just skinning and dragging a heavy sled behind me.
00:58:53
Speaker
And it gave my mind an opportunity to just explore its inner workings in ways that is not possible to do in society. Yeah, that's really beautiful. That's really beautifully said. And I think that it goes back. I wanted to connect back to an idea you said earlier about the negative self-talk and being militant with yourself.
00:59:23
Speaker
because I've experienced that myself and I've always wondered and I'm curious where you feel this is right now for you and it may change over time but
00:59:37
Speaker
you know, how necessary is that? Is that is that what do you have to be? Is that what it takes? Like, is that the price of admission? Or is there a more gentle way to achieve this objective, as you said, you know, you said, I think to you designed this to break yourself, I think you said, so is that
01:00:02
Speaker
Are these things so at odds with one another, like being human, exploring your own humanity and your values as you've described?
Confronting Fear and Finding Inspiration
01:00:12
Speaker
And can you do that and truly be gentle with yourself? Or does it actually require this kind of mindset that you've described?
01:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think that I want to clarify that the breaking myself phrase is a bit extreme. I wanted to set this up to be able to push myself beyond anywhere that I physically and mentally beyond anything that I had experienced before. And going in with such a low probability of call it the conventional success,
01:00:53
Speaker
I had to push very hard over a long period of time to get there. And I wanted to explore where that took my mind. And especially after being in Antarctica, that was the most socially inundated I had ever been in my life. And I was horrified about the concept of going to the most remote part of Europe
01:01:21
Speaker
alone in winter for up to three months. And I do think, Steve, you're right, in some sense with a trip like this, it's no longer
01:01:34
Speaker
It goes out of, if I've run 100 miles before going into it, run another 100 miler, like you can take it, you can be more chill about it. You have a cutoff time. So you have 30 hours to do it and you've done it in like 24 hours before. So you have some grace, some flexibility there with how you handle yourself. But in this case, I knew the whole time that I was racing spring and I was racing my European visa cutoff.
01:02:04
Speaker
And I wanted desperately to finish the trip. And two-thirds of the way through, I wanted to stop. At that point, I had seen the full spectrum of what I would see throughout the trip. And I knew that it would mostly be grinding tundra miles after that. Flat, bleak.
01:02:30
Speaker
and difficult and the snow conditions were only going to get worse. But I knew that I really had two options, either suck it up and continue or quit. And even if I quit, then no one in my life would have been like, oh, Brandon's a little wimpy dude, because he only did 50 days in the Arctic by himself.
01:02:55
Speaker
I knew I wouldn't get any flack for that, but the other option was flying back to Seattle, going back and readjusting to society, sitting on the couch in my parents' living room, staring out the window and contemplating why I quit when I could have kept going. And that sounded like the least desirable of the two options.
01:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, but also I would say not a lot of people have the ability and I think one of the key abilities to persevering when things go hard is being able to
01:03:32
Speaker
empathize with possible future abstract options like what you're describing, right? And most people just focus on the suffering that they're feeling and anything is better than that at that point. And then they get to the living room on the TV and the window a few weeks later and they're like, Oh, why did I quit? You know, but you know, they were not able to project themselves into that theoretical future and say, Oh yeah, I don't want to be there. I want to, you know,
01:03:59
Speaker
I'd rather stay here. And that's a key piece of self-reflection that I think could be a lot really useful to people.
Expanding Personal Limits
01:04:07
Speaker
And while you're talking, I just had to look up one of my favorite lines of poetry that I think speaks to this, and it's a William Blake line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. You probably have heard it, but I'll just recite it here. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things throw narrow chinks of his cavern.
01:04:37
Speaker
I feel like these adventures are cleansing the doors of perception. I think that's actually what you're doing. You know, like that's, that's what these, you know, quests are actually about is, you know, trying to understand, like you said, you, you, you put it, you've mentioned a few of the things, like understanding yourself and your place in the world, understanding your relationship.
01:05:05
Speaker
relationships, past, present, future, those things. It's infinite. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that another interesting thing is when I decided to keep going and I thought that the outlook for the rest of the trip was very bleak and in terms of what I would experience or see
01:05:27
Speaker
I was continuously surprised with the types of scenery and visuals that I was encountering. And as I continued to watch the landscape change, there was 24 hours of daylight and just out in the tundra with the cloudy skies. And there's just a hole in the clouds, very small. And the sun beams through like it's coming from heaven and shining on the earth. And it's 2 AM.
01:05:55
Speaker
I just stand there completely in awe. And what turned out to be the most difficult part of the trip physically and mentally and also the most horrifying was the transition of winter to spring. But it also turned out to be the most magnificent, beautiful, and inspiring
01:06:17
Speaker
part of the trip for me like seeing what the actual tundra look like seeing the rivers open up even if I had to like wade through them and drag my sled through like flooding it it was watching seeing how the lake ice melted and at the peripheral of the lake the ice collapses and there's like a four foot deep section of water I have to try to like navigate around to get on to the more solid lake
01:06:47
Speaker
guys there the you know the birds there was a lot more birds I started seeing insects it was it was like I was watching what was this this encased winter landscape turn into something that was bubbling with life and I yeah I the infinite
01:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, I can't I can't imagine the trip having not gone through that And it was in when I finished I took a bus to the airport um And there was the birch trees that i'd seen the entire time That were they're thin and they're just skeletons. No trees. They don't make any sounds because there's nothing on them to like rub against each other or or or shake in the wind and then the birch trees were they had leaves and
01:07:46
Speaker
It was just watching, it was like being able to witness the process of life and ebbs and flows in some philosophical sense that we have in our own lives as well. And I think that was a very humbling and meaningful part of the trip for me. I think that's a great place to leave our listeners thinking about the seasons of life and
01:08:18
Speaker
the joy of witnessing that, I can so relate to your experiences and can remember some of my own that were somehow similar. You brought me back to some of my own experiences in the mountains of actually not the climbing itself being the most interesting thing, but the Northern Lights or the view of the tundra or those kinds of things. So it's really powerful.
01:08:46
Speaker
And that's really what I think motivates so many of us at Apple Athlete is this connecting with ourselves so we can better connect with others and connect with our natural environment and live more fully simply. It's not about a podium or a gold medal or a bronze medal or any of that. It's about what you have just described. So really beautifully done. Thank you for that. Yeah.
01:09:14
Speaker
I will, yeah, I would just add, I mean, I've been on some solo quests, we'll say, and I've had to stop. One in particular, I'm thinking of where I had to stop. And I was so sad because I just wanted to know what the rest of the journey could be. And that it wasn't that I didn't accomplish this FKT or whatever is that I wanted to know what came next. So I applaud you for
01:09:42
Speaker
for taking that moment and being like, yes, I will continue. And I later on got to do it and got to see in a different way what was next. And it was incredible. So that's just, that's such a great point of, yeah, have the vision to see what can come and also that it doesn't just turn into the same slog. It's ever evolving. It's never what we imagined it to be. Tomorrow is never what we imagined it to be.
01:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. Are there any other last big takeaways from this journey that you would like to share before we wrap up? Yeah. I think that doing a trip like this and ultimately working through some of the difficult times
01:10:41
Speaker
It gives me a, it instills a deep sense of limitlessness, which is maybe a double-edged sword because I can, you know, maybe contemplate doing crazier things in the future. But I think it expands.
01:10:58
Speaker
the types of people that are tuned in to what uphill athlete does and what they project. It doesn't matter if you're running your first marathon or trail 100 mile or climbing Denali for the first time or doing a trip like what I'm doing.
01:11:16
Speaker
you're resetting your horizons, you're working towards a goal. And whether you're successful or not, I think that there's a lot of positive outcomes that will precipitate on all aspects of your life.
01:11:32
Speaker
And those are things, Alyssa, like you're saying, you can't necessarily foresee. And it allows you to re, what do you call it? To reestablish what your perceived limitations are. So when you run your first marathon and you think 50 miles is outrageous,
01:11:57
Speaker
But then you think about it and you step up to the plate, you train and you attempt it. You don't know if you're going to cross the finish line, but you show up anyways. And whether you finish or not, it doesn't matter. The fact is that you are.
01:12:12
Speaker
you are reestablishing a new ceiling for yourself and that will translate to your relationships and your work and and how you approach your life if you have the right angle with your Mentality to apply it and I think many people that you know climbing or running or whatever that are doing this
01:12:38
Speaker
find that. And that's why being involved with these types of efforts is so gripping and borderline addicting. Totally agree. I mean, I always think of a major part of when I'm training for something is actually I just call it like the mind expander, where you start and you think five miles is a long way to run. And then all of a sudden you look back
01:13:07
Speaker
And it's not all of a sudden, it's very subtle. And you go, Oh yeah, now 10 miles is my easy run. And so I always just think of like, I'm about to go do a six day race in Wales. And I think about how your mind expands to give you the capability to, to at least put yourself in the position to take it on. Whether or not you finish, that's a whole other thing, but
01:13:34
Speaker
Then it might shrink back a little bit as you're like, I can't, like you said at the beginning, I can't believe I did that. I sometimes don't know how I did it. But every time that expansion is maybe a little bit easier and maybe just a bit further. And I always loved that part of both the expansion, but also realizing that you don't have to live at the ultimate stretch all the time. You can come back.
01:14:02
Speaker
because the journey back outwards is just as enjoyable.
Global Adventure Aspirations
01:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great point. Yeah, I agree. And one last thing I will say is that this trip and the Yellowstone ski trip and also the 50 peaks have given me a more developed outlook for
01:14:25
Speaker
pursuing the things that I want to pursue. And COVID made me realize that I didn't have to wait around for structured events or go to, we'll call them business mountains where there's a lot of beta that's available. And I think a lot of people can do this as well. And once you, before I saw everything that I did as around the framework of an event,
01:14:54
Speaker
And now I can just open up the world map and I call it like spinning the globe like a basketball. And anywhere in the world I want to go, if it's desert or jungle or Arctic or tundra or whatever it is, I feel like I've developed the skills and the confidence to be able to design