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Ray Zahab, the great Canadian Explorer, on building back fitness after completing a series of chemo treatments. Taking control of his health, supporting his family, building Impossible2Possible, while continuing to tackle big projects year after year.
196 Plays2 years ago
What does it mean to get outside of your comfort zone? It could be starting a new job, trying a new sport, meeting new people or maybe it’s going on an adventure filled with unknowns. Whatever it is, if we decide to go there, we will come away with some valuable lessons and likely learn something about ourselves.
Today on Just In Stride we’ll enter the mind of a great Canadian explorer, adventurer and ultra runner, Ray Zahab.
You might know Ray from his book and documentary Running The Sahara but his list of accomplishments goes far beyond that. He’s conquered deserts in blistering heat and the arctic in sub zero temperatures, conditions many of us will never get a chance to experience. But through his foundation Impossible2Possible, he’s able to share his love for expeditions and adventure with a youth ambassador team, teaching them resilience, perseverance and dedication.
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Thanks for tuning in to the Just In Stride Podcast. I truly appreciate you taking the time to listen and I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Please take a minute after this to rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts. With your feedback we’ll be able to make the show even better and it’ll help us reach new listeners too. You can also find us on Instagram @justinstridepod and YouTube @justinstridepod for all the latest episodes and updates. Glad you came along for the ride with Just In Stride!
Transcript
Introduction to Endurance Sports Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Justin's Drive podcast. I'm your host, Justin Puleze. If you love endurance sports, you've definitely come to the right place.
Interviews with Experts and Athletes
00:00:15
Speaker
On this show, we'll talk to athletes, coaches, and professionals who can help us reach our true potential. Being a student of distance running for over 10 years and interviewing people in the sport for the last five, I've learned a ton, but there's always more to discover.
How to Tune In and Follow the Show
00:00:29
Speaker
Everyone has a story, and I know you'll resonate with each of our guests as we embark on this new journey together.
00:00:36
Speaker
Join us at home, on the road, or while you run. Together, we'll have some fun. So follow along on Instagram at justinstridepod and your favorite podcast platform and prepare to be inspired. Come along for the ride with Justin Stride.
Sponsorship and Discounts
00:00:53
Speaker
This episode is presented by our friends at Exact Nutrition, a tasty and healthy way for you to fuel your body before, during, and after a solid training session. I can't leave the house without a few fruit bars in my pocket and they never make it back home. Exact is offering you 50% off your order when you use the code justinstride. So head to exactnutrition.com and fuel your goals today.
Stepping Outside Comfort Zones
00:01:16
Speaker
What does it mean to get outside your comfort zone? It could be starting a new job, trying a new sport, meeting new people, or maybe going on an adventure filled with unknowns. Whatever it is, if we decide to go there, we will come away with some valuable lessons and likely learn something about ourselves.
Ray Zahab's Adventures and Resilience
00:01:34
Speaker
Today on Justin's Stride, we'll enter the mind of a great Canadian explorer, adventurer, and ultra runner, Ray Zayhab.
00:01:42
Speaker
You might know Ray from his book and documentary running the Sahara, but his list of accomplishments go far beyond that. He's conquered deserts in blistering heat and the Arctic in subzero temperatures, conditions many of us will never get a chance to experience. But through his foundation, impossible to possible, he's able to share his love for expeditions and adventure with a youth ambassador team, teaching them resilience, perseverance, and dedication.
00:02:10
Speaker
Welcome to Justin Strideray. Thanks so much for taking the time. It's great to be here, brother. Stoked. Yeah, not our first conversation, but definitely the first one on this show. So I'm excited to introduce you to our new listeners and can't wait to hear what you've been up to. That's awesome, man. It's great to be on here and congrats on the new format, the new podcast. It's exciting.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a, it really is. Yeah. And I'm, I'm stoked to kind of get, get things going here. Um, so what's new with you, Ray? Like, I know, you know, you're always up to something. You're like a great Canadian explorer. And, but it's no, it's, it's not always been that way, but what's been a, what have you been up to lately? What have I been up to lately? It's kind of an open ended and loaded question at the same time. I mean, I, you know, uh,
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm training where I am exactly in this moment. I'm training like crazy for what it is that I'm planning to do next. I'm trying to increase my mileage, my daily trail running mileage, mountain biking, starting to put in
00:03:15
Speaker
bigger days and trying to find that work life balance with family my daughters who are competitive athletes as well in their own sports and you know but be able to put in the time that I need to do to do the things that I want to do but that being said the primary focus for me right now is to become as healthy as I can be um
00:03:38
Speaker
right now as I recover from essentially what was six months of chemotherapy and monoclonal therapy for a rare form of lymphoma, which is the blood cancer. So I'm sort of coming off of that now. I've been six, seven weeks, seven weeks, about seven weeks since my last and final
00:03:59
Speaker
chemotherapy rounds and I'm feeling fantastic. As a matter of fact, I feel better now than I did the last two years while I was still doing projects and getting after it in hottest and cold places on earth and feeling like garbage, not realizing how much of garbage I felt like, but now I'm feeling
00:04:23
Speaker
Like I used to feel, you know, I'm starting to feel like I used to feel right. I'm getting my health back, which is an amazing thing to feel, you know. And, you know, it's great that you're kind of getting back there. You know, you mentioned that you feel better than you did before. Were there warning signs for this? You know, it's a rare form of cancer, like you're saying. How did you identify that? What was the breaking point?
00:04:48
Speaker
That's a great question. So I was training last year, I come back from Ellesmere Island, and even backing up before
Health Challenges and Lymphoma Diagnosis
00:04:58
Speaker
that. So longer than a year ago, I started noticing after having COVID a few times, that I wasn't recovering while after workouts, I
00:05:09
Speaker
I just wasn't able to prepare myself for things that I do like I normally could. And as you know, and many of your listeners would not know unless they've followed my adventures before. To this point, I've covered close to 20,000 kilometers of running, trekking, skiing across literally every large desert on the planet, less one, the Simpson in Australia, but every other desert, including the Sahara, 7,000 kilometers.
00:05:37
Speaker
I have crossed many of the coldest regions of the planet, unsupported Arctic expeditions have been to the South Pole, have crossed Siberia, Kamchatka, the Canadian Arctic numerous times, numerous different expeditions. So I'm used to adversity and knowing my body and knowing when things are going well and when they're not. And I come back.
00:05:54
Speaker
So I had COVID a few times, trying to prepare for things, was up on Ellesmere, came back, was preparing to go to Death Valley last summer, and I absolutely could not recover from workouts. I mean, literally, could run one day and not run the next. Not only that, I was finding that I needed to nap frequently during the days. And it was a slow degradation, dude.
00:06:16
Speaker
As you know, I used to smoke a pack a day, two packs a day, drink heavy, all this stuff before I got into ultra running and adventure sports and all this sort of thing. In those days, if I tried running up a set of stairs, I'd be completely winded in my prior life. And I would think, well, it's normal because I'm running upstairs and I'm winded. Well, it wasn't normal. Right. And I didn't realize until after when I changed my life and I started running and doing these things,
00:06:43
Speaker
All of a sudden I'm bounding upstairs and I'm like, oh, wait a sec. I felt like shit for the last 30 years of my life. Right. And all of a sudden I feel good. So it was kind of the same thing with this thing. It insidiously came on and I slowly depreciated to a point where my wife was like, you need to get blood work.
Transformation Through Ultra Running
00:06:58
Speaker
Like there's something wrong with you. And one thing led to another and they determined that I have a lymphoma, which is a common blood cancer, but I had a rare form of that lymphoma.
00:07:10
Speaker
And so my blood proteins were very, very high and I was anemic. And so it was affecting everything. So I started chemotherapy and monoclonal therapy in October.
00:07:23
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So that's, it's really having to know your body, you know, it's a, like you say, you go through all these event adventures and expeditions and you're really in tune with everything. So that really gets sense of like, this is not normal. This is definitely something different than what I'm used to.
00:07:42
Speaker
like how do we get to the bottom of this like so what was like the diagnosis and then you know, what did that do to you personally like did is it is it a super like it's rare, but is it threatening and like how do you fight so I If I go back in time, you know 2004 when I I transitioned so, you know, I told you, you know packet a smoker unhealthy guy changed my life then I start I
00:08:09
Speaker
Getting into the outdoors and my brother, uh, who got me into the outdoors, wicked ice climber and mountain biker and all that. I started out in mountain biking, was racing mountain bikes, competitively. Got in really, really good shape over a few years, racing in some pretty big international races and doing well, discovered ultra running, started racing in ultras and became a competitive ultra runner. And the types of races that I liked were the ones that would take me.
00:08:34
Speaker
to the furthest places away and just the whole aspect of being in these remote and faraway places and an appreciation of these places that I was learning about because running was teaching me so much about the world, but about myself. Being in a race in Niger in two, it was a 200 mile race nonstop.
00:08:54
Speaker
in 2004 and being completely beat down. Like I would go into these things and I would just give it everything that I had. Cause I kind of knew what I was doing, but also not, I didn't know what I was doing. So I would just go as hard as I could. And I remember I was having a really good race. I was like running top three and I was alone in the middle of the desert, feeling like a bag of nuts and bolts. I was just a mess, but I remember looking up at the sky.
00:09:21
Speaker
and thinking to myself, wow, there's literally nowhere else on the planet. I'd rather be in this exact moment, even though I feel so horrible right now, what a gift it is to be out here. So fast forward. When I'm doing these things, all these expeditions, all these years later, all these things that I learned about myself through the process, I learned that listening to ourselves, knowing where we are, without sounding too corny here, in space and time and appreciating where we are,
00:09:51
Speaker
was critical to me. And when I received that diagnosis and they said, well, listen, this is what you have. It wasn't like this sense of, and by the way, listen, this is what you have. And there is no cure. You know, we're going to get you, um, really healthy and you'll be back to normal or better than normal for the next two to five years on average. And you probably have to do chemotherapy again.
00:10:15
Speaker
But I was like, hey, I like those odds and now I have a diagnosis and I know what I'm up against. Right? So it was like sort of that same feeling. You know what? I'm in this office. I'm getting this diagnosis. This is the place that I am in my life right now. This is where I am and I need to deal with it and I can either, you know,
00:10:37
Speaker
you know, go into hibernation for six months during this process, or I can continue to live and embrace where I am right now. And it's going to suck in a lot of ways, but hey, and so that's what I, that's what I did. I know that's a really long answer for your question. It's, it's, what I love about it is that, you know, you, you use all those experiences to
00:11:03
Speaker
To then take on a new challenge, you know, that's, that's your health and it's a little bit different, but the mindset is the same, you know, how you tackle those things and how you approach them and the.
00:11:16
Speaker
You know, you can't dwell on it. You know, you got to kind of move forward in the best way you can. And that's, I'm sure you face that. Well, Justin, you know, as well as anyone, what it's like to run an ultra and you run the ultra, let's say it's a hundred miles or a hundred K, whatever it is, get to the end of the race. And you're like, I am never doing that again.
00:11:36
Speaker
But then somehow you get back into it again and you will yourself and you start getting excited. And then you're like, I'm totally stoked about this next race I'm going to do. Right. And expeditions are kind of that way too. Like I'll go away. I'm gone 20, 30, 40 days, whatever. Doing one of these things that I'm doing and I'm so beat down physically at the end.
00:11:55
Speaker
But, and I think to myself, oof, maybe that's the last one. And then a month later, I'm planning and training for the next. When I went into this thing and I knew what the chemotherapy plan was going to be, and I had amazing doctors, um, I figured out very quickly that I was going to have one really bad week. So I, basically what would happen was I was that monoclonal therapy and, and chemotherapy.
00:12:18
Speaker
it would be two days and then I would have basically almost 25 days off in between sessions. In that 25 day period, post chemo, I'd have a week where I felt like garbage, a week where I was kind of starting like a half a week to a week where I was starting to feel better. And then in that mishmash of time, I'd have about a week and a half where I felt decent. And I committed during every one of those months
00:12:45
Speaker
those chemo months that I would do something to keep me motivated, to keep me as healthy as I could possibly be, force myself to get out of bed and train, even when I didn't feel like it, eat the foods I needed to eat, not eat garbage, not stay emotionally and mentally strong.
00:13:05
Speaker
So that I would roll into the next sessions of treatments feeling like I gave it everything I could. So each month was like a challenge, like one of your ultra marathons that you would do. And the goal was be as healthy and fit as I can. I use those goals each month, you know, guiding clients in the Atacama desert or, um, heading with my buddies, uh, from Norda and Nick from Norda and going to the running show in Austin or, um,
00:13:33
Speaker
going with my youngest daughter to Death Valley to do some scouting for some upcoming projects or going on my own Arctic expedition in February. Everyone that gave myself something to focus on and I learned that from expeditions. Yeah, so cool. Does it change your perspective or outlook moving forward or do you just jump back on your plan for what expeditions look like over the next few years?
00:13:58
Speaker
like you normally would? That's a great question. I mean, does it change my outlook? You know, my sister-in-law and I were talking about this. She went through breast cancer and she said, you know, it's not really a journey. And I said, yeah, you know, this is just something that was in my life. It was like, you know, any of the other, it was a period of adversity. Right. But I think what it taught me
00:14:28
Speaker
is that for certain, you can have many things in your life, but your health is the number one most important thing that you can own. Do you know what I mean? To a certain extent,
00:14:42
Speaker
And no matter how healthy I was and my training and all that, bad things can still happen. But you may as well give it everything you got to be as healthy as you can possibly be, so that life can be as awesome as possible, right? Because you have one kick at the can, and that's pretty much it.
00:15:01
Speaker
And so I've always believed since I changed my life, and since I went through, you know, the transition of the transformation in life of being an unhealthy guy to a healthy guy, that if you can find happiness and passion in your life, then you've won the lottery, right? And so I wasn't willing to wither with this, but instead grow from it and take whatever
00:15:26
Speaker
you know, the hard days of what I've just experienced but also the really good days and push those forward into what I do next.
00:15:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I, you know, I'm sure a sense of gratitude comes with that too. Like every day that after that, where you got through it and now you can kind of enjoy all the things that you love to do, which is tons and tons of exciting and fun things and spend time with your family and all that, you know, what I see you doing with your daughter too is amazing. And, uh, you know, she's kind of following in dad's footsteps, like
00:15:56
Speaker
doing all these things. And I have two daughters and they're both better Nordic skiers than me. They're both better. They're better trail runners. They're better at everything. And, you know,
00:16:09
Speaker
That's such a great thing for me. I mean, that's really where my passion is in doing things with my family.
Family and Career Focus
00:16:15
Speaker
I mean, really, truly. But as you know, because you and I have chatted many times before, I do a bunch of things. I have my foundation, Impossible to Possible, where I take young people on expeditions around the world.
00:16:29
Speaker
Pre-pandemic, we were doing two expeditions a year. And now we're getting right back. And we've done one since that, like in the middle of the pandemic, when it was kind of like, there was like this little lull for a while and people weren't sure we did a mini trip. Now we're getting another huge youth-based expedition going to the Atacama desert this year. I'm super excited about that and communicating with the youth ambassadors that are going to be going on that expedition. I also have my guiding company, Capic One.
00:16:57
Speaker
Um, so I've got some amazing clients going to amazing places this year, my own expeditions and projects. I have a lot that I want to do following my daughters as they compete.
00:17:07
Speaker
in their own sports, they're, they're both competitive spring kayakers and spring canoers. And, um, you know, in the summer and in the winter competitive Nordic skiers. So I've got a lot I want to live for and be healthy for, you know what I'm saying? And, and, and be able to crank it back up and I'll be honest with you on some of my training runs these days, I feel, as I said to you in the beginning, better than I have in the last two years. Yeah. And that's got to feel amazing, right? Like, oh yeah. I feel it's legit, dude. It's legit because it's like you just flicked a switch.
00:17:36
Speaker
Right? Like I felt like garbage after my last and final chemo. And I thought, well, maybe I won't get out of this hole. And then each run subsequent to that, I'm like, wow, I forgot what it was like to have deers. Like it's the things that we take for granted. I used to be able to run up hills. I got a bunch of bodies who are really fast runners and I would go out on trails with them and we'd work each other on the trails. And I remember being able to run up climbs, really technical climbs, and get to the top and be able to know
00:18:06
Speaker
How hard can I push the top of this hill so that I can recover on the way down to race by buddies up the next part? Well, for two years, I forgot that kind of lost that and you just get used to not having that anymore. Well, the other day I have no trail running with one of my fast buddies and I'm like, Hey, wait a sec. I can push a little harder. It's not monotone. You know what I mean?
00:18:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you get those reminders of what it's like to try and gain fitness again when you're coming off of maybe being at peak performance. You know what peak performance feels like for so many years. Yes. It's kind of like becoming a beginner again. Yes. It's the craziest thing to lose. It's like losing your sense of taste.
00:18:52
Speaker
And then living like that for a long time and then just assuming all food is bland. And then one day it just comes back, right? And you bite into chocolate and you taste it and you're like, shit, that's good. Was there a breakthrough like for you, like as you're coming back to getting your fitness, are you?
00:19:12
Speaker
Is there something you're doing differently to kind of regain that fitness or is it kind of using old tricks to kind of get yourself back to? Well, interesting question. Thank you for asking it. I, you know, over the years, years ago, um, before we ran across the Sahara on the expedition, I was coaching, I had a coaching business and I was coaching up to 50 runners a month.
00:19:35
Speaker
on average. And I was always learning. I was in that industry, right? My brother and sister-in-law are in the health and wellness industry. They're both functional strength coaches. And they work with a lot of really interesting folks like NHL hockey players, for example, that are injured or people coming back from injuries.
00:19:53
Speaker
And so I learned a lot about physiology and running and all that in those days. And you learn from running and communicating with your clients and all that stuff about their races as they're going through some years and years and years. And then one day while I transitioned from racing ultras to doing expeditions that were longer and sometimes in more adverse conditions, crossing deserts in the middle of summer, for example, or Arctic expeditions in the middle of winter.
Unconventional Training Methods
00:20:22
Speaker
I realized that my training had to be unconventional in order to prepare me for, you know, hottest places on earth, for example. So, and meager resources of food in the Arctic, only bringing what I need, you know, that sort of thing. So I, in my training post chemo decided that I would follow some of those more unconventional
00:20:46
Speaker
elements of training and start applying them to really shake things up whenever you change things radically in your training program as an ultra runner or a runner you cause a physiological response so the longer you've been running and doing things
00:21:04
Speaker
the greater the dramatic shift in your training needs to be to incite a physiological response and adaptive process. So I'm doing stuff that I wasn't necessarily doing before, but some of the things that like I give Elliott Cardain or other myself, I'm
00:21:20
Speaker
I'm coaching a handful of friends right now just for kicks because I'm having fun with it. And I love these superstar athletes like Elliot. I mean, it's ridiculous how fast that guy, I mean, he'll send me his kilometer repeats. I don't know if he's comfortable with me talking about this stuff.
00:21:35
Speaker
He's laying down in the two thirties in on his kilometer repeats. It's ridiculous. I mean, if I'm riding my mountain bike, I suppose I could keep up, but at any rate, you know, I apply some of the stuff that I'm doing, the proprioceptive stuff in running or the more mindful stuff in trail running, getting smooth, getting really fast, using less effort to move quickly down the trails, nose breathing, all these different elements. So yes, I'm shaking it up and trying to keep it different.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, that's a challenge, you know, when you've been training for so long, sometimes you fall into this lull of, uh, of the same, same, same, same all the time. And I like what you said there, like really, uh, implementing some different things to really get your body to kind of get uncomfortable, you know, outside of the comfort zone, I think is.
00:22:22
Speaker
You know, we as runners, we as runners, and many of your listeners will sort of recognize this in themselves, is that we get comfortable doing something that we really like, right? And then what we do is we try to repeat more and more of the things that we really like, rather than occasionally
00:22:39
Speaker
Doing the things that we need to do that we may not like as much Right, but those call you know create those opportunities for the body to grow Like strength training there's a lot of people that just do not Like to be in the gym strength training they hate it But you know you do a strength training program balancing out with some plyo and some moves like that your trail running the difference in your trail running the capacity and
00:23:05
Speaker
will be extraordinary. Your agility improves so much or doing stuff like nose breathing runs where you're, you know, oxygenating your body, improving your capillarization, all of these things. You put the hard time and you put hard work in you get out on those long runs on the weekend when you're hammering and you're breathing normally and you're sucking in that oxygen, you're more efficient than you, you know,
00:23:31
Speaker
And how much of that are you passing on to your little ones? You know, they're, they're, uh, they're rocking it, you know? Yeah, they're both, they both have amazing, they have amazing coaches, right? So they're part of the ski program at Chelsea Nordic and they have amazing coaches there and in the winter. And, um, you know, uh, my oldest is on the Quebec team for sprint kayak. So they have amazing coaches in both sports. Um,
00:23:56
Speaker
The thing about it that I find so fascinating about them is they both do biathlon and they kind of figured out at a young age how to shoot between your heartbeats. So getting their heart rates to drop low enough when they get down into the shooting area that they could shoot and then get back up again and then ski once they hit all the targets. So it's really interesting and I think that a huge part of that
00:24:21
Speaker
is because they're, they're cardiovascularly fit as well. Cause they've been trail running since they were babies, right? With us, with my wife and I. So passing on, I think I'm learning more than I'm passing on, you know? From them. Yeah, exactly. From them. That's interesting. Yeah. And I'm sure like, you know, they don't want to always want to hear from their dad. So I guess it's good. It's totally true.
00:24:46
Speaker
They have coaches. When you look at your whole body of work so far in your life, if you go back, could you have ever predicted that you'd be here? You're doing so many things, and you're helping the youth, and you start a coffee company, and you're coaching. Could you have ever imagined that you got here? And what do you think, from within you, what do you think allowed for that to happen?
00:25:15
Speaker
to have this kind of growth in your life? Well, you know, I know I could have never predicted it because when I was 30 and I was, you know, the unhealthy guy, I told you about smoking a pack a day and drinking way too much and just constantly partying. I couldn't picture myself being 40, right? And then when I shifted my life and went from someone who was very risk adverse and unwilling to try new things and was afraid of failure and all of those things,
00:25:43
Speaker
instead became someone who was like, how with it, I don't care if I fail, I'm going for it. And someone who saw the world with the glass half full, instead of constantly thinking about where I was going to be, I was where I was now, right? In my mind. And I think that it's not a matter of taking things for granted.
00:26:06
Speaker
But I think we can't take ourselves too seriously either. And I think we have to really love what we do and be very passionate about what we do.
Pursuing Passions in Endurance Sports
00:26:16
Speaker
And if you have those things, everything else kind of starts to take care of itself, right? If you're super passionate about something,
00:26:23
Speaker
It will succeed over time, but time is the, that's the big ticket item. That's what costs the most is time. Cause it's the, it's the hardest thing is to be patient. Right. So when I first started doing, um, ultra marathons.
00:26:43
Speaker
I come off of mountain biking. I really didn't have very much money at all. I didn't have anything. I was living in a small apartment, renting it from a friend of mine, uh, here in Chelsea. And, um, when I transitioned into ultra running, my very first running race ever was the Yukon arctic ultra. So I had never done a running race. I'd done tons of adventure races, eco challenge qualifiers, raid the north. And as I mentioned a lot of mountain bike racing.
00:27:11
Speaker
But when I ran that first ultra, I knew something was different. It was 100 miler. I won it. I never really experienced anything like that before. It was the Yukon in the middle of winter in February. It was very difficult. But my mind was expanded to the possibility in completing that race that human beings underestimate themselves physically, mentally and emotionally and that
00:27:40
Speaker
That just didn't apply just to me that to many of us, we feel that way. But that race proved to me that, in fact, the alternative reality was true as well, that we can exceed any of those limits that we have.
00:27:57
Speaker
And I didn't set out after that race to go to more ultra marathons to try and win more ultra marathons. I set out to learn more about myself and try and figure out how I did what I did in the Yukon. Cause I still didn't understand how I did it. Even to this day, I'm not sure how I did it. And.
00:28:13
Speaker
In that process of pursuit of wanting to learn more about myself, one thing led to another. I was doing really well at all trials. I met a couple of buddies. We became really good friends. We said, hey, here's
Impact of Running the Sahara Film
00:28:24
Speaker
a great idea. Let's run across the whole Sahara Desert. So we make this plan to run 7,500 kilometers across the Sahara Desert. Six degrees of separation. Matt Damon hears about it, gets involved. I'm really condensing the story. And they decided to make a movie called Running the Sahara.
00:28:40
Speaker
And then, you know, fast forward a couple of years, I'm sitting at the Toronto Film Festival, Eddie Vedder is sitting there from Pearl Jam. And they, you know, Mike McCready did music for the film, Wycliffe. And there's this documentary playing at the Toronto Film Festival. And I'm pinching myself when I'm saying, how's this possible? I think when we live in pursuit of our dreams, things happen. Right. And it's just it's the same thing with impossible to possible, impossible to possible came from running the Sahara.
00:29:08
Speaker
Because when we finished crossing the Sahara, I couldn't believe that through an adventure, we could learn so much again about ourselves, but about the world. I thought, wow, you know what would be totally legit for like teenagers to be able to go out and experience what we just experienced and go and do the things we just did, obviously on a smaller scale, but be able to go to some amazing places. And so then I said, okay.
00:29:32
Speaker
I'm going to start this thing called Embossable Impossible. And so my wife Kathy and my buddy Bob and I started this thing and said it would be free. We're volunteers and we started creating these youth expeditions and we've been all 15 of them so far around the world, right? Amazon jungle, Rajasthan, the Arctic, et cetera.
00:29:51
Speaker
And so again, I know I'm answering your question in a very long way, but it's impossible to answer it in any other way. You arrive at a destination and you don't think I never, or rarely look back across my life and say, wow, I did that. No, I did that. And I did that. So I have a website obviously, and I, it stays updated, but I'm not focused on the past. I'm not focused on the past. It doesn't define you. What defines you is who you are in the moment, right?
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it was a big question. So I can make a story about that in that way, you know, and, um, you know, and Sahara, you know, running the Sahara, like great documentary and great book, you know, um, that depicts exactly what you guys set out to do there. And I encourage anybody who hasn't seen it to watch it. And I loved it.
00:30:40
Speaker
Like, do you think that, that event, you know, I know you say, can't go back and say, I did this, this, this, and this, and the list is very long. We can't talk about all of them, but do you think that that adventure kind of bolted you into another, like another level of maybe finding a different potential for yourself? Yeah. You know, and what I mean by that, just to follow up on what I said before, you know, I, you walk into my house.
00:31:05
Speaker
There isn't pictures on the wall or Guinness world records or any of that. So that's all in the filing cabinet, right? Instead we celebrate at our house what our daughters are doing, right? And I think that I think that I know that I don't want to be reminded constantly, you know, in my own home about something that I've done, but instead appreciate it. I appreciate the things that I've done, but instead I'm focused on what I'm doing now.
00:31:33
Speaker
and that I'm happy now and I'm doing the best I can with what I do and where it will lead down the road, right? I'm not, but I get people have different strategies and different ways of living and achieving the things they want to achieve. Obviously we have to set goals and prepare for them. I plan for an expedition that's a year and a half away. I'm training now for it. So I am a long-term planner that way. But to see a complete thing where I, you know, in the past would have said,
00:31:59
Speaker
Well, you know, for example, to answer your question you just asked, I didn't finish running the Sahara saying to myself, well, that's it. I'm going to be a professional explorer now for the rest of my life. It wasn't like that, right? It was like, that was incredible. And then one thing led to another, and then I was en route to the South Pole, or I ran just a bunch of different running.
00:32:20
Speaker
you know, and stuff like that. And it's just one thing led to another, you know, one thing precipitated another because of the passion that I had for what I was doing and how I was living my life, trying to live my life, you know? Yeah, totally. And I, I talked, like hearing you speak, I just feel like, you know, you're why, you know, like you're, you know, why you're doing these things and you know, what it brings to you,
00:32:48
Speaker
And, and for you, you know, you don't have to spread it all over your house with the medals and awards and all this stuff. Like you don't need those reminders. Those are for you too. You know, it's a, it's a thing is a good lesson to, to share with, you know, you, with your kids too. And, you know, and, and understand like, especially in a world like today with like social media and all that stuff, like it's all about the next thing, the next marathon, the next big race. And.
00:33:16
Speaker
how much of that is for you or for, or how much of that is for other people. I mean, that's for each individual to understand and decide, but. Exactly. Because we all live in an individual reality as well as a global reality, right? So, I mean, there's two things happening simultaneously. So I recently wrote a post, I said,
00:33:38
Speaker
you know, the greatest challenges that we face in our lives are very personal and relative to us as individuals. So something that I might think is really hard, like the chemo, for example, was brutal for me.
00:33:49
Speaker
But there was people, like I'm not alone in the cancer clinic getting the chemotherapy. There's people all around getting chemo. And there was a guy I was talking to, and he was in for his second, like it had come back, his cancer had come back and he was in there. And I said, well, I said, wow, does it make you feel like garbage? He said, no, he said, no problem. I have no symptoms, nothing. He said, you're going to walk out of here feeling great. He says, yeah.
00:34:11
Speaker
Like, wow, that is not my experience. And so in that though too, the great things that we achieve, the awesome things that we achieve in our lives are very relative to us as individuals. Has to be meaningful to us first before it can be truly meaningful to anyone else. Right. Yeah. And how do you, how do you choose the next thing? You know, your, your adventures and expeditions are so
00:34:34
Speaker
vast and so big. How do you decide where you're going to go next and what you're going to do? Is there a timeline for you? How far ahead do you plan?
00:34:46
Speaker
Well, I go to places that I, it has to be meaningful to me personally. It has to be some place that I've dreamed about or something that I've really wanted to do, you know? And typically it's remote or I mean, some of these expeditions, like when I did the first crossing of the Atacama Desert, north to south, 1200 kilometers, middle of summer,
00:35:12
Speaker
The data, I did it in 2011, the data and information I was able to get was very minimal. It was really hard to put that trip together. And it was brutally difficult because resupplies were far apart. You're talking 50 to 55 degrees Celsius every day, hole in the ozone. So the sun was brutal, right? The UV rays. And it was an incredibly difficult expedition to plan and train for. And I trained and planned for that for over a year.
00:35:41
Speaker
just for one thing, but that's typical for me too. Like expeditions typically are a year of planning and training. And then I go when I do it, I, everything's changes. Like I, my diet, I adapt my diet for the type of food that's going to be on that expedition. And I adapt to being able to perform with that and ironically will normally train myself up.
00:36:03
Speaker
even more than I was when I was doing racing ultras or mountain bike racing. I'm trained up more, you know, it's about adversity. It's about being comfortable in adversity because that's what expeditions are pure adversity. If, you know, I'm going to the desert in the summer, I'm going to the Arctic in the winter. Those are really difficult things for me, especially to do. So, you know, I trained for that. Choosing those locations, though, really has to be something. There's something special that draws me to that place.
00:36:33
Speaker
And I do love being in places or places where very few people have ever been, or places at times of year when people very rarely visit or immerse themselves in those environments, because I find that those times are when it's the most extraordinary. And I know you've done expeditions too in the Arctic, up in Nunavut also. I worked in Nunavut and I know this cold.
Extreme Expedition Experiences
00:37:00
Speaker
I felt this in, you know, January, February, where it's windy minus 60. There's no buildings or trees to hold that wind back. There's Northern winds. I'm just like really, like you can't, they, for us, they suggested you can't stay outside for more than five minutes. Otherwise you get frostbite. So then I thought of you, I said, you know, this guy's out there trekking along, you know, hundreds of kilometers, like how the heck
00:37:27
Speaker
Do you plan for that? How do you stay safe in those extreme conditions, extreme heat or extreme cold? Well, for starters, I find the cold so brutal. Oh my God.
00:37:43
Speaker
I have a great outerwear partner, as you know, Canada Goose, and they've always helped me. I've collaborated with the design team there to create some amazing gear. A lot of my gear to do my expeditions is custom because that's what works best for the job, right?
00:37:59
Speaker
I did a project, I've done a lot, we did an unsupported crossing of Kamchatka, as a matter of fact, got stopped short after 20 days unsupported in the mountains of Russia, crossed by call in Siberia, middle of winter, February 2010, 650 kilometers as the crow flies, but closer to 700 on the ground, and dragging slides running 50k a day, right? I mean, just crazy stuff, right?
00:38:25
Speaker
But I think the coldest I ever was in January 2020, and to hit home this point also, of doing things that we're truly passionate about. The Eastern Arctic, I have a lot of friends. You were up on Baffin. I have a lot of close friends in Baffin Island, in Kikik Tardjwak, a small island off the coast of Baffin, and I love seeing them.
00:38:47
Speaker
I love being there. And so it was always my dream to go from the island of Kekka Tardrak, cross the sea ice, keep going across Baffin on the way into Pangertong and do it in January, right? Like that was always my, I just, it would be meaningless to anyone else. Everybody else would be like, I have no idea what you're talking about. No, it's amazing. And so I decided that I was going to do this, this one winner. Oh, dude.
00:39:12
Speaker
It was Brutus 2020. The winds, I can't even tell you. The air temperature was minus 50. When I was going up over the highest point on Bath, the sea ice was bad enough, but I could average about 50K a day pulling my sled, all my gear, all my supplies. I went light, but I knew that I was going to try and do this in five days, 220-ish kilometers in five days.
00:39:39
Speaker
So I get that so much time I gave and it ended up taking me four and a half days. But I froze on that trip. My eyelids, the wind was so strong. It was blowing through the holes in my goggles, the air holes in my goggles, and my eyelids frostbit. Like it was insane. My whole face was swollen.
00:39:59
Speaker
I was a mess and I did everything to plan around that. I've posted some photos over at different times of my entire like I was wrapped up completely and it was all just a chunk of frost. Right. But anyhow, I got it done. But that cold is so brutal. You know, anyhow. Yeah, I mean, you must have the heat, though, can be just as bad. So in 20 in 2021,
00:40:30
Speaker
You know, I've done some projects in Death Valley and I was retracing, with a buddy of mine, we were retracing our 2011. In August, 2011, we did a complete north to south crossing of the Mojave Desert through Death Valley. It's epic.
00:40:48
Speaker
and 250 kilometers basically, right? And we went back in 2020 and we said, let's retrace it. Let's see our, do our route again and see if we can clean up our nav and all that stuff. I mean, dude, honestly, it's some of the, at that time in the year, the most brutal terrain on earth at that time of year, right? Because the heat just, we were a hundred K into it and we knew something was like completely off. We were drinking 10 liters each every 20 K.
00:41:18
Speaker
processing it, like run that number through your head. That's an insane amount of fluid, right? But we were processing it through but we weren't our bodies weren't cooling anymore, tapped out and it turned out we're gonna die, you know, and we tapped out and it was the hottest recorded temperature. I want to get this right. But I'm
00:41:37
Speaker
hottest 24 hour recorded temperature on planet ever was ridiculous. It was like 134 Fahrenheit measured at furnace Creek. And so there's, it's both ends of the extremes, but the, the crazy thing was we didn't know that was happening. It just was happening because we were out there in the middle of nowhere, but we still somewhat normalized it in our minds because we're like, well, it's just really hot. We prepared for this. We know already.
00:42:03
Speaker
Right? So the psychological aspect of preparing for these things is the biggest thing, you know? Yeah. And how do you know when enough's enough?
00:42:12
Speaker
I just knew my fingernails, dude, were on fire. If you ever reached into the oven to grab a pizza out of the oven and you don't have a cooking mitt on, that peeling of the heat on your fingernails, that's what it felt like. And I've crossed a lot of hot deserts, like the Namib Desert, almost 2000 kilometers from South Africa to Angola, middle of summer. There was times in that crossing where I thought, well,
00:42:35
Speaker
This is where I'm going to die, you know, but, you know, you make it through, right? You just kind of know you can kind of make it through. But this was like, no, we're going to die. You just like it was like dying, you know. So was that the closest call you think? No, I've had lots of close calls, lots. I've broken through rivers in the Arctic rivers. I broke through a river in the Arctic once on an expedition and almost got washed underneath.
00:43:01
Speaker
the ice. That was terrifying. And I got out literally at the last minute and was completely covered in water. Luckily I had my emergency suit. I had a down suit with me in my sled. My teammate, Stefano from Italy was with me. I had gone through and I was able to get myself out of this hole. It's a much longer story.
00:43:20
Speaker
rolled in the snow, it's minus 30 out and put on my, you know, to get all the moisture off, got all my wet stuff off, got my down suit on and walked for two days to like get a point of pickup. Like it was hypothermic. I just a mess, a disaster. All my, my toes all blistered and you know, all the skin came off my toes. They were all frostbitten from my wet boots.
Lessons from Close Calls
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Does that, does that, do those close calls make you,
00:43:49
Speaker
reconsider or rethink how you plan these things or where you might go in the future with the family and the kids and stuff. You know what it does? Yeah, it's a really good question. I've done 34 major expeditions since 2007 and I've had three go completely sideways, right? And that's a pretty good average. I will say this, it keeps you humble.
00:44:17
Speaker
and it makes you realize that you haven't got shit figured out, right? You always learn.
00:44:23
Speaker
And so anything that's gone wrong, I've never been afraid to write about it or say to people, I'm not moving the frigging goal posts. Like this is what happened. And it is not what I set out to do. And here's why it didn't work out. And I think by putting that out there, we're able to learn from the things that don't go right. I'm always apprehensive.
00:44:49
Speaker
to use the word fail because it was a friend of mine, Chris, who corrected me one time. It was an acronym he learned from someone else. And he said, well, there's no fail. It was only the first attempt at learning. And I thought, that's so great. Right. So, you know, I would say that these setbacks helped me appreciate things more that I have in my life back at home, family, friends, et cetera.
00:45:14
Speaker
these close calls, if you will, but also they teach me, okay, here's why things happen. Even though sometimes it's not predictable mistakes that happen. Here's maybe what I could do next time to help mitigate potentially this problem ever happening again. Yeah. I think that's really important too. Uh, what you said there about failure and being able to identify the learnings around it, because I think I just read something before talking to you. Like it's, it's one of those lines where it's,
00:45:43
Speaker
saying that, you know, you don't learn and you don't learn something from winning. You learn something from, from losing, you know, and how to move forward and what went wrong and how you can, uh, you know, when it's, that's such a good point. You know, when I was racing ultras, I started getting cocky cause I thought I was, you know, Mr figured it out and I was, I was, I really loved the desert races. Those were the things like, you know, I'd done MDS a few times and all this jazz and, um,
00:46:12
Speaker
I entered Badwater Ultra Marathon and I thought, easy, I'm used to running in the sand. I got this. Wasn't really prepared as well as I could have been. I had the best crew you could have asked for. Like Marshall Ulrich, who look him up for the listeners that haven't heard of him. I mean, the dude is literally a legend in ultra running. He's a really good friend of mine and he helped us with impossible to possible a lot.
00:46:39
Speaker
Marshall's just to give you an idea, just to give you an idea. He's finished Badwater 20 times. You heard that number, right? 20 times, right? I mean, the guys outside magazine called him the endurance king at one point. I mean, so anyhow, I had Marshall's crew who helped me, you know, for Badwater and I completely imploded at about the 40 mile mark.
00:47:01
Speaker
flat on my back, out of the race, a complete mess, right? And it hit me and I'll never forget me laying on the pavement, half passed out thinking, I don't know shit. I don't know anything. What was I thinking? It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I came home from that
00:47:20
Speaker
It humbled me. It taught me not to think I had everything all figured out. And I went on to, with humility, approach my next, I had three races before we would run across the Sahara. I won all three of them, the next three races. And I won those because of what happened in bad water. You know, I was able to just come back from that and learn from it. So as you said, it doesn't seem like it at the time.
00:47:48
Speaker
But the greatest lessons we come that we get come from the most difficult challenges from, you know, something like that. Defeat sometimes is the best thing that can happen. Right. I mean, I can say that, you know, a lot of people listening to you might not be able to relate to like the expeditions that you do because they're unique. You know, not many people can go out to do that, but they run ultras or they run marathons or half marathons or whatever. So, uh,
00:48:15
Speaker
As part of your planning, are there any things that you can always translate to like lesser distances, like from how you prepare for a big expedition? Is there lessons from that that you can also apply to lesser distances or other sports? Oh, absolutely. I think the key is, you know, I have a friend who just, Yannick Fornier, he just finished, do you know Yannick?
00:48:40
Speaker
I think the name before really nice guy. He just finished that race that's going on in the UK right now.
Mental and Physical Endurance
00:48:47
Speaker
A hundred K race. And he called me. He was, um, I helped him with his training and he was at about the, um, goodness gracious. He was halfway 50 K.
00:48:59
Speaker
called me on his phone. He's like, dude, it is brutal. It's insane. He said, I tripped twice. I fell. I've injured my ribs. I, you know, I, he said, I thought about pulling the plug, but he said, you know, I'm still going. And I, and I, and, and he said, you know what though, what's really interesting is I think, sorry, he may have been at the, it was time wise, time wise. He said, this is the longest I've ever spent on my feet ever.
00:49:27
Speaker
And I said, dude, you've already won. Like you've already PB'd in a certain aspect of your running. I think what's critical, and by the way, he, so he goes on to finish it, right? Called me today, he's totally stoked. He's beat up, but he's stoked. And I think that the lesson there is that you have to appreciate as you're training and preparing for anything, whether it's your first 5K or you're going to run a 50K or you're going to run 500 miles.
00:49:58
Speaker
The key is to appreciate those smaller gains that you get and the smaller achievements that you have because they all add up in the long run. Instead of only thinking about the big, audacious, crazy achievement one at a time, you got to think of the small things.
00:50:19
Speaker
When Elliot, we first started working together in November of, so it would be a year this November, so what would that be? November 21. We were looking at where he was at and how none of his races had gone well that year for him. And I said, you know what you need to do? You need to start.
00:50:42
Speaker
breathing and relaxing. You need to get comfortable running. You need to be comfortable with yourself and you need to run and not be stressed. So I want you to start breathing through your nose and the pace that you're going to run is how you can breathe. And I said, if you can only walk, well, then that's what you do right now. And that's all we're going to do for the next month. You're crazy. He said, you're crazy. There's no way. I mean, you know, this is a guy who's used to running 200 kilometers a week or whatever. I said, no, it's completely irrelevant right now.
00:51:12
Speaker
We have to get you back to a basic platform to a point where you have something to build on, you know, like, and so that small achievement within a month, he was running again, ridiculous speeds as he always does, but breathing through his nose.
00:51:29
Speaker
And then when we said, OK, now let's start doing some other things after having that small achievement, the greater achievements came. And then he was able to accept that. And then his race has started going really well for him. And we all have setbacks, but it's not about winning.
00:51:44
Speaker
It's about achieving the goal that you set out for yourself, right? So somebody asked me once, what did it feel like to reach the Red Sea after crossing the Sahara? And I said, I'm going to tell you, it felt exactly like the first run I did. So when I was racing mountain bikes, I was super fit, but we never ran. You would never run when you're racing in those days. And so.
00:52:09
Speaker
I, when I entered the Yukon Arctic Ultra, I had a buddy of mine who was a very experienced ultra runner, uh, who helped me to prepare. And I remember one day we went out and I did a run and it was seven kilometers from where I was living in Chelsea back to, you know, it was a loop. So, and for the first six, my legs would get achy when I first started, even though my legs were super strong from mountain bike, they would get achy, but I would run and I would take little walk breaks or whatever. And I ran every step.
00:52:37
Speaker
And that feeling of leaving my door and coming back to my door and running every step, that sense of accomplishment was so huge for me. It was exactly how I felt. So when the person said how to feel when you reach the Red Sea, I said, it felt exactly like the day I first ran 7K without stopping. It's relative. So the goals have to be relative to each as individuals, and we have to be able to celebrate those when they happen, but also always have an eye towards how can we improve.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's amazing stuff for sure. And, and I'm sure it's even difficult to, you know, when you're training accomplished athletes too, who have the experience, who have, you know, success in the past and then, you know, they go through those stretches where it's not going so well. It's like a lot of it's in their head and you got to switch it up too and get them to see the big picture, which, which I'm sure you're helping them do. Um, the terrain in which you train, you know, you do a lot of your training near your home, you know,
00:53:34
Speaker
Um, you know, some people think, you know, I gotta go to X location to train for this event and stuff like that, but you've proved that that's, you know, I'm sure you do some of that, but that that's not the case. You can train in your own backyard. So what do you think like the recipe is there for simulating what you're going to be facing when you, when you get on a plane and go to a new location? Well, uh,
00:54:00
Speaker
Let me say this again too, because it's fresh in my mind. So I'm talking to Yannick today at the end of his race, and he's like, oh my God, my ribs are killing me. I feel like I've been beat with a bag of hammers, right? Like, I mean, he's just a disaster. I said, you know what the flip side is? I said, Yannick, you know what the good news is? This massive effort that you just did to your body, your body's not gonna forget this. It's gonna grow from it.
00:54:26
Speaker
It'll never forget. You do something like that once, like you, you, you know, your first ultra that you ran, you thought there's no way, maybe you thought there's no way I'm getting to the finish line. You get to the finish line and then three ultras later, you're like, I can run an ultra. Want me to do one this weekend? I'll go and do it. You know?
00:54:44
Speaker
A big part, and people laugh when I say this, but it's 90% mental, the other 10% is all in your head. You get to this point where you can mentally adapt and get yourself forward through experience of doing. So I've done these things. So when I'm going to my next super hot desert, I know what it feels like to be in suffocating heat.
00:55:05
Speaker
I have a sauna in our backyard I train I you know I sit in the sauna every day I do the best I can training at home but I still do training trips for sure you know look it if I was a
00:55:18
Speaker
You know, Jim Walmsley, you know, I get it. You're going after UTMB. You're going to be living in those mountains and running it for months in advance because it's so sports specific. Like you've heard of sports specificity, trained specifically for the things that you want to do really well at. Because of the places I'm going and the remoteness and they involve navigation and potentially a helicopter drop or whatever.
00:55:46
Speaker
The means and resources to go to a place first most times is cost prohibitive also. So try to replicate as best I can at home the type of stress that my body will be under. Nothing replicates being in the place that you're going to be in. So like Jim Wamsley running at UTMB or anyone that has the opportunity, as you build up through anything, let's say your goal is just to complete the UTMB.
00:56:13
Speaker
Well, if you have a chance to go to those mountains on a trip to France at some point before you sort of know what you're getting into, it betters your odds of being able to finish it because you've immersed yourself in the environment. But here, when I'm training for the things that I'm doing, I train for adversity. So my training programs are not designed around, for me, 200 meter repeats with 100 meter break and I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about things like, OK,
00:56:41
Speaker
these three hours on Saturday, I'm going to get as much elevation or vertical as I can, but I'm not going to walk any of it. It has to be vertical that I can run. So I'm going to get as much distance with that vertical, but I'm not walking at all.
00:56:57
Speaker
And so now I've limited myself, right? There's a time, distance, elevation, speed factor because of the way that I've created the workout for myself. That's just one example of other, and this pervades every other form of training that I do, whether I'm on the mountain bike or strength training or I'm in the sauna. It's about adapting to a tremendous load of stress that my body will be on at an expedition.
00:57:22
Speaker
I see that, you know, you're, you're, you have a big willingness to share, to support also. And I always appreciate like talking to you because you always have so much good advice. And I know, you know, through impossible to possible, you're able to do that. And you're able to see the future, um, through this, through sport, through expeditions. What's your hope for, for those kids and for the future? And like, what's the end goal there?
00:57:50
Speaker
Well, you know, I think with our impossible possible, our goal has always been, I think we've had close to 70 kids that have gone on expeditions, but they've reached tens of thousands of students because they're expeditions, as you know.
Inspiring Youth through Impossible to Possible
00:58:07
Speaker
combined with an educational program and the whole thing is broadcast into schools through satellite and a live website. So you can have an expedition with four or five youth ambassadors in the Amazon jungle or in the Tunisian Sahara, but there's 50,000 students on the other end watching the website, right? So we're trying to connect through kids.
00:58:26
Speaker
A big part of it is to create an appreciation, obviously for the world. And what I mean by that is not just environmental, but cultural, um, connectivity, all of these things that it means to be a human being on this planet in this time. And so we are hoping that we are creating future leaders, people that will in whatever they're doing,
00:58:52
Speaker
and wherever they come from, whatever their background, that in their various aspects of lives that they go on to, they go on to lead in a way that is appreciative of the planet that we live on, but also with an eye towards what it means to be human. Because I think within every human being is this desire to explore and be an adventurer. And so it makes you appreciate the world more as a whole. And so that's our goal with these kids.
00:59:21
Speaker
Totally. Yeah. And I can say like, I live in Switzerland now, so I'm definitely tempted to explore a lot more when you see those Alps and stuff. And I definitely want to get in more trails and whatnot. And yeah, I love what you're doing with impossible possible. I think it's, I mean, if I had the chance when I was a kid to do something like that, it's like, it's amazing, you know, and it's something that, you know,
00:59:46
Speaker
When you're kids, you remember those things and those memories and being able to share it with schools and stuff as an educational tool. I think that's really special as well. Well, this next Youth Exposure, we have a diverse group of young people coming from the US, from Quebec, from Nunavut, from BC. I mean, it's going to be so cool because these kids are like, you know,
01:00:15
Speaker
like four quarters, right? And they're coming together and they're gonna do this thing together. So that, just that in itself, you know, they end up,
01:00:25
Speaker
connecting with so many more people, you know, and through what they get out of it. So yeah, totally stoked about that as well. And what do you find like, what do they ask you when you meet these kids? Like, what do they ask you most about, you know, kids are curious, and they sometimes they don't. What's interesting is the last thing about some of these places, like I've, I've gone back to some of these locations, like we talked about the Atacama desert, when I crossed it in 2011.
01:00:51
Speaker
There was nothing out there. I mean, I was in parts of that desert that I saw the Incan Trail like nobody had seen it for whatever thousands of years because nobody would be out there. The whole area or vast sections of that desert were
01:01:12
Speaker
owned by mining companies, large mining companies. The land wasn't being mined or developed. That's who had it. It was just a big, massive open areas. I've been back to the Atacama and I mountain bike the length of it one year and not exactly the same route because I was really out in the middle of nowhere when I ran across it.
01:01:35
Speaker
but it's changed. And in the last, since 2011, I've seen so much development in different pockets of the Atacama. Look in different parts of the world that I've been, people were calling before COVID the before times and the now times is now, right? And I think that for me, the before times were before social media and before this ease of communication around the world where an Instagram post now
01:02:04
Speaker
Do you remember when Instagram first started? If somebody posted a really cool photo, it was like, Oh my God, that's an amazing quality photograph. You must be a professional photographer. Now everybody's a freaking professional photographer. Like every photo somebody posts is amazing. Right? So I think that we think differently. We ingest information differently.
01:02:26
Speaker
Right. And I think that the world has changed dramatically since then in many ways. Like, I mean, that's a whole other rabbit hole we can go down. But I think they asked me the most about what was it like, you
Environmental Observations and Youth Empowerment
01:02:39
Speaker
know, when I went into the Amazon jungle in the early 2000s or what, you know, have I noticed a change in some parts of the planet? Yeah, I've seen glaciers recede to where they don't exist anymore.
01:02:51
Speaker
I've seen, um, I've been in parts of the jungles that are, were dense jungle with vibrant species of life. And those areas of jungle are gone. They've been burned. You know, there's nothing left there for miles and miles kilometers and kilometers square. Um, so the world has changed a lot. So they asked me the most, what were these places like that? Have you seen these places again? And what do they look like now? Does that, does that make you think any differently about like, you know, climate change and like,
01:03:21
Speaker
how we can improve what we do every day or how we go about things to try and slow down that, like the damage we're doing? Well, no, because I mean, everybody has, well, yes. I mean, listen, yes, in the sense that climate change is happening and the world is changing.
01:03:49
Speaker
And we're at a point where adaptation in our lifetime, I mean, we're adapting, look at the frequency of storms and all the things that are happening right now. And for sure, I worry about the future for my kids, ranging from environment to geopolitical and everything else and beyond. But I see in young people nowadays, and here comes that double-edged sword of social media,
01:04:15
Speaker
I see young people that are doing so much shit at 20 years of age. When I was 20, dude, I was a basket case. I was a disaster. Most of my friends who were 20 were a disaster at the time. 20 year olds, I can't believe what they're doing. Like people are accomplishing so many things. So I think we have a generation of youth that are brilliant.
01:04:38
Speaker
And I'm not trying to unload everything on the future, on our future generations, but I'm very hopeful in our greatest resource, which is youth, right?
01:04:49
Speaker
I tend to lean more on the glass half full. I think things have a way of sorting themselves out with a lot of effort put behind it. And so I think that we're, humanity is, everybody's, we are waking up to the things that need remedy, I think. And so only the future's gonna hold for us. Look at, yeah, it's sad to see glaciers receding at such a rapid rate, but
01:05:17
Speaker
you know, this is, it's, it's great to be sad. Now let's do something about it. Right. And so this is, you know, I'm trying to contribute as best I can with impossible possible and giving youth an opportunity to see the world and be immersed in it. But we'll, we all have the ability to do something, you know? Yeah. And yeah, and it's, we got to do the best we can. It takes all, it takes everybody to, to do those things and
01:05:44
Speaker
to make a positive impact and certainly like educating the youth about these things and it's going to help for sure. And, you know, that's a big part of it. I think about you and like when you, when you got into sport, like a little bit later and you broke some pretty big tough habits, you know, and I think about people who are older in age who maybe are set in their ways and they don't know how to get healthy or they don't know
01:06:13
Speaker
Um, where to go or how to get started. Can you share anything? Um, I know it's, you know, it's been a while since you've been at that place, but I'm sure you remember like, how do you dude? Yeah, Justin. Sorry. I didn't mean to talk right over you there. I, you know what I can tell you, because when you said that it came to my mind right away, um,
01:06:33
Speaker
It's funny how things happen in life. And then, you know, it'll perk up again in a different part in your life. But I remember getting an email from someone once saying, listen, I follow you on all your social media stuff and I love it. And, you know, I would like to go and do some adventures someday. But I mean, my first goal is to run a five kilometer. You know, I was a local five kilometer road race. And they said, but I have no idea. I don't even own a pair of running shoes.
01:07:04
Speaker
I don't even know how to get started. I have no clue how to get started. And I said, well, can I give you some advice, basically, you know, back and forth on messenger? Yeah, please. And I said, well, tomorrow morning, you start and you get off the couch and you put on your feet, whatever you have, and you walk out your front door and you go to the end of your lane.
01:07:25
Speaker
and then you turn around and you come back in the house and you take your shoes off and then you sit back down on the couch and you don't do any more than that. Then the day after that, you get up, you do the same thing and maybe you go a little further, you go two houses down, you turn around and you come back and so on and so forth to the point that you can walk to your nearest running shoe store or store or whatever to get yourself a pair of shoes.
01:07:48
Speaker
and then throw away those shoes that you started out with, and now walk back in your running shoes, because now you're someone with a set of goals and a plan, because sequentially you've done something every day. You're not gonna build Rome in a day. And when I would go through chemo, I'm used to someone who can go out and run 30, 40K, right? And I would come home after chemo, and two days of chemo, I would get up the next morning, I would be so sick, dude.
01:08:15
Speaker
Look, I just couldn't do anything. And I would spend two or three days laying around, you know, looking at my phone. And then after the nausea would start to go away, I'd say to myself, okay, today I'm going for a walk and I would go out my door and I would do the same thing that I told that person. And we live on a road that's about 500 meters long, dead end. And I said, okay, that's my goal. I'm walking to the end of the road and I'm coming back and then I know I've done something.
01:08:43
Speaker
And I would come home, and I would rest. The next day I would get up, and then we have another Cirque Desit, and I have this another, like, you know, road, it's about a kilometer. All right, I'm gonna go on a big hill. I'm gonna go walk that.
01:08:54
Speaker
Dude, I can't tell you how stoked I was when I would get out and walk that kilometer, because then I felt like I could do it. And I knew in my mind, I did 500 meters yesterday, I did a kilometer today, I'll do a kilometer and a half tomorrow. By the weekend, I'm gonna run a kilometer. By the middle of the next week, I'll do 5K run on the trails. By the end of two weeks, I'll be doing 10K runs, and that was about where I peaked out in between the key. I'll do 10K trail run.
01:09:24
Speaker
and I will get that shit done. And it built on one another, right? Rome not built in a day, one step at a time, and celebrate those small goals. Like I said earlier in our conversation, it'd be nailing to appreciate that that small goal is as valid as the bigger achievements that'll come later on. And check the ego at the door, right? Yeah. Like fitness is so relative, right? It's where
01:09:53
Speaker
You know, it's like when we go off effort-based, you know, that for you is challenging in the moment. But the former, the year before that, it was no big deal. I mean, you're used to doing, you know. Yeah, because you adapt to it, right? But in the same way that that person who had no clue how to get started, all you need to do is take the first step, right? And it sounds so corny to say, but it's absolute truth. Yeah. What would you say is like,
01:10:22
Speaker
movement has brought to your life. I know you have all these accolades in this list of accomplishments, but how do you think it's impacted you?
Life Lessons from Running
01:10:32
Speaker
Well, I think for certain running, I've said this many times before, but running, not today, but I mean in the past, running has been and is my greatest teacher because it's taken me around the world and taught me things about myself that I would have otherwise never known. So running has been much more than just a physical health improvement for me.
01:10:52
Speaker
But I also believe, and I've had people message me and say, you know, I can't believe you got cancer. You're such a healthy guy. How does that happen? And I said, well, you know what could have been a lot worse. Maybe who knows? Glad I'm so healthy. Right. So, you know, I.
01:11:10
Speaker
running and movement and exploration and adventure and ultras and mountain biking and all these things I do have brought me not only a sense of purpose but a sense of passion and it pervades every other part of my life, right? And every other part of my life is invested in that movement.
01:11:28
Speaker
So, like I said earlier at the beginning of our conversation, if you find something that you're passionate about, that you truly love in your life, and it becomes your focus or primary mover in your life, then you've won the lottery. I mean, what else do you want? You know? Yeah. And health and family, you know, and you have both those things now too.
01:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, blessed that you're okay and you can keep on moving forward. How can we keep track of you, Ray? Where can people find out about your exhibitions?
01:12:02
Speaker
All about you. Well, ironically, we were talking about the socials are clear, probably on social media. I mean, I'm on, you know, Instagram and Facebook and I have a website raisinghab.com, which gets occasionally updated. People seem to use websites anymore. The easiest thing. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. A lot of people like to use LinkedIn nowadays. Probably social media is the easiest way to reach out.
01:12:26
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Ray. I love talking to you, man. You're so inspirational, and it's amazing where you've come and where you're going and following along on your adventures and your kids now. We might be looking at some future Olympians there. I'm not sure, but I always love talking to you, and I hope everyone appreciated this chat as much as I do.
01:12:48
Speaker
Thanks, Justin. It was great being here with you again. I can't wait to find it. We got to get it on a run together. So I'm back in Canada now. I'm coming to Switzerland, so we'll see. Oh, amazing. Yeah, definitely. Drop me a line. Yeah. Take care, Ray. Thanks, man.
01:13:06
Speaker
And thanks for tuning in to the Justin Stride Podcast. I truly appreciate you taking the time to listen and I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Please take a minute after this to rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts. With your feedback, we'll be able to make the show even better and it'll help us reach new listeners too. You can also find us on Instagram at JustinStridePod for all the latest episodes and updates.
01:13:31
Speaker
Of course, this show wouldn't be possible without a solid team behind me. With logo and design by Vanessa Pugliese, as well as audio, music, and editing by Forest McKay, a huge thank you goes out to both of them. Guest outreach, social media, writing, and advertising are handled by me, your host, Justin Pugliese. Finally, we'd like to thank you, our listeners, for coming along for the ride with Justin Stradd.