Episode 377: Akshay Nanavati - 110 Day Arctic Crossing Project

Akshay Nanavati is a United States Marine veteran, speaker, entrepreneur, ultra runner and author. He served in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom and was later diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. He is currently training for a never before accomplished, solo, 2700km, 110 day expedition in Antarctica.

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Check Out My Endurance Series:

Episode 337: The Long Run Considering the Variables 

Episode 344: Endurance Training Simplified

Episode 346: Short Intervals Simplified   

Episode 348: Long Intervals Simplified   

Episode 352: Proper Aid Station Navigation

Episode 356: Easy Run - Simplified 

Episode 363: Mental Training For Endurance

Episode 366: Race Course Specific Training 

Episode 369: Speed Work Distribution & Double Threshold Sessions

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Austin, man. Welcome back, I should say. Thank you. Brother. So you lived in Austin for a while, right? I lived in Austin from when I was in high school. I moved here when I was 13 from Singapore. India did high school here and then left for my senior year and came back and did my undergrad in southwestern, just north of Austin. Oh, wow. Okay. So you actually really lived in Austin? Yeah. So how long ago was that? Do you mind me asking? I left Austin after, so it was my time in the Marines. My reserve unit was based here. And after college I left after undergrad, so I was about 21, 22, something like that. Okay. Yeah. So long, a long time. Long enough where it's a different city, almost completely different coming here now. It's like a world of a different city. Yeah, I would imagine so. We've been in Austin now for I guess it'll be two years in January. So it's coming up pretty quick on that. But I mean it's. It already happened when we got here, obviously, but it's just kind of continually growing. And I guess they just recently used to be this building - like regulation where you could only build so high south of. I forget which road I might have even been south of the lake. And they just removed that, which was kind of a big hurdle for development to occur beyond like malls, essentially, because like malls are going to be a single story a lot of times. Yeah. And now that that's gone, it opens it up for apartment complexes and condominiums and things like that. So now there's a bunch of developers are looking at these abandoned malls that are now down kind of south of the city or south part of the city, as like these great opportunities because, you know, as people keep coming in to Austin, that's what they're looking for, more housing and things like that. So yeah, it's an interesting time to be here. So yeah, I've heard it, Austin and even where I live, Phoenix is someone that's the fastest growing city in the country. Yeah, from what I understand. Yeah. So that's actually an interesting point because we were in Phoenix, that's where we moved from. And when we laughed, it was growing really fast. And especially during the pandemic, there was a scenario where our real estate agent told us. That normally the greater Phoenix area, which is like, you know, Glendale, Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, all these places would have like 35,000 houses on the market in any given time. That was like average. And during the pandemic it got down to 3500. So they were doing like a 10% supply. Yeah. Which as you can imagine, the house prices went 1s up like crazy. So crazy. We were lucky we bought it in 2018. So we got in before that obviously came to us and we sunk it all right back and stuff here because it's a similar situation here with, you know, supply and demand with that. But yeah you're back on the show now I think this is the third time actually because you came on by yourself. And then I had you back on with Dr. Nelson when we were kind of going over some nutritional stuff about you. Yeah, your project, which is starting to form itself in terms of actual dates and yes, sir, times and things like that. One year from now, I'll be actually either in Antarctica or on my way to Antarctica, in Chile, to train for. Right. So my whole world right now is training for it to attempt the first ever 110 day solo, 1700 mile coast to coast ski crossing of Antarctica. So a crossing of Antarctica coast to coast has been done with kites or dogs, but it's never been done without that. So pure man hauling, like dragging a £400 sled for 12 plus hours a day across the entire continent is the goal. Wow. And those skis, right? Cross-country skis? Yep. Is there a way to do it without skis, or is that just too long, I'm guessing. It's part of a part of the channel. Like something you could try with snowshoes. But part of the challenge is if you're not on skis, especially when you're on softer snow, you're just going to be plowing through. You know, there's that. But there are times where I'll actually be taking off the skis, because when you deal with there's a phenomenon there called Strug where it's kind of these windswept formations of snow that can be quite daunting, as high as, I mean, as a human being sometimes, but mostly not that high, but even high enough that and it's just kind of these little snow dunes, if you will, to navigate on skis. They're a nightmare. They're a freaking nightmare to ski on. I've been to Antarctica before on an expedition, and the sister guy just sucks. Like there's no two ways about it. So often when I'm dealing with significant portions of that, I will take off my skis to kind of just walk. It's even. It's just better. And what did you say those were called? So Shrug okay. Is there a Russian word? Oh, okay. I forget what exactly it means. I know what it's like, yeah, I know the phenomenon, what it looks like, and I've dealt with skiing on it and it's not fun. But yeah, those are. And I will inevitably deal with that. It's the nature of the beast in Antarctica, one of many challenges out there. So you're U1 targeting 110 days, which gives us kind of like a duration to wrap our minds around. What's the actual distance? 1700 miles, seven 1700 miles. And do you know, it is there because I'm imagining this isn't just a flat snow field. It is not the kind of thing I thought of when I first got into this world. But the South Pole is actually at 9000, 9500 ft. So you're going uphill. Like I'll start on a place called a fictional ice shelf, which is pure flat, and then go up a glacier called a support force. So you're going uphill and then kind of gradually uphill towards the South Pole and then gradually downhill on the other side, down the glacier called Reedy, back onto the ice shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf on the other side. But even downhill, it's not downhill where you can kind of, you know, get gravity and ski down. You're still having to work for every step with your sled. Is it relatively easier than going on the UPS, though? For sure. It's definitely at that point because at the South Pole, I'll be, you know, at distance wise, the halfway mark. I seriously doubt in terms of days I will make it there on the halfway mark because obviously your sleds are heavier, you're going uphill. So I think it'll be, I'm hoping around day 60 at the latest. So then I have another 50. Yeah, another 50 days to make it back down. But ideally I mean if I can somehow do something. Awesome happens and I'm at the South Pole on day 55. That'll be magical, you know? So yeah, you probably just know you're going to get there ahead of time if that happens, right? Yeah. Then I mean, if that happens, then I'll be in. I'll be feeling on top of the world because now your sleds have to wait and you're going slightly downhill. You're there that obviously there is kind of the cumulative fatigue, because doing 100 days, 110 days is not twice as hard as doing 55 days. It's exponentially harder, right? Because you have the cumulative fatigue build up of just the workload you're putting out there. Not to mention, I will be calorically deprived from the get go because I will be eating on the first five days. I'll be eating about 4500 calories, five days six through 1055, and then 6100 calories, and then working my way up to 6600 calories. Because initially when you get out there, your body just can't consume 6600 calories. So you start a little lighter just to get your body used to putting in so much food. And then I work up. But even at 6600 calories, I'll be at a deficit because I'll be burning like 8 to 10,000 a day. Which is why, as we were talking the other day, right. That kind of I'm filling out. Yeah, I have to get fat. It's a really weird thing, training for polar travel, because you need to train endurance. You need to train strength, and you need to do it all while you're fat. And none of those things go together. Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting because, like, yeah, you just can't roll up there in your peak fitness state and expect to come back or to get to the finish line in or even get there. You might just end up failing at that point because you'd be. What do you normally weigh when you're just kind of in the middle of something like a typical endurance training feat? When I was in peak ultrarunning shape, because this was a long time, ultrarunning was my main kind of thing that I was. I was doing nothing at your level, but that was my jam. And at that point I was £135 on the 3030. So I was skinny, right? Super obviously likes ultra running shape. Now I'm 170, so I have a lot more muscle as well as fat. Definitely just bulked up a lot too. And my goal because I'm going to Minnesota this winter for a training expedition, is to get to 175 before I get on the ice in Minnesota, but then I'll lose at least 20 or £30 out there, and then I have to bulk up again. And my goal is to get to 180 before Antarctica, because I think I'll lose at the minimum, £40. Okay. So when you get done, you're going to be back to that. Endurance ultramarathon, £103,540 version of yourself, which is going to be. Really interesting. You know, I've talked to a bunch of different kinds of long haulers. Yeah, mostly like transcontinental type stuff. Yeah. And one thing that I got curious about early on was I was asking him about that, like what was their approach in terms of weight maintenance or, you know, what was their target? Did they go in with more? Running's a little more goofy, I think, because there's an impact, of course, versus skiing. You're you have the advantage of it being a little lower impact I think. So you I mean, like I can imagine like if I put on £40 and started running, problems could occur exactly due to the impact. So that's not as much of an option for them. I think maybe £510 or so would probably be appropriate. But yeah. So I was just curious about how the body would respond with one approach versus the other. And it seemed to me, especially when I talk to someone who's done multiple, they would say the better they were able to maintain, the quicker their turnaround after was, by a pretty large margin. So even if they went in a little heavy and lost like, say, £20 over the course, yeah, it took them so much longer to return to normalcy after the trip versus 1s like I think one of the examples was the person they finished the trans con with was only like £2 lighter. So it was like, wow, you know, could have just been water weight, you know. Exactly. So it's a pretty wild level of maintenance. Yeah. And they had done it. You know, this might have actually been Dean Karnazes. Oh okay. Because I think he did, I want to say this was him, but he said he did because he's done it twice. He might have done it three times, but he did it. He did it once where he just kind of showed up with his normal state and just kind of tried to eat as much as he could, kind of what you would imagine. And then the next time I think he did it, he intentionally gained weight. I think it was like £10 or something like that. And he was able to kind of finish at his normal, like kind of comfortable training weight. So he shed the extra weight that he had put on, but he didn't lose much beyond what he would normally kind of like. Prefer to be at when he's just going about his day to day. Got you. And he said, I think after that one he bounced back a lot quicker. I think that was Dean. I've had a lot of different long haulers on you. I asked Christian Morgan. He's been on a couple of times. He's done like a lot of Appalachian Trail stuff. Okay. And he just recently broke the southbound record on the Appalachian Trail. And he was telling me, I think, too, about just kind of the variance between some of the different guys have done it because I think I think Scott Jerk might have lost a lot of weight during it, and he seemed to have a little bit of a harder time post, okay, post effort versus Carl Meltzer, who I think lost very little and he seemed to bounce back a little quicker, which who knows. I mean, it's a little bit of a lot of confounders probably to consider there. But yeah, it's an interesting thought process. So yeah, it'll be fun, fun to hear kind of how you feel after because there's really no way around losing that much weight for sure. Yeah. Just due to the logistics. Because how big is your sled? Because it'll be two sleds that I'm carrying for about I'm estimating around £400 at the most 200 kilos, which is £440. But obviously the lighter the lighter the better. I mean, it is ruthless with weight cutting, like even measuring my food, which by the way, you were very helpful for and came up with. So thank you for all your support along the way as well. But coming up with the food plan to get as many calories as possible, to be as light as possible, while also getting my macronutrient numbers. Right. Because you're again, you're putting in so much work. But unlike like, like you said, with the running, the transcontinental run, it's a lot more impact. It's a lot harder. But you have support teams over there like low impact for me, but I'm carrying all my own food. So that's like the, you know, the pros and cons kind of thing of each challenge. So I can't just eat as much as I'd like to, I can't eat as much. But I'll be dragging all my own food, my fuel, because I'll be boiling snow for water and my own tent. And I mean everything cutting weight like I've cut the tags off clothes. I'm not taking any. I'll be wearing the same clothes for the whole hundred and ten days at least, to say I'll be pretty stinky at the end of it. 1s But even like. I cut my toothbrush in half. I've cut the zips, the zip handles off my tent to save more weight. And I tie a string because you have to have strings on all zips because you're using mittens with them, right? So tie the string directly to the zip. Cut the zip handle off. Saved like another 35-40g. So as much as possible, just ruthlessly weight cutting to make it as efficient as possible. Not only does that have the physical element of just being a lighter sled, psychologically it helps because now you know you've done everything possible to be ruthless with weight cutting, including my food, to be as weight efficient as possible. Like on previous expeditions, for example, I used to eat some things like cheese and salami, for example. And I didn't know this at the time because on previous expeditions I didn't have to be as ruthless with weight cutting. It was a shorter trip, heavier sled, not the end of the world. This trip is so big. Never been done before for a reason, that I'm a lot more ruthless with my details of weight cutting. So I would realize that cheese, for example, might have ten grams worth of fat, fat, proteins, and carbs. Let's just say just a number. But for that ten grams of macro macro weight, it might be a serving of 18g. So that's highly weight inefficient, right? So I looked at foods that only had a 90% or better ratio of macro weight to actual weight. That way I'm just being as weight efficient with my food as possible. And to find all that to nail down the exact grams of food, it was a good amount of work to get that to be even 6600 calories. I've got it to weigh 1.1 kilos, which is very weight efficient. Bipolar standards. And that's your daily intake of 1.1. Yeah. So one one at 66 it'll be 1.1. So yeah. But when I'm at 61 because I'm taking a calculated risk from day 11 to 50, I'll be at 6100 calories. Just to reduce a little bit more weight on the sled. It'll save me another £5 by doing that. Uh, which again, it's kind of a risk because even at 66, you're still at a deficit. Yeah, but the sled is just nightmarishly heavy when you're, you know, when you're when it's not that big. So and you're hauling the extra body weight at that point too. So you sort of have this mobile aid station on you. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. That's a big reason why now, in my training, I don't actually run at all for my endurance work because to that point, like I'm carrying around just so much more fat even and so much more muscle that the injury, you're so much more injury prone, like I've noticed, noticeably feel it's a lot harder to move. So my endurance work purely comes from tire dragging and hiking, just because that's also more kind of applicable to what I'm doing, you know? So I've stopped running completely and I only get all my cardio work through that. Yeah. So tell us a little about the little or the sled setup. What does that look like in terms of your training? Do you have a you're pulling? Yeah. What else goes into that in the tire? Nothing. So when I live in Phoenix right. And so it's a really comical sight. I have this giant truck tire that I just go dragging around parks for sometimes hours on end, like a couple of weeks ago was my 39th birthday to sort of celebrate it at a 39 hour endurance week with three back to back nine hour endurance days. So two of them were nine hours of tire dragging and then a nine hour hike and nine hours of tire dragging. His mind numbing because you're moving so freaking slow, you know, and you're just moving painfully slow around this little park. So that's the core element. But now I'm going to Minnesota this winter to replicate the Antarctic conditions as much as possible, where I'll be dragging a sled. So that'll be just a very heavy sled. I'll load it up with tons of weight to try to get to £400. Not the same sled I'll be using in Antarctica, because those two sleds are custom made and I have them with me. But I'm. I want them fresh and scratched, you know, for Antarctica. But it'll be just a very heavy sled that'll be dragging for 35 days. I'm staying with my fiance at an Airbnb, just going out every day, and then 35 days, going out solo on an expedition like a mini Antarctica, essentially. And that'll be kind of loading it up with food. My tent, my fuel stoves, everything that I'll be using in Antarctica. Yeah, a total dress rehearsal. Exactly. So. You're gaining a ton of weight now in preparation for this dress rehearsal. Essentially, yes. That's going to take a huge chunk of that weight off of you, I would imagine. So what's the game plan after you finish the dress rehearsal? Once I come back, I immediately start bulking back up. None of this is great for the body, right? 1s But the way I see it is great for the mind and spirit. So but that's like I mean, right now even to bulk up, I mean, I'm eating other than being gluten free, I'm eating kind of everything. But right before I go on an expedition, I move to a keto style diet. And I actually primarily like right now I'm, for example, sleeping carbs. It's just a great way to just get fat. But I moved to a keto style because when I'm on ice, 73% of my diet is on fats, because fats is nine calories per gram and protein carbs are four, so it's more weight efficient to have a heavier fat ratio. Right? But to get my body acclimated and used to using fat as the primary source of energy, I moved to keto a little bit before the expedition. So once I come back, I'll just carb load, just eat a shit ton, start bulking back up, and then alternate between keto. Because my goal is not to be in ketosis. I'm not trying to lose weight, I just want to get my body fat adapted, not carb adapted as the primary source of energy. Yeah, once you get out there, your body's going to be burning a tremendous amount of fat off of you. And as well as what you're eating. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It'd be really cool if they could, like, hook you up to some sort of biometric. Yeah, things that could, like, analyze everything that's going on when you're out there between just the feedback your body's giving and the just the ratios of carbs of fat that you're burning along the way and stuff like that. Sure. Yeah. It would be interesting to know. Yeah. So you have it. Do you have percentages of fats, carbs and proteins? Kind of figured out what you'll be doing on a day to day basis while you're out there? I do. I'll be taking 300g fat, 150g protein, and the fat is the only one that will vary depending on my calorie. But at 6600 calories, it'll be about 550g fat. Okay, interesting. And how much carbs are you getting then? 300? 300? Yeah. So it's so funny because the numbers are so high. 300g of carbs still fits within like a ketogenic ratio, essentially. Because. Exactly. Because the numbers are so high. So even at those numbers, it's like 70. I think 70 to 73% of calories come from fat. So yeah, it's a topic that I talk about from time to time, because a lot of people who are interested in what I'm doing or interested in what I'm doing, somewhat because of the dietary stuff, because that's different enough. Yeah, from what they typically think an endurance athlete would be doing. So eventually they get around to asking me the common question of, well, what are you eating? What are your macronutrient ratios and things like that? And it's like, I always feel compelled to share what I'm doing in training alongside any description I give, because first of all, it changes. Like if I'm off season, the grams, the gram totals in every one of them will look different. Yeah, but you know, you introduce a 20 hour training week and then all of a sudden like, yeah, I might have a day where I'm eating quite a bit more carbohydrates than what a person on a ketogenic diet would do. But if you would test my blood ketone levels, there's a good chance I'm going to be well into a ketogenic-like therapeutic range of blood ketone levels. Yeah. So yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like we have like this dietary approach that has sort of like, I guess multiple ways of being defined, you know, that people kind of gravitate towards the Phinney Volk kind of criteria of like 50g or less, which for most people, that's probably a good kind of target if you're just going about your life not training for anything specifically, 50g is probably what it would take. You introduce training for the 100 mile race. That number shifts. Yeah, exactly. Put so much work. Yeah. It's so funny to think about. 1s Yeah. So what are you eating? How many calories a day are you eating right now? Just to gain weight? Right now, you know, my, I'm still at a point, especially with traveling. Just, like, eat anything. But once I go back because I'm about, what, six weeks away from Minnesota heading out, I'm going to, once I get back from this trip to Austin, move to start moving to keto and I haven't like currently been measuring calories. It's more just eating everything and just measuring that weight to make sure it's not losing. But once I go to keto part, a big part of it will be just drinking straight oil because again, you have to eat so many calories because not only do I need to maintain or not lose, I got to keep putting on and putting in that many hours of training while trying to put on it's work. You know you're eating like an animal, so part of it is just drinking straight oil to one. Get my body used to that because I'll be doing that on the expedition as well. Part of it is just drinking oil is just straight calories right. But obviously you can't eat or drink too much of that. That's not really good for digestion to say the least. So I do a little bit of that because again, when you're trying to eat so much fats, oil is the only thing that's pure fat. So there's no carbs or proteins in it, you know. So part of that I've gotten used to at one point, like drinking like 50g of oil a day, just mix it with some water or in a protein shake or whatever, and just down a ton of oil. There's different ways to do it. I remember when I was teaching, actually, I had like a jar of olive oil, like in this cupboard by my desk that I would just like when I was on, like a big training block. And it was like, I mean, you get busy when you're working a full time job and it's like easy to, like, not eat enough and then realize you. The hard part is like you get to the end of the day, you've done a couple of workouts and you're like, dang, I'm only like halfway to my calorie goals for the day, and now I have to eat this, like, uncomfortable amount of food. Yeah. So it's like you do all these weird little things to try to make sure you don't get yourself in that situation in the first place. Yeah. So like when I was kind of low carb, I wasn't going to, you know, try to do like oils, like you said something that's pure fat in a lot of cases. Exactly. I remember one day. So I would just take pulls from it, like sometimes like in between classes, like it wouldn't be much. So it wasn't kind of all that disgusting like it would be if I tried to actually physically drink a glass of it. Yeah, exactly. So it's almost just like a palate cleanser type of oil. Yeah. And like I remember one point I remember thinking was like, you know, this olive oil bottle sort of looks like a bottle of wine. I better, like, make it known what I'm doing here. Exactly. Like getting drunk in the middle of class trouble. 2s But yeah. So it's interesting stuff, but. Yeah. What you got to do. Yeah, yeah. Because there's two, there's kind of two components to that. There's the. You want to start the event with sort of a dietary approach you're familiar with, just so that, like you said, like you have like the fat oxidation rates that may be impacted by the duration in which you're doing it. So kind of going in cold turkey may not be good for that, but then it's just the digestibility. So there's probably like a digestibility threshold in general with certain things like oils that probably ranges from one person to the next. But then there's also going to be like an adaptation, I would imagine, where like in the beginning, your threshold is this. But if you're doing it for six weeks, that threshold may increase and get closer to what you're or hopefully to what you're going to actually be doing. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I was at a point and I had kind of stopped a little bit. Now life's been a little crazy moving around, but drinking like 50-60g of oil a day, you know, and no issues digestion wise. I also moved initially when I first started doing it, I drank like 50g of MCT oil, MCT oil. It was disastrous for my digestion. That was not a good day. So I moved to avocado oil. It's a great way to lose weight. Maybe. Exactly, exactly. So I moved to avocado oil. So you live and learn through making some mistakes as you go through this process. But yeah, I moved to avocado oil and now even like I mean I could easily drink 2030 no issues and just kind of increase a little bit from there. It's kind of a bummer because MCT oil would be probably the best option if it could, if you could handle it. I do have a little bit in the. One of my buddies is a supplement formula designer, so he made a custom made supplement for me for Antarctica because my diet isn't exactly healthy out there, right? Right. So his supplement gives me all the micronutrients, the vitamins. It does have some MCT oils in there as well. So I'm getting a little bit through that source and I forget what else. I mean, it's a beast of a supplement. It's got like legit and like this, that. And the other thing, it's an absurd amount of ingredients he's concocted together. This mix, I would imagine, like. Explorations and long duration things like this where you're self-supporting has gotten a bit of a technological advantage just for food chemistry, for sure. Now you can just dehydrate stuff. You can get like in the past, you'd probably come back with all sorts of deficiencies. Yeah. Now you kind of be on top of that. Yeah. Way back when they used to get scurvy and all kinds of stuff. Right. Thankfully we don't have that issue anymore. Definitely a lot more knowledge since then. Yeah. So yeah, I'm blessed with a good team who makes this possible. You know, my buddies created like an insane supplement and all the help has gotten even coming up with the nutritional plan, which has been invaluable. And I put it to the test on previous expeditions as well. And now I'll be refining it further and further on as I go to Minnesota. You know, a lot of things like even when I'm skiing, I've changed a little bit of my lunch diet. So I'll be skiing for the first shift for 90 minutes, taking a quick break for water, peeing food, and then eight shifts of 75 minutes is kind of the goal. So after the fourth shift, I have a slightly different meal because while I'm skiing, my on the go food is macadamia nuts and chocolates. So after the fourth break, I'll have a tiny bit of jalapeno chips in a different kind of chocolate, because psychologically, that also gives you something smaller to look forward to, right? You have a break to have to think about lunch, not think about the end of the day. I mean, as much as possible, keeping your mind present, staying in the now. But as you well know, your mind's going to wander. Yeah. And I'm going to think about what's next. So if you break it up into these mini chunks you have, it makes it psychologically easier. So that was a learning from I was in the Arctic earlier this winter, doing a couple of solo expeditions up there as training, and it was like, all right, I need something else to break the length of this day just to make it psychologically easier. So just switch the variety of chocolate and jalapeno chips, a very small amount for my lunch, because most of that I'll eat when I first come into the tent. That is heavenly. That's my morale. Food is at the after I. After I finished the day of skiing, I set up my tent. I went in there and while the snow was boiling for water, which takes a little bit of time, the first thing I ate was jalapeno chips and divine. Divine. Yeah. The mental side is really, really interesting to me and I've always been working. I've got a continuous goal of refining how to describe the mental approach of these longer efforts. I mean, I'm working mostly single day ultramarathon stuff, but it's a similar idea of scaffolding your goals and things like that. So one way I've been trying to describe it to people now, most recently is like, if you think of it like your mind, your mind is kind of like a magnet where it is going to get attracted to whatever kind of target or goal that you set out for it. Yeah. So the easy part is the end goal that sort of presents itself. And that's usually the draw in the first place. So that's good to have that like attention in that draw towards that because it's going to draw. You're gonna draw motivation from that and things like that, but it's almost too far off. So whether you're looking at it yeah, whether you're looking at it from the lens of I'm going to do this big training program to get ready for this 100 mile race, or you're actually on the starting line of 100 mile race, and you're going to go through the pages of getting from start to finish. Yeah, you you expend way more mental energy, in my opinion, when you have that goal too far out. So it's like that attraction, that duration of the attraction actually, like physically drains more mental energy than if your mind can kind of attach itself to something a little closer, 100%. Yeah. So you kind of got to build in this scaffolding of these different things that your mind is going to get sucked into and think about that will supersede what you want to get to. But it's too early to start thinking about it. Absolutely. And I always find that to be like, the more of those you can build in, the better it's going to be from a mental energy standpoint. But I'm still again talking about single day stuff. Granted, I guess the training you could get to durations as long as what you're talking about here, but that's also got a lot of like kind of intuitive built in things where you finish a workout, you're done till the next day. Yeah. Whereas you finish a day and you kind of are just doing more work and then basically sleeping, getting and doing it all over again, doing the same thing. Yeah, that's the challenge and part of the draw for polar travel, because polar travel, there's a polar explorer from the 1900s and the kind of the OG days of polar exploration who said polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time, which has been devised. And I couldn't agree more because, you know, unlike it often gets compared to mountain climbing like Everest or something like that. It's not nearly as dangerous as Alex Honnold Free solo or the alpinist, right? Free soloing up ice or even mountaineering. But it's far more painful. Part of that is when I, and I've done a lot of mountaineering as well. As you go up and down the mountain, it's more dynamic. The terrain is different, the days are different, the views are different and often the environment forces you into flow. Like I was in Denali early last year, the tallest man in North America. And you know, there's a 16 ridge at 16,000ft where it's such a thin ridge line, one foot in front of the other in front of the other, and you've got like 1000 foot drop on each side. When you're in that, your mind forces you into flow. The environment forces you into flow. You're not thinking about stuff. You're not looking at the views because you're thinking about the one step in front of you. Yeah, right. You have to. So that's beautiful. But in Antarctica you don't have that because it's just flat white nothingness. Every day, barring a few sections of Antarctica where there's a mountain range, every day is flat white nothingness, and you're doing the same damn thing over and over and over again. That monotony is mind numbing. And that's to me, as I'm more drawn from the suffering, the struggle, the endurance aspect rather than the danger aspect. So it's not nearly as dangerous as some of that mountaineering stuff, but it's a lot more mental and physical suffering repeatedly. And that to me, it's not the suffering in and of itself that I seek. It's what that suffering gives you access to. As you well know, running as you enter the pain cave, you struggle, you suffer, but it gives you access to that transcendence. And that is the draw. But because it's so monotonous to your point earlier, you have to break it down into those like, I'm not entering Antarctica thinking about day 110, right? So the multiple different ways to do that one element is the latitude markers. As I move from 87 to 80 8 to 80 9 to 90 degrees, the South Pole, another one is every ten days I'll eat a dessert. So I'll have a different meal. That also adds just a morale element. But now you have something to look forward to. And outside of those ten days, my fiance is going to write me a letter every ten days. That just kind of it's something really to look forward to, to open, you know. So I'll have sort of five days will be the letter, the next five days will be the desert, then five days the letter. So you have these little things constantly to keep you motivated and keep you going throughout. And then even in the middle of the day, as I mentioned, the lunches and even that first shift is 90 minutes and then the next ones are 75. So once that first shift is done, it's kind of like in my mind, the first shift no longer counts. It's like a nothing shift. Now you only have four shifts till you've got to hit lunch. You know, it's all these little things to keep breaking it down. And even just one shift is 75 minutes. That's your whole world. Your whole world is that shift. I just got to go there and. And the burden as well as the beauty of polar travel is during those shifts, your mind wanders because, as I said, it's flat, white nothingness. Right? So you can sometimes lose your mind if you're not, if you don't have mastery over it, it can make five minutes feel like a lifetime. And I've had moments on polar trips where I look at my watch thinking like, we're almost finished with the shift and it'll be like ten minutes in and I'm like, oh, damn it, this is terrible. You know? So mastery over the mind is the draw. And that's everything like training for that, you know? Yeah. Getting ready for Antarctica is mind mastery as well. It's an interesting topic because I think with my coaching clients, one thing I'll try to do is I'll try to separate as much as you can. There's obviously an exchange here between the physical and the mental. Yeah, but I'll try to describe in two different ways to give them kind of like focal points so that they can actually like. 1s Com so they can actually comprehend what they're doing and then actively do it and acknowledge they're doing it so that they feel prepared. So one of it is just you get to the start of this race, this 100 mile race, and it gets to be this point where you get closer and closer to you start getting nervous, anxiety and everything that goes into like, I've got to run 100 miles. And so it's like, how do you rationalize that? Will you make it smaller and how do you make it smaller? You look at everything you did to prepare for it. So what I'll tell a lot of my coaching clients is think of it this way. Like by the time you step on that starting line, you've done 99% of this project. The 100 mile race itself is really just a consolidation of like a week or two of training into one day. And it's really just that last 1% of everything you've done so far. And if you want to extrapolate even further and just think like, how long have you been running? Well, ten years. So. Well, you've technically been preparing for this for ten years. Then don't don't discount the steps that built you up to the training plan you currently did. I love that one. I think people have an easier time wrapping their head around. The next one is like, how do they actually think about the mental process in terms of acknowledging things that they've done that have prepared them? Because I think most people are mentally ready, they just don't know it. And if they don't know what, they can't access the tools available to actually get through it. So the way I tell it to people with this one is like, think of it, anything you do in life, like if you have a job, you're doing this just intuitively where it's like you go into work. Maybe your boss gives you a project. That project is going to take you two weeks to do so, you start scaffolding what you need to do each day at work to take the steps required to get there. So once you kind of have that scaffolding laid out, you stop thinking about the end of the project as your constant. Yeah, I mean it's there, it's in the back of your mind, but it's not something that you're burning a lot of mental energy on. You're worried about Monday from ten until noon. I need to finish this aspect of it, and I can't even worry about the next step until I finish this aspect. Yeah. So I think really just like knowing or acknowledging that in your day to day life, you're likely doing these things and it's just a matter of don't mindlessly go through that process. Acknowledge that process so you can actually get the gratification of what you're actually doing mentally, and then place that over the approach that you described in terms of adding it to the physical element of doing ultramarathons, or in your case, Arctic exploration. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And the mental aspect is, I mean, of course there is a physical aspect, but it mostly is that, as you know, from ultrarunning, but especially out there when you're completely alone, you know, navigating that solitude. So I've learned over time, like some of the core virtues that guide me is presence, being able to master presence and staying in the now. And a very simple way to do that is bring your world back into your five senses. So one of my many mantras I also use is make your world small. Kind of like what you echoed, right? So making your world small. Bring it back to the five senses and then courage. Because every day courage is the. I mean, Maya Angelou says, courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice it erratically, but not consistently. So. Courage every day. I mean, stepping out on that battlefield every day. It's work. Especially when you're being hammered by hurricane force winds. Right. Brutal winds, -40 degrees. Some of the most savage environments on Earth, you know, out there. And then curiosity, always having an openness to see what was what will be out there, like being out there alone, the depths of solitude, the depths of suffering. I get to open doors into the human soul that are very rarely opened, you know, and that's part of the draw. And so a curiosity to see what will be in that, you know, on the other side of those doors, like you have to battle the dragon to find the treasure. And the bigger the dragon, the dragon out there is going to be a big one. So the treasures I get to unearth are huge in curiosity. I mean, people have asked me, you know, what next? Who will you be after this? And I said, I don't know. Yeah. And that's part of the excitement. And then having a sense of humor is an absolute must. You have to be able to laugh at yourself, laugh at things because things get hard out there. You know, out there the volume of life is dialed. Everything is, you know, amplified at a high intensity. So the highs are so high, but the lows are so extremely low. And it becomes this kind of microcosm to experience the entire human condition in one kind of condensed period of time, which is part of the draw. But those four virtues I've found are not only valuable in this, but just in life to navigate the challenges of life. You do that. And of course, there's many other virtues, but I found that none of those four are someone's trump, the other is, and a lot of others will spring from them. They've been invaluable in guiding me through all the things I've done, even to prepare for what's coming. Yeah. And we've talked about some of the stuff you've done in the past on prior episodes, but for listeners who are maybe just going to listen to this one, this isn't something that you just decided to do on a whim and which is probably good. Yeah, exactly. So you said something that, I mean, we chatted about this a little bit yesterday too, but the way I think about just life in general, now that I'm older than I once was, I guess is the way to say it is. There's certain, like you hit certain benchmarks in life where you sort of have a big change or something is different to the degree where you feel like you've almost entered a different life or a different phase of your life, at least. And then you look back at yourself during those previous stages, and it's almost a different person to some degree. And the further back you go, usually the less connected you may be to that person, or the more separate that person is from your current self. Yeah. Generally, those take a lot of time to go from one to the next. I think, you know, you have some ones that are kind of built into society maybe where like, you know, high school versus college, your first real job out of college, stuff like that. But the way you've kind of gone about just endurance and ultramarathon, if we want to call it that, is putting you kind of in a position probably to, like you said, in a relatively compressed period of time, come out the other end not recognizing the person who went in. Exactly. Yeah. What's that like, given the different experiences you've had? It's, you know, to a certain degree, life through them my way. I mean, before when I first moved here, you know, as I mentioned, I moved from India to Singapore, got very heavily into drugs, lost two friends to addiction, and still have all these scars in my arm from cutting myself. This was a cigar burn. Very self destructive. Lost. Two friends. Got out of that. Watched the movie Black Hawk Down. You've seen that? Yeah, that movie changed my life. It got me out of drugs and into the military, the Marines. So that's why you joined? That's why I joined. Because watching that movie, specifically, that scene where Gary, Goran and Randy sugar, these two Delta snipers, they volunteer to go on the ground to set up a defensive perimeter to protect the second Black Hawk that it crashed. They knew that they had no idea when reinforcements would arise, and they knew that hundreds, if not thousands of armed enemy personnel were heading their way and they still volunteered to go down. They both died, but the guy they died protecting, Michael Durant, is still alive today because of what they did. And that courage, man, that it's awe inspiring, you know? So it made me question this very selfish, worthless existence I was living and almost overnight stopped doing drugs, joined the Marines. So that was the Marines birth, the very essence of who I am today, the desire to seek out struggle, to seek out adversity. Because Marine Corps training was hard. You suffered and that was beautiful, right? It taught me the ability in the human spirit to transcend suffering, to go to war with the self and win, and to do it in service of something greater. In the Marines. Nobody gave a shit about your well-being. What mattered was the men in the mission and set from all the politics of the war. And like a lot obviously was wrong and all that. But on the ground, even in Iraq, we were there to help. We wanted to do some good. We were serving, helping the people there. We were fighting for each other, you know, and even at the cost of your own well-being. There were a lot of times we didn't want to go on missions. You go when you're told to, you know which many times it sucked in the moment, but it was beautiful. So the Marines birth that and that's when I that like that was one evolution of the self one. You know there was a death of one version of me even now coming into Austin, because this is where I had my whole drug phase and I was looking at my life. And as I was driving in here with my fiance and I told her, like, I can't even fathom that version of me, I can't even imagine this version of me looking back, the things I used to do and the draw of that. Even going to frat parties in college, the amount I used to drink back then, you know, I can't even wrap my hand around that version of me. Yeah, because I struggled a lot even after Iraq, like the Marines got me into outdoor sports. But then after Iraq, I was deployed to Iraq in oh seven as an infantry marine. And when I came back, I really struggled with alcohol. When I was diagnosed with PTSD, depression, lost a couple of junior Marines to suicide, lost a close buddy of mine in the war, and struggled a lot. I mean, I was at one point a man drinking like a bottle of vodka a day. I would drink for five days straight, throw up, drink again, you know? And until I was on the brink of suicide, that was another of those transformational moments, because coming out of that, like, that's what led me to then going deep into studying neuroscience, studying psychology, studying spirituality, confronting my own demons, doing that inner work which led me to then writing my book Fear Varna, to help others navigate their fear and their struggle. You know, all of that was another transformational moment. So like some of these were thrust upon me. But after that especially is when I started to because when I joined the Marines, I didn't consciously do it as a way to seek evolution of the self. It was like, this is what I want to do. I wasn't as self-aware as I am now, but since then, since kind of coming out of that abyss of suicide, it was like, now how do I engineer such moments? How do I engineer these moments where one self dies and another is reborn? And Antarctica is that expression at its highest level? Because this is the biggest thing I've ever done, never been done before for a reason. If I can somehow pull it off, it's going to be game changing, right? And that's why even I've named the expedition the Great Soul Crossing. The idea is that it's a crossing of the soul from one life to the next. You know, I love this, that story from ancient Greece where when somebody died, they would put coins on their eyes to pay the ferryman to to ferry their soul from some one life to the afterlife. And it's kind of like, in my opinion, I believe in life there should be many deaths and many rebirths. So one dies and another is reborn. And these and this happens through the crucible of struggle, through the crucible of suffering to putting yourself. And this doesn't just mean physical, right. It can also mean mental emotional. Like, as you know, I've done Darkness retreats where twice I spent one day, one time in seven days, and the other time ten days in pitch darkness. Just complete darkness, 24 over seven, sitting in a room. All of these moments, those weren't physically challenging, but mentally and spiritually extremely challenging, you know? So putting yourself in these moments that result in one self dying in another being reborn and that's that's that to me, I think is not the essence of just growth and evolution, but it's how you feel more life. In in how you feel more alive in this human experience. It's a beautiful way to kind of move through life, to experience that. Yeah. I wanted to talk to you a bit about the darkness Retreat stuff, because I think that has been something that has gotten a lot more public attention recently. I think Aaron Rodgers did his four day darkness retreat between his last season in this season, and it was one of those things where, you know, he's a big enough name, where now people who otherwise would have never been exposed to it now are aware of what it is. Yeah, probably a healthy bit of humor and lack of understanding too. But yeah, I also have a buddy who's done it, and I think it was actually similar . I think it might have been like the same place that Aaron Rodgers went to. But you actually like introducing this to some people, don't you? Like, you were maybe one of the I guess maybe, maybe the question here is how did you find out about Darkness Retreats? And is this something that we've all been kind of ignorant to and has been around for a long time, and it's just now kind of getting its light? Yeah, it's definitely been around for a long, long time. I got into it because I went through a very, very challenging divorce without going too deep into it. My ex-wife kind of got caught up in this cult and it was a crazy situation. I ended up breaking my sobriety and when I do anything, I do pretty hard. So I broke hard and I didn't like that version of me. So I was like, I'd already done a lot of physical challenges at this point, but I was like, something's missing. So let me confront this fear I have of stillness. And so I wanted to go deeper into the self. So I was going to go do a ten day silent retreat. Their thing is called vipassana. They're much more common. And as I was researching it, I stumbled into this notion of a darkness retreat. And I was like, this is far more appealing to me because in the darkness, we're shutting off one of the primary ways in which we engage with the world: your visual sense. So even in a simple way, I can look right now and say, that's a white wall, but my mind has somewhere external to latch on to in the darkness. It has nowhere external to latch onto, so you're forced to go within. So that's how I stumbled upon it. And then I was very blessed. I went on Aubrey Marcus's podcast, shared it with him, and then he went on to the same darkness retreat that I went to in Germany. And then I think he did a documentary about it, which kind of blew it up. So by no means did I introduce it to the world. I did help, I guess, spread it a little bit, and I think it's a blessing. Like I couldn't be more happy to have spread it, to help spread it, because I know it made a difference. For Aubrey. It's made a lot of difference, and I think it's one of the most profoundly beautiful experiences to go to because in my experience with human condition, I think one of the biggest fears we have is stillness. It's not something people like if you ask somebody, what are you scared of? They'll say stillness. But we do. Everything in the world is could not be more evident of that, to distract ourselves from ourselves. Carl Jung even said people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. And sometimes it's drinking, drugs, binge watching Netflix. But sometimes it's even the positive things watching, you know, working, training. Often we do that. Even when I came back from Iraq, I went and did that. I did a one month ski crossing of Greenland, dragging £180 sled for 350 miles across the ice cap. Beautiful expedition. But back then I wasn't as aware and I was doing it just to escape my demons. I did not want to deal with the stillness of the normal world. And so it was actually after Greenland that I hit that rock bottom. But now I still do these things, but I'm not doing it to escape. I'm not doing it to run away. So darkness is a beautiful way to confront yourself, to be still with the soul. And see what arises. That's why I think it's a profoundly beautiful experience. I could not recommend enough to anybody. It'll it'll allow you to open doors within yourself that have never been opened before. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I mean, the way you described it is like you're literally turning off one of your senses, so you're shutting off an access point to the world. And then on top of it, you're consolidating yourself into a small room, because in order to keep it dark, you kind of have to. Exactly. So to some degree, you're probably shutting off other things to like others, you're shutting off such a magnitude of different sensory inputs that people have access to nowadays, since we have access to so many different opportunities. Yeah, which is both good and bad. Like you've kind of said, get yourself into trouble with that much information or that much stuff where at a certain point you almost have to hit the reset button. Exactly. And in the darkness you also see lights, because they say that your brain releases DMT in that level of darkness. So you start to see lights that are as real as any other lights. And in those lights, shapes will form and you call it what you want. Everybody I know who's gone to darkness experienced this, but you can call it God speaking to you, to these, through these lights or the universe consciousness, whatever your paradigm is. And that is very enlightening. It's very profound. I even journaled in the dark. I had a kind of ruler and I was journaling, and the stuff that came through was really, really, really deep. You know, it allowed me to find new places within myself that allowed me to access new stages of my own evolution and then bring that to the training that I do, the people that I help and teach. Did you? I mean, minus the journaling, I suppose. Did you have a hard time recalling what you were thinking about? Or were there certain things that my only connection pointed to? Something like this is really like, I'll do a 100 mile race, and one question I'll get is like, what are you thinking about the whole time? And I have the hardest time answering that question because there'll be like maybe 2 or 3 things. For whatever reason, my brain latches to and I assume I'm kind of going over those over and over again. And that's why they stick in there, because there's such repetition there. But there's also a bunch of stuff, almost like if you have a really vivid dream and then you wake up in the morning and you're like, wow, that was weird. And then later after you've forgotten, you're like, there's elements of it that you're like, I recalled this so vividly when I first woke up, and now I've completely forgotten it. Yeah, I assume there's that going on as well, where there's a lot of stuff that my mind is running through that sort of just gets kind of lost in the hard drive somewhere. Totally. And I can't even tell people what it was because I've already forgotten about it. I can completely relate. I think sometimes, even in interviews like this, people will ask me after, you know, how it goes, what questions he'd ask. And I'm like, I don't actually remember because you're so in it, you know, you don't. And the darkness is very similar. I mean, even my own journal, I came out reading portions of my journal being like, oh, because I don't remember writing that right. You know? And it was so moving to read that, to see what was revealed to me through these messages. So there's definitely a lot of that. And there's others that I do remember vividly, like I had what I perceive to be a conversation with God that left me bawling in tears. And I can vividly remember the lights that I saw hearing this voice and just, you know, the experience after that. So there's some of that and some that I just are very kind of these, like a dream, like a very, you know, weird kind of force that I have a vague memory of and some like some passages in my journal I don't remember at all. And that's so cool to go through moments like that, because you're so. In the business of that moment, you know, the pure business of that moment. Yeah. I wonder if this would, like, kind of ruin the experience to some degree, but it would be interesting to have a voice recorder. I actually did think about that because the first time I went in the darkness, I chose to be silent. Because when you speak to yourself, there's a feedback loop, right? I can hear my own words right now. So the chaos of consciousness is silenced by hearing my own words. So I wanted to be with the chaos of that consciousness. The second time I went into the darkness, the ten days, because the first time I went in, it was more kind of to heal. The second time I went in, it was pure training. It was training for Antarctica, training for solitude, stillness, mastery over mind, mastery over self, being with myself because I'll be with myself a lot when I'm in Antarctica. And that time I actually chose to speak out loud because that was an act of creation, like one of the tools I've really spent a lot of time studying is method acting. Are you familiar with it? Yeah. So yeah, method acting is basically like those actors who they live and breed the character. So Daniel Day-Lewis greatest method actor of all time, you know, or even Heath ledger when he was playing the Joker. Mastery of performance. Right. But even when the camera's not filming now, Lewis will stay in character. So he lives and breathes and he'll talk about how they actually dream and sleep and think and feel as if the character does not have himself. So what fascinated me about that is that if you think about that, I mean, here's a being who completely sheds his own identity, one director said of Daniel Day-Lewis, I've never seen anybody come close to complete obliteration of the self. So he completely sheds his construct of his identity of Daniel Day-Lewis and becomes something else. Now think about that in the lens of personal growth, because how we view ourselves is we have these constructs of our own identity. My nationality. Right. It's a construct of my own identity. And let me kind of elaborate on what I mean by that, because most of how we engage with reality is a construct. Like even, for example, if I see this white wall, I look at that and I've been taught from a young age that color is white. And that thing that I'm seeing is a wall. But there's a pure, imperceptible moment between pure experience and the constructs we latch on to experience. It's impossible to even notice it unless you're in these kinds of moments that we just talked about, where you're so in the now, and that's why you kind of don't even remember it. But most of how we engage with the world is through these constructs that shape our experience of reality. And these constructs then define how we move through life. Like even when I did my first 24 hour run, you know, in the ultra world, as you know, it's not. It's fairly common in the ultra running world to run a 24 hour run, right? I would say ultra running. But when I told my family in India, they didn't think that was possible. They had no idea that one could run for 24 hours. So in their construct of reality, that's impossible. But when you live in a world where that's normal, quite unquote, it changes how you engage with that experience, right? Because what makes a run long for you 50 miles and be nothing for somebody who's never run 50 miles could be the longest in the world because it's a construct of how we view it through, and our constructs are shaped by our beliefs or paradigms, how we grew up, everything right. And those constructs shape how we engage with the world. Now, the goal here is not to release constructs because they're valuable. They help us move through life, but the goal is to become aware of them so they don't define you. They don't limit you. You know, even as an example, when I'm out on the ice, I often will say things like, I hope the weather will be what it is tomorrow. When I say that 100% of the time I get what I want. If I say, oh, I hope the weather is not stormy, I hope it's not too cold. Cold is also a construct. I can be in minus ten degrees and I've experienced this where I'm warm or I've been in 60 degrees and I'm cold, right? So it's a construct of how we view it. And the more we can become aware of that, we can transcend it to create our own reality in how we experience it. So that was a core thing of what I'm doing in the darkness was method acting was training and creating the person I need to be to ski across Antarctica. And I have like a whole series of training around this because I went deep, very obsessive, as I'm sure you can relate. Yeah, into studying it. So I've built like six hours of training around it and really went deep into creating the identity and letting go of every construct that wasn't serving me, and creating a new one that would help me do this mission that I need to do, you know? And that means tapping into every force within your soul. Like the darkness, the light. That's another thing you know. Carl Jung also says one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. And we demonize the darkness, the fear, the pain that we go through as bad. You know, these things are bad, so we avoid them. But what was one of the most valuable things in my own healing journey from the war? And now using it is the struggle that I went through. You know, when I was in Iraq, my vehicle drove over an active bomb that didn't explode. My buddies drove over a bomb. It exploded. He died. 1s Who knows why that happened. There's no reason for that. And when I came back, I struggled with survivor's guilt. I was told that, you know, it's not your fault. And I get it rationally. Well, let's fly where they fly and war bombs explode. What? You know, you can't control that. But emotionally, I couldn't change the fact that I had that because the guilt was simply an expression of my love for my brother. It wasn't a bad emotion. There are no bad emotions. They're just emotions. And it's up to us to decide what we do with them. So instead of demonizing that guilt as bad, I reframed it, and for a long time I had a picture of my friend that I lost in the war and it said, this should have been you earn this life. Now my guilt became my ally. My guilt drove me to writing my book, Fear of Honor. It was the core essence of that where I go much deeper into sharing about the nature of our emotions and experience with fear and stress and anxiety, all these quotes unquote negative emotions. But that guilt became fuel, right? It was just how I viewed it that guilt wasn't enough in itself, the problem. So I tapped into my darkness and now it has become a weapon to move through life. 1s And everything is the weapon if you choose to. The world is your library. So even. And it's not like I'm always tapping into that space of feeling guilty. Sometimes it's pure gratitude. It's bliss. Like you're using both the darkness and the light as a tool to navigate. But the more you play in all arenas, the more you know which tool to use when you need it. Yeah, you probably get really good at recognizing when certain experiences draw a certain emotion out of you. What tool to pull then? So you're almost thinking not just about like what? You've already connected the dots between which tools respond best to which emotions. So then it's more about identifying what experience produced that and then kind of moving from there. Yeah. And a lot of it is experimentation. Like the only thing, the only way to attain that mastery is you can listen to a podcast, read a book, and that's great. That can provide some insights. But the greatest lessons are in the doing. You have to be in the arena. So as an example, you know, I was on an ultra a long time ago and it was the middle of the night. I was running on my own. It wasn't a sort of a formal ultra, just on my own. I think it was an 80 mile run and I decided to put all these audiobooks a very dark things, like one was at the Holocaust, one was a survivor of sex trafficking child soldiers. And the whole point was I would listen to these horrific stories and get perspective on my suffering, like, oh, this is not so bad. They have a ton worse. But it's, I mean, a really dark place because I just went like, the world sucks. This sucks. Everything sucks. Humanity's evil. And I'm like, all right, that didn't work too well, you know? So you learn and you kind of experiment by doing that. But there was another time, you know, when I did this 167 mile run across Liberia, it was about a marathon a day for a week. And on day five, I had this aching pain hit my shin about 17 miles into the run, and I started limping for a little bit. And then I just started sprinting. And the whole time I was saying things to myself like, Remember Neil, Neil's my buddy who died in the war? It should have been you that died instead of him. Suck it up. If you quit now, you deserve a coward's death, you know? And I was like, Liberia has been through civil war, Ebola, poverty. And I was like, people are suffering all around you. You have no right to complain. Earn this life, suck it the fuck up. Like saying these very dark things to myself. But that was a valuable place to go. Those last few miles I ran on that day were the fastest I ran the entire trip. I didn't always talk to myself like that. A lot of the other times it was just gratitude bliss for the experience. But the more you access all these forces, the more you know which one has value. And this is the point. Like we've all been through hard times in life, part of the human experience. Instead of running away from it, use it as fuel. Like I actually, I firmly believe from the core of my soul that there is a death, a debt I owe for this life that I've been gifted beyond just the times I should have died in Iraq, and many other times, you know, I've been blessed with great parents who gave me a good life. I've volunteered in leper colonies, I've seen people in extreme poverty, worked with former child soldiers, with survivors of sex trafficking. These people were born into hell on earth just by being born where they were born, they were thrust into hell simply by being born where I was born. I was blessed with a million times more opportunities than most. I didn't do anything to earn that. So in my paradigm, I believe there's a debt I owe for this life I've been gifted. Now, I'm not saying that's the right way to think. A lot of people are like, that's unhealthy and that's okay. The point is not to say that my way is the way, it's to say that whatever struggles you've experienced, your darkness, your pain, find a way to turn that into a frame and to a construct that serves you, that drives you forward. Like, I love my life. I couldn't be happier. And I'm not always thinking about this debt that I owe. But there are times where that is the most valuable place to go, especially when I'm stuck on an expedition. I'll be really in the suck and like, people have a lot worse. Do you owe a debt for this life? Suck it up. Keep going. So turn your darkness into fuel. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, I want to go back because you said you were kind of looking into the method actor stuff there, kind of like, you know, drawing from that, I suppose. Yeah. What's the deal with those guys and gals when they come out of that? Do they have a hard time returning to their former self or do they even want to? Or what is? I guess Daniel Day-Lewis is maybe the, as you said, the best. I wonder if he is. Purposefully not returning to his former self. Or if he goes into that thinking, once this is over, I need to kind of refocus and get back to who I was before. He really struggles. He really struggles. He talked about after Lincoln, which again, was an epic performance. Right? He talked about after that how much he struggled. Because in a way, you are you're you're creating a death of an identity you have built, you know. And so that's why he does very few movies. He's now retired from acting. But throughout his career he's done like ten movies, 11. Not that many. You know, even being what I would argue is the greatest actor of all time. And he would really struggle because he's, he's she's shedding this entire identity he's built and there's a death that is now happening. So there's a kind of mourning that happens of that death in order to then step back to Daniel Day-Lewis. But I would argue and he kind of says this. It's not like he's entirely stepping back into ballet, Lewis, because he's taking in each identity he's built, and it's affecting how he's now stepping back into the identity of Daniel DayLewis. Right. But there's definitely a challenge in letting go of that construct, letting go of those identities. I mean, even now, you know, when I, when I go, I'm training for Antarctica, 110 Days of Solitude. So I actually kind of struggle in crowds a little bit. Now that's a useful, useful mechanism for what I'm doing when I come back from Antarctica. There'll be a lot, of course, correcting to readjust a normal life. You know, right now I don't care about course correcting that. I don't care about fixing that. I know I could, because I did. Even after the war, I really struggled in crowds. I really struggled with loud noises. I've addressed a lot of that, but I kind of rebuilt it in a way because of what I'm doing in Antarctica. So you create an identity and then you can let it go. And yes, that is challenging, but I think it's still so valuable because you can create whatever you want, whatever you need. And the malleability of our identity is what's so valuable. You know, everything within us, like neuroplasticity. The brain is plastic. It can change. It can be rebuilt, even our memories. I go deep into this in fear. So without going too deep into now, the way we think about our past is not real. Like when we access our memories, we're not accessing a video camera on a screen. Every time we access our memory, we're accessing the last time we access that memory. So every time we enter into X memory, let's ask you, what did you do on your 25th birthday? And I ask you that every day for the next year, every time you access it, you're actually changing the neuronal structure of that memory based on how you accessed it last. So every time you access it in, let's say in a very disempowered state, you're feeling really sad. The actual content of that memory will change. And they've done a lot of studies on this. One researcher did a study where she asked nine people after nine over 11, where were you? And I asked him a bunch of questions. Five years later, I asked him the same questions and not only small details shifted, but huge details like even where they were when it happened. So when you recognize the malleability of our memory, the value of that is you can essentially create whatever you want, you know, because nothing about how we approach reality is, quote unquote, real. It's a construct. And the malleability of that has value to one degree. It can create a kind of apathy. Like if nothing is real, then who cares, right? Like, we can kind of get nihilistic, but I don't think that's the answer there. I think the value of knowing that is if my memories aren't inherently quite unquote real, I can create them to serve me in whatever way I want. I can find new meanings to them. I can alter the structure of that, and I can even use it. Memories like this were. One thing I started doing when I was in the Arctic is using how memories work to alter how a future version of me will think about this, this, this experience. I'll give you an example. So when I was in the Arctic, every day I would sit in the tent. I was on a solo expedition. I would know that a future version of me, like the version sitting here today, is going to think about this event a certain way, and our memories shape how we engage with reality. Like, why do I know to pick up this bottle and drink it? Because I have a sense of, you know, this is how a water bottle works. I open it because there's a memory around that memory that shapes everything about how we engage with the world. So in my present self in the Arctic, I was sitting there and I was going, I was remembering all the awesome things about this experience. I was smiling, I was sometimes listening to happy music. So I was quite unquote infecting the memory with positivity, with joy, knowing that future versions of me are going to think about this a certain way. I'm going to control how I want the future version of me to think about this, because that future version will then look back on the Arctic and then determine how I view the next thing. So even with running, for example, if every time I step into the run, I'm like, this really sucks, it's going to shape my memory. Yeah, but you can manipulate that, right? That's the value of the malleability of the brain, is that you can manipulate and create however you want to serve you. And method acting is kind of that on steroids, if you will, because they're literally building entirely new, even memories. They're creating a memory around their character. And that's kind of what I was doing to build who Akshay needs to be in order to ski across Antarctica. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I like to think about running. That, like stage one, is looking at it as punishment or something that you have to do and like you got to graduate from that. You got to graduate to that to like what a lot of people probably call like type two fun, which is the gratification you get when you finish and you want you want to recognize that as the focal point is that's the target, not the, you know, don't look at the discomfort that you may experience at certain stages during the run as the point to kind of attach the emotion to, but rather the hard work that you're going through there is going to produce the type two fund that you're experience afterwards. And it's the latter that doesn't come without the former. Therefore you should appreciate it. I shouldn't look negatively at it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's really interesting stuff. Um, I want to get into kind of the logistics of this project because it's just insane. Yeah, I'm familiar enough with the logistics of planning some long haul stuff just from talking to people who've done it. I was planning a transcontinental project that got derailed due to an injury. Yeah, eventually I'll get around to doing that again. But I went through the phase of, like, kind of trying to plan that thing. And one thing I recognized during that was there is an infinite number of things you could try to account for. So at a certain point, you have to sort of step back and just start itemizing. What are the things that I can't neglect that I need to make sure I have accounted for, and what are things that will probably pop up or may or may not pop up, but I guess just acknowledging there's going to be things I can't prepare for perfectly, and I'm just going to have to be okay with that and then be ready to respond to them when they come. Yeah. So. 1s What is? How do you look at the planning process for something like this? I mean, it's like a transcontinental project on steroids, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of learning from wiser people than myself. I have a lot of polar friends and mentors. One of my kind of biggest polar mentors, a guy named Eric Phillips, a great polar explorer, polar adventure. And he's taught me a ton. So I've also studied every expedition in modern history. That's how I even came up with the number 110 days. I wasn't arbitrary, right. So how do you look at previous expeditions to study the data of them and then obviously being in the arena a lot? I've spent a lot of time in the polar realm myself learning from that experience, taking into account all the factors, because as you said, you can't prepare for everything. But I want to be as conscious as possible about being ready for anything that's going to come my way, you know? And a big part of that is like what they call negative visualization. You don't, it's not framed often in like the world doesn't talk about this because it sounds quite negative. But even astronauts will look at everything that could potentially go wrong. So you can prevent that. You know, one of my many mantras is fear propels you to prepare. So I'm terrified of Antarctica. So I will look at all the things that could go wrong. And I've made a few mistakes on smaller expeditions. I made a mistake with my stove that sent this giant fireball that could have burned down the tent, you know? Thankfully it didn't, but I learned from that. So studying that, taking my experience and now mapping out every little detail. And then Al, who has a wealth of experience, Aly's Antarctic logistics and expeditions, they're the ones who manage the logistics for every adventurer on Antarctica. And they, of course, are the ones who are organizing all the logistics of getting me to where I need to go. And they have a wealth of experiences in this arena. So my job is to plan the expedition alone with the help of mentors and friends, taking my own experience there, planning all the logistics of getting me to where I need to go, picking me up. I mean, I have a satellite phone out there to call if something goes wrong, you know? I mean, when I was in Antarctica two years ago, I lost two fingers to frostbite and we had to call through the satellite phone. So that's I mean, it's but to your point, you know, every little detail, the smallest detail has to be taken into account. So gear lists, triple checking ten times, checking my gear lists. You know, the food plan, the weight. Every little detail is measured. And even practicing. I'm practicing at home doing everything with mittens on. Because in Antarctica, every little thing is a challenge. Peeing is a challenge. How do you do all that with mittens on, you know, so practicing that, even eating my food in a bag of nuts and chocolates, you can't just stick your hand in there to grab that. You have mittens. So having a ladle. My friend Eric was the one who enlightened me to that idea. You know, taking a ladle and then stuffing that in your mouth. Or I met these other travelers, polar travelers. When I was in the Arctic, they came up with the idea of putting a tent, a poop hole in your tent. So you actually. And I never thought about that. And so on previous expeditions, I had to go outside to poop. And when you're in -30 degrees and a wind is hammering you, it is absolutely a nightmare. Yeah, like I'm all about the suffering. But that was not a suffering I enjoyed. That sucked. You know? So they taught me to put a poop hole in your tent. So I sewed like a. Like cut a little hole in the tent with Velcro one side sewn in, and you become a flap. So now you could poop inside the tent and you just dig a little hole in the snow. All those little details make a huge difference. And at home I'm practicing, eating, putting on my polar gear, peeing, pooping, and practicing. Because sometimes you may have to go while you're skiing, you know? Hopefully not. That's not fun. But. Or also like even unzipping my sled to get the water bottles out, you might want to make sure your water bottles don't kind of slip at the bottom of your sled. How can I do that as efficiently as possible? Because if I lose even five minutes a day over 100 days, that's 500 minutes. That's 500 minutes of skiing time to cover this massive distance I need to cover. So I need to be as perfect as possible. And that comes with practicing all those things till I can do it blindfolded. Setting up my tent with mittens on. Can I do it blindfolded? You know, when you're being hammered by hurricane force winds, that's a challenge to do, you know? So doing all of that. And if you let go of your tent, you're in a world of hurt. So you cannot let go of that thing. You know, all of those little details make a huge difference. So are you just setting your tent up to repeat a ton during this phase when you're not out there yet? Yeah. We've just moved into a new place with my fiance, so now I'm kind of setting it up. But yes, once I get back I'll be doing that in Minnesota. I'll be doing that in the winter, you know, doing that and doing it consistently, especially when you're tired because you're going to have to do it when you're tired out there at the end of a 12 hour day of skiing, and you cannot afford to be complacent. You know, one of the things in Iraq we always used to say, complacency kills. And it does, you know, because you can get like in war, you could get complacent two months you're not getting shot at, and then you get a little complacent. And that's the one day something goes wrong, you know? So even in Iraq, like my job was to walk in front of our vehicles looking for bombs before they could be used to kill me and my fellow Marines. That's a very easy job to get complacent. Two months, nothing happened. You're like, I don't have to pay attention, you know? And I was far from perfect at it, at not getting complacent. But I really tried my best too. Not. Thankfully, nothing happened. But in Antarctica, it's the same thing, right? You cannot afford that. So practicing all that to make sure I'm on point. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting to think about just the planning of everything and then the practice because there's the training obviously, which takes us a ton of time. But then there's also the logistics of the setting. Yeah, the technical exactly the technical skills that need to be able to be done on, on just basically cruise control essentially. So yeah. Exactly. And then like you said, with some extreme weather. So I guess the stages are learning to do it really, really good just at home. Yeah. Stress tests it one more level out in Minnesota and then refine anything that maybe needs to be refined based on a little more of a specific 1s environment. And then that's probably close enough so that when you're out there at the Arctic, it won't be like you won't get caught off guard with too much of a difference in terms of what it's actually going to require to do all that stuff with mittens and everything you kind of described. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's even why I was in the Arctic earlier this year, as I spent about 29 days out in the field. 20 if that was solo is just practicing again, practicing solo time, practicing being out there. And then Minnesota will be continuing to refine, you know, after the Arctic for example, one of the bold decisions I made was, I think, I think necessary for Antarctica, because when I, when I was in Antarctica two years ago, I got frostbite on two fingers. And this finger, the right ring finger here, it was black and it had to go to the left middle finger. It recovered fully. But the point of this is the importance of training and refining when I was in the Arctic, because once you get frostbite, you're always more prone to frostbite. Yeah. So this finger, it recovered fully, but it would get slightly colder than all my other fingers. Yeah. You know, because it had frostbite and it was quite bad. It was like black and very gnarly. And so after the Arctic, I made a call to preemptively cut that finger off, cut the tip of this finger off because I didn't want it as a liability. Imagine I'm 60 days in Antarctica. I'm at the South Pole coldest point, and I get frostbite. My expedition is over. That's a huge risk that I don't want to take. So I just was like, I'm going to remove the tip, you know. So all these previous expeditions and now Minnesota, hopefully no more fingers will have to go. But 1s but just learning, refining, taking, doing every little thing possible, including the willingness to lose a finger if need be to pull this off. You know, all those little technical skills, the physical skills and mental skills to get ready. And Minnesota is the last kind of time on the battlefield, on the playground before the big one next year. Yeah. Well, we were chatting a little yesterday too, about why Minnesota and obviously Minnesota this time of year are coming up. This time of year is a pretty good playground to practice in cold, brutal weather. But it's not the Antarctic or it's not. It's not where you're going to be. And one of the reasons why like that is the reality versus actually going out there and playing. The logistics and the expensive things like that. Like what does it actually entail to put on something like this financially? Yeah. So the crossing will cost $750,000. It is not cheap. And that's not a number I made up. Ali who manages all the logistics. They quoted me that because, you know, for one, the flight from Chile to Antarctica alone is like a $50,000 flight. Then the flight from Union Glacier, the main base camp, to the other end of Antarctica, which is my endpoint, Bay of Whales, is like a $200,000 flight. From what I understand, that's a third of it right there. Yeah, exactly. Because it's not even just one flight to get out to the Bay of whales. You're landing in the middle of Antarctica like in the barren nothingness to refuel, you know, so there's a fuel jump out there. So somebody has to put that fuel drum out there and then even the staff, because the normal Antarctic season for adventurers is 85 days. Aly goes out there every year at this time of year. So the Antarctic season is about to start. November is the Antarctic summer. And they set up a base camp called Union Glacier. And then they break it down before the season ends. So that season is about 85 days. They have to extend that season just for me to pull this off. So while they won't have a full staff, they will have a skeleton crew because you have to have a doctor on staff, a pilot, a radio operator, a logistic crew, like a little skeleton crew to support this expedition. So that's that all costs money and they're there just for you, essentially, because no one else is out there at that. Yeah. At that point, exactly. The 85 days of Union Glacier is like a really awesome, kind of really cool place to be. I was there two years ago. You meet some cool characters, right? Everybody out there has done some wild stuff. So Union Glacier during the 85 days, it's pretty packed. But after that it's done. They'll break it down. But there will be a small skeleton crew essentially just for me, you know, so that all costs. That's why it really adds up. So even this year I wanted to go to Antarctica. Like right now, I'd be on my way there to do a shorter expedition as training, but that costs money. So to save money for the crossing, I'm going to Minnesota. Finding the cheapest way to kind of replicate the Boundary Waters region of Minnesota will be sufficiently savage. Like one of my polar explorer friends said she's experienced the coldest temperatures in her entire polar career. More than Antarctica and the North Pole in the Boundary Waters. Yeah, so we'll be savage. I'll get that. Obviously, it's not the same as Antarctica, but it's the cheapest and the most effective way to replicate that. So I can save money for the crossing. And we also have a crowdfunding campaign up. Some people are really supporting through high high net worth donors. And our crowdfunding campaign has reached $200,000 so far. But we still have a ways to go. And so it's like, yeah, my whole world right now is training my mind, body, spirit and fundraising. Yeah. To pull this off. Yeah. There's that aspect of it to the yeah, the Boundary Waters in winter. You know I lived in or I'm sorry, I lived in Wisconsin for 20 years. Yeah. And like before I moved from there, I was doing like I was training for, I think I was yeah, I was training for ultramarathons at the time, but I was teaching as well. So I'd wake up at four, 430 in the morning to go for a run, and we had one winter that was particularly brutal and. I think the worst it got was a 55 below wind chill, but my protocol during that was essentially like, I don't even care what the temperatures were anymore. When I'd wake up in the morning, I had like a standard protocol of what I knew I had to have, like a minimum like base, and then it just depended on the wind chill from there. Yeah, because if it was like five below in four mile an hour winds, like, cool. I don't have to put on that extra shell if it was five below, but 25 mile an hour winds, that is a whole different environment to be in. The wind is the most savage. Yeah, but you're talking about the Boundary Waters. I remember it all the time. And this is kind of like almost full circle. You're talking about trying to like, frame it in a positive way. I'd always think like, oh man. It's like, say it's 25 below zero. I'd look over what's it in northern Minnesota? And they'd always have it much worse. Like those guys are dealing here. 1s At least that's not there. So yeah, I remember one particular day I think this was the record low. Probably. It was probably like 55 below day. I looked there was a spot up in northern Minnesota. It was like 80 below wind chill. So I was like, oh my goodness. That just can't even be imagined. Like the wind is, yeah, unforgiving. So you'll have all that you bargained for? I think. Exactly. It should be sufficiently savage to prepare me for what's coming. Yeah. And to some, to some degree, it may actually be better because it's logistically easier to get there. So you're not you're not dealing with a bunch of losses like late in time between. All right. I'm going to do this so I'm actually starting the actual act of going out into it. Yeah. You'll just head up to Minnesota and a day or two later you can be out in it if you want to. Exactly. Much more logistically easier. And even a fact like that's a big reason why, you know, 35 days at an Airbnb is just spending more time with my fiance because she's putting up with a lot. Yeah, I'm a unique character to be with. But also, you know, other than training, I still have a lot of fundraising work. So this time at least I'll go skiing for 4 or 5 hours every day. But I'll come back and do work, spend time with her, and then? Then the 35 days will be completely solo in the wilderness. So balancing that. But it will. It'll be much, much more logistically easier to pull that off. I mean, we get there, get an Airbnb. We've already got that set up. Next day I can go skiing, you know, to your point. So it's cheaper, easier logistically in every way. And she couldn't theoretically fly to Antarctica. Right. So this makes it easier to also navigate all that while trying to do the work elements in addition to the training. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about just something you said earlier and then just the actual process here too. If my math isn't, if I didn't miss like a zero or something in here, you'll be going probably around 17 miles a day. Yes. Yeah. So 17 or about 15 to 16 is 110 days. Yeah. 15, 16 months, 15 to 16. And when you think about that's 12 hours of moving for 15 to 16 miles. That kind of gives you perspective of how slow of a process that is important because there's a stimulus to moving faster. Yes, that. Obviously there's like a threshold where if you continue to do that, then things tend to fall apart on you. Yeah. But there's that in the moment, like the stimulus of it being more, more fun in my opinion. 100%. Yeah. It's why I kind of like a steady state tempo run sometimes because it's there just fast enough where you get like a little bit of an increase, like a noticeable burst in that stimulus. But they're also sustainable enough where you can do a meaningful amount of time in it on any given run to the degree where you sort of have like a little bit of a better kind of type two aftermath of that sort of an experience. But you're just going to be out there, like inching along, plodding along. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's a big reason why tire dragging is not only physical training. It's great mental training because you're moving so damn slow around this tiny little park, you know? So is the monotony element of it. But yeah, to your point, it's very, very slow because of just how much weight you're hauling. You know, I'm choosing to do this unsupported meaning, like I'll have all my own supplies for the entire 110 days, as opposed to, let's say, having gear caches or something like that, you know, and it is mind numbingly slow. Yeah. It's not a very sexy sport to watch either. Like we are filming a documentary around it on the ice. I'll be alone. But they have come and they've come and filmed me in the Arctic and Iceland. They filmed me in Arizona training, but unlike, you know, some gnarly backcountry ski sports where they're flying down a hill, this is just an idiot plodding along very slowly. So it's not a very sexy sport. You fast forward. Exactly. You're going to. Somebody watching will lose interest very quickly. 2s Yeah, yeah. So this obviously is unprecedented in the sense that you'll be the first person to do this if it goes off as planned. Is there anything you can think of that comes reasonably close to it that you're like, all right, that's as far as we've gotten so far. So. They may have at least a perspective that you can lean into a bit for sure. There's definitely great polar adventurers that have done epic feats like Borge Östlund. He's a Norwegian. He's done one of the most epic polar journeys, in my opinion, in the world where just a few years ago, at 57 years old, he crossed the Arctic Ocean, you know, and he was in the dead of winter. Him and Mike horn did this or another guy ran. Gelinas is also a Norwegian. He's him. And Tori Larson crossed the entire Arctic Ocean unsupported from Russia to Canada in 109 days. I mean, they were on the brink of death when they came. The book about it is called Dead Men Walking, you know, and the Arctic Ocean is a very different animal than Antarctica. It's it's, I would argue, and I haven't experienced it, but from other adventures I know who've been through, both say it's physically much harder, but mentally a little easier, because in Antarctica it's just the empty white nothingness. And in the Arctic you're skiing on a frozen ocean, so they'll have like open water leads, like just these giant sections of open water, or these ice rumbles will crash into each other. And then you have to take the sled up and down these kinds of rumbles of ice. So it's a little bit more mentally stimulating to have those kinds of constant obstacles to deal with. But physically a beast, you know, and Borg has done part of that in winter. And even Tori Larson and running illnesses expeditions. So definitely a lot of great adventurers to learn from to follow that have pushed the very boundaries. It's just this is kind of the last great adventure that hasn't been accomplished. But Borge Oslin was actually the first person to ski across Antarctica when he did it. The feat had never been done so. His goal was just to do it. So he actually used a small kite just for portions of the journey. He actually skied a significant amount of it without the kite as well, but used a kite for a portion of the journey. And still evolutions like doing it without a kite happened after the pioneer. Like he's a true pioneer, right? And I'm sort of humbly following in his footsteps. But my friend Eric Phillips, he skied four new routes to the South Pole. Another buddy of mine, Lou Route, has pulled some pretty awesome expeditions. So kind of learning from the great explorers before, you know who've done some epic feats. But this is what I've taken to prepare for this. This just happens to have sort of never been. And it is kind of the last great unaccomplished feat in Antarctic exploration. And I would say the last other one is to do a coast is to do a land to land crossing of the Arctic through the North Pole. Solo. It's been done as a group and has never been done solo as well. These two are kind of the last in the polar realm that haven't been accomplished yet. So. But learning from them to hopefully be able to pull it off. Yeah, it sounds like you've done this. I know one, one person I like to listen to talk about preparing for events is Jim Walmsley, because he he'll talk about how when he's like picking like a goal time and a target, he'll do he'll go and he'll run like portions of say 100 mile course and he'll get like try to get like a good feeling for like what is a range of time that I can expect to be able like what's reasonable here. Yeah. Trying to associate like, you know, the act of being tired at the end and things like that. So like, I think he's probably got a threshold where he knows on fresh legs, relatively speaking. If I can cover it in here then that's a good target and he's just done it enough now where he can probably like ballpark things pretty nicely. You. There must be something with that where you're coming up with 15 to 16 miles a day where, you know, like you're not going to go to Minnesota and find out, oh, shoot, it's going to be closer to 11 for sure. Exactly. Like, I mean, theoretically, I could, I mean, the highest outcome of failure, I mean, death is a very small possibility because again, as I said, it's not super dangerous compared to some other feats, obviously, that you can't eliminate that risk. But the highest outcome of failure, which I just couldn't pull off the distance. So that is there. But I've taken other adventures to see, you know, like because nobody's done the full coast to coast crossing, but they've done portions of that journey from the Berkner Island to the South Pole, or from Bay of Whales to the South Pole. Looking at how long it took them, taking a little bit of that into account, obviously taking my own experiences into account to kind of come up with that number. But even I mean, last season there were three teams, three, three adventurers that attempted a partial crossing of Antarctica, not a full coast to coast, a partial crossing. All three failed just because they couldn't cover the distance. I mean, they're all still alive. Thankfully, everybody made it home safely, but they couldn't cover the distance needed to cover. So, I mean, even Steve Jones. Steve is a friend of mine. He's the expedition manager at Alli, tracked every expedition in modern history, and has said that anyone who attempts this will probably fail. You know, when one of the reasons why we had to move it from this year, where I was originally supposed to do a full crossing this year, the next year one is just we needed more money, but two was al was only able to give 105 days, and Steve himself said, you know, we just don't think anybody will last even over 100 days. So, you know, there was no point kind of giving anymore. And I get it. And he's like, I'm not trying to say this to be mean. It's just the nature of this feat. So I'm well aware that the odds are stacked against me and I, I mean, if you get like if I get soft snow at the start and it is what it is, you get what you get and you have to be with that. You cannot. That's a huge thing I saw. Sometimes adventurers will say things like, oh, these conditions were worse this year than every other year, and I'm not faulting them for it. Like, Antarctica is savage every year, but I cannot let myself get into that mindset because then that becomes a negative downward spiral instead of actually just whatever's thrown at you accepting the illness of that. Like when I was in the Arctic earlier this year, I got hammered with these two days of massive polar storms out there alone. Next day I'm skiing and there's a lot of soft snow on the ground, right? Which made it very hard to go up and down this undulating terrain in Norway with my heavy sled. And I could say, I wish there was hard snow, but instead I just kept saying thank you God for these perfect conditions because everything is perfect and it's an illness, for it cannot be anything other than what it already is. It cannot be anything other than what it already is and therefore is perfect. The more you learn to accept the illness of things, whether they be external or even internal, meaning that even our emotions, right? Like right now, if somebody comes into this room with a gun, I'll feel fear. I'm not choosing to feel fear. I'm not asking for it, but I'll feel it. In response to these external stimuli, most of our thoughts and our feelings we don't control in response to external stimuli. Instead of demonizing that, trying to resist it, make it go away because its quote unquotes a bad emotion. Accept it. The more you train yourself to accept the easiness of your emotions, if your thoughts of fear of the external stimuli instead of resisting it, the more you can then transcend it and choose how you relate to it. That's the power, right? So that's a big mindset shift for me is whatever Antarctica throws my way. It is not good, it is not bad. It is. And I will make it at the core of it. It just is and I will make it good. I will smile on the face of it and hopefully be able to pull off this massive distance, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's wild to think about. I'm excited for you. Thank you brother I think it'll be a great story one way or the other. Yeah yeah. Either way something because even beyond even if somehow I don't pull off the crossing, just being out there 110 days alone. Oh, no doubt it will be profoundly beautiful. Yeah. You know. Yeah. One other thing. I was, I mean, just thinking of the logistics. 1s Yeah. You fall a mile short per day. You're looking at an additional seven days, right? So like, you can't, I can't. Yeah. It's just it. So at what point I know you said earlier you're operating on a framework of 12 hours of work, four hours of prep and essentially snow melting for water and whatnot, and then eight hours of sleep. At what point do you start carving into the 12 hours that are non moving in order to maintain the 15 to 16 miles per day? It's hard to say because initially when I first start, I will not start right away at 12 hours. So you're at a deficit from almost day one, like because you don't want to. Every polar adventurer who's been out there, I've studied again from all of them. You don't want to start going ham because you want to get your body used to that absurd workload. And so if you go all in 12 hours, right, a get go, you're going to break very quickly. So started about eight, nine hours and then build. But you're now immediately putting yourself in a deficit of mileage. You're also remember I mean initially it'll be flat on the ice shelf but then going uphill. So I have to make up distance on the back end when I'm going downhill. Thankfully I'll be going down on the sled will be lighter, but as far as eating into that 12 or eating into or extending that 12 hours, the only place I can sacrifice a sleep right? Less than ideal. Because even at eight hours you're going to be under recovered from the king of the get go, you know, but it'll kind of be determined. I mean, I say I get the best snow ever, and at eight hours I'm hitting the distance. Sweet. You know? So yeah, it'll kind of be determined because another guy, Ben Saunders, whose expedition I follow, he was hitting some massive distances at nine hour days. Which kind of the distances I need to hit with a similar type sled. So I was like, all right, if I get that cool, you know, I can I can hit nine hours and then maybe on a good day I push a little bit more just to build distance. So a lot of it will depend on what I'm able to do, what the conditions make it as feasible to do. And, and then, you know, adding more time if need be. And that means sacrificing sleep because the four hours of ten time you can't really you to ten time takes what it takes setting up the tent, breaking down the tent and then boiling snow for water that takes what it takes so you can't do much to make that more efficient. There's a few things, but for the most part you can't do any more. So the only place I can eat is sleep. 1s Is. Is there a way to track where you're at for this? Is there going to be like a GPS unit where you can go on a website and be like, oh yeah, yeah, there'll be a live tracker that both Ali will be watching as well. So they'll know exactly where I am. And thankfully, as I said, it's not super dangerous for most of the entirety of Antarctica, except for one glacier. They can pick me up if things get horrible, you know, so that evacuation possibility is there. So they'll be tracking. And even people back home can kind of follow along. A live tracker, maybe not every day, but every other day I'll be sending audio updates from the ice as well. So on the live tracker, there's a little audio button and you can really. Yeah, it's kind of cool. The tech is awesome. Yeah, there's a company 060 that does this. They're awesome buddies of mine Anthony. So they're kind of creating the tech. It's pretty badass what you can do now. Yeah it's no joke. Yeah okay. So is this all going to be accessible on your website or. It is. Yeah I'll have it. I share the journey right now preparing at Instagram at Fear Vanna fear Da Vanna. The book is obviously Fear Vanna. And even on the website Fear Vanna. That's where we'll have the live tracker and we'll also write like right now there's the website Great Soul crossing.com. That's soul, Great Soul Crossing right now it's the crowdfunding page. But eventually that will also be the 1s the place to follow along with the journey too. So it'll be on both Nirvana and Great Soul Crossing. Awesome. Yeah. So those are the spots to find you. Is that where you go to donate if someone wants to help support? Yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking. You know, the great soul crossing. You'll find that link even at Fear and Instagram, but Great Soul crossing. You can find the donation. And you know we have different we're offering different gifts and rewards for different donation tiers. So for example I touched on the method of acting. I have like a six hour deep dive training, along with every mindset training I've developed over the years of pushing the boundaries on the edge there. If you donate like I think it's $9.99, you get access to all of it and every tier, even the small donations of $30. There's different training on how I did 25 different weapons to navigate the pain cave, whether it be physical or emotional pain, you know, so different donation tiers. We are giving away things and I'm not making a dollar of this campaign to be clear. Like, you know, it sounds like it's all going directly towards this. So any contributions are extremely well received. Even the book Fear Varna, it's on Amazon, audible, paperback, Kindle and it is. We were donating all the profits to charity so constantly on only right now shifted it to the crossing and then after the crossing it'll go back to other causes. But I'm not making a dollar off the book either. It's all going towards, you know, something. And then of course, as I mentioned, we'll be filming a documentary. So it's not just while I do get a lot from this journey, spiritually, the stories we tell through it will be able. Well, I mean, I've already experienced this from speaking on shows like this, speaking on stages, it inspires people to play on their own edges. I'm not saying Antarctica is the path to enlightenment. That's my path. But it's not the path, right? The goal is ultimately to help people find their own edges and play on those edges, because that's where you find the rewards of the human spirit. Propel stories to help people do that. Well, it's been awesome to record in person with you this time around, and hopefully we can do it again after you've got a massive record under your belt. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, hope. I hope to pull it off and would definitely be in touch. So thank you so much for having me. Absolutely enjoy the rest of your time in Austin. Thanks, brother. Take care.