Colin O’Brady returns to The Joe Rogan Experience after his record-breaking 54-day solo Antarctic trek—now a New York Times bestseller—and reveals plans for a six-person rowboat crossing of the 700-mile Drake Passage, a feat never done before. His team battled 40-foot swells and near-freezing temps (32°F ocean, 34°F air), suffering skin damage from relentless soaking in custom thin dry suits while relying on IAETO-compliant logistics and Discovery Channel’s satellite documentation. O’Brady frames extreme challenges as tools for growth, contrasting "quiet desperation" with the fulfillment of pushing limits, like his 139-day 2016 Explorers Grand Slam or upcoming Everest return to support Jenna’s summit bid. Both expeditions underscore how discomfort fuels human potential, redefining what’s possible in exploration. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, about my solo journey across Antarctica and kind of diving deep through my whole life and kind of what brought me there and other expeditions and the ups and downs of it all.
So, after I got back from the Impossible First, the Antarctica crossing, right about the time I saw you last year, I got a funny phone call, actually, of all things.
People were asking me, you know, what's the next expedition going to be?
What are you going to do?
And I said, you know, I just walked 54 days by myself across Antarctica.
Give me a minute.
Give me a minute to relax.
And I get a phone call via a buddy of mine from college.
Connects me to this...
This guy, this Icelandic guy, I've never met him before.
His name's Fionn Paul.
Don't know his story.
I do now.
He's an absolute legend.
And he says, hey man, you were just in Antarctica, right?
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, I think we should go back to Antarctica.
And I was like, alright, well what do you think?
And he's like, in a rowboat.
I think we should row a boat from the southern tip of South America to the peninsula of Antarctica across Drake Passage.
Yeah, so Drake Passage is known to be, you know, in seafaring, one of the most treacherous, if not the most treacherous kind of passageway in the world.
You know, you've got the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Southern Ocean kind of all converging between the Antarctic Peninsula and the southern tip of South America.
So you've got...
40 foot swells.
You got crazy waves, icebergs as you get close to Antarctica.
And the mission or the goal was to see if we could...
So ultimately, it took us just less than two weeks to do the entire row, but it was a long journey in the planning from that phone call all the way through to that year, but it was a 12-day crossing.
Yeah, so, well, water actually, we have a desalinator, so off of solar panels, everything's, you know, solar, there's no engine, no sail, nothing like that.
As we got closer to Antarctica, I think it started messing up because it got real salty.
It wasn't doing quite as good of a job.
The water near Antarctica was like 1 degree Celsius, so 33 Fahrenheit, practically frozen cold water, and I think that was kind of starting to tweak out the system.
Yeah, so when I was doing my Antarctica crossing, one of the kind of challenges is basically, can you take enough food with you?
Because what I was doing was called unsupported.
So no resupplies of food or fuel, you know, crossing the landmass of Antarctica 54 days.
And so I wanted to get like the most optimized nutrition.
And so I work with this company called Standard Process, who's all like a whole food supplement company.
And they've got all these sort of doctors, food scientists and this.
And I went in their lab for a year and they did all this kind of custom blood work on my body.
I'm trying to figure out, you know, basically my exact sort of physiology.
And they created these bars based on all of the research that they did that basically were these really high-calorie bars because it was the most high calories that I needed to optimize space.
And they were kind of – they were all – they're all plant-based and ended up – and I know there's – And what's in them again?
Coconut oil, nuts, seeds, different phytonutrients in a particular macronutrient blend that I needed.
It was about 45% fat because I needed the high fat, about 40% protein, and then 15% carbs.
Excuse me, sorry, I re-alternated the protein-carb quotient there.
But yeah, it worked really well for that.
And so when I was doing the row, I called up Standard Process again.
They've been an amazing partner of mine.
They were like, hey, I'm doing this row.
Those bars worked so good last time.
And like I just said, with trying to boil water and all this stuff is really challenging on the rowboat.
The best would be to have this really kind of high optimized nutrition that we could use again for a project like this.
But the parameters are different.
You know, the humidity is different.
The temperature is different.
There's six of us now.
There's not just one of me.
You know, can we optimize it for that?
So they kind of made a specialty blend of the bars again that they've called the column bars.
They've probably come up with a better name.
But it worked really well.
They're not for sale.
We've talked about doing that, so maybe in the future, but you can see online on their website all the different supplements and stuff that went into it, so you can kind of buy the component parts.
But yeah, one day we might make them, but they've been kind of just custom for these two projects.
But they've worked really, really well, particularly in the rowing.
I mean, they worked amazing in the Antarctic Crossing as well, but in the rowing, it was 90 minutes of rowing on, 90 minutes of rowing off, continuous, 24 hours a day.
So we're kind of in two sets of three, six of us total.
Three people rowing, three people resting.
And in that 90 minutes that you're off, that's also when you've got to eat, drink, sleep.
It's your only time to rest, basically.
And so, as much time as you can kind of optimize eating and stuff meant more sleeping.
And so, to have these bars, get done with a 90-minute rowing shift, be able to eat a 1,000-calorie bar, highest quality nutrition in your body.
I mean, Standard Process nailed it again.
It was amazing to have these bars and have it work really well for all of us to kind of optimize not just the food, but also the efficiency of sleep because the sleep got...
So you got, you know, three people rowing and three people in the compartment sitting in town.
I think if you kind of scroll up to the top, maybe there's one just that shows like the whole boat or like what it looks like maybe there.
There's kind of a shot of it.
So yeah, so you can see in there, like the back little compartment, that's where I was.
I was alternating with this guy, Fionn, who I mentioned, the Icelandic guy, who was the captain of the boat, really experienced ocean rower.
And we alternated inside this little cabin, and then the other four guys, they alternated two people, because that one's a little bit bigger in the front, though it's the bow cabin in the front.
But you're like head to toe in there, or you're crouched into a little ball.
And after doing something solo, I was pretty excited to do something, you know, as a team and doing something in a completely, you know, exploring a completely different kind of avenue of exploration in the ocean, something I'd never done before.
And I had actually, not only did I not know these guys, a couple of them I went to college with, but we like really loosely knew each other.
Like I kind of like maybe like, oh, recognize their face a little bit, but it didn't.
We weren't like good friends or anything like that.
Three of them I'd never met in my entire life.
And I also have never rode a boat in my life ever before.
And so when Fionn, he called me up and told me about the project, he's one of the world's most renowned ocean rowers.
He's got 30 world records or something like that.
Complete legend.
He's rode boats across every single ocean.
This was kind of the last big ocean that he'd never crossed.
No one had ever done it just like this before.
And so he kind of said, hey, I wanted this idea, but the logistics are super complicated.
Like going to Antarctica, there's all this sort of like treaties that you need, all this paperwork, getting a boat down to South America, importing it through the Panama Canal, etc.
I mean, it's like a tough thing.
And he'd been like kind of thinking about it for a year or so.
And he said like, hey...
I've seen you pull off some big projects together.
Can we kind of team up?
And I know, you know, your team has got really good at figuring out these logistics.
Would you be interested?
And I'd actually looked at ocean rowing a couple years ago as something that I always wanted to do one day.
And so it was kind of a, after I kind of got that first phone call, like I said, like, I'm like, dude, I just got back from Antarctica.
I don't want to go back there.
Tomorrow.
But, you know, of course, the curiosity inside of me got the best of me and I called him back up and I said, hey, let's do this.
What are you thinking?
And kind of dove into it from there.
My team kind of wrapped our arms around the sort of like logistic and building out the project and he was definitely the visionary of something he dreamed up and it was super cool to team up with him after doing something alone.
So, something I've been talking about super openly, including in my book, which is the Nat Geo article.
You know, it's a little bit unfortunate.
I actually just published a 16-page letter asking Nat Geo to retract the entire article.
And the reason it's 16 pages is, unfortunately, the entire article they wrote is just so riddled with inaccuracies and kind of misrepresentations and omissions that, you know, we had to kind of ask them, say, hey, look, you know, you kind of got this wrong.
I was never properly interviewed for it.
But one of the things you're talking about, this guy, Borga Auslan, this Norwegian guy, absolute freaking legend.
So what this guy did in 1996, so, you know, 20 some years before that I attempted my crossing, is he crossed Antarctica from the edge of the coastline, crossed the ice shelf all the way across the landmass, across the other ice shelf, roughly 1,800 miles.
And what he used to propel himself was he used a kite for a good portion of the time.
And it's an absolute extraordinary project.
And what's really weird about sort of this National Geographic article, a number of sentences is one of the premises of it was saying, you know, Colin never talked about Borg Ausland.
Like, he never talked about him in his book.
He never mentioned him.
He never this.
And in my book...
What's really bizarre and why we're asking for a retraction because it's just really ineffectual is that, you know, here I am on page 49 of my book.
Literally, it says, From 1996-1997.
Not only did he cross the entire landmass of Antarctica, but he also crossed the full Ron and Ross ice shelves from the ocean's edge.
Allison's expedition has deeply inspired me and was unsupported that he hauled all of his food and fuels with no resupplies.
So it was weird.
It's like the journalist wrote this article without reading your book.
It's not surprising.
And I had done, I don't know, there's a lot of speculation.
I did this big project and the film project around the road was with Discovery.
I don't know if Nat Geo is coming at Discovery or whatever, but it's really bizarre.
I mean, we could talk about all the different kind of fine points of that.
But the big distinction, and I'll say it, I've said it, shout it from the rooftops, but I'll say it here again.
Borga Ausland is absolutely incredible.
Like, I am in awe of the guy.
What he did in 96 is phenomenal.
That's why I write about it in my book.
That's why I've written about it in my social.
The day after I finished my crossing, I wrote about it on there as well.
And I said, wow, so many people have inspired me.
I'm standing on the shoulders of giants the only way I was able to do this.
So that's another one of the things that the National Geographic article unfortunately got wrong.
And in my 16-page letter that anyone can read, it's on my website, colinabrady.com slash blog, letter to Nat Geo, or it's linked to my Instagram.
It's not like a he said, he said thing where I'm like, oh hey, this got wrong.
It's just actually a really kind of documented and sourced document that has links to everything.
And one of the links it shows is actually his entire kind of project afterwards and the aftermath of him talking about it, including talking about with Parawing, which was one of his sponsors, the guy who actually built and manufactured the kite.
And they're talking about how he used it for about at least a third of his journey, 600 or so miles, as well as he was able to use the kite going 125 miles in a single day, which is, like I said, it's amazing.
It's really incredible what he did and the time that he did it.
It's just really kind of an apples and oranges comparison when it comes to polar travel and the distinctions of that.
Yeah, so there's basically these different distinctions in the world of polar travel, and that's another one of the things, again, I'm not sure how they got this wrong.
In the link on the 16-page thing, I show the text message when the journalist asked me, well, tell me about these definitions of unsupported and unassisted.
I sent him the link, and there's these links, it's kind of a published thing on this website called Antarctica Logistics and Expeditions, the main sort of expedition facilitator, the person who runs logistics down there.
It's very clear, unsupported means no use of resupplies, unassisted means no use of kites or dogs.
And so the thing that I did solo, that people I guess have gotten somewhat confused about at first, was I was the first person to cross the landmass of Antarctica, Solo, unsupported, no resupplies, and unassisted, no kites.
What Borga Auslan did is he was the first person to cross Antarctica, not just the landmass, but also the ice shelves.
So there's frozen ocean on these ice shelves.
So from the coast, across the ice shelf, across the landmass, and across the other ice shelf.
And no one yet, including myself, has ever done a solo, unsupported, unassisted crossing of both the landmass and the ice shelves.
I hope someone does it, man.
It would be amazing.
I had a 375-pound sled, and I almost ran out of food at the end, crossing the landmass.
And if you'd need maybe a 600-pound sled or something like that, or maybe a more optimized food solution that no one's thought of yet, but it hasn't been done yet.
And so he, like I said, on some of the days he talks about it openly, that he went, he does it in kilometers, but if you calculate back to miles, like 125 miles in a 15-hour period of time.
That's unfathomable just walking, pulling a sled.
They're just two different things.
It's like the difference between sailing across an ocean and rowing a boat across the ocean.
Why do you think National Geographic got that wrong then?
Because the way they wrote it, it was, you know, it's...
They made it look like you're just a fame whore and that, you know, there was a bunch of other explorers and outdoors people that were in support of the fact that Auslan was the only one, the first one to do it.
They didn't make this distinction and they actually made it seem like as if the sled was an ingenious solution.
But it seems like that was a planned thing and that was an engineered thing and that it wasn't something that he built up on the fly.
This was the method that they used to help him get across the snow.
I mean, so yeah, it definitely tested me to the edges of my potential.
There was many times that it felt impossible.
I think we talked about it last time, but the second chapter of my book is called Frozen Tears because on the first hour of trying to pull my sled, 375 pounds, fully loaded of food and fuel...
I started crying.
I literally started crying.
The tears are freezing in my face.
It's an all-time pathetic feeling.
I mean, it was really, really brutal and really challenging.
And one of the things, for sure, in the National Geographic article, they're not disputing that I did this.
It's not like they're saying, you didn't walk 932 miles by yourself across Antarctica.
They kind of grudgingly gave you credit for doing something really freaky.
They also didn't mention the difference between the time it took you to travel that and the time it took Auslan to travel a far greater distance or that he used that kite to go more than 100 miles in a day.
He manhauled for parts of it as well, like a significant distance, but a lot of it, when the wind was with him, you know, he put up his kite and pulled along.
National Geographic did not recognize that, that that's a different thing, that he can go on the snow, pulling 300 pounds, more than 100 miles, how many?
But that, what we just saw in that image of him getting pulled by that giant-ass fucking kite on skis, strapped to this harness with all the weight behind him also being pulled by that giant-ass kite, that's a different thing.
And I mean, the biggest thing for me is, unfortunately, it was portrayed in a certain way.
I don't know if it wasn't fact-checked or what that, but for me, the whole purpose of any of this, the whole purpose of writing the book and sharing it with the world and talking to people via your podcast or whatever, my whole goal is to inspire other people to step outside of their comfort zones, do things in their life, challenge themselves.
You know, I really poured my heart and soul into it, but it was challenging.
I've been journaling since I was a little kid, like since I was 12 years old.
So, going back through all my journals and thinking about, you know, there's the Antarctica piece of this, but the subtitle is From Fire to Ice.
So, I talk about, you know, being burned in this fire in Thailand, being told I would never walk again normally, going through all these pieces of my life.
But one of the things that happened when I was in Antarctica, which...
It was interesting to me, maybe you'll find it interesting, is as I was out there by myself in this empty white landscape, 24 hours of daylight, endless white nothingness, my mind started filling in with all of these memories.
So I deleted almost all my music, I'm in silence, I'm in full solitude.
Like if I said to you, hey Joe, remember the day you graduated from high school?
And like, something's going to pop in your mind right now.
We're going to keep talking and you're going to move on from that.
But when I was walking out there by myself, someone would pop in my head like, hey Colin, remember your first swim race when you were a little kid?
And all of a sudden, like, I'd be back there.
Like, I could like dive in and I could see my mom on the edge of the pool deck and the, you know, the winds blowing across my face and I can see the kid next to me and I can taste the chlorine in my mouth.
I mean, visceral memories, like a lucid dream were coming back to me.
Throughout for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time.
So the book itself, it reads about Antarctica, but it intersperses the way my experience was in Antarctica, which was actually going back in through my life in this kind of tapestry of visceral memories and flashbacks of other expeditions and childhood and the ups and downs in my personal life and kind of all of these things kind of conspiring into one.
But it was wild to go deep into the brain like that.
We should probably point out, we've had a podcast before, and this podcast that we did before was right after you got back from this journey in Antarctica, and you described the whole thing in Thailand, you described getting burned, and how you never thought you were going to walk again, and all that stuff.
If they could find that you did something, that you did something incorrect, or you lied about something, or exaggerated about something, I mean, they made you out to be a liar.
Yeah, literally said fiction, but how much of it could be fiction if you fucking really did walk 54 goddamn days not an artik Not only that, the kind of weird parts about it is not only that, but I also had a GPS on me the entire time.
It was completely transparent.
Every 10 minutes, the entire journey, we're live for the sea.
The New York Times covered it.
They had my GPS tracker up live.
The map of my route is in the first page of my book, let alone online 24-7.
There's been hundreds of articles written about this by outlets who have fact-checked and researched or whatever.
So for Nat Geo to make all those claims, it's like saying, like, Colin somehow...
He tricked every person ever from every news outlet that's covered this and fact-checked it and reported on it and his editors of the book and some hacked his jeep.
I mean, it's like a crazy conspiracy weird kind of stance on it.
Or he says, like, Colin made up this thing about no rescue zones.
No one's ever written about the fact of in Antarctica, and he talks about me getting picked up in Antarctica like I can call an Uber.
He literally says in there, uses somebody else's quote, he says, I mean, getting picked up in Antarctica is like calling an Uber, which is by itself just- He really said that?
He literally says that in the article, which is just crazy.
The irony of this is if you Google Borca Auslan...
In 2019, right after I finished my crossing, he's interviewed about all this.
And in a quote, and I link to this in my letter, him saying, there are parts of Antarctica, particularly in the large Sestrugi zone, which is exactly what I was talking about, where rescue is impossible.
The guy who's against me is also quoted saying the other thing, but then he says, it's like, the whole thing is just, you know, it's crazy, man.
It's the last third of my part of my journey, which, by the way, was on my GPS, which, by the way, I talk about in my book, which, by the way, I widely acknowledge.
And it's called the South Pole Overland Traverse.
And so...
The South Pole Station, the U.S. research station that's at the South Pole was resupplied throughout the summer season from the coast, and they drive this kind of bunch of tractors basically up this area called the Leverett Glacier.
It's not like a paved road.
This is them driving over ice and snow and filling in crevasses along the way, etc.
And there's some tire tracks and some flagging that are out there.
So, first of all, I've already traveled almost 600 miles without any of that.
And then as I get there, and we know this is part of it, and I've talked about widely with all the polar experts, all of the people that make the classifications, and unassisted refers specifically to kites and dogs.
And they're trying to make this claim that the Road somehow, quote unquote, big air quotes, road.
So they're now, because of some of this, the polar community have gotten together after my project.
So my project squarely falls in the definitions as they were, followed all of the rules and all of this.
Now, now they're sitting together and they're saying, you know, maybe we should rewrite some of these rules or make certain definitions different.
Which, by the way, if they want to change rules, that's totally fine.
The problem is, it would be like this.
This is like, well, them calling me sort of like a liar or something would be equivalent of this.
With Major League Baseball got together and said, you know what?
All games in baseball are going to be 10 innings now instead of 9 innings.
And all of those guys over the last hundred years that played 200,000 games or whatever, who played nine innings, they cheated, they lied, they didn't play the full game.
If they want to change whatever distinctions or classifications or stuff forward-looking, great.
So I think they're trying to make it finer grained, which is like there would be like a kite distinction.
There would be a no supported distinction.
There would be a distinction for using, you know, partial of a, if there was a flagging or this like, you know, road, which by the way, is not a road to be clear.
Like I said, I published this 16-page document that's on my website.
I sent it to the editor of National Geographic.
They have acknowledged that they've received it, and like I said, it's been a holiday weekend, so they've had a few days to have it, and hopefully they do the right thing.
Yeah, I mean, it goes way back, but even kind of as a sport, and maybe the polar community wants to do this more formally, but there's something called the Ocean Rowing Society that has the records of different rows going back over time.
There's this race across the Atlantic that happens called the Talisker Whiskey Ocean Race across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean every winter that happens.
And so Ocean Rowing, I mean, it's a subculture.
It's a small subculture, don't get me wrong, but it happens.
Like, it's a thing.
You know, there's boats, there's races, there's competitions.
But had anybody gone through that path?
Yeah, so Drake Passage had never been rowed fully and completely before.
There was a guy who's a fucking legend as well.
I wish he was still alive because I'd love to sit down more than anything with this guy.
His name is Ned Gillette.
A true, true explorer.
He actually got killed in the late 90s, I believe, when he was climbing in the Himalayas or in Pakistan.
He got shot by someone who came through the camp.
I don't know the whole story.
It was a super sad story.
But he's done all of these projects.
Before social media and stuff like this, this guy was out there doing these badass things.
And he...
He made this boat called the Sea Tomato, and he took it down to Chile to try to kind of do what was kind of a hybrid row and sail.
And so he has a sailing mast on there.
He's got oars.
He's got four guys with him.
They try it the first season.
They actually can't even launch their boat off of Cape Horn.
So they wait a whole other year.
And then the second year, they launch the Sea Tomato under sail.
Because the weather, I mean, Drake Passage is, we'll get to that, but it is gnarly, bro.
Like, it is like, I mean, people, you know, as you say, going around the Horn, people say that in sailing.
Like, Cape Horn is known to just be, like, just treacherous, brutal water as the two of these oceans kind of collide and these huge standing waves come up.
So a whole season, they sat down there with the rowboat and didn't even launch it.
So, basically, the best time of year to do it would be December, January, because that's the Southern Hemisphere summer.
And so the temperature is a little bit warmer, you've got longer days.
We purposefully did it over the summer solstice, so December 21st, you know, that'd be June 21st for us in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year.
We still had night, you know, a few hours of darkness every single night, but we at least had the longer days, because once it gets dark, and there's waves coming at you from every single direction, I mean, it is...
I mean, I don't know the numbers, but a plane crash happened the day we were leaving and 38 people died in a plane crash in Drake Passage as we were about to depart on our road.
That's a whole other crazy story.
But, you know, there's shipwrecks out there.
There's boats that have gone down.
There was a...
A cruise ship, I think, that went down in the 2000s.
And you put it in the water and it fills with water and it holds the boat into place.
I mean, not very well.
Even in this, if we had the volume up, it's me basically talking about how we're getting pushed back in the wrong direction, but we don't have the strength to row against it anymore.
But you obviously get, not only were we spooning under sea anchors, smashing these little things, and oftentimes those other guys in the other compartment were either three Three of them were inside the compartment at a time and one would be sitting out and taking shifts or they sometimes smashed four in there.
But I mean, they're like literally on top of each other.
So we got close.
But then also, obviously, there's no space on the deck.
So it's like, hey, man, just turn your head away.
I'm going to be, you know, pooping basically a foot away from you while you row into this bucket.
So, one of the things, like, you know, people have asked me, was, you know, solo Antarctica crossing harder in the row, whatever, and it's like, they're very different.
But one of the things that was so rude about this, Antarctica and the crossing was a lot colder than the Drake Passage row.
It was about average temperature when we were out there was probably like...
In the low 30s, you know, dipped below a few times.
But the ocean temperature, like I said, it's 32, you know, 33, you know, just above freezing.
There's icebergs in the water when we're getting close to it.
And you're just getting splashed the entire time.
So from like minute one, hour one, leaving Cape Horn, we are soaking wet.
So we started out in just this Gore-Tex, this thick saline Gore-Tex basically, and that worked pretty well for the first few days.
But one of the other cool innovations that Fionn thought of having done so much ocean rowing is he was like, dude, the only way this is going to work is if we have some sort of dry suit.
It's just too cold.
But you start looking at dry suits and you're like, you could never row.
You couldn't be functional wearing this crazy dry suit, right?
And so, he basically says, he spends the year, one of the things that he did is he found this, like, Polish manufacturer, and we all got our bodies measured, you know, 25, 6 different measurements and all this, and basically created these custom dry suits that were a lot thinner than a typical dry suit, but kept us dry, but also allowed us to have the mobility on the oars, and it was really actually built for the sitting position and the leg, you know, the leg press and the arm motion and all that of rowing.
So it was awesome innovation.
And we got just, I mean, thank God we had those because we were getting soaked.
I mean, we were getting so, so, so soaked out there.
And in the 90 minutes, you would think like, oh, in the 90 minutes, quote unquote, rest phase, you would get in there, you know, maybe change clothes or something like that.
No, absolutely not.
Like we had these suits on.
We're soaking wet.
We'd get in the cabin.
We were all sharing like one sleeping bag.
Like I had just one sleeping bag that Fian and I were alternating.
It's basically like, if I showed you what it looked like on the last day, you'd be like, I wouldn't sit in there for one minute, let alone try to sleep.
There's no pail.
There's brown water on the bottom.
It's the smells from us living in and out of there.
I mean, it was grimy and wet and cold.
But these suits suited us pretty well.
The one thing that was great, obviously, we were clipped in for safety.
So we were clipped into basically these ropes that you saw on the edge there.
So if we were going to get knocked off...
The boat hopefully we would be able to clip in, or the boat itself actually fully self-right, so if it rolls over, it hypothetically rolls back over the top.
We had some close coals, but we never fully rolled it, thank God, but we did test that.
But one of the things about the suits is the suits basically have like neoprene booties.
It's all like one piece, like you would have in a dry suit, which was awesome for keeping us safe and dry, but I didn't take the suit off for the last six or seven days at all.
And so when I finally took the suit off, my feet, like you think about your fingers getting like pruney maybe like, you know, in a swimming pool for a couple hours or hot tub or something like that.
Like imagine seven days of wet and cold and sweat and like all the things.
Like when I took the suit off, like I almost threw up on the ground.
Because it was just gnarly, festering skin, and skin was ripping off of my feet.
It's hard to put the point on, like, oh, I'm recovered, but it definitely took a few weeks to just kind of get everything back, the stability back in the body, mind, all of that.
You know, look, I'm passionate about these things.
It's super fun.
I do them because I like testing the edges of my potential.
I like exploring different places.
Like I said, I'd never rowed a boat before and to kind of take this project on and say, I've done expeditions before.
I've pushed my body in deep and interesting ways.
But one of my biggest curiosities is certainly about the mind, but particularly growth mindset.
Can I say, I'm not a rower, But in the course of a year of training, I'm going to train myself up, get on a team with some amazingly accomplished watermen, and learn the skills required to make this crossing.
And it was cool to kind of prove that out this year because I think that that really applies across so many things.
And I'm just a generally curious person.
And I think I'll keep pushing myself and pushing my body because that's one of the things I love to do.
But I think that curiosity throughout my life is going to be, you know, a lifelong path of diving into sort of different things and taking them on.
I think that to me, one of my biggest sadnesses and one of the things I like to say to people is like, you know, people come to a certain point in their life and they're like, I'm a lawyer, or I'm good at math, or I'm terrible at art, or I could never do comedy because I'm not the funny one.
These limiting beliefs inside of us.
I could be like, dude, I've never rowed ever in my life.
I'm 34 years old.
I've never rowed a boat, but it doesn't mean I can't learn now to row a boat.
I don't know if you remember from last time, but I have this coach.
His name is Mike McCassle.
He's just this legendary guy.
He's done 5,800 pull-ups in 24 hours.
He's pulled a truck across Death Valley.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, he's a total legend.
And he trained me up for Antarctica.
I mean, I came to him and I said, hey, look, like, I'm not the most experienced polar explorer.
I got to pull this 375-pound sled.
Like, what do you think?
How can you train me up?
And he came up with such cool training methodologies for that.
Like, one of the things he had me doing for Antarctica was he had me, you know, I was doing planks with my hands in ice buckets.
And, you know, as my heart rate's getting jacked up, he's having me hold that.
And all of a sudden, he's like, all right, get out.
And I'm doing a wall sit, but now my feet are in the ice buckets.
And he puts a weight plate on top of my legs.
And he's like, okay.
And then he hands me these Legos.
And he's like, solve these Lego problems.
And until you don't solve this Lego and build this little, like, you know, aircraft Lego man or whatever, you know, you can't get your feet out of the ice bucket.
I'm like, what?
What the hell is going on?
But he's like, look, you're going to be in Antarctica.
Your life is going to depend on you securing your tent right or tying down the ropes properly or this and that and the other thing.
You're going to be cold.
Your hands are going to be frozen.
You're going to be tired, but you're going to need your mind, your dexterity to be there.
Yeah, there's a picture of that, of Mike bringing me through that.
And so with the row...
It was super cool to come to him again and say, hey man, there's no blueprint for this.
There's no blueprint for this.
There's no one that's done a fully human power crossing of Drake Passage before to the Antarctic Peninsula.
There's some ocean rowers, but this is different.
How should we prepare for this?
And Mike, it's not like he's like, well, I know everything about ocean rowing, but that same curiosity, that same growth mindset, I trust his ability to train me.
He's like, I don't know, man.
Let's start thinking through this.
And so in the gym, I mean, we did all sorts of creative things.
He brought the ice back.
He started putting a rowing machine on BOSU balls, like half BOSU balls, basically.
And I'd start rowing, you know, doing normal rowing motion, but he'd start shaking it around because basically the ocean is going to be moving me around so much.
So just the rowing motion isn't going to prepare me for the lateral movements, you know?
The lats, the obliques, you know, all the kind of side-to-side stability stuff.
Then he took it one step further, which is he actually shows up at my house, knocks on my door at 2 o'clock in the morning.
I think he had prearranged it with my wife.
Knocks on the door and he's like, get up.
And I'm like, what?
What's happening?
And he's like, we're going.
We're training right now.
And he gets me.
He's got those BOSU balls, but now it's the middle of the night, so I'm sleep deprived.
I'm kind of disoriented.
Now he's got me on the BOSU balls and he had brought these buckets of It says training for the drake the impossible row episode three you could find it online jamie it's on the discovery channel youtube page What did you
Yeah, so the rowing machine on the BOSU balls, that's like in the gym.
Also, a lot of deadlift was really useful.
And then a lot of stability stuff.
So Mike would have me do certain things like we'd have, you know, like a seated row or something like that.
Or monathons, I thought that was the most interesting because it was going to be destable.
So the waves are usually coming from, they change directions, but at any given time they're coming generally from one direction.
So you're either leaning in really hard to your left side or you're leaning in really hard to your right side.
That's a difference to the ocean rowing than just like a pure river rowing.
And, you know, he would have me basically like holding, imagine like a deadlift bar, and then I'd have my eyes closed, I'd be holding it there in kind of an isometric motion, and then he would pull the plate A light plate off one of the sides and so I'd have to stabilize and catch you know either my left side or my right side so a lot of stabilization and balance stuff and then the other piece that was huge you know Mike you know admittedly doesn't know a lot about rowing specifically in terms of the technique of rowing and the technique of rowing is actually very specific
and so A friend of mine, a guy named Chris Woida from Portland, I called him up and he's like this champion rower, collegiate rower, rowing coach, and he took me out on the Willamette River in Portland in a single man, like, rowing skull.
So very different than an ocean rowboat.
You know, an ocean rowboat's a lot bigger, different, different waves.
But he taught me on the river the actual purity of the rowing motion.
So a lot of the training and the physical aspects of getting stronger was with Mike and the mindset and the ice and all the things we did there.
But certainly the stuff that we did on the river in the Willamette with Chris was huge for me to actually understand the motion.
I just like you when you're like, how hard can it be?
Just kind of push your arms, you know, back and forth.
It's a pretty complicated motion.
It's a full body thing.
It's a coordinated, right?
It's a very coordinated thing.
You know, you're powering out of different things.
And certainly on river rowing, you're having to, you know, square.
It's called squaring the blades.
You know, you've got to take some blades out of the water and, you know, turning them so they can just glide across the top and get back in and glide and all that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot to the motion.
And so it was a short period of time.
I didn't take my first stroke in a rowboat until July in the river and then August in the ocean rowboat when we came together as a team for the first time to train in Scotland.
And then I was rowing across the Drake in December.
So it was a pretty short period of time to kind of learn about rowing and get stronger.
But it was a fun process to dive into something completely new.
Yeah, so like I said, Fion has a lot of ocean rowing experience, and from his other expeditions, we kind of collectively talked about it as a team, and he was just like, okay, this is what he felt has worked the best for people to do a long stretch, get enough rest, but obviously maybe the first day or two, you think, oh, I could row for...
Four hours at a time or something like that, and you get a longer stretch of rest.
But over time, your body really starts to wear it down, and so he kind of felt that was the happy balance.
I was delirious.
We were all delirious and sleep-deprived, and it got weird out there for sure, but I think it was the best.
We've got guys from four different countries, three different continents.
No one knows each other super well.
A few of them had done a project before in the past, so they know each other a bit better.
But in general, it's not like it was six guys who were like, oh, we've done a bunch of stuff together.
We're bros.
We both hang out.
And it really, you know, required some really diligent kind of human dynamics to bring it all together.
One of the things, we came together in Scotland in August and we rode for the first time.
That's the first time we all met each other.
We came together.
That's where our rowboat was.
We were getting it custom built and built out.
And then that was the only time we saw each other in person.
We had these Skype calls and stuff.
And then we got down to Punta Reina, which is where we staged it out of in Chile, in Southern Chile there.
That's kind of, we got our robo, we imported it, we're getting everything going.
And those 10 days in preparation were some of the absolute hardest of the entire project, getting to the start line, right?
You know, there's gear everywhere.
We're trying to figure out how it all fits.
Like, you know, how are we going to fit all this food in here and our personal gear and there's nowhere this.
We're trying to pack the boat and like, you know, tensions are elevated.
Everyone's just kind of like nervous.
Like the reality of what we're about to do is setting in.
And, you know, there was kind of some breaking points.
And to credit where credit's due, one of the guys named Andrew Town, absolute amazing guy.
He's actually a management consultant.
So he's like a lawyer, businessman, management consultant.
And he's like, he's like facilitates all these conversations in his work.
And he sits us down and he goes, hey guys, like we need to have like a real conversation about like teamwork and what's going on.
Cause there's six of us in this tiny little boat, life on the lines.
We come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different things.
Like let's set some intentions.
And, you know, at first I think we're all maybe a little bit skeptical, but he sits us down and we have this conversation about like, you know, let's talk, let's talk, let's talk real.
Like, what are our real fears going into this?
Like, what are our vulnerabilities?
What are our weaknesses?
How can we trust one another?
And, you know, we all were very honest with one another.
And I think it really set the tone for the entire thing.
One of the guys is a school principal.
He's got a two year old daughter at home and he's like, Hey guys, like, I want to do this.
Like, I want to be a part of this project, but like, here's some of my fears.
And for me, I'm like, look, we've got to have a communication.
We've got to be able to stay to each other.
If we're having a bad day, we've got to just be honest.
Like, hey, I'm not having a good day, but it's not because I'm a bad person.
We've got to support one another.
And really having that facilitated conversation as a team early on before we were out in the water and the intensity, I think carried us through.
And I'm so, so, so grateful that Andrew facilitated that conversation because that was a really turning point in the group dynamics.
Yeah, so the whole discovery thing is a really cool part of this.
So basically what happens, Fion had the idea for it, this legendary ocean rower, but the component parts of pulling it all together are really complicated.
One of the reasons is because...
So, say you owned a yacht or something like that, and you're like, you know what, Colin, I want to take my yacht to Antarctica.
Like, that's not really something that you can just do.
There's a whole bunch of environmental protections and laws and things like that.
There's, like, specific boats that have, like, permitting.
It's called the IAETO treaty.
And it's basically what governs tourism in Antarctica.
And the reason they do that is because of sort of environmental concerns in Antarctica.
And it's a really good thing.
But turns out like my ocean rowboat is not like part of like the full treaty of Antarctica.
And so the only way to do it and be like well within the rules and like above board within everything that's going on in Antarctica, all the environmental protection is to have one of the IAETO certified boats there And so what we realized is we needed what was called a supervising vessel.
Not a vessel that would give us support in the middle and hang out with us and we could jump off and take a hot shower, but a boat that's basically overseeing the totality of the project and also has us being fully permitted throughout that.
And so we're like, okay, that's interesting.
There's going to be this other boat out there.
We've got to figure out who this is.
It's super expensive.
So we've got to raise the money to make sure we can have that.
You know, all these types of things.
The only way it can work.
We kind of got set to work on doing that.
Myself, my wife Jenna, she builds these projects with me.
Blake, who works with me, and a bunch of people kind of working on kind of the details of it.
And we quickly realized, like, wow, what an amazing opportunity.
If we have this other boat out there...
We can film this thing.
And I've wanted to film some of my projects and share them really widely before, but when you're walking across Antarctica, dragging a 375-pound sled, and the whole purpose of the goal was to be solo, it's not like you can have a cameraman just hanging out there shooting you.
I mean, although there's just a road, so there's just people hanging out there.
L-O-L. L-O-L. But basically, that's when we said, hey, let's see if someone will be interested in coming on as a media partner of this and really filming this and sharing this in a big way.
And so we got to talking with Discovery.
They got on board of it.
And it was a really cool vision.
It was kind of a combined vision of theirs and ours.
Through all my other projects, I mentioned the GPS through my last, you know, Antarctica Crossing and my other previous world records before.
I always carry this GPS and share it in real time.
I have this non-profit where...
During the row there were 600,000 school kids and school curriculums we built around like ocean and environmental learning and stuff like that all incorporated into the kind of daily following along with the science and curriculum.
So I always wanted to share the projects in real time.
And so we talked to Discover and they're like, this is super cool.
Let's do three different things at once here.
So we invest in all this satellite technology with Iridium, the Iridium satellites.
And they were able to basically allow us to do social media during the time.
So if you're sitting at home on Christmas Day as we're arriving in Antarctica, like you watching me bouncing around on this rowboat, you can follow the whole thing.
So the unsupported part of the project means the second we launched, they couldn't touch us.
If they touched us, it's catastrophic.
It's over.
That's the end of the thing.
And so my wife was on board that.
She runs all the best projects for me in the background.
So she crossed the Drake in this larger boat, which for Drake Passage standards is still a much smaller boat.
There were five guys who ran the boat and then five guys on the Discovery film crew.
But they rigged our ocean rowboat up with all these GoPros and batteries and all this kind of stuff.
So we were completely self-sufficient on the boat itself and just had to switch out memory cards and stuff for ourselves.
But what ended up happening is there was a social media component happening live.
And then what Jamie just pulled up in the video of me training, there's these 14 episodes on Discovery Go that are online right now.
And they're all like five to 10 minutes long that kind of tell the story in mid-form episodes, which is cool because that was coming out concurrently.
So while we were out there, they were putting these pieces of content sent out by the satellites that people could see.
And then this spring, a couple months from now, they're going to have a long-form documentary that comes out about the entire thing.
And there's definitely been some really cool footage of ocean rowing expeditions in the past.
But to have a boat out there and to be able to shoot it from the perspective of not on the rowboats, Sometimes on the rowboat, it's weird.
You've seen boats in really big swells, but because of the perspective on the rowboat, it's kind of moving with it.
You can't kind of dwell how big it is.
But I think there's a video, actually the last video maybe I posted on my Instagram, where you can see my boat just completely disappearing and going up and down and completely disappearing in the waves.
And they're able to shoot back and get drone footage and all this sort of stuff.
So the feature-length documentary should come out in a couple months.
Because these are experiences where you told someone, hey, you're going to sleep 90 minutes at a clip, and then you're going to row for 90 minutes, and you're going to poop into a bucket, and you're going to sleep like a sardine with a bunch of other dudes on this boat.
I mean, you know, one of my reasons for doing this, for sure, is to test the limits of my own potential and grow.
I'm not doing them just so that I can be the exact same person on the other side of Antarctica or the other side of Drake Passage.
It's to take that learning.
Right.
I've been asked a similar question, I guess, before.
My answer, or the way that I think about it, is I've started to think about life and the totality of life experience between, say, a numerical 1 in 10. 1 being...
The worst day of your life and 10 being the best day of your life.
And, you know, one might be, you know, a day that a family member passes away or one might be being wet and cold and freezing in an ocean rowboat, you know, spooning with this other guy and, you know, been shit in a bucket and being exhausted and tired, you know, like just like rough moments in your life, right?
And 10 is this hedonistic joy, the most pleasure-filled day ever, just happy, joyful, maybe you've succeeded in something you've accomplished, like all this kind of stuff.
And as I've kind of looked around at the world, people say, what are you afraid of?
You must not be afraid of being alone or you must not be afraid of, you know, these hard challenges and stuff like that.
I'm like, well, maybe not.
But what I'm really afraid of is actually living a life range bound between four and six.
I think too often people, you know, the typical life experience, unfortunately, because we have some creature comforts, particularly in the Western world, where, you know, you can live a life just stuck between four and six.
So maybe the happiest day of your year or your week, it's like the Super Bowl and your team wins the Super Bowl and you crush a couple beers with your buddy and you high five and you're like, oh, that was awesome.
Like, that was cool.
But it's not 10. I mean, it's a six.
And then like maybe the worst day of your week, it's like a Monday and your boss yells at you or something like that.
And you're just like, you're like, oh man, like, That's kind of a bummer, but you know what?
I don't really give a shit about my job anyways, so I'm not really that bummed about it.
It just is.
I'm just kind of in this life of quiet desperation in the middle.
And I think a lot of that has to do with because we're hedging or we're afraid of the ones.
We're just like, I don't want to experience a one.
I don't want to experience discomfort.
I don't want to experience pain.
Anything to do that.
But what I've realized, I think of it like kind of a pendulum, like swinging the totality of life experience.
Like, to get to the tens, you also need to embrace the ones.
Like, the totality of life and the experience, it's not, I'm not experiencing these high highs or these hedonistic joys or these beautiful flow states or things like that, you know, in spite of the ones, in spite of the challenge, but it's because of them.
By pulling my sled, you know, 53 days, on my 53rd day of pulling my sled across Antarctica, I get there, my hips are poking out, my ribs are sticking out, I'm exhausted.
I can barely pick my duffel bag up to put it in my sled.
My body's completely compromised.
I'm exhausted.
But then I tap into the deepest flow state of my entire life.
I find this place in my mind, in my body, in my soul, and, you know, I push 32 hours without stopping to the finish line.
And I wouldn't have gotten there had I not pushed myself, had I not, you know, gone through this difficulty.
You know, I like to say that, you know, pain is mandatory.
These challenges are painful, straight up.
Pain is mandatory.
Make no mistake about this.
The obvious things I'm doing are painful, they're hard, whatever.
You know, you don't have to be in these moments so wanting to be like, oh my god, this is horrible, I'm in this, and why did I get my stuff out there, this is terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, and go down this path.
You're like, I'm doing this because when I step outside of my comfort zone, I grow.
And as I grow, I can share that with other people and hopefully have that ripple effect of positivity and inspiration that's lasting in the world for others as well.
I did a big mountaineering project before any of this.
For these last two projects, I did something called the Explorers Grand Slam.
So I climbed the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents and went to the North and South Pole for the last degree of latitude, faster than anyone's done that.
So I was 139 days back in 2016. So Everest, Danali, Kilimanjaro, etc., back to back.
The next actual physical project that I have, it's not some world record-breaking thing or anything, but my wife, so one of the things that we do, we have this non-profit, as I mentioned, and love speaking to young people, kind of opening their minds to the outdoors and being stewards of the land and really Inspiring young people to think about, you know, doing hard things and testing themselves.
It doesn't have to be in the outdoors at all.
It could be anything, music, art, culture, whatever it is, but to aim high in their life.
And one question we started asking young people was this question, which is, what's your Everest?
You know, it's a really obvious metaphor for kids.
It's like, you know, what's your big goal?
You know, what is your Everest?
And kids are amazing.
In a gymnasium, I get, you know, kids raising their hand going, you know, my Everest would be the first person in my family to graduate from college or, you know, whatever amazing things kids, you know, dream of.
And help facilitate them towards those goals.
But about a year ago now, my wife, who's not, you know, didn't grow up, you know, climbing mountains, didn't grow up as an avid athlete or anything.
She's been wildly supportive of the work we've done.
A lot of the book is really about our love story and building these projects together.
But she looks at me and she goes, Colin, my Mount Everest is now to climb Mount Everest.
And so, we are going back in April.
I've climbed Mount Everest once before from the Nepalese side, but we're going to go back and climb Everest.
We'll be there in April, May of this year, so in a couple of months, to climb Mount Everest from the north side.
And really, for me, that's to be a support, a facilitator of her goal.
So, the next thing I'm doing kind of in the athletic or outdoor space is actually to support Jenna in climbing Kudanku.
Literally, her Mount Everest being Mount Everest.
And it's really cool to see her, you know, just someone so close to me, commit to a goal.
It's an audacious goal for her.
For her back, I mean, she's amazing.
She's strong.
She's fit.
She's trained.
She's ready.
But like, just like six months ago, I never rode a boat.
You know, a year ago, yeah, she's climbed some big mountains.
But to say, hey, I want to climb Mount Everest was a massive goal for her.
I think for her, this, I don't want to say it's one and done, but I'm sure that, you know, I don't think she has the huge desire to keep doing these types of things.
I think the next journey for both of us probably after that is a parenthood, having kids.
So on the north side, there's less crowds, what we'd be climbing from.
But also that day, I mean, look, I don't have the answer to the problem.
That certainly was a problematic thing that happened up there.
It's kind of a weird, perfect storm a little bit where it was actually really stormy for a while and then people got delayed and the ropes were delayed getting in and all of a sudden there's one good day and everyone goes at the same time.
Yeah.
Again, I don't know what the solution is, but everyone going up at the same time on the same day on one day in May is obviously clearly based on that picture.
Did anybody die that day?
Yeah, people did die that day.
I don't know the exact count, but people did die that day because they got stuck out there and couldn't move one way or the other.
When I was climbing in 2016, it was actually a somewhat crowded day.
Nothing like that photo, but it was a more crowded day.
I was climbing with a Sherpa by the name of Pasang Bode, an incredibly strong guy.
When we summited together, it was his seventh time on the summit.
Just an absolute legend.
And him and I talked about it, and we were behind all these people.
And we actually made the decision.
He said, we've got to weigh the kind of pros and cons here.
If we stay behind people, you're moving as slow as the slowest person in this line.
And it's just like you've seen those photos.
It's just not a great situation.
It's cold.
You can get frostbite and all that kind of stuff.
And so we actually made the choice to unclip people From the ropes, the fixed rope there on the first half of the summit day, all the way up to a section called the balcony, we actually climbed unroped, but beside the people, because we actually made the call that we said, you know, actually climbing unroped of this section felt safer, you know, risking a slip or a bad fall with no ropes felt safer than being stuck behind some other people.
And then eventually it did get too stape and too falling off.
And that's, I mean, that's definitely the exception, not the rule on Everest.
But the fact that exists is just horrible.
I mean, there's horrible, you know, there's nothing good to say about that other than it's just, it's tragic for sure.
So, you know, I think that, again, I don't know what the solution is.
I'm proud of Jenna for setting this goal.
And, you know, I think that people should, you know, set that goal.
I think people...
If that's what they want to do, great.
If they want to climb mountains, if they want to do anything, they don't want to stop people from doing that.
But certainly a situation like that where people are stuck on ropes and dying in a situation where that shouldn't happen like that is a terrible thing.