133: The Real Foundations of Endurance with Chadd Wright | The Nick Bare Podcast

You can't out mindset the physical abilities that is required to do this stuff.

And when you put in that work, the work is what makes you mentally tough.

You ain't getting no more mentally tough on race day.

No one knows what they're doing. Everyone's just figuring it out.

And I don't think that that ever ends. The result that we set out to achieve no longer becomes attainable.

How do you react to that? We forget that really the standard of who you are as a human being, that's the thing that's going to make the lasting impact.

I pray every day, Father, conform me into the image of your Son, Jesus Christ, at all costs.

He's going to call you to suffering. just me and you in here yeah that's intimate i like that man it makes for a good uh environment for a focused intentional conversation that's what i'm hoping for it's it's cool man i mean nick man do you ever you have to look at this some days and just be like how did this happen?

Dude, this is unbelievable, man. It's so inspiring to me when I came here because I can look at this place, this team, these products, everything that you've done, and it's such a great example because I know you.

I know you're just a... You're not a normal dude, but you're just a common human like every other human.

But what... any of us can accomplish purely out of a passion for something, a dream, a direction, and consistency.

Those key ingredients. And like, look at this, dude.

Anything is possible. It's unbelievable, man.

How old are you? I'll be 35 tomorrow, actually.

35! Look at this, dude! At 35! And not to mention, you spent a big portion of years in the military.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's... You know, I think the reality is that comparison is a thief of joy.

And... I've been learning this the hard way recently that sometimes no matter where you're at, you're looking at what other people are doing and you become discouraged.

And I've kind of just completely flipped the script the last couple of months.

And it's just like, I'm going to focus on what we're doing, the team, ignore the noise.

And I mean, moving into the space was absolutely surreal. but it feels like it happened so fast.

You know, it feels like, it literally feels like last year.

It was two of us packing orders out of an old warehouse.

I love watching your OG YouTube stuff when you first started.

Like I've seen some of the original videos of like you just, I assume with a cell phone camera or GoPro or something like that.

Yeah. And then you're talking about I want to add to what you said.

A lot of times when you look at what other people are doing, sometimes it can have a comparison.

It's the thief of joy is kind of the word you use.

But I look at what people like you are doing, and it fires me up.

So it can go both ways. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, what is it that fires you up?

Just realizing the potential that exists.

For someone like me, because we're similar in a lot of ways, like the potential that exists for me to go as far as I want to go.

Like I see the potential here because you have went so much further than me in terms of business.

You know what I mean? And just knowing that that potential exists, whether I ever take that direction or not, whether I ever want to move in the direction to where I have a facility, even half this size, but I know it exists because I've seen you do it.

You've shared it with me. If you did it, I can do it.

That's what fires me up. You know what I mean?

I used to... I used to limit what I thought was capable, I was capable of, the potential, because I believed I didn't have the tools, the skills, the education, the experience, the resources to get there.

And at some point, and I can't pinpoint exactly when this was, at some point I realized I had everything that I needed to get to where I wanted to go.

And I was recently listening to this podcast And it was this gentleman who built and sold a business.

And then he went and worked in private equity.

And then after his stint with private equity, he was contracted as a consultant to go in and work for these Fortune 500 companies.

The best of the best of what they do. huge companies with huge executive teams and he said he went and worked for these teams as a consultant thinking that he was going to be overrun by experience and knowledge and he said he went and worked for these organizations and came back and thought no one knows what they're doing everyone's just figuring it out and it gave him so much confidence yeah and that's a reality is none of us know the exact right or perfect or best way to do things.

We're all just figuring it out as we go.

And I think once you truly accept and realize that, you then have the power in your own hands to go create and build whatever it is you want to build.

That's it, man. Yeah. I know. I don't know if you've ever read the... In the SEAL teams, they have a creed.

And one of the lines in that creed talks about how the standard for us is not to think that we are some special type of person, but simply to... to realize that we are all just common humans with an uncommon desire to succeed.

That's really all of us. It's a level playing field.

Like we're all, like you said, nobody has this top tier education that's taught them the way that everything has to happen and they get it all figured out before they ever start.

Like nobody has all the answers. Everybody that's out here pushing, striving, building, training, working towards something better We're all just common humans, and those of us who go further, we go further simply because of an uncommon desire to succeed, simply because we don't quit.

We keep showing up. because that's just who we are.

You know what I mean? So it's a will? It's just that uncommon desire to succeed, that will to keep showing up, right?

Even in the midst of all the noise and the failures and everything else that happens, like...

That takes time, though, and patience. And there's a lot of ingredients that go into that.

But I agree with you 100%, man. I still, with the business I have, I mean, we're still just figuring stuff out on a day-to-day basis.

You know what I mean? We're still thinking about what's the direction we want to go?

What do we want to put the most energy into?

But it's fun, dude. To me, it's fun. It's stressful.

At times, it's heavy. At times on the micro level, it's not fun.

But then when you step back and you look at the entirety of the journey, you're like, no, this is fun.

You know? There's a huge weight that is lifted too when you have the humility to recognize that and vocalize that.

I believe so many people along the way, and I look back to when I first got started, 2012, small college apartment.

I didn't want people to know how small my business was then.

So I documented very little. I didn't want people to know it was a one person team.

I didn't want people to know that I was operating out of a 10 by 10 foot bedroom.

So I was afraid to showcase and I wanted people, potential customers to think that BPN was larger than it really was.

And that got me to a certain point But then I've realized that ego wasn't going to get me any further.

And it's better to just have humility and be honest.

And I am 2012, I'm 13 years in building this business right now.

Been documenting my life on social media for 11 years now.

And I'm still figuring it out. I'm in a chapter in Season of Life right now that looks much different than my life did four or five years ago.

And I don't think that that ever ends. We don't ever figure it out.

I hope it never ends. I hope it never ends.

I mean, how boring would it be, you know, if it... To have the answers.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you ever get to the point where you have all the answers, it means you've stopped.

Like you've stopped gaining new ground. You know what I mean?

You've stopped pushing into new territory.

It's so good, man. You talk about documenting your life and how in the beginning you didn't show everything because of ego.

I can see from a business perspective how there is some strategy in that, but I guess a piece of that is also ego.

You don't want people to know how small you are.

But I think, man... It seems like nowadays, even more so maybe than in the past, like people are so hungry for like just people who are going to be real.

Authentic. Authentic. People are not only going to show their successes, but show their big time failures, man.

And like the Yukon race, for instance, we didn't finish that race.

Me and David didn't. We made a film out of it.

Like, well, what are we going to do now?

Just scrap the film because we didn't achieve the desired result.

And it's like, no, we're going to make the film and we're going to show the result that happened.

We're going to show the failure because I think there are a large number of people who are going to relate to that and who hopefully can see in that film how we dealt with that failure.

And continue to follow us as we move forward and how we respond to that failure in the future.

Because, I mean, how many people listening to this podcast have signed up for a race and didn't finish the race or didn't hit the time that they wanted to hit for the race or how many people have started a business and failed their business or made a big mistake and it set them way back?

Like, We got to show those things to each other so that we can, one, encourage each other, and two, so that we can learn from each other how to properly respond when those things do happen, because they're going to happen.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I do want to talk about the UConn 1000, but what you just brought up makes me think, as a creative and someone who leads a creative team here at BPN, It can sometimes be our downfall before we go into a project.

And you can apply this to all areas of life.

Before you go into a season of life or a project, you try to plan everything perfectly as it's going to happen.

Before even this story starts developing, you already know what story you're going to tell.

You set these expectations. And then as soon as something changes, a lot of people in this case would have said, Film's done.

We're not creating this film. The story that we plan to tell isn't there.

Yeah, but now there's a new story and this story could be even better.

So how do we pivot and adapt and adjust?

But so many people get to that point Where, well, no, like my predetermined course of action is gone.

Just trash it all. There's nothing there.

No, there could be so much more there. Maybe this was what was supposed to happen.

And this is the story that's supposed to be told.

That's going to be much greater and better.

It's hard to submit to that though. Like it's hard.

I mean, if you have faith, you got to just know and hope.

You have to be mature to submit to that because, you know, if this would have been the case for, you know, me and David looking at the Yukon specifically, say five, six years ago, I might would have said, oh, well, we're scrapping the film.

But like I'm mature enough now to realize, no, there's still so much value here that's relatable. in a totally different way to a very large audience of human beings because we're all the same in that we all experience failure.

We all have something in life, some challenge, some effort where the result that we set out to achieve no longer becomes attainable.

How do you react to that? Well, your fallback is maintaining the standard that you've set for the person that you want to be.

That's the major lesson in it. You know what I mean?

When the result is no longer achievable, do you just all of a sudden turn inward and get poopy pants and stomp around and act like a baby about it?

Or do you keep pushing? Like, do you keep showing up as the person you want to be?

You know what I mean? The standard. Are you still meeting the standard?

The standard is what's important, but we put so much emphasis, especially in social media land, in filmmaking, in endurance events, we put so much emphasis on the result.

You know what I mean? And we forget that really the standard of who you are as a human being is, that's the thing that's going to make the lasting impact throughout the course of your life, you know?

I want to go somewhere with that. But first, can you give a brief overview of what the Yukon 1000 is?

Yeah, for sure. So the Yukon 1000 is the longest kayaking race in the world.

It starts in Whitehorse, Canada, which is in the Yukon Territory, way up in the northwestern part of Canada.

And it runs from Whitehorse, a thousand miles down the Yukon River, You have 10 days to complete the race, and it finishes just at basically a roadway crosses the Yukon River.

It basically is a road they built in to maintain a gas pipeline, and that finish line is there.

But the unique thing about the Yukon 1000 is that it is a completely unsupported race.

And a lot of people get this confused with self-supported.

Self-supported means that if you need to resupply or you need something along that thousand miles, you could potentially pull off the river and go into a little hut or a village and get something that you need, medical supplies, food, water, whatever it may be.

Unsupported means you start the race with everything bit of everything that you need to complete this 1,000 miles.

And you cannot get anything along that journey to resupply yourself.

It also means you cannot have any form of communication with anyone else.

So you're totally isolated. And what is... the most remote environment that I have ever been in.

And now I'm a man of the country. You know what I mean?

I live on 700 acres in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

I know the woods and the wilderness, and that's my environment.

But this place was next level. You know, you go into this type of backcountry and you realize, you know, you're easily at times 150 to 200 miles from the nearest human being.

And the nearest human beings, it may just be a little village that's a collection of a few shacks with a dirt, you know, airstrip that...

And they bring food and water in by way of these boat planes and stuff.

And you realize, holy crap, I can't make mistakes out here.

This is for real. If something happens out here, no one is going to be able to get here.

It's going to be days before someone's going to be able to make it in here to help us if we run into a situation that we need assistance.

Have you ever felt that before in your life in any other situation?

No. No, I mean, I've been to some third world countries and stuff while I was in the Navy, you know, and you knew that, you know, there was medical care available, but it was at a very low level.

You know what I mean? You know, you could get some simple medicines or stuff like that.

And we always had a doc with us. But I have never felt that type of aloneness that I felt out there.

I mean... you know, you would stop paddling and you would realize this is what complete silence sounds like.

No airplanes, no traffic, no nothing. Just complete silence.

So that's the Yukon 1000 kind of in a nutshell.

And This has been the direction that I've, the last two years that I've really went with my personal journey as an athlete, the last two years I've kind of moved out of the traditional like ultra running, racing type of space.

And I've been for the last two years moving more into these more like expedition type races.

You know what I mean? And I love it because it pushes you in different ways.

Like in ultra running, There's a lot of grit involved, and it's just you keep going.

The training can be very specific. You get to focus on, you know, running.

That's what you focus on is running throughout your training block and, you know, a little bit of nutrition and hydration and stuff that goes along with that.

But with these expeditions, like the UConn 1000, you have to be able to perform well But you have to be able to perform physically, but you have to be thinking about all these other things like navigation, eating, drinking, the weather.

You can't ever get behind. So you have to be able to do all of these things, different things to survive out there.

Plus you have to be performing physically, which is exhausting.

And so it's a cool experience. I highly encourage you to do some sort of challenge like that one day.

It sounds so interesting. It will make you grow.

I mean, it will really make you grow as a, as a, just a complete human being, you know.

What was traditional ultra running not providing you any longer that you were searching for?

Um, It's the realization that there are going to be real consequences if I make a mistake here.

Like in a traditional ultra running race, and please guys, don't take this as I don't like running anymore.

I still love, I mean, I have plenty of plans to do other 100 milers and other races in the future.

But, you know, when you're running a traditional race, you're usually no more than... six or seven miles from the next aid station.

You know, sometimes if you're doing like the Cocodona 250 or something, you may be 18 or 20 miles from the next aid station.

But the trails you're running on are generally easily accessible.

There are roadways within proximity that, you know, if you had a real issue, you're wearing a tracker or you have a cell phone, somebody's going to be there within about an hour to pick you up.

But when you go out and either the Yukon 1000, last year I did the Colorado Trail Race, and you realize I'm in the middle of this wilderness and I'm a hundred miles from the nearest civilization.

And there are no roads here. Like there's no way out of here, but through.

It's that element that sharpens your mind, your skills, your proficiency.

It takes the seriousness of it to the next level because in a real sense, your true life and well-being depends upon you doing everything right in that environment.

You really can't go into autopilot in some of these expeditions.

I mean, if I think about some of these races that I've done or ultras, you can pretty much go into autopilot.

You follow the lights that are in front of you.

You follow the signs, you follow the path.

You know, if it's five, 20 mile loops, every 20 miles, you're going to hit the checkpoint again.

And you just got to put out, you know, during that effort.

Which is a beautiful thing. It is. It's a great experience.

You can still unlock a lot of great undiscovered compartments of your mind during those races.

But the thought of an expedition like that, where the only way I can think about it and describe it is this organization sets the conditions very loosely for you to go and try to survive. and complete this expedition.

That's the perfect way to describe it, Nick.

It's like, these are the easy, if you ever want to be a race director, these are the easiest events to put on, you know what I mean?

Because it's like you said, it's super loose, you know?

It's like, with the Yukon 1000, that's a hard river to navigate, by the way, which I know sounds crazy.

What, you have to navigate in a river? Like, But it becomes super braided in places, meaning there's different channels that are going in all these different directions.

And if you take the wrong one, it's going to add literally 10 miles potentially onto your route if you take the wrong channel.

So there's a lot of navigation. But it's so remote that once you get past Dawson City, there are no maps of the river.

So we, as a team for that expedition, you have to go online and create your own maps of the route.

Like I have to look at satellite imagery.

I have to overlay the satellite imagery with UTM grid lines because I have to be able to call in grids in the case of an emergency.

I have to have these maps printed out. And I have to have all of the available airstrips pre-plotted on every one of my maps.

Like, I can't just go and purchase that stuff.

I have to build all of that out. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, that's all part of the training. Yeah.

It's a huge preparation. It took me hours and hours and hours to build these maps out.

How many times did you get turned around or lost?

We definitely took a few turns that we shouldn't have took, probably on four or five occasions during the course of the 435 miles that we covered on the river.

And you pay for it, man, because when you get out of the flow, like when you get out of the main flow of the river, it, you slow down substantially.

And so that's another aspect of this particular race is knowing how to read the river.

Because you may have a channel and say that channel at the fork, if you take that channel, it's going to cut off, let's say three miles.

Let's follows that bend, well, you've got a little cutoff that's going to cut that whole bend off.

So you're saving three miles, but you get out of the main flow and you try to take that cut through and you realize you would have been faster if you would have stayed in the main flow and even added three miles to the course.

So like... I didn't realize how important that was until me and David, we're cranking, we're paddling, and we have another race team beside us, and that race team takes that big three-mile bend, and they stay in the flow, and we take this little cutoff, and we think, oh, man, we're going to gap them right here.

You know what I mean? And by the time we get out of that cutoff, That team was so far ahead of us, we could just barely see them on the horizon because they stayed in the main flow of the river.

So eventually, after about three days, I realized I have to watch the surface of this water so carefully and look for any little ripple or any little evidence that there's flow.

And I have to chase that flow, like I have to hunt the flow. as we go.

And you even learn how to read it from the wind.

So if you have a tailwind coming behind you, as that tailwind hits the surface of the water, wherever the flow is the strongest, the water is going to be the flattest.

You see what I'm saying? Because if the water's moving in this direction and the wind's coming from behind you, the water's going to be smoother. where it's moving the fastest.

If you have a headwind and that wind's coming against the current and hitting you in the face, wherever the water is the roughest or the most turbulent.

The little ripples. Wherever the ripples are the biggest, that's where you know the flow is going to be.

Did you know this prior to going to the race?

I had no idea. It took me three days to figure it out, dude.

Yeah. There's just so much that goes into it that you learn and has to click for you to be successful out there.

That's a wild experience. How many teams started this race?

I want to say there was about 30 teams this year.

How many finished? Do you know? I don't remember.

I don't remember the numbers of how many finished.

I know there were a good handful of teams that were not able to finish the race for all kinds of different reasons.

Some people had issues with their boats or their equipment.

Some people capsized multiple times. In the first day, you have to cross a big lake.

It's about 50 kilometers across this lake.

It's called Lake LaBarge. And we get out in this lake and the wind kicks up and we literally had two, two foot, two and a half foot waves hitting our boat, basically rear quartering into our kayak. for seven straight hours.

And we're just, you know, we're in a little sea kayak, and it was extremely cold.

The water's glacial runoff, so it's freezing cold.

And there were multiple teams that capsized multiple times in the crossing of that lake.

And you know, those teams weren't able to finish because, you know, you capsize in that water in those conditions.

You can't just get back in your boat and keep paddling.

You have to get your, hopefully you don't lose your boat.

You have to swim your boat to shore and then you have to immediately set a shelter up and rewarm yourself or you'll become hypothermic.

I mean, in less than an hour. So you're going to be in your shelter rewarming yourself for two hours probably before your core body temperature has come up enough for you to safely get back out in those conditions.

Have there been people who have died? Not yet.

There will be. There will be someone who dies.

How long has this race been going on? I don't know exactly how long.

I think the current race director who has really taken the race to the next level, he's made the standards a lot higher in terms of the cutoff times and really the structure of the race.

I think he's been running it for maybe the last five or six years.

Okay. Yeah. And then you guys pull down at what mile marker and for what reason?

We pulled out at 435 miles at the last possible place that you can extract, which is a little town just before you cross the border into Alaska called Dawson City.

And so the caveat to all of this is my teammate, David Charbonnet, which I wish David was here with us today.

I went through SEAL training with David, both BUDS and SEAL qualification training.

And David was my teammate. Now... Shortly after we graduated SEAL qualification training, David had a parachuting accident, and he had a significant spinal cord injury and was paralyzed basically from the waist down.

Well, David got to the point in his life after being paralyzed for 13 years, and he said, Chad, I don't know this body that I'm in right now.

I don't know what the limits of this body is.

I want to figure out what the limits of this body is.

I want to go on an adventure. I want to push myself.

He was like, do you know of anything that we can do together?

Because I had hit David up and I was like, hey, man, let me push you in your wheelchair for 100 miles.

Or like, let's get you out and let's do something together, you know, hard.

And he's like, you're not pushing me for 100 miles.

So he was like, do you know anything that we can do together?

And I said, well, yeah, I've heard of this really crazy kayaking race called the Yukon 1000.

And so... He went, he went, he really didn't respond to it.

And I didn't know over the course of two years after mentioning that race to him, he lives in San Diego.

He linked up with an Olympic paddler named Chris Barlow in San Diego who coaches Olympic athletes.

And he spent two years with Chris Barlow learning how to kayak. and literally went to the world kayaking competitions to qualify for the Paralympics.

And he got really good at it. And he just calls me up one day.

He's like, hey, man, I got really good at kayaking.

Let's do this race. He called my bluff. And so we didn't know how far or if we were going to be able to finish this thing.

Because no one has ever attempted this race with David's condition, being paralyzed.

You know, we look at people in a wheelchair and we think we can relate to them.

Like we think we can imagine. Well, all right, I get it.

You can't use your legs. I can imagine that.

I can imagine figuring out how to get around in a wheelchair and kind of carry on with life, right?

You don't see the intricacies of what they have to do on a day-to-day basis just to perform tasks like going to the bathroom.

Like, you don't understand the issues that people with that condition have with circulation in their lower body.

Because they can't—their muscles aren't pumping to move blood in their lower body, right?

Like, that causes a lot of issues. You know, we're out in the backcountry, Nick.

If we need to take a poo, we're going to dig a little hole.

We're going to squat down over the hole, and we're going to poo in the hole, and we're going to go—

He can't do that. How does he poo in the woods?

So much that he had to overcome to be out there in that environment that we so take for granted, man.

And we didn't know. Nobody's ever attempted it.

We're going down the river, man. Everything's going great.

We're rocking and rolling. didn't flip the boat over.

Our rule was no swimming. So David's a great paddler.

Those waves were hitting us. We even went through some rapids.

He's really good at bracing the boat with his paddle.

But he had told me, He said, look, man, the main thing that I have to watch, look out for is what's called pressure wounds on my butt.

Because we're sitting in this kayak seat for 18 hours a day.

We're pulling 120 plus mile days in this boat, 18 hours a day.

He said, I have to check every night for these pressure wounds.

And we get through day one, no issues. Get through day two, no issues.

Get through day three, And we just pull up on bank to camp.

And I get the shelter set up. I'm out kind of moving the boat around, taking tidying up some gear, getting ready to bed down for the, you know, three hours that we get to sleep.

And by the way, it never gets dark. Really?

Sun's up 24-7. Yeah, that's weird. That is odd.

It's weird. And so I'm tidying up camp and I hear David.

David's doing his checks in the tent on night three and he says, oh, that's not good.

I heard him say that in the tent. And I thought, man, I know what he's talking.

I know what it is. I knew immediately what it was.

And so he was like, Chad, come in here and look at this.

And of course, him and I are tight, you know, like, look, dude, these old bodies that we're in, these are just flesh suits, right?

Like, so he rolls over and he's like, check my butt out for me.

And I check. And so the way he would check it, he would use his phone just to take a picture of And then he would check it, you know, but he rolled over, I checked it, and sure enough, there was a pressure wound.

It basically looks like a deep bruise kind of right on his sit bone.

And it was about this big, real dark spot.

And if he continues... sitting, and it really has to do with not only the pressure of sitting, but also just the poor circulation.

If he continues and the skin breaks and it becomes an open wound, there's a very high probability that it will get infected because of poor circulation.

It takes months for their wounds to heal if they take damage to their lower body.

And so David's like, You know, if I get a cut on my leg or something, he's like, we'll keep pushing because worst comes to worst, they can amputate my leg.

But if I take a wound on my butt, you can't amputate your butt.

And like his life, his mobility is his wheelchair, which requires him to sit.

And even if it doesn't become infected, they then will have to – spend potentially months laying on their stomach, allowing this wound to heal.

And so when we saw that, he was like, yeah, man, I cannot go another 500 miles with the way this looks right now.

And there were no questions asked. Like, it wasn't like I was going to try to convince him to put his health and his time and responsibilities as a husband and as a father after the race was over.

Like, there's no question. Like, no. Yeah, it's over for us.

But we still had a little over 100 miles to go to get to Dawson City from that camp.

To be extracted. To be extracted. And there was, like I said, man, we're 100 miles from the nearest civilization.

And we were like, yeah, well, it is what it is.

You've still got to go another 100 miles on it.

That puts things into perspective. Yeah.

You're not being extracted right from where you call it.

It's get to the next point, which is a hundred miles away.

You have no other choice. And so- We got up the next morning and we paddled hard.

The cutoff, there's a cutoff at Dawson City and it's real tight.

You have to get past Dawson City by a certain time in order to continue the race.

And there were a few teams that didn't make that cutoff because you got to work to get past that cutoff.

Like to do this race in 10 days is a big, big effort. even just to finish it in 10 days.

Um, so we said, we made a commitment. We said, all right, we know our race is over.

We got a hundred miles left. There was, I'm not going to lie to you.

We were pretty beat down. There was physically, physically.

Yeah. I mean, your hand, like my hands were like sausages, dude.

Uh, My hand swelled so bad that over the course of the last two weeks, all of the skin on the tips of my fingers have peeled off.

Because my fingers got so big, I guess it stretched the skin.

It's like the opposite of ultra running.

You know how beat up your feet get? That's your hands in this paddle race.

And your traps, your lats, your core, everything is just so exhausted, man.

It's hard. How many calories do you think you were consuming a day?

I think probably 6,000 calories a day, right around there.

You need to carry all of that too. Yeah, it's all got to be in the boat.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But we made a commitment to each other on day four.

We said, we're making this cutoff. Like even if, even though we know our race is over and that gets back to what we were talking about just a little bit ago, man.

The result was no longer achievable. We knew that.

No questions asked. We could have just got up out of camp on day four and we could have covered that 100 miles over the course of 15, 16 hours and just kind of took it easy getting down to Dawson City.

Which most people would do. Which, that's the temptation, right?

Like, you're not going to finish the race.

But David and I both looked at each other and said, no, we're making the cutoff.

And so we paddled hard, dude. And we pulled into Dawson City with over a half hour to spare.

We covered 100 miles on day four by 4.30 p.m.

We covered 100 miles in less than 12 hours.

Wow. That's impressive. Yeah, it was big, dude.

When you were on the water, were you guys talking the whole time or was it silence?

Silence. So we talked a good bit in the mornings, and then the hardest part of the day would usually be from about 2 p.m. until maybe 6 or 7 p.m.

It was just a hard—for some reason, that was just a hard part of the day.

And we would get kind of quiet then, but we would still check in on each other.

And then usually in the evening, we would get some new energy and conversation would pick up.

Sometimes the pace would pick up. But a lot of times, communication is also situationally dependent out there because the wind can get so bad. especially if it's a headwind, that in the boat, David and I are about the same distance apart as you and I are right now at this table, but the wind would be so bad that there was no way we could hear each other. talk even this close.

And so during those times, I mean, you would have periods where the wind was just hammering you for six, seven hours at a time where you could not talk to each other.

Like you were basically on an island by yourself with a dude this close to you, but there was no way you could hear each other.

So what were you thinking about this entire time and all this solitude?

I was trying to take in the beauty of what was around me.

Um, and it became difficult for me, especially on day four.

Uh, one of the bad things I started thinking about is I started looking at this dang watch too much.

And, um, Just like when you're putting in back-to-back days, back-to-back-to-back-to-back days that are 120, 130-mile days, that starts to get to your head.

And so I started getting way too... Let me check this watch.

Oh, dang, I've only been a half a mile. And so I started thinking too much about how much ground we had covered and how much ground we had left to cover to get to that Dawson City.

And so what I actually started doing, Nick, is I would reset my watch every 10 miles and And because for me, I could mentally say, if I can look at my watch and it says four miles, I can say, okay, I can get from mile four to mile 10.

I was tricking my mind because when I would look at my watch and it would say I had already been 70 miles and I knew I had another 50 to 60 miles to go that day, And I was already so beat and I had already went so far.

It was like, it was crushing me mentally, man.

I can imagine, yeah. And so David would ask me, he'd be like, what's our mileage for the day?

I'd be like, oh, eight miles. He'd be like, what are you talking about?

I'm like, dude, I had to start resetting my watch every 10 miles.

It's smart. And it worked. It really worked, man.

It's smart. It's like when I run ultras... say it's a hundred mile race.

I break up into 10 mile sections. Yeah. Like, all right.

Like section one is zero to 10, then 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40, because you get like 70 miles in and you're, you're hurting, you're in pain.

You realize you have 30 miles left, 30 miles.

And you start thinking, well, that's more than a marathon.

I have more than a marathon left. And it's this much time per mile.

It's this much time on my feet. You get in your head.

Big time. You know, it becomes overwhelming.

So breaking it down into those small chunks, you can manage that.

It's critical. It was critical for me, man.

It always has been, yeah. And it's funny how you can trick your mind.

As smart as you are, you can almost outsmart yourself, you know?

Well, it's like me on the bike right now, since I'm in Ironman prep.

I'll break it down into these small, like five to 10 minute sections.

And I'll go as long as possible without looking at the clock on my watch, Some of these workouts, you know, you have like 35 minute intervals at certain power.

And when you're in an uncomfortable position for 35 minutes, it's a long time, dude.

So I will put my head down and I'll close my eyes and I will try to get as far as possible without looking at the clock.

You get to a point where you're like, I'm sure I have like eight minutes left.

You open up, you look up 14, like, no, no, no.

It's a mind game the entire time. I want to talk to you about setting my mind so that I'll actually learn from the race, your race.

Yeah. I don't know if you want to talk about that.

Yeah, I'd love to. So, by the way... Congratulations on this success of the BPN race this year.

Thank you. There's nothing that compares to it.

Not only was it an amazing event with amazing people, well-ran, just clean, tidy race, Everything about it was an awesome experience.

I appreciate that. But you guys have brought the sport of ultra running really to the mainstream.

And I know that wasn't your intention. It just happened.

There's never been another race that got the amount of exposure that that race got basically on the first year, just right out of the gate, man.

And I know that wasn't your goal. You didn't put the race on so that you could cause a big scene.

That wasn't your goal. But when you bring a bunch of awesome people together and they start doing awesome things, sometimes that just happens.

And it happened this past year. And I was so, one, thankful to be a part of it, but so proud that you guys, you and your team put in the work to make it happen.

But what I want to talk about, what I learned there is... So at that race, I think I only ran 84 miles or something like that.

And there were a lot of people, I think, who... well, what the crap, Chad?

You only ran... We thought you were going to win the race.

You know what I mean? Like a lot of people... And I get that, right?

Because I'm a runner. That's like my bread and butter, right?

But I was actually proud of how far I ran because I had not been running at all.

I had been training for this UConn 1000.

I had been paddling. Like literally I had...

My running was four or five miles a week.

You know what I mean? And I realized that there were a lot of people who have followed me for a long time who thought that I was going to be able to do well purely based off of mental toughness.

And this really opened my eyes that on some level, there is a belief that exists out there that you can just get mentally tough enough to show up and perform at a high level without putting in the necessary work.

Yes. This has happened. It's not anyone's fault.

If this has been your perspective, be honest with yourself.

It's because of what has been portrayed through the highlight reels of social media.

Yes. This state... that people think exists where you can become mentally tough enough to just go and perform anytime without putting in the proper, specific, intentional training that you can just go perform because you have built this level of mental toughness.

This does not exist for any human beings.

Not me or any of the other guys out there who portray themselves as 10 times more mentally tough than me.

It don't exist for them either. If anyone out here is ever successful at a high level in athletics, it is because they have put in the work to be successful.

And when you put in that work, the work is what makes you mentally tough.

Yes. You ain't getting no more mentally tough on race day.

It's all, everything's done on race day.

You shouldn't be learning really much of anything new on race day.

But the reason people want to believe that you can just train your mind to to this level that you could just go and perform without the work is because then it gives them an excuse to not do the work, which is the hard part.

People want to believe I can just use this little hack that Chad just told me where I reset my watch every 10 miles, or I can break things down into small digestible segments, or I can just decide to be patient or stay present.

I can be really deliberate I can just do all these things and I can perform.

Like, that's going to trick my mind into this state where I can just keep going.

No. You have to be physically prepared. And then you have to apply all of those mindset techniques, layer them on top of the physical preparation, layer them on top of the work, strengthen them throughout the process of the work.

And that's how it all comes together to win.

Like those guys that were at your race that were in the final hours, that went for 50, 60 hours, however long they went.

I could be more mentally tough than Kendall all day long.

Maybe I am. But he'll beat me every day of the week. until I show up and put in the amount of miles that he had put in to show up and to perform the way he performed that day.

You see what I'm saying, man? I mean, it makes me think back to what you're explaining right now.

When I went for my first sub three hour marathon, I knew leading up to that race that I was not in sub three shape.

I did not put in the work. I did not hit my splits.

I I couldn't stay on track with the training.

And when I towed the line for that race, I told myself, you can mentally outwork your inability physically to run sub three.

I told myself that. I said, you just got to just mentally work through it.

So I went out, I knew I had to hold a six 45 minute per mile pace.

I went out at six 40 for the first six miles.

And then I dropped off to like a seven 45 minute per mile pace.

And I crossed that finish line at three hours and 24 minutes.

I missed that goal by 24 minutes. And that was a huge realization for me.

I needed that failure because it told me, and it taught me you can't, out mindset, the physical abilities that is required to do this stuff.

Thank you for the confirmation on that. 100%.

Thank you so much, Nick. But I do believe we are in this weird time here on earth and within social media that people are putting more time towards the mental preparation, which is absolutely critical and necessary.

And I think it is almost a hedge to the physical work that is required.

The way that I like to think of it is sometimes people put so much work into the theory and the thoughts and the study of a certain thing But then when they actually are put into the practice and real life application, they fail and fall apart.

For example, Yukon 1000, you could have someone who studies that route for years and reads how to maneuver a kayak and reads how to watch and monitor the water and the waves and the ripples.

And you put them out in the water and they go, holy crap.

I know nothing. Yeah. I know nothing. You have to match that mental preparation and readiness with the physical test and readiness.

Yeah, man. And the, the load went to, to truly prepare for, for a sub-three-hour marathon, for a performance like Kendall and what was the other guy's name?

Kim. Kim put on at the BPN Ultra. To truly prepare for that type of performance, you need to have... I want to be honest with you right now.

The load... of that type of preparation to perform at that level, you probably don't understand the level or the load or the weight of the training and preparation that goes into a performance like that.

It's not, I'm just going to go out, I'm going to run for an hour every day.

Like, I'm going to make a commitment to run every day.

Like, no, man. It's like, for guys to perform at that level, it becomes this thing that consumes them.

It has to consume you. By the way, to the detriment of everything else in your life, all of your other responsibilities are going to suffer.

Like... If you want to perform, if I want to perform at that level, I have to have a conversation with my wife.

I have to have a conversation with my guys that work with me at 307 Project.

Like, hey, I'm going to make a conscious decision to allow this to consume me because it's that important to me that I'm successful at this specific event.

That's the load we're talking about. It's not just the daily grind.

It's not just the daily maintenance, like the gym or like, it's so much more than that to perform at that level.

I mean, I was the one that was standing at that start and finish line at the top of every hour for majority of those hours.

And deep into the race, when Kim and Kendall would line back up, You can tell when someone has the mental capacity to keep going.

They have the will, but their body isn't matching.

That physical readiness isn't matching the mental readiness.

They would line back up at the top of every hour, deep into the race, looking just as equally mentally sharp and physically sharp.

I mean, they were hurting, they were struggling, but they would finish those loops consistently hour after hour after hour.

And if that storm didn't come in and completely destroy the course and the race, I think those guys would have gone another 24 hours.

Yeah. Like they were not slowing down, but they were physically prepared to handle that amount of volume.

Yeah. They put in the work. Yeah, you're talking about thousands of hours of running to put on a performance like that.

For one performance. For one performance.

That's it, man. Thousands of hours of running.

Whenever I go into these big fitness preps, and I think most people think that I go from one race to another, to another, to another.

And I think you're the same way as me where...

We pick our expeditions or our challenges very strategically and intentionally because we know what is required when we go into that process.

It is all consuming and you have to make sacrifices and you say no to a lot of other things.

Before I went into this Ironman prep, having the conversation with Steph of, This is what it's going to require having the conversation with my team.

This is what's going to require knowing that at the end of each day, I am absolutely wiped, especially after spending time with the kids and the family.

And that's a huge priority of my life, being present for that.

You do that for 18 weeks, you're pretty wiped at the end of it.

But you can know when you complete it, you put everything you had into it.

And you are physically prepared to manage and handle what you're about to endure.

That's the beauty of a prep and a build.

It really is, man. It really is. When this clicks with you, what you're going to, talking to other athletes out there, when this really clicks with you, you're going to reach this state where when you commit to a big effort,

You are going to feel the burden of that effort at the moment of commitment, if that makes sense.

I feel that in my soul. Yes, sir. Thank you.

If you're not feeling that, it means that you're not really committed.

It means that you are not going to perform as well as you can perform.

It means that you have left yourself an out somewhere.

You should feel the burden of that commitment from the moment that you commit in your mind to doing this thing.

And it's heavy, man. Heavy. It's really heavy.

And I just want to be real with people, man.

This is what is behind these efforts. And I went running with a good friend of mine, Mason, this morning around Lady Bird Lake, which, by the way, I'll never forget our run around Lady Bird Lake, man.

That was one of the... Highlights of my run, like as far as training runs.

It was a great night run. It was one of the highlights of my entire running career was running with you that 10 miles around that lake.

And the guys were out there. Yeah, filming it.

And like, that was so much fun. But yeah, I was running with my buddy today around Lady Bird Lake and he signed up for a last man standing race.

And he was like, man, I know I have to believe I can win to win.

And I'm like, yeah, you're right. I said, but how do you build that belief that you can win?

I said, the only way that you can believe that you're going to win is by putting in that That training, that specific intentional training on the front end, like that's how you build that.

And it is essential that you must believe you can win to win.

If you don't believe you can win, but you're not going to win.

But to truly believe that you're going to win, you build that belief by putting in that specific intentional hard training. training prior to the event.

You only get to experience this very few times really in your athletic career.

The biggest time I've experienced it was when I won the Mid-State Mile the second year.

There's a film on that called Just One Mile on Amazon Prime if you guys are interested in watching it.

But I remember showing up to that race and And I didn't care, like literally, I didn't care who else showed up.

Courtney DeWalter could have showed up. David Goggins could have showed up.

I didn't give two craps who showed up to this race.

I knew for a fact I was going to win that day.

No questions asked. How did I arrive at that place?

Which is a, dude, you want to talk about a freeing feeling when you toe the line with that type of mindset?

Like to your core, you don't care who shows up.

No one's beating you. How did that happen?

It was because I spent four or five, no, six or eight months prior to towing that line with the singular focus of preparing to win that race.

Singular focus. That's how I arrived that day in that state with that mindset.

When it comes to racing and competition and winning, Are you in pursuit of the win to beat everyone else?

Or is it to honor the commitment you made to yourself to be the best?

I have to answer that question honestly.

It's to beat everyone else. It's to say...

I'm that good. Yeah. You know what I mean?

I appreciate the honesty there. Yeah, I mean, that's the honesty, man.

I love competition. I love it, man. I actually, I'm starting to miss it, you know?

Like, that's another thing I learned at your race.

Although, you know, I was happy I was able to show up and run 80 some odd miles with zero training.

I thought, okay, that's great. But at the same time, it pissed me off. because I realized I wasn't in good enough running shape anymore to be competitive.

And I love competition. And so it pissed me off, dude.

Like I've been running like since UConn, was over and that was done.

Like I have been running long every single day because it pissed me off that I couldn't be competitive in a sport that I love.

Are you coming back for next year's race?

Lord willing, man. Lord willing, yeah. We're moving it to April next year.

So it'll be a little cooler. Thank goodness.

I know. That was brutal. I know. But I mean, it was part of the experience, dude.

I'm not going to complain about the weather out there because it was just part of the experience, you know?

What I loved about the Go On War Ultra, and I didn't expect this, and we definitely didn't expect the race to just catch as much attention as it did in the moment.

We thought maybe that once we published the film, which we're releasing September 5th, We thought maybe then the race would gain a lot of popularity, but we didn't think in the moment it would blow up like it did.

But there were a lot of people guessing who was going to win the race.

You know, a lot of people were saying either you or Truett, one of our athletes, Johnny Davies, he was going for the win.

There were a lot of assumptions on the table, but Kim and Kendall were these people. unassumed underdogs that came out of nowhere who were able to run the race because their names were selected in the lottery.

Yeah. These were just two guys who had been putting in work for a long period of time to be given the opportunity to show up and throw down.

What a beautiful opportunity, too, because that won't be the case for them next year.

For sure. They won't get the same opportunity.

Yeah. I mean, I can remember those days as an ultra runner in 2018, 2019, when I could show up to a race and I knew I was tuned up back then.

Like I knew I was going to run in the top three, but nobody knew my name.

I mean, that's a cool position to be in.

It's a cool position to be in. It really is, man.

And it, you know, Truett, What a crazy athlete, dude.

Pull up world record, fast marathons and jeans.

But it was amazing to me how many people were so adamant that Truett was gonna win.

Truett's not an ultra runner. Again, that goes back to this whole concept of people's belief that someone who's mentally tough, which Truett is a mentally tough individual, You do that many freaking pull-ups in 24 hours, you have got a strong mind.

For sure. But it goes back to this whole thing.

It proves the point that people believe that a mentally tough individual can step up and perform when they haven't put in the specificity, the specific training needed to perform at that specific event or challenge.

That's the exact word that was on my mind as you were getting there.

Specificity. Yeah, man. You can't make these broad stroke statements of this person is good at this thing, so they're going to be good at everything.

You have to train specifically to achieve a certain outcome.

If I think back to my last marathon, I made a PR of 239.

That was crazy. almost three years ago now to say that just because I ran a two 39 marathon, then I can go run a two 39 marathon now.

So now those three years ago, my, my training in the last three years has not been specific enough to go achieve that outcome right now.

Just because you did one thing once doesn't mean you can go do it again.

It requires a whole nother block to get there.

You know, and like that specificity is so critical and vital for anything you're going after.

And you can never base a future performance off of past results.

Never. Like it's an impossibility. Never.

Especially when you're talking about high level, like.

You know, you get up and you start playing around with the top tier, you know, in any sport, running, kayaking, whatever, man, you're splitting hairs.

Like, you have to have, your training has to be so specific in order to perform at those levels.

Yeah. You know? So now that you're getting back into more running, what's calling you?

So we are signing up for a 100 miler in June that I've always wanted to run since I started ultra running in 2018 called the Old Dominion.

It's the second oldest 100 miler in the nation.

Maybe in the world. It's the Old Dominion.

It's in Virginia. And it's one of the few races, as the sport of ultra running has grown, ultra running has changed quite a bit.

And not in a negative way. It's just different.

Ultra running used to be, even in 2018, it was still very grassroots sports. you know, $20 entry fees.

You know, the winner of the race would get a loaf of homemade bread or, you know, something like that.

And there was just some guy at the start line who blew a horn and everybody went off and ran.

And, you know, that's a cool experience.

And the Old Dominion is one of these races who has, they've really maintained that type of, that old spirit of ultra running.

And, yeah, It's a course that has changed very little over the course of however long it's been running.

Decades it's been running. So you get to run the same course that guys were running 30 years ago.

And I think that's another cool aspect of it.

Where's that at? It's in Virginia, so it's kind of like in the Shenandoah Valley.

Oh, it's beautiful out there. Yeah, it is, man.

It's a mountain race, a lot of trail. I think there's some road sections on it, too.

But Lord willing, I'm going to run that, and I want to really try to put down a fast time at the Old Dominion 100.

I think currently my best time on a mountainous 100-miler would be I don't know, 19 hours, 18, 19 hours, something like that.

So I would love to go out there and PR on my 100-mile mountain.

You know, it's all terrain-dependent, so you have to kind of categorize them as a mountain trail race or something like that.

But I'm looking forward to experiencing that.

Um, my favorite format is, uh, is last man standing though.

It's, it's just, it brings me so much joy when I get to be out there running and competing in that type of environment and that type of format.

Um, so I would love to come back, uh, April.

The invite is there. And, and do, uh, your and your team's race, um, So as of now, that's what I'm thinking and kind of running that old dominion and then maybe really focusing on really honing in on that last man standing format because there's a lot that goes into going as far as those guys went.

There's a lot of technique that goes into going as far as those guys went.

I would love to go 72 hours at a last man standing race.

That would be a high goal for me to set for myself.

I think the race in April is going to go long.

I think it will too. It's going to go really long.

I think it will too, man. And then... I know it's not running, but I got to go back to the Yukon.

Redemption? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, David is now going back to the drawing board and thinking about how can we manage the swelling that he was experiencing in his legs, which was another thing we didn't even talk about.

How we can change his seat up properly. to really mitigate those pressure wounds.

He's going back to the drawing board and really getting innovative with what we can do to kind of overcome the issues that took us out. this year.

And I'm leaving it up to him. Of course, my primary choice for a teammate would be him.

But if something, if he comes to me and says, Chad, I just don't think that we have the ability to overcome these issues that I faced in this body that I'm in right now.

Or maybe he needs an extra year for us to come up with some sort of battery-powered Normatec boot that he can wear in the boat to mitigate this swelling and move his blood in his lower body.

We might have to partner with an engineer or somebody to come up with something like this, you know what I mean?

Or some sort of special seat that bolts into the kayak, you know?

If he needs an extra year, that's fine too, but...

Next year, I got to go back to the Yukon, man.

It's haunting me. And that place, I've traveled all over the world.

That place and that wilderness is the only place I have ever been to in my life where I, as soon as I left, I started counting down the days that I could get back in that environment. just because the remoteness and the sheer beauty and the isolation, you feel like you're exploring a new continent.

With that level of solitude, one of the earlier questions I asked is how much you guys were talking on the water.

I'm just curious, in that type of environment, that remoteness, alone in your own thoughts for so much time, could you feel the presence of God with you during that effort?

Yes, you can. I mean, and you can really see it.

You can see like, you see creation out there, meaning the environment, God's creation.

Like you see it on a whole nother scale out there because it is so raw and untouched.

And, you know, like bears and Rocky Mountain sheep and the trees and the mountains and big bobcats and birds and eagles.

And like, you're just like, oh, my gosh, like. what a masterpiece this is.

Like, because we don't get to witness that.

Like, even when we go, you know, you go out here and explore a national park or, like, you're going to find little pieces of trash and the trails are going to be marked and, like, you stop, even we go out to your farm where you run your race, you know, you stop and you're probably going to be able to hear an airplane.

You see power lines. Yeah, power lines, but, like, You do.

You have this appreciation for the beauty of the Almighty's masterpiece.

Like, this is as close as I've ever seen it to its original form.

You know what I mean? Man has kind of marred it, messed it up a little bit, you know?

And that was cool. And David is also a very strong, faithful man.

We share a common faith in Jesus Christ.

And so, I mean, we prayed together. I mean... multiple times a day, every day, you know, that was really cool being out there with somebody with a shared faith in that beauty of creation, in awe of this masterpiece that was made and formed by the Almighty.

And then to be able to pray together and share that common faith was powerful, man.

Pray for each other, like, lift up our requests to the Lord, like, Father, we're going through these rapids today.

Please help us get through here dry. Yeah.

You know? For sure. It's good, man. I can only imagine.

I don't think I've ever been, no, I haven't been somewhere remote like that and have experienced something such.

Well, less people traverse that river each year than climb Mount Everest.

Really? Yeah. because of just the harsh conditions of what it takes to get to.

Yeah, there's just nothing out there. Like less people have traversed that river than have climbed Mount Everest.

So yeah, it's just, there's just nothing out there.

It's so hard to get to. That's incredible.

Yeah. So I have this question for you. I'm curious.

You made this Instagram post. I think it was one of your more recent Instagram posts.

And- I'm really curious, just like the depth of thought behind it.

And you said, where has gone the purity of the message?

Our minds have been eroded by emotion and greed and hypocrisy.

I am becoming a stranger and alien in this place.

Thy will be done. Yeah. What'd you mean by that?

Um, So my appetite for like social media and online presence and stuff has for some reason like really fell off. know why.

And don't get me wrong, guys. There's so much good that has come and I believe will come from these platforms that the Lord has called us to and blessed us with.

But for some reason, my appetite has just fell off, like fell out because one of the main things that's affected me here lately, man, is the veteran community on social media.

And the... It's out of control right now.

Dude, it's really affected me. Just like the... Just the bickering and the... I mean, I had to include hypocrisy in there because like, you know, guys calling out guys for stuff and it's like... man, we so often forget about all the mistakes we've made.

Like, you know, it's... I understand that, you know, we as veterans, like, we have a responsibility to police each other to a certain degree.

But there's got to be a better way, man.

And When I first got on Instagram, I feel like it was a place where people were just sharing and inspiring things, posting cool photos.

Like there was very little. This is great.

I mean, this was 2019. Maybe my perspective, maybe I'm all out of whack.

I don't know. But I remember getting on Instagram and being like, man, I could go on here and look, so-and-so completed this race.

So-and-so's training for this. And maybe my feed has just changed because I also got off track for a while.

During COVID, man, I got really angry about everything that was going on.

And I got really... like into that conversation, political conversations.

And that became consuming to me. And like, I contributed for a while to the hate discontent.

And maybe my feed, it's just showing me all this stuff.

Maybe it's just my own fault. No, I don't think so.

I mean, I'm seeing the same trends. But it's just like, Dude, I want to get back to being the person that everything that I put out on my platforms is intentional in terms of I either want it to make you think about something that's important.

I want it to inspire you to maybe do something different.

Or maybe realize a higher potential in yourself.

Maybe at times I want it to make you smile or laugh.

And I want it to be based around a story that's worth telling.

You know, I just have a yearning to get back to that, man.

I'm not going to quit on social media. I've taken definitely a pause from it.

And I think I have already started to change my direction to try to be maybe a voice there, both on YouTube and on Instagram and whatever else comes, that, hey, let's get back to why we even started this page.

You know what I mean? Because everything I'm seeing, man, is just, It's just not good for me personally.

And by the way, everybody listening to this, if you've followed me for years, I sincerely apologize for the times that I've gotten off track.

I understand it, but the Lord, thankfully, I think in His grace has just bringing me back into alignment with who he's created me to be.

You know what I mean? Through a series of wild stuff.

I mean, I spent the last month sitting with one of my biggest mentors in my life as he dies from pancreatic cancer, sitting with him for hours on end as he's dying and like, Man, just so many things have just been happening that are just tuning me up.

That whole experience with him has changed me deeply, man.

In what ways? I think first thing, I realized death is the great foe that in a way, it kind of stands, death is this thing that kind of stands above man and kind of mocks man's wisdom.

Like it's the, death is this, it's our biggest problem as humans and we can't solve it.

Mm-hmm. And so it mocks all of our wisdom.

Like we want to try to explain the creation of the cosmos or, you know, we build these great buildings or, you know, do all of these advanced scientific studies and all, but like we can't solve our own biggest problem.

And it's ugly, dude. It's a big problem.

And it just leads me down all of these different trains of thought about death itself as I'm sitting here witnessing it and do its work in someone who I love.

Like, why does this have to happen? Why do we have to die?

Like it's led me down all of these mature, maturing thoughts that I'm, obviously I go and search the scriptures to answer these questions.

It's made me consider how important faith is.

This mentor of mine was an entrepreneur.

He only had a third grade education, couldn't read.

He built an empire, millions of dollars.

Couldn't read or write. I would go. and read the Scriptures to him because he had faith in what he knew, which was the very simple message of the gospel.

He saw his own, like, he knew his mistakes.

Like, he saw his own wickedness, even though he was a good man.

He knew he had made these big mistakes in life and like he had an appreciation for the gospel that Jesus Christ died according to the scriptures.

He was buried, that he was resurrected according to the scriptures and that if he will put his hope in that to save him from himself, that he will be forgiven and that he will spend eternity with his father, his creator in heaven.

So like he had a saving faith in that very simplistic message.

But I would go and read the scriptures to him.

Nobody else did, but I would read one. And you got to understand, he's dying, like vomiting uncontrollably, like can't be still because he's in so much pain.

And I would read a piece of scripture and he would say, read another one, read another one.

And I would watch these words that I was reading off of these pages manifest literal power in him. like his expression would change.

He would be comforted. And like, I would go over there and he might would have been in the bed for two days straight.

Nobody else could get him out of bed. I would come read the scriptures to him for hours.

And like, he would all of a sudden be like, hey, let's walk out and sit on the porch for a minute.

Like he would get out of bed. Like these scriptures were manifesting power and hope and courage in him in real time.

I was like, good night. I've never seen this type of power come from literally reading these words off of these pages.

And then what I realized is that he was so close to crossing over this veil between this realm and the realm that he was about to enter.

The veil was getting thin. And so... He was understanding the things that I was reading to him better than I could understand them.

Like they were more relatable to him. And that's how they were manifesting so much power in him.

And I say this veil was getting thin because I would walk out of the room every few hours to go use the restroom or something.

And there was a little camera in his room so that people could monitor him without sitting in there with him because not a lot of people like to sit with him because it made them uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable. So not a lot of people would sit with him.

And they would just monitor him on that camera.

And I would watch him on that camera when I would leave the room and he would be laying in bed and he would start reaching up and reaching for things above him like this.

And I didn't know what he was doing. He would stop doing it when I came back in the room with him.

But he was seeing something above him and he was reaching for it.

And so since I have actually researched that, and there are some hospice nurses that have some Instagram pages, and they post and talk about this phenomenon where this is a very common thing that they see in people who are very close to death.

Very often, as this veil becomes thinner, somehow they're seeing into some way into the other realm and they're seeing things above them and they're reaching for them.

And many times these individuals will even call out the names of loved ones who have died before them.

And in the very end, my friend passed away the day that I got back from the Yukon.

He had had a stroke. He was paralyzed. The whole left side of his body was paralyzed.

This cancer just kept taking more and more and more from him.

And the morning that he passed, he left this tent at 6 a.m., He literally sat up.

He's paralyzed on his left side. He hadn't moved his left side in three days.

He sits up in his bed, reaches both hands toward the sky, lays back down, and dies.

His transportation had arrived, apparently.

And I'm like, You know, I don't need all that stuff to believe the way I believe.

I believe the way I believe because of the fact that I know the Almighty took me from being a very ugly person to being... someone who can actually love others, who can actually love God, not a perfect person, but a person with godly desires.

Like he changed me, transformed me. Like that's the only miracle that I need because there's nothing else on earth that could transform me literally overnight in the way and to the degree that I experienced that transformation.

But I got to see all this in my mentor as he passed away.

And it's just so magnificent. It's powerful.

It just strengthens our faith. It's a gift.

It's a gift, man. And to just also, you know, death is our final race, man.

It's the great foe. The final measure of a man is in some sense how he bears the burden of his death.

And some of us will have to die a very hard, arduous, ugly death.

And he did. And he bore it very well. And I would go in and sit with him.

And I said, Mr. Don... If you don't want to talk, if you just want to lay there, like I'm just going to be here with you.

But every time I'd go and sit with him, he would talk to me.

He would smile. He would give me a hug. We would pray together.

We would talk about the scriptures. We would talk about old times.

Like he was doing all of that for me as he was walking through this final challenge of life, this physical life.

It's like, man, I want to be able to be that type of man.

Teaching you and showing you how to be truly tough.

He taught me to the very end. Yeah. Like-

He was always my mentor, like from the age of about 13 to the time I left to join the Navy.

He taught me how to work hard. He taught me a lot about being a man, responsibility.

I worked for him on a farm. And I'm like, I don't even think he called me in to sit with him.

He didn't call me in to sit with him. His wife called me and said, Mr. Don wants to see you one more time because we had kind of parted ways for a while due to my own selfishness.

I don't think he called me in because he wanted to see me one more time.

I think he knew he had more to teach me is what I think.

You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's been a powerful experience, man.

Yeah, you mentioned... kind of being a little discouraged to maintain this social presence based off of the noise, the darkness, just the toxic aspect of what social media can be.

And I agree with you. I think there's great aspects to it and there can be, and it can be an extremely positive place. but I often think that there's more negativity and consequences that come from social media than positives.

If you allow yourself to be consumed by it.

But I do think that people like you and me have a responsibility to stay on the platforms, to be that light in the darkness.

And like just sharing with you what you have done for me in the past couple of years, you as a, a mentor, a guide, a follower of Jesus and being very confident in that and being very vocal and public about that has given me a lot of confidence in my transformation of these last couple of years to be that man and to be a man of God.

And I truly believe you do that for a lot of other people, especially men.

And you have to keep doing that because If people like you stop doing that, we're going in the opposite direction.

So it's a responsibility and obligation.

And I view you as a true role model in this space because you are... you're tough, but you're tough in the right way.

And leading a life and leading individuals through the word of God is so powerful and it doesn't exist out there.

So you provide me the encouragement to keep going, keep pushing, keep creating.

So I think you got to keep going. Yeah. That means a lot to me, Nick.

Uh, uh, that, that's a huge encouragement to me and, uh, I'm just so thankful I've been made useful, man.

What an honor it is to think that the Almighty would choose any of us. to use us to the benefit of His people, those people who believe and trust and hope in Him.

That's the greatest purpose that I could ever serve or ever fulfill in my entire life.

It's so important to me, man. Yeah, I told you about the podcast I did yesterday, and it's like, I didn't feel ready for that.

Like that wasn't fun for me. Didn't feel ready.

I love coming here and having conversations with you, but that was a hard one.

But it's like, I'm just trying to be obedient.

Like, Lord, if you want to use me, here I am.

I don't feel ready. I can't figure out why you're using me.

Because you could have sent a man a lot smarter than me, a lot more intellectual than me, who understands things a lot better and can defend your gospel a lot better than I can.

But you chose to send me. I don't know why.

I'm not going to question it. I'm just going to go.

And hopefully you work through me by the power of your Holy Spirit in me to accomplish your sovereign and immutable will.

What an honor it is to be a member of the body of Christ and to be active in it.

It's very well said. My like just word that you previously mentioned that has been just front of mind recently has been obedience.

Just be obedient, just be obedient to Christ.

And on the heels of talking about social media, The problem I think that we experience in society right now is just conformity.

And Romans 12, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will.

I think we have a responsibility to not necessarily resist or fight against conformity, but conformity that is conforming for the wrong reasons, the wrong purpose.

You know, in that verse, so those few verses right there, that is the foundation.

I do a lot of public speaking, and those verses are the foundation of my entire speech.

The word used for be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the word used for transformed is metamorphosis.

It's a complete metamorphosis that we are going through, that we must go through, I just think it gives more meaning when you understand that's the word that's used to this type of transformation that these few verses of Scripture are talking about.

The example of metamorphosis that we have in nature is the caterpillar. becoming a butterfly, something totally different, right?

That's what we are becoming by way of... the renewing of our mind.

We're working toward this metamorphosis.

Another way that you can put it is we are being conformed into the image of Christ Jesus himself.

Like that's what this process is that we're going through.

The Holy Spirit is sanctifying us, conforming us into the image of Christ.

But now that process... isn't always what we want it to be.

A metamorphosis implies radical change, and radical change can sometimes be very uncomfortable.

You know, if you read about Jesus in the book of Isaiah, which, by the way, was written 400 years before— I think it was 400 years before Jesus came to earth—

Here's a writing, Isaiah 53. It describes the life of Jesus perfectly, written 400 years prior to him coming to earth, a miracle in and of itself.

But it describes one of the aspects of Jesus Christ.

It says he is a man of suffering, and he is well acquainted with grief.

And so... Me going to sit with my friend as he dies brought a lot of grief that I could have avoided.

I didn't have to do that. And I was even asking myself, why am I doing this?

What is the purpose of willfully accepting this grief?

Grief that's literally, it feels like it's crushing me.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. That exposure to that grief was part of this metamorphosis.

There are many aspects of it. It's not always what we want it to be, what it looks like.

I pray every day, Father, Conform me into the image of your Son, Jesus Christ, at all costs.

The first time I prayed that, I left out the at all costs part.

And the Holy Spirit kept prompting me, no.

No. You've got to be willing to submit to this metamorphosis at all costs.

And so that's what I pray now. And when you're submitted to that at all costs, and that's your overarching goal of your entire life, is to allow the Lord to do the work in you that He wills to be done, He's going to call you to bear grief.

He's going to call you to suffering. He's also going to call you to joy.

He's also going to call you to hope. He's also going to call you to love and all these things.

But those are all the things that we want.

But just understand there are going to be some hard things along this path of transformation that we all must experience together.

You know, it's been my experience anyways.

How do you know, or how do you recognize when what you're going through is a transformation that God is working on you as opposed to you're making the wrong decisions and going down the wrong path?

Oh, well, that all depends on... How much you believe you actually have the ability to make any decisions?

That's a hard question. It's a very hard question.

Because... When you really, as you go, Nick, like in the beginning of our journey, we need to feed off of milk.

A very simple food plan. We're babies when we first start.

You know what I mean? We're reborn. We're made new creatures.

And we have to go through a very similar progression as beings who have been made spiritually alive.

We have to go through a very similar progression that we go through as a human being.

We have to start off as babies, and the Lord continues to work in us and through us and give us more and more understanding of the truth in Scripture for us, His people.

See, all things in Scripture, they're all spiritually discerned.

Until you're made alive... Spiritually, you cannot discern or appraise what is being said by Scripture.

For me personally, before I was made a new creature or regenerated spiritually, I couldn't understand what the Bible was trying to tell me.

And even when I was made alive, I could only understand the very basic principles that it was trying to tell me.

But as you go... as I've went, I have started to see that the scripture, oh, it's so unique from any other religious philosophy because it leaves nothing for man, not even a thread for man to cling to.

In other words, you will begin to see things that will start to shape your understanding in a direction that the Almighty, His will for every aspect of your life is sovereign and immutable and that He actually elected you to be His.

And it's not because of a choice you made.

It's crazy, man. But the Holy Scriptures are dripping with this, that man will not choose God because man is spiritually dead in his natural state.

And so he will not choose God until God... by His grace, comes into man and makes him spiritually alive.

And then man has the ability and will indeed choose to believe upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is deep stuff. I like where you're going with this.

I like where you're going with this. You talk about that, and so my perspective has almost been shaped to a degree... where whatever is happening in my life, even if it's seemingly due, in terms of suffering, even if it's seemingly due to my own decisions, my perspective is being shaped into, even if it's seemingly due to my own decisions, those decisions have been predetermined. there's a lot more to this, okay?

Because this opens up a whole Pandora's box of questions then.

I will ask you a foundational question. We can, those of us who believe in the gospel, I think we can all agree that the Father sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross and to cover the sins of man so that all men who believe upon him will be reconciled unto God.

And when God looks at us who are covered by faith in the blood of Christ, God doesn't see us.

He sees his son. I don't think that God would have sent his son to die on a cross in hopes that someone would eventually believe in that.

You understand what I'm saying? No. What's the opposite of that?

God would have sent his son, Jesus Christ, to die on a cross.

What if God sent Jesus to die on the cross and Jesus died and no human ended up believing that in the atonement that was made for man by Jesus on the cross?

What if no one would have believed? What if it would have just fizzled out?

You see what I'm saying? What if Jesus would have died on the cross and it all just fizzled out after that?

You're saying it wasn't a hope, it was a no.

Yes. He knew. He knew those of us who were going to believe in that.

He would not have sent his son just hoping that surely one of these humans will listen and believe.

So I'm going to take this chance, and I'm going to send my son.

Daggone it, I hope somebody believes in him, and I hope this doesn't just fizzle out, because if so, then I've just sent my son to die.

No, he sent his son to die because he knew those of us from the literal foundations of the earth...

He knew us because he had elected us to believe in that gospel from the foundations of the earth.

And what we are, we are now the bride of Christ.

There's this reciprocal glorification. The Son glorifies the Father by dying on the cross and reconciling humans back to the Father.

The Father glorifies the Son by taking all of us who are saved by faith, and He offers us to the Son as His own special people.

Mm-hmm. We are the bride of Christ. We are literally a gift to Christ.

That's the whole purpose of our salvation is so that the Father can offer us as a gift to His Son and say, here, Son, this is your own special people who will trust in you, who will worship you, who will glorify you for all of eternity.

Here. Here. It's the whole purpose of our salvation.

That'll give you a little perspective on how important the Son is.

The whole saga is all can be summed up in the glorification of the Son.

The Father glorifying Jesus. Jesus glorifying the Father.

It's reciprocal because somehow this being that exists beyond the realm of our understanding exists as three beings in one being.

That's why it's all reciprocal. Yeah. I'm talking about some meat here on the bottom.

I just take that for what it is, man. How did you get started?

Because I'm at this pivotal point in my journey with Christ where I'm all in and I surrender everything.

But where did you get started with diving into the scripture?

Like for someone, I am not extremely educated in the scripture yet.

Mm-hmm. Where did you start? Did you just start reading it?

Did you dive into certain books and chapters?

What was that journey like? Yeah. Man, it's changed so much.

I mean, for me, at the very beginning, the very first thing, the very first book of Scripture that I read was the book of Matthew.

But as I read it, I only understood the core or the foundational elements of the book when I read the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus Christ preached.

And Jesus lays out the true standard of righteousness there. that, you know, God is, right?

And he lays out these standards and he says things like, you know, the first commandment is, the most important commandment is to love God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind.

That's impossible. I haven't done that. Oh, and he's, you know, he lays out these standards on, you know, if you look to lust after a woman, that's the same as adultery.

If you hate your brother, that's the same as murder.

Like he's laying out this standard of true righteousness that made me realize that good night, I didn't think I was that bad.

But if I'm going to measure myself off of this standard, that's no longer a man-made standard, but actually a standard coming from what I believe to be a perfect being.

Holy smokes. I have sure missed the mark on this, man.

Because at that time in my life, I didn't love anybody.

I was extremely wicked. But you don't even have to be that bad to miss this standard.

And so I understood that core foundational element of seeing my own depravity, right?

Like wickedness. And then seeing this, okay, now that I can see that in myself, I can now understand the whole purpose of Jesus coming, right?

God so loved me that He sent His only Son to pay the debt that I owe as a person who's literally born into this sin, who's living under the curse, who's literally born spiritually dead.

He so loved me that He sent His Son to atone for that, to take upon the punishment that I 100% deserve.

Like that right there, boom. When you see that and you understand that and you put your faith and your hope in that right there, that's it.

You don't have to go any further. You're good, man.

We are saved by grace through faith. And that faith is not of your own so that no man should boast.

That faith, that ability to believe in that very simple realization of yourself and realization of Christ, the very faith that you have is the gift.

That's a gift that we receive. You can't just wake up one morning and decide you believe that.

You have to be made alive. You have to be able to see that.

And then you have to be able to believe that and hope in that and trust in that.

Not that you don't have doubts. Not that you don't have questions.

But that faith is a gift given to us by the Almighty.

Now, I encourage you to go further than that because there's so much more that the Almighty has given us in Scripture today.

I love to read books by men who have dedicated their lives to studying the Word of God.

How much time do I spend reading the Bible every day?

Two hours, maybe? Some days, maybe three hours.

Every day? Yeah. I'd say I spend two hours a day, on average, studying, reading Scripture.

Okay. For how long have you been doing that?

Ten years. Okay. Let's say ten years. But I'm never going to become the expert.

Only putting two hours a day into something, I'm never going to become the expert.

But there are men who have been chosen, I believe, by the Father to dedicate their entire lives to to really digging into these scriptures and figuring out how it all fits because the scripture can't contradict itself.

If the scripture contradicts itself, it is not the word of God because God is a perfect being.

He cannot contradict himself, but it seemingly does.

The reason it seemingly contradicts itself is because of our own ignorance of how it all fits.

It's a big book, right? Thousands of pages written in a language that we don't know.

We can't speak. Written to people who were living in cultures and under circumstances that we can't understand.

Because we don't have historical context.

But there are men who have dedicated their entire lives to figuring this out.

And so I believe it's great to read books written by these men who were chosen by God and have dedicated their entire lives to this alongside of Scripture.

It's helped me tremendously. And some of my favorite authors are R.C.

Spurl. He's passed away now. A.W. Tozer.

He's passed away. A man who's still alive now who's excellent is a man named Paul Washer.

Now, I don't think that these men have the same authority as the Scripture has over my life.

But I do believe that the Lord chose them to spend their lives the way that they spent their lives to the benefit of guys like me and you, who the Lord has other purposes for us within the body of Christ.

We can't all be the brain, right? Some of us got to be the feet.

Some of us are the hands. You know, we have all different purposes.

But I read from these men today, An old one, Martin Luther, 16th century.

He has a book called The Bondage of the Will.

That's the book I'm reading right now. Martin Luther, again, another man who changed the course of history because he dedicated his entire life to the truth of Scripture.

And these men have left us writings that we can read alongside Scripture.

But now we have to vet these men, obviously.

That's why I love reading books from men who have already passed away, because you can assess them based off of how they lived their life.

You know what I mean? That's kind of a benefit.

I don't think it's a necessity. But that's kind of been for me how I have... really dug into some of these more weighty and maybe difficult to understand topics.

I would love to get a list of, if there were three to five books that I had to get started with.

I'll text them to you. I'd love to get that list to start diving into.

That's easy. That'd be super beneficial.

That's easy, man. Thank you for allowing me to share all that.

I appreciate all of that. I mean, I was, I was glued in this whole episode and this whole conversation, but like, I felt like you were talking directly to me, which you were, but like forgetting the cameras were here, forgetting the mics were here the entire day, the last like 20, 30 minutes.

I appreciate you sharing that. Um, like I said, I consider you and view you as a mentor and I want to walk with Christ in the same way that you walk with Christ.

I'm on that journey. I'm going into that journey.

So any guidance, any mentorship along the way, that you want to throw towards me, please do.

Please do. Thank you for permission to do that, man.

Yeah. That means a lot to me. Yeah, and I consider you a brother, man.

You've always been so gracious to me for years now.

I mean, you open up your home to me. You've done this on multiple occasions.

I don't deserve this. Again, why it's like i'm glad that i can in some way give back man you're doing good things thank you brother you're doing good things i appreciate you until next time enough said

[Beyond Mental Toughness: The Necessity of Preparation, Humility, and Faith]-[133: The Real Foundations of Endurance with Chadd Wright]

📋 Summary

The Myth of 'Out-Mindsetting' Physical Reality

Embracing Humility and Authenticity

The Yukon 1000: Lessons in Survival and Standard-Setting

Faith, Metamorphosis, and Obedience

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript