#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness | Modern Wisdom

Hello friends welcome back to the show.

My guest today is Ned Brockman.

He's an Australian ultramarathon runner, motivational speaker and a philanthropist.

Is good mental health the same as strong mental toughness?

Ned has completed some of the most famous endurance feats in all of Australia so what's driving him?

And does the world actually understand his mission?

Expect to learn why Ned ran 1000 miles around a track raising over two and a half million dollars for charity?

Ned's reaction to the accusation that his event was just toxic masculinity rebranded, what Ned's diet for endurance running looks like, why he hates running but does it anyway, what Ned is doing to combat homelessness, Ned's most transformative moments on his journey running across Australia and much

more. Bit of a cool one this was recorded while I was in Sydney the day after my live show.

So uh very fun to meet Ned in person he's a legend he's doing some unbelievable work and the guy's hard as nails so yeah I really hope that you enjoyed this one.

But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Ned Brockman.

Ned Brockman welcome to the show.

How are you mate? Good thank you for coming last night.

Thank you for having me it was uh it was a fun night I didn't know what to expect as I felt a lot in that room when I saw you it felt like all the energy was on you like it's quite an intense I think environment that stuff but yeah it was really cool I loved to hear all the questions and the answers

was great. Fuck yeah thank you talk to me about what you've just finished doing recently this is the first time you've actually got to sit down on a podcast and talk about it since you completed everything.

Yeah I'm a bit traumatized to be honest so it's a bit um it's it's good I'm excited to talk about it's been as you said I've just haven't really chosen to do it because I'm um I guess I wanted to process it a bit but yeah ran a thousand miles around a track uh in what was hoping to be 10 and a half

days but ended up a bit longer than that just due to a few um probably being a bit under ready for it but still completed in 12 and a half days fastest person ever do it since I've been alive which is a pretty cool stat um I've only been alive for 25 years so if you guys did it before that but um yeah

ended up 130k a day around a 400 meter athletics track for 12 and a half days.

Why decide to do that particular event?

Um a culmination of a few things I ran across Australia two years ago um and kind of I felt this like uh desire to want to keep doing these things and push my body that you know the more discomfort you put yourself through the better of a person or you know more of a person you become um and off the back

of that I knew I wanted to do something every one or two years and uh thought about running across the length of UK uh was here a lot of people have done that uh bit too hilly for me so I chose uh stupidly a thousand miles around the track um and yeah I didn't really think too much about it I don't

really think too much about these things I'm I feel like anyone who takes these on are usually a bit older they're usually you know 45 50 have done 25 30 years of running prior I only started uh three and a half four years ago um so I think my naivety and stubbornness kind of go hand in hand um but yeah

then got to got to the start of this year and went well I'm gonna do this gonna lock it in and I do a lot of stuff with homelessness um and wanted to align the two and ended up yeah ended up finishing it in 12 and a half days which throughout the period throughout that time I've I don't think I've ever

um felt as much pain as I did in that 12 and a half days talk to me about the training preparation yeah it was a lot of people ask that like the what's the physical side of things versus what's the mental preparation I think you know obviously as I said I didn't get the record so I didn't um probably

wasn't physically prepared enough uh but I don't think I will be for another 15 20 years and that's why accumulating an awful lot of time and attention to of course of course and that's like that's the the game but I feel like at 25 you're somewhat relatable to younger people and also older people um

and it's not really running for me that's the thing it's just running is the tool I use to feel what I feel and I have almost an ability to get people to watch I guess and so I can then push what I want to push by doing that and so whether that be through helping homelessness or getting people up and moving

inspired to do something it's like a a social change organization masquerading as a fitness pursuit exactly exactly yeah because I don't like even before the Oz run right the run across Australia I didn't really know why I was doing it I just wanted to I wanted like I wanted to feel what it would feel

like to run across Australia I wanted to feel like what it would feel like to run 100k a day um and I'm not willing to just sit back and go I'll wait till the right time because I think in life there is no right time I think you just have to start these things um and so off the back of that didn't really

know why or what was going to come of it and then I saw off the back of the Oz run that there was so many people just in Oz I guess that when I was so inspired to run my first marathon or to speak someone on the street or to whatever it may have been I was like I want to give people something like tangible

to be able to put that inspiration into after I do something um it's off the back of this thousand mile run I wanted to get people allowed to do their own thing as well so I started Ned's uncomfortable challenge which was like uh giving them their own 10 day thing that they can pick and choose to do

something hard and feel what I feel that was kind of like the hope so the lead up to it was like quite intense because I've got this thing I'm trying to run this like almost organization that's trying to help people move and raise money for mobilise homelessness but then as well train really hard for this thing

that you can't give anything else but your undivided attention and well didn't you do uh was it 50 marathons in 50 days while you were at work yeah yeah not while you were you you went to work and then did the marathons after as well I'll still a sparky yeah yeah so I don't know there's something you're

right there's something relatable about doing it while you've got the other obligation because it's all well and good and very impressive still Ross Edgley swims around the UK fucking unbelievable feat but he slept six hours on six hours off six hours on six hours off for you know the best part of a year

yeah and he had a support crew and he had all the rest of it and although it's unbelievably inspiring and obviously the pinnacle when it comes to sort of human achievement for distance swimming another side of you discounts it because you go well that's so different to my life yeah that's like if I

had the support crew and if I had that thing maybe so the relatability I think gets pulled away so although it must have made the preparation more difficult the fact that you've got slack to answer and emails and calls and artwork to sign off or whatever the fuck you need to do I think especially if you're

talking about that there's a degree of relatability because everyone's got to pick the kids up everybody's got to walk the dog yeah there's always that that's that was the biggest thing I've learned in the 50 marathons was like I had to go to work for eight and a half hours and everyone as you said

everyone can relate to the fact that they got to go to work and then they get home and they go right now I just gotta feed and and you know whatever it may be walk the dog but then I was like right I had to run 42k in the afternoon and then also feed myself also wash my clothes also you know clean my

sheets whatever it may have been right so yeah that kind of but that was like I'd only been running for six months at that point like I didn't run at school in like I only played rugby and road but I never ran so doing that was like a it was a whole new world so preparation for the thousand miles yep

how strategic are you with this you said that you kind of pull the rip cord and just jump into stuff but I know some of my friends that are training for marathons there's even free apps online they're like this is how you break down your mileage per week and this is how you do so it's relatively structured

how structured are you and sort of scientific evidence -based formalized with your process for this kind of stuff physically it's evolved very cowboy in the at the start of this kind of four years the ozran I would say still very cowboy like I'll be fine I'll tough it out and I learned a lot through

that especially when I started this I was have a coach do I'm a nutritionist but I think there's something very valuable in just doing it and being like having to find out yourself what works what doesn't yes there is people who have done the research and they know so it's like you need to lean on them

when you don't and haven't found what you can find throughout your own training uh but the physical I guess my lead up the biggest thing I probably did was strength training and a lot of it like you can't a lot of people try and run the case before the event and realize that they got injured throughout

the process or they they tried to climb too quick because the almost insurmountable achievement there is like too big we have to make sure we hit those case so we know we can do it where strength training I think gives you that time under tension but then running on heavy legs and running on you know

sore calves whatever it may be allows you to kind of feel what it feels like to back to back a longer day after a longer day after a longer day but nothing can emulate or simulate one running 160k after 160k feels like it's like just next level okay and you can only really feel that after day one all

right so you decide to get to the start line and what's the process you need to break it down if you're going to try and do a thousand over whatever yeah 10 days you've got mileage that you're trying to hit per day talk me through what a typical day was like once the races came around yeah so the goal

I got actually got injured prior to the to the start got eight weeks out and i had a bit of a shin overload because i um i guess probably overdid a little bit the strength was up but the the case i was trying to hit 200k a week roughly with three big strength training dates and i think i just hit it

a little bit but i was so close to the event that i was like i've got all these sponsors this uncomfortable challenge the fundraising all these things were there and i knew i couldn't pull out so it was like never right time you must do what you said let's just try and work out the best way um a lot

of physioing a lot of praying uh not on not on my knees because that was all but and then i i would yeah got to the got to the start line essentially when had a pretty severe injury from the get go um and the goal was to run 160 a day for 10 days ideally we knew that wasn't probably going to go to plan after about day

three or four but that's what we deal with when it happens um got day one did it in 16 hours that was kind of the goal get it 10k done every hour is that how you tried to break it up yeah and so each lap i would each lane i would do two laps in lane one two laps in lane two two laps in lane three all

the way to lane eight come back to lane one so that would be 12 .8k oh because you accumulate a little bit more distance each by going out exactly to the edge and it keeps variety which probably mentally exactly yeah because just doing 4000 laps of lane one yeah is like almost completely unachievable

in my mind where like lane one twice lane two twice lane three were really 500 laps of yeah yeah whatever yeah so it was like that was a master lap so two laps lane one two laps lane two all the way to lane eight and then back down again so that was one mass lab had to do 125 master laps i know this sounds

we much more consumable yes i know this sounds funny did you have a favorite lane as you were running was the one that you looked forward to lane four on the way out the way back home like after the you like three quarters of the way why so it was like lane four on the way that the start wasn't good

because you still had and like the the tiny little bit of distance each lane further out adds up so when you're over that and you're heading the way out it's like oh i've only got two in lane five now which means i've only got three more lanes which essentially if i just run for like two minutes i've

got two laps two laps oh cool i'm done and then like at the end of each mass lap i would eat or lay down get a rub down or just quickly turn around and go we're reversing direction every every master lap so i would go that way and then come back it's a really nice setup that's like a good way to mentally

break it down yeah exactly but then by like by day four the master laps that's like why not choose to do this why i i don't know it was almost like this what's the movie with um tom cruise in it where he keeps getting through and then he dies yesterday start and go again oh uh fucking day after tomorrow

tomorrow will be on Sunday yeah yeah i fucking love the one yeah he dies he keeps waking up in this yeah that's your workshop whatever yeah so i would like finish a master lap and i'm so exhausted like after day three i day two was 20 hours day three was 21 hours of running and then i so and to keep

the record i was like right i've got to shift that to 12 hours running two hours resting two hours sleeping and in that two hours resting i was still getting the shower eating so i had like an hour of sleep and i'd wake up and i'm like oh that's right i've got 12 hours of running right now um and so that's

what would happen i would get to the physio bed after a master lap and nothing would move like i'd wake up and it was the exact same thing like i just kept seeing like the my shoes there mum hadn't moved no one had like done anything and on the aus run what was nice was like you'd see a different scene

you'd see different cars you'd see different people but here it was like i'd wake up i'd see a blue track i'd see like the physio table where it was the food hasn't moved and i'm like i'm in a fucking loop here what is happening like yeah you are i was like how do i get out of this and it's like the only

way out is through like the only way out is to get this thing done and the only way to get this thing done is to put one foot in front of the other but when you're like day four and you still got a thousand kilometers to go that's like terrifying so talk me through the degradation of your body and legs

across this yeah i i felt quite strong up until that day three uh daylight savings changed so we went forward an hour which really fucked my head up oh fuck so we lost daylight savings yeah on day end of day three so that was like oh no we've lost an hour even though we hadn't yes it's it's from the beginning

of the 24 hours to the end of it but you're using yeah and i'm like no no no yeah um and the idea behind the the 16 hours was i started at 4 p .m on day one and um wanted to go throughout the night so it wasn't as hot because here on the track if you get a hot day it's like five years hotter and so that after day

one i slept throughout the day had like my my eight sleep had my um like the room was blacked out everything was great yeah and then after that i realized which i tried to do in my training was like sleep being cooked and your heart rate being up and how do we get those things down but yeah that was that stress

that built up about this whole event so like after day one i'm just like oh god i got another you know 900 miles to go and so after day one sleep just never came like i just couldn't sleep so as we discussed last night like sleep is one of if the not the most important thing for recovery right and if you

can't even get two of it a night um the wheels are going to fall off if you like it or not you can try and tough it out all you like and i was doing my best to do that but um day five was when i actually haven't really spoken about this to anyone i except for like the immediate crew i got to the end

of day five uh day five six hours i'd hit 810 kilometers so i was over halfway pretty well on track uh but i wasn't really making decisions very well and i'd started to lose that like almost consciousness like i wasn't really there with everyone even though they were right around me and mum was like

like she's like do you say you must eat you must rest you must drink you must change your shoes i just didn't have it in me and so we we got to this point where mum's like you either run or go to bed i'm gonna call go to bed i went right at 45 minutes i'm gonna go to bed 45 minutes hopped in bed with my

shoes on clothes on it's after like a 12 -hour day i'm laying in my bed and i my heart rate was at like 110 that's me resting i'm laying there i just like i could feel it in my throat my ears were like pulsing my eyes were like forcing out of my head and i'm like okay this could be how i how i go i reckon like

genuinely thought this is it because like the sleep deprivation thing becomes gnarly but if you can nap and you can switch it off a little bit there's like little tricks you can play and you know ultra runners do that all the time but over that kind of period it starts to i think go the opposite way

and like you start to die um and so i'm laying in bed my throat's like closing up my nose is bleeding and i go mum can you stay out the door i'm like not sure what's gonna happen here like i'm pretty concerned about like my health 20 minutes later i'm like freaking out mom mom mom she's like not there

she's like left she's having crisis talks with the team because she's watching me go i'm gonna die and go on we need to get him to bed he needs to sleep and we need to like make sure this because essentially i was trying to get this record so bad it was like i wounded dog going i need to like kill or be

killed right and when you're in that mode you've done what you've done already to get there you can't make that decision to say hey guys we've got to quickly sleep here this record's gone it's fine um so mum comes in and goes get in the shower get in the shower you're going to bed i'm like okay so thank

fuck for mum because otherwise like i don't know what would happen or i would have gone out there and just tried to death march until i couldn't and then yeah ended up getting a bit of a sleep got about two hours that night and then woke up with a bit of uh you know oomph in my step um and kind of like

a bit of clarity that this is not about a record you're 25 it's important to go for them i think shooting and hoping and putting everything into getting it is really important and i think what you learn about yourself in continuing to finish what you set out to do is 10 times more important than a flag

in the ground to say i got it did you see ross failed his long distance swim twice yes or he did the one recently in um america kind of yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry and uh yeah with that i think he's got of all of the endurance people that i've spoken to and that i know i think he's got the best mindset

around it because he's very well first he's a freak like he's yeah personalized so much of this he talks about suffering his uh resilience is suffering strategically managed i love that dude he's just smiles at through the most terrifying yeah terrifying human uh but i what i like particularly about his approach

is that he doesn't he doesn't tell himself a story about it it's not about him it's not about his capacity his worth as a human yeah doesn't make him less or more like for doing it he's just he sees himself like a science experiment yeah he is a sports scientist yeah at heart and um yeah it's interesting

thinking about the situation that you were in where you've got the mental capacity which is the exact thing that you need to use to make good decisions is the very thing that the situation you're in is depriving you of which means that your difficult decision becomes infinitely worse yes and then you

can't even step in to help other people make decisions on your body you can't even tell other people that you need them to make decisions you don't even have that level of self awareness yeah so i mean the sleep deprivation thing while doing these sorts of events i i think must be one of the most difficult

things the reason that ross is so good at what he does is his digestion because he can eat and then be horizontally i don't know about you if i eat i need to be upright for about half an hour yeah i need to gravity apparently needs to help me digest shit right but he can happily chug down you know best

part of a liter of porridge piping hot porridge that burns his throat on the way down to warm him from the inside like a fucking internal edible hot water bottle yeah and then get back to not only being horizontal but face down in water swimming not seeing anything exactly so i wonder if i wonder if there's

a person out there who's like an elite sleeper who might be a worse runner who might be a worse lifter who might be worse swimmer or whatever they could they could win by sleeping yeah they can just the same way ross can digest at any point i wonder if there's something that can be done by training

sleep more effectively you know what i mean yeah 100 but it's like yeah i don't know i also feel there's like a being in that mode of like because i like i can imagine ross's brain is quite like just constantly right but when you're in that deprived sleep state i feel that there's a lot more clarity

not when you're out of it right but like in that period of like there is there's nothing else that matters other than the task at hand there's something so pure about that even though like i would wake up and go oh god i've got to i've got to go again yeah um and even when i finish the run for the next

10 days i would i'd be in and like napping i'd finally nap and then i'd wake up from like in this terror you've got to do it again that i've got to get up and get to lane eight and mum's there saying it's all it's all good and every physio's it's fine mate you're not you're not out there i'm like i

know what you're saying it's not computing like i appreciate you you're telling me i'm here but i feel like i owe another 170k to the people that are watching on the live stream telling me it's you know what i mean like there was this because you're so wired to get this thing done you can't just switch

that off once you're done you know what i mean you can't just go oh we're finished this is fine yeah it's like a it's a very traumatic way in other news this episode is brought to you by ag1 you are not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it and this is going to help i tried every green

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free supply vitamin d3 and k2 plus five free ag1 travel packs and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom that's drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom so get back to where are we now day five day six yep yep what's happening

um where we're still going essentially i said we need to i need to work on an 18 hour six hour rest so in that six hours trying it four or three or two is this because of the pace that if you were to push the pace much more quickly it would be too fatiguing yeah it was more just the the fact that this the lack

of sleep thing was was there was no i was finishing if i wasn't sleeping i just you can't tough that out um what was the original time on time off plan it was well the first few days 16 eight and in that eight there'd be six or seven hours i'm usually a pretty good sleeper but for some reason it just

was the stress of the thing and and yeah and you can't you can't fight it otherwise you're just sitting there going and then i would get out earlier and go again and that's just like not a not a thing to do so yeah ended up 18 hours um and i was probably that's when the average dropped down a little

bit on those days where i was like we've just got to get this thing done but um i was pretty proud of the fact that i got through those next you know five days still averaging over 120 130k and then i just what i found and what i usually in these kind of events is like i have some sort of fun like i

have some sort of reprieve with family or with friends or with you know at dinner we might be laughing about what happened or what i said or what someone did this time around i didn't have one freaking second of it and for me as someone who really like uh laughs about the crap that's going on and like

really smiles about the crappy things i just didn't even have that at all and so i like that was really hard for me and so the majority of the time like even when we we raised a million dollars on day nine and i looked up and i was like it was the first time i went oh my god like you're actually doing

something important and valuable to society and people are clearly inspired so they're right they're donating it was the first time i actually like took a breath and going oh this is what you're doing is insane you hadn't found any joy in the suffering up until that point none of it like not one bit

and then even the night before we finished we raised like 700 000 that night we were i was 2 .6 million before i'd finished and then i i just like took a breath in there was i don't know how many people in the stadium just there to watch and i was like you've got to kind of appreciate this because these

moments don't happen all the time and you know i might get it five or six more times my life where i die like i want to enjoy these moments and then even after that i'd seen all this all this money raised and i still was like i've got another hundred k to go and i had to like just grit the teeth that final

day was a uh 26 hours non -stop 160k done and i crossed the line and i punched that fucking banner i was just so angry you're so um disheartening because i with the ozran like i just had so much joy throughout it as much as i had the suffering i also had so much joy um but i think off the back of this i'm

actually going to find out so much more about myself and like things i've learned throughout going through something so hard and so lack of joy um yeah i'm like excited again i'm yet to work what that is out yet but i'm sure eventually i'll i'll have that lesson what were you angry about i think i lost

like i just lost who i was in it because i'm i am that happy jovial person and i'm usually bringing everyone up and when when i'm up everyone's up in especially in the support team and i think i found that like i was putting a lot more pressure on the crew than i needed to because of how much pain i

was in so that i was angry that like it wasn't as fun for everyone else involved where like i feel like the ozran was much more like that um yeah and then just i i think i was also extremely proud to have finished it but i think that was masked a bit more by the that it was just so fucking hard yeah

it was just so violently hard talk to me about physical pains challenges such going through it yeah i had uh so i had tenosyte of itis in both shins which is like fluid around the tendon sheath uh anterior tibialis muscle um so essentially i've had that before right yeah i had it in the ozran probably

like 20 days in um i had a day three on my right leg and had to have a addictive span on that one for the rest of the run a lot a dick disband so for people with dropped foot when they um like walk into the mass or they can't pull their shin up essentially their foot up it's just a device goes around

the ankle and then a rubber band goes through your laces and so when you lift your hip up your foot comes up all right and then you yeah and so essentially we found that that worked on the because it takes the pressure off having to actually exactly when you press off footwise your calf explodes and then

it's down and that rubber band essentially just pulls your foot up yep pulls your foot up and i felt that like that worked on the ozran it's a something if it does go to crap i can utilize this as a plan to keep moving um we packed another one because we thought maybe my shin will go on the left side

and it did on day day eight or nine um so i'm running with two big dick disbands rubber bands people like what's going on these legs um i just have weak shins apparently and again that's another thing that just over time you get stronger shins you do these things um and then my right knee which i'm

still dealing with a little bit um essentially i've lost hip mobility and so my gait was off all of you know two centimeters so when i'd land my knee would land in every step so about 400k to go i had that pain so i had to walk 200 meters run 200 meters because the end of the running of 200 meters i

the pain was just so immense that i had to like walk to ease it so for the next 400k it was just a walk run walk run um and yeah it was quite funny when people came to run with me i'm like i've just got to explain this scenario like israel adesanya flew in from uh Auckland the second last night he's

like ready to run with me fully keen i'm like just say no mate we're walking and running every 200 meters he's like yep oh good mate no worry um but yeah that that i've had a like injection in that now just to kind of ease it um but it's all nothing structural which is good bloods were all fine um apart

from like a bit of a gluten response just because of the high amount of carb you're eating and the inflammation in the body uh those markers are a bit higher but iron was good everything was good i was uh pretty cortisol fine liver liver bit higher from pain meds but what do you think that's really

interesting because i would have expected hormonally something to have been going on if you're lying in a bed and you're resting heart rates at 110 and you're only getting half an hour or an hour's sleep and you've got to do all of this work i think a lot of the time because the only thing that we have access

to are our thoughts right yeah so we know what the uh in a world is for us i can't detect what my hormone and estrogen and progesterone levels are but if your bloods have come back in the normal what relatively normal what that shows is the power of the framing that you've got inside of you because it's

not something systemic that's going on or at least not something that could be measured free radicals other like blah blah blah in the blood i'm sure that there'll be areas that weren't fully tested but it just really shows what power you have mentally to be able to make a relatively okay performing

physiology totally fucked yeah yeah yeah it's it's quite it's quite an interesting thing isn't it i um yeah i was i was a bit perplexed we only took them seven days later so i reckon in that period they probably would have been a bit but like i kind of guess you don't want to take them right then and then

you know it's going to be another fucking another source of stress for you as well by the way get in let's let's pin you blah of course i would be intrigued to take them throughout and seeing what well they can do i think they can do a little ear for lactatins yeah um yeah i mean it is always interesting

but again i i just like it for the uh just because i said i was gonna do it i don't there's no like i'm not trying to prove anything to anyone it's like one of those ones where it's like this is something i want to attack life is you don't know what's coming tomorrow so let's set this thing up let's

do it let's get it done what does the ultra running community think of you that's a good question um i want to dance i'm not going to dance around this because it's like something that's again being 25 something i never thought i would have uh dealt with as much um there's purists in everything and i

know for a fact that people in boxing and swimming and all those things that take on these events without the i guess resume of what is supposedly supposed to do uh in order to attack a thousand miles you're the jake paul of endurance racing there you go perfect fucking god don't put that on me he's

got a mullet too yeah yep um yeah i i was shocked when i first copped a bit of flack for a few things but i'm always like even your talk last night talking about um like anyone who's spreading negativity it is funny when you've never copped it that you think they are they so oh my god they must be right

because you know i'm this this lack of this person i'm not capable but that person he's he's got it he knows yeah that that person's assessment of me is is bang on like all your close people around you tell you love you no they can't be right now you're fine mate what you did no not a chance who know

you so well but then the the nuffy that said oh how dare you pause your watch for this amount of time because it doesn't reflect exactly what it is oh yeah no he's he knows me in and out it's interesting i think we're just so naturally drawn to make sure i think innately that's us to want people to

love us and want people to approve us and welcome us with open arms but so you find the people that don't and work out a way to try and do the thing that will make them love you yeah i when i first went through that i was like i'm like i'm going well how do i you just lose so much of yourself by doing

that like you become the most broad have no backbone stand for nothing if you're trying to be general and please everyone so it's it's good that you have people that don't like you but if you're yourself and you have those people that violently love you and can't support you enough uh like as long as

you can see it for that and exactly as you said these people are so insecure about themselves and so worried about what people think of them too that they prefer to spit hate and anger in saying that in the in the running world i would say majority of people accept me and appreciate that what i'm doing

is you know probably a bit dumb and not the the road to take but it's also one that i would not change for the world i would i would do the ozran again 10 times over at 22 years old to continue to like i just want people to avoid i've said it for like the last probably three years any keynote i've done

any speaking to anyone i wanted people to live like live just make the most of it stop waiting stop getting on your phone stop just go and do the thing you've always wanted to do give so give without wanting anything in return i think there's a lot of that where it's like people want something from an exchange

or want something from doing something i feel like if you can just give and give your time or energy or a smile or money to someone or whatever it is um that is a very rewarding existence and then to get uncomfortable i love the fact that you can intentionally put yourself in really hard scenarios and you'll

find out things about yourself that you'll never have learned unless you did those things if you did the hard things um and so yeah live give get uncomfortable that's all i want that's all my message is and if i can get people to hear that through what i do regardless of that being running swimming

kayaking rock climbing whatever i decide to do next and i'm sure i'll keep ruffling feathers with the purists of the sport who can't stand the sponsors paying me what they're paying me or can't stand that i'm getting to speak at these events where they're like but it should be this guy because he's

can run this really fast marathon time it's like i appreciate that and those people are incredible those i i could never match it with the elites of the elites in the marathon world or the ultra marathon world it might take me years to get there but i hope that i have a message that people can go yeah

that's cool i like that i appreciate that for what he is and yeah i don't want to get that mixed up with me being i've never gone i'm the i'm just attacking this thing because it's there and i feel like i'm capable of doing it and off the run i did it definitely shows that i am capable i just have to

do the years and years and years but by the time i'm able to do it i'll probably want to do something else so yeah do you know will guj i do yeah he's a he's a good friend yeah so will i've known well for years and uh you know he did his thing america across america he did a an interesting uk one before

there was the counties different counties different the three peaks or four or five peaks no no so this was maybe even before that where he ran i think it's a marathon in each county in the uk maybe every day it was like the 60 55 or something no no no 40 30 48 30 that was it was in 48 marathons 30

days that was it yeah yeah i do and um before that yeah and then he did the thing where he ran across america and not too dissimilar he's probably maybe like 30 only few years older than something like that uh for the people that don't know him fucking good -looking kid uh handsome big dick uh anyway

i haven't seen the date yeah right it's uh you're not british um and uh he doesn't i was talking to rich roll about this and he said what did he refer to as he said the endurance races are a bit of a granola crowd they're sort of a bit crusty and uh you've got will his trendy and he wears flares yeah

exactly you know like skincare routine yeah and um he ends up doing really well on a number of like pretty fucking extreme events but it ruffles some feathers people just want to hate it and it's like it's just such a odd way to look at the world and it's sad and i think if you can look at from that pity

point of view it's like it's actually sad that you can't go you know what this boy's been running he's rugby player he's hot as shit he's getting deals from a freaking you know whatever it may be and they can't just go you know what good on you you ran across america in 55 days that's fucking incredible

like give the man his flowers like let's not hate on people for what's the response been to russ cook i think um relatively positive i and i'm sure he's copied it and as anyone you think his granolary beard has helped him with that i'm being so likable he's he's just such a you can't not like the guy

there's something wrong with you if you can't not like him you have to like him yeah he's too just bubbly and funny and like you don't know what's going to come out and it's i remember this is the guy again for the people that didn't know that he ran the length of africa first person ever i think yeah

to the the full length yeah from bottom south over the top of tunis yeah yeah wherever the fuck it is yeah and uh i remember i was watching you on his instagram stories halfway through it and i think he'd managed to get some sort of food poisoning yeah and he was running down the road with shit pouring

out of his shorts throwing up and videoing himself just saying that they're trying to stop me yeah they they're trying to they're trying to they're trying to stop me but i'm just too fucking fierce i'm just still here chewing pavement yeah chewing tarmac eating asphalt and uh i i don't know it's not i

really wish that that was the way that i'm built in those situations and maybe if i dedicated myself to it there's something that i could activate fuck me i love seeing someone that is yeah like seeing somebody that is dealing with suffering with a smile and uh i don't know is noble and like cool it

is and that's why so many people love rus like they just want to just give me more rus like when he was post you know day 300 of running you got his goggles on through the sahara like that is that's just you know what that is that's authenticity that's him being him and i think so many people want to

be themselves but don't know how and you've got this guy who's just so unapologetically himself and that is that's attractive and draws you in and i feel like if we can all do that that's where you don't have these people that are sad and miserable about their lives but that's just that's the way the world

is you're never going to change them they've they've got to change themselves and i wonder if uh i wonder if that's part of the reason that you were maybe a bit angry when you finished the race as well that you have this opportunity to like not only be you for your own experience but also like this is what i

want to put out like the whole one of the big reasons of doing this is to set the example this is how you can deal with suffering with a smile yeah this is how you can go through some adversity and and and be jovial and add levity and and maybe that was a as much of a missed opportunity as not completing

the race would have been not just doing the thing but how you do the thing yeah i guess as a part of that but i still feel it it uh grabbed a lot of people and went oh jesus we've got a like this how is he still going how is you know we've been drawn on live tick tock at 3am going and he's still moving

he's still moving like i know i know it got it definitely got through the message i wanted but i think yeah potentially crossing and went yeah maybe maybe if i got the record it still wouldn't have been as important as the what happened anyway if i did i still don't believe i would be going i got this like

i don't think that would be the message i hope it wouldn't be that if because as you said at the start it's like ross isn't better or worse than anyone because he's done something he's a human being that's living his life the way he wants to live it and that's what's quite implied himself in a very

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wisdom you were you were saying before this is something i've been thinking about an awful lot especially you know i'm here in australia i've been on tour uh the first night i've done three shows very in very close succession and each one was the smallest show of this tour and also the biggest show

i'd ever done each time so it was like a thousand people then 1700 people then two and a bit thousand people so each one it's escalated up and um i especially at the first show there was a lot of like gripping from me to make sure that i didn't mess up and it went great all of the shows went really

perfect you know i couldn't have asked for them to have gone any better how much prep have you done for those like what sorry i'm no no no what like how long was your preparation for a show of that like because you're so refined and so uh clear with what you were for two hours yeah yeah but incredible

except for the um arthur shackleton uh yeah i met arthur shackleton quite the problem is ernest shackleton is the guy that did uh uh went across antarctica but alfred lansing is the guy that wrote the book yes urans and i managed to split the difference between this shackleton and fucking anyway so sorry

no no no uh quite a lot of prep um you know i ran half of the show last year maybe 20 times okay i did work in progress shows this year in austin so i did the in front of 40 people i'd like a comedian would do working different bits and what story do i want to keep in and which story do i want to get

rid of and stuff exactly yeah what did people like what didn't they which jokes landed well which didn't and refined it and refined it and refined it and then went through this run but i realized especially after the first one that i was gripping very tightly to the experience um very not fearful but very

on edge you know i just wanted to make sure it was very precise and sort of laser focused on the thing but it's very difficult i think to kind of be taking in what's happening whilst focusing on the thing that you're doing right it's very difficult to hold those two positions at once in your mind like

with maybe your most recent race that you're so laser focused and obsessed on what is this particular thing you know the type of race that you're doing is so unvaried there's no novelty um it's very constricted and constrained right it's like running in a lot you might as well have fucking ran it on a treadmill

yeah and um i realized chris bumstead talked to me about it's not just about winning it's about how you win and the story that you tell yourself and the experience that you go through so not just winning and being a gracious victor or losing and being a gracious loser or whatever it's like and how did

you feel when you did this thing because when you look back yeah sure you can say i ticked the box i did the tour i completed the race i did the whatever but really what was the reason for doing the thing what was for the experience yeah it was for the way that you felt the energy the vibe right intensity

yeah all of that yes so um one of my friends before i did the show in melbourne was like how are you feeling for tonight i'm a bit nervous i've got some uh pro panel if you want some beat -a -blockers and uh i thought i could use those but i really want to like i've got myself here like the entire reward

is to feel the terror of course of hearing a few thousand people outside murmuring murmuring murmuring murmuring and then the music comes on and you have to walk out so yeah i just think it's really interesting hearing you talk about this experience is one where you maybe did this incredible achievement

and raised all of this money and stuff but internally the experience maybe that you had left something to be desired from your presence from the way that you tuck it in from all the rest of it and i think that you know that's another frontier to try and conquer too yeah and to talk about that and to

say hey look it's not necessarily just about winning or losing or completing it or not completing it it's also about how you do it outwardly and inwardly as well i think as well i took on this i love that whole just talked about the the i reckon i took on this probably because i felt i almost had to

not not for anything but like i've told myself i'm doing this every two years and then i did it or i'd set up that i was going to do it and so when i'm in it i'm like why am i doing this even though i know like i i'm there's intention behind it to do good and get people to move and for myself to experience

what i experienced but like in those moments of being in it you be able to have that almost um you talked about last night being just like be and to sit in it and be like how on earth after you know all i've been through or whatever i've done how have i got to this point where i'm running around a track

where it's live streamed where people are fundraising where people like i find that a really cool thing in itself is like you've gotten yourself to a point in this life where you've chosen this road this this this and you're here and there was like a few moments there where tom who met last night he's

next to me and i'm like why are we like what is happening like what on earth have i done in my life to get me to a point where i'm going i'm fucking doing this thing regardless of what happens um and that in itself by finishing that and having those questions like why are we here why are we doing this still

finishing that and still having those you know being angry like again as you said it's like maybe there's something in that next time is like well the next thing i do whatever it may be it's like you've got an ability to then make the people around you enjoy it and you try and break it down so that each

five hours you have a moment of reflection and go well you know what this is actually but you never ever get to that by not experiencing this relationship this is how bad it could have gone yeah and this is how good i want it to be of course and like you know if i did that if i broke the record and i

did it in 10 days and it was a seamless event i did 16 hours of running i got 169 each six hours got eight seven hours sleep beautiful meal woke up every day and went again it just wouldn't be what it is now right like it just wouldn't be the um i guess message of like how to not give in and i think

that's what i hope i can continue to show is that like it's not about necessarily you know being i'm better or worse it's about going commit and see the damn thing through because life on the other side of that i think is with a perspective of something really cool well it's not just within events you'll

have ups and downs i'm sure even on the australia run even on the the marathon after work yeah competition uh even within those you've got good days bad days but i think if you broaden the time horizon you know we talked about this last night as well that okay well maybe across events there's going

to be some that are better and some that are worse and some of the worst days within events will make the better days feel better and some of the worst events across events will make the better events feel better that what can i take from this because fuck knows what the next reason is that you need

to galvanize yourself and steal yourself against some sort of a challenge maybe it's something in your personal life maybe it's something that happens professionally maybe it's some fucking press story that comes out maybe it's the next physical event that you do or one down the line and you need to

draw on that and without that without the bat without it going bad or worse maybe than would have been ideal the next one actually you can't survive yeah and it's that odd thing where ironic tragedy that life has to be lived forward but only makes sense in reverse yeah of course and you don't know the lessons

from exactly what you're doing until you've done the next it's why you know you you'll have heard that story about the farmer's son who gets a horse finds a horse that runs away it comes back it breaks his leg yeah the soldiers arrive and then they say how unfortunate the horses run away how fortunate

to come back with a heard of them how unfortunate it's broken your son's leg how fortunate it means he doesn't get conscripted into the army yeah it's like well what's the way you perceive it exactly and over a broad enough time horizon i think people generally get what they deserve yeah you don't need

karma or spiritual energy to deliver justice to people they just need to keep repeating their patterns and habits over and over until reality just gives them what they deserve yeah and uh i think that's kind of that's why ultimately i have so much faith that good people end up out on top completely

agree what um what's what's your goal with not necessarily the podcast but like more broadly when you started i know it's definitely evolved and what you i'm assuming from when you started to now and what your hope with it all but like what is the hope where does it not end but where does it go for you

with the because i like i'm in this not uh i wouldn't say it's definitely not lonely chapter but it's like one of those you've kind of got a open dormer you know what where do we take this because i have an ability to potentially uh inspire a heap of people or is it is it to double down on something

else is it businesses or whatever like how do you do you just go with it or do you you have an intention behind where you want to go or what's the what's the great question you know very few uh bits of sympathy given to people who have lots of options right because most people have fewer options than they

want and when somebody says well there's lots of different directions that i could go down like oh what what do you also made them through a lot of work of course yeah of course but still yeah i know you said it last night problems of abundance are always going to be given less sympathy than ones of scarcity

of course right um so in some ways you think well what a luxurious position to be in how great that you've got that but then on the flip side you have all of this optionality which means that you the pressure is on you to go down is it more virtuous for me to spend all of my time fundraising for homeless

people but is homelessness even the best charity that i should be doing this for i could be raising it for a more worthy cause maybe i should be swimming instead of running or maybe i should be doing whatever so in my experience i've always been bad at long -term planning and i kind of came out of the productivity

bro world at least initially so in that world you know you have a you write your epitaph and you've got what's on your headstone and what's written in your obituary then you break that down into you know 10 -year like chunks periods into three -year sets into one -year goals into 90 -day sprints into daily

actions and you know you have this perfectly coordinated this is how i'm going to get there i always struggled with that naturally and then laid on top any sufficiently quickly growing situation means that optionality breaks out in ways that you couldn't have ever imagined so for you five years ago

you didn't even know that things that you could be doing were things that you could say yes to that even existed right yeah so in my experience it's very difficult to have rigid long -term plans yeah which is why principles and rules are much easier so for me i just try and follow my curiosity i want

to keep on learning about stuff i think is important yeah i want to follow my instinct i like i like how much you are clearly inquisitive of so many people it's a really cool trait thank you yeah it's honestly man i i everybody is idiosyncratic and varied and they're into distance running and fucking

80s jazz i hate distance running by the way war war hammer 40k yeah and blah blah but you know they're into like they've got all of these different things that they've got going on and uh i kind of get the sense that people like in interested curious people like life is a intellectual buffet right and sometimes

they want to hear mark norman shit talking doing gay jokes sometimes they want to hear about this really intense war stories sometimes they want to hear about the psychology female serial killers whatever blah blah blah yeah and uh yeah the job that i have is just to keep satisfying my own curiosity

if i keep doing that i think downstream from that everything will go well yeah um yeah that's the only guiding principle at the moment is like just try and do stuff that i think's interesting yeah that's interesting to me and uh i think next year i'm going to start doing some stuff on bullying interventions

um so i happen to have a couple of friends tracy vine core who's the head of the canadian anti -bullying association um and tony volk as well who's another evidence -based bullying intervention guy i really want to see i don't know of anybody that's talking about bullying very much like as in like kids

or as yes so um specifically for kids because most bullying occurs in school the reason that most bullying occurs in school is that for bullying to happen you need social networks to ossify for a while and in the workplace especially with remote work now people come and go from jobs so much they don't

spend that much time in the office around the same people but in class you see the same people every single day for five years often 11 years right if you follow them through like one big school or whatever so that's how you get locked into these hierarchies and the pecking orders occur so it's easy

to do the intervention there but really interesting thing that no one is talking about and there are interventions for is um helping ex -bullied adults to overcome that bullying we heard about it last night in some of the q &a's that some of the people have got chips on their shoulder about people that didn't

believe in them when they were kids or people that were mean to them or whatever in school and trying to liberate adults from that because it's very shameful to you know to be in your 20s your 30s your 40s and still realize that you're driven by this thing that this devil on your shoulder this kid that probably

maybe doesn't even remember doing it and for you it's still something that crushes you so were you bullied yeah badly like school okay yeah for long like whole schooling uh i think when you're in primary school when you're super young kids are just like they're just blobs do you know what i mean so they're

not really doing bullying but then when we got into secondary school uh it was never extreme physical violence that's up but it was that this sort of very mundane social exclusion that in some ways i think sticks with you for longer because it tells you a story about your position in the world socially

about how you get the love of other people about how safe you should feel around other people as well yeah can you trust other people do you need to offer them something in order for them to accept you or want you or be friends with you do you have a backup like do you have a reinforcements ever do

you feel like you're like do you feel like some i know kids should never be bullied but for you potentially it may have aided in your pursuit now i'm assuming absolutely yeah so is there an argument not saying bully and this is great but like hard love and hard being uh like onto that i don't know there's

something in it because i know so many i'm myself included there was definitely bullying at school where i've you know you feel like ostracized or not a part of something or laughter because of a certain thing it's like that it 100 sticks with you but i also feel that like i was never i was never badly

but it was also enough where you're like well maybe this will help me in some i dude i don't disagree and this is one of the ruthless things about anything difficult that you go through again what i spoke about last night right like the all of your greatest growth is germinated from your lowest points

and but you can't tell someone that in the moment you're like hey you're you know you're gonna really appreciate this in in 10 years time this is going to be the thing that's going to propel you to actually to do whatever to you know to be the strongest person that stands up at your father's funeral

you're like that's not but it sucks yeah exactly because in the moment people don't feel good about it so yeah this is one of the most ruthless things i think about is difficult life experiences which is that lots of the things that you're most ashamed of the dark sides of your personality your insecurities

your fears are just the other edge of the strengths that you love most in yourself yeah so for me solitude hard work my ability to keep going and and not need support of other people all of that sort of resilience and agency and intentionality is definitely borne out of the fact that i needed to i didn't

have anybody else to rely on yeah so in some weird way and i think this is to be honest how most of the chips or maybe even all of the chips from my shoulder at least the conscious ones i'm sure the subconscious ones are still fucking running around yeah but the unconscious chips on my shoulder i realized

well if the things i'm proud of are the light side of the dark stuff and the dark stuff wouldn't have come about how do i have not gone through the difficult stuff that means i need to be grateful that i went through those things which maybe means in a weird roundabout way i actually need to be grateful

for the people that did it to me or for the situations that i was in because if i take so much pride and value in those but the the only other element that i'd add in here i always had a problem with people who said um it was meant to be like this sort of retrospective storytelling of and the reason i

don't like it is let's say that you're in a car accident and and you break a leg and in the hospital bed despite the fact that you're on a ton of morphine and you're supposed to be miserable and life sucks and loads of bad stuff's going on you meet your future partner and the nurse that's caring for you

or something like that and you go see it was meant to be i was one story another story is you were in a fucking shit situation and you alchemized it into something amazing like i think when we retrospectively say it was meant to be it removed the agency that we had from that situation which is exactly

where we should take all of the lessons and all of the pride what's the lesson that you take from it was meant to be just doing things keep doing things until it keeps meant your mentally yeah it's like no no it's like i can find this out by exactly you went through something hard yeah and you made

something good out of it congratulations that's this is i i've got a whole bloody goose this is my whole in desire behind this uncomfortable challenge thing i said at the start is like i don't like we don't need to be bullied to feel something hard to then go oh i'll overcome that you can bully ourselves

yeah we can i mean that in in the purest way we should be throwing ourselves in these harder things in order to you know learn those lessons and if you have to do that it's going to be you're going to learn these things about yourself without you know being told your haircut shit or yeah no i like that yeah

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a checkout that's l -i -v -e -m -o -m -e -n -t -o -u -s .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout yeah i really want to just linger on that how you're doing the thing not just doing the thing um that you have the opportunity to get the promotion get the new car have the marriage do the whatever and in retrospect

sure you will be able to maybe have the photos and all the rest of it but the only person that could have experienced whatever it is that you're going through the only person that could have been on that track that was going to do all of those laps and all of those miles was you the only person who was going

to run across australia or was going to swim around the uk was going to run across america or the fucking length of africa you go anybody can watch the videos even you can watch the videos of you but only you gets to experience what it's like to do that and it's this odd blend between do you want to

be the absolute best in the world at thing which i do think can cause you to need it if you want to be the best all sacrifices are on the table everything fucking life not an enjoyment of the event relationships yep exactly family bank accounts reputation everything right is one thing but if you are doing

something for not being the fastest in the world if it's not a sports competition or it's not a zero -sum game where there's only one winner and you want to just be that one winner i feel like there's a little bit of tolerance just a bit of give at the top and it's like where can i sneak in something

there and i sacrifice five 0 .5 performance to gain 50 presence and that's what i think is fucking interesting about all of this stuff that you guys are doing whether it's rust whether it's ross whether it's yourself whether it's will it's very well put i was almost i was like when you said come on the pod

i was excited initially and then i went oh i don't know if i'm like i had this it wasn't that i wasn't uh ready or worthy it was that i was like am i ready to talk about what i feel or think because of the only i know what i felt in that thing so to sit and talk with who you are would be one of the best

people to try and get it out like get it out of me but that is like again you can only associate with something you've ever you've done and so then i'm like oh do i do i really want to do this because i want to be able to get to a point where i can explain it to people in the best way possible so that to

me is like it's a lot of writing that's a lot of um speaking to people it's a lot of like hearing how same with a keynote or speaking is like well that didn't work well so i'm gonna say it this way and so i was a bit like nervous about the fact that i might come off as like it's like it might go straight

over people's heads but i'm like it's a really cool digital diary of my where were you at that yeah and so in five years time i might laugh about some of the things i've said because i'm what the fuck was that i'm sure your first bloody podcast you're going what on earth was i saying but i think that's

what's freaking cool about this is like if i do look back at it and i do look and go well that's what i was thinking at the time and that's what i felt and that's what uh yeah it was exactly right it was nothing i'm not hiding anything here i'm not trying to say i'm something else it's like it is just

what i am and i think that's a really cool isn't it strange that authenticity is something you need to practice like you need to work at being authentic there's so many yeah that yes in this yes 100 like how can you yeah why is it easier to not be you than it is to be you to file in line and just get

our world do what they do exactly yeah but you know so much of what we do our social lives especially people that don't have to have long conversations like when you think i don't know i would love to know what the longest average conversation a person who doesn't need to record it and put it on the internet

has apart from outside of work maybe like stolen 20 minutes here and there over dinner with the the kids or the partner like little bits here and there just the opportunity to ask yourself questions i i had this like um prescription my equivalent of neds uncomfortable challenge was record a fake podcast

with a friend once a week so you put a phone on record it put it on the recorder my pop it in the middle because a lot of people want to become better communicators they want to really understand themselves don't if they if you're a fan of a podcast you probably like having interesting conversations

anyway but you don't need to go and fucking publish one not everyone's got the time or the inclination to go do it i was like if you record it then you're forced to be rigorous in the way that you think you're precise with these things but authenticity oddly enough is something that has to be discovered

because you've got to dig away all of the fucking layers of social expectation and bullshit and decorum and politeness and bullying and past fucking traumas and patterns and tiredness and caffeine and all of that but you've got to like get rid of all of that to be like dig dig dig dig and then finally

you hit something you hit something solid you're like oh fuck that feels like me that feels really true yeah and it's weird because it's like how is it easier to not be truthful or authentic or honest than it is to do the other thing well because of all of the social expectation it's not as jarring

it's not as like oh why is he why is he posting about this thing exactly yeah yeah i think that's the other thing with the running thing is like i don't running is just the tool i use it's not like and so when i'm doing this thing and being myself i think that's why it's so jarring for some people because they're

like this is not how you're meant to be running around a track for a thousand miles you're meant to be doing it like this is how they've always done it and it's like well it's not really me and to find i think exactly right you have to remove everything and find out like i don't want to be a sparky

this is fuck me like i want to do this i want to find this and and that's why i think it will change over time it's like this will come i will be really excited and that's what i will start pushing like you mentioned the ptsd talk me through we've got up to the end of the race now yep finishing at least

punching the uh just fucking thing was a little bit angry yeah recovery next few days psychologically physically all the rest of this stuff what was it like i uh i drove home from the track so i'd been that whole 26 hours because my old man is farmer like through and through he's like we live six hours

from him the the family farm and he has no idea about directions around the city and i'm like wheeling in my wheelchair up to my up to my ute hop in he starts going to the driver's center i hop in i just knew he'd asked me for freaking directions the whole way home so i was like i'm driving turned ac

dc on and drove home for six hours for no no no no back to into sydney from where i where did the track run was like 30 minute drive into the east of sydney where we are um and yeah but when i got home i was like i was just in shock like i sat for about two hours after the run in the room that we got

ready for each day i'm just like staring at so you've not been awake like 28 hours 28 hours yeah from 4am it was now like yeah 8am the next morning i'm sitting there just like it was massive blister on my car from all the tape because my leg was essentially strapped up to be like a um like a crutch

because i was just like stumpy like couldn't move it and then my knee was cooked everything i'm just sitting there like first breath i took over the whole 12 and a half days of like sigh of relief the sigh of like it wasn't even it was no post run endorphins there was no like it was just pure and utter

relief that it was over and then i could take a moment to go oh my god what just happened guys um so then went home laid on the couch and i just was in this like tweaking out stage for like 12 hours i reckon just like in and out in and out and there'd be food in front of me and i'd go to sleep and i'm

like oh late night um and then i i did not sleep well for the next seven days i would i would nap a lot um and i'm very like i have to move every day like i have to get my body up and do an hour of something otherwise i'm like you know it's not good get if i say in the afternoon i haven't done something

i'm like says this is nasty i don't know why it's just it's just in me it's not like a like i can you know control it but i i feel much better for doing it so i'm like now three four days of not doing any exercise and i've just done so much to get in to turn off is near impossible um so in bed yeah

i'd just be up all night staring at the ceiling and then i'd finally get asleep on the couch and that's when i'd wake up just like it's a really really hard thing to explain because you're like you know it's all okay and everyone right around you saying it is fine it is fine yet you're like i don't

trust you like i'm like i'm literally trying to do this thing and it's not done i tatted on the ozran where i had like road trains because they were constantly on the like trucks big trucks big trailers um they were constantly on the highway and i'd i reckon i'd run past a hundred of them each day over

the hundred k we get into one of the road houses where i'd sleep for the night and the whole night i just have these road trains coming at me and i'd be like spitting at the wall because i was spitting so much because there's so much dust in my mouth throughout the whole run so i'd be like traumatized

like road train i'd jump and then i'd like spit at the wall and i'm like i'm in a room i can't spit at walls or like i'd wake up in like a penny like and so i kind of knew what to expect this time around i knew that this would happen and i kind of like weirdly enjoyed it like when do you get to that point

where you actually get to feel those things because of what you've done to yourself and then that's what i really like in this period now is that i know i'm going to crash for certain i know there'll be a point where i'm i'm a bit lost i've you know devoted my life to this pursuit of this thing with no real

plans after it and i kind of give myself that time now because you can't have ups without downs you can't have downs without ups i love feeling those downs like i love feeling that because i know when i do process what just happened i'll be so much prouder and so much more grateful about the five million dollars

we raise you know like it's those things i don't think you can feel the beauty of those without this kind of really downtime and i'm i'm okay i know how to deal with those but it is it is one of those things that i think people kind of push away is like oh i can't feel terrible i need to like i think

lean into it the way you lean into feeling good and finishing you should lean into like why is my head like this why am i feeling these things what's this emotion i i love those like more than anything in other news this episode is brought to you by shopify look you're not going into business to learn

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wisdom to upgrade your selling today i started realizing this to do with meditation a little while ago that um do you do it every day i try to it's difficult when i'm on tour but yeah i try to and um i just can't i mean i can if i if i go if i intentionally wanted to do it i would be able to do it but i

just i'm just having you myself there i think okay to do it seems like running might be a pretty good proxy for that for you relief um but what i realized was people have a variety of modalities maybe it's fucking weightlifting maybe it's running maybe it's meditation maybe it's breath work maybe it's

whatever a lot of the time when you feel an emotion that arises inside of you especially one that you don't like you have some sort of coping mechanism that makes it go away now you can alchemize into something beautiful right you know running a thousand miles around the track or do it you know doing

whatever rostered you know that i feel something and i'm going to lean in and i'm going to grip my teeth and i'm going to do this really fucking phenomenal great way to turn something like pretty bad and useless into something that's really magnificent but the same thing with meditation emotion arises

inside of you you release and allow it okay you still haven't actually got to the root of where that fucking emotion is coming from and this is only something i learned since doing therapy over the last year that it's like you can keep doing that and you can have really beautiful coping mechanisms yeah

the one that makes you run the one that makes you lift the weights the one that makes you swim around the uk the one that helps you to be more mindful or a peaceful person but it still doesn't get to the actual core at no point are you going you're finding a way to get it up and out of you but at no point

you're actually looking inside and going yeah but why does that keep coming up like why is that thing there and um not everything actually needs assessment in that way there's some stuff that just i think there's a lot way too much getting assessed yes there's stuff that just is you do this very intense

thing you dedicate to yourself to something for a long time out the other side of it what the fuck did you expect of course you've been saying that you've been like monomaniacally focused on this one thing for months and months and months and then you finally do it there's a fucking existential crisis coming

like it's gonna happen are always gonna happen to every person that does that sort of a thing but on the other side the stuff that's oddly like more mundane i think the patterns the assumptions you have about yourself and about the world your relationship your place in it it's like hey if that thing

keeps coming up even if you've got a great beautiful coping strategy like you can either continue to keep on coping and coping and coping and coping for the rest of your life but here's the fucking dangerous thing that a lot of people probably think which is well if i get rid of the emotion what about the useful

coping what if my desire to go to the gym or to run the races or to be mindful or to be peaceful what if that goes away what if that goes away because what if the only reason i do the good things is because the bad thing that's motivating and that's sort of honestly like a fear of peace i mean it's

very much a fear of novelty it's like well i've kind of got some kind of stasis here and even if it's like a little bit out of balance i've managed to get it back into balance if i take something away even if it makes life better i'm now out of balance again i've got it all compensate so do you feel

like you've got like a just you need to do things or do you feel like you're at peace with whatever happens this way we go life's good no i have very much a need for control in my life i'm very sort of structured very organized very routine eyes yeah and getting more used to being sort of free flowing

in that way might be useful but then on the flip side people are constructed differently and we find solutions that work for us and this is one of the reasons why i'm so hesitant about anybody that gives one size fits all answers to success or or mindfulness or what you should do in life and stuff because what most

people have done that are successful is they have found a very specific way that works for their mental pathology and their fucking construction who's exactly what their environments were exactly so matthew sired sports reporter uh in the tennis world really interesting jocovich and adal and fedra all

were world champions at the same time but all of them have massively different training styles one super aggressive one super fun one super robotic but all of them traded places so you go if i want to be a world tennis champion which one do i do and you go well it depends who you fucking are yeah every

one of them has been a fucking tennis champion yeah and all of them have different approaches so i love about that i don't know who it was on your pod when you talk about the you know you might be 98 right yes richard riggs yeah so and then that the 2 right is something that you should still listen

to like people being certain on something that is potentially not so certain is a is an odd way to share the truth between us yeah i love that so much it was um a really good way to be what did you make of that jill stark article that was written about you uh i haven't really spoken about too many people

um i think it has evoked uh it's allowed people to start conversation about um this topic and i'm the least uh i would like to say toxic human being i'm not at all and the fact that you know my mother was my immediate support person shows that like i can't really like she is i would love jill to speak

to my mother like that would be amazing um i think it was quite opportunistic i think it was like a bit of a clickbaity kind of article but uh yeah i think it's allowed people to question and there is the the gym bro uh i must be tough i must not deal with emotions i must be stoic and no one you know

do not talk about emotions there's that side of things that's that needs to probably be addressed a bit more but then there's like we also don't need to be too aware of our emotions all the time i think you need to be aware but use them to your benefit and be um yeah i mean i don't i just don't want

to i don't want to get too on tech i understand yeah but i just think um i've got nothing against jill i'm sure she's amazing i didn't read too much of the article i just saw i just knew it was a tainted uh really it was just not needed yeah because yeah for the people that didn't uh read it men's mental

toughness is just toxic masculinity rebranded cult hero net brockman's grueling 1600 kilometer charity run as ozzy's talking but now everybody sees it in a positive light basically that uh doing hard physical things denies you of tapping into your emotions in a way it's a coping mechanism etc etc look

i think that the modern world has a multiplicity of problems one of them is victimhood one of them is people um needing more resilience they need goggins screaming in their face another group of people are the ones who do push too hard and that do need someone to say hey man maybe you should slow down

like read some poetry outside or go for a walk or do whatever and uh i think horses for courses with regards to this if you are someone that is doing something very very good and very very hard and very very inspiring f***ing hell like yeah it's very very different and very difficult there's a really

interesting study out of the u .s and taiwan that showed men who suppress positive emotions have worse mental health outcomes than ones who suppress negative emotions so you know when we're talking about all of the dangers of men not opening up and all the rest of it i spend a f***ing ton of time in the live

show that i've done here talking about opening up and opening up on stage but very few people are saying what about helping yourself to achieve some glory and some pride and to conquer something and get mastery and feel really f***ing good and positive what about like oh guys listen i'm sure that there's

an article out there that says this guys listening to heavy metal music in the car whilst on caffeine is like right -wing coded or you know there's all of this like so you think like fitness is right -wing coded and um you go yeah but what if it makes them feel happy and f***ing full for the day why is that their

favorite part of the day yeah and they rock up to their family and they're inspired and ready to go yeah like yeah i think it's i just there was a friend of mine she had an article that talked about the jill stuck article and me and then just framed it and really like well what are what is different

to Ned Brockman running a thousand miles and screaming because he's in pain or yeah being happy because he finished another day to Jessica Watson who sailed around the world and being excited like what's the difference we're men and women we're pursuing something hard and we're showing ourselves i'm

not i'm not saying be tough be a man i'm saying be tough doing do an uncomfortable challenge go and sleep on the street speak to someone on the street this is not gender toxic masculinity related at all this is do hard things because you will grow and to to paint it with that brush is just so out of context

what's the sleeping on the street thing are we like just as part of the uncomfortable challenge people signed up and said well i'm gonna go on street sleep on the street and see what it feels like for 10 days wow that's one of the yeah yeah yeah and and speaking to people on the street for 10 days or um

no like all those things but that was yeah someone did why is uh homelessness such a big thing right yes um the fact that we're all human beings and i feel like no one ever wants to be homeless no one's chosen to be homeless they're whatever for whatever reason they've ended up there a lot of homelessness

is a lot out of their control um i've been fortunate enough to have the backing like my family there and if something goes wrong i can always rely on them a lot of people don't have anyone to rely on and then they go down a path of um you know it just for me i feel for these people because they didn't

have the same access to things that i had throughout my upbringing and even an education or a yeah you know all those things that i just feel we all should have the ability to know we have a roof over our head a shower at night and a good good bit of taco to eat every day so that for me i just like

i want to bring awareness to it i don't know how to fix it i don't know how to solve some homelessness but what i do know is if we can make enough noise about it and get people seeing each other regardless of status wealth all those things seeing each other as human beings i think that's why i chose

homelessness because i think by being in the front of the public eye and having that voice you can get everyone involved and go oh this is something we can we can help is it a big problem in australia uh it's nowhere near as a state uh when i went over there i was like blown away it was crazy in l .a and yeah

it's i i was i was crying all the time i was like this is fucked up like this is sad but uh it's 126 ,000 in australia every sleeping rough yeah so that that doesn't mean on the street but that means car uh couch surfing um yeah i mean i'm just i'm compassionate for that because i don't like i would hate

to see someone i know personally in that scenario and i as i said we're all human beings we all have we all should have the same access to things and i think um we're also we have access to so much so why can't we help those people there was a prince william documentary yeah homelessness do you see

this i haven't seen it okay so prince william is criticized for a big new documentary saying he will show the uk how to prevent homelessness the main critic said that he should leave it to the experts and non -government movement needers aren't needed very strange yeah and i think like with mobilize

the the charity i'm working with it's really exciting we're seeing like the noise created from this that it's now going oh government's got to get involved because it's almost too loud to not take take on so they're getting behind it now because of what we've done and the funding and it's going to become

this hopefully it's like we've started something that gets people off the street and gets people into safe housing into kids into school things like that where you know you're seeing a mother with a child who's living out of a car or like that stuff is it's interesting man bottom up social change campaigns

the stuff that everybody broadly already agrees with it's like well why did we need this much motivation to get this thing moving in any case like no one wants more homelessness no you know like the homeless people don't want it the house people don't want it yeah like no one wants more attacking this yeah

exactly but i don't know it kind of makes me think well maybe that was a it's evidently a worthwhile effort if it takes still a lot of work of course relatively like a minimal amount of work in order to cause this big sort of snowball moving downhill you know what i mean yeah it's very cool yeah it

is cool what else would you be interested in looking at is homelessness just the entirety of your um i it's not not necessarily like this is it right it's like i would say the through what i've done now my passion is definitely getting people moving and um live, give and get uncomfortable i think that's

the big message but um right now the homelessness scene i want to i want to end it i want to get people like i want to see the change happen in real time so that's why i want i don't i don't want to be an ultra runner that goes i'm going to raise for this one this time because it's five of the month

like i'm i genuinely care about homelessness um and the thing with these guys too is they work with everyone it's not them trying to fix it it's them going we want to work with everyone who's already so it's like whether it's orange sky like people who clean clothes or haircuts or all these things that already

so they kind of set at the top and then they go here's we've got the funding here you go let's help let's help let's do this that's awesome yeah it's really really cool so it's not about them being the ones who've done it's them helping and facilitating everyone else who's helping as well um and the funding

because of the there's no red tape it's not caught up in government stuff it's this is funding from the 55 000 people who donated and the big copies you got behind it it's like here we go go nuts and hopefully that through the uncomfortable challenge every year people just like movember right that's

the goal i want it to be i want everyone doing it in october i want everyone doing an uncomfortable challenge because it's like that time of the year where we go oh yeah that's where we do this hard thing and we raise money for people who need it it's like this is going to be an october thing annually

calling it noktober neds uncomfortable challenge october oh very nice yeah yeah i want it i want it like that's my goal and that's again that might be the next thing i go into is like let's build this thing out so it becomes this ingrained in the nation psyche like and i love shooting for the stars

i love like taking on a challenge it might be impossible but in the pursuit of it i think is a pretty cool whatever happens it can't it can't be bad the result dude i love it i appreciate the fuck out of you and uh i'm really excited to see what you do next appreciate me i've i've really really enjoyed

today and i appreciate you thanks for last night and yeah you're a good man my pleasure where should people go keep up to date with the charity stuff your stuff everything else yeah just ned brockman there's a couple of challenge on instagram um i mean social media isn't necessary evil for these things

i uh if i could i do mean this if i could not be on social media um and still raise the money inspire and you know there's a commercial aspect of things so you have to um do what you have to do but if i could do that without social media no one would fucking know who i was but it's a necessary evil

and it's the game we all play the ultimate price that you have to pay exactly and it's all worth it all worth it appreciate it appreciate it

[Ned Brockman: Endurance, Suffering, and the Pursuit of Social Change]-[#875 - Nedd Brockman - Pushing The Boundaries Of Mental Toughness]

📋 Summary

The Philosophy of Discomfort

Navigating the Limits of Human Endurance

The Complexity of Authenticity and Criticism

Conclusion: Looking Forward

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript