EPS. 28: Stephan Kesting - Frozen Ground, Unbroken Spirit: The Fight Against the Odds - Architect of Resilience

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Architect of Resilience podcast, where
we explore the secrets of overcoming life's challenges and
unlocking unstoppable strength through deep personal
conversations and expert insights. Well,
Stephen, I can tell you of all the stories I was
just telling you about my year that I've been through. You

(00:21):
know, all that leaves me is
upbeat and proud. Even though it was like a train of like
these horrific things that I just detailed that me and my family have been through
this year, you know, when I reflect back
on where I'm at, I think about the future
and all the opportunities and everything,

(00:43):
you know, the, the moment and the open book I have in front of me
and where I can go from here. At the same time, when I look
backwards, I think about how proud I
am for being here and walking through the things
that I just walked through and going, you know what? Holy.
I'm a strong individual. There is very few people

(01:07):
that could stand up and walk through that and come out the
way that I have. And so that reflection
gives me this sense of power. And
so, yeah, thank you for
the pre podcast conversation, I
guess. And that's my reflection on it. I guess

(01:28):
I should go ahead and introduce you. So for our audience, I'm talking
to a, I, I'd say a good friend of mine because
we've talked on and off for years and you're one of the few people that
have like picked up and said, which some people have done through the years,
came down, spent time with me, you know, instead of
just saying, hey, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to learn, I'd like to,

(01:51):
you know, podcast, but, you know, jumped on a flight and came out
here and, and spent some time and we've
developed a, you know, a real relationship from that and I always
appreciate, and that's why the opportunity is always open there for
people that are willing to actually
do the work and step up and do things that other people aren't. And

(02:13):
so, so this is Stephen Kesting. He's a Brazilian
jiu jitsu black belt coach and a leading educator in combat sports
and self defense. With over three decades of martial arts
experience, Stephen is the founder of the Strenuous Life podcast, a
popular YouTube channel and has garnered millions of views. His
teachings, his teaching approach combines technical

(02:35):
precision with profound insights into mindset and
perseverance, making him the go to resource for martial
arts artists worldwide. Stephen's book
Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic recounts his
gripping survival story during a harrowing or deal in
The. Or in the wilderness. Through his experience, Stephen highlights the mental

(02:56):
toughness and resilience needed both on the mats and in life's
most extreme situations. Beyond
martial arts, Stephen is a passionate hiker, nature enthusiast,
enjoys the outdoors, and.
Yeah, family, dogs, all that good stuff. Welcome to the show. Did
I miss anything? Was it a appropriate intro? That was a great

(03:18):
intro. Thank you. I look around and go, oh, yeah, he's talking about me. That's
kind of cool. Thank you.
It is kind of cool sometimes when you take a step back and you reflect
on those things when people
are talking about you. Exactly. And it's that third person, you're like, oh, hey, wow,
that's actually a good story. That person's done some things like,

(03:41):
oh, I did that. Oh, yeah. And that. And it. Well, I
mean, hopefully by the time that you've been on this planet for a while, you've
done a few things well and you've got a resume
of. Of cool things that you've. That you've done. I mean, otherwise, what's the point?
Yeah, exactly. Well, let's.
You know the. The Architect of Resilience podcast, right.

(04:03):
It's a lot of discussions around strength, but the
definition of strength. And can you tell me how that
definition has maybe evolved in the recent times for
you both on your. Your journey in
the physical sports, martial arts, but as well as, you know, some of your
other experiences? Well, I mean, to start

(04:26):
with, if we're just talking pure physical strength, strength training
is important. Not to the same level as for you or
for many of your guests. I mean, I lift weights and I think it's something
that's allowed me to keep my body together despite my five
decades and many, many miles. Right. It's like Indiana Jones said, it's not the years,
it's the mileage. And. But

(04:49):
strength is really the ability to. To keep going, to not stop.
And there. Strength and endurance and perseverance
kind of blend and the.
There's a saying in the martial arts that the mo. Of all the physical
attributes, whether that's strength, speed,
balance, reaction time, even strategic

(05:11):
thinking, of all those attributes, the most important one is
endurance. Because if you're tired, you're not strong.
If you're tired, you're not fast. If you're tired, you're not even smart.
And when you're talking about
projects that take multiple decades to pull off, at that
point, you need the endurance to just keep

(05:34):
going. I mean, the.
Since you mentioned the book, the book is really the story of
a goal that was in my head for
20 to 30 years and was this lighthouse that
I was navigating towards through some really
difficult times. And I wasn't

(05:56):
in the position to pull that off for a long, long time.
And normally, you know, I'm a big fan of taking
action, you know, taking violent, immediate action
and, you know, not meditate. Movement beats meditation,
right? Getting started on something is incredibly important.
And many people who never get anywhere, they just never got started

(06:19):
at the same time. That's not always possible. Sometimes you're just in a position
where you've got to sit and take it and eat for
months, years, in some cases decades, until you
finally get in a position to pull the trigger and do something that
you've dreamed about. So it's this dichotomy between, you
know, take immediate action and get

(06:42):
started, but at the same time, you can't always do that and
you, sometimes you just have to sit in the pit and,
and slowly and methodically work
towards getting in a position where you can even get started.
I appreciate that terminology. So anyone that
is a repeat listener of any of my content

(07:04):
will hear the terminology, the pit quite a bit. So we talk about,
you know, the precipice, that moment of taking the step off the edge
into the unknown, the experiences of the free fall, the
plunge. But that, that piece of the pit. And
there's, you know, a lot of, I guess,
negative connotations around being in that. But that

(07:26):
is, that's your story. It's kind of the opening
to the podcast that I just did here where,
you know, it's a three step process, like acknowledging, like,
hey, and in this case, you know, maybe acknowledging this, this, this is
something that's going to be with me for a long time before I get there,
but celebrating too, the fact of like

(07:49):
just that, like, how proud are you going to be on the other side when
you get to the end of that, in leveraging that. And I'm
thinking about that in your conversation, leveraging it for
the, the endurance strength of being in that for the long
haul. And I certainly realized that with many of my kind
of long haul projects that have stuck with me through the years, they're, they're very,

(08:11):
not instant gratification. And that's something that is
hard to see in the world that today where we
have so many triggers to be able to propel people to,
you know, financial success or notoriety
or all these things that you can build in this very short period

(08:31):
of time and, but not everything's that way. So tell,
tell me about this. This Journey on this long haul kind of
experience. Sure. So
when I was in my 20s, I spent an awful lot of time
out in the bush. I did some very long solo trips and often those

(08:51):
wilderness trips were associated with processing
really difficult times. I mean it's
the place I retreated when my first. So
I was. Had four brothers and a half sister. And while I was
off on one wilderness trip, my
next oldest brother, Peter managed to take a dirt

(09:14):
bite out on the country road, middle of the night without
headlights and got slammed into by our neighbor. So he died
screaming for his mother out on the country
road. The cops came after and the
ambulance took hours. The cops came, they actually arrested
him because brain damage from auto

(09:36):
accidents looks an awful lot like intoxication. They thought he was drunk. He
wasn't. Ended up biting a cop. My mum was there freaking
out. It's the worst possible thing your parents can go through, a parent can go
through. And a few hours later he was dead. So I
came out of the wilderness after a reasonably
long solo trip. It was a six week trip

(09:58):
traversing northern Ontario basically from Lake Superior up to
James Bay, which is a very bottom nipple on Hudson Bay and
back overland. It was the toughest thing I'd ever done. I came
out. I wouldn't say I was happy when I came out, but I was satisfied.
Right. There was a deep sense of satisfaction and pride, which is what you talked
about. And there's a big difference between satisfaction and happiness.

(10:21):
But like, holy, I pulled this off. I went into a
pizzeria in the tiny town of Long Lac, Ontario. And it's
got like one pizzeria, two gas stations and a corner store.
And I ordered a. The biggest pizza they had. While they were making that,
I called home. This is four cell phones before sat phones
to tell my parents I was okay and found out that my brother was dead.

(10:43):
So I went from this high, from the
highest, one of the highest highs of my life to one of the lowest
lows of my life within 10 seconds.
Yeah, and
the processing of that over the next year,
I mean there was a lot of, you know, being

(11:04):
young, not having any real tools to deal with that.
I was adrift. And the one thing that
ended up giving me some focus was I was
wandered into a map library at the University of Toronto and
just started connecting the dots. Like, hey, I've heard about this area,
essentially the eastern coast or the western coast

(11:28):
of Hudson Bay. And yeah, a friend of mine talked about this
other friend of mine who did this trip and I should just look up that
trip. And then how do I get there? Well, I got to connect another river
system because I don't have the money to fly in there. How do I get
there? Well, why don't I connect another river system? And
so in the space of a couple of hours, I connected

(11:49):
2800 kilometers. So that's about 1800 miles.
Ish of river, basically going
from the Rocky Mountains to Hudson Bay, in my mind
anyway, and on paper, yep. And this, this. This gave me a goal,
something to work for and gave some sort of purpose. And also,
I think, returning to the wilderness, when the wilderness was where

(12:12):
I'd gone from my highest high to lowest low, it was kind of a
redemption. Right. I'm going to try this again. I'm not going to
allow that experience to be stolen from me and recast
as being associated with the death of my brother.
And so, yeah, I slowly worked towards that

(12:33):
goal, and I ended up
taking off from Jasper, Alberta, which is in the base of the
Rocky Mountains. So, so this. This
inspiration for doing this were what, you were in your maybe 20s or
30s? Yeah, I was in my 20s there. I was in my early 20s. So
that's. This idea formulated in your head, but the actual

(12:55):
journey itself now is. We're talking.
No, I ended up doing that journey in my 20s. Oh, you did? Okay. I
bring that up because that was my touchstone for how to
process grief and how to process mortality and how
to, you know, that's the place where I go. And so in my
early 20s, when you have not much money but lots of time,

(13:16):
it was possible to retreat to the wilderness to deal
with things like that. And, you know, within the first
week of being out there, the grief that I'd
been holding, I hadn't cried at all about my brother's death.
I'm paddling down the river, it's a sunny day, and all
of a sudden it just comes up and clubs me from behind like a baseball

(13:40):
bat ambush. And now I'm floating down a river that's,
you know, it's a river big enough to be seen from space. And I'm
there, little tiny person, little tiny canoe,
sobbing my brains out. And
that was incredibly cleansing. And by the time I
was about halfway through that trip, I think I had processed that grief about as

(14:03):
well as I could have. And then the second half of that trip was just
adventure. And that feeling from going from, there's something
wrong, but I don't know what it is to, hey, dumbass, here's what's
wrong. And being able to process that
by myself, in privacy in a
relatively high stakes situation. It's kind of weird how going to

(14:25):
a high stakes situation and being alone and being completely isolated
allows one to laser focus on things. But it
really, maybe it's just the, the repetitive motion
of paddling, paddling, paddling, paddling, doing the same thing kind of
on autopilot. Allows the mind and the, allows the mind to
wander. So yeah, that was in my 20s. That was what I did in

(14:48):
my 20s. But then along came kids, along came a career. I
worked, I've worked 25 years as a firefighter.
I've dealt with a lot of death since then.
Not only did my one brother die, had another brother die,
I watched my grandmother die. I watched my mother
die slowly and painfully from als. I've been

(15:12):
to hundreds and hundreds of deaths
as a first responder and I don't know
about that all being. I mean there's a certain amount of trauma there but at
the same time it's also an incredible gift. Right. If you
watch someone pass away in front of you, it's
awful, it's terrible. And it's also their last gift to you. It's a

(15:33):
memento mori. Hey, this is where we're all going to go. So
what are you going to do with your time? It's this
again, a weird dichotomy between
watching something terrible unfold, but it also being their final gift,
that person's final gift to you, whether you know them or not. And obviously if
you know them and are closely tied to them, it's an

(15:55):
even more powerful gift.
Yeah, yeah. Those words are really striking home with me right now.
So. Yeah, then I just
wrap up the basic storyline here. My 30s and
40s, I was nose to the grindstone. I was, I'm
relatively well known in the martial arts space and especially the Brazilian Jiu jitsu space.

(16:18):
I was building that whole, those channels, that
business and that knowledge
base and it's just a lot of hard work as you know.
Yeah, you put in the time for sure to build. I mean
you've got 300 plus thousand I think subscribers
on YouTube. Like you're a well known figure in this

(16:41):
industry. You've got training programs like
yeah, you've been.
That stuff doesn't happen by accident. I
wish that is years of grinding and
putting in some hard work. I wish there was the four minute abs
of business success. But I guess that's called random crypto. Investment in meme

(17:04):
coins and then prayer. Yeah. And then that can get ripped away in a
second's Notice, too.
Yeah. So as I'm grinding away, I'm
also finding out that I'm dying because I had inherited something from my mom. I'd
inherited polycystic kidney disease, where basically your kidney function
just precipitously decline. Well, inexorably

(17:26):
declines up until the end when it becomes precipitous.
And so, you know, it was kind of a thing that, hey, this is going
to happen. But it's always the
dark presence behind you, like, fucking kidneys are
gonna. Are gonna crap out on me. And I'm watching the
line of decline and, like, I've maybe got five years,

(17:49):
maybe seven. And then you reach the Hail
Mary stage, right, where you're reading
every last publication on the topic, and they're
like, hey, here. Researchers in China found that if you did
this to, you know, if you gave rats, I think it was like, niacin, that
it delays polycystic kidney disease. So now I'm popping niacin

(18:11):
knowing that there's a very small chance this is going to work. But you're in
the Hail Mary stage. Like, what's the worst that's going to happen? My kidneys will
fail. They're already failing. And, yeah, turns out
that there is somewhat of a difference between human kidneys and
rat kidneys and how humans process niacin
and rat processed niacin, because. And that niacin is just one

(18:33):
example of many. So, you know, I'm trained as a scientist.
I've got a couple of degrees in biology, and here I am.
And I understand now when people get cancer and they
go to some Mexican cancer clinic and
they're looking for
anything that could possibly help, and they're looking for hope,

(18:56):
despite the fact that these clinics, for the vast part,
are predatory. Like, hey, we're just going to separate you from
the last of your money so you don't give it to any of your family
because you've got stage four liver cancer. And there ain't
no treatment for the type of liver cancer that you have. But come to our
holistic wheatgrass clinic here, where we'll

(19:18):
give you massage and Reiki and most importantly,
hope. So I have a little bit more sympathy for
people who are in extreme physical
distress, who are now swinging for the fences
and just trying anything for a Hail Mary. So
I was watching my kidney function decline. I was watching my physical

(19:41):
abilities decline. I was barely able
to exercise. I was,
you know, a good day of exercise would be a vigorous walk. So I was
at that stage. I was in my late 40s. And that
that really sucked because so much of my life has been physical, whether it's on
the mat or lifting weights or doing cardio

(20:03):
or going in the outdoors. Yeah. Part of how you
define yourself is getting stripped away from you. And
people that haven't had that definition, I don't think can fully
grasp what that means when those capabilities are
taken from you. Yeah, it's absolutely
brutal because it is how you've defined yourself. I imagine

(20:25):
it's. It would be like if you were
getting Alzheimer's, but you could be outside yourself and watching yourself
decline and going, man, that's. That's not who I am. That's not
who I was. This is. I
mean, Alzheimer's is a little bit of a
blessing almost, that after a while, you don't see it anymore.

(20:48):
Yeah. You're not aware of it. Yeah, but I was
very aware of it. So eventually my
nephrologist told me, do you know anyone who can give you a
kidney? And I hadn't thought about. Strangely, I kind of
known that kidney transplants were a thing and that I might
have to have one. But, like, it becomes real very quickly when he's asking,

(21:10):
okay, who's the list of people who can give you a kidney? And it turns
out, in terms of family members, that list isn't very long.
So this is. This is
horrible. Like, a thousand times, rather would give someone a kidney than ask someone for
a kidney. Yeah, that.
That would be a challenging thing. But it sounds

(21:33):
like you did take that step. I did.
I. And actually, it was amazing, because
all of a sudden, friends, I didn't know I had started coming out of the
woodwork saying, I'm gonna go. I went. I went and got tested yesterday. You
what? Yeah, I went and went and talked to the
transplant clinic. Oh, sorry. I went and talked to the transplant clinic, and I'm

(21:55):
gonna get tested. Like, I. I was
humbled, but in the end, it was my brother.
And so you don't get a better genetic match than your brother.
I've got a rare blood type O negative. So it was good that he was
also O negative. And, yeah, we both went
under the knife. And one of the very last things I remember thinking

(22:18):
is, you're there in that holding area, that bullpen, before you get wheeled into the
or. It's like, I wonder if. If I survive,
if I can make it back up to that. That part of the world that.
The barren lands of Nunavut and very
northern Manitoba, because I just. So this is one of those longer trips I
brushed up against the Southern part of that. And it looked, it was

(22:40):
just an amazing experience to be there between the,
the forest, the boreal forest with all the spruce trees and pine trees
and then the tundra right where it just breaks open and it's wide open
country. And I wanted to get back to that
area. I'd wanted to go exploring further north in that area. It's like I wonder
if I can get back there if this, if this transplant is successful.

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(23:48):
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at merrickhealth.com Discover the future of
health today. So you're sitting there, you've been
dealing with this conversation, a reality in your head
for years that you're dying and now you're
going, you're drifting off, going to sleep,

(24:10):
going under the knife for, you know, potentially a life saving
procedure. But maybe it doesn't work out. Yeah. Where
your brother is going to save you, where your prior time you
were up there, it was post dealing with your other brother's death.
And this is, this is the thought that is
all of a sudden popping up and running through, you're seeing

(24:33):
the visions of that place as you're, as you're falling asleep under
anesthesia. Yeah. And I guess
it's having dealt with mortality, having used
that process of going into the far north as
a young man to deal with mortality, but not my own other people's
mortality. Now it's, it's really your own mortality that's being presented to

(24:54):
you and you know there's a risk to my brother, there's a risk
to me. I don't know if I'm ever going to wake up
from that. I mean ultimately you never know. Going
under any kind of general anesthetic that it's always rolling the dice.
Yep. But you know, you hopefully I, I'd done everything I
could. I had made wills, I had appointed powers

(25:16):
of attorney, I had Set up my business
to run as well as it could while I was. Say, I came back, but
I was incapacitated. I was in as
good physical shape as I could be with 12% kidney
function. Right. Like, I. I was still trying to.
There's 12% be in a complete sack, and

(25:37):
there's 12% kidney function where you're still using
the little bits of energy that you have strategically to try and develop, you know,
keep your strength up and keep up your. Your health as best as
you can. But ultimately, it's a Roll the dice. Yeah.
And so I think, to some extent, returning to the
north was an. An attempt to deal with issues of my own

(25:59):
mortality as opposed to. To other people's mortality. Yeah.
So how long ago was this? The kidney transplant was in
2015. Okay. So that was a while ago, but it
took. So that was not too long before we met,
because I think we met maybe 2017,
2018, somewhere in that range. That was when I was finally

(26:22):
beginning, because it's tough. Like a kidney transplant knocks
the hell out of you. I mean, the weirdest thing is growing pains. Remember
those. Those amazingly sharp pains in your shins
when. Or your. I've got my youngest going through that on occasion now
she's seven. So. Well, I got to go through it twice. Once when I was
7 and 8 and once post kidney transplant, because your

(26:45):
body's been doing all this amazing juggling of, you know, calcium and
magnesium and electrolytes as it's desperately trying to stop
you from dying. Yep. And so now when
you all of a sudden go from 12% kidney function up to roughly 50%,
in my case, with, like, 44, 45,
your body's now reshuffling all

(27:08):
the. The ions and trying to
shove, you know, take calcium out of your system and jam it back into your
bones. And so, yeah, I got to go through that. I got to go
through multiple infections and multiple complications, and
I. Double kidney removal, which was actually
incredibly painful. Yeah. Nothing like

(27:29):
feeling like somebody's pushing a screwdriver through your abdomen for days on
end. So that. That was good times. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's. It's. And unfortunately, I don't do
very well with morphine and the opiates. So,
yeah, I got to experience all that unblunted.

(27:50):
And so, yeah, it took. When we
met the first time, it was. I was right in the throes
of the recovery there. Like, okay, what's. What's this month's medical
surprise? But I'll say by four years on,
it Was like, okay, you know, I've begun pushing
things again. I'm back to lifting weights. I'm back to

(28:13):
doing endurance hikes in the mountains. I'd done a 50 kilometer
mountain trek in the middle of winter a few times at that point in a
single day. So it's like, okay, I can. I've
taken this new body out for a couple of spins. And it's like that with
any injury, right? If you get injured and you have to have surgery or rehab
or whatever it is, you're pretty leery the first couple times you

(28:34):
go back to the activity, you know, to full activity, and you almost have to
take a couple of hits to that body part to go. No, it can
withstand some, some strain now. And now I can have
permission to slowly begin ramping it up.
And that area began to sing to me and
that it was a vision. And it had been a vision for 20 years. Like

(28:56):
during the dark days of having two young kids
in the house and quite frankly, going through the early stages
of a divorce. This is pre transplant. I had the actual physical
NTS 1 to 250,000 maps on the
wall of the hallway that led to my office. So every time I walked down
there, I could look at the map and like study the lakes. And

(29:19):
it had been this beacon for a long time. And like, let's
make this a reality. So now to make something a reality, you have
to ask yourself what needs to happen? If what would need to happen? Well,
one thing that would need to happen is I can't be the only person
running my business because if I go away for I
figured a couple of months to do this trip,

(29:41):
you know, the business would just implode and I'd come back to financial catastrophe. So
what would need to happen? Well, I'd need to hire somebody and train them. And
I tried to do that before and it never worked out. Like. No, I,
I really need to get serious about
outsourcing some of this and also growing enough to be able to
afford the outsourcing and growing enough to be able to afford

(30:03):
the, the financial
costs of doing a. Going off into the
woods for a couple of months. Because that, ironically
isn't the cheapest thing. No, it's not the easiest thing to just spend
a few months on vacation. Well, I wouldn't call it vacation, but you know what
I mean. Sure, masochistic vacation.

(30:26):
Yes, masochistic vacation. But it's still something
that, you know, again, unless you're just out
of high school, you don't have, you've got you know, some support. You've
not, you don't have all the liabilities that you've encountered of
having, you know, a family, a life, a business, a career, any
of that stuff. That's a, that's a pretty big thing. Yeah. But it's a

(30:48):
useful prepare for it. It's a useful thought exercise for anyone who's running their
own business is what would I need to
do if I was going to take a couple of months off? That's
probably a clarifying question, even if you don't intend to take a couple of months
off, because a couple of months off can happen regardless of whether you like
it or not. You could be down with, I don't know,

(31:09):
long Covid. Right. And just absolutely
devastated for three, four months. I
call it the what if you got hit by a
bus rule. Right. What if you got hit by a bus and it didn't kill
you, but it took a long time to recover, how could things continue?
And using that as a, as a model, just as

(31:30):
a mental model does
force you to then say, well, if I was going to survive that, I would
need this and this and this. So let's see about how we can start
accumulating this and this and this. It's. And it may take a long time to
get there. It wasn't a quick process to get there for me, certainly,
but I eventually did get there. And

(31:51):
for that period of time, it enabled that. And then when you hire
somebody and when you get people doing that, you got to go by the hit
by the bus rule again. What if this person got hit by a bus? This
is a single point of failure. Because you can't have a single point of failure.
Can't have everything
subject or beholden to a single point of failure, regardless

(32:13):
of whether that's you or your number one employee or your number
one, I don't know, proprietary industrial
process, because somebody else might develop a similar
industrial process. So
having the, some redundancy, right.
It's actually a very, you know, anything that can go wrong will go

(32:35):
wrong. How do you survive that? Well, you have redundancy of
function. You know, if, if, if I was out in the bush
and I only had one way to light a fire, here's my one lighter
that's, you know, I'm guaranteed to lose that lighter.
So now you need redundancy of function. And it doesn't mean a thousand lighters, but

(32:56):
it might mean some lighters, some matches, some magnesium,
sparking tools, some other ways to
accomplish the same, the same goal.
I, I Like that, approaching it from the survivalist mentality.
That's a, it's a good point. Yeah.
What, what else did you have to do in preparation for,

(33:18):
you know, getting, getting ready to do this? Well, from the physical, I guess you
will call it. Sure. So the goal was to spend. I had a
50 day journey that was about a thousand miles. This is, this is the
plan. A 50 day solo trip starting
from basically the end of the road in northern Saskatchewan
to Hudson Bay. So that's a thousand miles across

(33:40):
some pretty inhospitable terrain. It's not like there's a single river
you're going to be following. I was going down river, upriver across one of
the largest lakes in the world, up
another river, over a height of land, and then down
a river about which it's not very well documented at all, with
another gigantic lake in the middle. And

(34:03):
people underestimate lakes. Right. If you look at
fatality rates with any kind of water sport,
by far it's drowning. Right. The big lakes, you know, people worry
about bears if they're going out in the bush. And I remember being told,
oh, you're going up north, there's bears up there, you better take a gun,
you better take two guns. And I did take

(34:25):
a gun. But statistically like
something like five people a year in North America get
mauled by bears. Now, of course, if you're in the middle
of the Iowa hurricane, which would in my case be the Hudson Bay coast,
where you have polar bears the size of dinner tables roaming around.

(34:46):
Your. Odds go up from whatever 5 divided by 300,
300 million is. But still, the biggest
hazard by far is hypothermia and dying on a lake.
So there was this trip
and I didn't know exactly how long it would take.
And the.

(35:10):
So it involved a ton of research, involved a ton of gear
acquisition, it involved a ton of just food preparation.
And I thought I was going to do a whole bunch of physical training for
it. And so I was going to, I had a whole
training plan mapped out. It was going to involve a ton of paddling, it was
going to involve, you know, actually doing the activity. It was going to involve a

(35:32):
ton of upper body weight training because you're mostly shoulders and
arms and torso. And then in a short
succession, I managed to screw up both of my shoulders. One was doing jiu
jitsu. I was rolling with somebody who was smaller
than me, less experienced than me and lower ranked than me. And he, I was
fooling around and he caught me in some kind of weird Arm lock. I was

(35:53):
like, yeah, this, I'm not tapping out to this. And just
I can get out. And I did get out and I got out 1cm at
a time by wriggling a little bit, breathing and then wriggling a little bit and
breathing and just making adjustments. Man, I got out so good for
me. And, and that shoulder was absolutely buggered for the next six
months. And then a month after that I

(36:15):
was racing my kid on a skateboard. And what's somebody in
there? What's a 50 year old man doing racing on a skateboard? That is an
entirely valid question. I wiped out as, you
know, 50 year old man having fun. That's what you're doing.
Yeah. Kissing the pavement
at 20 miles an hour at 50

(36:36):
years old managed to blow up my other shoulder. So now here I was. I
had done all the work to get ready for this massive trip, this trip
of a lifetime, this thing that I'd been looking forward to for literally 25
years. And now I could barely move my, my
arms. I couldn't lift them above my shoulder
and. Well, how do you prepare now? So my answer there,

(36:59):
and my apologies to everyone listening to your podcast, because the strength was
to do endurance. Because I, I couldn't do physical
for, for months anyway. I couldn't do any upper body conditioning. So it's
like I might as well remove the one week link
of the chain that I can do something about. And that's endurance.
Yeah, tons and tons and tons of

(37:22):
hiking in the mountains. I live in Vancouver, so
some pretty steep mountains and sometimes some gondolas going down so you
can get beautiful by the way. Yeah, I love it.
It's a reason that real estate's so expensive here. It's because everybody loves
living here. So yeah, ironically

(37:42):
to prepare for an upper body endeavor
or test, all I could do was lower body cardio,
which I, I remember talking
with Mike McCassel who's down in your neck of the woods.
Yep. And when he did his.
So this is very much in my, in my head for people

(38:04):
who don't know who he is. He is a Navy SEAL who
smashed David Goggins pull up record. But
sorry, Mike McCastle is a, as a. In the Navy who
smashed David Goggins, the Navy seal. His pull up
record and the first. Time and a number of other like crazy feats
like you know, pulling a, pulling a vehicle through. I think

(38:26):
the, the what's that? Valley. Death Valley.
Just tons of just like weird crazy
endurance strength feats. Yeah. Yeah. And even Just
pain and suffering. Like, I think he smashed the ice
submersion challenge, right? Like submerged his body in ice, I
want to say for two hours. Like just

(38:48):
crazy. But
the first time he tried smashing David Goggins pull up record, he ended up in
hospital with Rabdo and I think
also tore all the muscles in one of his arms
and then like. So that's, that's pretty
serious. Like that's. Yeah, no, he got, he got schooled pretty

(39:11):
hard that first time. Yeah. And then he did it again
roughly a year later. So I asked him what he had done different. Well, obviously
he had more time to train, so that's one thing, but he'd also done more
cardio and the. That's kind of weird when you think about it. I'm just
doing sets, pull ups and sets of five. But he argued that
it would improve his body's ability to remove waste

(39:33):
products. So I think that was, that was
what was going through my head as I was preparing for this upper body challenge
by doing lower body cardio. And so yeah, for
preparation, a lot of it was research, like trying to squeeze every
last little bit of information I could out of looking at accounts that go back
to the 1800s. People like J.B.

(39:54):
terrell, the early 1900s. There was a couple
people who traveled up there in the 1910s, there was
a. In the 1930s. And of course people have been
traveling up there since forever. But they were native people
doing their trade routes, they were trappers, they weren't writing
books and they weren't writing how to Ascend the Cochrane

(40:16):
river guidebooks. Besides, nobody in their right mind
writes guidebooks on how to go up a river because everybody
now goes down a river. But you're, you're just hunting
in the liter, the literature, which isn't very extensive,
and online forums, hey look, here's somebody who did part of the trip
back in, I don't know, 1995 or

(40:38):
1995, and they're writing about it. So
did they, do they include any information? So trying to
compile that, there's a lot of research required. There's a
lot of. Yeah, I was
dehydrating a lot of food, trying to aim for
about four and a half to 5,000 calories a day for

(41:00):
50 days. Yeah, that's,
yeah. I'm surprised you weren't burning more. I was,
I lost about, I ended up losing about £20 on that journey.
So. Okay, yeah, that's a significant amount of calories right there. That's
3, 500 times 20 pounds. Another
yeah. So you got those stores in your body to pull from too. Yeah. Well,

(41:22):
I mean you're also, you're limited by weight, Right. You've got a. For each extra
pound of food that you take. Yep. You're limited because
that's one pound more you need to carry across the portages and that's ultimately you're
running into the carrying capacity of the boat. Actually looked into
keto, Right. Tested keto because the
calories per gram of fat are double than what they are per

(41:44):
gram of protein or per gram of carb. It's 8 calories per gram as
opposed to 4 calories a gram. So the thinking was if I could go keto
on this, then it'd be not quite half the weight
because I wouldn't be entirely strict keto, but call it
60% of the weight because 250 pounds of food, that's
a lot of, that's a lot of stuff to carry in a boat. Well, you

(42:05):
wouldn't have to go full keto just to access the calories of the
fats because I believe that's how a lot of the
Antarctica crossings were done was a lot of
just super high fat diets. My only concern with that is
what does it do to your GI when you're taking in 9,000
calories of oil or butter a day. But I know that that's

(42:28):
been a. Practice when Malakov and Weber, who are the first
guys to reach the North Pole. So not Antarctica. This has been done
Antarctica as well. Right. I think Colin O'Brady had a very high fat diet when
he skied across Antarctica. But when Malakov. Yeah, that was the one I was thinking
of. So this Russian guy and this
Canadian guy went to the North Pole and back. So it was the. This is

(42:49):
reasonably recent, I'll say last 15 years. And they were the first people to go
to the North Pole and back self supported. So not
having animals. Right. Like a. The dirty little secret of
Arctic exploration is that those guys would set off with 50 dogs
and come back with none. So basically the
dogs were both walking dog food because they'd kill off the dogs

(43:12):
and feed them to the other dogs and then they would eat the dogs themselves.
So I don't know if that's sad. It is.
So Malakov and Weber, seeing that it was, I'm gonna
say the early 2000s, decided that they wouldn't be. It wouldn't.
The optics of eating dogs, eating their way
across. Yeah, that would not hold well in the world

(43:34):
today. And that's a good thing. Yeah, yeah, I will say that's an
improvement. Their diet was something like 80% of their calories
came from fat. But like with so many other
things, it's its genetics. Right. Can your body
tolerate a diet that's 80% fat? I mean, some of it's going to
be acclimatization and, and getting used

(43:56):
to it and some of it's genetics. Right. Do you have the
genetics to withstand that? Yep. And so
I did a, I actually did this one properly. I went to my doctor, I
said, I'm going to try keto. And he's like, please don't.
Like this is, you know, the data isn't there. So we can argue
whether the data is there for keto or not. But I can tell you what

(44:16):
my results were. So I went and did blood work
before and then I did, you know,
ldl, hdl, your triglycerides, your ratios, all that stuff.
And then I did strict keto for a month
and you know, I felt okay. I didn't
feel great. I never got that surge of energy that people talk about.

(44:39):
But you know, okay, maybe it's just a question time. Maybe I need to do
it for, you know, maybe I'll feel different after six months. But
at a one month interval I went and got blood work
and blood work came back pretty fast a couple of hours later. And I'm
looking at, on my computer going, holy. Every single number had gone the
wrong way. My HDL had plummeted, my LDL had gone through the

(45:01):
roof, my triglycerides had gone through the roof, all the ratios were massively off. And
I'm looking at my computer and my phone, my phone rings and I pick up
my phone, it's my doctor, it's not my doctor's office saying, hey,
the doctor would like to make an appointment with you tomorrow or next week or
two weeks from now. It's my doctor going, you have to stop. And I'm like,
yeah, I'm looking at, I can see that, I

(45:23):
can see that. I am, as of 30 seconds ago, I have fully
stopped. So to
anyone who wants to try that, do the before and after blood work. Yeah.
And because some people, I anecdotally, it seems
about a quarter of people just absolutely can't handle that. And I guess
I'm one of them. Apparently the numbers tell you

(45:44):
so. Yeah, I mean, of course there's going to be people going
with no true Scotsman arguments. Well, you were eating, I don't know,
too much coconut milk and not enough coconut oil or if
you'd done it for 12 months then your metabolism would have
shifted or something like that. I highly recommend that
people, anytime you're doing any major shifts in diet,

(46:07):
supplementation, medications,
pharmacology, like doing before and after
blood work. And so Merrick Health is really great
resource for anybody that doesn't have a doctor where
you can work with a provider, you know, online. And
they do some incredible assessments. They have the best.

(46:29):
So it's typically like a 45 to 55 page long
assessment. Wow. That will detail your level
as far as recommendations for
lifestyle changes, supplementation
changes, pharmacology. So you can really kind of, you know, look at what
choices you would want to make but gives you the, that whole

(46:50):
spectrum. And so you can find
that@christophan.com if you order blood
work, you can also have me go through it with, with you as well. As
far as some of those recommendations as it relate to supplementation,
how do. They do the blood draw component? Obviously you're not doing that at home.
No, you. Yeah, they use, they use LabCorp.

(47:12):
You can, some people will send, you know, a phlebotomist
to your house. But I think that they found some inconsistency in
the quality of the phlebotomist that do
the, the in house service. So they've had a lot of just misses in it
being done wrong and having to be redone. So they've
eliminated that. But in the states here there's, you know,

(47:35):
LabCorp's pretty much all over the place. So it's
a, it's a really good place. So I've, I've
been using it for years and so yeah, it's,
it's just fundamental. Like would anybody, we have access to these
tools today that you didn't have, you know, in the past
when we're talking about these, you know, past generations of folks and

(47:58):
the stories that you're talking about, like today you have so many tools at your
disposal where we can find out those unique impacts of
your genetic predisposition and you know, the
impacts of what's going to happen. Because you can try to read things
online and there's just, there's so many things where, you know,
sometimes just an herbal supplement will affect one person

(48:20):
wrong and end up leading down the road to, to liver
failure. And it's just, maybe it's 1
in 10,000 or whatever but like being able to codify
and know how you actually respond, your unique bodies,
you know, chemistry, biochemistry is, I mean
it's, it's right there and it, it's so easy to do and it's going

(48:43):
to improve your quality of life. And I,
I'm potentially prevent a catastrophic decline of it.
Absolutely, absolutely. It was really
enlightening going through this process of becoming a reasonably heavily
medicated individual because I, I have to be on anti
projection meds for the rest of my life, which are essentially immunosuppressant

(49:04):
meds. Talking to these
doctors that say, not just a doctor,
talking to kidney specialists, talking to not only kidney
specialists, but transplant kidney specialists and asking a question
like, hey, what happens if I start taking, I don't know,
magnesium along with these meds?

(49:26):
And the trouble is if you go online or go on a forum
or talk to somebody who completed their,
I don't know, online degree in naturopathy or
homeopathy, they'll give you an answer. Oh well, the magnesium will interact
with this and this will be the result. And now you talk to,
I'll say real doctors, but not only real doctors, doctors who've

(49:48):
spent decades specializing in this. And they only deal with a small number
of medications. Right. So you'd think they'd know all the interactions.
They're like, we don't know that hasn't been
studied. So it shows you and
it's, and it's. So you dive into it. It's individual. We all have our own
chemistry and enzymes and processing like there's larger

(50:10):
scale of like chemical interactions. We can understand it. But what's happening in your
body, it's, it is unique. Yep,
definitely. And, but even there's
a unique component which you can't get around. Right. Stefan tries keto, pretty
good example of a disaster.

(50:30):
But then there are also, if you've got two
medications, you know the effects of one, you know the effects of the other and
you know the interactions. Okay, let's increase that to. So you need to know three
things. Now you got to three medications. Well, now you need to know
three plus the interactions 1 and 1 and
2, 1 and 3 and 3 and 2.

(50:51):
So the number of interactions you need to know goes up. Now
you increase that by say you're taking five
different supplements. It's only five supplements. Oh no. You need
to know the side effects of those five supplements and the interactions and now not
just the pairwise interactions, but maybe there's
a three way interaction like that. And now

(51:14):
we're mixing this with genetic individuality and your gut
biome and God knows what else. It can get complicated really quickly.
So yeah, I think we're both very firmly in the camp of, you
know, you need
some kind of objective insertion of reality and whether
that's, you know, so I get blood work every month. It's not as fancy as

(51:37):
the blood work that you're talking about. And I certainly want to look into the
blood work that you're talking about. Even if me zipping across the Canadian
U.S. border to have my blood drawn at a lab.
Yeah, I'd love to get that coordinated for you. So,
yeah, it's, it's, it's just you also need to
work with a provider that is not looking at

(51:59):
managing, oh well, you don't need that. Like, this is a, it's an
opportunity to you to have a forward looking,
preventative, you know, approach to managing
your health. Not after the fact, like, oh, well, we're
not going to run these numbers because you're not diabetic. Well, we need to
look at, there's a lot of things that are leading indicators that we can really

(52:20):
manage and head off and see if certain things are, you know, working in your
lifestyle or not. So. And just like
your example of your lipids and everything going completely off kilter in
a month's time frame, I mean, you can take,
it's pretty crazy what you can do with interventions with the opposite
direction of what you did with diet and

(52:43):
supplementation where you can completely head off these highly medicated
conditions with hyperlipidemia or diabetic
type conditions in literally a matter of weeks, you know,
four weeks, six weeks as well, if you've got the, the
information and the guidance. So it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's,
I highly recommend people do, do the work. But let's, let's jump back to your

(53:05):
story because we're going to be pushing on an hour here and I want to
make sure we get into the actual journey
itself at least as much as you want to. So.
Yeah, that's a long setup. Yeah. So
basically, July 1, 2019, I set
off from Mississippi, Saskatchewan down the
Churchill river and set off on this, the first of the seven legs of the

(53:28):
trip. And
it was definitely one of the hardest things I've ever done because
I mean, the, the challenges of the
north are really wind and water.
The, the somehow the wind up
there always has a way of being going the wrong way. It's amazing.

(53:51):
You're going south on a river. The wind is coming north now the river turns
and goes east. Well, guess what, the wind is coming west.
And then the upstream segments were extremely difficult
because it was, the river was in flood, so the water's
running through the trees, the shoreline that you would normally be walking on, dragging your
boat up. Oh, ropes. So I spent a lot of

(54:14):
time buried hip deep in water kind of with an
Ursat sweatsuit. Like heavy, heavy rain gear over
semi insulative clothing. So I was burning. That
sounds brutal. Yeah, I think the amount of calories that
you burn goes up somewhat when you're in cold water for a
large part of the day your thermogenesis kicks in

(54:37):
and. Yeah, but
it was, there were many times
that I thought I wouldn't be able to complete that for. I mean the, the
problem that I thought I would have initially with both my shoulders being buggered actually
got better. It turns out that 30, 000 paddle strokes
a day is actually pretty good rehab. Right. Just

(54:58):
brings, brings blood moving and takes you to one of
the things that I'm sure you found that
strengthening, getting movement through a damaged joint
and strengthening the muscles around that joint don't always work, but it
works 80% of the time. Usually. The answer of two, I've
got a sore back is to begin strengthening your back.

(55:20):
Yep. I'm sure there are, you know, we're not doctors, we're not giving anyone
advice. Movement, movement is an incredible
healer. Movement and blood flow, like it's like
fundamental. Like I, I feel pretty strong
stating. That yeah, if it can be fixed then
it's probably. That's going to be part of it. Exactly. Yeah.

(55:43):
And yeah, there, there were some, definitely
some interesting moments on that trip.
The. And certainly many dark nights of the soul.
Right. Many times are like, I don't know if I can go on. Like I
just feeling absolutely smashed. Tell me about
one of those instances.

(56:05):
Well, the feeling absolutely smashed
happened many times because basically I was
under a couple of deadlines. I was under a deadline to get to the Hudson
Bay coast by August because in September you
start getting massive storms coming through. Also the later in the
year, the grumpier the polar bears get

(56:26):
along the Hudson Bay coast. But the storms was really my main concern
because now you might get trapped
on the coast for five days. When a big system blows through, there's
no boat coming to pick you up, there's no helicopter able to come get you.
But it's the densest concentration of polar bears because
Hudson Bay is this massive body of water. It's like 800 miles

(56:50):
across. Doesn't show on the map behind me
here. If you looked over there where you can't see,
it's. It's a massive body of water. And the hunt, the polar
bears are out on the ice hunting in the winter. But when the ice melts
in the summer, they go to the coasts and they sit there and they wait
for the ice to come back in. So that 10

(57:11):
kilometer 6, 10 mile stretch in from the coast
is polar bear central. So it'd be kind of a bad
thing to be trapped on the coast by the predictable autumn
storms in polar
bear central. So there was kind of a hard deadline for me there.
Also, you're only carrying a certain amount of food and you don't know what's

(57:34):
coming up. You don't know, oh, once I pass
the last tiny native outpost because along the way in the first half of the
journey I passed three little tiny native villages.
And those are useful for getting an extra, I don't know, 5,000 calories.
Right. I'll just. Once you've been underway for a
while, you can eat anything you want. Right? Oh,

(57:56):
here's a, here's a Haagen Daz. Let me just slurp that down like
here's a pint and down the hatch it goes. And I'll take my
bag of brownies. There's not a lot of food choice out there. And some
apples and oh look, half an hour's gone by and this,
you know, 2,000 calories worth of brownies has just disappeared. That
feels completely normal because you're burning so much

(58:18):
energy. I'm sure when you were gearing up for your
a thousand pound squat, thousand pound deadlift, you were just burning
ridiculous numbers of calories a day. I couldn't get enough
food in like I was a chore like trying to get eat
all constantly. Yeah.
But I found that just, you know, waking up in the morning and

(58:44):
like hobbling around camp like an 80 year old man. Just
arthritic and bent over because now you're bent over in this paddling position all
day. The real trick was to lie to yourself. Right.
I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go for 5km today. I'm just gonna
make it to that other island. I, I'm just, I'm, I'm just
gonna go for the morning and then I'm gonna take the whole afternoon off and

(59:06):
just do nothing but, but nap. And
then of course you get momentum going. Yeah. And now you're,
you know, I call it the just a tip principle. Right. But just, just a
tip, just for a moment, just to see how it feels. Once
you're in motion, usually you continue to, to
maintain. Yep. So I'm a

(59:28):
firm advocate of lying to yourself
to get you going. But at the same time, you also need to
have. When you're by yourself especially, you need to be your own
voice of sanity to.
Because when there is no. Well, there is a plan
B, but it's not a very good plan B, right? If, if you break something

(59:49):
out there or you really
up trying to run a rapid or trying to portage and
you, you could lose everything. You could lose your boat, you could
lose your, all your food, and I took precautions,
but it could still go catastrophically wrong. So you, you need to
at one be balancing paranoia on one

(01:00:12):
hand because it, the consequences are so severe
if you screw up. And on the other hand, you need to
be, get this
mentality of like, whatever I need to do to get going. And it's, it's again,
it's a, it's a dichotomy because too much of one. If it's
too much paranoia, you'll never get started. And if it's not enough

(01:00:34):
motivation, you'll all. Sorry. If it's too much paranoia, you won't do anything.
If you're too gung ho and like complete at all costs
and you, you lose track of the big picture,
things go catastrophically wrong. I think one of the
hardest moments of the trip was
so I was going up the Cochrane river, getting close to the

(01:00:57):
tree line, and things started getting a bit hazy and
like there was a, you know, the sunset was like really, really
red and there was just a little smell of a campfire in the air. And
I told myself that this had to be massive wildfires
because there are now massive wildfires pretty much every summer
in Alberta and maybe British Columbia, so

(01:01:19):
thousands of miles away. And this is just being carried high,
high in the air. And I woke up the next morning and it was just
a haze. You could barely see. Like, you couldn't even see a
mile. And the smoke was heavy on the ground, like, okay, that
wildfire is a lot closer than I thought. So I
continued on, navigating by compass, even on small lakes,

(01:01:41):
because you can't see now you're paddling into this thick
fog of smoke, haze of smoke, I guess.
And I eventually triangulated that the forest fire was right
ahead of me on the section of river that I needed to get to to
continue my journey north. And
I knew that if I got to a certain place that I'd be safe. Right.

(01:02:03):
If I got to this point here before the fire got here, there was, there'd
be a way to continue. So ironically, the way
the best strategy in that case was to go full hell bent
for leather to try and get to that place, to get to safety
and basically be able then sidestep the fire like a matador.
And that was a tough day. That was because now you're, you're

(01:02:26):
being driven not only by your overall mission, you're being driven by the practicalities.
Like if I don't get to this point before the fire, then I don't know
what's going to happen. How long is the fire going to be there? I don't
know. Is the river going to be passable? Are the portages going to
be passable after it's all been burned? I don't know.
So I had an emergency stash of caffeine

(01:02:47):
tablets in my medical kit and popping those and just going
as hard as I could with no break for about 13 hours of
upriver travel. That was, that was a tough day.
Yeah, yeah. I was lucky. I'd been on
the road long enough to acclimatize the body
because to a certain extent you can only climb it. You can do training for

(01:03:10):
something and you should do training for something, but in
the end it's only the activity itself that provides the
best or the truest form of conditioning for it. And once you're in a challenge,
like you can't prepare for a marathon. By running a marathon every day,
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you can't prepare for a

(01:03:31):
thousand pound deadlift by doing a thousand pound deadlift every day.
You got to, you know, be deadlifting something less than a thousand
pounds. You're the deadlift expert. But I don't. I think I'm right on
this one, right? I think you're right.
So once you're in a challenge, you don't. It's
terra incognita. Yeah. So you get an opportunity

(01:03:53):
to push yourself really, really hard.
Yeah. Tell me about the small villages along
the way. How large were those? How connected are those to, you
know, society, you know, at large? The further
south they are, they might have road access. Two
of the.

(01:04:16):
So they're small, they're 600 to a thousand
people. You know, they'll have one or two stores
and usually for some reason a fried chicken outlet.
And then there'll be calories. Yeah.
And yeah, it's the native peoples of the southern two villages

(01:04:37):
were Cree. The northern village was Dene, which used to be called
Chipawan. And by the
end, the last town I got to at the very end of the trip was
Arviat. So that's an Inuit town. So I basically went from the
Cree country to the Dene,
which were very nomadic people, mostly hunting

(01:04:57):
caribou, to the Inuit, who would hunt caribou
sometimes and hunt marine mammals most of the time.
So it was a. It was an old trade route that would connect these areas
that isn't barely traveled nowadays. But that was one thing that kept me
going. It's like if I've, yeah, I'm doing this, yeah, I've got my
special sorrows. Yeah, I've got my special challenges. But the bottom line is

(01:05:20):
people have done this for thousands of years, ever since
this area was repeopled after the Wisconsin glaciation went
away. Call it 8,000 years ago. I don't know when
the first. I should know this, but I don't. I don't know when the first
people settled there. I want to guess
4,000 years ago that we have record

(01:05:42):
of after they. After the ice went off the
land. People have been traveling these routes. So if
they've done it, then there must be a way to do it. That's a useful
heuristic. If somebody else has done this, then there must be a way for
me to do this. All right, guys, we talk a lot about mental
resilience on this podcast, but let's talk about another type of resilience.

(01:06:04):
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(01:06:27):
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(01:06:49):
can you tell me what similarities do you see
between survival in the wilderness and navigating, you know, adversity
in modern life?
I think there's an endless number of parallels. I
mean, whenever you're doing anything

(01:07:09):
difficult, I think self doubt is
something you're going to be dealing with. Right? Certainly. Can I
continue on the trip? It was. Can I keep doing this? At
one point, I thought I had an infected hand. It turned out just to be
an overuse injury. But you don't know you don't have diagnostic stuff. Your
hand swells to the size of a grapefruit overnight. Did I get some

(01:07:32):
small cut on this
or is this just the overuse? Something,
something tore, something gave up and so
now this, this is, it's just a swollen hand.
But it's amazing where your mind can go to when it's.
When part of it's looking for a way out, right? Part of it's going,

(01:07:54):
it's okay, Stefan, like you gave it a try, you're
suffering. But you know, with this hand you probably can't
continue. Like it probably wouldn't be safe to continue. Like you're gonna end
up just having to chop it off or use a saw to take it off
if it's infected. So, you know, you should probably,
you know, should probably think about dialing, winding this up and

(01:08:16):
just turning around and going to the nearest road access,
which would be quite a long ways. But
that's self doubt. And if you're trying to do
something, I don't know, finish your PhD, it's going to be
difficult. There's going to be self doubt. Oh, this is a stupid topic.
Oh, my data didn't show what I wanted to show.

(01:08:39):
My examination committee is going to fail me. I should just, you
know, play video games all day and that's that. Just
no, give up. So you're dealing with self
doubt in both cases. But what I learned was that
it's not about denying self doubt, it's about recognizing
self doubt. It's kind of like going, okay, things are objectively

(01:09:01):
shitty right now. And this
is about the time that self doubt should come, right? It's like this animal that
sits at the back of the cave waiting for moments of weakness to
come out and start whispering in your ear. And if
you can go, oh, there you are. I thought you'd be showing up
right around now, hey, you know, how's it going? And

(01:09:24):
kind of laugh at the inevitability
of self doubt arriving.
It saps it of a lot of its power. So I think that's
a, that was an important parallel
or an important thing. Something that I
learned from you actually was the

(01:09:47):
idea of little problems becoming big problems. I
think when we chatted about your
800 pound squat every day for a month challenge, that's something you talked
about, which was that you learned a lot about
recovery. Because if you left something, and I'm saying,
I'm putting words in your mouth, tell me if I'm wrong, but that a little

(01:10:09):
niggling pain one day could derail your project the whole next
day. So to the extent of your ability, it's important to jump
on little problems that have the potential to
snowball into big problems and try and nip them in the bud.
The danger of that is you end up chasing every little problem. And some little

(01:10:31):
problems are totally ignorable. And in
the grand scheme of things, you know, you don't want to
waste your time tracking down every last little problem. But
sometimes when you. If you have the ability to say this
potentially is a mission critical thing that could really
derail the entire endeavor, that's

(01:10:53):
one you got to jump on right away. Those things that can compound. Yep, yep.
That's maybe minor, but if it's something that can compound, you've got to
pay attention. Yeah. And
then I guess another. The sort of final
big idea that I came away with was the
idea that health

(01:11:14):
is like a credit card, right? You can definitely
take money out of your account. You can definitely live on a credit card. If
I gave you a credit card for that, had a $20,000
credit card credit limit on it, you could definitely live pretty
well for a couple of months on it. And there are times that you
have to live on credit, but if you keep on doing

(01:11:37):
that, you're going to end up in very severe financial
trouble. Health is the same way. There are definitely times you can not take care
of your health. There are definitely times when you can
not get the sleep you need, not get the exercise you need, you can live
on. If we look around us, there are lots of people who live on gas
station Food and McDonald's. It is possible to survive

(01:12:00):
on that for some period of time.
And if. If you were starving? Yeah.
Like, I can't stand the taste of McDonald's, but I would eat it if I
was starving. It's better than nothing. But if you keep on doing
that, you're. You're eventually gonna have to pay the piper. So
when you're in the middle of a challenge like that, you know that you're dipping

(01:12:21):
down, you know that you're going.
By day 30 of that trip, I was severely
overextended. My credit card was blinking.
There was a big red light going off. You know your credit card is about
to blow up.
And there's a time to go into the whole,

(01:12:44):
but not often. Again, It's a Mike McCasl thing.
So second time we've talked about him is you should train often,
test rarely. So there are times to push
it and there are times to just be training.
So pushing yourself to the limit every single day for years on end. I
think something's going to break. There has to be

(01:13:07):
an awareness that you can pull
all nighters if you have to for your business or for your job or
whatever it is, or if you're parenting a young kid. There are going to be
shitty nights, but there can't be an infinite number of shitty nights because then
something's just going to break. Yep.
Well, we are getting, getting pretty late on

(01:13:31):
the, the timing here, so I'd like to learn a little bit more about
rapping. You know,
this trip up, like, what did that look like? And then what are
your final kind of observations? Did you resolve and
accomplish what you hope to accomplish as a result of this? And
then, yeah, feed that into where, where can people learn

(01:13:53):
more about this, your story, anything else that,
that you're working on? Sure. Well, I mean,
I'm still here, so I didn't die. And I did eventually make
it to Arviat, which was the end point.
I'll say. The, the last
week, the last eight days of the trip were some of the lowest lows and

(01:14:16):
highest highs I've ever experienced because I was going down a river that was running
through the tundra. So there were little tiny trees. You know, the trees
were where, where there were trees, they're like 5 foot high or 10
foot high. It's Krumholtz. But mostly it's open tundra.
The weather for that last week was horrific.
Just sideways rain,

(01:14:40):
always a headwind, just about freezing
temperatures. There was a couple
of. In this week of horrific weather, there were two days of
perfect weather where I came across a caribou herd. So I
was paddling in the sunlight with
a tailwind for the first time in weeks,

(01:15:01):
passing through these
sunlit tundra hills with caribou crossing the river right
ahead of me is one of those days you go like, I've got to commit
this one to memory. Like, when I'm 80 years old, I still want to remember
this day because this is why I do it.
And then, so there. That was the

(01:15:23):
perfect day. And then the next day was back to,
you know, eating shit. Every moment that I was out in the boat, where
you're bent over because you don't want the rain to hit your face
and run down the inside of your raincoat where your world just
contracts to doing the next thing, it's just,
I was down to counting strokes. I was down to. I'm just going to take

(01:15:46):
lying to myself again. I'm just going to take a hundred Strokes, that's all I
need to do. And count them out loud to 100. And then
guess what, you take another 100, you start counting again. But it just
disassociates your mind a little bit and gives it something else to
focus on other than the absolute exhaustion and the, quite
frankly, the, the searing pain from

(01:16:08):
struggling that hard. And so the, the very
last day, I was only
50km from Hudson Bay, so I should have been able to do. And it was
strong current, lots of white water. I got up
super early and I should have been able to knock
that off in a three, five, four, five hours because there's the strong

(01:16:29):
current. And of course the wind turned for the last time and
kicked me on the balls one last time. And it ended up being an all
out struggle to get to the bay. And when I finally got to where I
was supposed to meet my pickup boat to take me the remaining
60km along the coast to Arviat, I
got a satellite text going, the tide's out, the water's

(01:16:52):
too shallow, you have to meet us here. That was another four miles out to
sea. And when you, it's, you
see sometimes like, I don't know, Special Forces selection videos where they have to do
a forced MARCH and okay, 10 kilometers or 10 miles
left, 5 miles left, 0 miles left. And then they get told and you
got to go further. And at that point, like half the people drop out.

(01:17:13):
So going towards an imagined endpoint, which
for me was a tiny little hut at the mouth of the Fluiaza
River. And then just having given everything
I could to get there and then finding out, and you got to go further,
that was, that was difficult. So they set off. That's pretty analogous

(01:17:34):
to life though. Yeah, yeah. If we're looking for
analogies, you know. And again, I guess it comes down to
lying to yourself strategically.
So I remember setting off because now Hudson Bay is
gigantic. There are literally icebergs out there.
There's a fog so you can't see very far, and you're paddling out into the

(01:17:58):
open ocean in a boat and lots of
people have drowned on Hudson Bay. It's, it's, there's
six miles of tidal flat and 14 foot tides. So when the
tide comes in, it's white water going in and when the tide goes out, it's
white water going out. So it's like, I'm not happy about this at
all, but I remember paddling out and just, you're

(01:18:21):
in the intertidal. So there's large rocks and
that's the Only you see water, you see fog, you see large rocks and you're
paddling towards some point on your Garmin, on your gps
and it's like that's, that's a trust exercise right there. Like
yeah, yeah. I, I, I'm trusting that this is the right location. I'm
trusting that this little piece of silicone and rubber that I'm holding in my

(01:18:44):
hand is pointing me in the right direction. And eventually one of those rocks started
moving and it was the boat and it, it took me to Harvey it and
I think the
again somebody asked me afterwards that I was telling them
this story and I thought I had good stories about bears and I had good
stories about forest fires and good stories about white water.

(01:19:07):
And they were like, yeah, but did it make you happy? I was like,
happiness isn't the point here. It's
was satisfying and you
know, there are times to be happy but I think ultimately
satisfaction is a better North Star to use.
I like that. Satisfaction doesn't mean happiness.

(01:19:30):
These are separate things. And
yeah, satisfaction as a North Star. Yeah,
those are good takeaways from, from today's conversation.
Yeah. So in the end I, and that kind
of opened the door and I've gotten north. Not as long a
trip, not trips are as long

(01:19:53):
since then, but there's,
there will be other trips, some might be longer in the future we'll
see this,
the story of that trip ended up becoming a book. Like people were like
oh you should write a book. And it's like, oh yeah. Because I'd been basically
blogging about it. My only distraction on that entire

(01:20:16):
trip was I'd write at the end of the day I'd write up something on
my phone and had a way to beam that message into space. And
so I was basically blogging about it and also uploading a few photos from
it at something like a thousand dollars a gigabyte.
Like it was a very, very slow dial up speed for
incredibly expensive because that you take this like mini

(01:20:38):
satellite dish. But that was my only distraction
and my only unnecessary weight. I didn't really need to have that
satellite dish but I thought if you know it's for
one it's a redundancy because it's a way to communicate.
If I break my sat phone and my Garmin
gets lost, then I still have a way to communicate with the outside world. And

(01:21:00):
that's pretty important especially
if you have a major health crisis or I get an
injury or lose everything. And so I had
this hastily written notes. Oh, you should turn that
into A book. Yeah. And
if, if you're writing a book, it turns out that

(01:21:23):
it's actually a massive, massive amount of work.
And I'm aware of this. Yes. It should be pretty
easy, right? These thoughts are clear in your head. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Yep. It's a big undertaking. Yeah. So
that's, that's out now. It's Perseverance,
Life and Death in the Subarctic. And I think it's a pretty good read.

(01:21:45):
Got picked up by a publisher. It's been
distributed by Simon Schuster, so somebody else thinks it's legit as
well, not just me. That's a big deal, getting
picked up like that. So, yeah, that is a good sign. And
it's definitely on my list. I would have read it before this, but as you
know, I've been dealing with a few, just a few things that helped me in

(01:22:06):
my life at the moment, and I haven't had
some reading time with that, but I'm, I'm excited
and looking forward to it and. Yeah. Appreciate
your grace and understanding my current. Current
life. Yeah. Well, I'm
at. There's a season.

(01:22:29):
Yes, it's seasons. Life comes in seasons. Or
we could think about it as
long term periodization. Right. Yeah, Periods. Yes.
This is the. I don't know,
the workouts that just grind you into the absolute dust and hopefully

(01:22:51):
you emerge from it. Yes. Stronger or
maybe wiser or something. Where, where
else can people find and learn about.
Learn about you? Well, if they're interested in the jiu jitsu
end of things. If you. I'm all over YouTube,
Instagram. If you search for my name, Stefan Kesting on

(01:23:13):
any social media platform, you should find me my main website there is
Grapplers. I've started putting more of my outdoor
stuff because there are these two kind of pillars or two
bipolar aspects. And bipolar is the wrong word. Multiple
personality aspects. Right. There's the outdoor thing, which has been one of the
guiding themes of my life. And then there's the martial arts stuff, which

(01:23:35):
has been the other guiding theme. So they're in two different places.
The outdoor stuff is more on my Essential Wilderness channel.
So that's a website. It's also putting a fair amount
of stuff from other trips on YouTube.
If you search for Essential Wilderness on YouTube, you can find that.
So, yeah, I think those are the two places to start. There's

(01:23:57):
Stefan the jiu jitsu guy, and there's Stefan the
outdoor guy. I've also got a little bit of stuff
on Stefan the firefighter, but that's
a little bit harder to find. So if you find that, congratulations. Well,
appreciate this early morning conversation, our
matching outfits, all of it has been

(01:24:20):
a good day. So, yeah, thanks for joining. Well, thank you so much, Chris,
and best of luck with your stuff, too. Thank you. Thank you.

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EPS. 28: Stephan Kesting - Frozen Ground, Unbroken Spirit: The Fight Against the Odds

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}EPS. 28: Stephan Kesting - Frozen Ground, Unbroken Spirit: The Fight Against the Odds