Speaker 1: We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land
Speaker 1: on which this podcast was produced, the Galligall people of
Speaker 1: the Urination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
Speaker 2: Dear Diary, Today was quite rough and tough. The junes
Speaker 2: here are massive. The sea is not too bad that
Speaker 2: the wind's blowing the wrong direction.
Speaker 3: I'm over that.
Speaker 2: Think he's done in moderation.
Speaker 4: Everything's plenty of.
Speaker 2: One thing or the other. I've got a broken toe,
Speaker 2: chafed to the left arm and right nipple, and he's
Speaker 2: sure to stone the stink.
Speaker 3: It's two thousand and seven Women, Mozambique and Bow Miles
Speaker 3: is setting off on an epic.
Speaker 5: Journey around the coast of Africa.
Speaker 3: He's always been an adventurer, but this is his most
Speaker 3: audacious trip yet. His plan is to travel the next
Speaker 3: four thousand kilometers purely under his own steam in his small,
Speaker 3: one man kayak. For the next five months here faced
Speaker 3: huge swells, treacherous weather, and for six weeks of the
Speaker 3: trip he'd be entirely alone. He'll make it just over
Speaker 3: halfway before he decides to call it quids. But this
Speaker 3: half journey isn't the end more a beginning for a
Speaker 3: lifetime of adventures that will see Bow run six hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty kilometers through the Australian Alps, cross the bas
Speaker 3: Strait by kayak, run an hour a mile marathon, spend
Speaker 3: forty days eating only canned beans, and walk his daily
Speaker 3: ninety kilometer commute. I'm at Middleton and this is Headgame today,
Speaker 3: what it takes to live a life of adventure and
Speaker 3: how you can find it even in your own backyard.
Speaker 3: I'm extremely happy to say that I've got Bow miles
Speaker 3: in for my head Game podcast. You're an adventurer explorer.
Speaker 3: And when I say that to my son, because I'm
Speaker 3: the same, I say, oh Dad, what do you do?
Speaker 3: I said, I'm an adventurer and an explorer, and he
Speaker 3: says that that's not a.
Speaker 4: Real job, right.
Speaker 3: It's interesting that when I'm speaking to you, who is
Speaker 3: an adventurer and an explorer. Now take me back to
Speaker 3: what first ignited that sense of adventure in you bo?
Speaker 5: Where did that come from?
Speaker 6: I was my mum was pretty good at trying to
Speaker 6: keep me off the sporting field, so which are half
Speaker 6: worked and half didn't. But that involved things like golf
Speaker 6: lessons and books and things that weren't going to bang
Speaker 6: my head or injure my knees or legs or whatever.
Speaker 3: So your mom was keen to sort of wrap me
Speaker 3: up in a bit of cotton wool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 6: Well, she's a country kid, right, but she's also she
Speaker 6: was an emergency nurse, and so she just saw all
Speaker 6: the worst of humanity, I suppose when that comes across
Speaker 6: there in the et department.
Speaker 4: So which kind of worked.
Speaker 6: I didn't play much football as a kid, which I
Speaker 6: I think is great now I've got great knees and
Speaker 6: great ankles and whatever.
Speaker 4: But through the books that she bought me.
Speaker 6: I think from about I was never a reader until
Speaker 6: about fifteen, and then it sparked, and then I couldn't
Speaker 6: put a book down for five.
Speaker 4: Or I don't know, well forever.
Speaker 6: Really, I don't read as much now as I did
Speaker 6: as a kid, But as a kid I read lots
Speaker 6: of adventure stories the everest thing bit, you know, and
Speaker 6: I just thought, Wow, I want to go and have
Speaker 6: some grand adventures and go and see the world.
Speaker 3: So that's what really sparked your interests were books and
Speaker 3: then adventure through literacy, and yeah, did you read them
Speaker 3: and think I could do this, Yeah, exactly. Did it
Speaker 3: spark a journey for you to go out there and
Speaker 3: see what's about?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I can remember myself as a kid reading Roll
Speaker 6: Dahl and Danny. I think it was Danny the Champion
Speaker 6: of the World would go and he'd go and poach
Speaker 6: pheasants in some aristocracy, you know, in the behind the
Speaker 6: garden walls, you know. And I remember as a kid
Speaker 6: my heart rate rating thinking that is fun.
Speaker 4: That is cool.
Speaker 6: And I started to do little, smaller versions of that
Speaker 6: as a fifteen sixteen year old because I was a
Speaker 6: pretty meat kid. I wasn't overly adventurous, but yeah, that's
Speaker 6: where it started, and I can kind of trace it
Speaker 6: back to that, but it's taken me a lot of
Speaker 6: years to kind of redevelop my own form of it too,
Speaker 6: because I know you've been up Everest AWNT. But I
Speaker 6: went there as a nineteen year old, hiking around the
Speaker 6: place and doing some small little peaks, and it scared
Speaker 6: the heck out of me seeing those high mountains.
Speaker 4: I thought, Wow, this is scary.
Speaker 6: So I needed to go away and find my own
Speaker 6: form before I potentially go back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can imagine at nineteen Everest being scary because
Speaker 3: my first mounts in the iclone when I was seventeen
Speaker 3: was Snowden in the UK, and that was scary to me.
Speaker 3: So let alone seeing Everest at the age of nineteen.
Speaker 3: What was your first real adventure as a kid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that it was the bursting the bubble. You know.
Speaker 6: So your circle of influence or your circle of where
Speaker 6: you're willing to go, gets bigger the older you get.
Speaker 6: Maybe it starts at the age of eight or ten. Hell,
Speaker 6: it starts at the age of too, right, you just know.
Speaker 6: It goes from twenty meters to fifty to one hundred
Speaker 6: to kilometer or whatever. And I remember at my dad
Speaker 6: was militant. He would never take me places if he
Speaker 6: didn't think it was worthwhile taking me there, and he'd
Speaker 6: be the only person that would know what's worthwhile or not.
Speaker 6: But he said, I can't go to a mate's place.
Speaker 6: You want to go there, go yourself.
Speaker 4: So I'm fourteen, maybe fifteen.
Speaker 6: I got a clapped out old bike and it's about
Speaker 6: thirty five ks to this friend's house over you know,
Speaker 6: several villages away, over mountains and through a bit of
Speaker 6: bush and some of it's dirt road and I thought,
Speaker 6: you know what, and I was scared the heck of
Speaker 6: doing it because I'd never done that. If I have
Speaker 6: a puncture, you know, what do I do? But I
Speaker 6: rode to this mate's place and feeling that, you know,
Speaker 6: I've gone beyond my boundary. This is full on and
Speaker 6: it's fantastic, and I'm using my body to do it.
Speaker 6: And so I recognized pretty early that, you know, the
Speaker 6: body is a really.
Speaker 4: Cool tool to just go places. And I've done it
Speaker 4: ever since.
Speaker 5: Yeah, your body's of the primary motor transport.
Speaker 3: You know. It's so easy nowadays to jump on a train,
Speaker 3: jump on a plane, jump in a car, where ultimately
Speaker 3: the adventure is with oneself. Right, is actually you know,
Speaker 3: moving yourself and getting into these locations yourself.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, And I look, hindsight's fantastic, and you have
Speaker 6: the sort of you know, you can articulate it as
Speaker 6: an adult that these are where these things were born.
Speaker 6: And I didn't recognize it then to some extent that
Speaker 6: it was just a young kid growing up. And I
Speaker 6: genuinely don't think I was a man until about twenty five,
Speaker 6: twenty six, so I still had sort of ten years
Speaker 6: of sort of boyhood, young adulthood still.
Speaker 4: In front of me.
Speaker 6: Where I was, I had no ambition, and now my
Speaker 6: outdoor stuff has turned into ambition and it has lots
Speaker 6: more layers to it. It was far more simplistic then,
Speaker 6: probably more pure, but of course it was a bit.
Speaker 4: Aimless as well. I was just doing it because it
Speaker 4: felt right.
Speaker 3: And what was the first adventure that you went on
Speaker 3: that gave you that sense of ambition that they gave
Speaker 3: you that sense of wow, Actually this is what it's
Speaker 3: all about.
Speaker 4: Well, I set off for Everest, you know.
Speaker 6: I read all the Everest literature and mountaineering literature from
Speaker 6: sort of the ages of sixteen through to eighteen, totally
Speaker 6: inspired by in some respects the tragedy of ninety six
Speaker 6: on Everest when all those people died this huge monumental
Speaker 6: May climbing season. So that I mean that in that
Speaker 6: tragedy inspired such interest, and so I went to Everest
Speaker 6: and that was that was one thing or another. But
Speaker 6: when I was truly I was never really at risk.
Speaker 6: There there's lots of villages around, there's other trekkers, hikers,
Speaker 6: other climbers, and I'm still just a young bloke. I'm
Speaker 6: not really being edgy yet My first edgy experience was
Speaker 6: solo sea kayaking off the Great Australian Byte, going out
Speaker 6: to see some islands off Sojuna, And that was where
Speaker 6: it was Rotto, okay, but you are you are accountable,
Speaker 6: you are everything, and you know you're going to have
Speaker 6: a good day or a bad day based on your
Speaker 6: decisions here. And that was I think I was twenty
Speaker 6: two or twenty so it was, like I say, emerging
Speaker 6: into that sort of I was no longer a boy.
Speaker 6: I was becoming an adult because I was making accountable decisions.
Speaker 3: And what sparked that decision to have that segue? You
Speaker 3: know it could because it's quite a segue to go, right,
Speaker 3: I'm going to hike around the Himalayas to then you know,
Speaker 3: jumping in a kayak and then putting yourself in that situation.
Speaker 4: I was by default. Really I really wanted.
Speaker 6: I wanted to do it, but it was supposed to
Speaker 6: be a friend's trip, me and a couple of mates.
Speaker 6: You know, we finished Uni, we graduate and let's go
Speaker 6: on a big sea kike trip for a couple of
Speaker 6: months around some islands.
Speaker 4: And they all pulled out. They got girlfriends. I did not.
Speaker 6: I was never much much good with girlfriends, and so
Speaker 6: off I went by myself, and so by default I
Speaker 6: was by myself, and I suspected I liked my own company,
Speaker 6: but it really hammered home then that Yep, I loved
Speaker 6: my own company. And so that was and sea kayaking
Speaker 6: is fantastic for that, that autonomy, your own speed, you know,
Speaker 6: you sort of go where the wind blows, literally, and
Speaker 6: so it was just great. I loved it and made
Speaker 6: enough mistakes to realize that I really liked improving, and
Speaker 6: made enough good calls to know that there was some
Speaker 6: really amazing moments in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's a there's adventure, and then there's you know,
Speaker 3: versatility in adventure, you know, hiking, kayaking, you know, going
Speaker 3: off by yourself. This segue thereafter again with this epic
Speaker 3: journey around the coast of Africa. What made you decide
Speaker 3: to do that? And where did that idea come from?
Speaker 6: I was still very much I had my head in
Speaker 6: the sand, really, and my early filmmaking stuff was pretty crap,
Speaker 6: and to be honest, it was very I was trying
Speaker 6: to look for heroic moments. So I was trying to
Speaker 6: look for something that was long winded enough to get
Speaker 6: respect just by sheer fact of doing it. You know,
Speaker 6: it didn't have it didn't have as much humility every day,
Speaker 6: no, nor creativity, you know. I think adventures need all those things.
Speaker 6: But Africa came about because of the relative success of
Speaker 6: me going six weeks alone across these islands in Australia.
Speaker 4: So I was in esperance.
Speaker 6: I was drunk in the pub and I thought, you
Speaker 6: know what, I'm going to up the ante here. And
Speaker 6: I came back home and this is Google it only
Speaker 6: really Google didn't really exist. But I did some research
Speaker 6: into people paddling in Africa, or South Africa, or around
Speaker 6: the sort of southern half of Africa, so you know,
Speaker 6: south of the equator, and very few big expeditions had
Speaker 6: been done there.
Speaker 4: Especially not alone. So I trained up for it and planned,
Speaker 4: and that all went out the windows. I hit Africa.
Speaker 6: But four years from when I did the Australian trip
Speaker 6: to when I did the African trip, and away I went,
Speaker 6: and yeah, I changed my life absolutely, that big expedition.
Speaker 4: Learned a lot about a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's great, mate, because there's always a purpose and
Speaker 3: always a cause. And as much as the adventure was
Speaker 3: on your side, there's also filmmaking you love, you loved
Speaker 3: documenting and your adventures along the way. Was that another
Speaker 3: passion of yours? Did they sort of merge together or
Speaker 3: did one sort of lead the other?
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're kind of.
Speaker 6: I kind of used it to justify going away and
Speaker 6: instead of earning proper money doing all sorts of other things,
Speaker 6: I thought, how do I go and have an adventure
Speaker 6: but it maybe earn some money out of it, or
Speaker 6: maybe make a job of it. And so I was
Speaker 6: interested enough in you know, there's not many folks around
Speaker 6: that don't love a good story being told via a
Speaker 6: screen medium, whether it's cinema or TV or you know,
Speaker 6: a game show. There can be just great versions of it.
Speaker 6: So humans love it, and so I thought, how do I?
Speaker 6: And it's challenging too, you know, it's making films is
Speaker 6: freaking hard work. So I took that challenge on board.
Speaker 6: But I was not a natural sea person. I wasn't
Speaker 6: a natural filmmaker.
Speaker 4: So let's just see how they go. I knew I
Speaker 4: had to work at both of them. But I do
Speaker 4: love making.
Speaker 6: I love shot making, and yet I'm not a I
Speaker 6: think I'm a natural shot maker, but I'm not a
Speaker 6: natural technician in films. I've got partners now in Michigan,
Speaker 6: Guy I make films with. He's a much better shot
Speaker 6: maker than me because I'm so busy about bloody doing things.
Speaker 6: But I can recognize a good shot and I loved
Speaker 6: that from the get go.
Speaker 5: And you've got a PhD? Is that correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: It's good for a doorstop, and I've got I've got
Speaker 6: a whole box of them. I worked at a university,
Speaker 6: and your currency at the university is to get a PhD.
Speaker 4: So that was kind of part and parcel of it.
Speaker 6: And it's about expeditionary life and about the benefits of
Speaker 6: that in an educational setting.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of what I wrote about.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of schools and programs out there that
Speaker 6: take young folks out there and.
Speaker 4: This sort of support of that.
Speaker 3: And talk us through what you documented for your PhD.
Speaker 3: It was the four hundred k kayak journey across the
Speaker 3: bas streets. Now, coh, that's that's some adventure.
Speaker 6: Well it seems like it, but it's a bit of
Speaker 6: a pussy cat really. It can get very yeah, I
Speaker 6: mean yeah, mate, you're yeah. The stuff you've done is
Speaker 6: well compared to that in some respects it was pretty
Speaker 6: tame in a sense that Bastra can get very angry
Speaker 6: very quickly. But otherwise it's very it's very paddleable and
Speaker 6: comes down very quickly.
Speaker 4: It's very shallow. So with our forecasting these days.
Speaker 6: And a smartphone in you in your hatch, you're fine.
Speaker 6: You just got to go on a good day and
Speaker 6: be willing to you know, if you if you cap
Speaker 6: out right, I'm willing to paddle in eiden knots, then
Speaker 6: you just you don't go out in anything other over
Speaker 6: eighty knots and that's it. You just that's that's your day.
Speaker 6: So you kind of try to draw a line in
Speaker 6: the sand and life becomes pretty easy as an expeditionary
Speaker 6: seat with good comms, you know.
Speaker 4: So you do that twenty five years ago.
Speaker 6: When you're relying on a barometer and looking to the
Speaker 6: sky a bit more and you're going to get into
Speaker 6: some more Gnali situations. But these days, with thephisticated stuff
Speaker 6: we have in our pocket, that's remarkably easy.
Speaker 5: What did you learn from that expedition?
Speaker 6: I learned lots in a sense that that's where the
Speaker 6: sort of the do things a bit differently bug might
Speaker 6: have bitten, you know, I thought these are you know,
Speaker 6: take Africa for example, that was a It was a
Speaker 6: six month expedition on single on dirt, poor. I'm having
Speaker 6: a grand, existential, amazing experience as a young bloke. But
Speaker 6: I come back and I've got twenty hours where the
Speaker 6: footage I end up making a fifty minute film takes
Speaker 6: three years to make the film. There's an awful lot
Speaker 6: of one experience that goes into just one idea in
Speaker 6: one story whilst out on you know, crossing bas straight.
Speaker 6: Ten years later, I wanted to make I want more
Speaker 6: bang for buck for my adventure. Nowadays, that doesn't need
Speaker 6: to be as long. It doesn't need to be as
Speaker 6: I don't need to be at the breadline of life
Speaker 6: and death. I can come back a notch and I
Speaker 6: kind of I want to be homeful. And I'm in
Speaker 6: relationships now too, you know. So I'm a married man
Speaker 6: with kids.
Speaker 4: I can't bugger off for six months.
Speaker 6: So I need to try and package my adventurous world
Speaker 6: into a long weekend or overnight or twenty four hours
Speaker 6: or a week, you know, rather than go on these
Speaker 6: big ones. So what's the difference between Everest and crossing
Speaker 6: the Spacific and coming back and doing your own boyhood
Speaker 6: river and sitting up a tree for a day. You know,
Speaker 6: you can you sort of trick yourself into thinking that
Speaker 6: these things are adventurous. And I think it's that's tough.
Speaker 3: True, But you had a six part series on YouTube
Speaker 3: which ultimately set the tone for you. It changed your life,
Speaker 3: not as in, you know, change your life, but it
Speaker 3: changed your way of of now thinking, Wow, this is
Speaker 3: this actually works. You know, this is this is getting
Speaker 3: a lot of traction. It's getting a lot of attention.
Speaker 3: Let's go on to the next.
Speaker 6: Well, I think what you've touched on there and is
Speaker 6: that I mean, I was an ever I was not
Speaker 6: an overnight success on YouTube, and even now I'm just
Speaker 6: a I'm kind of a small fish and a bit pond.
Speaker 4: But there's a lot of us watching YouTube too, so
Speaker 4: can we. But what it did do is.
Speaker 6: It kind of made me realize that I was always
Speaker 6: one of those grand stories and I was a filmmaker.
Speaker 6: You know, there was for ten years I wanted to
Speaker 6: make a grand story and be a filmmaker.
Speaker 4: And none of it was overly success. None of it
Speaker 4: was successful period.
Speaker 6: But the smaller bite sized chunks of bass by Kayke
Speaker 6: in ten minute installments on a platform that's very inclusive.
Speaker 6: You know, YouTube's are positive social media, and it's in
Speaker 6: most people's pockets. You know, most of the world now,
Speaker 6: I think it's seventy five eighty percent of the world
Speaker 6: has Internet capacity. You're in all of those people's lives potentially,
Speaker 6: And so I thought, you know what, rather than become
Speaker 6: this sort of cinema esque feature filmy filmmaker guy that
Speaker 6: takes yourself seriously, just produce stuff and put it in
Speaker 6: people's pockets. And I'm sort of I'm sort of half
Speaker 6: flipping on it now because there's also oppression in being
Speaker 6: a YouTuber because it's relentless, right, I've just got a
Speaker 6: big I've got to be a two week storyteller and
Speaker 6: that's freaking hard. But otherwise, the actual platform and the
Speaker 6: creative outlet I think is great and I love it.
Speaker 5: We've skipped over Africa.
Speaker 3: Take me impact to that adventure, that expedition. What was
Speaker 3: the idea, what what why did you set out to
Speaker 3: do that that expedition?
Speaker 5: What was the purpose behind it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Well, there's yeah, so there was no charity. It's just
Speaker 4: bo trying to do his thing. I must have been.
Speaker 6: I got nervous about six months out planning for this
Speaker 6: and invited then some friends to come along with.
Speaker 4: Thought, right, how do I sort of you've.
Speaker 5: Got nervous doing it yourself?
Speaker 3: You thought, do you know what it's too it's too
Speaker 3: big to take off by myself.
Speaker 6: But it's solo at sea. It's a bit like free
Speaker 6: soloing rock. You know, there's it's complete accountability. And the
Speaker 6: sea is a scary place. A big sea is a
Speaker 6: scary place. And you know I had I didn't have
Speaker 6: charts at aviation maps, and you know, I'm going and
Speaker 6: sort of half cooked because Google wasn't around.
Speaker 4: Then. You just got to do as much research as
Speaker 4: you can.
Speaker 5: And how did the expedition?
Speaker 4: Look?
Speaker 5: What were you trying to achieve?
Speaker 4: It was all set out to be.
Speaker 6: I'm going to paddle from the Tropic of Capricorn on
Speaker 6: the east to the Tropic of Capricorn on the west.
Speaker 6: So start in Mozambique and finish in Namibia. And so
Speaker 6: I started about I don't know twenty or thirty nautical
Speaker 6: miles north of the Tropic of Capricorn in them Barney
Speaker 6: and I go and I have with me for the
Speaker 6: first month or six weeks. This Kiwi bloke, he's a sailor,
Speaker 6: really good with the sea, and a lovely bloke too.
Speaker 6: And Kiwi's are hardy. Kiwi's are just they're just, you know,
Speaker 6: the bloody getting sort of folks. And so off we
Speaker 6: go and everything kind of works enough. You know, we
Speaker 6: make lots of rookie mistakes, and the trade winds kick
Speaker 6: our ass, and you know, the locals are very friendly,
Speaker 6: but we find it really hard just to get water
Speaker 6: and food, and you know, we go through all these
Speaker 6: sort of trials. Jared, my Keiwii mate, he gets malaria
Speaker 6: and we have to overh to visa, so we have
Speaker 6: to illegally get him out of the country.
Speaker 4: And then I set off on my own for a
Speaker 4: couple of months.
Speaker 6: And that's where and that's where the Bo the Boy
Speaker 6: becomes Bo the Man, almost almost overnight. You know, it
Speaker 6: was sort of to make those decisions, and I've never
Speaker 6: been scared at moments during that.
Speaker 3: Take me through, Take me through a day by yourself,
Speaker 3: you know, when you've got other people, you're you know,
Speaker 3: you're collectively decision making this problem solving. You find yourself
Speaker 3: by yourself a trip that you didn't want to be
Speaker 3: by yourself. Right, let's be honest, and now you'll find
Speaker 3: yourself by yourself.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was sort of careful what you wish for,
Speaker 6: you know. So the rule of thumb was with Jared.
Speaker 6: So the rule of thumb was, if one of us
Speaker 6: can get out through the shorebreak, then they wait out
Speaker 6: past the shore break until the other one can get it.
Speaker 6: And sometimes it'll take an hour for one or other
Speaker 6: of us to get out through the shorebreak, which is
Speaker 6: fierce in Mozambique. It's steep, it's relentless, and it's just
Speaker 6: always there. So by yourself going out through a shore break,
Speaker 6: I'd allow myself an hour each day to try and
Speaker 6: get out without you. So you get out, you get
Speaker 6: smacked and hammered and pulled out of your kayake. You
Speaker 6: can't roll because they just it's surf. It just pulls
Speaker 6: you out. You wash up on the beach and you
Speaker 6: collect or your crap up and you pump your boat out.
Speaker 4: You get back in in a way you go.
Speaker 6: And so every morning was okay, I'm sitting now, I'll
Speaker 6: have my whatever I'm eating and drinking that morning in
Speaker 6: the dunes, I slowly pack. I'll get up before dawn,
Speaker 6: you know, the first crack of bird, and then I'm
Speaker 6: just I'm down on the beach and at first light,
Speaker 6: I want to be on the water, and i'd sit
Speaker 6: there eating whatever I'm eating, and I don't take my
Speaker 6: eyes off the surf and my eyes off the water conditions,
Speaker 6: and where is the best spot to get out? Where's
Speaker 6: the low brake, what are the sets doing, where's the reef,
Speaker 6: what's the tide doing. Mozambique lacks a lot of and
Speaker 6: so does northern South Africa. Lacks a lot of headlands.
Speaker 6: It's just beach, and it's beach for twenty or thirty
Speaker 6: k's and there might be a small extinct headland which
Speaker 6: is basically just a a bulbous section of the beach.
Speaker 4: That's what you're gunning for.
Speaker 6: You're just looking for anywhere that's got the least or
Speaker 6: some sort of lea side, like a little fold point,
Speaker 6: or somewhere where the swell and the movement of water
Speaker 6: is less, or you're looking for something like a rip.
Speaker 6: You know, you're looking for water to be traveling back
Speaker 6: out to sea, and you want to get on that train.
Speaker 6: But it's all moving too, and low tide to high
Speaker 6: tide is always shifting. So you might have come in
Speaker 6: on a high tide, you got all this water in
Speaker 6: front of You're fantastic, But you get up in the
Speaker 6: morning and it's low tide and you've got four hundred
Speaker 6: meters of reef in front of you, you know. So
Speaker 6: I was often having to drag my kayak down to
Speaker 6: a small headland or somewhere that looks like it's.
Speaker 4: More well easier to get out. So it was the
Speaker 4: constant dance of that and the language barriers.
Speaker 6: I didn't speak the local languages, so asking a local
Speaker 6: was somewhat useless.
Speaker 4: And they're just seeing some alien dude rock up on
Speaker 4: their coast, you know. They the I'm not sure whether
Speaker 4: they should help you r rob you in.
Speaker 5: So how do you feel when you're by yourself and me?
Speaker 5: How you know?
Speaker 3: How how isolating is it? You've now by yourself, You've
Speaker 3: got quite a journey ahead of you. What you're feeling,
Speaker 3: are you're thinking about you know, turning it in or
Speaker 3: you just got you.
Speaker 5: Just say I'm going to I'm going to finish this.
Speaker 4: Bit of both.
Speaker 6: The trouble is I mean to to sort of I
Speaker 6: have an okay trigger, you know, as in, I'll pull
Speaker 6: the pin when I know that it's going to do
Speaker 6: either long term damage or I just can't go on
Speaker 6: with my run across the Australian Alps, it was very
Speaker 6: much the same. I plugged on because I knew my
Speaker 6: leg wasn't was still okay.
Speaker 4: It was okay. I was injured, but it was okay enough.
Speaker 4: And with Africa, if I'd pulled the.
Speaker 6: Pin anytime sooner, that was just an impatience thing or
Speaker 6: would have been a knee jerk thing.
Speaker 4: And I knew I kind of had to.
Speaker 6: I don't enjoy suffering, but I don't mind if it
Speaker 6: when it's sort of a means to an end either.
Speaker 6: And I started to think in smaller chunks then to
Speaker 6: get to Durban, re evaluate, get to Cape Town, see
Speaker 6: what happened, just just to use those chunks of time.
Speaker 6: And so that's what I do. It's, you know, and
Speaker 6: then that's a classic tale, isn't it of adventures. It's
Speaker 6: a breakdown time and movement distantly.
Speaker 3: When do you finish and how do you feel that
Speaker 3: you've you've you've you've you've finished this trip?
Speaker 6: You know, we have defining moments in our life, don't
Speaker 6: we and finishing Africa or getting to I got to
Speaker 6: Cape Town.
Speaker 4: I'd had to.
Speaker 6: Borrow a paddle at that stage because I'd lost a paddle,
Speaker 6: and so I was using this new fangled paddle of
Speaker 6: scoop paddle and I had ten and I was all
Speaker 6: through my arms.
Speaker 4: It was too stiff and too fast for I'll plug
Speaker 4: it here.
Speaker 6: And so I was, you know, and I was in
Speaker 6: love with like three women. I had negative money in
Speaker 6: my bank account.
Speaker 3: It was just shit.
Speaker 5: Talk to me about these three women.
Speaker 6: Well I one in England, one in South Africa and
Speaker 6: one in Australia. And along the way mate, Well no
Speaker 6: I didn't want to, but you know, these things just happened,
Speaker 6: you know. And so I'm in a bit of a
Speaker 6: rock and a hard place emotionally and physically economically, which
Speaker 6: is which is good for adventure, you know, when you
Speaker 6: push yourself into a corner. But I had to pull
Speaker 6: the pin. Then it's you know, the seasonal stuff, and
Speaker 6: getting up to Na Bibia was going to be a
Speaker 6: political nightmare too, So that was a relatively easy decision
Speaker 6: to stop the trip. It was a month short of
Speaker 6: when I wanted to be, but I was way I
Speaker 6: was way short of where I wanted to be physically
Speaker 6: anyway geographically.
Speaker 5: So you pull the pin.
Speaker 3: Was that quite a bittersweet moment where you were just like,
Speaker 3: pull the pin, forget about the footage? You know? Did
Speaker 3: you feel disappointed? Did you feel like absolutely yourself down?
Speaker 3: Did it? And the more that you, you know, the
Speaker 3: more that you sort of sit and dwell on it,
Speaker 3: the more it agitates you, the more the deeper that
Speaker 3: footage gets.
Speaker 6: Right, totally, it was a bit of a festa. And I,
Speaker 6: you know, this is where this whole notion of success
Speaker 6: comes in. There was there were lots successful about that trip,
Speaker 6: but more unsuccessful I felt, you know.
Speaker 4: So I came home with a.
Speaker 6: Bit of a I don't know, a bit of a
Speaker 6: debbie down atmosphere about me. I just thought that what
Speaker 6: I'd taken on was overly ambitious, not enough training or research,
Speaker 6: and just a bit a bit ad hoc. And I thought, bo,
Speaker 6: you've probably pulled the trigger on this a bit early.
Speaker 6: You probably need to be a bit more of a
Speaker 6: salty to do this for a longer period of time,
Speaker 6: in a different phase of your life.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: I just I felt like I cocked it up my
Speaker 6: sort of one opportunity to have a grand adventure before
Speaker 6: serious life kicked in.
Speaker 4: I'd sort of miss misstepped on.
Speaker 6: I thought, and so I was pretty cross at myself
Speaker 6: with that, and sort of that's why the footage sat
Speaker 6: in a box and I went off and did shorter
Speaker 6: stuff and then some money and whatever.
Speaker 5: You done six weeks solo paddling.
Speaker 3: It's being an adventurer. Did you not just think, right,
Speaker 3: let's just take the take the positives from the journey,
Speaker 3: implement them and use them for the for the next
Speaker 3: big adventure, because ultimately that was.
Speaker 5: Coming right, Let's be honest.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I do now, I absolutely do now. But I
Speaker 6: was I suppose I sulked a bit, you know, I
Speaker 6: was still I've always been a positive dude.
Speaker 4: But I think I got home and I was.
Speaker 6: A bit of woe is me because I didn't climb
Speaker 6: climb the peak that I wanted to climb. So I've
Speaker 6: had to learn that maturity. And yeah, that was sort
Speaker 6: of where it all set off from.
Speaker 3: When did you think, right, let's get this switchage out,
Speaker 3: let's actually make something of it. Unless you bring something
Speaker 3: positive from the journey.
Speaker 6: Well, as we know, some of the best stories of
Speaker 6: all time are created with animosity or when you don't
Speaker 6: succeed thought right, and so humility then percolated to the surface.
Speaker 6: It wasn't I failed at my trip. I failed at
Speaker 6: my original intention. Whereas you're right, there was so much
Speaker 6: good stuff in there. The people were amazing, the landscape
Speaker 6: is remarkable. I scared the bollocks out of myself. I
Speaker 6: went lots of highs and lows and all that great stuff.
Speaker 6: It just didn't quite have the end result that I wanted.
Speaker 6: But after a year or two of getting on with
Speaker 6: things and sulking somewhat, it was like, right, come on,
Speaker 6: make something of this, and positivity kick back in. I'm
Speaker 6: a natural optimist, and let's make a story out of
Speaker 6: this thing.
Speaker 3: And you're an incredible storyteller as well. So you know,
Speaker 3: looking back at that footage, sure, I'll.
Speaker 6: Tell you what well, and maybe you stumbled upon it.
Speaker 6: I wasn't until I started making that film, because I
Speaker 6: realized I had to be a humble I didn't do
Speaker 6: all the things I set out and I told people
Speaker 6: I would just do I thought I'd do all those things,
Speaker 6: and I didn't, and so I had to eat my
Speaker 6: humble pie and become a different kind of storyteller.
Speaker 4: And I think that sort of started me off on
Speaker 4: this path of.
Speaker 6: You don't have to be a hero bo, just go
Speaker 6: and have a great time and shoot the every day.
Speaker 3: Did you receive some bad news about a fellow kayaker
Speaker 3: that passed away trying to paddle from Australia to New Zealand?
Speaker 5: How did that hit you? Join that?
Speaker 3: And was that one of the defying moments that sort
Speaker 3: of defleated you and gave you made you decide to
Speaker 3: call it a day.
Speaker 6: It was part of it. It's probably where doubt started
Speaker 6: to trickle in of this confident young bloke who was there.
Speaker 6: And Jared was still with me at that stage. He
Speaker 6: was he wasn't yet sick, and he filmed me being
Speaker 6: I used to do a live radio across Australia each
Speaker 6: week and I'm alive on radio to ABC in Australia
Speaker 6: and the presenter says that Andrew who'd set off a
Speaker 6: similar time to me, and I talked to before he left,
Speaker 6: and he's a world class He was like the Alex
Speaker 6: Honold of the solo sea kayiking world at that time,
Speaker 6: you know, really kind of edgy ballsy stuff, willing to
Speaker 6: go longer.
Speaker 4: Further, with few commns.
Speaker 6: It just sets off on these big, massive trips across
Speaker 6: the golf of Carpenteria Tazzy in one hit and now
Speaker 6: in New Zealand. And for such a for such good,
Speaker 6: you know, for all of my failings as a sea kayaker.
Speaker 6: If I'm impulsive, he's patient. If I trained fifty ks,
Speaker 6: he trains a hunt. You know, he was very good.
Speaker 6: He was kind of the blueprint of what a mountaineering
Speaker 6: sea kayker would look like in a sense. So to
Speaker 6: hear him live on radio or by the presenter say, look,
Speaker 6: Andrew's gone missing, presumed dead. They haven't found his kaykit
Speaker 6: at that stage, I don't think I was. And I
Speaker 6: was quite surprised by how emotional that made me.
Speaker 4: I thought, Gee, how's this bloke, Who's who's so good? Die?
Speaker 4: And I'm just doing a co steering trip, you know, geez,
Speaker 4: what are you doing? Mate? You know? So I was
Speaker 4: pretty sad about that.
Speaker 3: Wow. And so you're dealing with all of that, and
Speaker 3: were you dealing with that? Was there a morning a
Speaker 3: morning process within that as well? That just in your
Speaker 3: head sort of tarnished that trip.
Speaker 4: I think so.
Speaker 6: I mean I didn't know Andrew personally at all, but
Speaker 6: but he was out there as a kind of he
Speaker 6: was sort of representative of the zenith of what we
Speaker 6: were doing. And my sat phone at that stage where
Speaker 6: people were able to text, it lit up with texts
Speaker 6: saying are you okay? You're okay because all the headlines
Speaker 6: in Australia where Australian kayaker goes missing, And like I say,
Speaker 6: the hindsight thing, absolutely, I look back at it now
Speaker 6: and it's a sort of a change of tone in
Speaker 6: that expedition based on that knowledge that Andrew was likely
Speaker 6: dead and that he'd made a mistake or he got
Speaker 6: so close. You know, they found his boat and in
Speaker 6: it was one camera and.
Speaker 4: He's got a photo of Matt Cook.
Speaker 6: You know, he's got a photo of the peaks of
Speaker 6: New Zealand, so he saw landfall.
Speaker 4: And then, as we know, so.
Speaker 6: Many drivers make those fatal mistakes five ten k from home,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 4: Their faculties just ease a bit. Now.
Speaker 6: He was strung out like all buggery by that stage too,
Speaker 6: but you know, he did so much of the journey
Speaker 6: and then it all just came to put and yeah,
Speaker 6: they played on me for weeks.
Speaker 3: Revisit the footage. When you actually realize what you've got
Speaker 3: and what you achieved and you know the moments that
Speaker 3: you had, does it reignite a positive spik within yourself
Speaker 3: to not only get this footage out, but also to
Speaker 3: get back out there and give things another crack, whether
Speaker 3: it's another expedition, another task or whatever.
Speaker 4: It was absolutely, yeah, get over yourself boat. There's plenty
Speaker 4: of life to go.
Speaker 6: You know. It was this success in so many ways
Speaker 6: and a failing in so many ways, and that's cool,
Speaker 6: that's fine, get over it and make.
Speaker 4: Up for it with other ways.
Speaker 6: And I realized too then that that was all self
Speaker 6: shot and only probably about a fifth or you know,
Speaker 6: every five films I shoot these days a self shot.
Speaker 6: There's real craft in just how you go about you
Speaker 6: every day or every week when you're expeditioning. And it
Speaker 6: was just learning your craft, learning what you're doing out there,
Speaker 6: and you know what, don't take it so seriously, mate,
Speaker 6: nor yourself. Just go out there and have a go.
Speaker 3: Yes, So it gave you the kick up the ass
Speaker 3: that you needed to, Yeah, ignite yourself back into back
Speaker 3: in the game, get your sort yourself up by get
Speaker 3: your head back in the game.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're all right, mate, there's plenty of people suffering
Speaker 6: real problems and you're moaning about your trip around Africa
Speaker 6: didn't quite go like your thought.
Speaker 4: Come on mate, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but when.
Speaker 3: You're when you're engulfed with it is. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: lot more it's a lot more dramatized than it is
Speaker 3: in your head, isn't it. So Yeah, once you engulf
Speaker 3: yourself with something like that, and you know you give
Speaker 3: so much of your time to it, it's normal that
Speaker 3: you do that of in the same headspace. Were you
Speaker 3: surprised or did you forget about some of the footage
Speaker 3: that you had and when you revisited it with you like.
Speaker 4: God, this is actually pretty cool.
Speaker 5: So I've got to get this out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah. If I edited it now, I'll be fascinating.
Speaker 6: And I've contemplated it actually, and make make a mini
Speaker 6: series of Africa again, just in little nuggets and make.
Speaker 4: It sort of youtubeable. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, yeah, And there's some real gems in there the
Speaker 6: year that I would tell a very different story now,
Speaker 6: you know, I put myself kind of I protected my
Speaker 6: ego a little still in the first edit, and I
Speaker 6: wouldn't do that now, No way I'd go to town
Speaker 6: on it.
Speaker 3: Which journey more expedition really stands out for you that
Speaker 3: you learn the most from.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'll talk more recently. I ran the McMillan's
Speaker 6: Walking Track. I ran that twenty twenty one, early twenty
Speaker 6: twenty one. The film series. It only just came out
Speaker 6: because it was a problematic story to tell because I
Speaker 6: was no longer just running for the sake of trying
Speaker 6: to run the fastest or longest or whatever it was.
Speaker 6: It had a complicated story behind it, and so I'm
Speaker 6: proud that I went back and did that.
Speaker 4: And I'm a better.
Speaker 6: Runner now than I was two years ago, and so
Speaker 6: I'm sort of I look back on the footage and think,
Speaker 6: to you, I was sort of training fifty or eighty
Speaker 6: hours a week, you know, in kind of hills, not mountains,
Speaker 6: and was able to make that work on sort of
Speaker 6: a subpar body.
Speaker 4: So I'm really proud of that. And they're hard days.
Speaker 6: They're just hard days days on end where you just
Speaker 6: suffer fest And so I'm proud for that of that
Speaker 6: two hundred and twenty k run.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you've done. There's so many adventures that I want
Speaker 3: to talk about because you've done so many. But you
Speaker 3: you're almost the epitome of letting people know that you
Speaker 3: can have an adventure in your own backyard. Right. You know,
Speaker 3: you don't have to You don't have to seek your everese's,
Speaker 3: you don't have to seek yourr you know, your cape horns,
Speaker 3: you don't have to. There is literally adventure to be
Speaker 3: had in your own backyard. And one of you, one
Speaker 3: of your adventures which I love, and I don't know
Speaker 3: if we could call it an adventure. I suppose it
Speaker 3: is was eating your body weight in canned beans.
Speaker 6: Yeah, do you know? And here it is, so I've written,
Speaker 6: like what a guy.
Speaker 5: I love this?
Speaker 6: You know, Ah, I've had all my book signings that
Speaker 6: I've had in the past, I've almost signed as many
Speaker 6: tins of beans as I have.
Speaker 3: Just you could just talk us through that, mate, because honestly,
Speaker 3: when that's why I say about adventure.
Speaker 5: Normally people sick.
Speaker 3: To one adventure and they're like, I'm going to hike,
Speaker 3: I'm going to kayak, or I'm going to run or
Speaker 3: you know, you literally the most versatile adventurer I've ever met.
Speaker 5: What made you want to eat your body weight in beans.
Speaker 4: I don't know what film it was.
Speaker 6: It was Dennis Quaid, I think where he miniaturizes himself
Speaker 6: and he goes in this little capsule like a submarine,
Speaker 6: in a body, and he's in a body, in a
Speaker 6: tiny submarine, just cruising around someone's lymphatic system or veins. Anyway,
Speaker 6: I suppose there's a bit of a long bud to draw,
Speaker 6: But I do love the idea that I mean, our
Speaker 6: body and what we put into it is going to
Speaker 6: make us feel and think a particular kind of thing,
Speaker 6: which is all we go adventuring for anyway, right, is
Speaker 6: to feel something physically and to feel something emotionally and
Speaker 6: spiritually in your.
Speaker 4: Mind, whatever it might be.
Speaker 6: So we've got all these things that we can manipulate
Speaker 6: ourselves with. And of course food is such a huge one.
Speaker 6: What would I think and feel and how would my
Speaker 6: body react to just eating beans for however many days
Speaker 6: it took, and I scratched out the figures, and forty days, yeah,
Speaker 6: well thirty nine in the end, thirty nine days of
Speaker 6: eating only beans, which was four to seven tins a day.
Speaker 6: It was liberating and in the fact that I never
Speaker 6: had to think about food, as in, if I was hungry,
Speaker 6: I would just eat a tinner beans and that was it.
Speaker 6: I'd never think about what I'm eating, how I'm going
Speaker 6: to prepare it. I just crack it in and just
Speaker 6: crack on. It was really quite liberating. But the body.
Speaker 6: I went from an emotional state of sort of seven
Speaker 6: to nine every day, which is my regular kind of life,
Speaker 6: to just a six all the time. I was a six,
Speaker 6: and so I got to view what it is like
Speaker 6: to in some way be oppressed by food and what
Speaker 6: the hell does adventure look like when you're only.
Speaker 4: A six all the time.
Speaker 6: And it was fascinating, was a fascinating insight into humanity,
Speaker 6: into my what my body is capable of and what
Speaker 6: my mind. You know, where does optimism come from? Bloody
Speaker 6: comes from what you eat? Because I was just beige
Speaker 6: all the time. And yeah, so it was an adventure
Speaker 6: of somewhere. I didn't go anywhere, and that itself was
Speaker 6: really challenging for me too. I didn't have the motivation
Speaker 6: to go running or paddling. I didn't have the energy
Speaker 6: to do it as much, and so I had to
Speaker 6: make a story out of feeling pretty shit and doing
Speaker 6: something really different and so there was challenges coming at
Speaker 6: me from all over the place, and it was it
Speaker 6: was kind of cool.
Speaker 3: No, I love I love the humor in adventure as well,
Speaker 3: because when we talk about adventure and we look at adventure,
Speaker 3: everyone thinks it's going to be sort of really arduous
Speaker 3: and you know, you know, hardcore, and there's got to
Speaker 3: be some kind of traumatic sort of experience in there
Speaker 3: that's going to change you for the rest of your life.
Speaker 3: But ultimately the humor and adventure is super import as well.
Speaker 3: You know, you've got to be able to look at
Speaker 3: adventure from the bright side and be able to smile
Speaker 3: at it and be able to laugh at it.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, yeah, I look, I suppose so.
Speaker 6: And yet I've you know, when your producer reached out
Speaker 6: to me for our chat and I looked you up
Speaker 6: on Wikipedia, and just because you know you wear similar age,
Speaker 6: I think I've got a year on you. And in
Speaker 6: terms of and you've done things that are far more
Speaker 6: they're just so different to mine too. You know, your
Speaker 6: life fascinates me incredibly because of the kind of I
Speaker 6: think you have had all of these high end things
Speaker 6: that are scary as hell and have different deeper meanings
Speaker 6: and you've been told to do things and whatever. It's
Speaker 6: just I think you create humility and fun out of
Speaker 6: yours because you've had this counter experience and maybe you're
Speaker 6: still having them. And I'm trying to just find my
Speaker 6: own middle ground too. I haven't had the counter experiences
Speaker 6: you have, and if I have, they've been self inflicted
Speaker 6: and probably mistakes.
Speaker 4: And so I'm.
Speaker 6: Often thinking to you, how do I just milk? Because
Speaker 6: I love all the fantastic positive aspects of adventure and
Speaker 6: they're often really good hard work, but they're not death
Speaker 6: defying anymore. And I think that's healthy. And so yeah,
Speaker 6: that's where the smiles and the laughs come in, because
Speaker 6: you know you're just out here by choice.
Speaker 3: And they say that beans, beans are good for your heart.
Speaker 3: The more you eat, the more you far.
Speaker 4: That's totally true.
Speaker 5: That correct.
Speaker 4: I needed no help in that department.
Speaker 6: And I'm one of the bloody windiest blokes I know.
Speaker 3: How do you go from kayaking to running? Are you
Speaker 3: just a naturally fit individual that's got a super resilient mindset?
Speaker 5: What made you switch up?
Speaker 3: And why? Six hundred and fifty koments through the Australian Alps.
Speaker 6: Well I like, I'm probably more of a runner than
Speaker 6: I was a paddler. Even that that was my release
Speaker 6: as a fourteen fifteen year old kid. I thought I
Speaker 6: can run and burst the bubble of my home. Lived
Speaker 6: on a small farm with dad, So that was a
Speaker 6: good release for me as a young bloke going through
Speaker 6: kind of puberty, I suppose. So I became a runner
Speaker 6: before well and truly before a paddler, and so that
Speaker 6: was always my default, and I was always okay, you know,
Speaker 6: I've got a good heart, good strong heart. The only
Speaker 6: thing I can say about my body is that it's
Speaker 6: kind of an abusible body in that I just don't
Speaker 6: get injured all that much. I have a strength, So
Speaker 6: I'm lucky. I've got my mum's body. She was a
Speaker 6: great athlete. And once you kind of know that, you
Speaker 6: sort of lean into it a little. And so I
Speaker 6: was able to run longer and longer distances when I
Speaker 6: started to get into it, and I do things, you know,
Speaker 6: I did it as a twenty Well, I did the
Speaker 6: Big Run as a thirty something year old bloke, but
Speaker 6: it was on ten years worth of just training ad
Speaker 6: hoc but always running.
Speaker 4: I've always run, and it would been was. I was
Speaker 4: so surprised.
Speaker 6: You know, this is when the Pacific Crest and the
Speaker 6: Appalachian and a lot all the European big famous walks
Speaker 6: are being run for fastest known times and it's becoming
Speaker 6: a bit of a thing. And I was shocked to
Speaker 6: know that the Australian ups walking track had never been run.
Speaker 6: It had been attempted for four or five years by
Speaker 6: a bunch of blokes and it had been knocked back
Speaker 6: with weather and snow events and landslides and fires and
Speaker 6: all sorts of stuff, you know. And I just got lucky.
Speaker 6: I just picked my time and away I went and
Speaker 6: was able to get the job done on a bit
Speaker 6: of a shonky leg. But it was remarkable. Yeah, And
Speaker 6: like Africa, like Day sixty two in Africa, big waves
Speaker 6: and being scared to death. I learned a lot about
Speaker 6: myself out there with the body demise, more than.
Speaker 4: I'd ever had.
Speaker 5: How long did it take you?
Speaker 4: Thirteen days? Ten hours?
Speaker 6: I think maybe a couple of minutes and that, but
Speaker 6: it's down to now eleven eleven days and something so
Speaker 6: and look, people will pop.
Speaker 5: You were the first to do it. You broke that moll.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, first to get first to string it toget. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: and so and that held for four or five years,
Speaker 6: and now people are whittling away five and ten hours
Speaker 6: at a time every time they do it. But it's
Speaker 6: a long lots of wheels can come off, you know.
Speaker 6: There's twenty eight thousand meters of vertical terrain and a
Speaker 6: lot of sections that are bush bashing blackberries or hot
Speaker 6: bush or just just thick jungle for kilometers at a time.
Speaker 6: So it's it's hard. It's not like the at of
Speaker 6: the PC that's pretty slick.
Speaker 4: In a sense. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And how did you sleep? Were you just literally sleeping
Speaker 5: off the trail?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I had.
Speaker 6: I was fully supported, so my brother in law and
Speaker 6: my parents pinch hit for a couple of nights. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it was good, and I was sort of averaging fifty
Speaker 6: odd k's a day because I did the longer route.
Speaker 4: There's lots of various I did the easier route.
Speaker 6: So whenever there was an up and over a mountain,
Speaker 6: over single track, or go around contoured fire trail, I
Speaker 6: do the contoured fire trail. So I kind of cheated
Speaker 6: in some respects but attacked on an extra fifty k's.
Speaker 4: But I had.
Speaker 6: I had relatively good access by Charlie, my brother in
Speaker 6: Laura full drive, so I'd just yeah, I'd just roll
Speaker 6: out of swag and sleep in a swag or a
Speaker 6: tent and just snorm my head off and get up
Speaker 6: in the morning. And it was I was roughly twelve
Speaker 6: hours on trail each day and four hours of just
Speaker 6: mosing around a meal, and I had eight.
Speaker 4: Square hours of sleep every day. It was good.
Speaker 3: Wow. So that and the trip around Africa keep Horn,
Speaker 3: those are two that that really stick out to you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean they're the bigger, longer range things that
Speaker 6: saw a mind and body demise or where you you
Speaker 6: know where you have those. You know, every three or
Speaker 6: four days you have a questionable moment in your mind.
Speaker 4: You why am I doing this? What's the point of this?
Speaker 3: And why why do you do it? I answer that question,
Speaker 3: what is the point in it? There must be for
Speaker 3: you to keep doing it?
Speaker 6: Well, I suppose it's a bit like when I pass
Speaker 6: something that's that's usable or good loot on the you know,
Speaker 6: someone has hard rubbish on the side of the road
Speaker 6: and I pass it, and I see it, and I
Speaker 6: have room in the car. I can't unsee it, and
Speaker 6: I go back and I genuinely get it. And when
Speaker 6: I have these moments of clarity where I think, oh,
Speaker 6: you know what that trail I'd love to run or
Speaker 6: walk that trail or paddle that particular coast. If I
Speaker 6: still have that thought a day or two later, and
Speaker 6: I write a hundred words about it in a notebook
Speaker 6: or a thing, it just manifests it in beds and
Speaker 6: that's it. And then it says, the pride thing, Let's
Speaker 6: let's do this. I've had the thought, it's got it's
Speaker 6: got legs, let's see it through. And so then I
Speaker 6: just and I'm genuinely excited about new places, both real
Speaker 6: and imagined. Absolutely so that once once a story has
Speaker 6: struck and I'm keen to do it and it excites me,
Speaker 6: then away I.
Speaker 5: Go, yeah, what fascinates me about you? Bo is?
Speaker 3: You know the extent of your adventures, like you said,
Speaker 3: the big ones, you know, paddling Cape Horn and running
Speaker 3: the Australian app through the Australian out the six hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty kilometer to a ninety kilometer commute to work,
Speaker 3: where you just thought, I've got ninety kilometers to commute
Speaker 3: to work.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to drive in. I'm going to walk in.
Speaker 5: I'm going to run in. You do that as well,
Speaker 5: don't you?
Speaker 4: I did. Yeah, that was it was part of my
Speaker 4: commute series. I only did two of the four.
Speaker 6: It was going to be walk, then paddle, then ride
Speaker 6: a horse, then take a balloon. The last two were
Speaker 6: a bit harder to arrange, and I got made redundant
Speaker 6: in between, so perfectly I didn't have to do those
Speaker 6: last two. But the paddle at was the hardest adventure
Speaker 6: I've ever had, hands down. So I took four days
Speaker 6: to get to work, which it usually takes me seventy
Speaker 6: five minutes to get to work, and that took me
Speaker 6: four full on days dragging a kayak. It was sort
Speaker 6: of almost like an Arctic trip of glaciation. You know,
Speaker 6: you're just having to drag this kayak through everything and
Speaker 6: anything and then paddle certain sections. It was fricking hard
Speaker 6: and brilliant too. It was brilliant, one of the best
Speaker 6: adventures I've ever had, and it was often ten or
Speaker 6: twenty meters from the road.
Speaker 4: I always drive amazing.
Speaker 3: So where is your mindset at? On a daily basis?
Speaker 3: You could because you're one of these people. You could
Speaker 3: step outside your door. You're seeing adventure and you'll want
Speaker 3: to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I'm far more disciplined now, and I write things down,
Speaker 6: and I'm a family man with two little girls and
Speaker 6: a wife, and so things are far more strategic.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, But.
Speaker 6: You know, I am intimidated by life in a sense
Speaker 6: that while I'm scared of death, and two I'm scared
Speaker 6: of not doing enough in my years I have left.
Speaker 6: So it's always for me now it's about what are
Speaker 6: the best ideas? Because ideas are cheap, and the hard
Speaker 6: part is to make good of your best ideas. And
Speaker 6: so I'm constantly trying to whittle down the best ideas
Speaker 6: into the best stories which give me the best day
Speaker 6: to day bang for buck.
Speaker 3: And how important is it to get your story across?
Speaker 3: How important is storytelling? Because ultimately that's all we have
Speaker 3: to leave behind, right I suppose.
Speaker 6: So, although I'm becoming more of a skeptic of legacy, because.
Speaker 4: I suppose once I'm gone, I'm gone.
Speaker 6: And I think of all the people I greatly respect
Speaker 6: to left stories and artwork and things, and I think
Speaker 6: they're magnificent. But I love their artwork, but i'd much
Speaker 6: rather them be here too. So the legacy between a
Speaker 6: legacy and a person, I'd much rather take the person.
Speaker 6: So yeah, the thing with stories for me now is
Speaker 6: that that's how I own my money. So it's just
Speaker 6: honing my craft. I'm just a carpenter that wants to
Speaker 6: become better on the tools, you know. So I'm just
Speaker 6: trying to create and I want to burst the bubble
Speaker 6: of It's about eighty percent male thirty to fifty that
Speaker 6: watch my stuff online and I want to I want
Speaker 6: to crack out of that and get more genders and
Speaker 6: more age diverse and more and more, you know, just
Speaker 6: people in weird corners of the world.
Speaker 4: So that's a real challenge.
Speaker 3: Our final question before we wrap up, if your daughters
Speaker 3: want to go on some crazy adventures, No go with them?
Speaker 5: Does that go with them? Does he stay at home?
Speaker 4: I trust them, I think to either have me along
Speaker 4: or not.
Speaker 6: I reckon I'd be a pretty good support crew, pretty handy,
Speaker 6: good at taping up wounds and reading maps for them.
Speaker 6: I hope they want to go on adventures. I think
Speaker 6: my oldest particularly will love it. But I love that
Speaker 6: idea too, of being able to go out and have
Speaker 6: a full blown real sweatfest of an adventure that's hard
Speaker 6: with the girls when they're up for it. Jeez, it'll
Speaker 6: keep me young.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm the same with my children.
Speaker 3: I've got my fourteen year old son now, and my
Speaker 3: wife has always told me be careful what you ignite
Speaker 3: within them, because now he wants to climb the seventh
Speaker 3: summits and guess what Dad's going with him?
Speaker 5: So that is brilliant.
Speaker 6: Now what about the military though, would you happily have
Speaker 6: him go to the military.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, the right person to point in the
Speaker 3: right direction.
Speaker 6: Eh yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose I was done. You good,
Speaker 6: So I suppose that makes sense.
Speaker 3: But listen, thank you so much for coming on my podcast.
Speaker 3: You've been fascinating and talk about adventure I think you
Speaker 3: home the true sense sense of adventurer because the versatility
Speaker 3: and the scalability that you that you go out and
Speaker 3: explore is phenomenal. It's humorous, it's inspiring. Mate, keep doing
Speaker 3: what you're doing, and I look forward to logging in
Speaker 3: and subscribe in to your YouTube channel mate, to see
Speaker 3: plenty more to come and listen.
Speaker 6: No more beans, no fair enough thasm Oh jeez, I
Speaker 6: get the beans thing a lot.
Speaker 4: Thanks Mane, Thanks man.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much for joining me on Headgame.
Speaker 3: If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're subscribed so
Speaker 3: you don't miss any of our incredible stories, and leave me.
Speaker 5: A review wherever you're listening. I'm Att Middleton. Catch you
Speaker 5: again next time.