Crazy Challenges with Luke Tyburski

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Athlon podcast, finding out how ordinary people do extraordinary things.

100%. Who doesn't want to do a race called the Double Brutal Extreme Triathlon made perfect sense to me.

That was Luke Tversky. And this is Crazy Challenges. So on this episode of the Tribeathlon podcast, I got the opportunity to interview the Luke Tversky. Now, Luke Taburski was a former professional footballer that turned to endurance adventure, and he kind of started on that journey with some incredible baptisms of fire, whether it be the Marathon de Sable or the Double Brutal Extreme Triathlon. I first discovered Luke by watching the ultimate Triathlon on Amazon prime, which is where he attempted to do a triathlon from Morocco to Monaco. So swim from Morocco to Spain, cycle from Spain to France, run from France to Monaco. I'll let you watch that on Amazon prime to find out how he got on. But he's just gone on to do so many other crazy adventures, as well as setting up a coaching business, doing speaking podcasts, writing a book, all of these amazing things. So it was absolutely brilliant to dive into the mind and the mindset behind doing these incredible adventures. I hope you enjoy the conversation. This podcast is brought to you by 33fuel.com. Now, if you're like me, when you're doing your endurance sport, you want to avoid those products that look when you look at the ingredients, they look like a chemistry experiment. But it can often be difficult to avoid them and still have the energy for the sport. So 33fuel.com produce an amazing set of products, whether it be gels, bars or powders, but packed full of awesome superfoods so that you can not only get full, faster and fitter, but you can also get healthier at the same time. If you listen to this podcast, at the end, I'll give you a discount code to get a nice saving off your first 33 fuel.com order. So check it out@33fuel.com personally, I absolutely love their products, particularly their Chia Seed gel. This podcast is also brought to you by the Tribe Athlon app. The best place to find all of the running, swimming, cycling or combination events out there, the best place to find people to train with, and the marrying of the two, helping you find out where your friends are competing so that you can enter the event. Because we all know that if you enter a triathlon that your friends are doing, it's so much more fun than doing one where you know nobody. So go to tribathlon.com download the app and find your next event.

So welcome to the triathlon podcast. So I first fell across you, Luke, when I was on the Turbo Trainer over the winter looking at different interesting documentaries to watch, and the Ultimate Triathlon came up. I looked at him, which madman is willing to take on trying to get from Monaco to Morocco in 12 days? And I watched it and I absolutely loved it. I thought it was an incredible story. Clearly it didn't all go according to plan, but it was great. And so it's brilliant to get you on and meet you if we can say in person, I don't know, but as close as we can at these current times. So it's brilliant. So thank you very much for coming on, I suppose. Let's kick things off. Do you want to tell people, for those people that don't know much about you, tell them a bit about your backstory and then tell them sort of what you've been up to over the years because it is quite an incredible story.

So first of all, I want to say thank you very much for having me on. It's always a pleasure to chat with people and who want to hear my story, which is always nice. So the. I'll give you the short version of my story, but the long versions in in my book Chasing Extremes, so you can check that out. But the short version is I grew up in Australia. I was an elite footballer, soccer player, and I played it basically the highest level I could in Australia, and left, left my hometown at 16 to. To move in with a random family because I was playing for a professional club while I was still in high school and then played in the top league in Australia and bounced around for a few years and decided to go to America to continue my career to get out of Australia. And I was studying at the time as well because I always had this. I didn't study straight out of high school, although my parents definitely wanted me to. But I said, mom, don't worry about it. When the time's right, I'll get an education. Cause I was always intrigued by the human body, how it functions by the human mind and how that can control the human body. And this is from 14. I was reading sports nutrition books at 14 years of age, reading some sort of basic psychology books at 15, 16 years of age, because I was just really fascinated by the human body and the mind and what it could do. So I studied exercise science with a focus on physiology and psychology and bounced across to America where I continued to play and study and then I ended up playing in the. In the lower leagues in America as well as College and then I went over to Belgium and then to the UK where I reside today. So I had a little bit journeyman career. I didn't play in any top leagues outside of Australia but I played professional football for about six, seven years where I didn't have to work, I didn't have to get a job or any sort of part time job and I was okay just to get by. And for me that's all I ever wanted to do. From as far back as I can remember from a four year old kid. You asked me in primary school, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a professional soccer player. You ask me in high school, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a professional soccer player. And they're like, yeah, well if that doesn't happen, what are you going to do? Don't know, don't care because I'm going to do this. So I worked very hard. I had supportive parents, I grew up in a loving family. It was almost like a working class family. There wasn't limited money or anything like that. We never went without. But if we wanted something that we, if we actually wanted something and didn't need it, then it wasn't always available. So my parents worked very hard. They showed me the way that if you want to achieve something in life that you, you need to work hard as well. And that always followed me alongside that they were always supportive for me to be curious in how I can approach life and don't always do everything that everyone else is doing. If you want to do something then you have to work hard to achieve it. But don't worry what everyone else says or does. So that was really sort of my understanding upbringing and the basis of the way that I view, think and act today. And then after I retired from football at around 28 years of age, which is still quite young because I was battling with injuries for multiple years. And then I started to have a pretty dark battle with depression and it got pretty bad to where I didn't want to live anymore. I was standing on tops of bridges at two different times in my life where I didn't want to be here and the injuries from my football and the mental health which was all one in the, was really starting to take its toll on me. And I retired from football at 28. And as an escape from life as a, I don't want to face up to now I'm not a footballer anymore to a loss of identity, I decided to take on an Ultra marathon. Because that sounded like a good idea at the time.

Just any ultramarathon, was it?

No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't just like, I'm gonna do a 50K, you know, a little bit longer than a. Than a marathon. So for context, my friends in Australia started to do marathons and Ironman triathlons. And I all thought they were like, they were mad. Like, I had one friend that raced in Kona, Hawaii, Ironman World Championships. And when he first told me what he was doing and how hot it was and all this, I thought he was joking. I didn't think anyone could do that. So this is where my mindset was as a footballer, right? Just before I retired and my friends were doing marathons. I thought they were like, you're taking decades off your life. You're killing yourself by doing marathons. So I remember one of my friends telling me, there's this race in the Sahara desert where you run the equivalent of six marathons in seven days, carrying everything you need for an entire week in your backpack. So the food that you want on day one, let's call it Monday, you carry in your backpack, and all the food you eat Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and even Sunday, you have to carry in your bag when you start. And I don't know why. It was partly because I wanted to escape from the life that I was looking at in that moment when I was icing my calf muscle that I tore when I retired to. When I decided to retire from football. But this conversation with my friend came into my head and I thought, what am I going to do now with the rest of my life? And for some reason I thought, I'm going to do this race. So I found it online, I googled it and there was a phone number and I called it up and I said, I want a place. And they're like, oh, it's normally sold out, but if you pay a deposit today, we'll give you a place. And I was like, yeah, sure. Paid the deposit, literally drained my savings account. And in six months time, I had a place in the 27th edition of the Marathon Desabes. And I had six months to train for it. And I thought, right, what I'm going to do now for a living, I'm going to be an endurance adventurer and do these big races all around the world and just try and somehow make a living from it.

That's incredible. And I've got friends who've done marathons at harbor. And that is. I mean, I Remember hearing the stories and reading their blog articles about the state of their feet. I mean, and actually having to almost like tap up other competitors to see if they've got any leftover water. Because you have to carry all your own water as well, don't you? And so therefore you're fairly limited on your water. And it just. I mean, this was before I got into Ironman, but I'm still not sure, even after getting into Iron man, that it sounds like an appealing race. How was it?

It's. The long version is there's a YouTube video called it's Not a Race, It's a war free on YouTube. And it's about 27 minutes. And it. I started to vlog. And this is back in. Even before when vlogging was cool, back in 2011, I started to film this just with a little like a go GoPro type thing of my training leading up to the marathon De Saab. So the first sort of 10 minutes shows me. I watched it probably a couple years ago. The last time I watched it, I laughed at myself. I'm thinking, look at this idiot. He has no idea what he's doing. But it was showing a bit of training leading up to it, and then the race itself that I carried out there. I had a pretty amazing race, all things considered. But I was extremely disappointed because I went in there being super competitive, wanting to finish in the elite top 50, which is sort of like. I don't want to say it's like finishing on the podium of a normal race, maybe like finishing in the top 10 of a race that's like, really well renowned. The top 50 is. They call it the elite top 50, and it's top 50 people out of a thousand runners. And the reason why it's called the elite top 50 is on day four, you start three hours later than everyone else when you run a double marathon. So everyone's sort of finishing closer together. And so these top 50 people, when I did it, there was 45 men and five women who started at that time. I wanted to be in that and I wanted to finish in the top 50. That was my target. Like, this is my first ever running race. I'd never run a marathon before. I'd never run a half marathon from before. Never had 10k. And here's this crazy idiot with six months of training going, I want to finish in the top 50. So I raced hard and I was. I think I was 22nd after day one, 30 something after day three, and 40 something after. After day three. Sorry, yeah. 34th after day two. So I was in the top 50 and I was doing quite well. But the thing was, as I carried an overuse injury into the race, which you can see on the it's not a race, it's a war on YouTube video and that my knee went as my ITB it went after day one, so I was always going to get slower and then my toes. So to give you a sort of a quick snapshot of the state of my toes, I constantly, every, every February, March, leading up to April, when the marathon desarbs is, there's different things circulating around social media about the marathon de Saab's I kid you not, since 2013, the year after I did it, I have seen pictures of my toes circulating social media for the last six, seven years because they were that bad. It was hilarious. So I de gloved my. One of my little toes, which quite literally means the skin and everything just sort of fell off. I was on penicillin after two days because I was that badly infected. I had to have every toe taped up after two days and for the rest of the seven, like mummified feet. And then when I got back to the uk, I went to see my podiatrist and said, oh, you know how I was doing that desert rain. He's like, yeah. And I said, my toes aren't in good shape. So I went there and quite literally he cancelled two of his patients and said, I'm going to come back to you because we need to do surgery. And I had minor surgery in his office to cut away some of the inflected flesh so there wouldn't be a chance of the infection going further into my toes and potentially, if there was, the infection got any worse, may need to get rid of a toe or two. So my toes were pretty bad, but I survived it, I managed it. I had the full service of the marathon de sabs. I had an intravenous drip in the middle of the Sahara Desert. After a quarter of the way through a double ultra marathon on day four, I had a stomach virus where liquid and fluids and everything was coming out and up and all the rest of it I had, you know, I fell over, I was bleeding, I had all these blisters. So I got my money's worth to say in a very short, succinct way.

And I think we'll come back to this later on, but there's definitely a recurring theme of injuries through your. Through your events, isn't it? And I'm sure that's because you're Pushing yourself to the absolute extreme at every point. But we'll maybe come back to that. So, so what happened after the Marathon de Sabler? It was next. Was that your double Ironman? Your first ever triathlon, and you do a double Ironman, or did that come somewhere else in the sequel?

No, that was later. I came back from the Marathon de Saab's and told the world, my little inner world, I'm going to be an endurance adventurer. I'm going to travel around the world. This is my pitch to family, friends and everyone when they've said, okay, you're back from the Marathon de Saab's. Now what are you going to do? You're 20, 29 at that stage. What are you going to do with the rest of your life? And I was like, I want to be an endurance adventurer. I'm going to chat, I'm going to travel around the world and I'm going to do all these big crazy challenges and I'm going to speak about them and I'm going to write books about them and I'm going to write magazine articles and I'm going to have brands sponsor me. This is going to be my life. It's going to be fantastic. And no one, yeah, no one thought I was serious. No one thought I could do it, and everyone thought I was just losing it. And I was battling with depression at this point and not speaking about it to anyone, so no one knew what I was dealing with, the underlying. My underlying mental health. So it was a case of I was escaping from my life, but my big, ultra endurance challenges and this big, big goal of being this endurance adventurer was I didn't want to face up to the fact that I wasn't a footballer anymore, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So I just thought, I'm going to chase this big, lofty thing that's not even a real thing. So with that as context, I googled the world's wettest, highest, craziest, toughest ultra marathons and all the rest of it came up with a big list of all these ludicrous runs, some races, some trails and things like that, and found the world's highest ultra marathon, which was quite literally running down Mount Everest from base camp at 5,300 meters down to Lukla, where the airport is at 2,900 meters. And although that wasn't. Although that seemed like a massive challenge, I thought, actually, if I'm going to be this adventurer, I've got to do really adventurous things. So. So I got in touch with the race organizer and said, do you know any of these elite ultra marathon runners from Nepal that I've seen popping up at race results around the world? And he's like, yeah. And I said, I would love to go and live with them high up in the rural mountains of Nepal and learn from them how they train and how they eat and all the rest of it. And he's like, yeah, sure, no worries. So I changed my flight and I went out to Nepal about three weeks, three and a half weeks before the Everest Ultra, and went out and lived with two different elite ultra marathon runners in the rural mountains where I'm pretty sure they'd never seen a Westerner before, and spent three weeks living like a Nepalese mountain person.

Fantastic. And that's one of the amazing things about this sport, whether you're going off to an ironman or whatever it is, you just exploring parts of the world that you would never go to if it wasn't for these particular challenges, isn't it? And I just love that about it.

Yeah, exactly right. Like, yes, I did it in an extreme way, but both of the runners today, this is seven years later, I still keep in contact with. So it's not just the places, it's the people you connect with. And it's only really been the last three or four years that I. It actually had sunk in what I did and where I was out there. Like, we're talking no running water, no electricity, you know, the toilet was just behind the house. You know, we're talking extreme. But at the same time, these people who quite literally lived to survive every day were the happiest people I'd ever met, you know, and it was. It was just amazing to get a snapshot of their lives and to be part of it and to experience another way of living. But also beautiful scenery, beautiful mountains to run up and down every day. Like, I was one of them. We were at three and a half thousand metres above sea level and right on this ridge. So you either went straight down or you went along the ridge and then went up to another ridge. So it was great running. And then after I was there, I trekked up to base camp of Everest with the race and the race organizers got a parasite called giardia, which basically is this parasite that clings to your lower intestines, the small intestines, I think, one of your intestines and doesn't want to let go. So when something like that happens, your body just says there's a foreign Object in me, I'm going to get rid of you. And the only way it knows how to do that is flush it out. So I'm at this stage, I'm three days from the start of the race, four and a half thousand meters, four and a half thousand meters above sea level, heading up Everest, and I just have extreme diarrhea, extreme vomiting for the next three days while I'm still walking another, literally 10 kilometers. We did over three days, but from four and a half thousand meters to nearly five and a half thousand meters. And then the night before race day, I was in a really bad way. Hadn't ate or drank anything for three days, and I had 65km to get back down the mountain the next day. Did you? I'm here. I survived. Yeah, well, literally, it was one of those times when people go, oh, there's no way I could have done that. And there's no way that, you know, that I would be able to get down from the mountain. And a lot of the things that I do today, which I'm sure we'll get into later, is I'm a performance mindset coach. So I help people get out of their own way and provide tools and systems of how they can overcome obstacles and adapt to setbacks so they can actually achieve their true potential. And this is a story I tell to clients and I tell to companies that I do workshops for all the time. And it's like, put yourself up Mount Everest when you've got literally two options. You get down the mountain or you call a helicopter. Now, people that call the helicopter are the ones that are unconscious, getting thrown down because they're being carried down by someone up in the death zone. And they're in, you know, need of medical supply of supplies because they're gonna die if they don't get down the mountain. You know what I mean? Because of the oxygen deprivation to the brain and things like that. Here's me with a parasite in my stomach, and I've had diarrhea and vomiting for a couple of days. Like, am I really going to go and pay $5,000 for a helicopter just because I feel a bit ill? Come on now. So it's a question of asking yourself, well, can I take one step? This is something that we hear all the time, but is if you put it where you've literally got no other option. Okay, well, what can I do? Instead of being like, I wasn't super positive and going, yes, I'm going to run down the mountain and I'm going to smash this race and it's going to be awesome. And I'm not going to vomit anymore. I'm not going to, you know, have diarrhea anymore. I'm just going to do it. I wasn't in a positive frame of mind. I was just trying to be less negative. So being less negative was, can I just walk? You know, can I walk for the next to the next big rock or can I take 10 steps and then sit down? So when we're faced with, oh, this is going to be really hard, put yourself. If I have no other choice and so to speak, have a gun to my head, how will I do it? And that's one of the things that is a continuing theme with all my big challenges is I asked myself the question, what if I had no choice, then what would I do?

It's all about leverage, isn't it, to kind of step outside of this sport. But Tony Robbins would use the same sort of analogy, which would be saying if you said somebody give up smoking, they'd say, well, it's quite difficult. I might or might not be able to. You put a gun to the head and say, give up smoking. Guess what? It suddenly seems quite easy, doesn't it? So it's all about leverage.

Brilliant.

What about. And so what came next? What came after Everest?

What came after Everest? I came back and I said my whole plan, the reason why I tell people this plan of being an endurance adventurer is, you know, go around the world, write articles, write books, have documentaries made. All this stuff that I had planned in 2011 after Everest, I had a couple of magazines who commissioned me to write articles. I started to talks on sort of like the adventure talk scene, I guess you would call it. Different adventure shows, travel shows. I started doing talks on stage and started to talk about this challenge that I did. And I actually started to write a book and I was going to write a book just about my Mount Everest experience. So I started to write what I thought would be my first book so I could start to see myself getting traction. So I thought, I've got to keep this up. I started doing a few other ultra marathons. I bought a bike and started to do some cycling. Like I was in my hometown in Australia, it was out in the countryside. So we had like old bikes, we would cycle to friends places, but I'd never cycled on a proper bike before. So I got a bike, started to do some cycling, started to do some long cycling. And as I'm an Aussie living in London and I didn't know how to surf. I thought, right, another adventure I'm going to do is I'm going to learn how to surf. So I quite literally went, well, where do you learn to surf in the uk? I've heard of this place called Newquay. I'm going to go down to Newquay. In Cornwall. Yeah. And I'm gonna learn to surf. Great. Okay, so how do I make this an adventure? Well, I'll catch a train. I could hitchhike. I didn't have a car and I thought, oh, that sounds a bit boring. How far is it? And I looked it up. It's about 400km. I wonder if I could cycle that in a day and then learn to surf the following day. So I convinced a couple of my friends to get up at 3 o' clock in the morning one Saturday morning and follow me down from my house in London, all the way down the 412km from my house in West London to Newquay on a Saturday. Took me 18 hours. I think it was 412 kilometers and about four and a half thousand meters of climbing for all you cyclists out there. I did it on the second longest day of the year, the day after the summer solstice, because. Makes sense. More light. It's middle of the summer. It should be good weather. It was windy and poured with rain for 18 hours. So there's a video on YouTube called Luke Learns to Surf. It's on my YouTube channel at Luke Tversky. And it's horrendous. Like, it's pouring with rain as soon as I leave my flat. And it's just horrendous weather the whole time. But then the next day, if you'd.

Done it in Australia, you'd have been absolutely fine.

Exactly. But the next day it was sunny, beautiful. We learned to surf. We did it.

We.

Had a private lesson, my crew and I, the four of us with a couple of instructors. I had a GoPro on the surfboard. I got up a couple of times and we did that. And then we drove home on Sunday afternoon. So it was a nice little weekend away. So that was. That was one of the next challenges. I went out to the Nepalese people who I stayed with. They were doing a big race in Ultramarathon in Hong Kong, and they invited me out to come and support their race, come and be a crew member. And I thought, yeah, I'll come out. I've never been to Hong Kong. And one of their sponsors bought me a flight. So it was like trying to cover costs. And then I decided, well, I can't just go out there and pick crew. I've got to do my own adventure. And I looked at Hong Kong and I looked at places around Hong Kong and I saw this little island off the southeast coast of mainland China called Hainan. And there was a little mountain range through the middle of Hainan. And I thought, well, if I get a taxi 100 km from the airport and then I'll go and spend a couple of days running through the mountains, sleeping in a hammock. I took over like this Crocodile Dundee knife as I called it. And I would take a bit of food and apparently there was. There's loads of coconut trees and there'd be other tropical fruit trees. And I thought, well, I'll take some food but I'll live off the fruit for like these three or four days. I was going to run through the mountains, like so stupid. I mean China, like bottom line, this is, this is not like Hong Kong China, this is China China. And I'll leave that there. And I got the Hong Kong. My cousin lives in Hong Kong, so staying with him and there's a big typhoon that went through the country is when the typhoon went through the Philippines in 2013. It went through Hainan and basically took two days off my trip. I should have taken that as a sign and said I shouldn't go. But now I went out there like two and a half days short of what I'd planning. Got a taxi at the middle of the of the island to where I was going to set up my base in this city of a hundred thousand people. So I thought it's got to be one or two people that speak English, right? Another schoolboy mistake and assuming that, you know, someone in the middle of China would speak English. So I got out there and it was just ruined from the typhoon. I had to pay a taxi driver extra money just to drive me the hundred kilometers because it was just there was trees and power lines down. And then I stayed a night. I know I went to stay a night there, but my, I didn't have enough cash. I didn't have. My credit cards didn't work, my debit cards didn't work. I had no money. I had the equivalent of like £5 as if I was in London. So I had no money whatsoever. And I looked up in the mountains and I thought this is where I was going to run and there's landslides, like chunks of earth were sliding down this mountain where I was planning on heading. And I thought that's just stupid. I can't go up there. So I made a decision to stay in the city where I was woozy Shan City for a night and then that would give me three days to get back to the. To the airport. But obviously I had no money, had no cards whatever. And this woman who was the receptionist at this hotel that I thought I had a reservation and pre booked that obviously not. She obviously felt pity on me, took me across to let's just say a very cheap and not so very cheerful hotel paid for me for a room that night. And then when I got up the next day, I literally had two days to cover the 100km and get me back to the airport before I. Before I flew home from Hong Kong to back to London. It was an adventure and a half. But I did make it. There's a lot more details in the book. I don't want to ruin it for other people if they want to read the book. My book Chase the Extreme. But it was the first time and probably the only real time that I thought I might not get home.

Wow. Wow. Well, having seen a couple of the things that you've already a few things that you have done, if that's the most extreme, then yeah, I think we need to find out more about that because that's. That sounds like quite a journey. So I will be. I'll be reading Chasing Extreme to find out more and then. Wow. So what next?

Well, you know, like I came back and this adventure thing happened and I started to talk to more magazines. So I'm networking like a. Yeah. Like a possessed person because I want to create this new career. Right. Everyone was still thinking like, what are you gonna do when you grow up? You know, what are you gonna do? How you gonna. Like I'm, I'm quite literally, if I can cover rent and I can pay for food, then I'm winning at life. Everything else I made went back into doing adventures, back into travel costs and back into, you know, if I needed new kit. And my. And my long term plan back in 2011 was I knew I needed to do something big that would put me on the map, that would distinguish me as this is what I do for a living, not just some guy that got a hobby on the side. This was my way of thinking in 2011. So I stared at a world map with nothing but adventure on my mind and literally waited for something to put pop out at me. And then I saw this little bit of water, this little bit of water, this little gap between Morocco and southern Spain which is called the Gibraltar Strait. And it's the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. So on a map, you know, on my laptop, it doesn't look all that long. So I thought maybe I could swim that. Then I thought, well, what if I did a bike ride from Spain? So I, well, what about cycling along the Mediterranean coast? That sounds beautiful. So what if I cycled east along the Mediterranean coast? Where does that take me? And I hit France and I thought, hang on, if I swam from Morocco to Spain, cycled the entire southeast coast of Spain to the Spanish French border, then I could make a triathlon out of this and run from there to where's the next country? And I went along the Mediterranean coast and then hit Monaco, Morocco to Monaco. Swim, cycle, run. I'm going to do that. And then obviously I spent the next six months researching one. Was it possible to swim the Gibraltar Strait, how far it actually was and how many days I planned on doing it and how much I thought it would cost. And then the big thing was when I was going to do it. So I came up with the ultimate triathlon in 2011 and I did it in 2015. So I gave myself four years to become an endurance athlete, to know how to swim open water, swim in the ocean, cycle long distances, run back to back to back to back long runs. So fast forward again to 2014, I thought, right, the year before the ultimate triathlon, I should do a triathlon. So I'd never done a triathlon before. Right. So you alluded to this earlier. I did my first and to this day my only official triathlon where I googled once again the world's toughest triathlon. And what popped up on the front page, I think it was third down, was this race that really caught my eye because it was called the double brutal Extreme Triathlon. And I thought, I've got to do this, it's perfect. So a double line, man, why you.

Were drawn to it after starting 100%.

Who doesn't want to do a race called the double brutal Extreme Triathlon? Made perfect sense to me. So in short, it's a double Ironman triathlon. So double the distance of the swim, the bike and the run. It was in North Wales, so not flat. So we're talking a Snowdonia's hill. Very. Yes, yes. It was in Snowdonia national park. So we're talking about, I think ended up doing about a 5 mile swimming 200 and it was 230 miles on the bike with 5000 meters of climbing on the bike and then a double marathon on the Run. But the start of the run course was you had to summit Mount Snowdon, come back down and then finish the double marathon. And I think we had 3,000 meters of climbing on the run leg. So you're looking at 8,000 meters of climbing for a double Ironman distance race. The water wasn't warm but it wasn't super cold. I think it was like 13, 14 degrees. And Saturday, the first day we did it was windy and rainy but Sunday was nice and sunny which was good. And I did my first ever triathlon in 35 non stop hours.

Nice. Yeah. You didn't sort of decide to sort of. I mean when I decided to get into triathlon, well, you know a couple of sprint triathlons and I'll do an Olympic and then if everything's going according to plan, I'll do a half ironman, you know, gradually build up to an ironman. No, you just leapt straight into the.

Deep end, didn't you? I did, I did. I thought if I'm going to do this ultimate triathlon and it was about 12 or 14 months after the double brutal. I thought, you know, if my first triathlon is going to be seeing, you've got to look at it from the perspective of where I was as an athlete. I'd ran 100 kilometers, 100 miles non stop. As an ultra marathon runner I'd cycle 412km nonstop before plus multiple 300 kilometer plus days. I'd started to do open water swimming so I started to do some 5k races and 10k races in the ocean, in lakes. So for me then to go and do a double ironman, for me it was a case of I did probably 85% of an Ironman one day on a Saturday just because I thought oh, I'm going to go and do a triathlon like my own, swim, bike and run. And I thought if I'm going to do an ironman I know I can do that because I've all pretty much done that in training and I've cycled and swam and ran so much longer. So to put it all together is very different. I appreciate that. But also I'd done the distances and so much more. So putting it together in one, well one and a half days made more sense.

So that leads me on to a question actually we have not thought of before. But so when you're training for an ironman you don't do an ironman in your training. So therefore there's always that mental debate as have I done enough training to, you know, but you've always. If you're going to do an Ironman, you've got to make sure you've at least done a 2.4 mile swim, at least ridden 112 miles and at least run 26 miles, at least, you know, once. But separately, how is there any research or have you kind of found anything around? How much do you need to do beforehand the individual components to be realistically able to get through adding them all together on the big day?

Look, we're talking about something like an Ironman.

Yeah, an Ironman or you know, doing the double brutal extreme triathlon, you know.

Yeah.

What is it you need to have done beforehand?

So I think there's a couple of ways to answer this. There's the really boring way and which is, which is the honest and the truthful way is it depends on the person. There's so many variables of history. What you've done is sporting history, not just in the sport, but also, you know, if there's someone who had done no sport their entire life and took up triathlon at 30, compared to someone that was say, like me, a professional athlete their entire life, an elite level athlete, even in a random sport like football, but then took up triathlon at 30, you know, more likely than not, the person who's been an athlete their entire life from just a physiological standpoint is going to get to a fitness level quicker and probably doesn't need to do as much training. So that's sort of like a boring answer. Depends on the person and what their history is as well. But I think it's really hard to say like these sort of x percent of what they need to do. But as a, you know, I coach people, athletes from a mindset perspective and runners, and specifically ultra runners in their own training, their running training is whether I've trained. I've trained people that have gone to Kona, I've trained people who have gone to 70.3 world champs. I've trained the everyday athlete and ultra marathon runners who have done massive big races around the world. And when it comes down to riding their big block or a couple of big training blocks leading up to the race. And like the important ones, when they say to me, how long's my longest run gonna be? Or how long's or how big is my biggest week gonna be? I ask them, what do you feel like you need to do to be ready? Now, the reason why I put this back on them is not because I'm lazy and I don't want to answer it myself is because we all know that endurance sports, a large portion of it is mental. And if someone says, well, to be ready for an Ironman, I really feel like I need to do a brick session, a bike and a run of 100 miles and a half marathon. And as long as it fits with the progressive of their training, I would say to them, okay, you good, no worries, I'll keep that into account. But when I write their program and send it to them the next week, guess what their big brick session is? A hundred mile ish and a half marathon ish. Because when they do that, guess what? They feel ready, mentally ready, physically. They probably don't need to do that. So what I would do in the lead up, I would drop the miles a little bit. This is the one thing that a lot of people that I've seen in ultra running, even marathon running and Ironman training is they get into it and they've done an Ironman or two and they think, right, how I trained for my first two Ironmans is or first two Ironman seasons. Let's say I need to keep training like this to get results. Well, if you started in your 30s, like there's a huge proportion of people who started doing ironman in their 30s, then you're getting older. And unless you've been an elite athlete your entire life, you're getting older without a huge base. So to get the same gains, I would be saying you can drop down a little bit, maybe work on a bit of the shorter, the speed sessions. But the endurance stuff, you've been doing this for two or three years. So it comes down to what the athlete feels like they mentally need to do. But you've got to also take into account accumulative fitness. Not over a week, not over your six week training block. But I'm talking about if you've trained consistently, and I mean consistently, where you don't have any more than say six or eight weeks off in one block a year, say your off season is six weeks where you do nothing. If you do that every year, I would say you train consistently. So accumulative fitness over years counts to where you are today if you've been doing that consistently over years. So it really, for me it's really hard to give a specific answer, but I hope with the whole thing of what do you feel like you need to do to be ready. And taking into account the previous months, years or even decades of what you've done in the past doesn't necessarily mean you have to do the exact same thing because that Fitness is still going to be with you.

I think that's a great point. I think, you know, endurance is so much about the mental side of it. When I was training for my Ironman, I said to my coach, I really need to do a marathon. I can't get off the bike and say, right, I've now got to run longer than I've ever run in my life. I just knew I had to have it. In fact, actually chatting to Jeff Galloway, he was saying, three weeks before you do a marathon, you should be running 29 miles slowly. And he said, because what it will do is physically it's good for you at that point, but mentally it puts you in a completely different place on race day, which I thought was really interesting. I'd never heard that advice before, but, yeah, so going back to the ultimate triathlon. So that was 2,000 kilometers in 12 days, I think, wasn't it? And you swam from Morocco to. Actually, did you. Am I right in remembering, actually, you ended up spending swimming from Spain to Morocco, didn't you? Because you couldn't do.

I did swim from Spain to Morocco. It's been an interesting point, actually, online over the years.

The people honestly get caught up with that.

Oh, it's been a very interesting. It's been very interesting time over the last year. There's always when you put yourself out there in a public, like, I'm, I'm in the public eye, but from a very, very, very small standpoint, I've got a. I've got a triathlon documentary on Amazon that. It's won some awards at some film festivals. You know, that's the extent of it. But, yeah, there's always going to be people who are negative towards what you've done, you know, and I don't want to give too much away about the documentary, but it's a case of. In short, I didn't swim from Morocco to Spain because when I got down to Tarifa, the most southern point, Spain, where the base is, after two years of communicating with the. There's one guy, one company who you pay and gives you two boats to navigate. You swimming across the strait and support boat, and you pay them and they take care of it. Yeah, just like the English Channel, there's. There's. There's an organization that you get in touch with to do that same thing. I'd spoken this guy for two years telling, I'm doing the ultimate triathlon. All this. And, you know, I'm gonna have a documentary maker down there, so sign releases for footage and all the rest, all this stuff. Yeah, like never once. And I said, I want to swim from Morocco to Spain. I want to swim from Morocco to Spain and want to swim from Morocco to Spain. Oh, that's, that's the opposite way that we normally do it. We normally swim from Spain to Morocco. Yes, I know that. Okay, fine, fine, fine. It's going to be more difficult. Yep, fine, fine, fine. Two years I made sure I've told this guy, this is what I'm doing. And all he ever said to me was, it's not the normal way and it's going to be more difficult and it's pro. And you know, that was it, that was it. And then I get down there and he says, oh, you want to swim from, from Morocco to Spain? Thinking, yeah, pretty sure I was talking to you these last two years and it's going to be more difficult. Yeah, the same conversation, last two years. Oh, and we have to start further down the coast. So it's going to be double the distance. And I'm like, excuse me. You know, I just thought that I was gonna have to. Yeah, instead of swimming at an aerobic swim, I was gonna have to do a higher end aerobic swim with some threshold efforts to get through the, to the tough currents at times. But no, it's gonna be double the distance. And in short, we decided it was going to be too much of a risk to do that. So we spun it around and I swam from, I only swam sometimes, I say, from Spain to Morocco, you know, five over five hour ocean swim. Yeah, yeah. Took me over five hours to do it. And then got in the boat that, that day and got, took only, I think it took 45 minutes to get back to Spain. And then I had one hour to get changed and things like that. And then I jumped on the bike and did 100ks that day.

I mean, I think that that's, that's the perfect example though, when, when you organize something, one of these extreme challenges, you've got to accept that life and reality is going to get caught up along the way, isn't it? And, and you're going to say, well, look, actually, okay, I could get really, I could beat myself up about the fact that I said I wanted to go from Rocco, Spain. Actually, ultimately, does it really make any difference?

Well, that's what it, that's what it came down to was like it. And you can see in the film I got quite emotional for a couple, it was quite literally for a couple of minutes. We filmed in this little alleyway after we found out this. We were sitting in this office with this guy, and I'm not gonna lie, I was. I was pissed off. Like, I'm very good at controlling my attitude, focusing on things I can control. But in that time, I was pissed off. But I knew I couldn't be angry because I couldn't do anything about it. And I couldn't do anything about it because this guy was in control of this whole event. So for the swim part of it. So when I came out of his office, I was quite emotional. But it was a case of I got that out of me on camera. And it was very like, the cameramen set the camera up, they all walked away. My crew and the cameraman and I just talked, and that was it. But then it was a case of, like, right, okay. Like, bottom line, I wanted to swim between Morocco and Spain. If I swim from Spain to Morocco or Morocco to Spain, bottom line, I still swam between the two continents. So it was a case of. Instead of. Instead of having an hour's rest and then jumping on the bike, it would just mean that I'd sit on a boat for 45 minutes, then have an hour's rest. Well, rest, shower, eat, put cycling kit on and go. And then it's like, really, in the long, grand scheme of things, it doesn't make any difference. Yeah, no, I agree.

I think you just got to get on and enjoy the experience. And I suspect because it was the first part of the challenge, probably, you know, that's. That creates a bit more tension, doesn't it? And then how did you. I remember you eating big Tupperware bowls of green stuff.

What.

How do you. I think, are you vegan? Do I remember?

You're not. I'm not vegan. I don't eat meat. Me being vegan has been thrown around in different articles and things like that. I've never said I've been vegan. I eat plant based, I guess you would call it. And on the ultimate track, like me. Sure.

Flexitarian. Do what you like.

Yeah. Like, I eat. People ask me, what is your diet? And I say, I eat real food. And I eat the best quality food, the best quality real food that I can afford. And I ate, you know, anywhere between, I would say, zero to three portions of meat. And I put, like, everything into the category of meat, whether it's fish or red meat or white meat or whatever. Probably zero to three portions of meat a week, three or four portions. Sometimes I don't have any of meat. And I eat eggs. I don't eat dairy and. Yeah, but it's all real food and the best quality produce. So there are times like where I eat. A lot of people see that I don't eat meat. So in the ultimate triathlon we talked about eating plant based. I did eat some meats but it was rare that I did only because it's just too hard to digest and it was more of a case of trying to get food in the best way possible that I didn't have to chew and digest and things like that. So yeah, definitely not vegan, but it's. Most of my nutritional intake is vegetables.

And so how do you fuel on a. When you're doing literally day after day after day of constant, I mean exercise to the point where you were literally swimming, sorry, cycling and running, where you were asleep, I think, I think from memory you fell asleep on both and just to the point where you just collapsed, didn't you? I mean it is insane. Push yourself to that level. But how do you fuel for that level of endurance?

It's actually, it's actually a question. I haven't got as much as I thought I would. Although the documentary does show bits and pieces of what I ate. I haven't actually got this, you know, I probably. I've done over 100 interviews across all formats at least in the last five years, four and a half years. But yeah, like what I actually ate throughout the whole thing hasn't been a question that I've got as much as I thought I would. I have no idea why. But my. I experimented in 2013, 2014. I was a science experiment for myself because I started to like, obviously I read up on sports nutrition as a 14 year old, you know, 14 year old in the mid to late 90s and all the latest sports nutrition data in Australia was fat is bad and all you eat is carbohydrates and lean protein. Do not eat fat as bad. So I went as. I went as extreme so as saying to my parents, when you mash the potatoes to make mashed potato and mum used to put, you know, a bit of full fat milk and some butter. I said, mum, just steam my potatoes and put them on the side. I don't want the mash because there's butter in there and there's full cream milk in there, that's bad for you. And like my parents were working class and they worked really hard to keep my sister and I going and all the rest of it in the family functioning. So for them to do a little bit extras, it was hard because they're already flat out. But they knew that I was doing it because I was trying to help myself perform. So I was doing it for a reason, not because I was trying to lose weight or whatever. I was just trying to be a better athlete and I was reading all these scientific books, right? So I always had this curiosity throughout my entire life around nutrition. So when I retired, when I went out to Nepal and you know, I'm going out there with all these gels and they're running for four or five hours on nothing. I'm scratching my head and thinking, what the hell's going on here? So I started to experiment with. First was fueling with fat to do endurance sports to become more fat adapted. And I started to finding people who I started to follow in 2013 and started do more research, started doing some pretty, pretty hardcore experiments where I was fasting for days and then training. I would have a normal meal the night before and go out and do a hard seven, eight hour bike ride with my cycling crew of two or three guys. Basically I'd say out of the seven hours, five hours of efforts and they were training for Ironmans and I was doing the thing and it was a hard, hard bike ride. And I would have water, nothing, nothing else but water and zero calorie electrolytes. So there's no carbohydrates in the electrolytes. And it was just pure experimentation and I'm documenting how I felt. And then I, and then I read up on this thing about using ketones as fuel. So what would be known now as ketone being in ketosis, ketogenic diet. And so I read up about that and then I bought some strips where you pee on them and I got a blood test to figure out my different ketone levels. And so I trained in ketosis for. I think it was, I think I did, I think it was eight weeks. So it took a couple of weeks to get into it. Eight weeks being in ketosis, same training block had come out of it, had like a bit of rest, was more fat adapted. So I started eating some carbohydrates, same block. And I realized for most of it I was pretty much the same. But it was a case of long efforts. So whether it's like a big long climb where like I was trying to like smash it on the bike, or like a long hill where I was trying to really, really push, I would get to 3/4, 60%, 80% of the top of the hill and throughout the back end of my workout and I just struggled to Sort of get that energy back. So I was experimenting with that and I found out that no bit of carbohydrates. So I wasn't in ketosis, but I was definitely fat adapted. Where my body was able to use, just to clarify what I mean by that was my body is able to use carbohydrate and fat sort of going from bouncing from one to another. But I could, I could work out, I could train, I could exert myself at a higher level with eating for longer, with eating minimal food or and just top up with some fat. I experimented being like full blown vegan when a lot of people started to talk about being vegan and athletic endurance performance in 2014. So I thought I'll give this experiment, I get the premise of it. So I went full blown vegan, 100% vegan from a food perspective and same thing. I just felt like I just wasn't recovering as well. I didn't feel like I had the same amount of sustainability at high end for long periods of time. So I went back to this way of fueling where I ate carbohydrates in the form of normal vegetables, root vegetables, quinoa. I didn't really have rice or anything like that. After Nepal and I had my parasite, my gut biome changed a lot. So I can't really have gluten. So all gluten products went out the door. So I started experimenting with making my own seedy nut loafs and things like that. So you can see like I've experimented a lot with different ways of eating and now and then going into the ultimate triathlon, it was a case of i1 just trying to eat as much as I can. But to get the amount of calories I thought I could get close to needing, it was a very high fat diet with nutrient dense carbohydrates. So in short, how did I do this? Was I ended up being introduced and working with a real food sports nutrition company called 33 fuel. And I was a customer of theirs for about two years until I became an ambassador. And now I work with them quite closely as an athlete for them. And they started by just having these shakes which is 33 nutrient dense sort of superfood type things. They look like little bags of dirt. They hate me saying that, but they're really tasty and very nutrient dense. And then chia seed gels where they're dry and you put liquid in them and you shake them up, wait 10 minutes and becomes a gel. So with all of my research and everything that I'VE done and finding 33 fuel, I started to use these shakes. So I would have two or three of these shakes with couple of avocados, mashed up, an entire tin of coconut cream, seeds, nuts, all this type of stuff in the big. To go back to what you said, your Tupperware container. So for breakfast, I'm probably having two and a half thousand calories for breakfast in the case of like this mush, you know, so straight down. But you got to think, like, I'm waking up starving. So I'm getting dressed and I'm washing my face and I'm munching on this. And then normally an hour or so into the ride, I would have the same breakfast but half the amount. So within an hour or so from where I started that day, I'm having over 3,000 calories. Yes. Obviously it didn't carry on like that because it's hard to eat that amount of fat and that amount of density throughout the whole day. But that's how I started each day. And then I would have always have almonds in my back pocket or somewhere. I made a mix of sunflower seeds, which is good, high, good amount of fat and protein with cacao nibs. So raw cacao or cocoa, which is broken down and processed. It comes from the cacao seed or nut and that's crushed up and you get these little nibs. So it's like 100% raw chocolate. It's very bitter. But I love them. And they're obviously, there's a bit of carbohydrates in there, loads of fat, lots of antioxidants to help with the free radicals that I'm putting through my body because of the stress. So I had a mix of sunflower seeds and raw cacao nibs, and that's how I was fueling. And then at lunchtime, which a lot of people saw, and I've actually been criticized a bunch of times, is at lunchtime I'd have a salad, and you probably saw it in the film Crunchy Salad. And people are like, he didn't eat enough. The reason why he, you know, he was struggling in a couple of days because he didn't eat enough calories and this and that, whatever. No one's ever asked me, like, how many calories did you eat or what was in your salad? For me, you know, those salads was, yes, there was lettuce, yes, there was carrots and tomatoes and peppers and all these good stuff. There was also seeds, there was also nuts. There was also chickpeas. Sometimes There was ham, sometimes a Spanish omelette, so eggs and potato. And that was always, you know, half a gallon, so to speak, of olive oil. So in that salad, I'm probably getting easily over a thousand calories from the salad. So people saw that I was eating salads with a bit of chickpeas. He doesn't know how to eat, probably doesn't know how to fuel. I wasn't going to then talk to the camera and talk this. No one wants to see that. So that's how I was fueling. Brilliant.

It's really interesting. Really interesting, because I remember seeing the salads and thinking, that doesn't feel right. But I'm sure you know what you're doing. But no, it's really interesting. And how did the Ultimate Triathlon end up becoming an Amazon documentary? How did you get it from concept to being on our tv?

Oh, my goodness. That's why I'm bald. You know, my hair felt. No, not really. I had this idea, as I said, come back to the. I want to be this endurance adventurer as my career. And it was just a pipe dream, running away from life type thing. Sounded good at the time. And one of the things was I want to have wanted to have some documentaries made about it because I wanted to do these big epic challenges and have people come along with me for the ride. That had nothing to do with I want to be on TV or I want to be famous. I definitely don't want to be famous. Yeah. I tell people I want all the. All the connections and the monetary rewards from being famous, but I want to walk down the street and no one know me. And I know that doesn't work. Yeah. So I'm quite happy with not having the other stuff while I can still walk down the street and no one knows me. So it was about showing people that what it's like to go on these big epic journeys. And I thought, for the ultimate trap, I'm gonna have to have a documentary made about it. A guy got in contact with me just when I was starting to brainstorm how I can make this happen. And I said, look, I've got no money. You know, I've got no money. I'm trying to. I had a few sponsors that helped me get to the start line. I had to take out some personal loans as well. So my. My bank paid for part of the Ultimate Triathlon. So I invested myself. I went all in. And two weeks, I think it was before I was due to fly out to two or three weeks before I went to fly out to Spain, the filmmaker who's going to come out and basically had no money. I said, ultimate trust and I'll pay for your expenses for the two weeks are out there and I'll give you a large chunk of the rights of the film and then whatever you feel is best, you do it and I'll just come along for the ride with you. And he was like, that's cool, sounds great. He's got control over film. I didn't really mind because there'd be a film made fun. Two or three weeks before I went out, he calls me and said, luke, I'm really sorry. So I pitched it that I had this documentary being made to some of the sponsors. I had three, four magazines that I was being commissioned to write articles for, saying it's going to be on a documentary or the rest of it. And he said, I can't come out. I've got some paid work that it's going to be reoccurring. It's a multi year contract to do some filming. And it's the first year is now I have to leave next week and I can't be at your ultimate triathlon. So I'm thinking, holy crap, like, this is just like, how do I get a filmmaker with no money? It was, I don't want to say the next day, but I'm going to say days later, I received a direct message on social media from a guy simply saying, I heard you on a podcast that you did talking about the ultimate triathlon, having a film made about it. I'm a freelance film editor. If you need any editing done, any promos done, I really want to help you out. I'm looking for a project to help out with. I know you've got a filmmaker, but if I can help in any way, let me know. So I text him and I said, are you around tomorrow at 2 o' clock for a chat? He was like, yep, sure. I said, fine, I'll be running, but call me at 2 o'. Clock. So he calls me and I said, do you want to come and film it? He's like, I thought you had a filmmaker. Well, he pulled out, there's a spot now here's the deal. Offered him the same deal. And I said, look, it's up to you. And he said, I mean, I'm there, I'm doing it. And I thought, well, hang on, are you married? Yeah, I've got a wife. Okay. Do you have family? Yeah, I've got kids. I'm like, go ask your wife, you know, if you can do this because you're not going to make any money for like two weeks plus you have to edit the film, do all this. So anyway, so the next day, text me says, I'm in. And it was by complete. I don't want to say luck, because I worked hard to promote the ultimate triathlon. And it was just this guy heard me on a podcast and he reached out and I said, yep, fine. So he came out. It was just filmed by one person. I've spoken to many professionals and they've said two to three people would have taken to film that. One person filmed that. He hired a camera to get a better camera to film it with. We had a bunch of GoPros stuck on the bike, on the van, on me for a period of time. And yeah, he filmed it himself, edited himself, you know, I paid for a few bits and pieces at the end of it. And then we took it to a few film festivals, won a few awards. I organized seven screenings in four different countries. So in Australia, was in la, it was in Northern Ireland, it was in the UK and went out. And it was the feature film of an adventure festival in Poland as well, randomly. So, yeah, it's been around the world. And it was a case of what do we want to do with it now? And he said, well, Netflix is very tricky to get onto, but let's put it on Amazon prime to start with. And so he did his little thing and got in touch with people and ended up putting it on Amazon Prime. And it's being watched a hell of a lot more than I thought it would be, which is really cool. And I get, I would say 15 to 20 direct messages from people every week who watch it.

Well, that's fantastic. I mean, that must be incredible to a have people coming and talking to you about this crazy adventure that you went through, but also to be able to relive bits of it, because there must be certain bits that you couldn't have. You couldn't have, you know, seeing the state that you got yourself into seeing, you know, you couldn't have ever relived some of that without the video footage. So that must be brilliant. And then that obviously led on to the 500 man. So tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I finished the Ultimate Triathlon and I was in a physical, mental, emotional, pretty dark place. So I had a bunch of different physical ailments. Let's say after the. After the Ultimate Triathlon, which I talk about chasing extreme in my book, very in depth. And 2016 was basically a recovery year. I had this idea in 2016, I thought 5, 500 men and it could be like a triathlon, non stop, 10k swim, 390 bike and 100k run. Now that's basically a little bit longer than a double ironman. So in terms of could I do it? There was never a could I do it? It was just a case of I've just got to do the training because it's pretty, pretty much a double ironman and I would be choosing a course. So after the ultimate triathlon, one of the things that I've, that I've shifted to was I want to try and do a few more things that were inclusive, where people would come and join, join me, you know, like, because that's one of the things that a lot of people said, oh, I wish I could have come and joined you to the ultimate triathlon and cycled with you and whatever. And so I created this 500 man simply to be a one. It was raising money for charity. It was one of the second thing, only the second thing I was raising money for charity for. And I wanted to get people to come and join me. So if people want to come and join me for a swim, I swam out at my local lake down here in southwest London in Shepparton, where I swim regularly. And I created a looped course for the bike ride. And then I live near Richmond in southwest London and I was just gonna run loops around Richmond park to do the 100Ks and I was inviting people. I had a couple people come and join me for the swim. Shepparton's really busy on a Saturday morning, so there's a bunch of people out there. We got permission to film. So all the lifeguards were out there, all excited, the guys on the kayaks. My wife came out with a GoPro. She would swim out in front of me and she'd be hanging in the water holding up the GoPro and I'd swim past. We got some footage from, from the water and I did the 10k swim. And it was just a case of then I wanted people to come and join me on the bike and then on the run. And it was going to take me a day and a half. It was really just this. And I convinced the same filmmaker from Physique, Jay from Physique Media, to come out and film it. And I said, look, I'll give you a few hundred quid, come and do it and you do whatever you want with it. Whatever you get from it, you do whatever want with it. Just a bit of fun, something to show. And I got a couple of the brands who I work with now, they help sort of COVID costs and all the rest of it. And that was, that was basically the 500 man. But it didn't quite go to plan.

No, I don't know how much you want to share of that, but no, I mean it clearly it didn't go quite according to plan, did it? It sort of, yeah, the bike element. I mean, I suppose this then comes back because I don't want to spoil it for people that haven't seen it, but I suppose it comes back to this kind of recurring theme that we touched on right at the start actually, which is injury. So obviously injury played your football career, then you had a number of problems in the ultimate triathlon with injury particularly around your knee and kind of finishing on crutches. And then the 500 man. Is that kind of, is that sort of recurring similar injuries or is it just, you know, is it just.

No. After the ultimate triathlon there's a, there's a massive shift that, that, that happened in my mind in terms of the way I trained. Like I over trained for about three years and I'm quite happy to say that now. And I was using, I was using endurance sports as an escape, almost like an addiction and I was really over training the mental battles that I was going through with my mental health, which I speak about very openly in my book Chasing Extreme. But the thing is like, it's not the first time I've got this question and one thing that I always say is leading up to the ultimate triathlon, yes, I had injuries in the marathon de Saab's and I had injuries in my football career. But what about the dozen or so ultramarathons where I never got injured? What about cycling from London to Newquay? 412km non stop. I didn't get an injury. What about doing a double ironman and I never got injured. What about doing all these things? Yes, I've been injured. If you look at it. Oh, he's been injured numerous times. But you've got to put that into perspective of how many of these big challenges I did in a very short period of time. So it's a very valid question, you know, and if, if, if the shoe is on the other foot and I was looking at someone and I was saying, wow, like there always seems to. You get injured and you don't finish these things. I would say the same thing. But there's also thousands and thousands and thousands of Kilometers of big challenges where I did it, no problem. But the 500 men was, was. Was very different because I, I don't see it as. As an injury. What happened to 500 men. It was. It was environmental. Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was environmental from. From the heat. You know, we don't have to go into specifics, but it was definitely environmental heat. And I talked about, like, why I think that was. I made a mistake, you know, in a swim by wearing a wetsuit when I should have just swam in my Speedos because I think that started to overheat me. But it was. Yeah, it was definitely a case of, yeah, it was the environment that. That got me. You know, who would have thought that I would have overheated doing a triathlon in the UK? So, yeah, exact. Exactly. I've been here over 10 years, so I'm definitely more of a. More of a British these days. But, yeah, the 500 man was really interesting because I listened to my wife, who was part of my crew of the Ultimate Triathlon, and she and one of the guys who I was cycling with, who was cycling the whole length with me, he thought I was unsafe to cycle with. And my wife just sort of said, you're not cycling. Don't care. And I. Stupidly or intelligently, there's two ways to look at this. Said to her, out of the challenge, leaving it in your hands. So she's an Susan osteopath and she's my medical team and she takes care of me from a physical standpoint. And I just said, look, I'll leave it up to you. And we're at this point, she's just like, you're done for now. We need to rest because you're weaving all over the road and it's nighttime and this is not safe. So we had a very big discussion at the end of that, months after it happened, to agree to disagree. I think she should have kept. Let me. Kept going and she stood by her and it was like, emotions aside, let's pretend we're not married. Let's pretend I'm an athlete and you're the medical officer. And we did that thing. So that was always interesting, but we agreed to disagree and we've moved on. So. But then to create the short film and put it out there again on Amazon, it's been really interesting because I talked about the 500 men quite a lot after, and I just sort of thought people would go, ah, was one of those things. It's an environmental. It happens. The amount of. The amount of Support that I got, and I didn't need support, I was totally fine. And people to say, well, you could have just not put the film out there. You could have not actually did it because I didn't do the 500 man. And we called it quits. And in a dramatic way, which you saw at the end, but it was a case of, yeah, but this is real life. Just because you. This is what I say. I talk about this on stage all the time. Just because you work hard in life doesn't mean you're going to achieve what you want to achieve, you know, because working hard is a prerequisite. So I trained my backside off. I knew how to train for this. I did everything I could and it didn't go my way on the day and I could reflect afterwards and go, I think I could have changed that or that. And it may have made a difference. But in the grand scheme of things, every time you set out to do a big challenge, whether that's starting a business or it's like if you had a. If you wanted to start a new business as an entrepreneur and you got this great new idea and you said, right from day one, we've got a camera crew to film me and nine months time, it falls on its face and you've got all this footage, a lot of people would say, well, let's not show that because I failed, and let's just show the next one when I sell it for half a billion, right? Well, I was like, well, no, let's show it. Let's put it out there and show people that just like in life, nothing always goes to plan all the time. And sometimes things happen outside of your control and it's okay to show your vulnerability, that you're not this superhuman person that just does everything they set their sights on and pushes through everything that you are human. And that was the whole point of why we put out the 500 men. How we did.

I think it's brilliant you did put it out because, you know, so many people, as you say, would have just gone, didn't work. Let's not bother. And when I sat down to watch it, I wasn't expecting for it not to play out with you finishing it. And so actually I thought it was. I thought it was great that you did put it out there because it shows that, you know, these things, particularly the sort of things that you're trying to do, just don't always go according to plan. And you just gotta. You've got to see that the best of it. So I'll ask you two last questions conscious that you've been extremely generous of your time. First one is what's next?

Now what?

Clearly you've got more of these things up your sleeve. What's next?

Let's just say we're recording this in the middle of the global coronavirus epidemic. Let's just say that is not happening. Right. I, I have a plan for next year, 2020 and a plan for 2021. So it took me four years to, from concept to completion of the ultimate triathlon and I went from zero as a broken down into footballer to then completing it. So I understand what it takes to create these big challenges and logistically, financially, all the rest of it, try and make them work. So I'm married now, wasn't married at the time and 18 months ago sat down with my wife and I said I've got a plan. So she rolled her eyes and she said okay, all right, hit me. What is it? Because I like, I don't do these big challenges for anything but from the pure fact that they feel like an adventure and I love, and I love adventures and I just love going on these adventures. That's why I don't do a lot of races. Because racing an Ironman, and don't get me wrong, when you're racing an Ironman to go fast, the amount of respect I have for that is off the charts. But for me to go and do that it's, I'm not interested in going fast like it does have no interest in me. So I would rather go and do an Ironman distance on the weekend by just by myself, go and swim in a lake and go and do a bike and to have an adventure, not to do a race, that's my personal reason why. One of the big reasons why I do these big challenges. Okay, and we're saying that is I'm like I said to my wife, I would like to do a couple more big things. Like I'm not old, I'm very young, some 37. But at the same time is these take a lot out of you physically, mentally, emotionally. They take a lot of time out of your, not your year to do our nine month training block. Like to do these big things, you've got to sort of start training for them years in advance, especially big ones. So I had this idea of what I wanted to do this year which has obviously been taken off the table, which is fine. But next year and the year after I've got two big challenges. One next year is in the uk so so if you're in the uk, look out when I do announce that that is really coronavirus will dictate if that goes ahead next year or not. And the year after is something that I'm working towards and something that I really want to do and it will be the biggest thing that I will ever do and I won't. That'll be it. That'll be my biggest big thing and it's a, it's a very long adventure. I haven't announced anything yet but I'm just going to leave that little lure out there for you that I have a very big challenge next year in the UK and then a very, very big challenge coming the year after in 2022. And everything that I do now, all my training, everything I'm doing at the moment and everything I've been doing for the last six months has been with 2022 in mind. And that for me, that's how I work best. Well, that's.

I look forward to hearing what those are in due course. And my last question is, are there any books that you. Other than Chasing Extreme, which clearly we all now need to read because we've just got a snippet of what is, you know, some incredible stories that you've got to tell and you know, a couple, a few things we haven't even touched on yet or haven't got time to today. But are there any other books that you would recommend that you particularly often give away or that you've found really helpful in your journey?

So the books that I enjoy and that I read, I read a lot of. This probably doesn't come to a surprise because I've touched on bits and pieces of what I do these days for a living in terms of performance mindset coaching is I read a lot of neurology books and I read a lot of books on mental strength and yeah, things like that. And was one book that I read that was. It was really. I got a lot out of it. It's called the Leading Brain. It's from two psychologists. It's not a textbook, it's very easy to read. So if you're thinking like oh, it's going to be too dry, it's not basically two psychologists and they have created a program that they teach in corporations, all science based and as a really easy read. But some of the golden nuggets, as I call them, that I got out of that in terms of psychology, one was to do with Habits as well, which is really cool. And the other book that I go back to Time and time again is Viktor Frankl's search. Yeah, because the reason why I love that, the reason why I love that is for many years I've talked about having hope, opening the conversation around hope. And Victor Frankl's book is, you know he's he and to paraphrase it he could tell when someone in the concentration camps was going to die because he knew when they gave up hope and as soon as they gave up hope he knew that when he's out there only got a week left and they're done. And even before I first read the book years ago I had this conversation with numerous people about you know, some people would say I hope to do this and people say no, don't hope, say you will do it. I'm like well yes, but first you've got to hope because when you hope to do something it starts a conversation, you know, it's almost like it gets you to the start line. If you don't hope to do it, if you say I can't do it then you're not even going to get to the start line. If you say oh well I can't Quite go from 0 to 100% positive and say I will do that ironman next year to get you to the start line of your training you might say well I hope I can do it, I hope I can, you know I hope I can get to the start line, I hope I can, you know, swim 2.4 miles and then all of a sudden if you start reframing it like that you can start coming conversation well if I hope to do it well what's stopping me? What do I need to do to do it? So I started to play around with this idea of yes, if you can go straight from, from zero to I will do it and starting to act but let's be honest, not everyone can have that amount of self belief. So I talk about having hope, having self belief and then building confidence and I think it's a progression.

I think that's brilliant, that's a fantastic book and I talk a lot about it in business because it's an incredible business book because of what Viktor Frankl went through and kind of the insights as to our purpose and why and all you know and I think that I think the line is something along the lines of he who knows his meaning will withstand anyhow. But I've never really made the link with that and sport and how hope is the next step before sort of I suppose, commitment, you know, mental commitment. I think that's that's brilliant. That's really good. And I haven't heard of the leading brain before so I'm going to go and check that one. But this has been absolutely incredible. You have got so many stories tell. It's been absolutely brilliant. I'm extremely grateful for you taking time out of your day to share these with us. I'm guessing that the best place for people to find out about your performance mindset coaching is your website. Do you want to just remind us what that is and spell it so that I don't get it wrong?

Yeah. So luketobersky.com and my last name's T Y B U R S K I but I'm sure you'll see it in the show notes on There is everything from you can get my books, my books are on Amazon. My book is on Amazon. The ultimate triathlon documentaries on Amazon. 500 mans on Amazon. I also basically put everything that I know about performance mindset I. E. How to overcome obstacles, adapt to certain setbacks and see opportunities that maybe you never saw before. Everything that I've been training myself, training my brain, training my mind to help me optimize my physical performance, I actually put into a course end of last year. So I have a course that's pre recorded, it's on teachable or there's a link on my website and it's called the Performance mindset for athletes course. And it's called literally because it came about where I kept getting asked on stage, how do you keep running? Whether this is a sport talk or a corporate talk or a seminar or a keynote talk where people don't care about sport, it's a business function or something like that. I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of property investors all around the world and they say, well, how do you keep pushing yourself? You know like when we're struggling to get investment or when we're trying to close a deal or when how do you keep going? And it's like, well if you're struggling to keep going in the moment then you're always going to go. So just like education, you want to gain more knowledge, you've got to learn to gain that knowledge in sporting realm. If you want to be mentally stronger, you've got to train your brain to be mentally stronger. You want to be physically stronger, you've got to train to become physically stronger. So I would give people a few little bits and pieces at the end of my talks because obviously I don't have hours on end to give away everything but I'D say I've been training my mind to optimize my performance since I was about 13. I started meditating at 13 years of age, not because my parents were that way of kind. I was playing elite Sport and at 13, 14 we had coaches that were doing meditation, that were doing breathing exercises, that were doing mindfulness exercises. I loved it. All my mates thought it was like hilarious and mess about but I thought it was cool. So since, you know, nearly 20. Well yeah, for over 20 years I've been training my mind. So all the techniques that I know work for me and a lot of them that I've now over the last probably like 5, 10 years have sort of dovetailed them with science. And I put that in my own way, but I can back them up with, okay, this has been proven in science. I've been doing this for 10 years. Awesome. Must be doing something right. I put that into an online course and so on my website, luketoberski.com it's called performance mindset for Athletes course and everything goes through there. Social media I'm at Luke Tversky. I do all my own social media. So come and say hi and we'll have a chat.

Fantastic. Well, huge thank you. You've been extremely generous with your time and there's some great stories there and great pearls of wisdom in there as well. So thank you very much. Luke.

What incredible guy Luke. Isn't he bursting with energy, enthusiasm and a drive to achieve things beyond most people's wildest dreams? You can find out more about luke@luketobersky.com that's spelled T Y B U R S k I so luketoberski.com you can also watch his amazing things on Amazon and there's just so much there to learn but also to just enjoy watching people achieve incredible things. So I hope you enjoyed that. Don't forget to share those photos on Instagram with Tribathlon while you're out on your adventures, whether you're cycling, running, swimming, whatever it is, please do share those photos with Tribeathlon. Until the next time, keep on cycling, running or swimming or a bit of all of them. Don't Forget to check out 33fuel.com if you want to get faster, fitter and healthier through their incredibly high quality, health conscious, endurance, nutrition. And if you use the discount code TA33 you'll be able to get a 10% discount. So they that's capital T capital A33 the numbers and you'll get a 10% discount off your order@33fuel.com you won't be disappointed. Don't forget to download the Tribathlon app for more amazing podcasts, but also to help you train, compete, and to build your tribe.

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