How To Train Like a Hybrid Athlete | Fergus Crawley

That was the first knock in that process I'd had, where it was the first experience that things aren't as black and white as I wanted them to be. Every day I felt like a failure because I didn't feel like I was moving myself towards those linear goals because I was in a negative place mentally. The value for me is it's the only time during the week that I'm sort of free from distraction. So I will actually go into long runs, long rides with kind of a list of things to unpack and think about. Focus on the things you enjoy first and hold onto them and sort of protect those elements. But you don't need to be doing push-pull legs, push-pull legs every week to be able to be in shape and strong enough to move things forward.

Let's go! Guys, welcome back to The Game Plan. We have an actual athlete as a guest today. We have got someone who can run more than 5K.

Sometimes. Sometimes. I ran 5 miles here yesterday and in the heat I was struggling. I was struggling.

Fergus, welcome to the show. Have you been fine in Marbella? How's the head?

The head's still a little bit foggy. I drank more on Sunday than I have done in all of 2024 combined, but what better place to do it than here? It's class. It is good. Oh, that's good. And, uh, yeah, it's been a couple of days of active recovery.

What have you, um, like, what brought you here? Is it like a friend's birthday or something?

So a friend that actually grew up here, I haven't seen him in about 4 years, and we were trying to sync up in London. He said, I'm actually— my birthday, my granddad's 80th this week, which is tonight for them.

Can't be a good 80th.

Exactly. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna tag along. I've never met your granddad, but let's, let's link up at the weekend. So I saw him, saw him this weekend, uh, we stayed just down the road, and yeah, no, it was, it was just first time in a while we'd seen each other, which was good. Nice. And a good couple days either side of what was probably something that— the reason that I don't drink very often. I have been reminded as to why I don't drink very often.

Yeah.

So restarts the cycle.

Yeah. What venues did you go to, actually?

Playa Padre on Sunday. Best. And then Memento briefly, and then left at 2 in the morning, 'cause that's as much as I can handle these days.

Oh, shit. Memento. That's heavy. That stays open till like 6 or 7.

I know. That was my concern. It just hit a point where I was like, "I..." Yeah. "I don't feel comfortable." You just snuck away. You're like, "This is too alien for me now." I need to leave now. Well, hands on knees.

You know what, I'm like, the older I get, the less I go out and the less I drink, really. And when I first came to Marbella, like, you know, a few years ago now, you know, um, we would go out so much and we'd be so excited.

So trigger happy when you got here.

Exactly. And so it was like kind of pandemic still, like half, half lockdown. Yeah, like the world was super locked down. Marbella was kind of open.

Proper strict to start with though.

It was, but in 2020, then in 2021, it was like pretty much all open. So we had like, we were like, we have to go out. We were like, it would be rude not to. And so, you know, we did everything. And then as time goes on, you realize like, oh, the beaches here are beautiful, the weather's beautiful. I want to be up early doing podcasts, training outside. So the healthy side of Marbella, it becomes just more, you know, just kind of a better option that you'd rather do. But I'm so glad to hear that you like—

I mean, to be fair, that's what like both Dave and I's takeaway has been the past couple of days is I think, 'cause it was kind of a bit of a nostalgic, oh, should we go to Marbella? And go for a big one like we did in 2018. Was the last time we saw each other in the setting. We're like, well, we've moved on a lot since 2018. So actually on Monday morning we're like, you know what? I think nostalgia's bullshit. Yeah.

I hate you.

I think we'd rather just have had a long dinner and then got up early on Monday and just worked in the same room individually on our own businesses and then sort of had dinner again that night.

We're getting old.

Gone to the gym. That would've been great. So. Yeah, lessons learned. But yeah, it's whenever I do drink these days, it's always— there's got to be like a specific set of criteria that feels like it justifies a hangover. I won't, I won't ever drink just for the sake of drinking these days at all because it just doesn't, it just doesn't equal a good outcome when there's things I want to be focused on. And if I find I can't focus on things I actually enjoy, I get really pissed off at myself and the self-punishment cycle.

Oh man, that shame and guilt. And I also think if you don't save it for special events, when you do have a special event, it takes away from it. You're like, I went out last week, like, I'm not as excited to go out and have fun. And so how do you find, like, alcohol, from even like a scientific level, how does it affect your endurance, your performance, just while we're on the topic?

So obviously muscle protein synthesis, it destroys it, which, which is, which is one thing. But the big thing that I've always found from an actual metrics point of view is heart rate will always be higher for a couple of days afterwards. Fatigue will always feel higher. I'll feel sluggish, I'll feel less snappy. In terms of the mechanisms at play, your whole system is just compromised, which means aerobically you're going to be compromised. You're not going to be as efficient in everything, which means that you'll accumulate more fatigue from doing the same amount of stuff. So yeah, I did a, I did a moderate effort 5-miler along the beach the other day, and that felt like a decent hit out, even though that'd normally be a pretty routine. I mean, I'm not used to the heat, obviously. Running, running with the top off in, in what was it, 28 degrees, is not something you get to do very often in Scotland. Yeah, I'm always— because I was in South Africa in February and went too hard in the sun training for a couple of days and I did feel beaten up. But yeah, it's just, it destroys your training efficiency. And the main thing is it just destroys your excitement for it, which, when I've got a lot of training volume to get through, a lot of things to tick, if I'm not excited about it, it feels like a chore. And that's not why I do these things. So again, it comes back to when is it worth accepting a hangover and when is it just a bad decision?

Yeah, and I find for me, the biggest impact is just mess up my sleep. Like, especially if I am having a few drinks these days, I actually much prefer, just out of preference, not only the impact on my sleep, I much prefer doing it during the day, like at lunch or something, and then you wind down in the evening. I find I'm just way better off the next day. Like, sleep is just, as you probably know, is just a fun— like, it's kind of like the, the, the secret to it all. Like, we all know by training nutrition, you know, we all focus on that. Sleep is like the foundation of everything. So like, for example, one of the reasons the other day I was like we have to do the podcast in the morning. Yeah, I don't consume caffeine after 12 PM, so I was like, I really enjoy doing a podcast when I've got like a nice caffeinated drink. And so I'm like, no, we got to do it in the morning. So I've really started to focus on my sleep like more than ever in the last like year or two. So anything like caffeine in the evening, alcohol, I'm like nerding out on sleep.

I'm the same, caffeine curfew 11, sometimes 12. Caffeine curfew? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you heard that before?

It's like CCing somebody in an email and then You see caffeine curfews. We're nerding out. We're nerding out.

Hard line. Gotta have a rule, otherwise you might just think, "I'm a little bit sleepy at half one." And then before you know it, you're lying in bed like, "Ah, no." So you mentioned Scotland there.

What was it like for you growing up in Scotland?

It was brilliant. I mean, aside from the obvious things that everyone will bring up, which is, I mean, we have similar weather patterns, don't we?

I think Scotland's worse 'cause it's more north and up.

Yeah, and wind. Yes. Oh, yeah. Glasgow's wetter. Edinburgh's windier. Both are cold and unpredictable.

So those flexes— we're wetter, we're windier.

Yeah, it just depends. It depends which side of the coin you want to fall on. Neither are great. But, um, exposures to every type of sport— the thing I'm most grateful to my parents for is any sport that me and my brother wanted to try growing up, they'd let us try. Okay, so skateboarding, golf, cricket, rugby, football, anything and everything. And the exposure that I got to that allowed me to figure out what I enjoyed and just develop skills and meeting new people, all the skills that come with it, which is why I kind of still try and do as much as I can these days. I think character building, getting out on a rugby pitch on a Tuesday afternoon and then having a teacher shout at you for not having your top button done up when your hands are like this, I can't do it.

Like Glass.

Yeah, stood in the shower. Yeah, so it's, um, I think that's one of the best things about it. It was, it wasn't, it was never that comfortable, and on days where it was, you really appreciated it. So good culture of rugby. Not the best sporting nation at anything in the world really, other than apparently elephant polo one year.

Okay, I do not know what that is. As in like polo on elephants?

I believe so. I don't know, I just assumed. I didn't do any more research beyond that, but— We're gonna have to fact-check this people. I think so, pull that up, pull that up. And curling. I think we were really good at curling one year.

Bicep curling, right?

Yeah, of course, yeah.

I'm like, I thought I was the best in the world at that.

Celtic. There's a Celtic connection there somewhere. But, um, yeah, I think the English accent comes from parents being from the Northwest. They moved up because my dad played cricket and played for Scotland in the end. And yeah, just loved it because it was very character-building, very— you've got flat roads, you've got hilly roads, you've got oceans, you've got lochs, you've got mountains, you've got all this stuff, which is great. And it's all— the best thing about Edinburgh, in my opinion, is half an hour to an hour where you've got pretty much every element of Scotland you'd ever need before you get to like otherworldly, different planet level stuff that's 5 hours away. And you're there like, huh, no phone signal, no supermarkets.

Nice.

It gets mad, it gets wild. But when you go to those places, it does feel pretty special. I've done a few events in places like that, and you do think, this is crazy that this is the same country that I live in, kind of just down the road. Just down the road in American terms. Yeah, it's a 5-hour drive.

And so was rugby your main kind of sport that you played as a youth?

So I was, um, right up until 18, and then I had 3 concussions in 4 weeks. Nice. No more rugby. No more rugby. So I was, uh, I was pretty close to an issue with my brain after the last one, because the challenge was that the first one was on a rugby pitch. You then have 3 weeks before you're allowed to play again once you've passed your concussion test. In the middle of that, we were on a rugby tour to Canada, and we were on a lazy river, like a water park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, rugby boys, until lazy river became a little bit more dynamic river.

In Toos River.

I was grabbed by the shorts in my dinghy, and I thought, "Oh, I know what's happening here. I'm going under." Got pulled through my dinghy, thinking, "Huh, he's done well here. He's got me through in one, like, just wishbone through." Yeah. And then picked up, sort of dump tackled out of the water, kind of thinking, "Uh-oh." Like, pop out the water, like, "Uh-oh," before I go back down. And then smash my head off the bottom of the floor. And because it wasn't on a rugby pitch, none of us considered it was a proper concussion.

It wasn't like recorded.

And then— The third one was a rugby pitch after the 3 weeks. So no, it was— so it was 4 weeks after the first one. And yeah, just got knocked unconscious over a ruck and kind of woke up like, oh, oh. And then woke up again on the Tuesday after the Sunday, and I can't really piece together the memories of the Monday.

Fuck. I remember. So the whole reason— that's why, like you mentioned rugby— the whole reason I got into fitness, into gym, was actually from playing rugby.

Yeah.

So I remember, and this is actually kind of funny, you know the way nowadays kids are all obsessed with like David Laid and, you know, all being shredded and being aesthetic. I was like, there wasn't— Instagram didn't exist when I was first like 16 or whatever. And I would just watch like rugby, you know, rugby players. And I play rugby and our coach would like weigh us every day like cattle.

Yeah.

And we all just wanted to gain weight, you know. We didn't want to— we didn't care about abs. So my entire teen and teen years were just spent like, you know, getting into the weights room, playing rugby, and trying to gain weight. Which in hindsight, I'm so glad I was on a permabulk for my younger years because but it gave me a great foundation and it kind of like, you know, I got good results as a young lad. But it's so funny, like nowadays all these kids are starving themselves and cutting them, cutting down to look good for what they see on Instagram. And it's like, in my, my era was just completely different. So how I got into fitness as well was, you know, playing rugby with my school. And I remember like I was pretty good, pretty good at rugby, but nowhere near the best. But I was really good at like strength and conditioning and like even the fitness aspect of things because I'm a very simple man. Bro, I'm not— my brain, it's a little bit on the slow side. So when it came to all the drills and the passing, everything, I'd always like mess up, switched off. But if it was just sprint, run a straight line, lift this—

what position did you play?

Flanker. Okay, yeah, nice. The best position, really.

Come on, this is 6, sometimes 7.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's all the same. And so how you got your concussion— actually, so I got a concussion once as well, and just like that, you wake up on the pitch and you're saying like, horrible, crazy shit. Like you're like, where's my— like all this mad shit, embarrassing stuff. It's like you're in a dream. And, uh, yeah, that was the only time where I got a concussion. And yeah, I just had to take a few weeks off. It was chill though. My brain hasn't been the same since then, I think.

Interesting.

Yeah, I'm like, now that I think about it, unrelated, it all changed from that week onwards. But so, right, you're playing rugby, you're getting concussed, then you switch to hybrid training. No, tell me how that came about.

Well, I kind of did. Yeah, so it was, um, I was told I couldn't play rugby again, but in the back of my head I kind of didn't compute that. It was more like, keep training as a rugby player, keep training as if you were going back to it. But that was— I think it was because I didn't really know anything else. So what I did was I just upped my running volume, upped my lifting volume, understood nutrition. I did a lot of deep diving at that age on understanding just intake versus output, all these sort of things that weren't really common knowledge back then. It was nutrition advice around rugby was very much food quality, and there was no understanding of energy balance or considerations around that. So I learned that, and then kind of quite quickly understood the power and control I had over the outcomes, which was really exciting to me because I had gone from having community sport teamwork on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday every week, like done, set like that, and that was great. And then that was just taken away from me like that. So I kind of looked for a solution, which I found in the form of self-driven health and fitness, which kind of just became strength and conditioning for rugby. It then became a little bit longer distance running. I was doing maximum 10K But as with everybody that gets into running, there wasn't huge rhyme or reason as to the pacing or the strategy. It was more a fast effort 5K on Tuesday, hard effort 10K on Thursday, and then wonder why I tore my calf 6 weeks later.

Me right now, getting, getting— because I start running and that's pretty much it.

It's a journey we all need to go through.

I'm— I've got those topics lined up. Like, this is actually a consultation for me.

Yeah, it's a podcast, it's a selfish pursuit. I have lots of questions I want to answer. Yeah, and we're gonna Show this other people.

I'm like, I can't afford therapy or a coach, start combining the two.

So it's, um, I think it was, it was, I went from, so I was about 102 kilos at the peak of my rugby weight and got that all the way down to 76. It got a bit unhealthy actually. I kind of, I got fixated on, I'd say I probably slipped into the orthorexia category a little bit, certainly for a while without really knowing it. But I think it's because it didn't feel like a bad thing because I was completely like, honestly, the, the, like, the control I had then, I can't really understand how at the age of 18 I had that. Like, with my exam, it just, it completely changed my perspective on things. The control I had over food, the control I had over training meant that if I set a revision plan for my A-levels, if I was 1 minute over time or even slightly deviated from it, that, that wasn't even an option. And it was just flawless. And it led to really good exam results. Nice. Good. Aesthetically driven stuff, but I did take it a little bit too far in terms of weight loss because I just wanted to get leaner and leaner and leaner. Got to about 7-8% body fat for no show, nothing planned in. And I was looking at pictures of myself and I can be like—

I look back at it now, I'm like, I think young guys definitely get fixated on it a little bit more because like you don't really have a business or a real relationship or anything. You're like, you've less responsibilities to care about, so you're like, oh, this is everything for me. And I was the exact same. Definitely orthorexia, you know, a fear of bad foods, afraid to eat out, afraid about social events. And like, it kind of isolated me a lot from my friends when I went into college and finished school. And so it's good and bad because this is like, I did a lot of self-work and, you know, I drank less and didn't go out as much, but definitely missed out on a lot unnecessarily. Like, if I went out a little bit more, met my friends or went for a meal with my girlfriend, wouldn't make a difference, you know.

I, uh, I used to carry— they probably still exist, but there was a brand called Joseph Joseph who make like homeware cooking stuff. And I used to carry— there was like this tripod flip-out scale that I used to carry in my pocket right here, and I'd whip it out at lunchtime and I could weigh the food in the school canteen.

The teachers were like, uh, Fergus has started dealing.

Yeah, it was so confusing. But the thing was, I was so jacked at the time that they could clearly see, like, the correlation. Yeah. But everyone was like, "This is a bit weird." Yeah. But I was so completely, like, set on my vision that you are in total control. I think it wasn't even like, "Get jacked for any other reason other than you have control over what you're putting in versus what gets out the other end." Yeah. Which I think is good, because it's like black and white training. Input v. output. Is quite hard to come by in any other walk of life. Like, business, yeah, hard work equals success. You can throw any cliché at it if you want, but it's not a simple case of— unless you're world-class at Facebook advertising or whatever it might be— you put X amount in and this is what you get. There's a lot more variables at play. Whereas if you're in control of your food, if you control your training, you know that what you do here equals what you get there. And it's just a combination of time, patience, input, and an understanding. And I think that's where I just didn't take any criticism because I was like, no, I can see and feel the benefits for me psychologically. And then once I did get really, really lean, I did have a bit of a wake-up call. It was actually lads' holiday to Mexico after we finished school. Oh shit. And we were in a situation where we were a bit out in the sticks and the only option for food for breakfast we had one day was pancakes with Nutella. Two things I would not eat normally. So it was like either eat or don't eat. But I didn't know what was for lunch at this point. So it was kind of like, oh right, okay, I guess I'll just have the pancakes and Nutella. And I had it and I got to the end of the week and I had a few other things along the way and I wasn't a fat mess.

Oh man, no way. Hang on, hang on.

This isn't fit with my worldview. And then from that point onwards it was kind of a IFYM couple of years peak, probably when you were really—

yeah, yeah, when I entered.

Yeah, yeah, I think that was, um, yeah, it was that sort of era of YouTube, that was the sort of content that I consumed because it was just the strength focus, like the sort of power building, eat, be lean, stay lean, but then get strong. Yeah, but then kind of eat and just be in total control of your macros. That was kind of what I really enjoyed for a couple of years. And then went full powerlifting mode because I just kind of got stronger. I've always been reasonably strong even in a rugby setting, so it just kind of was the natural next progression. Did that for 4 years, fell out of love with that when I was working.

How come?

I just— I was working a grad job in London and I was traveling from Balham to Alperton, which for anyone in London—

I know, I know, Balham.

It's along with Alperton's Wembley.

I lived in London. I just know Chelsea and Kensington.

Yeah, I've heard of Balham. Yeah, Alperton's just just north of Wembley, I believe. Not, not the— there's nothing there to draw you there other than Genesis Gym. Yeah, which is a powerlifting gym. And I'd got to the point where I did have to, like— it was 8 weeks of training to get 2.5 kilos on the bar. Like, it was at that point. So best lifts in competition were 260 squat, 160 bench, and 250 deadlift, I think, is the best I've done in comp. I think I failed 262 like 3 times. Yeah, bastard. Um, so it was at the point where, like, the— my perception of powerlifting, and the only way I could enjoy it was in the right environment, the right setting. Yeah. But in Southwest London, there was nothing that I could access. So I traveled an hour and 10 minutes each way to the gym every night to train. And then when I put the bar down in my last powerlifting competition, I was just so underwhelmed.

Yeah.

It was just like, uh, that wasn't really— the feeling I've got right now doesn't justify all of the midnight meal deals on the Sainsbury's in Wembley as I'm sitting on the tube on the way home.

Yeah, do you have to eat a lot?

Yeah, yeah.

It was—

it was— I could finish training at 11 PM. And then it was, it was, it was, it was, it showed again that discipline that I'd built. Like, I was working in London, I was acclimatizing to that, but I kept powerlifting training throughout, and that was really, really valuable. But it just wasn't fulfilling. And I think my take on things now, especially with people getting more and more pissed off about labels on the internet and who does what and why people do certain things, is 99% of people are not the best in the world, nor are they trying to be the best in the world, nor are they professional at what they do. They're training for enjoyment or fulfillment. Which means if it's not fulfilling and you're not enjoying it, the fuck are you doing?

Yeah, I, I was never drawn to powerlifting. And like, I was— powerlifters don't get annoyed, I respect it. Like, I think it's really cool to watch. Like, you know, I follow some powerlifters on Instagram, but for some reason with me, when anytime I'm doing like, you know, a heavy single or triples, I just don't feel like I've done a workout. I'm a pump addict, you know. I love a real high rep set, drop sets, supersets, all that, that bodybuilding BS, you I love kind of trying out new machines, all that. And I just, for some reason, it just never appealed to me. And I just like, I don't feel like I was getting a full workout in. And I'm just like, let's say I get really strong and I put up a rep. I'm like, I can't carry the bench around with me and show everyone. It just never really appealed to me. But I do have a lot of respect for people that get into it. And, you know, obviously it is sick to throw up some badass numbers.

Have you ever— I mean, how many years have you been a pump addict? Many.

Oh yeah, like probably like 14.

Have you ever had like ebbs and flows where you've gone into sessions and thought, this feels a bit the same, this feels a bit repetitive?

You know what, I actually haven't. You haven't? No, not really. Like if I change my program, like I like to do, you know, some MMA training the odd time, you know, go for a run. I'll even like some days I'll change— some weeks I'll change my split, like if I'm on holidays or something. I've actually started doing some HIIT classes recently. Like, you know, I'll change things up a little bit, but I always just gravitate back towards, you know, hypertrophy training. And yeah, it's strange. I'm like, I guess I truly just really fucking love it, you know. I've been training for 14 years now, and I just love the way it makes me feel, the way it makes me look. I'm just like, I think that's my shit, you know.

Yeah.

Hypertrophy. But in terms of like, I'm not like weak by any means. Like I just said, I set a PR in bench about 2 months go, like, got like 140 kg for 3 reps. So, you know, maybe, maybe 160 is on the cards.

Yeah, probably. I think my 143 was the best I did when I did 160 in comp. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, hitting 3 plates for reps is a good feeling.

Oh man. Yeah, that's— after that I was like, all right, I'm done.

Yeah. I, I— since peak powerlifting, I've— the best I bench is 145. I can bench one— I could do 140 for a grinder right now, I think. Not today though. Yeah, I, I think that's probably off the cards, but yeah, like, I, I can, I can kind of stay within a range I care about, but like beyond 140, I stopped caring. Yeah, like 4 plates, how much heavier am I going to need to be to bench 4 plates, and how much am I gonna have to sacrifice to do that, and will I care when I get there? Yeah, I think asking myself these questions was like, okay, powerlifting maybe isn't what it once was for you, but I think what people sometimes fail to recognize is that the, the journey that they've been on with the the thing that they've been focusing on, sometimes you might have extracted all the value from that, and that's a good thing. That doesn't mean that, yeah, I've made a mistake, a waste of my time. It means that you can, you can take the lessons and apply that to something else. Whereas what I struggled with for a bit was the identity crisis of you are a powerlifter, when in reality what I could have done was say, okay, you've taken a lot from powerlifting, a lot of skills you developed, a lot of strength you've built, a lot of people you've met, all these things that went along the way. How do I now apply those to something that's going to be more fulfilling to me? And that, that's ultimately what I did in the end, but it did take me a while to to, to wrestle with that. Because it was the example I always use is I used to say no to playing golf with my friends on a Saturday because I had heavy squats on a Monday.

Yeah.

And I didn't want 12,000 steps in my legs ahead of my heavy squats. I wasn't enjoying powerlifting. I enjoy golf. I enjoy seeing my friends. But I sacrificed those two things for something like— it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

So we've gone from shredded young bodybuilder to powerlifter, and then when did we arrive at hybrid athlete?

So 20 18, I was working in London. I felt my, my mental health declining a little bit again, um, after a negative experience in the past, and decided, you know what, the mistakes you made in the past handling this, you've learned some lessons from that. What were you missing last time? A sense of fulfillment, a sense of purpose. What are you missing this time? Probably the same. So how do you find one? And I thought, okay, men's charity Movember jumped out. Rugby connection. Mustache is a bit disarming. It kind of takes away the narrative. It kind of softens it a little bit.

I've seen that pic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twinsies, twinsies style. Good at solving crimes. And I thought, what are you good at? You're good at squatting. Okay, how can we combine those two things? So I did some research and discovered that half a million men die by suicide every year around the world and thought, okay, I'm gonna try and squat half a million kilos in 24 hours. Obviously that's where everybody's—

Boy math.

Where everybody's brain would go, isn't it?

Duh, come on.

I think it was August, August in, yeah, August in London. And I phoned Movember and said, look, I'm thinking of doing this. My friend was just about to open a gym in Edinburgh, so I said, okay, I'll do it there. It can help as a bit of a PR stunt. And then got connected with my current business partner and coach, Johnny Payne, who was referenced as the guy that would help me get there because his take on it was, this isn't a strength challenge, this is an endurance aerobic capacity challenge. You've got the strength required, how do you apply yourself to it? So the main thing was building up my aerobic base whilst keeping my strength base as sort of high as it was. If it went like this, that's fine. But if the aerobic base went like this, again, I didn't need to squat 268. More.

Yeah, like, it's anonymous.

Nobody needs to squat 360 other than top-end powerlifters. So I think I made my peace with letting go of some of that strength by having a purpose that was a little bit more important. So all I did was just start this charity campaign and, long story short, raised 24 grand with it in year one. I was 128,000 kilos in when my left knee decided to leave the building. That was after 2,100-something reps at 60 kilos.

2,100 reps. I'm just trying, I'm just trying to actually just—

the format was, I think it was 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, every minute on the minute, set of 10 at 60 kilos. So basically 25 sets, 25 sets of 10 at 60 with about 40 seconds of rest between them, 5 minutes rest. And I did that for 4 hours, then had a half hour break, and then got going for the next bit. And that's where my knee wasn't very happy. So I think with the mistake that we made with it was that in the half an hour break, I should have kept my legs moving because they kind of completely locked up. And I was like an equipped powerlifter where— oh, punching mics again. Equip powerlifters punch mics, apparently. But it was— I had the bar on my back and I almost had to like pull myself down. Like, I couldn't sync with the weight of the bar. Yeah, I had to like work against my quads that were like— it was like, it was horrible. And then rep 2 of that, that bit, my knee just just, yeah, pinged. So lessons learned, but essentially a lot of money raised. Um, huge, huge thing that I took on, but it was a case of we didn't have a blueprint to work with. We kind of just thought, just, just lift.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Do a lot, a lot of lifting in a short period of time. Um, so yeah, it was about 5, 5 and a half hours I think it was of pretty much constant squatting at 60 kilos. Didn't go the way that we'd hoped or intended in the first, in the first place, but but at the end of the day, it was a huge learning curve, huge learning curve. Raised a lot of money. And the main thing was, along the way, I discovered how much value I found in aerobic zone 2 training, how much better I felt day to day. Like, I felt not unstoppable— that sounds like a crazy thing to say—

but say it, man.

Like, day to day, walking around, like, I just felt fitter, felt lighter, more agile. Yeah, I felt strong, but I also felt— I felt it was more like I felt when I used to play rugby. Yeah, like, I felt— I felt broad in terms of my skill set. Like, it was just walking up a set of stairs as a powerlifter, I knew I was a powerlifter. Yeah, I was walking up a set of stairs now, I was like, oh, you're a well-conditioned young man.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It was, it was good to know that. And again, what I discovered was, I mean, the science supports this in terms of how much work you need to do to maintain muscle mass and strength versus how much you need to do to build it.

Yep.

Is massively—

it's like 30% easier or something like that. What's, what's the sign? There's an exact percentage, it's about 30%.

of volume required. That's it, to maintain what you've already got, um, versus what you need to build it. And that's— that means that essentially the bias now is if you've done a huge, huge strength and hypertrophy block leading into picking up endurance stuff, that's where you can be in a good position to stay in good shape, enjoy lifting. Because I think this is what a lot of people in the endurance world don't— they don't understand that people enjoy lifting. Yeah, I think that people think that you just lift to be jacked, or you just lift to look a certain way, and there's no value in that. But they don't, because they, they might not have experienced it. Like triathletes, ultra runners, marathon runners, I've spoken to, a lot of them, oh, why don't you just stop lifting and get faster? Yeah, because I enjoy the lifting.

Exactly.

The whole point, that's the whole reason I do all these things, is because I enjoy them in and of themselves. Yes, it means I need to compromise here and compromise there and not just chuck shit at the wall and hope that something sticks, because you need to be careful with how much volume you take on. But yeah, I discovered with that process, like, I saw 60 minutes of zone 2 Johnny put in. It was like 4 weeks into the process, he put run, run for an hour an hour in zone 2 heart rate, gave me a heart rate range to work out. I was like, I haven't— I can't run for an hour. I've never run for an hour in my life. That's crazy. And then having the heart rate prescription, I was half an hour in, running along a familiar part of Edinburgh, kind of wandering around, looking around, kind of realizing that I wasn't really paying that much attention to effort or running. I wasn't blowing, I wasn't sweating like a pig, and I was just kind of enjoying the process. And I thought, this is, this is life-changing. So for me, zone 2 stuff psychologically— forget the physiology for a second— has become a massive mental boost, calibration point, reflection point during the week for me to enjoy. And the fitter and more able I've become with that, the more reward that I've reaped. Where that changed is when all this became part of the job. So now Zone 2 stuff isn't as much reflective and away from the day-to-day as it once was. So I need to make sure to find that sort calibration point, reflection point within the week now because my longer aerobic sessions are kind of— I'm always filming them or there's always some sort of performance thing I need to focus on. But yeah, for me, taking, taking the top-end intensity of powerlifting or the focus intensity of a set of 12 drop sets, something like that, that real short and sharp, you've got to get your head in the zone, you've got to go with aggression, you've got Slipknot in your ears, you're caffeinated up to your eyeballs. And then the other end of the spectrum, you've got work at a really easy heart rate that feels like you're barely even working. And do it for a long period of time. And if you can do it in a nice environment, you'll actually enjoy it. Yeah, there's a huge spectrum end to end there. And if you can sort of pick up a lot of skills along the way end to end, I think it's good fun.

Yeah.

And a lot of people train for fun.

And so there's so much to unpack there, so much I want to get into. So just quickly as well, I've, I have a question. When you're doing like these long runs, this, you know, the easy long stuff, how do you sometimes deal with the monotony monotony, like in your head? That's what I find difficult. I'll get bored. You know, it's not like I'm actually that tired. Like I can keep plodding along, but I'm kind of just like bored. What helps me a lot is like a really good playlist. I know you made a video on no headphones. Is a good playlist or a podcast because again, it allows me to just literally zone out and I forget where I am. So how do you like, how do you deal with the monotony without using headphones and all these distractions?

So I think it's fair to say you have a hyperactive mind.

Oh man, we can all agree.

ADHD.

ADHD, OCD, every D. Yeah, yeah. Oh no, that's a, you know, that's a doctor, doctor checked. Yeah, that's verified.

So I do as well in quite an analytical way. And I think the value for me is it's the only time during the week that I'm sort of free from distraction. So I will actually go into long runs, long rides with kind of a list of things to unpack and think about.

Wow. I've never heard this. That's a gem right there. I've never heard that.

So it's business-wise, personal-wise, like if I've got a lot of alone time to think, think, what am I going to think about? It's an opportunity. So if you've got 2 hours, I mean, you going out your front door here and running down to the beach and running along there, that's— I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take much sympathy if you say, oh, I get bored. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna decide with you on that one.

Do a house swap, I'll go to Edinburgh.

But it's, it's— if you, if you, if you don't often get a chance free from distraction where there's no devices nearby, we don't have somebody pestering you for something, you'd have an email chasing, you'd have somebody knocking at your door, and you've got work going on the house, you'd have somebody saying, oh, can you have a quick look at all that stuff. If you've got 2 hours of allocated time, 3 hours of allocated time, whatever it might be, if you go into that with a game plan—

yeah, hey, there we are, I made him say that.

Roll credits.

Yeah, done, we are out of here.

Then you've got a chance to unpack things. And I found the best business ideas, the best decisions in life, the best bigger picture thinking questions I need to ask myself— without getting too profound, is all discovered in that sort of state of mind because I really struggle more and more, especially recently, just the time. It's so many things from so many different angles. It's really hard to actually even an hour at a time just focus on one individual task without taking myself away to a different coffee shop and leaving my phone behind. I need to properly segment things out to get time free from distraction. So I've got I've got a notepad that I leave by the front door that I'll come in and scribble any thoughts I have as I go. It'd be easy to sort of iPhone notes it as you're running. Yeah, that goes against the point. So most of the time I run without my phone. If I, if I need it, it's in a trail bag and I can't access it.

Okay.

I run without headphones because again, that's external stimulation. And if you can't be comfortable for an hour or two without external stimulation, something's wrong. I think that's something that needs addressed. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Especially this is the therapy part of the podcast.

So especially, like, especially with the way the content and everything's going, it's just dopamine hijack. Everything's just, it's just so intense. So if you can break away from that, it's a good, it's a good sort of break from the norm. And I do think that it means that the psychological benefit of Zone 2 stuff, as well as the aerobic underpinning fitness benefit that comes with it, are equal parts. And for me, if I go a week without having Zone 2 work in, I genuinely feel worse the following week because I haven't had that time to sort of reflect and unpack things. Yeah, and that's where doing it outdoors without headphones, I think, are the two things that sort of unlock the next two doors of that process. Because it means that one, outdoors you've got more, you've got more things to engage with. If you're doing it on a treadmill, obviously you're gonna fucking hate it because you're just engaging with walls. You probably, you probably are already familiar with. If you do it at the place that you train down here, he's gonna be looking at stuff you're already looking at. Whereas if you go up into La Concha or something, and even if it's a walk, then you've got you've got something new, you've got something exciting, you've got something— oh, this is, this is a break from the day-to-day, and you'll just find your mind wandering. Whereas headphones keep you sort of lasered in on one thing. And if you— especially if it's an audiobook or a podcast, you're engaging with something else, which means that you're actually just distracting your mind, which means it might be easy to think about each step— excuse me— might be easy to think about each step more and more. Whereas I often find I kind of just go for time. And I think that, but the difference is if you're used to full send all the time, you might be running too— like, your definition of easy is probably higher than what easy actually is in terms of the heart rate zones you should be working in for easy.

Yeah.

And that is the thing that CrossFitters especially really struggle with because they go— you tell them to go easy and they go slightly less.

They get rabido.

Yeah. And that's, that's— it's not the same. So it's like like a 5K pace is probably around threshold heart rate, for example, or just above. And you're 2 zones below that for what would be zone 2 aerobic stuff, using lactate heart rate threshold as a sort of model. And zone 3, you can sort of sit quite comfortably in for half an hour, 45 minutes, and it feels less hard 'cause you're not blowing. But zone 2 should feel pretty simple. Not age-old sitting at Gasp in oversized hoodie on a recumbent bike going 0.3 miles an hour, which we've all seen, It's, it's, it's— I think the value psychologically and physically is equal parts. And again, going back to if we train for enjoyment and fulfillment first and foremost, then those two things should be essential. Aerobic underpinning of all of our fitness and the psychological opportunity to reflect week to week. I mean, if people are really good at meditating and reading books without distraction things, then maybe it serves less of a purpose. Yeah, but if you've got an analytical, hyperactive mind, that time is gold.

That's, that's my favorite thing that that I've taken away from that is what you said just at the very beginning, is get a list of things that you want to unpack and run with them. I think that's super powerful. And so we've been, we've been chatting for ages and we haven't even gone over like some of your standout achievements. Like, people like, is this guy even any good? So tell us some of your like proudest achievements and milestones.

Yeah.

Um, when it comes to, um, not, not just, you know, powerlifting, bodybuilding, but like, you know, running long distance and everything you do.

Yep. So never did a bodybuilding, and I know you did something, yeah, epic. So yeah, so never did a bodybuilding comp, was, was gonna prep for one and decided when I got really, really lean that wasn't good for me. I didn't— I decided, you know what, this isn't for me. Went to powerlifting, um, competed all over the world for, for 4 years, um, competed in Las Vegas, Finland, all that sort of stuff. Really enjoyed it and got a lot of value from that. Then pivoted into the hybrid stuff. 2018, 2019, 2020 were all charity fundraising focused.

Okay.

So all of my training was kind of focused around doing big events for Movember, raised just over £100,000 for Movember in the process, which is fantastic.

Yeah, we're gonna go back into that as well.

Yeah, cool. And then from there, 2020, I think the project raised £48,000 or something, and the amount of work to get us to the point to pull that project, it was a full-time job on top of a full-time job. And ironically frankly, it started negatively affecting my own mental well-being. So I thought, you know what, 100 grams, a great milestone to have hit. I need to take some time back for myself to focus on other things. And that's where things transitioned into more along the way. I mean, the social media for me for 2018 to 2020 was just like a training diary, like, look at how hard my training is, donate some money to what I'm doing, cheers. That's kind of— that it was, it was a funnel effectively. Um, so then from there, 2020, summer of 2020, I training at the start of the year for the Celtman Extreme Triathlon, having done my first Ironman in 2019, the year before, first triathlon in fact. Ironman Lanzarote, bad decision, don't do it, don't do it in that order is my recommendation. And then lockdown happened, which meant I had to pivot. So went to parents' house, my brother went to parents' house, we'd accumulated a lot of gym kit over the years, so had enough to focus on training for a couple of things. We then decided Jamie was going to start training to deadlift 500 pounds, run a sub-5-minute mile on the same day. And I was going to train to squat 500 pounds and run a sub-5-minute mile on the same day because that's something that's been spoken about in CrossFit Level 1 for many, many years. Nobody had ever done it. And then coincidentally, Adam Clink over in Virginia had said that he was going to train for it as well. So we both had the thought, lockdown's changed our lives, let's use this time to go for this thing. Long story short, we did it within a week of one another. So who did it first? He did it first. Oh God damn it. I didn't, I didn't really care about that at all, but it was just, it was a case of it was funny to just watch it unfold, like going back and forth. Yeah. Oh, is it, is it going to be this weekend? Is it going to be all that sort of stuff? So yeah, 500-pound back squat and sub-5-minute mile on the same day, that sort of catapulted me into this world a bit more. And exactly one year on from that, I did a 1,200-pound powerlifting total and sub-12-hour Ironman in the same day. Very, very early time to be in a powerlifting singlet, let me tell you. So that was a, um, was it 205 squat squat, 121 bench, 220 deadlift into a sub-12-hour, 3.8K swim, 180K bike and marathon all together in a triathlon format. That was a long day.

What, so what is, what's like the total amount of ground covered?

220.6K, I believe.

In one day?

Yeah, yeah. And then obviously walking from the squat platform to the deadlift platform to the bench platform.

5 meters.

12 yards, yeah. It was, so yeah, So it's 3.8K swim, 2.4 miles, sorry, 3.8K swim, 2.4 miles, 180K, 112 miles bike, and then 26.2 miles or 42.2K run, so marathon. So in that format, and then the thing that the swim was affected by the bench and the deadlifts, I could definitely felt my traps. Oh really? I just felt out of rhythm the whole swim. It was the worst swim I've ever had in a full distance race. Race. Um, but the bike was, the bike was really good, and the run, I had some GI issues that just made the second half of the run tough. But all in all, aside from the early morning and the, the fatigue, the lifting only really affected the swim because of the way that I trained up until that point. Um, but it was just funny that it literally felt exactly one year later from the 500-pound squat, sub-5-minute mile on the same day. Then December that year, December 10th I think it was, I a 600-kilo powerlifting total into a sub-6-hour 60K ultramarathon. So 220 squat, 140 bench, 240 deadlift into, yeah, sub-6 hour. I think it was 5:54 hour, um, 60 kilometers, which was a tough day out again. And the deadlift moved. The squat was tougher than I expected, but the deadlift moved surprisingly well. So I don't honestly think the lifting affected me too much. But again, the way I've always structured my training is kind of getting used to having a lot of these things consolidated into similar days. So conditioning-wise, I got used to it. Whereas if the average person that just trained in a gym setting did a deadlift and then went for a run, I'm sure the run would be a lot more affected. So it's kind of— I can't really give too many takeaways on exactly that. But yeah, balancing these two things at the same day was the sort of novelty, and I've enjoyed that process. Along the way I've done the Celtman Extreme Triathlon, I've done a double Ironman, which was a 7.6K swim, 373K bike, and 84.4K run.

In double Ironman in the same day, pretty much?

Well, it was a weekend, it was— Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, the same day it'd be, I don't think anyone could do that.

Yeah, I was like—

Especially in that setting.

Yeah.

'Cause it was Snowdonia. So, 8,200 meters of elevation across the whole thing as well, which is 400, 300 and something meters less than Everest or something, so it was ridiculous. Of us, but Snowdonia is a harsh setting, so.

I know, the swim was— I've seen it. I don't know it personally.

Not yet, not yet. Wait until your midlife crisis when you start doing all this silly stuff. But yeah, so triathlon's been a huge part of it, ultra running's been a huge part of it, done, yeah, first 100 miler was in 2019, things like that. Last year I tried to do a, actually a year before that, what was it last year? So double was 2022, yeah, 2023 I did my first strongman competition and which is really good fun. Again, taking that strength application, getting a little bit bored with barbells and thinking, you know what, let's pick up some natural Scottish stones, which is just good fun.

It's like heavy rocks, good patriotism as well, you know, shoulder.

Like, it's just, it's just silly. I love it. Um, we had a 130 kilo and 150 kilo Atlas stones delivered to the gym last week as well, so the silliness continues. Nice. Tacky. Yeah, do you know what tacky is? Tacky, as in like strong, strongman, they use it on— have you heard of it?

I'm Italian. Tacky is in like Geordie Shore, like tacky.

That is tacky. Yeah, there's a thing in strongman called tacky, which you put on, you put on stuff to make it grippier. I always assumed it was like more condensed chalk or something.

Yeah.

And I went and did my first strongman training session with tacky with the Stoltmans and discovered it's fucking glue. It's an actual glue, it's an adhesive. So you cover yourself in it, you cover the Atlas Stones in it so that you can grip it. And the first time I was pulling an Atlas Stone up to my chest Yes, it's— There's a picture.

Just rip your nipple off.

There's a picture with my nipple like out here and it's just horrendous.

Oh my God.

Nobody told me to shave myself of all hair beforehand.

I knew that anyways.

Yeah, and then the worst thing was I said to Luke Stoltman, I was like, "How do you get this off?" And he just with his big barrelly laugh was like, "Paint stripper." Paint stripper. And I'm like, "You're fucking joking." And then he comes over with like a little, like what would normally be like a little plant spritzing bottle and just sprays me down with paint stripper. Oh my God, that is—

That is a fever dream right there.

I was like, at this point I was thinking, you know what, I don't think this is gonna be for me long term. Yeah. But either way, I'm enjoying the process. Yeah.

And you did recently something ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah. So I ran 250K in one go from Edinburgh to Ben Nevis on Friday the 29th of March, which is quite recent. I'm still kind of a mi— I'm recovered from it now, but I'm still—

That's so recent, you know, like it was— it would have said like, that's like, what, about a month or two ago? Like, it would take a while to even mentally deal with that. And so is that the longest distance you've ever run?

Yeah, yeah, by some— I'd never run more than 100. I've done 100 miles before. Yeah. So everything beyond 161k was unknown territory.

Okay.

And at 151k, I was in a fucking hole.

Yeah, like, like, there's a lot to unpack there. There. I'm like thinking in my head, my little 5K, divide 250 by 5, it's that, it's 50 times harder. I'm like, I'm trying to unwrap it in my head. Like, when you're about to go off on that, like, what are you thinking? Like, how do you mentally prepare for that? So what I will say is I really want to stay on this, this 250 one because it's, it's easy for me to understand, you know, it's just running like this to that. Whereas like with the strongman, the tacky and all, I think the running is because it's so simple, it's just like how far can you fuckin' run. Yeah, yeah, really, really interesting. So how do you mentally prepare to run 250 kilometers in one go?

So simple answer is segment everything as much as you can. So try and chunk it into 55Ks, 250 1Ks, whatever you want to put it as. And in preparation, a lot of it was just getting comfortable in what I'd call your go-all-day pace. So all of my training became like 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours of just sort of moving at a pace that was sustainable over a long period of time. Time. And I got comfortable with that. But what I was struggling with in the prep was, because things were so busy, there was so much going on that details are irrelevant really, just business challenges, restructuring staff, focusing here, sort of bringing that up there, and all this sort of stuff going on that I was heavily involved in. It meant that my prep wasn't ideal in terms of how I wanted my headspace to be. So I was kind of wrestling with that, where I was irritable on my long runs, like 3, 4, 5 hours. Was after 30 minutes, 40 minutes, I'd be like, I want to get back to my desk and work.

Yeah.

And that doesn't happen to me often. So I think it made my— it meant that I couldn't get into the perfect headspace for the 250 that I felt I could have done. But what I was still trying to do was obviously create that headspace where I could just settle into this go-all-day pace. So I did as best I could within the circumstances. But I do think that my training runs weren't quite as effective as they could have been at really drilling that, get comfortable just going like this for a while. The pain is going to increase, but if you can just keep yourself calm up here, you can keep moving forward. So segmentation-wise, there were kind of 3 key sections to it. Well, 2, 2 key sections to it really, but 3 that I had in my head. So the first one was the Union Canal, which was from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Glasgow. The next one was the West Highland Way, which was the, the sort of walking trail from Glasgow to, um, Fort William, basically. So it's a very popular walking trail, but there's sort of two sections to that as well, where the first half's a little bit more pedestrian and then the terrain takes a change. So in my head, I kind of— the mistake I made was I kind of written off the canal because I'd done— I've done that many, many times before. And I kind of, I was familiar with it. Yeah. And it was flat, it was concrete.

Nice. That's like, I'd say concrete is like luxury when you're doing that.

You say that, but the impacts that came with it, I think the mistake I made was because I'd written it off when the pain started setting in at about 50, 60K, as I knew it would, I think it caught me off guard a little bit because I'd kind of just not really done much mental preparation for the canal. All my mental preparation was from the beginning of the West Highland Way onwards. So I got a bit complacent, to be honest. So when the pain set in about 60, 70K and I started to feel a bit beaten up, that section was 85K, to be clear. I was just getting pissed off with how much my feet were hurting, how much my hips were hurting because of the concrete. But I knew that the trail was coming. So all of the strategy I had in my head, the mental preparation I've done in terms of break it down like this, section to section, because we had stop-off points on the canal, they were normally about 10K apart. So it was 10K at a time. Yeah, 10K.

Okay, 10K.

10K. 10K.

That's probably the way, like, especially for my ADHD brain, that's probably the way I would like to divide it.

If you think you're— if you think I'm 6 out of— I'm 6K out of 250, you'll be fucked because it's too overwhelming. And whenever I found myself in a hole, it's because I was thinking, holy shit, I'm in a hole and I've got 90K to go. You're fucked, mate. Yeah, like, there's no way. But then if it was, okay, you're— you, you've got 4K to go to get to the next park bench that you know is gonna have some food at it. Yeah, you can sit with the boys, you can complain, you can you can chuck your poles at a wall, you can make some silly jokes, whatever it needs to be. That's much easier. 4K I can do. And then you can reassess there. And so it's just this constant reevaluation process, like with anything. If you're thinking, right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build a 7-figure business, you don't, you don't get there tomorrow. Yeah, right. What do I need to do? Okay, I'll buy a domain name. Okay, what do I need to do? Okay, I need to create a, create an account for it. Okay, I need to, I need to look at what sort of business model I work at. The stages and phases in the same process process. The same with food. If you're going to change your diet and you're going from completely ad hoc spraying and just make it up as you go along to, right, I'm going to be a restricted calorie carnivore dieter, then you're probably going to find it difficult to get into that rhythm as you go. It's bit by bit, stage by stage, and the cliché of bite-sized chunks.

Yeah, no, I— so I'm like, do 25K. It's like, come on, man, just do 10 more times. Yeah, you know what, that's actually I'll never forget this. I like, when I first started a business, a little side tangent, and I wanted to like, you know, hit a million in revenue.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen that, like, it's like just a quote, it's like you need to get like X amount of people paying you this amount. It just breaks it all down. And it's like, once you do that and you kind of look at it like that, it's the same distance, it's the same amount, but it just becomes infinitely more easier. In your brain.

It's just processing. Like, the task is no different, it's just the roadmap is clearer. That's the way that I view it, is like all you're trying to do is cut through noise. And, um, I think in a business setting, going back to the zone 2 stuff and the aerobic stuff before, the, the application of the forced bringing your energy down, calming yourself down to a day-to-day setting means that whenever I have an emotional spike, whenever I get an email that pisses me off, whenever something like that happens, I can kind of tap into a lot of the skills that I've developed with aerobics stuff to, to manage that, which means that the 250 in and of itself was a really good exercise in how much can you tolerate. I mean, my coping mechanism with these things is dark humor and sarcastically just sort of taking the piss, like, well, this is fucking shit, isn't it?

Typical Scarf. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Irish, the exact same misery.

Dark humor to the point where I'm glad that, I'm glad that some things were left out of the video, put it that way. But it's Essentially, it's kind of a coping mechanism and the questions you have to ask yourself when, yeah, 151K and 210K, I was an absolute hole. Like, the rest of it was just kind of ultra-endurance suffering where you just need to fight with yourself to keep moving forward.

And what was it like when you finished? Like, the feeling?

Completely, completely nothing, really. What? Just so exhausted. What? But what I'll say, I know that won't process well with your head, But the, like, it was just, that's the job done. It'd been such a long, it'd been such a long run-up, pun intended.

Yeah.

Been such a long training process and such a long actual event that I'd had, I'd just gone through so many iterations of this sort of mental processing that when I got to the finish line, it was just, okay, job done, happy days. You can reflect on this later on.

Oh my God, I'd be like, I'm king of the world.

But it was, I kind of expected that. Like even with the only distance that I really feel like buzzing afterwards. Yeah. Well, heavy lift or a 5K. I think. Because a 5K, you're not destroyed enough that you're on the floor rolling around. Whereas with a best effort mile, for example, I've like, whenever I've done a best effort mile, I've run a sub-5-minute mile twice in my life. Yeah. And both times I've been like rolling around like a limp fish for like 10 minutes afterwards. So you can't really be like, woo!

Yeah, yeah.

You're like, is he all right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is he still with us?

And then, then you're just happy that you sort of settled. Whereas a 5K, you can do that. Whereas a big lift, you've just got so much energy that's gone into it. And I'm not actually— I don't know, I'm not that high-energy a person anyway. I'm quite steady with most things, which meant that— yeah, the, the thing I always say, it sounds a bit— it's a bit of a cop-out to some. Anyone that's competitive probably won't like my take on this, but the question I always ask myself, going back to the circumstances around my prep, is have I done everything that I could with the circumstances I had available to me to be stood here at the start line? And if the answer's no, then there's no point in being there. Whereas if the answer is yes, in my mind the work's already done. Whatever happens next is what happens next. If, if I am underprepared but I know that I did everything that I could within business circumstances, training circumstances, it is what it is. You did what could. Maybe the timing was wrong, whatever it might be. So I think the, the value is in the process for me. The value is in the lessons that I learned, the business criticisms that I need to make to be able to actually train with the volume, the questions I have to ask myself about what do I actually enjoy, why am I doing this, what are you going to do differently once this is all over, and then applying those things. That's where I see the value in this stuff, because it's not as much— I guess with, with bodybuilding, it's kind of a constant constant on and off, how do I look in the mirror, how do I perform in the gym, day-to-day assessment. Whereas the way that things have gone for me with these big events is kind of everything's feeding into this one big test that assesses the past 3 to 4 months. Obviously a prep's different, but you've got that more tangible— depending on how you view things, because you probably don't feel you're getting any leaner day to day. It's all psychology.

Never good enough.

But it's I very much see the event as almost the victory lap. The work is done in the process, not in the event itself, which meant that getting to the finish line with all of the key people around me and just enjoying the fact that we as a team had achieved what we set out to achieve and overcame loads of issues along the way. Like, there was a section of the West Highland Way for 35K that was really runnable when I'd recce'd it 3 weeks earlier. It was a bog, like you had to sidestep through it. There was one point that going downhill, I almost had to like use my poles like shimmy, shimmy down it. I'm like, for fuck's sake. So going into it knowing like this section is going to be runnable, we can break the back of it, I expect to do it in this time, going to be in a good position, and then you're met with a bog for 35K. Like getting punched in the face psychologically like that when you know you've got 120K to go, that's the value for me. That is the value. The finish line's kind of, that you've just done what you said you were going to do.

That's my favorite quote you've said so far.

You said—

wait, let me not butcher it— the event is the victory laugh. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. That's going in the intro. That is awesome. I absolutely love that. And it's like, it just sums up kind of any athletic endeavor when you really think about it. Like, yeah, with a bodybuilding prep, you prep for 16 weeks and you're on stage for 20 minutes.

I think if it's self-driven, yeah, whereas if it's a competitive— of course, yeah, yeah, for sure. Maybe, I don't know, maybe I've just— I've had my competitive run in life, but I don't like this. The reason I've not done HIROX and I probably won't is because I don't— if my logic is if I don't wake up in the morning excited to train for something, yeah, there's no reason to do it. Yeah, there's commercial— I could do things for commercial reasons, but my rule—

I was going to get into that.

My rule is on training, yeah, is if I'm not, if, if I'm not doing it for the right reasons, then I don't do it. Because essentially training is a precious thing to me. Yeah. So if I, if I create a negative relationship with it, then that's a slippery slope. Yeah. Um, and as soon as I start to fall apart, everything will fall apart pretty quickly because it's all in the same ecosystem. Yeah.

And so on, on HIIT, okay, massive trend recently. Um, few, a few questions on that topic because, you know, I've started doing the odd class here. I really enjoy it. Am I right in saying that HIIT is kind of like CrossFit without the shitty form? Like, it's a more like organized organized circuit version of CrossFit. Like, what's the difference between HIROX and CrossFit?

Uh, CrossFit's higher skill.

Okay, yes, yeah, there's like Olympic lifting and all that.

Yeah, I would say CrossFit's higher skill and much more strength dominant. The word strength, in my opinion, has no place in HIROX. Yeah, it's a threshold test.

Yeah, for sure. In theory, there's no heavy, heavy lifting.

Yeah, but there's a lot of reels that say full week of strength and endurance training for HIROX, and strength training is not 150 wall balls. That's strength endurance.

Or maybe if you're weak as shit, but CrossFit, you can be really—

like, if you're a really good Olympic lifter, Matt Fraser, Tier 2, me, Olympic lifting background, both GOATs. And that's what— obviously it depends on what, what events are administered, but if you're really strong, you can go a long way in CrossFit. But I think what HIROX is fantastic for is it reduces the barrier to entry for people to have a go at a more circuit, varied-based fitness endeavor that has skills involved and different movements movements, but none of them require technical proficiency to the level that a snatch would, for example.

The way I view it when I go into class, I'm like, I'm burning some calories and getting a pump. That's the— I like it, you know, I like it. It's for fun, and that's, that's pretty much it, you know. But I, I would—

and that's all it needs to be.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I think it's, I think it's awesome. Like, there's the form, people keep it pretty strict. You're not doing— my only critique of CrossFit is you got pregnant women doing 40, you know, clean and presses and all like for high reps. I know obviously it can be done like, yeah, yeah, perfectly, but just, just generally you do see some mistakes. But I, I still like CrossFit, like I don't hate on it. I've done some amazing CrossFit classes, but I like, I like HIIT as well. And you said, so a few, few ones because like this is a hot topic at the moment, do you think it is just like a current trend and that it's going to kind of become less popular over time, or do you think HIIT is here to stay?

I, my, my guess, I'm happy to be wrong on this, yeah, is, is that a lot of the people that are really, really into it now, if they're coming from a functional fitness CrossFit background, a lot of the things that they enjoy about that is the randomization and the variety, whereas HYROX is the same every time. Yes, obviously some courses will be slightly different to others. I know different rock zones are much longer than others and things like that. For example, Berlin HYROX was a really cool setting in like an air hangar, so the running was more outdoors than it was World War II vibes. But then the London Olympia, like, you're running indoors, it's such a big event. It's, it's— I mean, they have commercial targets they need to hit, they need to get people in. There's some stuff they're doing with affiliates that's pissing people off. I think, I think essentially a lot of people I know that are quite drawn to training for the sake of training are going off the idea of doing the same thing over and over again a little bit. But there's a lot of people that like single discipline stuff and improving and chipping away year on year, month month on month. Otherwise you wouldn't have competitive 5K runners. Yes, they're training year in year to improve the 5K time. Yeah. So it depends on the personality of the person, but I think because it's such a hot trend, a lot of the people have jumped on because of the trend now might jump on to whatever the next one might be. Yeah. What that will be, I don't know, but I think that what HIIT has done really well is give people an entry point to a varied set of disciplines. Well, it's a new sport entirely. It gives them a way of training for something that gives them a— some— it's something to get the skin in the game with, which is quite hard to do if you're just a recreational gym goer. Yeah. Because you're not going to sign up to a CrossFit competition unless you're a pretty high skill.

Yeah, I would definitely like sign up. I find it less daunting to sign up to a HIROX than a CrossFit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And there's things like Battle Cancer, you've got functional fitness charity events, it's all quite low skill but it doesn't have that competitive side of it that feels— it doesn't— I can't imagine it gives people the same buzz that HIROX would. But I, I think, I think it's fantastic. I think there's some big egos in it and there's, there's some egos developing on social media around it that are almost bringing the entry point back up. Yeah. Which I think is the exact opposite of what—

Yes, that's what it's trying to be.

And I think people need to accept that it doesn't test strength. Yeah. Essentially, if it did, there would be a weight that you can or you cannot move. If you can't move the 60-kilo farmer's carries, you take a 10-minute penalty, or you can move them, something like that. Yeah. It's a threshold-dominant test, which is very, very valuable in and of itself. Myself. I've had podcasters that are competent in high rocks call me out on podcast without me knowing. I've had it sent to me. Yeah, say that because I haven't done one, I haven't been testing myself in a hybrid arena.

Oh bro, I'd like you to do one. I'd like you to do one.

A lot of people would, but you'd smoke it again. My rule is if it isn't exciting to me, I, I'm not gonna do it because training is, training is for me.

And at that obsession, just fuck around and do it just to shut everyone up.

I think I will at some point. Yeah, but it's Do it for the YouTube video.

Come on.

Yeah, but that's the thing. Then I'm doing it for content. I always—

You're becoming the villain.

I always want— I've always wanted things to be athlete first, content second. Yeah. 'Cause otherwise I won't enjoy the process of filming stuff for it. 'Cause yeah, I don't exist like a full-time YouTuber at all. Yeah. Which means that when it comes to filming stuff, it can feel like a real chore and I'd rather just do the thing.

Yeah.

Nothing gets in the way of training more than filming it.

Oh man.

Nothing gets in the way of filming stuff more than training.

You're like, Seriously, I'm— that, that's such a conflict I have as well because I love, I love training on my own.

Yeah.

And like, I love just, just zoning out. Yeah, that's kind of my version of, you know, yeah, zoning out really. I don't go, go on my phone or anything, just, just music. I put everything on notifications on silent. And so yeah, propping up the tripod, getting the lighting and the angle completely, completely takes away from it.

Yeah. Oh, that's 7 minutes rest this set.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And one thing, the only time I do like it, if I'm working with I'm like, I'm just going to train, you, you just do whatever you need to do. And actually, that actually makes the best footage. And so also with Hi-Rox, is that even drug tested? Do you know?

I think it is. I think they've— I think they brought in stuff for the Elite 15 or something it's called. I think they've said that there's rules on it and that there's— that there's— I can't remember the wording, it was something along the lines of, we now— we— Hi-Rox adheres to the wider rules of engagement. Rules of engagement sounds very formal, but whatever it is, it did seem to say that there is, there is now a clause in there, but I don't know if there's been any testing done. But again, it does— what, what I've always struggled with, with it is at one point I found myself looking if you were allowed to wear a t-shirt. Yeah, because I was like, this is— it's kind of bodybuilding light. It's become a bit of a—

some sexy fellas. There are two sexes, very large. Yeah.

Sellers. Yeah. Again, I don't really care what people, if people are doing it for them to enjoy it, to train for something, to get some skin in the game, great. If you're in the Elite 15, you're making a professional career from it, then there's guidelines that you should abide by, 100%. But I think it's the big egos and there's this sort of like puffing up your chest and they say, I heard stories about London High Rocks where the amount of people that were just sort of thinking they were the main character in an event of 12,000 people or whatever it was. Yeah. It's like this is—

Thinking they're in a movie.

And if the aim if the paradox is to reduce the entry point for people to get into fitness in a new way, then you don't want massive egos at the front and center of it sort of raising that up because it's gonna become intimidating to people. And I think the thing with, yeah, I think when there's prize money on the line as there is at the top. Oh, is there? Yeah, there is. How much? I'm not sure to be fair. I think the, I think, I wanna say $15,000.

That's solid.

For the world championships.

That's a good summer.

Yeah, I mean.

That's a few dinners in Cipriani.

Yeah.

It's one or two, maybe. Well, depends how much that cake you want.

Yeah, yeah, €30 a cake and it wouldn't last long. But, um, it's like Hunter— I'm pretty sure Hunter's won the past 3 World Championships or something, I think. But yeah, I think essentially for a sport that's got more and more prize money, more and more sponsorship money, drug testing should be a part of the elite sport for sure. I think that's where it should be.

What's, um, like steroid use like in the hybrid scene in general? Like, obviously we know bodybuilding, it's like sure thing. Powerlifting, it's— I know you have the— what's the drug test? An IPF, or—

yeah, so IPF. And then, and then you've kind of just one that does whatever you want. There's another one in the UK, the G— uh, there would— yeah, there was another one there, the GBPF or something in the UK. And then, yeah, there's a few.

And still people like cheat that and, and get past it, even though I think it's decent enough.

That's what put me off powerlifting in many ways in the end, was I was a competent lifter until I was 19, and then I went from T1 or whatever it was, teen category, to the open category— no, junior category, sorry. And people I was competitive with the previous year suddenly were opening with 30 kilos more than me.

Yeah.

And it was kind of the decision of you can go one of two directions here, and the direction I chose was kind of just, you know what, you can keep powerlifting for a bit, but you accept that you're not going to be competitive and you might not enjoy it as much anymore.

Yeah.

And that ultimately got me to a point where to get stronger I got a lot heavier. So I used to compete 82.5, and then I finished— but I weighed about 80, but I finished at about 102 kilos.

Those.

Um, so like my strength, a lot of my strength was tied in with bodyweight because, yeah, essentially I decided to go in the direction that was not putting all of my commitment and health and things into powerlifting as a sport because I didn't care about it as much as, as some of the guys around me did. And I think that's because maybe it was a different sporting background, I don't know. But I think, I think what I'm grateful for is that I always knew the powerlifting wasn't the be-all and end-all for me. Yeah. Whereas I think at the age that I was, the point that I was, I could have gone in a different direction. Yeah. Um, had I been really, really all in with it.

Um, and so, so in, um, in not powerlifting but, uh, like the hybrid scene.

Yeah.

Like how prominent would steroid use be?

I don't know because there's no— what I like about it is that there's no governing body. There's no— you can't be the best at it.

Yeah.

There's people on TikTok saying trying to be the best hybrid athlete in the world.

Yeah.

And all this. Well, nothing exists to make Yeah, yeah, social media. It's, it's— this is why I, I'm not as focused on bodybuilding and aesthetics and things, and it's kind of performance driven, is because I think when everything starts becoming about how jacked you are versus how much you can perform, then that's where all of the questions will start getting asked more and more and more. Whereas I think hybrid, hybrid on TikTok has become how jacked can you be and how much can you run. Yeah. Which is making that the question called in a lot more. But again, there's no— there is no competition. We'd love to create a competition where you can put somebody who's going to do a best effort 5K and a best effort deadlift in the same day or something like that, and then see, see what things look like from there. But as it stands, there's no way of testing people in a performance setting, which means that there's no— there's no way that you'd be able to know what, as a world, people that call themselves hybrid athletes would test themselves for. But I accepted years ago that I'm never going to be as strong as I was when I was a powerlifter. Yeah, I am kind of getting to the point now where genetic ceiling-wise, I'm starting to wonder where, how far off that I am, how much I'm gonna have to fight like fuck to get back to 145+ kilo bench press, whatever it might be. How many more of these black book little things have I got on my desk before I can take them off, before I get to a point where I can say, you know what, mid-30s, maybe, maybe it's time to consider supplementation of a different variety. Yeah, but it's, yeah, it's, I don't know enough about it to, to really make an informed decision.

Yeah, you're not more plates, more dates.

No, no, no, not many people are. I think that's, that's the problem is, is I want to, I want to absolutely top end myself in terms of genetic ceiling because enjoyment is my first principle. And that, that's the thing as well is if I was, if I was to put myself into a, an arena where I was measured competitively and I started getting an itch for that, that would send me down a direction where I'd start to consider, yeah, things in a different way. And that's why I think there needs to be boundaries. If you Everything I do is self-driven, which means that there'd be, there'd be no merit to me fucking blasting for the sake of just moving things forwards there. Yes, it's that, that's the thing for me is I know what I get value from. I've got rules I hold myself accountable to, which is enjoyment first, athlete first, content second, commercial, commerciality second, which means that if those things were in the other order then there'd be considerations to be made.

Commercial first, Trent.

Let's go.

Yeah, I know. What do you think of Nick Bare as an athlete? Do you think he's natural of what he, what he's done and his physique and everything?

I wouldn't be able to comment because again, you don't know. Yeah, it's, it's, he's a very, very high performer. He's in very, very good shape.

He's just overall a big dude, like, like, you know, he's super tall.

And again, you'll know, I've seen him seen him in person.

Yeah, no, I've never met him in person either. I just—

jacked guys that you think of, you can often see in the wild, you know, oh, you're just really lean.

Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, that's, that's the biggest one.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's, again, it's, it's, yeah, I don't know him, I haven't spoken to him, I don't know what his day-to-day looks like in and out, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to pass comments on the assumption.

But good mature response. I'm like, come on, give me some clickbait here. Nah, Nick, me and Nick have followed each other for like since literally we both started YouTube. And yeah, we've spoken in DMs a good bit. He's definitely gonna be someone that I get on this podcast at some stage. I think he's a really good dude. And personally, I'll get slated for this, personally I actually, I actually think he's natural. Just from what people, people that are mutual friends, and just from the— he's just like a rugby player. Like he's just a tall, wide dude.

Yeah, he's built as an athlete, isn't he?

And I think crazy dedicated.

Like this is— it's important to caveat this because I I, me and my brother are very, very good at adapting to new demands. Yeah, like, I think that, that's the, that's the thing that he is the reason that I, I've realized that we've got a predisposition to being able to adapt to new things. So that's why I'm always— it's always important to caveat individual focus and individual progression is the main thing. Yeah, for Jamie to have deadlifted 500 pounds, run a sub-5-minute mile, 4:53 no less, at 19 years old whilst I was also doing a 500-pound, a 500-pound squat and sub-5-minute mile. That is— that's not something that the average 19-year-old, and however old I was, I can't even remember how old I was at the time, duo would be able to do. That, that's the genetic adaptability that we've got, which is great. But the more important thing, Nick's the same. We've both come from a background of strength and, yeah, muscle tissue.

Good place to come from because, like we said at the start, you know, 30% harder or easier to maintain, whatever, whatever it is.

He's a phenomenal athlete. His marathon time times are sickening. And I'm training for a sub-3 marathon now, and I know that there'll be people online that are going, oh well, Nick did that years ago, let's see how Fergus gets on. That's kind of— that'll be fun for me. That's good. There's no part of me— people do it online— there's no part of me that feels any need to compare or contrast, because like I said, this world, this hybrid athlete, it's fucking— yeah, made up.

Yeah, yeah, it's not like—

but that's the beauty of it in my mind, is it's, it's a, it's a lifestyle pursuit where you get to do different things that give you different value that you can enjoy. Yeah, and until there is a time where you can be measured against your next person, then no one is inherently better than the other. Yes, individual performances can be tracked in different ways, but yeah, it depends.

Who is the hybrid World Cup?

Who is the person at the core of all of that? Are they, are they happy? Are they, are they moving the right direction? Is it giving them the right things, or is it making them a little bit obsessive with the wrong things? Whatever it might be. But I think, yeah, from a, uh, one thing I will dispute is I did see him on a podcast clip saying that he pioneered hybrid training. He popularized it.

Okay.

But he didn't pioneer it. Alex Viada did in the book called The Hybrid Athlete in 2015. So there are, there are receipts.

Okay.

The phrase was coined and used by Alex Viada, a book he started writing in 2013, published in 2015. The methodology— Johnny, my business partner, very close with Alex, he, he came up with the phrase.

Where is he from, Alex Viada?

Um, he wrote the book when he was in— yeah, he's American, but he was in, he was in Carolina, I think Durham, Carolina at the time.

Have you got him on your podcast?

Yeah, he's been on. He's not been on the Modern Mind, but he's been on the Omnia podcast. Yeah. Um, but he's— I mean, he's frighteningly intelligent. But I mean, even for Alex, it was a bit of a throwaway, we need a name for the book. Yeah, the Hybrid Athlete, because it was a methodology and it was the way that you program for progression and concurrent training disciplines. Simultaneously. So how can you make progress in something that does not make you better at the other thing? Powerlifting won't make you a better 5K runner. 5K running won't make you a better powerlifter. How do you improve them both simultaneously?

Okay, so, so on that, what is the one thing, like, your biggest tip for improving in all areas?

Except that less is probably more.

Okay, nice.

Which, for a lot of people coming from bodybuilding, powerlifting, volume-dependent running, especially in triathlon, is, is this dependency on how many days a week I lift, how many miles a week I run, how many sessions a week I do, all of these almost arbitrary things. The question is, what is the prescription and focus and intention of each of the exercises within those sessions, and how are they moving you towards your specific goals? Hybrid training, in my opinion, can only be hybrid training if there is a specific endpoint that you're working towards, because you need boundaries to set. Concurrent training is training different things at the time. That's all that means. That's kind of just strength conditioning. Hybrid training is the pursuit of concurrent disciplines that don't inherently support one another. So if you're training for something that conflicts with this, how do you put together programming to be able to go like this with them? And that, that's the hard bit. Just running 5Ks and lifting regularly is not actually that complex. I feel personally attacked, but you're not going to lose your game.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

5K run. If you decided, I'm going to do a full marathon prep, yeah, you'd have to be a lot more sensible about what do you change and how do you adjust things to be able to, one, perform in your marathon, and two, not have it massively impact your gains. The mistake a lot of people make is a lot of people that enjoy things just abandon the thing that they enjoy. Yeah, just like, I've done years and years and years of lifting, I'm going to train for marathon and stop lifting entirely because a running coach told me to. Yeah, do a marathon, tick the box, go back to the thing that they enjoy lifting, think, I'm weak as piss, this is shit. Yeah, well, what do I do now? Maybe I'll do another marathon, but I didn't enjoy it that much. Maybe I'll do an Ironman. That's the thing that people at my office are doing. Fuck, that's expensive. Yeah, before you know it, you don't—

let's forget about the cars.

You don't, you don't, you don't enjoy training that much anymore. And that's a mistake that I know a lot of people make. So that's why we really try and encourage— I really try and encourage— is, is, is do focus on the things you enjoy first and hold on to them and sort of protect those elements. But you don't need to doing push-pull legs, push-pull legs every week to be able to be in shape and strong enough to move things forwards.

I can run a 5K in 22 minutes. Is that good or bad?

That's excellent. All right. Excellent, yeah. All right. But if it's 21 minutes and something in 6 weeks' time, that's even better. So that's the way to look at things.

All right, so I'm like, my goal would be to do like a half marathon one day.

And then you're on the slippery slope.

Yeah, exactly. Like also the thought of like an Ironman Ironman, the swimming is probably the most daunting part. But I think we spoke about this on your podcast, you're like, just getting in the water helps a lot. So we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But there's a point that I've been— there's a topic that I've been, you know, dying to talk about with you so much, and it's the topic of mental health. We touched on it slightly. You were in a super dark place.

Yep.

How did you get there? Tell us about it, because I think that'll help a lot of people.

Yep. So I mentioned the sort of control power input the output I experienced sort of tail end of school. I did my best to get into Oxford, which was, was kind of the direction the school put me in, and I didn't, didn't get in. And then ended up going to Durham University, which kind of— I hadn't even looked at the university. I chose my college, therefore accommodation, based on the fact it was self-catering catering, not because it was the right place to be. Bro's gonna bro. Um, so I, that was kind of— I felt that was the first knock in that process I'd had, where it was the first experience that things aren't as black and white as I wanted them to be. Ended up at Durham, quickly found myself on the back foot a little bit because I was training in powerlifting, individual sport. The university had no provisions for it. The course that I was studying— I studied theology and religion, not because it's what I wanted to study, but because it gave me a better chance in terms of odds of getting into Oxford because it was like 3,000 to 1 for English literature, which is what I wanted to study, versus 73 to 1. So I played a game of odds, still lost, and ended up going to Durham to study that. So I didn't meet many, many like-minded people on the course. And then the accommodation I was in, I was basically in a block with a lot of international students, and it was kind of it was like, not, not in an offensive way to anyone, but it was just there weren't like-minded people there because, yeah, but that's it. It was like, it was kind of everyone that they couldn't place within certain areas of the college was kind of just put in this section. So the sort of 3 core pillars of my university experience, shall we say, I didn't really meet anyone or, or connect with anyone the first couple of weeks. And I was a very sociable young man, very outgoing, very confident, and kind of felt on my ass a little bit, felt a bit embarrassed about the fact that I hadn't made any mates. I didn't really feel like I connected with anyone in the first couple of couple of weeks didn't kind of— I don't know whether I just sat back and kind of thought things would change for me, or whether I just got a bit petulant about it. But I, I didn't— I started feeling a bit sorry for myself, and that felt like I'd failed a little bit, felt like something was wrong. My definition of masculinity was very traditional at that point. My notion of success was very linear. It was very best exams possible, best results possible, best uni possible, best job possible, best promotion possible, best house possible, best wife possible, best holidays possible, best promotion, best partner at this firm, and then you retire and then you're dead. Yeah, it's kind of— it was a very, very linear, and I'd kind of mapped out all the things that I wanted to, to aim for within that progression. But within 2 or 3 weeks, I just found myself pretty miserable and like I'd failed, and like I was, yeah, just embarrassed that I hadn't really connected with people whilst my friends at other universities were seemingly having a great time. And that just got worse and worse over the next 18 months where I didn't— I, I— and every day I felt like a failure because I didn't feel like I was moving myself towards those linear goals because I was in a negative place mentally. And it got worse and worse steadily, slowly but surely. The only thing that I had at the center of it was my training, but I was doing all that on my own. I did eventually make friends at the gym but again, the only time I saw them during the week really was, was during training. Um, Durham didn't even have decent— there were 2 squat racks in the entire uni, for example, which is just blasphemous. Yeah, terrible. So even that, like, even just training on my own was difficult. So it was a case of accepting that I was not in the position that I wanted to be, and rather than taking action to improve it, I just got I, I just kind of thought, why me? This is unfair, all these sort of things. But more importantly, tried to hide this fact from everyone around me— friends, family— over a period of time, because I didn't want to be deemed a failure. I didn't want to be labeled as a certain thing, way, whatever it was. And I was very ashamed of the fact that I didn't feel 100%.

Yeah.

And I was ultimately what's retrospectively being diagnosed as depressed. If you'd asked me before 2016, does depression exist, I would have said no, convenient excuse for people to avoid responsibility or hard work. Or is mental health a real thing? No, it's again just this wishy-washy shit that people use to sort of talk about things in a way. And then early 2016, I started to be affected physically by the decline of my own mental health. I was struggling to sleep properly, struggling to eat properly. I'd go to the gym to hit 200 for 2 and fail 180. So all of a sudden, all— everything started to unravel when my training started to fall apart as well, because I couldn't eat. Everything, everything tied in. And then it became overwhelmingly real. Mental health was very much undermining my day-to-day, and it was affecting me physically. So I felt foolish for being wrong, and rather than taking it on the chin and saying, oh, I was wrong, I'm gonna now seek support from the loving family and friends that I had available to to me, I went even further into my shell and felt even more ashamed and felt even less of a man, felt even more disappointed in myself and afraid that people would label me as a freak or let down people's expectations. So things get a bit blurry from about February of 2016 when I realized that a full week had gone by where I hadn't had a human interaction other than with like a barista or a Tesco cashier or something. Yeah, just because I'd become so insular, I was kind of locking myself away. I didn't recognize who I was. The only thing that I had was, was training, and I was doing my uni work to the best of my ability. But in my second year, I only had like 6 hours of contact time a week. £27 grand well spent. But it was, uh, yeah, I, I was— my circumstances allowed me to just detach myself from a lot of things. I ended up living in Newcastle in second year rather than Durham so that I could try and live with people I knew from home rather than live on my own in student foundation, because the friends I did make at the gym, by the time I'd made them, they'd already signed for housing in second year because it all happened so fast. The British universities is wild. So I was detached from my university, I was detached from my course, I was detached from my training. So I was training at a warehouse gym in suburban Newcastle most of the time on my own, didn't really make any friends there, and just found myself in this position where things were getting worse and worse. I was being more and more ashamed of how felt because of my definition of masculinity, because of the fact that I felt that if I exposed myself as vulnerable anyway, I'd be a failure. And then things got to the point where in May of 2016, I actually attempted suicide. And that came as a result of— this is something I discovered. I was in, I was in Roman Kemp's documentary called Our Silent Emergency where he was trying to determine—

so the lowest point you had became to suicidal.

Yeah, so what I discovered— 2021, I can't remember when it was, but essentially the documentary— Roman Kemp, his best friend, longtime best friend, producer on the show, died by suicide, and Roman was essentially trying to discover why. So I— he spoke to me as a survivor of a suicide attempt to try and figure out what I was thinking at the time. And what I discovered in that conversation, reflecting on something that I'd done quite a good job of just kind of moving gone from, not really unpacking, was that I didn't choose to die. I just felt like I needed some peace and somehow managed to block out the reality of what that actually entailed. In my head, I rebranded suicide as peace. Yeah. And that was the only way that I could leave behind, because I did— what's really important to flag is I did have network. I was very fortunate to have parents I could reach out to, friends I could reach out to, but it was my, my fear of being judged, my fear of being labeled a failure that stopped me from ever even considering doing that. It was just— it was the smile, the bullshit that I gave people whenever I was asked about how I was doing was just completely the opposite of how I felt. And the worst thing is, just to summarize how warped my worldview was, the first the first feeling that I had when I came around from my suicide attempt was anger that I'd failed. Because the perception was that the one thing, the one fucking thing that I'd had in almost 2 years of suffering and feeling sorry for myself, the one thing I'd done to change it, I couldn't even do that. And that was what, that was what really scares me, is that just the self-punishment I found myself in. And the, the, the fact that my first feeling wasn't one of shock or gratefulness or whatever it was. And what was terrifying was that I, um, I was so intoxicated from the sort of method of the attempt that I could kind of think and I could lie there, but I couldn't really move. It was— I, I kind of crawled my way back into bed slowly but surely. But there were footsteps outside my door. My flatmates knew nothing about what was going on.

Oh my God.

And it's just horrifying to think back on. And what scares me the most is that everything that I've enjoyed since, every smile I've had, Erin, my wife, the dogs, all this stuff that's amazing and I'm so grateful for now, almost never would have happened because of that decision. And I'm so, so grateful to have come out the other side. It gives me a bit of a renewed lease on life. It makes me think about things maybe a little bit more profoundly and maybe why I do some of these stupid things, because that self-discovery is kind of a— I know what lies on the other side of asking deeper questions of yourself. And yeah, I've got a hyperactive mind. I need to, I need, I need to ask those questions to myself, otherwise I might find myself slipping in a different direction. But what I will say is I'm not impervious, or I've not beaten my own mental health. I've got a really good toolbox of things that I've understood and equipped myself with over the years, so I know what's good for me and what's bad for me. So it's a case of learning from that experience. But I, I would say that the immediate recovery, I kind of took the next 6 months to just be happy being happy for the first time in a while. And only from that point onwards did I really start to actually unpack it. When I only told my parents at Christmas in that year, so it was almost 6 months later that I actually told anyone what happened, which was just again a reflection of how I was at the time. And I'm really passionate about talking about this stuff because I now feel that vulnerability in man is an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to expose your weaknesses and improve them, because you're not going to be the man that you want to be if you don't address your weaknesses. We all have them, we all have them, and the only way you can expose them is by making yourself vulnerable and sort of sticking your neck out a little bit. And that's why big endurance events, big training protocols, big challenges, whatever they are, are exposing my vulnerabilities and forcing me to be like, right, how can you be better here? And I embrace that vulnerability now. I'm happy to share it. And I'm confident enough in my own abilities, my own emotions, and my own, my own understanding of myself that whatever happens happens, and it's just a learning curve. All these things are just learning curves.

If you could go back and speak to yourself the day before you attempted to take your own life, what would you say?

No one feeling lasts forever. That's a mantra that I often use in events now, and I think it felt impossible to believe that at the time, but I just didn't see a way out. I think that's what started— I don't think there's anything I could have said the way that I felt at the time. I don't think there's anything that I could have said without having a, here's a vision of the future, this is what life looks like if you see your way through this. But then again, it's given me a new perspective on life. So in some ways I feel fortunate or thankful that I've gone through that experience, which is a crazy thing to say, but I'm here right now. I'm happy right now. I've got a life I'm grateful for, and every little thing along the way equals this. So do I regret a pattern of poor decision-making and a bad definition of mental health? Absolutely. But has it made me the person that I am today?

Yes.

So therefore, it's just a part of who I am now and something I can take with me moving forwards. But what I do try and do is make sure that the mistakes that that I made through talking about it. I do a lot of work with schools and corporates and things on this topic, and it's, it's helping people understand that the mistakes that I made don't necessarily need to be the mistakes other people make, because for me they came from a warped definition of masculinity and success that ultimately, now being in my opinion more masculine and more successful in every measurable metric, I see the value of emotional fairness. This strange, strange rabbit hole on the internet that emotions are somehow inherently feminine and therefore to be done away with, that I see more and more coming up, especially with teenage boys, it's happening a lot, is, is damaging. Because I think emotions, if weaponized for an individual, can be a superpower. Vulnerability can be a superpower. When you've done prep, I'm sure when you felt your most vulnerable, most defeated, most destroyed, the self-control required to not eat that food or not binge or not do these things, that's really a part of it. The reps and iterations of going through that process just build you up as a character moving forwards. And whilst it's a small example, it's, it's a vulnerability you've exposed yourself through, it's an emotion you've had to tackle, it's emotion you've come out the other side from, and that now means that you are who you are now. And I think that's where emotional awareness makes you better as a man, more successful. Special Forces soldiers, very emotionally aware, and they are much more masculine and harder than teenage boys on the internet, that's for sure.

Much more masculine than them Hi-Rox boys.

But it's, it's emotional awareness gives you an understanding of, of how do you react to a problem being presented to you, what actions are to be taken. And the only way you can develop that as a skill is by exposing yourself to those challenges. So if you pretend that you can stoic your way through things when you've done nothing to warrant having a stoic mindset— I'm sure fucking Marcus Aurelius had plenty of challenges he had to face to give him the informed opinions that he had. He didn't just wake up one morning and decide, I am going to be a masculine, successful man and not have emotions today. Yeah, it's not as simple as that. It's a case of doing the reps, doing the work, and exposing yourself to things that are intimidating scare the shit out of you, are uncomfortable, feel like risks. And the more times you do that, the more comfortable you'll be with those things. And then the compounding effect of doing those things over time means that you'll, in my opinion, discover the person that you truly are rather than the person that you're trying to be for the sake of other people. Because that's what a lot of people spend too much time doing. It's what I was spending too much time doing. I was basing my whole life around this linear ladder of fucking bullshit that just dictated every decision made and made me feel like a failure.

Fergus, that is a beautiful way to wrap up today. You're a one-in-a-million dude, not only physically but mentally too. And I really enjoyed today's chat, bro.

Thank you very much.

Glad you had a good trip to Marbella.

Thank you very much. Awesome, man.

Boom!