Do Difficult Things: "I Felt Like I Was Going To Die"

Ever wondered what it takes to push past your limits and tackle challenges head-on? Join me as I share my personal journey of conquering my first Ironman triathlon, an adventure fueled by childhood dreams and the relentless pursuit of personal growth. Inspired by a quote from Jordan Peterson, this episode uncovers the trials and triumphs of my rigorous training and the grueling event itself, which featured a daunting 3.8-kilometer ocean swim, a 180-kilometer bike ride, and a full marathon under the scorching 41-degree Celsius heat of Western Australia. Along the way, I faced not only external doubts and extreme conditions but also the ever-present threat of shark sightings, all of which tested my resolve and determination to break free from my comfort zone.

Embark on a journey that transcends physical endurance to discover profound lessons in resilience and self-discovery. The story doesn't just capture the essence of completing an Ironman; it delves into the transformative power of challenging our perceived limitations and exceeding expectations. Listen to how a commitment made with a friend to honor a childhood fascination with the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon became a testament to human potential and growth. This episode serves as a reminder that embracing difficult endeavors can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself and the remarkable capacity we all possess to confront and overcome formidable challenges.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I felt like I was going to die. I remember when I did my first Ironman triathlon, going back almost 15 years now, and it really pushed me to the edge. I want to tell you that story today. Recently on the channel, we have been talking about this idea of men needing to do difficult things. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Jordan Peterson quote regarding this subject, but let's take a listen now. Find something difficult to do. You need that. You're not built for comfort or pleasure, like if that comes along good, you know, if you have a day where you're comfortable and there's some things around you that give pleasure. As you can hear there from Jordan Peterson, he is of the opinion that men need to do difficult things, difficult tasks, difficult work, difficult adventures in order to become the kind of men that they're supposed to be. He makes the point that if comfort happens to come your way, then so be it and you can enjoy it, but don't set your life up according to that hope, but rather believe that you are going to need to do difficult things. Well, I agree with that position and I want to tell you a story from my own life about doing difficult things, and I want to make sure that you watch all the way to the end, because, after I share this story, I'm going to tell you the answer to the question of why did I actually do it and what did I learn from that experience.

Speaker 1: 1:28

I want to tell you the story today about my first ever Ironman triathlon and, for those of you who might not be familiar with what that event is about, it's a 3.8-kilometer ocean swim, followed by a 180-kilometer bike ride and then, finally, a marathon 42-kilometer run. As you can imagine, it's an intense day. It's an extreme push that really takes you to the edge. I remember doing this event back in 2009, december 2009, in Western Australia, and it was a really, really rewarding but extremely difficult and challenging experience. Some of the factors around this day in my training and my preparation. The furthest I had ever ridden a bike in a training ride was 104 kilometers, which to most people is a really long ride, but in preparation for 180 kilometers really is not enough. I'd done a lot of running, I did a lot of swimming and I can remember in the lead up to the event, remember people, even friends, sharing with me the fact that they doubted whether I could get it done, and I found that fascinating because I thought that people believed that I was stronger than I realized they actually thought, but it actually inspired me to say well, I believe I can get it done and I'm going to push on and do everything I possibly can do to get this event finished, and I remember on the day we actually had 41 degrees Celsius temperature. It was brutal weather.

Speaker 1: 3:02

In the lead up to the event, the week or two before the event, we actually had received reports that on the beaches five kilometres either side of the beach where we were supposed to do our swim leg, there had been six great white shark sightings, four attacks and one fatality, and so knowing that there are great white sharks in the area is not a very comforting way to start your swim leg on a triathlon day. And so I remember there being several shark spotting planes and helicopters in the sky. There were about 30 surf lifesavers on paddle boards, and we also got told that there were about a dozen divers underneath the jetty, near where the swim leg was, with the shock rods, which is basically a big steel rod with a shotgun shell on the end, in order to help defend the competitors from the possibility of a great white shark appearing in the middle of our race. And I'll tell you what it's a great incentive to actually be very, very average as a swimmer on the day. Don't be super fast, don't be super slow, stay in the middle. But we got through that 3.8K swim and then we went into 180 kilometer ride and it's one of the most difficult days of my life. It was seven hours out in the beating hot sun. We hired bikes, my friend and I. We didn't have our own bikes. All we had was our own pedals and shoes to use. We hired bikes and spent seven long hours in 41 degrees of heat trying to punch out this 180 kilometers and, as you can imagine, we were in the middle of the night. We were.

Speaker 1: 4:44

Your mind goes to some crazy places when you're pushing your body that far. I remember my wife was able to travel with us over to the event and the bike leg itself was three laps of a 60-kilometer circuit and when we got to the end of the second lap, completing 120 kilometers the furthest I'd ever ridden on a bike I remember her running alongside me and cheering me on and saying keep going, and all of these positive things, and I had the bizarre experience that other endurance athletes had warned me about saying that your body gets pushed so far to the edge that you can actually become a little bit delusional. And so as I rode away to commence my third 60-kilometer lap on the bike, I remember beginning to cry sitting on the bike and tears are running down my face and I was becoming a little bit delusional as I was talking out loud to myself and saying why am I doing this? I don't have to do this. And I was snapped out of that little delusional moment as another cyclist came past me and looked around and saw me in the state I was in and decided to check in and say are you okay, are you doing all right, mate? And that sort of snapped me out of it. But it was a reflection of how far our bodies were getting pushed in that situation, beyond anything we'd ever experienced before and beyond what I knew I was capable of. I was being challenged all day about whether I could actually get this event done. And so 180 kilometres.

Speaker 1: 6:21

I remember vividly on the third lap, out in the middle of the forest somewhere, I remember being overtaken by a disabled athlete. One of the rules of Ironman triathlon is that people are allowed to compete if they are disabled in some way, and this particular gentleman didn't have use of his legs, but the rules around that were they're only allowed to enter if they can find another competitor in the race who's willing to carry them from the swim leg to the bike leg and then from the bike leg to the run leg. And so his particular bike was a lay down reclined flat bike that he actually pedaled with the use of his hands like this. And I remember struggling away in the forest trying to get through my last 60 kilometers and down to my right I see this movement of this man coming past on his reclined you know modified bike, pumping his arms as he went along without the use of his legs and he looks up at me and he encourages me from his handicapped position. And it really was a bit of a low point in the day because I thought, wow, I am going so slow and struggling so much that people who can't even use their legs are overtaking me on the bike and I'll never forget that part of the experience and my friend who did the race with me we had an agreement that we would not try to stay together during the race but run our own tempo and I didn't see him from the start of the swim leg through until about 10 kilometers into the marathon. At the end and he finally caught up to me and we ran together for about 10 kilometers.

Speaker 1: 8:04

And I remember him also hitting these incredible, difficult walls of physical exertion that he actually had to stop halfway through the marathon and he was curled up in the gutter in front of someone's house trying to vomit with a mixture of disgusting green and black bile the only thing coming out of his stomach because he had lost track of his nutrition and hydration plan and had actually become really quite ill. And it's the extent that this kind of a day pushes you to. It takes you to the edge, it takes you to the absolute limit of what you think you're capable of. And I remember, in the last 10 kilometers of the run leg that day, the volunteers coming out and giving the competitors who were still out on the course, of which I was one, bringing us glow sticks to attach to our shirts and our singlets, because the sun had already gotten down and we were out there needing to be able to be seen on the course and so we had to attach these glow sticks to the front of us so we could be seen and I remember that being another low point thinking, wow, the sun's gone down, more than half of the competitors are already finished and resting and I'm still out here on this run leg.

Speaker 1: 9:21

But I had to dig extremely deep mentally to get through each of those legs and to keep on going, and there was probably about eight genuine times through the day where I said to myself I can't keep going, I can't get through this, I can't get it done. But something deep on the inside kept on speaking to me, saying you just have to go that little bit further. And so, long story short, I did actually get the race finished and I've got the medal here to prove it. I thought I'd just give you a quick look at the medal. There there's my very first Ironman triathlon finisher's medal that I got in 2009. And you probably can't see it from here, but on the back of the medal I have the times engraved and I'll remember that my first finish time in that triathlon.

Speaker 1: 10:12

I've done four of these events now and my first ever time was 14 hours and 49 minutes is how long it took me to complete the race, which is a long day and a long time to be out there. Ironman Triathlon has a 17-hour cutoff, which means you've got to get it finished inside that time. If you are one second beyond that time limit, your name doesn't get registered as an official finisher of the event, which has got to be the most brutal realities to live with. But I got finished in 14 hours and 49 minutes and I tried to wait for my friend to see him come across the line but I actually got quite ill, had to be taken to the medical tent after my event and get put on a drip and had the foil blankets over me to try and get my core temperature back to normal. And it was a huge, huge day, huge output pushed me further than I'd ever been pushed before physically, mentally, emotionally and really, at that point in my life, one of the greatest challenges I'd ever done. And as I reflect back on it, I guess it's important to ask the question well, why did I do this? And there's a story behind that and I hope the answer to my question of why I did this can inspire some of you men watching along.

Speaker 1: 11:31

I remember being a young boy, about 10 years old and where I live in Australia in the 1980s there was a very famous sports show adapted from an American show called Wide World of Sports, and this is pre-cable TV. This is back in the day where we only had a handful of channels to choose from. But Wide World of Sports would be on TV every Saturday afternoon for five hours and they would do a global recap of all the biggest stories of sport around the world. And as a young kid who loves sport, it was one of the best ways to get your fix of what was happening around the world in sport. And I remember every year they would do a three-hour special on the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon.

Speaker 1: 12:14

And I remember as a young kid something getting into my heart and into my mind a little seed of a thought that said one day I'd love to be challenged to compete in an event like that, just to find out if I've got what it takes to do it. And sure enough, many, many years later, that seed sprouted into the idea of I think I finally want to do it. And so in 2009, in my early 30s, I went to a friend and said listen, I want to do this Ironman triathlon. Do you want to do it with me? And I asked him that question in October 2008. The race was scheduled for December 2009. And he said to me what are you thinking in a couple of years' time? I said no, I'm thinking next year and I'm going to register this week. And, to his credit, he actually registered with me and we trained together and we did the race together and we both finished.

Speaker 1: 13:11

And I really put myself through this grueling 12 months of training in this incredibly brutal race day because I had this question on the inside have I got what it takes to get this event done? You see, I thought that I would be mentally and emotionally tough enough, but I didn't know. I needed the context of such a tough experience to find out if I could get the answer to that question. And so that's why I did it. I wanted to be pushed, I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to experience who would I really be in that moment when I hit rock bottom? Because my estimate was that inside me was a tough guy who wouldn't quit. But I needed to be in that brutal context to find out if that was true or not. And maybe that's you watching along. Maybe you need to deliberately choose something challenging like this to bring the best out of you. I guess I'd have to ask myself the question as well what did I learn from that experience? Well, the number one thing I learned is that deep on the inside is the capacity and the ability to go way further than I actually thought I could, and I have leaned on that experience so many times in multiple other areas of my life since that race day where I've been able to say to myself Andrew, you got through that event and that experience, you can beat this challenge that you're dealing with right now.

Speaker 1: 14:38

And so I'm going to bring an end to this first story in this series of stories on men needing to do difficult things. But I really want to endorse this idea that you heard from Jordan Peterson at the top of the video men need to do difficult things. We will never be at our best if we only ever go for comfort and softness and pleasure and recreation. We should enjoy those contrasts when they come along sporadically. However, we need to accept and embrace the challenge that difficult things are part of the journey of a man, part of the making of a man, and actually it can be the making of you as well, if you're enjoying hearing about this particular subject and would like to hear more about it. Why don't you go ahead and click on this video right here, where I take a deeper dive into this idea of Jordan Peterson's quote on men doing difficult things? I know you'll love that too, and I'd love to see you in another video.