Oregon, Mexico, Key West discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
It. I mean, I really love it. When did you get into what you call extreme athletics? Because, you know, anybody can run ten miles, most people can do a marathon, but this is a dramatic uptick when we're talking on the levels of athleticism and endurance. I mean, for you to run a marathon a day, 26.2 miles a day, I mean, what does it take to get your body to a point where you can do that? Most people are in a marathon and then they got to take three weeks off. How long have you been involved in this stuff? So it's a culmination of a lifetime of work, right? So this isn't something that you can just kind of go out and train for. So my entire life, I've been a professional athlete. And I got into it because I wanted to empower people that had been in situation that was similar to mine as a foster kid to do whatever they wanted to with their life because we live in a country that actually allows you to do that. And I wanted to share my story with them and empower them to be more and to empower them to follow their dreams, just like I am right now. I mean, I find myself in 1998. I started this stuff, and I've set several world records running. I've set the world record on stand up paddle board when I paddle boarded from Oregon and Mexico, then I broke that paddleboard record when I travel from Key West in the excuse me, hold on a second. World records, this is very impressive. If I had a world record, I would say it very slowly, so people could take this in. You paddle boarded from where to where? I paddle boarded from Oregon to Mexico in 2007. What am I missing? Hold on a second. How do you paddleboard? From Oregon to Mexico. This is very tough for me to take this in. So I have a motorhome that I use as base camp. And I shuttled with wave runners every day to a launch point, and then we GPS, wherever we left off, and we keep paddling, and then we'd leapfrog that motor home and keep doing it over and over again until we got to the Mexican border. And then in 2010, I broke that world record when I paddled from Key West Florida to New York City. I really can't believe this. This is mind-blowing stuff. Paddle, look, it's one thing to run. I'm a runner. Upper body stuff, I can't believe how far can you travel on a paddleboard in a day. I just can't believe this stuff. Well, when I went from Key West to New York, I averaged 18 miles a day, but when I set the flat water world record on a Lake, Smith mountain Lake in Virginia, I paddled 30 miles a day, and I paddled that 540 miles of shoreline, I believe it was 16 days. So when you were, I just want to get this not that I'm going to do this. I don't really need the details. This is just for the storytelling here. But when you're paddle boarding from Florida to New York, you're doing this on ocean water. Absolutely. I'm doing it in the ocean water, and I can tell you when I went from Oregon to Mexico, I saw great white sharks, most every single day until I got to point conception, which is three quarters of the way down the state. And when I went into the ocean at the Oregon California border, I thought it was the alpha person in the water until I saw my first 17 foot great white shark about 6 feet away from me and then I realized I'm basically fish food. I think once word gets out in the great white shark population, they will be afraid of you. They just, they're not yet familiar with what you've accomplished. But this is so exciting. Now, so right now you're in the middle of this journey going from Alabama to Utah. You are running. So this is on foot across most of the country, 26 miles a day. We're going to.