Coree Woltering - the Ice Age Trail FKT and EcoChallenge | KoopCast Episode 45

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast i have the one the only the incredible cory woltering the world needs a whole heck of a lot more of people like cory cory recently completed his first foray into the adventure racing realm being a part of the first all african-american team to compete in the eco challenge team onyx you can find the coverage for that race right now on amazon prime and in addition to that cory recently completed a fastest known time on the ice age trail we talk about his preparation going into both of those events some of which went to plan and some of which did not go to plan we talk about what those races have meant to him and what he has learned from them so let's get right into it here's my conversation with cory woltering at this point have you finished the whole eco challenge series watching it once or twice or three times or four times like how many times have you run through this yet uh probably about four so i mean i watched yeah i watched pretty much all the episodes as soon as they came out

um on like that thursday night when they leaked it a little bit early and then i watched it again um on that friday how did you find that experience uh it's definitely interesting watching it on tv when you're not there because it's it's kind of weird to see yourself on amazon prime to begin with but then like just seeing what the different teams went through and like how far a team how far ahead some teams were compared to uh some of the slower teams it's like the conditions change so quickly there that it's like multiple different races are going on so i guess for me it was just kind of the inside of like what some of the front teams went through compared to what some of the back teams went through um but it's it's awesome to watch and i mean it sounds like you didn't have like any scope of that before you actually started watching it like what was actually going on in the field like unlike an ultra marathon where you can sit around like powwow with people afterwards you can kind of get a sense out of it like you're looking at this going is this the same race totally um yeah so it's like you have teams that finished extremely quick and then you have teams that it took you know all 11 days and so because of that um like after the race i guess people are finishing it just at different rates where it's like some people are going to hotels to relax some people just quit and flew home and so there's just a wide variety of the different experiences uh post-race

so uh we i really i didn't even know who won um until i watched uh the actual race and you guys were all like the whole field was essentially under a gag order from the time that you finished basically to the time that it came out correct yes so you could could you even like kind of talk yeah it's almost a year i want to kind of go back to that that year in a little bit but you couldn't even like talk a lot amongst yourselves to start to piece some of the stories together yeah um that yeah that's the really hard part about it because like it's like we were there but i i didn't know what happened wow that's so incredible so it's like i mean this is like literally reliving an experience of which you still needed further context for when you were watching it on amazon prime yeah so like when i first watched it i was actually like texting a couple different people and i'm like did you know that this happened like how did we not know this like yeah like we we don't we we were there but we didn't see it so we didn't really know how did you how do you feel that the ultimate um the ultimate tv broadcast like portrayed the teams and then like the personalities within the teams as well because you know at the end of the day this is it's a tv show right and a lot of these reality style tv shows they kind of get a notorious rap for just exploiting the things

that are entertaining and sometimes at the expense of like the characters in this case the athletes like how do you feel that that portrayal actually happened from reality to tv i think they did very well with it this year um i know that there have been some in the past that um they showed a lot more of like the fighting that goes on between the teams and um just different things like that whereas this time they really didn't show too much of that and that is probably a good thing i mean they they had a lot of incredible stories to tell throughout all 10 episodes so i guess they just felt like they really didn't need to show all that and people would find it to be interesting anyway which i think it was so what's the feedback that like you've personally gotten from it because i know you watch it in your public personality you've been you know on social media and stuff like that and you've done and you've done some pretty cool things in between you actually doing eco challenge and it being aired that have kind of like um that that have also been good for your public profile so what what have you like received in terms of feedback from just the people that are watching this um you know 98 of it is great um a lot of people reaching out being like hey you know thank you for being out there thank you for sharing your story thank you for not being afraid to be the openly gay black man that's out there just running around

the woods in a speedo and you know just being you um and so that has been awesome and a lot of people have been reaching out saying just also like thank you for inspiring us to get out and go hike or to ride a bike or check out a new trail um because like team onyx that was one of our big goals is basically to just encourage people of color to want to go out be active maybe try a different sport that they haven't done or something that they've always wanted to do and just haven't done um so it's been great to get a lot of feedback like that but then you know there's always going to be people that have something to say and feel like they need to put it in your inbox or write it on your wall or whatever and um there's there's been quite a bit of negative stuff coming in like i get at least one message a day um from somebody out there that's like oh i know that you're a great athlete but what does being black have to do with it or you're a great athlete but what does being gay have to do with it and then my favorite was uh the one that they called out team onyx for being racist because we didn't allow white people to be on our team and i was like honestly like this is where we're going with this right now i'm like okay um so yeah there there's definitely a wide variety of stuff do you even respond to that or you just be like yeah what about what a freaking idiot like i don't have the time to i shouldn't even waste my time with this it depends um for some people i just i'm just like whatever i really don't care and then there's some that it's just so ridiculous that i feel the need to

actually respond to them um and it's actually quite funny so i had an exchange with someone on instagram like three weeks ago now about three weeks and basically he called team onyx out for being racist and he's like i don't have a problem with you being black i don't have a problem with you being gay but uh he's like if you know if we had a all-white team should it be called like a team cotton and blah blah blah blah and all this stuff i'm just like oh my god like honestly i was like and then he he ends his message with i was married to a nubian princess for 20 years but now uh i have a half black sun so my black card is still active and i was like oh my god but i couldn't let that one go so so i just i explained to him like hey you know like the reason team onyx is here is because yes we did want to be the first all african-american team to race an eco challenge or an expedition length adventure race and like this is why it's important and laid out all those steps for him and then i was just like and you might want to like watch your wording a little bit and i'm like i don't know like whatever so i didn't hear anything and then he responds like five days later and he's like are we not allowed to speak our mind anymore in america like what is this country coming to you and like went on some rant about that i was like you are more than welcome to speak your mind but if you don't have anything nice to say or anything constructive to say then maybe you should

keep it to yourself and he's like but if you have anything else you'd like to tell me i will sit here and i will listen to this and maybe you'll get somewhere and he doesn't respond and then like a week later he's like well actually here's my story and i was like okay i at least appreciated the fact that he was willing to like give me some context from where he's coming from he's like yeah i'm just like a poor white dude from the south like i'm just trying to do the best i can blah blah blah he's like but if everybody would meet me with kindness and compassion like you did in your responses then he's like maybe you know the world would be a better place and i was thinking yes it probably would be but you shouldn't be going on these rants in the first place so well at least some good could call of it right yeah and so like every once in a while there's that stuff that happens and i'm like i don't know i uh i just feel the need to call people out now sometimes because you know um one thing people say about getting into the outdoors like a lot of people of color have said you know i just i didn't feel comfortable because i didn't see someone that looked like me or they've gotten messages before and so i just wanted to highlight that like this is actually real like people do get messages and people don't always feel safe and i'm just happy that i'm getting these messages rather than somebody else because it doesn't scare me like it doesn't bother me i'm just like okay whatever as a team i mean you guys definitely went into this to like raise some awareness having an all african-american team did you all discuss that

internally as a team and say hey listen this is going to be some realistic controversy blowback negative feedback or whatever and here's how we're going to handle it did you discuss that in advance amongst your team or amongst the producers or anything like that yeah absolutely um so like we knew what we were getting ourselves into and we're totally fine with that um the producers loved it um and honestly like most of my teammates aren't getting all the other messages and stuff like a lot of people are coming straight for me and i'm like that is totally fine um but like they'll also hop into the discussion though on like instagram or whatever when they see something they're just like we're not gonna let this one sit here you know and it's like it's it is what it is but whatever i mean if you're not pissing people off then are you really living yeah you know like i've always looked at these things and i knew i knew when you set this up when you originally went into it i'm like okay there's gonna be some you know some sort of outcome of this but it like with the airing and the timing of the airing and the state of racial relations in the country just created this really it it's like an enhanced storm of stuff that you would have to deal with anyway you know if this would have aired three years ago you know without all of the racial controversy or at least less of the racial controversy there'll still be some of it but now it's just like amplified so much because of the situation yeah yes it is so uh that's it is what it is i mean you know we we set out to

do what we wanted to do and we i think we did it well so are all are i always want to know after these things are all of you still friends afterwards yeah yeah absolutely um which a lot of teams cannot say the same uh especially from fiji um that that uh the race took a toll on a lot of friendships in fiji and so if you finished as friends then that was already a win or even if you didn't finish the race but you're still friends after that is a huge win um on that course oh i i i probably know uh 10 or 12 people that were out there every including you and you fit this profile as well that i'm about to describe every single one of them afterwards was fucked like there was something wrong they broke a bone they broke a few bones they have some sort of you know intestinal disease like just like every single person after they got off the island and got back to the states they couldn't tell you like what happened during the race obviously because of the gag order and whatnot but physically they were annihilated yeah um i don't i just i don't know like i understand that it's a jungle but like they don't have poisonous snakes they don't have poisonous spiders like insects aren't really that bad there but these plants and just the mud and like the cow shit that drains into

the rivers that you're on these paddle boards and and stuff like it messes you up and so like honestly breaking a bone is probably the better way to go than some of these intestinal things that were happening you're picking the lesser of two evils there oh yeah okay you just you kind of had to let's rewind a little bit because i think this is like good this is good for the listeners um so you actually did the eco challenge was actually done the race itself from win to win last year uh september of 2019 so like the second week of september through the 20 something okay so about a year ago when this podcast comes out about about a year ago um you got the call for that win uh january january um yeah an instagram message from our team captain clifton and he's basically like hey i'm trying to put together the first all african-american team to race an eco challenge would you be interested in it oh by the way it's in fiji so like i got on google and was like where is fiji and then once i figured out where that was i was like oh look at these really nice white sand beaches and blue water like i would absolutely love to do that and so uh we put together our application we found all of our teammates through instagram and then uh last like february i guess we found out that we were in

and then uh the dread started to set uh set in as i realized i had a lot of new skills to learn that's what i wanted to get into so you went into this going oh sweet i get to do some sort of ultra distance race in fiji it looks like a cool area not having hardly any clue what even what even an adventure race was comprised of yeah i mean the last time i watched an eco challenge i was what like 18 years old or something and at that time you're just like oh that looks like it's pretty awful but cool like i wasn't even an endurance athlete at that point so like for me i'm just like whatever great tv okay so let's start to unravel this a little bit because you're a runner you have a triathlon background so you have and you obviously have a current endurance background and you're a good athlete but adventure racing is a completely different kettle of fish where there's all of these other what what a lot of people were referred to as like mountain skills that go into the the event itself how did you start to unravel like how because you didn't have any knowledge of it how did you start to unravel all of those and let's kind of like walk through what we did as like coach an athlete to get you like to complete this adventure racing crash course that you took yeah um well you know my current training ground of ottawa illinois is so mountainous that i can practice all of my mountain

skills here so um yeah that was that was the first step i think was just trying to figure out where i needed to go for these different certifications you need to have um and so like one of the things was rock climbing and ropes one was whitewater and swift water river rescue um you also had to be able to swim up to like a class 2.5 rapid um you had what else do we have we had sailing uh wilderness first aid and cpr so um yeah once again not a lot of those things around here so uh we we made it work started out with um just ultra training i guess and added in a little bit of just like core body work type stuff and then i guess it wouldn't have been till july of last year that we're like all right instead of just running like you need to actually get on the mountain bike you need to go get on these ropes courses you need to get out and go kayak or canoe or stand up paddleboard and uh it worked i mean i got to the start line the way that i the way because a couple people have asked me about this since then the way that i've described it is you had this impeccable endurance training base and then you took these very specific and narrow crash courses on the skill side of

everything so the rock climbing skills and the rope skills and then the water skills and then some of the navigation skills but they were you you can i want you to describe it the way that you would think think of it but from a coaching standpoint i was looking at those as very like rudimentary crash courses let's just get cory over the bar so he's minimally competent in these activities absolutely that's a great way of looking at it and i think that that is correct um because yeah like i have the engine to do it and i don't require a lot of sleep and so that's a great thing for adventure racing but if you want me to be the primary navigator like we are fucked so like there we go did it ever come down to that um no it did not come down to that thank god because uh it would have been a nightmare um and so like but even even most of the teams that you still had to have like some sort of like jungle navigation type thing which is basically an online class you can take and like i don't care if i stare at my ipad all day like once you get out into the woods that jungle navigation is completely different yeah it's definitely uh you have to learn in the field like there's the the practical classroom application of those of that specific skill is not going to take you very far as you now have experienced yeah so okay so you took a crash course and all this stuff

but still you really don't know what you're getting into until you actually get there that's part of the thing with the ego challenges it's just this big this big curtain and then they peel it back once you get to whatever section that you're actually getting to what was that like like what was like the unknown piece of it like like knowing that you're absolutely right you're a great athlete like you're a great cardiovascular athlete you have a great base of training and things like that but still you're gonna ask yourself to do things that you don't know what's coming up you might not know how to solve that problem like what was that whole thing like in real time yeah um so the great news is cliff and chris have both raced um expedition length adventure races before so they uh they liked to tell us a little bit about what we might have happened on the course but you can't actually know for sure so like we just kind of had this general idea of like okay so like when they let us see like the first section of course or whatever and they're like all right now we're going to be going out to the comic house and we're going to be sailing i was just like yep like we we had a they gave each team a like basically a one hour lesson on how to sail a comic cow um before the race started and so you had like three different stations you're at for 20 minutes each

and it's the first time most of us are seeing these things yeah what's a comic cow by the way you're gonna have to describe what that is for some of the listeners it's like a basically a canoe that can hold four people and it has two arms on it and like a base and basically um you should be able to sail them pretty much anywhere um in the ocean but to start this race you have a 10 kilometer paddle uh to get out to the ocean so you're basically starting out with river navigation and then you're going to go to ocean navigation and it's like okay um they they're like we're this will be fine like everyone's going to hit 10 kilometers and then you pass us like a bigger boat and then it's like yay open ocean here we go there is no wind so uh after 10 kilometers of paddling to get to where we should be able to put up the sail uh most teams chose not to put up the sail because there's just no wind so all of a sudden it's like oh this is already the first problem of the race like there's no wind so now when we have 30 kilometers to go like are we still going to paddle this or are we going to hopefully like look for some wind out there or what and like oh my god it was just miserable um and so yeah that's a great way to start out you know be like four hours into this and you're miserable um what was your what was your boating experience prior to that uh i had been on a sailboat

before on a lake um that's it yeah that's it that's like your previous i mean you're a good swimmer obviously triathlon background right but yeah boating experience none like no like i'd been in canoes like single person canoes and kayaks and that stuff well i guess single person kayaks and two person canoes but never something where it's like four people and it has this massive sail on it and you're out on open ocean okay so you get out there the open ocean you're trying to decide how to get to where you're going 30 kilometers down there and you guys just decided to paddle yeah that's what every team was deciding to do just because the the wind was not beneficial and so it's just really funny because the race was hoping that you know there'd be like a dramatic um like start to the race or everyone's paddling which the start was dramatic you saw like four teams flip over in the first 30 seconds of the race um so like that was dramatic but then once you get past this boat you should see a bunch of sails up and it should make like really pretty views and like really dramatic opening and really cool and instead you just see a bunch of people paddling and so so it didn't quite work out how they had hoped it would um but yeah just it took a long time which is hard but just it doesn't make for good tv well like it just it really doesn't make for that good of tv and like it's just it's

already hard and then you're just like all right like because i think that first section is maybe 80 kilometers total of paddling or maybe a little bit more um and so like it was just like come on like when does this ever end that's so much man okay so you took all of these like rudimentary crash courses in these various hodgepodge adventure racing skill set how well do you think that that actually prepared you for the event um i think that they were all very beneficial to have and definitely it helped quite a bit but uh in true like fiji fashion i probably should have spent a lot more time on the water and uh not necessarily so much on land um just because like if things are going well and you can and you don't have to paddle and you can actually sail then like the first two days of this race go by so much quicker but instead you know you spend like 18 hours a day just paddling for the first two days and that's just a lot of paddling what about from like uh like an like any other is there anything that during the race you either got to or having watched the race later you would have kind of gotten we're going to get how the whole thing unfolded uh in a little bit where you can kind of like look back and go ah man like i really wish i would have done that like i had no idea that that was going to happen um you know i think that most of the stuff in the race we knew would happen at some point um i do

honestly i wish that we would have been able to uh do the big waterfall climb um just because my rope skills were very uh were very solid at that time so i was like i was going to be most proud of that i think just to be like i did that um but um yeah you know just i think that overall it kind of went well there are just a couple things that happened that weren't on camera that ended up just being why we are so far back there um but other than i mean i honestly think we would have been in the top 30 for most of the race i was gonna ask you this you can feel free to to not get into it and we'll cut it out of the podcast but what didn't get shown on tv that you wish would have gotten shown on tv for whatever reason either you were doing awesome or it was just some complete like debacle like peel the curtain back a little bit on something that that might have not made the or that got left on the cutting room floor yeah so um on our way back from the smaller island um like we'd already done the first like 30 kilometers of sailing or whatever then we did the 20 kilometer trek um and then had to sail back and you could either choose to sleep that night and then leave in the morning or if you felt confident enough you could go out for you know uh like a 30 or 40 kilometer ocean sail at night

and uh as a team we chose to go out at night um which i was just like great you know when else am i ever going to be saying that i'm like sailing in the south pacific at night so like what's pretty awesome um but it's also like do we have the skills to be navigating an ocean at night like it's like i trust my teammates but i was just like okay like we're making some bold choices here and i can i can respect that though um so anyway everything is pretty decent and we're navigating this well at night and we're getting probably within about five kilometers of where we needed to dive down for the first medallion and just through whatever reason so like there's that little platform that's out in between like the two arms and we were taking turns just kind of like laying out on that stretching for a second just not being in the cramped position of paddling for hours because we were actually kind of sailing at this point so i was out there on that platform and whatever happened we're still not exactly sure what it was um but the the arm broke off of the boat and it threw me into the ocean so here i am just like out in the ocean one of the arms broke off there's like this elastic strap that is holding the two pieces connecting on and it was just one of those things where like nobody saw this coming so just a complete surprise for me like i'm laying there one minute next thing you know i just see myself up in

the air and then out into the water like okay this is totally fine chris is not freaking out about it at all because he's like you know how to swim you're good you're calm and so like sure totally fine but now we have a problem because our boat is broken in the water and it's like we either need to get that arm off like completely off or uh because it's still attached on one side or i had to find that elastic strap and try to put it back on and hope that it'd work but it's like who knows what's gonna happen but the big thing is we needed to get the sail down because now it's an unstable boat so with the wind that was happening plus the waves that were happening i actually did find the elastic strap and was getting ready to put it back on but we just couldn't get the sail down fast enough so it ended up flipping our boat in the ocean like all four of us are in the water now um our gear is still like so we're all in the water our gear is still strapped under the boat um and we're like all right like this is actually a decently big problem at this point so um chris dives under and finds an air pocket and was able to figure out um what um what pack had like the emergency flares and the radio and all that stuff in it um but basically if you use your emergency flares or you need to use your radio then you are usually disqualified from the race but like we were out in the

ocean at least at this point we had just been drifting so now we had we're probably about four miles away from where we needed to go and it was just like this is bad so we shoot off the first emergency flare and just nothing like nobody sees anything um we don't see any of the race helicopters around there's like nothing so we're like okay this is fine so then we get the radio out and we try to radio back to hq and we just have no signal like just no answer from them like nothing so we are like all right we we have a decision to make here and there's really nothing you can do except for you use your final flare and just hope that someone sees it but with our sail already being like also in the water like you you just you have to hope that someone sees it so use our final flare um the race still didn't see it and so now we're like okay we're just out here in the middle of nowhere and this is not good but there's apparently a fijian fisherman that was out in the water somewhere and he saw the first flare and he's like he just thought people are joking around so he didn't do anything but then he saw the second flare go off so he figured that people are in trouble and is like i'm gonna go see what's going on so he pulls up in his fishing boat as our comic cow is just like submerged and he's like

oh he's like what are you guys doing we're like well that's a great question we're trying to sail but that doesn't seem seem to be working but we're like we're part of this race and we need to be over there and he's like i'm not trying to freak you guys out but you're in shark infested water so you need to get out of the water and get on my boat and that's sort of like like do we get on the boat do we not get on the boat but then we're like well the race isn't here so uh so i'm like yeah we'll get on the boat he's like it's fine i was just making a pot of coffee like i'll have some warm coffee for you guys like it's like i'll take you over to the island where you need to be and we're like oh my goodness like get all of our gear um and we're basically like we just need to leave this boat here i guess like there's not really anything else we can do so we're on the way back to the island and the race hq still had like a gps tracker on all the boats and uh they finally realized that we were like not anywhere near where we needed to be at this point so they're looking for us they send out two boats to look for us as we're on a fishing boat heading the other direction and we're able to like finally wave them down get them and they brought us to the island where we needed to be they went out they rescued our boat and then they determined that it was like an actual like equipment malfunction and so because of that they had to bring they brought out a second boat to us and

let us continue on um in the race but we lost about seven hours from this jesus so yeah so it goes from like you know we were decently high up there and we were doing well um to then losing seven hours uh throughout this whole thing the craziest thing about that is the random fisherman that comes along i was like what are you guys doing here yeah like we honestly couldn't believe it and he's like what are you guys doing it's like i don't know like we we don't want to be like right here now either so yeah like what are we doing but just explaining just explaining the concept of an adventure race to some random fisherman in fiji like you might as well have been an alien totally absolutely and it was pretty funny and like we love to look back and laugh on this whole experience um just because like it was funny but like seven hours is a long time like that's a good chunk of daylight right there that we just lost i'm glad i'm glad that we got to tell that story that got left on the cutting room floor because there are no cameras around you obviously to uh to to document it totally and so our boat had a gopro on it but i don't know if the gopro is lost as the boat went under or what but i'm like i really hope that somebody finds that gopro someday um and is just like looking through the footage of this and

is like what the hell is this what are these people doing that's hilarious okay well let's not i i was thinking about getting into the kind of what happened at the end of the day with your team but yeah let's leave that for the listeners to actually go to amazon prime and view the whole race because i thought it was extremely well documented and it was very well put together it it it blends the athletic side with the entertainment side as well i mean this is an actual race with real athletes doing it and it's not just elite athletes it's everyday athletes and things like that i thought all those elements came together quite well yeah absolutely i think it did like i'm i'm very happy with how it turned out and i i know that they are thrilled with how it turned out okay so we'll direct everybody over to amazon prime and do you know how long it's going to be on there for i have no idea oh so get there soon and a good good reason to sign up for amazon prime if you're not already an amazon prime member um let's switch to the ice age trail and the the chronological sequence of this is you get into eco challenge you do eco challenge covid hits you do the ice age trail and then the show the tv show the eco challenge tv show comes out yes so it's kind of like it's just a weird it's just a kind of a weird orientation that i wanted

everybody to get used to so before we get an ice age trail itself which is really well documented as well i want to kind of go into how that unfolded because you like a lot of other athletes have kind of had this like oh god what am i trying to do with this year and it went through a lot of like fits and starts at the very beginning and almost like the eco challenge unfolded in a really quick and haphazard almost manner so let's back up almost to like black canyon right so what was the original intent of of 2020 for you as as you were going through it yeah uh so 2020 um i was basically hoping to race black canyon and get a golden ticket into western states and then race states and i don't know anything else later in the year but basically those are kind of like the two bigger things but um that uh did not happen like i thought it would um black canyon ended up being a very disappointing day um which i still do i look back on it quite a bit and i kind of laugh because i've only finished one of like five 100ks that i've ever started um so that just it kind of makes me laugh a little bit um but yeah so black canyon and then it was like well i have all this fitness so like

what am i supposed to do and what did we sign up for next uh way too cool um and basically went there and was like i don't have leg speed to race a really fast 50k right now but uh i will go out and enjoy it and had a good race there and then it was basically like i got back from way too cool and covid was starting to shut everything down um so i still squeezed in the marathon at land between the lakes in kentucky and then like that was the last thing that was on the schedule for a long time so um you know i just i was bored at home and basically was like all right i'm gonna run every street of ottawa illinois starting on april 1st um and did 205 miles over 12 days and raised 13 000 for small businesses in ottawa so that was really fun and gave me a reason to actually get out there and run um and well one of the big things about that was they had shut down all the trail systems in illinois so like my only option for running was running on the road or not running um and so i was like well i guess i'll just i'll run every street why not um but then i finished that the trails still aren't open and i'm like what am i gonna do with my late spring and early summer if nothing is open

and there's nothing to do so i was like let's go after an fkt and i think we texted back and forth on this a lot about like how far do we want to go like will there be races later this summer or do we want to you know just go all the way and not really think about racing uh later this summer or fall so um i don't know like somehow we decided on ice age um after thinking about it for like a week uh it just kind of became the thing to do i guess um well hold on wait a minute no but there's actually not that much more to it than that because the time frame this is what i want to kind of get out of this the time frame between when you finished every single street and when you decided to run the ice age trail was only several weeks it's not like you had this big grandiose okay let's start working towards this since march i think we can go back and look at our text messages and it's probably maybe six five or six weeks between i think i'm maybe even shorter than that between i'm gonna do this and the and the actual start date and yeah from a training perspective i remember having this conversation with you and just trying to communicate that you're gonna rely on your entire experience as an endurance athlete not necessarily the last three weeks so let's get all the logistics wrapped up and if you have to take training off the table to like get everything buttoned up get the sponsors all on

board you know do get your crew and everything like that great that's a great use of your time let's not cram in miles because you had this you had this kind of like base built up essentially from every single street every single street yeah um i think it was i think we decided maybe four weeks before that we're actually going to go through with it and then i contacted my crew about like three weeks before i'm like hey what are you guys doing uh in june and they're like i don't know and i'm like no i'm not talking about just like one day in june i'm talking like what are you doing for three weeks of june um which it wasn't hard to convince them to do it so that was great but yeah like it was i don't know some of those things where it's like i had thought about doing it probably years from now um but this is the perfect time to do it i want to get some of your reactions to these stats so first off i'll what how long is the ice age trail because there are going to be some people that are that are listening to this that that kind of don't have a concept for how long it actually is yeah it's about 1147 miles of trail well it's road and trail so you have i want to say that you have probably about 550 miles of trail and 550 miles of road somewhere in there and you did it in how many days 21 days 13 hours and 35 minutes okay so i'm going to

break the math down for the people out there that can't do basic division in their heads and that includes me and actually when i saw all the files start to come through it started like this actually the reality of how of how big this was actually hit me to a much greater degree as well so week number one was 344 miles and 83 hours and 40 minutes of running week number two was 300 miles and 87 uh hours of running and week week number four the last or sorry week number three the last week was 471 miles and exactly 100 hours of running so it's a 344 mile week a 300 mile week and 471 mile week all of which is like over a month of training each one of those weeks and you did it all in three consecutive weeks and my point with that is is like when you went into it you can do all the math right you know how long it is you know how many days it's going to take but the fact that you were doing so much more running than you had ever done in your life you're literally doing five or six weeks of running in one week like did any of that hit you before you sat out on this adventure not really so like that's probably the best part about it though like i just went into it like okay like i just need to run between 50 miles and 60 miles a day and this will be fine and so like i didn't

even think about it like that i'm just like i get to do an ultra tomorrow then i get to do one the next day and there you go um but like i don't think i really thought about the number of hours it would actually be when it came to uh just the weekly totals and stuff and i don't think i actually looked until the end of the first week and like oh wow that's a lot see that's this is what i've always told people it's like what what are you attaching to your weekly training volume like what sort of psychology are you attaching to that because if you i i guarantee you and this was not intentional i think by either one of us but i think it ended up being a good strategy so we get bonus points for being lucky the fact that we didn't go over that and put that in the in these contexts like the fact that yeah you're gonna do six weeks worth of running in one week like because everything came together so quickly and it almost didn't allow for the opportunity for you to kind of like get in your own head and start to forecast too much you were just like just like you said okay get to go run an ultra today and then tomorrow i get to go run an ultra and then the next day i get to go run an ultra yeah i mean i think that's probably the best way to do it um because like well i had originally said that like i was hoping for maybe about 12 hours a day was like about what i wanted to be out there um but even i said 12 hours a day i still don't think i even um thought about like monday

being 12 hours and tuesday being 12 hours and just stacking them on top of each other i think i just went in like okay it's just 12 hours so and yet it didn't really it wasn't unfolding too well at the very beginning no like it never is really unfolding that well i don't think um well i don't know i mean it started to at the end but the beginning i mean it was not you've recollected this in in a few areas but it it definitely did not go to plan fair statement right at any point in time were you looking at that going oh god like i just can't get done i don't have enough i don't have enough time to do the remaining miles because you were so far behind i mean you were yeah 40 miles behind at some point at the most yeah yeah about on day like 14 or 15 i think um so that's quite a ways into it but honestly no um it basically came down to you i just knew that i could sleep less and move more and still get it done um so like i was willing to just basically not sleep if that's what it came down to um and we had talked about it early on where it's like sleep as much as you can in that first week stay rested just get through the first week to 10 days and then after that things are going to start to fall apart maybe a little bit and that's when you're going to have to make the decision on sleep or not um i was having to make that decision quite a bit earlier um because i mean the first day i think

i did like 55 miles or something on day one and i'm like great i'm already up on record pace it's all good day two was just the giant meltdown with the ticks and i only covered 28 miles on day two and so all of a sudden like well there's like 25 to 30 miles that i just did not cover that i needed to cover um and so all of a sudden it's like well now we have work to do like we are already behind and it's only the second day um but then through the first i think by day five i was back on top um and by day nine i i think i was like 20 miles up on day nine um and so like actually i was having a good day um or a good stretch even though at that point my ankle was just so messed up but still having a decent amount of mileage and then just over the next few days like things just massively fell apart um and so i go from being like 20 miles up to like 40 miles down yeah so when you're comparing yourself to the current record out there you basically had two parts of this roller coaster the first part happened almost immediately with the ticks ticks invade like you were you were i mean you were seriously falling behind because every you know 100 feet or whatever you had to pick 20 ticks off of you but then you rolled your ankle and you kind of like fell behind significantly i was going to say a little bit but that's not true you fell behind significantly because you're back up on record pace you fell down so you fell back significantly because of all the complications with the ankle

and the terrain and stuff like that like but what i'm getting from you is is like you were just saying oh i'm just not going to sleep as much like that's kind of what it was coming down to yeah and like it it was one of those things where being behind on record pace didn't actually like ever stress me out um because i also knew that we had a lot of flat running that would come towards the end of this so it's like if you can just survive the first two weeks of this like your third week will be much better or at least that's what i kept telling myself um and so like for me it was like all right like if we have to be out here for an hour longer every day or two hours longer then yeah we just we won't sleep um and so like towards the end of it like i mean i pulled two all-nighters in the final four days and um had one night of like maybe three hours and one night of like four hours in the final like 100 hours of this thing so um like it really i mean it really did come down to just not sleeping did you know that you were capable of that beforehand or did you have any sense that you were just good in sleep deprivation situations before this um i knew that i was pretty good with without a lot of sleep um but not anything to like this extent where you know the most i think i slept in those three weeks was probably six hours um was the longest nap basically that i had um but there are a lot of four to five hour day nights of sleep and like it just kind of became

that new normal where all of a sudden it's like well this feels fine like it doesn't feel too bad and then we start only getting like two or three hours it's like well this doesn't feel great but you know it's it's not awful um and then towards the end it's just like i don't need sleep like we are close enough to this thing that i just don't need sleep and i mean i remember saying with like 160 miles to go and like 44 hours left on the clock i'm just like we're not gonna sleep until we get to the finish of this and everyone's like like you're talking almost two days now after you've already been out here for 19 and i'm like doesn't matter we're not sleeping but um i did take a 20 minute coffee nap uh with 60 miles to go but it sounds like you have more confidence in your crew oh yeah like they uh they uh they like sleep um and they were also all like not getting much sleep over the final week of this thing so like they were exhausted i was exhausted but like i just would not stop and so i just remember some of these overnight like road sections where like we'd have the crew van driving behind me as i'm running down the road and they're like yeah you know it's super fun to be going like six miles an hour down a country road somewhere like i'm like it is what it is like this is the fastest i can move right now so like there'd be hours of that though that they're just sitting in the van driving behind me like here we go um but that's so brutal man well god bless your crew but

i mean it's like this is what i've always come down to with athletes is like you got to be the boss like your crew can pull you out of holes every once in a while and that's nice and good and you might get lucky that they help out here and there but at the end of the day you got to be responsible for you and sometimes even despite people's other people's kind of best intentions that want to help out you still got to be the one that's making the call you know yeah and like especially with the ankle thing that happened pretty early on like the ankle is day five i didn't tell my crew about it until day seven um just because i didn't want to give them one more thing to worry about but yet they're just like on day six they're like you're just moving a little bit slower than normal i'm like it's totally fine then on day seven they're like what is actually going on like you are not fine like what's that like oh i rolled my ankle on day five but it's it's okay that's so classic that's so classic don't worry about me i'll be okay and they're like it's not fine though and they're like you can't even like put pressure on it right now and i'm like i can put pressure on it i just don't want to i don't think people understand like this was not just a normal ankle roll that you kind of like walk off like your ankle was foobard yeah like i like i even had moments where early on i just told i told the crew i'm like hey guys like i'm not able to cover the amount of miles i need to cover right now so um we we're just gonna have to go into like basically emergency mode here and i'm

like we have 22 hours a day that i can be out here covering distance i can still sleep for an hour eat for an hour and we'll just make this work until we get back on record pace and they're like you really don't want to do that right now and i'm like you're right i don't want to do that right now but we're gonna go to about 18 hours so like i had some pretty big days in there and still is able to get some sleep um and then had one day 11 i think was the short day like 26 miles or something like that but i saw a sports chiropractor and he's able to just he did some laser treatment on it he did some of the grassed in technique where you know they're doing the scraping and all that and that just hurts so bad but it got it to the point where i actually had range of motion back in my ankle um because like i was finally at a point where i didn't even have range of motion in my ankle so um walking on flat ground just hurt walking downhill was almost impossible without trekking poles but i could still at least hike uphill decent um and so like it was just one of those things where they're like is this a high ankle sprain like do you actually have something broken like a bunch of other questions just came up and i was like i don't know but we don't have time to stop did the did the improvement in the ankle really unfold like that because when i watched the outside tv documentary and a lot of people listening will have watched it as well and i mean it seems like quasi miraculous that one day and i i actually knew how like i don't think they portray portrayed how bad

your ankle was to the extent that it actually was is way worse off than what somebody who's watching it to to would be led to believe and that's just because we've talked about it afterwards but it was way worse and then all of a sudden like it seemed like a like a switch got flipped and it was way better did it like really unfold like that from like one one day to the next where it got almost miraculously better yeah like it was absolutely the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen um because like that previous day i think i had i think i had covered maybe like 60 miles that previous day but it took me like 19 hours or something like that and it was mostly road or like limestone trail and so because of that it was it was like okay i'm still able to cover this mileage but my ankle still really hurts it's swollen like things are just not great i went to bed at like 2 a.m and then woke up at 6 30 and the camera crews in the room and like i don't want to get out of bed like i'm just like this is gonna hurt like i know how this goes and like i just i was like fine whatever like we finally have to get up and we need to start and i put my feet on the ground and like my ankle just didn't hurt and i was like i had no idea how to explain it and like i was shocked because i was just expecting to be in pain like from that first step in the morning until i go to sleep that night and just it was it just it didn't hurt i was like this is absolutely ridiculous and so like i didn't know the camera

crew was gonna be there when i woke up that morning like they had texted tom overnight and they came for when i was waking up and like just there's nothing that should say that it should have felt better that day and it just it did and so it's funny because pete kostelnick um he sent like when he heard that i hurt my ankle or whatever um he sent me a message on instagram he's like just keep moving forward it will fix itself and i was like you know i don't know like i don't know that i believe all this stuff yeah i was like i don't know if i i don't know that i believe all this stuff but i'm like you know the dude has a lot more experience with multi-day stuff than i do so if pete says keep moving forward i guess i'll keep moving forward and sure enough like one day it just fixed itself it's so i've so you're not the first person that i've seen have that happen to in a multi-day thing it's weird it's weird it's stuff that in like normal day-to-day life you'd be like yeah you need to take like three weeks off you know i mean that's that's kind of like that type of injury like you're taking two three weeks off not running 471 miles in a week afterwards it's just like it's so absurd and i mean i kind of echo pete's advice where you just never know what's going to happen you just got to keep kind of rolling the dice until you come up snake eyes and it's clear that you can't go on any further yeah crazy so it's all said and done like you've had a good amount of time to like process this

now and actually recover and you and i've probably been messaging back and forth more about the hilarious recovery stories than anything else we won't get into that but like as an athlete having gone through this experience and then also another experience where you kind of like you know you got out of your comfort zone to a significant extent not just a little bit a significant extent what do you take away from that that you're going to use in future years yeah um one of the big things that i kind of learned through this is just you know taking things 10 seconds at a time um and i've said that like on a million podcasts now but like honestly on the days where my ankle is just hurting so bad along with both of my shins were just on fire um it got to where it's like okay if i'm limping on the right side and i'm limping on the left side then i guess i can still limp in a straight line and move forward but like every step i took was just hurting so bad all day for a few of those days so i was just like i'm gonna count to 10 like that is the only thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna focus on counting to 10 over and over and over and that will get me through the day and like there are days where i honestly just count 10 for like six hours at a time and just be like well here we go just 10 more steps here we go um and it sounds kind of sick and like like there's something wrong with me or something but it's like that's what you have to do like when you're in a situation like that you know you still have 600 miles to go and you only have you know 11 days or 10 days or however many it is

it's like all right like 10 seconds at a time that is the only way to attack that um so i guess the biggest thing now is i actually feel like i can race 100 miles um because before i've always thought of 100 miles as being like a fun event in the woods or in the mountains you know and um like i've i've raced them well but i don't know that i've had any like great races uh when it comes to the 100 mile distance um but now i'm really excited for that just because uh especially over the final 160 not 160 hours 160 miles uh to be able to cover that in 38 hours on the final days of this like i think that's what gave me the most confidence of like if you can do that then you can go out and you can race a really hard 100 miler and still do it well yeah you know for the longest time and i think this is still a little bit prevalent not only with elite athletes but with um just a lot of everyday athletes they tend to treat the 100 mile distance is like this defensive proposition where they're just constantly playing defense and they're constantly trying to be overly conservative and things like that and i think when you're fit enough and you have the experience like you've had like these these experiences to accelerate the learning curve to a large extent right when you're fit enough and you have the experience you can actually go into 100 mile race and say okay i'm gonna race this this is not that long like carl carl melzer would say 100 miles is not that long the reason he can say that

is because he's done so many of them yeah absolutely and you did 100 miles i don't think this this shouldn't get lost you did 100 miles in under 24 hours on the last day or the second to last day second to last day yeah that was that was the start of the push and i was like if i can cover 100 miles in 24 hours then we will get the record if i can't then the record just might not be happening um and so like i think i covered 103 miles in 24 hours or something like that um and then was able to finally see my crew at mile like 105 so i'd been seeing them the whole time but i sent them ahead so they could sleep because i was on a flat section and i was like i'll have breakfast after 105 miles of running and i'll take a short little 20 minute nap and we're gonna go again and so yeah that's so awesome man so what's happened to you like after this because you've had like these two i kind of want to talk about your professional career for just a little bit because you've had these two kind of big pieces of exposure like for you personally with eco challenge which got elevated certainly in this ice age trail which which also has gotten a lot of a lot of attention what's like what's changed or what's different for you personally after having both of those kind of come out in quick succession um oh boy just a lot of media stuff uh because so many

people are just like they'll hear about the final four days of the race or the final uh like basically the final 160 mile push and all that and they're just fascinated by that and they want to hear more like what actually gets you to go out and do something like that or like how do you come up with ideas like this when everyone else is not being as active during quarantine and covid and um so that's been nice but like there have been a lot of brands that have been reaching out with different like partnership and opportunities and stuff like that um just it's also just given me a very large platform to be able to go out and tell people about things i enjoy and like causes i like and uh want to support and and so like that's been really cool um especially that companies now are uh more into like diversity in the outdoors um because this is a great way to do it and by doing something like an eco challenge and then a longer fkt like this it's not just saying like diversity in trail and ultra running we're saying diversity in outdoors and adventure sports um so that's been really cool that uh brands are noticing that and people are actually interested in it man well if we're up to me the world needs more quarries like we need we need more of that across the entire space and you hit the nail on the head not just trail running but the entire outdoor space i quite frankly i asked that question because i think it's awesome totally biased host question from my perspective but dude

you like you you you carry that burden and you carry that message really well so i hope i i really really do hope that it continues that this is just the start of it and those doors continue to open for you yeah thank you um i'm i'm very optimistic about how things are going so um so yeah dude that's a perfect pin to put in it right there you're optimistic on the way things are going nobody heard this on the front side of the podcast but we're both complaining about how much snow there is in my backyard in september and the storms rolling through auto if we could leave it with some optimism let's do it right there my friend cory i'll give you the last word man you you've kind of like taken up a mantle on from a lot of different fronts here what do you want to like leave the listeners with a message that you can kind of impart on them yeah um i think i said it at the end of i don't even remember if it is the the ice age trail fkt video or what but i'm like you know just treat people how you want to be treated and be proactive like check on your lgbtq plus friends check on your friends of color and you know invite somebody out to go try something new like go explore um and if we do that i think the world will be a great place love it man all right dude appreciate your time cory thanks a lot yeah thank you and there you have it there you go appreciate cory for coming on the podcast today and i'm very

grateful that i get to help guide him in his athletic endeavors as his coach he's just such a great person to work with if you are not doing so already give cory a follow on instagram or on twitter it will be well worth your time i guarantee it the links to both of those are in the show notes appreciate the heck out of everybody listening today if you have any feedback go on over to apple podcast give this podcast a five star rating or review or you can just hit me up on social very appreciative of all the feedback that i get as always we'll see everybody out on the trails you Thank you.