In this first episode, I interview Tom Brazier on his most recent adventure race – a 9 dayer in New Zealand by the name of GODzone. Tom is one of Australia’s best ultra-distance runners, having represented Australia in the 2016 World Skyrunning Championships and now one of our best adeventure racers, his team having finished third in the international division of GODZone.

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GODZone is as epic as the name suggests and so I pepper Tom with questions about willpower and mental toughness. We end up covering a lot:

Breaking points:  trench foot and team tension

The pathway to such extreme tolerance: ‘How to boil a frog’

Motivation: curiosity, accomplishment, competition, comradery, FOMO

Pre-commitment: remembering why the rational guy wanted to do this

The social side of endurance: chicken and egg, feedback loops, Gonski and the ‘hive-mind’

Will power as ‘consistency of self’: reconciling all the differing parts of ourselves that want different things

Type 3 fun

Optimisation: Flirting with the boundary between enjoyment and the grind

Grit: Angela Duckworth’s ‘substituting novelty with nuance’

Tom has been having cold showers for a year and a half!!

Self-discipline and the attraction to feeling in control

Physiological fundamentals: volume and hydration

Trade-offs in quality of life.

Many thanks to Tom for kicking this off in such good form!