Colin O’Brady Shares Details of HIs Brutal Arctic Training Regimen

What are you gonna do next? Because I know you. You're one of those dudes. You have to keep doing these things. Once you've done two of these things, you're gonna keep doing these things. Yeah, I did a couple before that too. But I think last time your advice to me was stop. Stop while you're live. Yeah. But you didn't listen. You don't listen to me anymore anyway. Just keep doing what you gotta do. You know, look, like I'm passionate about these things. It's super fun. I do them because I like testing the edges of my potential. I like exploring different places. Like I said, I'd never rode a boat before and to kind of take this project on and say, you know, I've done expeditions before. I've pushed my body in deep and interesting ways. But one of my biggest curiosities is certainly about the mind, but particularly like growth mindset. Can I say like, I'm not a rower, but in the course of a year of training, I'm gonna train myself up, get on a team with some amazingly accomplished watermen and learn the skills required to make this crossing. And it was cool to kind of prove that out this year because I think that that really applies across so many things. And I'm just a generally curious person. And I think I'll keep pushing myself and pushing my body because that's one of the things that I love to do. But I think that curiosity throughout my life is gonna be a lifelong path of diving into sort of different things and taking them on. And I think that to me, one of my biggest sadnesses and one of the things I like to say to people is like, you know, people come to a certain point in their life and they're like, you know, I'm a lawyer or I'm good at math or I'm terrible at art or like I could never do comedy because I'm not the funny one. Or I'm like, you know, these limiting beliefs inside of us. It's like, I could be like, dude, I've never rode ever in my life. I'm 34 years old, you know, I've never rode a boat, but actually like, but like doesn't mean I can't learn now to row a boat. Seems pretty straightforward. Yeah, exactly. How hard could it be? You have a little leg action too. What did you do to prepare for it physically? So the physical prep was pretty cool. I don't know if you remember from last time, but I have this coach, his name is Mike McCassell and he's just this legendary guy. He's you know, done 5,800 pull ups in 24 hours. He's pulled a truck across Death Valley. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, he's a total legend. And he trained me up for Antarctica. I mean, I came to him and I said, hey, look, like I'm not the most experienced polar explorer. I got to pull this 375 pounds lead. Like, what do you think? How can you train me up? And he came up with such cool training methodologies for that. Like he had one of the things he had me doing for Antarctica was he had me, you know, I was doing planks with my hands in ice buckets. And you know, as my heart rate is getting jacked up, he's having me hold that and all of a sudden he's like, all right, get out. And I do in a wall sit, but now my feet are in the ice buckets and he puts a weight plate on top of my legs and he's like, okay. And then he hands me these Legos and he's like, solve these Lego problems until you don't solve this Lego and build this little like, you know, aircraft Lego man or whatever. You know, you can't get your feet out of the ice bucket. Like, what the hell is going on? But he's like, look, you're going to be in Antarctica. Your life is going to depend on you, you know, securing your tent, right? Or tying down the ropes properly or this and that. And the other thing, you're going to be cold. Your hands are going to be frozen. You're going to be tired, but you're going to need your mind, your dexterity to be there. Yeah. And there's a picture of that, of Mike bringing me through that. And so with the row, it was super cool to come to him again and say like, Hey man, like there's no blueprint for this. Like there's no blueprint for this. There's no one that's done a fully human power crossing of Drake Passage before to the Antarctic Peninsula. Like there's some ocean rowers, but this is different. Like how should we prepare for this? And Mike, it's not like he's like, well, I know everything about ocean rowing, but that same curiosity, that same growth mindset, I trust his, you know, sort of ability to train me. I don't know, man, like let's start thinking through this. And so in the gym, I mean, we did all sorts of creative things. He brought the ice back. He started putting a rowing machine on Bosu balls, like half Bosu balls basically. And I'd start rowing, you know, didn't know I'm a rowing motion, but he'd start shaking it around because basically the ocean, it's going to be moving me around so much. So just the rowing motion, isn't going to prepare me for the lateral movements, you know, the, the, the lats, the obliques, you know, the, all the kind of side to side stability stuff. Then he took it one step further, which is he actually shows up at my house, knocks on my door at two o'clock in the morning. I think he had prearranged it with my wife, knocks on the door and he's like, get up. And I'm like, what, what's happening? And he's like, we're going, we're training right now. And he gets me, he's got those Bosu balls, but now it's the middle of the night. So I'm sleep deprived. I'm kind of disoriented. Now he's got me on the Bosu balls and he had brought these buckets of ice water. So I'm rowing this thing. It's shaking around. It's the middle of the night and he starts throwing ice water on me and we're doing these laps. Yeah, here I am, you know, getting into this. The, yeah, you could check these out. The Discovery channel did back to it says training for the Drake, the impossible row episode three. You could find it online. Jamie, it's on the discovery channel, YouTube page, YouTube, they have a whole playlist. Okay. Yeah. So there's 14 of these videos training all the way through the whole project discovery, put them online. They're actually doing a feature length documentary this spring, but yeah, did you do for rowing for the specific muscles of rowing yourself? Did you lift weights? Did you do rows? Did you use a rowing machine? Would you use? Yeah. So the rowing machine on the Bosu balls, that's like in the gym. Also a lot of deadlift was really useful. And then a lot of stability stuff. So Mike would have me do certain things like we'd have, you know, like a seated row or something like that, or more thangs. I thought that was the most interesting because it was going to be disabled. So the waves are usually coming from any, they change directions, but at any given time, they're coming generally from one direction. So you're either leaning in really hard to your left side, you're leaning in really hard to your right side. That's a difference to the ocean rowing than just like a pure river rowing. And you know, he would have me basically like holding, imagine like a deadlift bar. And then I would have my eyes closed. I'd be holding it there in kind of an isometric motion. And then he would pull the plate, a light plate off one of the sides. And so I'd have to stabilize and catch, you know, either my left side or my right side. So a lot of stabilization and balance stuff. And then the other piece that was huge, you know, Mike, you know, admittedly doesn't know a lot about rowing specifically in terms of the technique of rowing. And the technique of rowing is actually very specific. And so a friend of mine, a guy named Chris Wojta from Portland, he, I called him up and he's like this champion rower, collegiate rower, rowing coach. And he took me out on the Willamette River in Portland in a single man, like rowing skull. So very different than an ocean robo. You know, ocean robots, a lot bigger, different, different waves, but he taught me on the river, the actual purity of the rowing motion. So a lot of the training and the physical aspects of getting stronger was with Mike and the mindset and the ice and all the things we did there. But certainly the stuff that we did on the river in the Willamette with Chris was huge for me to actually understand the motion. Because I just like you when you're like, how hard can it be? Just kind of push your arms, you know, back and forth. It's a pretty complicated motion. It's a full body thing. It's a coordinated thing. It's a very coordinated thing. You know, you're powering out of different things. And certainly on river rowing, you're having to, you know, square, it's called squaring the blades and you know, you've got to be taking the blades out of the water and, you know, turning them so they can slide across the top and get back in and glide and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot, there's a lot to the motion. And so it was a short period of time. I didn't take my first stroke in a robo until July in the, in the, in the river and then August in the ocean robot when we came together as a team for the first time to train in Scotland. And then I was rowing across the Drake in December. So it was a pretty short period of time to kind of learn, learn about rowing and get stronger, but it was a fun process to dive into something completely new.