If You Sweat, You Die: Dressing for Antarctica | Joe Rogan and Colin O'Brady

Now, what did you wear in terms of like a base layer? Was there a concern about you sweating while you were pulling all that weight, especially initially when it was 375 pounds? Yeah, so one of the famous lines that people who have been in the polar environments will say is, if you sweat, you die. And it's maybe a little bit of hyperbole, but it's not far from the truth, which is you start sweating and you stop for even 30 seconds, your clothes are literally freezing to your body. And so it was this crazy kind of balance of being able to pull this sled, get your heart rate elevated enough to keep your body warm, but not too warm that you were sweating. And so any second I would start sweating, I would strip layers off. So there was times, especially when there was no wind, it'd still be ambient temperature minus 20 minus 25, but I would just have like a thin Gore-Tex jacket on and one base layer. That's it. I mean... Were you wearing merino? I... merino actually itches my skin, although it's really good for me. I'm a little bit allergic to it. So I wore like synthetic fabric. Do they have a synthetic that completely mimics merino in terms of the way when it's moist, you still stay warm? Yeah. So merino, honestly, merino is amazing fabric for that reason. Unfortunately for me, like I said, it just irritates my skin. It is so funny that you could suffer through all that, but you can't have itchy clothes on. Like a little merino wool is going to make me feel bad. No, but... So I use synthetic, but it's crazy. What company are you using? Like what... I was using mountain hardware base layers and then actually my outer layers was this Norwegian company called Bergen's of Norway. They don't sponsor me, but they actually believe it or not, the Norwegians know a thing or two about being in the polar environment. And so they've designed a really good jacket and pant that's actually really breathable and really good. And then I sewed a fur rough onto the edge. So a wolf fur rough on the outer side of the hood. I think it's wolf. Yeah. Wolf fur. Wolf fur. I thought you were saying wool. Well, then I was like, it sounds like wolf. You know more about this than me. I'm not the... I hope I don't know your audience. I am not a big hunter myself. I've never done that, a lot of that. But yeah, that's a wolf fur. Well, they know how to survive in the cold. Yeah, exactly. The base layer is a synthetic... What is the material that it's made out of? The base layer is, yeah, it's a synthetic, like a polypropylene, something like that. And so when it sweats, it dries quickly, is the idea? Yeah, it sweats, it dries quickly. But the idea was just to not get it wet. So basically strip down as much as possible. But like literally, I'd go from that, and then of course I needed to eat and drink every whatever 30 minutes or whatever, actually more like every hour, so I'd stop. So I'd stop in the front of my sled, I had a huge puffy down jacket, like a massive like Michelin Man, huge puffy down jacket. So even if you're stopping for a minute to drink water, before even trying to do that, boom, put the big jacket on, because that's how cold you can get immediately from stopping. I mean, it's just so much colder than when pulling the sled, your heart rate stays up and keeps you pretty warm. I would imagine like your hands and your feet too, that would be a real issue, right? The small digits? Yeah, I mean, you know, frostbite's real for sure. Hands outside of the gloves, that's why some of the stuff I was doing in the training of getting my hands with the dexterity, you know, you have to tie all these knots with big gloves, mittens on, you can't take your gloves off for any sizable period of time. If you look back on a lot of my photos, I've actually got tape on my face over across my nose and my cheeks. And that's because I started getting tiny little bits of frostbite on the bottoms of my nose and on my cheeks, because I'd wear a full face mask, buff, everything, but even, you know, tiny little, you know, one needle prick of wind on your face throughout the day and that cold is gonna turn into a cold injury. And so I started getting a few cold injuries on my face, nothing, you know, too bad you're looking up. Do you grease your face up or anything? Mostly the tape and then I had a little bit of like Vaseline or like ChapStick type of stuff on some of the batteries. The one thing actually that I did that I'd never done before, what actually worked well was a tip that I got, which is my fingers started cracking really, really bad from the cold. And so they were like really painful. And I actually was pouring, putting superglue into all of those basically little micro cuts on my fingers, which when someone told me that as a trick, I was like, really? But turns out it's actually a really good trick. So it's kind of super gluing these cuts on my fingers back together. And that actually worked reasonably well. All things, I mean, all things considered is the operative word, but it worked. Yeah. Wow. You're wearing the, what about your eyes? So I'm wearing goggles, but funny enough, I had a couple of fancier, nicer ski goggles with me, but yeah, there's the tape on my face right there. But yeah, it's like, that's actually just like the normal K-Tape tape, like a physio tape that you can see like athletes wearing. And I just had it in my repair kit. It wasn't meant for this purpose, but I was like, what do I have that I could put on my face to block it a little bit better? But I had those goggles on some of the time, but actually the goggle that I wore the most was one that you might use for Motocross, because it has like a plastic face mask over the front of it, because the wind, when it was blowing, it would just kind of blow around. So sometimes I had this flee stripped over my face, but it would blow too much. And so I had this more plastic face mask. Yeah, so that's the, that's one. You can see, look how frozen it is on the inside. That is so crazy. Oh my God, man. And then like this neoprene mask underneath. So I had like double face mask, double tape, like anything to just, you know, keep me warm. I never suspected that it was so high above sea level there. Yeah, yeah. So you've got whatever it is, 9,300 feet at the South Pole. So it's basically just like elevated ground, but it seems flat. Right, but yeah, I started at sea level. So I'm not only, like I'm actually going uphill all the way to the South Pole. So for the first 40 some days, I pulled that sled uphill completely. So it was freaking me out. The whole thing freaks me out.