Joe Rogan STUNNED By Ultra Swimmer Stories

You were just telling me something that is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard that you swam from Maui to Lanai Right and you're the one only humans ever do that I'm told I was the first person to swim from Maui to Lanai and back the one way is a pretty famous Swim race that's done every year. You're the first person to do it the round go back. Fuck, dude. Why'd you do that? How long you got? Started when I was a boy. They told me I couldn't do it What what made you want to do that? That's a ridiculous proposition so I got into I decided in This guy sounds silly. I read a book in January of 2004 about this woman named penny Dean who? Still to this day holds the record for the fastest crossing of the Catalina Channel so swimming from Catalina Island to San Pedro or to not you typically swim to point point Vicente and she had done it in like Seven hours and 20 minutes and I was like, that's amazing. How far is that? As a crow flies, it's 21 miles with the currents. It's a little longer and I was like, you know, I really want to do this But I got to learn how to swim first. That's that's three miles an hour swimming She is a phenom Penny Dean had a stroke rate of 90 strokes per minute, which I mean that might not mean anything to someone who doesn't swim but like To turn to have a hand hit the water every you know Third of it two thirds of a second is a remarkable things. Yeah, I can't hold the cadence of that for a hundred yards Wow, and she did it for 20 miles. Yeah, what a beast. She's out of control Yeah, there's certain people like that man that freaked me out I think I think marathon swimming might be one sport where if you just look at the numbers I think women are better than men. Mmm. Well, there's that woman who swam from Cuba to the United States, right? She was the first person and she didn't she do it like at a fairly advanced age Yeah, I mean she's of course got an amazing pedigree of swimming and this wasn't her first rodeo. Right? Right, right Why why do you think women are better than men at that? I mean Those of us that I'm not a member of this community anymore But when I was it was one of our favorite topics of discussion I think thing opportunities or ideas that were put forth were higher pain tolerance something about being you know Evolving to be able to give birth Just means they can tolerate pain a lot higher I think another thing I've heard is buoyancy, you know Women are naturally gonna have more body fat which provides insulation when you do these swims You're not allowed any wetsuits or aids of any sort So shorts you're like you're in a speedo and a single latex cap and that's it And so if you can have a little and so I think women's Hips because they're gonna have more fat on their hips They it corrects one of the big buoyancy issues that we have in swimming. Mmm. We didn't evolve to swim We're horrible at it naturally Because we swim like this. We drag our hips through the water Mm-hmm, and if you think about the importance of aerodynamics in most of the things that we think about Whether it be archery or race car driving or cycling, you know in water It's that much more important because the density of water is you know thousands of times greater than air So swimming is just a hundred percent about avoiding drag Wow, so well that totally makes sense. Um, I just have been fascinated forever with people that are capable of pushing their brain to do things that other people just don't think are possible like a You know Bigfoot 200 race or like any of those things But the swim one is particularly crazy because you can't stop Right, right Like if you're running an ultramarathon and you just want to sit down for a couple minutes and just take a break You can do that. But if you're swimming There's no damn thing you can do you could tread water is about as good as it gets But you can't touch the boat or the kayaker it's an immediate disqualification. Oh That's so crazy man, that is such a Wow, so you heard about this woman doing and that's what I read this book and I was like I really want to do this at the time I was I was actually in my residency in Baltimore and I was like, you know I really want to do this and I'm gonna have to learn how to swim to do it so I started taking swimming lessons and then I Mean to make a very long story short basically by about the summer of 2005 I entered my first swim race, which was a two-mile swim race in Lake rest in Virginia and I did it. I was like, oh my god. I just swam two miles in the open water You know, it was hard, but I was like, okay, that's the proof of concept now you just got to figure out how to make it 20 25 miles and So I just you know Went completely psycho and ratcheted up the training and And then in October of 2005 I did my first Catalina swim That's got to be a pretty good feeling though when you're done that you are capable pushing yourself to What most people think is an impossible distance? Yeah, I mean people you asked a moment ago. Why do you do this? I would say that in life Velocity means very little acceleration means everything. So what do I mean by that? Right? Like if you're going 650 miles an hour in an airplane, you don't actually feel it. Mm-hmm. You only feel when speed changes so I've always had this theory that emotionally, that's also true like happiness is only interesting when it's juxtaposed with sadness and so The feeling of crawling on the shore after you've been swimming for 12 to 14 hours is amazing But what makes it especially amazing is that six hours earlier you thought you were gonna die So you start these swims in the middle of the night to avoid the shipping traffic So that first swim boat drops you off at Catalina Island. It's midnight That's a darkness. You can't imagine like you can't even see LA from Catalina You have to swim for six hours before you even see the lights of Los Angeles. Really? Yeah What do you see the stars and the phospho like bio luminescent organisms in the water? Whoa Which is incredible and that's worth the price of admission So every time your hand comes through the water You're pulling and ripping these little things and you're seeing the sparks and you can't tell where the water ends in the sky Starts in other words the stars and the bioluminescence looks like one cylinder Wow So for the first few hours, that's cool. But then you know, my first swim the water was incredibly rough I had only swim in the ocean for two weeks before the swim I did all my training in a swimming pool. So and a lake on the East Coast So now I look I wasn't used to how to keep the salt water out of my mouth Right. So then I was like puking my guts out and then my why you were swimming? Yeah, you got some yeah Yeah, how does that work? You just stop and puke and then keep swimming Wow, and then But then my tongue started to get really swollen from the salt water because again as I would learn later on I would go on to do many more of these swims. But what I learned is the importance of Spitting the water out of your mouth very quickly. So in a in a freshwater pool or lake you get away with more But in the ocean you swallow that salt water you're gonna get sick as hell So all this stuff's going on. So by Five in the morning you've been swimming for five hours You're getting cold You're I mean, you know, frankly just physiologically like your cortisol levels are in an eight or you're just you feel horrible It's like it's a really bad feeling and you're not even halfway there and it's like you don't know if you can do it and blah blah blah blah Well, if six hours later you're now crawling out of the water feeling like you've done this amazing thing that that's emotional acceleration That's like the greatest contrast. I Know what you're saying. I've never experienced that but I was Explaining the other day to a friend of mine about this camping trip that we went on in Montana I went it was like nine degrees outside. It's freezing cold We're stayed out there for five six days and then when we finally got to a hotel room I took a shower and it was the most amazing shower I've ever experienced in my life and that's a small thing, right? No, but you take a shower every day and it's like big deal Yeah, when you do it in that setting or think about the the meal you've had if you've been fast similar situation Yeah, we're starving or lost at sea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine That's a so now that you've done how many of these have you done these crazy swim races or swim? Yeah, they're usually these major major ones are not racist you you're on your own you have to You go to the Federation that oversees that body of water and you say hey I want to do this and then you you know you go through all the channels to do it like they have to have an observer There and they you follow these official rules so that you can be registered as someone who's actually completed it Right and someone's there to make sure you didn't you know, you did it correctly I Don't know I probably done all in probably like a dozen of these but probably like six of them really long ones What's the longest? Well, I thought it's a good question What is the Maui one was 20 miles there and back so 40 miles total? No, no, it's a Maui Channel is a 10 mile channel So round trip is 20 the bigger question is time in the water because you rarely get to swim these in a straight line So the Maui Lenai one I wanted to go Maui Lenai Molokai Maui To do the triangle and that would have been 30 miles as a crow flies But we just you know boat captain wasn't willing to do it at night because of the tiger sharks and during the daytime we couldn't Physiologically figure out how one could suffer against those the wind because the wind gets so brutal in the middle of the day So even the one that I did which was just the there and back I ended up swimming for 12 hours Because on the the first way crossing where there was no wind took me four hours And then it took eight hours to get back Because I was swimming like the hypotenuse of a triangle, right? Like the currents going this way so I had to swim this way just to go in a straight line And I still couldn't I almost missed Maui Jesus Christ, so I almost got swept out to Molokai Just because the current was about 1.7 knots which is about as fast as I can swim maybe two knots fuck That is a ridiculous thing man, why are you doing this this is this is maniacal well, I don't do it anymore I mean it was certainly it was an amazing season of my life, but I think Once my daughter was born Which was ten years ago this summer? That's when I I only probably did two of these after she was born because then the training just got so I just You got to live in the water if you want to do this sport like you got a Including the winter, you know, like, you know even in San Diego where I live It's still you know 55 degrees in the water and you're gonna spend three four hours a day in the water Freezing, you know, it's just so I was like, you know, I just don't have the the drive to spend 25 hours a week swimming You