Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLDjdaxHIzg
the jurogan experience so you start off with this first mile and then you eventually work your way up to all these challenges yes yes and then eventually you decide i am gonna row across the atlantic ocean by myself yeah so okay so the row um i was on a bus right and i was like talking to someone sitting next to me and we were talking about endurance challenges and um i was a stubborn know-it-all 19 year old so of course i was like oh i've heard it all i know people climb mount everest i know people sail around the world i know about all these things and then he mentioned his friend rode across the atlantic and that was like that just stopped me in my tracks like what like people can do that like i never it was so far beyond anything i ever imagined and um i think like with endurance what's so cool about endurance is like at a certain point everyone's body hurts right so what makes endurance like a really cool experience is seeing how the human will and how like determination and how a strong mind like you it's a requirement because everyone no matter how fast or slow you are is going through that that mental wall and so um yeah i found out about ocean rowing and i was really captivated not only by that mental component because like if you do a marathon you go home you take your shower you um you have people cheering you on but but ocean rolling you're stripped raw of that and and something about that was intriguing to me because it's like okay how can you dig deep internally when you don't have the you know the finish line um you know whatever party and like the swag and the people and the nice cozy bed and i just kind of i liked that idea of like
being so stripped raw that you have to dig deeper than you ever would if you didn't have all those other externals so yeah i found out about it on a bus i went home and went and googled everything i could about ocean rowing and it was at a time where i did my first ultra marathon so it was like a hundred kilometer run or 62 miles and it was again one of those moments where i was like i never thought i could do that and my body proved otherwise so what are all the other things that i'm saying i can't do but maybe i can so it was really that information at that particular time where i was like really open to the idea of wow maybe it is possible but um it was a matter of like researching everything it wasn't like oh i gotta do this it was oh i gotta find out everything because i mean if someone told geo someone rode across the atlantic wouldn't the first thing be like is that really true like so i mean that was the first place i i looked like are people legitimately doing that how much time was it between you finding out about it and you actually doing it two years that's not that long no did what kind of training did you do um so like physical training like compared to doing like i've trained for like iron man's and then trained for adventures like physical purely physical to like these more adventure type things and like training for an iron man 90 is like what you're doing in the gym for ocean rowing and for like the more adventure type um athletic pursuits i would say that like 90 was like the logistics like you could be the most fit person in the world but if you don't have a boat what does it matter like so i spent most of my time just like sorting out through all the logistics the sponsorship getting the gear training with the gear but um yeah like my training priorities for rowing and ocean were um injury prevention so i did a lot with like strengthening my core and my
lower back and then on the weekends is when i would do like a six to eight hour row training row just to get more to get used to the boat and the equipment more than anything else and you would go on a lake lake erie yeah yeah now how fast do you go on this boat uh like maybe i would go like 30 miles a day no no how fast like perhaps three two or three miles two or three miles per hour so basically like the speed of walking yeah so um my boat was a 19 foot row boat it was like 400 pounds but once it was fully loaded it was a thousand pounds so it did have like a sliding seat yes okay so um i i had a sliding seat so that meant that like my legs and my back were the main source of like power but um i think the best like you mean a sliding sleeve like a rowing machine exactly so like so that helps you it means that like the power was coming from the most powerful parts of my body not my arms so some people assume like oh it's just your upper body it's just your arms but in fact it's more your legs and back but uh so this thing's going two or three miles an hour correct and how many miles is the atlantic ocean how many miles three thousand yeah three thousand so oh my god don't think about it just don't even think about it oh my god that's so far that's so far it was the worst reaching the halfway point just because like how long did it take you the whole trip 70 days 70 days that's not that bad when you think about it how far you went yeah i would say so yeah i i anticipated it would be 70 or 100 days oh yeah that's a big gap i had 30 days of extra food and oh that's good yeah yeah was anybody monitoring you uh i had like a tracker so people could like look online and see where i was um but there wasn't like a follow boat or anything like that
what are those nights like it was pretty amazing yeah so of course the stars were amazing like shooting stars and just like yeah breathtaking and then what surprised me like i thought it was like wait is this real am i hallucinating but the the i think the most stunning part was actually looking in the water because they had like um this type of glowing plankton so it was like a phosphorescence so sometimes i would see things glowing in a distance and then all around my boat anytime my oar hit the water like i would see all of that and wow yeah like i was so busy planning the trip and the logistics that i didn't know like what wildlife i'd see and so that was definitely like a pleasant surprise to to see that must have been really crazy yeah have you ever seen no no i've seen it on video so you can find a video of it um what is it called it's bioluminescence but there are like puerto rico is probably the closest place to here that has really good bioluminescence too like yeah so that it really looked like that yeah yes that's amazing very trippy that is so wild yeah so i could put my hand in the water and um did you take any photos or film it i did have some uh film and uh yes sometimes i no like you can't really take good i mean yeah i didn't have really good bioluminescence photos look at that shore that's insane now you said the stars stars were amazing yes like how amazing i mean light pollution at all right yeah i mean i i mean it in some ways it felt like i was just like living this national geographic experience of like you know i had dolphins come right up to my boat i had um yeah yeah like uh i think it was like the fourth way mark i was like i want to celebrate and um my way of celebrating was very limited
it was like oh am i gonna have two snickers bars like there's not really anything other than what i had but this pot of dolphins surrounded my boat and we're doing like flips and tricks and like really right at that moment that i was reaching it so yeah the the dolphins and sharks and birds and um i even had like fish following right underneath my boat like because barnacles would grow it was like i on on the side of my boat i would um scrub them off but sometimes they would just keep following my boat so every time i i named them ed ed and eddie but i had like three dorados that would keep following and birds that came on my boat wow yeah catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience