Ethan Fleming is a guy with an extraordinary passion for pushing his physical and mental limits. He’s just a guy who loves testing himself and sharing the valuable lessons he’s learned by putting himself through the wringer.
Ethan’s adventures are a testament to his relentless pursuit of self-discovery. Whether it’s signing up for marathons on a whim, diving into full-distance triathlons without a second thought, or knocking out a jaw-dropping 11,401 burpees in a 24-hour charity event, he’s all about embracing the challenges. With five Guinness World Records, including a mind-boggling 24-hour assault bike ride, and a breezy 800-kilometer solo state-crossing bike journey to his name, he’s not your typical thrill-seeker.
But it’s not just about the adrenaline rush for Ethan; it’s about the incredible lessons he’s uncovered through these experiences. His mission? To help others break free from their self-imposed limits by showing them that success isn’t just about reaching the finish line; it’s about giving it your all, no matter how tough the road ahead may be.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Ethan Fleming about extreme fitness.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How many people lack self-belief and worry about judgement from others.
– Why people shouldn’t give power to intrusive negative thoughts.
– How you can have a mental breakthrough when you stop fighting the pain and embrace the present moment.
– How sleep deprivation can hinder someone’s mental health.
– How minimalist shoes improve foot function and relieve foot pain.
Connect with Ethan:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@getgoing_au
Facebook
facebook.com/getgoingaus
Links Mentioned:
getgoinggpt.com.au
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Maybe you’re fit, maybe you’re trying to get fit, but what if you wanted to take that to the extreme? Well, you’re going to find about that on today’s episode of the The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want the TRUTH about having a healthy, happy, strong body starting feet first. You know those things at the end of your leg, the foundation, the things you stand on and run with and walk on. Anyway, on this podcast we explore the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, do yoga, CrossFit, do crazy things like you’re about to hear and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively and did I say enjoyably? Trick question, I know I did. I would never leave it out because look, if you’re not having fun you’re not going to keep doing it. So find something you enjoy. I’m, Steven Sashen, co-CEO, co-founder of xeroshoes.com. Here’s the T-shirt to prove it, and we call this the MOVEMENT Movement because we are creating a movement. It involves you, more about that in a second.
About natural movement, letting your body do what it is made to do and the you part is really easy. Go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join but that’s where you’ll find all our previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media, all the other places you can find the podcast if you don’t like the place you found it this time. And if you want to help it’s really easy to get the word out, just give us a thumbs up, give us a good review, like, subscribe, hit the bell icon on YouTube. You know the drill, if you want to be part of the tribe just subscribe. All right, let us jump in. Ethan, it is crazy early where you are. Tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, sure. Well, look my name’s, Ethan. I’ve been running a health and wellness business for about seven years now but that’s what I like to call my full-time job. My part-time job is what I call a suffering enthusiast, which is pretty much I’m enthusiastic about finding ways to torture myself. It started for me in about 2018, I had a weird idea… Well, actually that’s a lie. My friend had a weird idea to do burpees for an hour.
Steven Sashen:
So pause right there. This is the way almost all bad things start, where someone has an idea and then there’s usually a beer involved or a how hard could that be or… But anyway-
Ethan Fleming:
Pretty much.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, and I remember my friend calling me up and saying, “Do you want to do an hour of burpees?” And at the time, my ego was through the roof in 2018 and I’ve gone, “An hour of burpees. Why don’t we make it 24 hours of burpees?” Anyway, that idea turned into reality and then reality turned into torture and then I remember when I finished that event which I ended up doing 11,401 burpees. One centimeter short of the Guinness World Record line because I didn’t measure the lines properly. So that was a really good lesson in what you shouldn’t do, which was great to have that. But yeah, I finished that and that was kind of I guess you could say the narrative of what my life’s been since is trying to find these uncomfortable things to do to learn from them.
Steven Sashen:
Well I want to hear about the other ones other than burpees, but let’s back up to burpees. So up until that point what was the most you’d ever done?
Ethan Fleming:
Burpees?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Ethan Fleming:
I don’t know, an hour, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I was pretty ignorant back then, which actually had its benefits because I think as we get a bit older we seem to evaluate risks a bit more and that stops us from doing things we want do. Right? But back then I remember it was literally an eight-week training program, a couple of burpees a week. Sorry, my dog’s scratching at the door. Then after that it was pretty much game on, it was brutal.
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah. So what did you imagine it was going to be like or what was your plan going in and then what actually happened? Because it strikes me that deciding to do 24 hours of burpees, once you get into it’s going to be like that Mike Tyson line, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” I imagine there was a number of punch in the face moments.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, there was. I mean, the punch in the face moments came in about 30 minutes as well because… So we had the bright idea of doing it at Federation Square, which in Australia is this big place in the CBD with everyone watching, which was traumatizing. But we were about half an hour in and we started getting cramps, it was hot, we were in a lot of trouble but we had the plan to do it 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. That was the plan for pretty much the whole 24 hours.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Now first of all you said we, so your friend who came up with this idea he’s doing it too?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, so he did and he got hospitalized. So he went to the hospital with…I always forget how to say it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, rhabdomyolysis. Yeah.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. So yeah, he was in hospital about at the 12-hour mark.
Steven Sashen:
Holy crap, so can you explain what that is rather than me doing it?
Ethan Fleming:
Oh, sorry, I just put myself on mute. Basically yes, what rhabdo is is that you work a muscle long enough, long story short. The toxins break down, they go into your kidneys, your kidneys can’t actually produce and filter these toxins, kidney failure, that’s pretty much the short version. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, no big deal. So he did that at 12, man there’s so many things that are going through my head. So first of all, he’s gone at 12 hours. What time of day did you start?
Ethan Fleming:
I think we started at about 10:00 AM. Yeah, so about 10:00 PM he was pissing out black goo, which was pretty funny because the news report the next day… I still give him a bit of crap for this. But the news report says, “Trainer breaks world record for 24 hours of burpees, fellow trainer gets hospitalized.” So I still make sure I show him that one every now and then.
Steven Sashen:
So I mean, again I got so many questions. I’ll start with this one, when he dropped out at 10:00 at night ish what happened in your mind?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. I wasn’t the resilient person I was back then, so for me it was a lot of tears, a lot of sadness and I remember we had this idea to write these letters to ourself that when things got hard we’d read them and it would kind of inspire us. But I remember reading it just broke me down even more, so that one didn’t work too well. But I think because of the situation, I was in the environment, I was in where I had so many people watching. I really didn’t have much of a choice and that kind of worked to my favor, so that was probably one of the main reasons I was able to finish it.
Steven Sashen:
How many people were there through the middle of the night?
Ethan Fleming:
Well if you take out all the 2:00 AM party animals, there was still quite a few but-
Steven Sashen:
No, hold on don’t take them out. I want to know somebody comes out of a bar, they’re a little wasted and they see you doing burpees in the street basically. What the hell did they say and do?
Ethan Fleming:
That was 95% of the people that were coming past and I would be doing burpees. I’ve been out here for 13 hours doing burpees and then there’s some guy being like, “Do it faster, mate.” And then he’s jumping in with me and it was a very interesting experience, that’s for sure. He dived headfirst into it, that’s for sure.
Steven Sashen:
That is pretty entertaining, so which actually leads me to a question. So what was the pace that you were doing these at? Can you give me a sense of how fast or slow you were going?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, so I actually just remembered it then when you were talking. So 15 every minute on the minute was how we did it and that was for 45 minutes and then you’d rest for 15. So every time the buzzer would go we’d do 15 and then we did that for four hours then it was 14, then four hours, 13. So we had this kind of every four hours we’d drop a burpee, hallelujah. But after 12 hours, you didn’t really notice the three burpee difference but that was the process of how we did it which lasted.
Steven Sashen:
How’d you come up with that idea as a protocol?
Ethan Fleming:
I don’t know, I think everything looks good on paper and that one looks good on paper and we trialed it for about an hour or two and we thought you know what? This is pretty possible. But doing something for an hour and then testing it for 24 are two completely different things and back then I was a broken human before I actually started using things like barefoot shoes movement. All these other things, I was a broken human back then.
Steven Sashen:
Broken how?
Ethan Fleming:
I just had a lot of problems that I didn’t fix and I had a lot of issues with my body, I was very much like if you grind something down long enough it just turn to dust. Right? And my approach back then to health and fitness was very much just do more, do more, do more, rather than working out what to do and why you do it. Right? So the burpees for me was the top of the problems and then after I did the 24 hours of burpees, I was this crumble of a human and I had to rebuild.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’m going to get there but I’m not there yet asking what it was like to recover. So had you done any other prep other than tried that protocol for a couple of hours?
Ethan Fleming:
We, literally it was an eight-week prep. But because I was so inexperienced with knowing how to train for I guess something like this, it was just like we ran, we did weights and we did burpees a couple of days a week. That was it, and I mean it’s pretty obvious that if you want to get good at burpees you should probably do burpees. There’s not a lot of science behind that, right? There’s the set principle and stuff, but just do the burpees. But the problem is we avoided that naturally because you don’t want to do burpees and then we suffered for it.
Steven Sashen:
So there’s two other parts about the record. Was there an existing Guinness Book Record?
Ethan Fleming:
There was, yeah. So it was about 10,000 burpees, so these were traditional burpees. These were the ones where you don’t have to go chest to floor and the way that I missed out on this record was that when it finished I was on the news, “Guy breaks Guinness World Record.” All this, and then when I put the application through it said… What did it say? It said, “Your lines were too short.” So your feet are supposed to go to the line and touch the line. I was going here, so essentially one centimeter short. So I did 1000 more than the record one centimeter short.
Steven Sashen:
Oh man, so yeah. So there’s a line where your hands are basically behind your hands when your feet are coming in, they’ve got to get in the line.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Now of course, the obvious question… Well, before we get to recovery. When you discovered that, that you had missed it by a centimeter what the hell went through your brain?
Ethan Fleming:
I was very disappointed, because for me it was-
Steven Sashen:
You think?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. Well, back then I didn’t do those things for internal glory that’s what I would say. I did them for more of an external gratification I think, where now when I do something it’s driven from an intrinsic motivator. But back then I was like, I put a lot of eggs in this basket of wanting to break this Guinness World Record and then when I missed it, it was really disappointing and I felt like I led everyone down as well at the time for sure.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I can imagine you might’ve wanted to trade that for rhabdo.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, at least I would’ve had a reason.
Steven Sashen:
So then, all right you finish it and I mean it’s funny I watched a video last night just almost accidentally of guys who decided to do 100 burpees a day for 30 days and one of them could do the 100 and they broke it down into sets of 25. One of them could do it in about 10 minutes, the other in about 12 minutes, 30 days later, it was about six minutes and seven minutes. But the one comment they made is over the 30 days it never got easier, they got faster it never got easier. So just the idea of going through it all and watching them it was interesting because nothing really changed much in their body. They expected it would but nothing really changed. But even them, just watching them recover from doing 100 over the course of 10 minutes. What was it like when you were done? What happened to your body? What did you have to do next to become human again?
Ethan Fleming:
Out of everything I’ve done and I’ve done some pretty whack stuff-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, we’ll get there.
Ethan Fleming:
That ruined me more than anything because my hip flexors were completely torn to shreds because just the movement of going in and out for so long. My knuckles were so bad, I’ve got a photo I’ll have to show you where they were fully torn, both of them.
Steven Sashen:
Before you said that, I was going to ask were you wearing gloves? Were you wearing knee pads? What else were you wearing?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. So if you imagine doing a burpee the lower you have to get to the ground the more challenging it is. So we would do them on our fists because you’ve got an extra two inches there. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Yep.
Ethan Fleming:
But because of that… Yeah, we put gloves on, we put these little MMA gloves on. We looked absolutely ridiculous but we did them on MMA gloves. By the time you took off your gloves after 24 hours because I was too afraid to test it during it my hands were the most red raw things you’ve ever seen, there was no skin across all of my knuckles. So I had nerve problems in my hands for a while, I had plantar fasciitis on my feet for ages. God, hip flexors were torn to shred so I couldn’t run or walk properly. When I finished it I remember at the time I was living with two people and I was on the toilet and I sat down on the toilet and I had to call them to get me off the toilet. Because I couldn’t actually physically get off myself, which was quite demoralizing to have to call your housemates to get you off the toilet. I could still wipe, thank God but they had to get me off.
Steven Sashen:
That was just preparing for your old age.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, that’s it. It was practicing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Now, that you’ve done it once it’ll be okay the next time.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly, and of course the… I mean the last question I can think of about burpees. Given all of that did it occur to you, hey, I should do this again?
Ethan Fleming:
Well, actually I spent two and a half years training for burpee records after that. So yeah, I guess I had a bit of unsettled business with them. I didn’t have the best luck with them after that. I tried to break a one-hour Guinness World Record which I spent I reckon nine months training for and I kept missing it by two or three burpees at a time which was very, very frustrating. Ended up breaking a lousy three-minute Guinness World Record for them. But yeah, that’s where my journey ended after that for the burpees.
Steven Sashen:
For the Guinness Book thing, there are a couple ways of doing that. One is you just do the thing and then you send them whatever documentation to show that you did it and the other is paying them a bunch of money to come out and watch. Which of those did you do?
Ethan Fleming:
So I did all the filming and then sent it in which is by far the most affordable way of doing it. Otherwise, you’re spending I think it was $8,000 in Euros.
Steven Sashen:
I did the cheapest submission recently and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to get the record, but I’m pretty confident the moment it’s published someone’s going to beat it. So I’m 61 years old and I did a standing back flip on the ground, so just-
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, nice.
Steven Sashen:
Right now, the world record for oldest standing back flip is a 94-year-old guy but he did it into a swimming pool so that doesn’t count and I couldn’t find any video showing how far around he even made it. But I know there’ll be some 62 year old circus geek who will beat me and then we’ll be in a competition until one of us dies. But I’m definitely not going to pay to have them come out and do it, I’ll just show them my birth certificate, show them the newspaper and send in the film.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, it’s a tedious process. The amount of hours I’ve spent submitting records is beyond me.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so let’s go into that phase. So after burpees, and then I’m curious to hear a couple of things. Just what changed for you personally? And I don’t mean your own psychology. I mean, what happened to your business or whatever you were doing? What did the attention get you or not get you? And then moving from there to, as you were saying you were just beating yourself up to do these before. What changed to have this internal motivation to try and do these other endurance events?
Ethan Fleming:
Well I think the number one thing that resonated after that, and I mean not the day after, I mean three months after in hindsight.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, once you could get off the toilet on your own.
Ethan Fleming:
Exactly, you don’t finish it instantly and go, wow, you’re still suffering. But long story short I look back on it and I’ve kind of gone, I did that off eight weeks with pretty much no specific training, no idea what I was doing and I was able to do that. What else is out there? And I feel like that narrative has kind of driven me for the last four or five years and that’s where a lot of my work now is helping other people kind of find their new limit. Right? Whatever that is to them and that’s the thing that changed for me. My approach now is like, is it possible? Yes. Okay, then let’s try and yes we can be as much prepared as possible for it and there’s definitely better ways of preparing for things. But at the end of the day I think sometimes as people we confuse what’s hard with what’s possible.
Steven Sashen:
Say more about that, that’s a really interesting distinction.
Ethan Fleming:
Well, it’s like if you think about a marathon. Right? Marathon is what a most average person would call the pinnacle of health and fitness. Right? But I would say… Maybe not 95%. But most people can complete a marathon even if they were just to walk some of it, right? But we don’t do it and then you ask yourself, why are you doing a marathon in the first place? Most of the time it’s not to get a sub three and a half hour time, it’s to be happy with yourself that you completed and did something out of your comfort zone. Right? So we can all strive for that but we don’t because we confuse what’s hard with what’s possible. That’s what I kind of mean by that concept is like the amount of times I’ve heard people tell me, “Oh, I just can’t do it.” And it’s like well, you can do it. You just don’t have the belief in yourself and you’re worried about what other people are going to think if you get a bad time.
If we could remove what other people would think about it, I think we would do a lot more.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s another aspect to that I’m wondering about that that I’d love to hear your thoughts which has to do with the way people perceive someone who has done something versus what led to it and what makes me think of this, I heard an interview with a comedian named, Leslie Jones. She was on Saturday Night Live here in the States and she said, “The problem when you’re watching someone who’s done something, you see them now but you don’t see the how and without knowing that part it can be either disheartening or confusing or just send you on the wrong path.”
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, 100%. I was describing this about mental toughness the other day, I run these retreats where I take people away and mental toughness you could call it. But essentially we just do some really hard stuff and we were talking about the concept of mental toughness and if you have two people. Right? You have one person who completes a marathon really well. You’re like, oh yeah, he’s a good runner and then you have one person who struggles through a marathon and you go to yourself he’s really mentally tough. It’s like well, one person prepared better. Why does the one that didn’t prepare better more mentally tough?
Steven Sashen:
Well you know it’s funny, I wish I could remember who was the person who did this. But there was some world champion marathoner who stayed around after he ran two hours and just a few minutes beyond that. I mean somewhere around 210, 215 probably, and then stayed until the marathon ended which was like nine hours later and came up and congratulated all the people who finished just under the wire like nine hours and said, “What you just did, I couldn’t do. I couldn’t keep going for nine hours.” And it was a really beautiful and very true thing that people don’t understand what the difference is between someone who’s an elite superfast person versus someone who’s just grinding it out for whatever reason. I thought that was a very, very elegant… Is that the word I’m looking for? It’s easier for now. A very elegant thing to do, to stay and thank those people and appreciate them.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s some crazy people out there that stick through some really, really tough stuff. But I also find it sad for the people that have prepared to do so well because all those day in, day out mental toughness things that you don’t see. That’s why they’re so good and that’s why they can complete something in half the time of someone else a lot of the time. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Well, that reminds me. I was at a lecture from a ultra runner named, Tony Krupicka, and someone said, “I’ve run a 50-mile race but I’ve never run 100 like you have, what do I need to do to train for the 100?” And Tony says, “Nothing.” He says, “Well, you’ve already done all the training you need. That last 50 miles has nothing to do with the training, it’s all in your head.”
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, 100%, love it. The ultra running world is just the pinnacle of mental toughness, it’s so fantastic.
Steven Sashen:
Dude I don’t like to drive as far as they run, but that’s because I’m a sprinter. So the idea of that… I mean, I can’t think of anything that… The only thing I’ve ever done as a 24-hour something, like a deliberate 24-hour something was when I was oh my god like 15 and I went to a summer camp and they had a radio station. So I did a 24-hour marathon of just being a DJ for 24-hours and I will admit, I think at around three in the morning I put on one side of an album and took a 30-minute nap. So that’s the closest I’ve ever done. Oh no, I take it back, I did a 24-hour movie marathon too.
Ethan Fleming:
24 hour events are something else, that’s for sure. They definitely have their own waves of problems and enjoyment.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, and those were mostly sitting around. So post burpees, what are the other things that you’ve done and when you’re taking people on these retreats what do you have them do? But I want to hear about you first.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, so I mean I’ve done quite a few things. But probably the most pivotal thing that I’ve done was after that I had this series of little things and when I say little I mean I rode a bike from the state to a state, and there’s a few other things that I didn’t train as much for. But the one that I set my mind to and the one that I trained for ages was I planned on dragging a car 100 kilometers, which started out, I was like I’ll do a marathon with a car and then I was like you know what? Someone else has done that. What’s the furthest we can go? And I was drawing lines on a whiteboard, all these different things and I was like 100K’s, drag a car, all right. What else am I going to do with my time? Let’s see how we go.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, pause right there. What else am I going to do with my time other than drag a car for 100K?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. Well, I was looking for something I could sink my teeth into and give me a good nine months kind of training.
Steven Sashen:
But where did that idea even come from?
Ethan Fleming:
Honestly, I wish it was this euphoric moment that had came to me. But I literally said to myself I want to have a challenge and I went on a whiteboard and I wrote down about a ton of disciplines on one side and I wrote down a ton of things on the other side. So 24 hours, 100K’s, all these different criterias and I just drew lines together to be honest and then, Steven, when I found one I liked I was like that’s the one and then-
Steven Sashen:
I just love that you brainstormed drag a car as one of the activities.
Ethan Fleming:
Well, I think it was a sled or something and then I saw 100K’s and I drew 100K’s and I was like I don’t want to do 100K’s of running. So for some random reason that dragging a car 100K’s for me sounded more attractive than running 100K’s, which in hindsight I realize now 100K’s of running probably would’ve been more enjoyable.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and of course then the question. What kind of car and were are the brakes on and did you have to go uphill, downhill or were you on a flat?
Ethan Fleming:
So I was at an airport runway, which was interesting. Yeah, so that was a pretty cool experience. But I had a Jeep Wrangler, so it was two tons. Now, this was not my choice. I submitted this to Guinness World Record and they said, “You’ve got to use a two ton car.” And then I thought, I’ve only trained to even think about using a 1.4 ton and they’re like, “Well, bad luck.” I was like, “Oh, life gives you lemons. So here we go.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, you don’t want to be one centimeter short on the car.
Ethan Fleming:
No.
Steven Sashen:
So now again, I’m just thinking of all these things. Okay, if it was me I would take the Jeep, that’s cool. But then I would put bald tires on it, so there’s almost no rolling resistance, I’d pump them up like crazy. Did you do anything to the car?
Ethan Fleming:
We did, yeah. So the car was 2.5 tons, we had to get it down to… Because it was my own Jeep at the time and it was one of those classic Jeeps where it was raised, big tires. So we had to strip it all, change it all just to get it workable for the event.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Look, I don’t want to be too insulting. But it didn’t occur to you to go to a car dealership and have them give you the car and then give you the car?
Ethan Fleming:
I know, I thought about that but I already had my own car so I could train with my own car which I did not because it was COVID and we were in a 5K radius, so the training was a whole different other area. But yeah, I just stripped the seats out of the car. I took some of the roof off, put the soft top on, managed to get it to 1.999 and then added a small dumbbell in, problem solved.
Steven Sashen:
So you’re on an airport runway, I’m assuming it was not in use and you weren’t dodging planes?
Ethan Fleming:
Well it wasn’t in use because of COVID at the time which was really lucky, that’s the only reason we were able to get it. There was still defense force planes landing and things like that but it was pretty much free the whole time which was great.
Steven Sashen:
And so was it literally just up and back? I mean, were you just doing a loop?
Ethan Fleming:
It was a 5K loop, so you would just do the whole loop. I would describe it… I don’t know if this is possible but it was a continuous uphill loop. That’s what we used to describe it as because-
Steven Sashen:
Well, I was thinking about that because most people don’t know they think runways are flat and they’re not.
Ethan Fleming:
No, they’re not. They’re actually designed to catch an airplane and unfortunately with that is that means that the asphalt or the bitumen is actually really grippy and it sticks to the car. Yeah. So that was probably the number one thing I was not prepared for was the weather and the runway, those two things were traumatic. It still gives me goosebumps thinking back to what it feels like doing that on there.
Steven Sashen:
Well again, this is the punch in the face moment. How long did it take you until you went, oh, shit I did not think about this?
Ethan Fleming:
I was about three hours in and it was a very, very hot day in Melbourne, Australia and when the sun was hitting me and I was sweating. I remember my friend goes to me, “Hey, man, if you stay at this pace three hours in it’s going to take us two and a half days without any stopping.” And I was like, “Thank you for your moral support. I really appreciate it, I’m so glad I chose you on my support crew.” Anyway, that was the moment where I started to really spiral like I shouldn’t have done this, I’m going to waste everyone’s time, real negative thinking. But like any ultra endurance event you have your ups, you have your downs, you just got to ride the waves.
Steven Sashen:
So I don’t want to gloss over that point too quickly. When you were having those thoughts whether it was early on when you realized oops, or in the middle of the night again. How do you work with those thoughts? What do you do when they’re popping up in your brain?
Ethan Fleming:
I always try to think of them and not give them power. So if they come in, I almost just like… Kind of like meditation. If you ever try to meditate, you let a thought come in and you just let it pass. Obviously, it’s easier said than done in these situations but I think just not giving it power and allowing it to be a real thought but not allowing it to take over your actions. Yeah, I want to make those decisions but I’m not going to make those decisions, let’s see how I feel in an hour. Every time you do that an hour later you feel different.
Steven Sashen:
My favorite way of playing with that has to do with hunger, where there’s sometimes where I’m hungry and it’ll hit me out of nowhere and I’m immediately thinking I’ve got to get food and I go, well, that’s crazy 10 seconds ago I didn’t have that thought that I was so desperate for food. So what happens if I just wait? And it’s not like I watch it pass. It’s just that a few minutes later I notice I forgot to pay attention it’s gone and eventually it comes back, it’s not like I’m fasting for any preachable amount of time. But often people have never even had the experience of dealing with something as screamingly obvious as just hunger and watching that it doesn’t stick around or grow exponentially the way that we imagine until we’re just chewing table legs. So yeah, the meditative version of that it’s a good way of thinking of it. One of my little mantras I like to say, “What do you care what you think about you?” It’s like some thought just popped up and whatever, I mean it’s just a thing.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, I love it. It’s interesting, it’s like the human body will give us signals that they want something to change. But the human body and the human mind will also adapt to your current situation and there’s a fine line between you just having you actioning those feelings and letting them go, and most of the time if we let them go long enough the human body and mind will change for us which is great.
Steven Sashen:
Well, you might get a kick out of this. So one of the reasons I moved to Boulder, Colorado almost 30 years ago was I was doing Zen archery and they like to say it’s meditation in motion and people go, “Well, how does that work?” And I go, well, when you’re doing Zen archery you basically end up getting five different thoughts. There’s this sort of fear, there’s wanting to do it right, there’s wanting to look good. I mean, there’s only five different things that come up in your mind when you’re trying to do this thing and most of the Japanese arts they’re prescribed so there’s a perfect way to do them but you’ll never do them perfectly. It just doesn’t work that way, and there’s also this weird part where you’re simultaneously trying to be really relaxed while you’re holding this really strong bow that if you don’t shoot it properly, it could cut your ear off. I mean, literally.
So what happens though over time, if you just get the same five thoughts over and over and over you just bore the out of yourself and after a while you just stop paying attention to them. They show up it’s like whatever, that thing again, and the interesting thing that’s the advantage to Zen archery versus just sitting on a cushion and meditating. Is when you’re just sitting on a cushion you get an infinite number of thoughts and instead of just that limiting thing and I imagine there’s a similar thing happening for you when you’re in one of these events, and I want to talk about more. Where you know that after a little while it’s like that same thing about I can’t do it or fill in the blank, whatever the small number of thoughts are. Before you respond to that, then of course that leads me to this question. At any point in this, do you find any kind of mental breakthrough? Or something where it just suddenly gets really blissful, wonderful, open, because you’ve just given up on trying to fight against the pain and the agony and everything else?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. Probably about 19 times over 24 hours and then there’s followed by 19 depression times. I feel like there’s a lot of people that will say that they’ll do this and those thoughts don’t come up. I would argue that those thoughts are still always there but they’re just followed by peaks and troughs. But the thing is those troughs, those low points like you’re saying they just don’t have the same impact they used to. Oh, I’m feeling really terrible, I’m having maybe a negative thought. But you just kind of don’t care about it the same way, you just realize it’s just going to pass. So when you know it’s going to pass it’s fine, but when you don’t know it’s going to pass it’s traumatic.
Steven Sashen:
Well and, I like what you said about you’ll have the high points and then the valleys that follow. Because there’s a woman who wrote a book, I haven’t gotten it yet I ordered it from the library. Not that that’s relevant, called Dopamine Nation, and one of her premises is that when you have these really high moments your brain is trying to get back to a baseline and so if you think about a seesaw. If you’ve got a really high moment, you’ve got to get that really low moment afterwards to get back to balance. So your brain is creating those low moments literally just to get you back into something that feels normal, which is a fascinating way of framing those high points and back to Zen archery. I remember there was a time where there’s a line in Zen archery, which is at the moment of release the archer’s true nature is revealed and it’s highly mythologized and doesn’t mean anything really. What it really means is that if you know how to look, when you’re doing this weird thing of shooting this Japanese bow.
The way you release, the way you let go, what happens in that moment just shows some things about your personality. It’s simplest way I can put it. But there was a time where anytime I shot, every time I let the arrow go I just got this wave of bliss and the next thought that I had was, “God, dammit.” Because I knew that the longer I had that the worse it was going to be when it went away either for real, physically unpleasant or my wanting to get that back. So I think I really just shortened the process where it was like bliss, dammit, bliss, dammit, and eventually it kind of evened out. But I think if I had gotten attached to the bliss part, it would’ve been bad.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, 100%. Everything is borrowed, every heightened emotion is borrowed.
Steven Sashen:
I love it.
Ethan Fleming:
Every low emotion is borrowed, you’re always just… Sometimes I have these moments in a challenge where I’m so on top of the world, I’m almost high on life you could say and I’m thinking to myself oh, shit. Because I know that this is usually followed by a complete in the pits feeling. So it’s just like you said, this is the perfect way to say it.
Steven Sashen:
But here’s the funny way, it may be the other way around. It may be that all the struggle and the whatever and that… Because actually this is Dopamine Nation. One of her recommendations for dealing with things like addiction is to do something like exercise or something that is demonstrably not crazy unpleasant. But unpleasant enough that when your brain is trying to regulate, it’s going to have to up-regulate with something pleasant. So maybe it was all those unpleasant things that led to the blissful things rather than the crash, which if that’s the case it really reframes the way we think about highs and lows.
Ethan Fleming:
It does and it also makes the lows really bearable because you’re like I’ve got a little high coming up in seven hours.
Steven Sashen:
Well, speaking of seven hours. So how long did it take you since it clearly didn’t take two and a half days?
Ethan Fleming:
Well, it pretty much did. So it was 48 hours and 30 minutes with probably about seven minutes of sleep, and that was pretty much it.
Steven Sashen:
So before burpees it was every minute on the minute and then 15 minutes off every hour. Were you just moving nonstop on this one?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. This was me attached to a car for literally 48 hours and I mean besides going to the toilet and most of the time I was going to the toilet on the runway, don’t tell them. But yeah, so it was nonstop.
Steven Sashen:
What were you eating and drinking during that?
Ethan Fleming:
I mean, I had normal nutrition protocols. So I was having salt tablets, one or two of those each hour depending on the sweat and stuff. I was having your gels, I was having normal food. The perk of doing your car is that your heart rate doesn’t peak over 150, 160, so you can sustain it from a heart rate point of view but from a body point of view it still breaks down.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So again, once you were done, I mean 48 hours, Jesus. What happened in the aftermath of that?
Ethan Fleming:
Do you know what’s funny? I literally got in the car and fell asleep and I remember waking up at home, that was pretty much the journey home. So yeah, my body slept straight away because I hadn’t slept for 56 hours I was up for the total. But the body recovered really well from that because I actually spent so long training for this. Now, it’s pretty hard to train for dragging a car because you don’t drag a car obviously around the streets of Melbourne and if you do you’re getting arrested.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Ethan Fleming:
But what I did is I attached a sled at a park. I just put tons of weight on a sled and I walked around it for four hours a couple of times in the morning and that was my training regime for the nine months. So because of the preparation I had and the low impact of the event, I actually recovered well from that one which was good.
Steven Sashen:
I’m required by law to ask this question, what were you wearing on your feet?
Ethan Fleming:
I started doing minimalist shoes day to day but I wasn’t at the point where I was using them for events yet. Now, I use them for every single thing I do and that means from thongs to runners, to training, to events. But back then I would walk around in minimalist shoes and then train in… I used some crappy ASICS that caused me shin splints to be honest.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Ethan Fleming:
But yeah, that’s what I used I think at the time some ASICS thing. I had Vivo’s for some of my other events and then I’ve played around with heaps of different brands.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. We’re in this phase where people are trying things from every different company and finding the things that work which I’m all for, and it’s like all of that is growing the awareness and is helping all of us. Anyway, back to you for the win. Okay. So we’ve got 24 hours of burpees, we’ve got 48 hours of dragging a car. So what else has been on your endurance crazy list?
Ethan Fleming:
I did 24 hours on an assault bike, you know that one? There were you… Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Using legs.
Ethan Fleming:
I did 100 hours staying awake which was pretty rough. I did a-
Steven Sashen:
Just plain staying awake?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, I thought to myself. You’re banging on about all these resilience challenges but you haven’t even stayed awake long. So I was just like stuff it, I’m going to try 100 hours awake.
Steven Sashen:
I mean look, I did 72 by accident when we were on Shark Tank which in the UK they had Dragon’s Den I don’t about Australia but-
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, I’ll say.
Steven Sashen:
So when we aired I just was up for three days dealing with the website crashing and customer service, etc, and around this 70 hour mark… I had a treadmill desk. I’m walking on the treadmill talking to someone on Skype, they asked me a question and I kind of look up to try to see if I can find the answer and the next thing I knew I was sound asleep standing up.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, it was horrible. I had to reverse my days. So during the day I would somewhat take it easy and then at night I would go for runs, sit on a bike. I had to treat it like an exercise challenge or I wouldn’t have stayed awake and even when I was sitting down I was bouncing this ball because if I didn’t bounce the ball I would just fall asleep instantly.
Steven Sashen:
So at what point did your mind really seem to crack on that one because that’s what I imagine happens?
Ethan Fleming:
The first day kind of… I actually came into this, I was going I’ve been up for 56 hours before. The first 50 hours is going to be a breeze, I’m not dragging the car. But without the stimulus of doing something it was horrible because I just had so many natural hormones telling me to go to sleep as you should that avoiding those was really challenging. But after I avoided them, that’s when just deliria came in. I remember I was driving home or I wasn’t driving, but I was in the car and I was going down to grab my shoes and I thought my dog was licking my hand. I didn’t even have a dog in the car, my brain was just turning into mush. Yeah, it was a pretty horrible experience actually. I probably would never do that again, that was a one and done thing.
Steven Sashen:
No, yeah. That one I would never do it obviously. But I mean, I’ve just read enough about military training and whatnot and just the effect of that because people have been curious. Why do we have to sleep? It’s like well we don’t know why but we know that if you don’t, you go crazy.
Ethan Fleming:
And you really do go crazy, I started creating an alter ego for myself called, Tom. I was going around to my partner at the time… Sorry, still my partner. But saying, “Ethan’s, not here right now, Tom’s, here.” And she’s like, “What the fuck are you saying?” This is at 80 hours and she said she came in one night and she said I was just sitting there staring at the wall and this is hour at 80 or something and she came back three or four hours and I was still just staring at the wall in the same spot. No phone, no TV, nothing, I’m just blank lost. I still wonder why I did that one. But the reason behind why I actually did that is I had this idea for another challenge which required a lot of sleep there and I needed to know if I could do it and the summary was no.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I appreciate that you have that kind of good sense at least which is a weird thing to say after we’re talking about the things that you’ve already done. All right, so wait? Okay, so what else is on the list?
Ethan Fleming:
What have we got? It’s hard to remember. I did an Adelaide ride off, no training. So Adelaide is a state in Australia, sorry. So I took a flight with a bike to another state and I just rode home, self-supported off no training, that was one. I did 24 hours on assault bike twice, I have the hour assualt bike Guinness World Record, currently still have the 24-hour assault bike Guinness World Record. Three minute burpee Guinness World Record and then the car Guinness World Records. So they’re my Guinness World Records and then the other ones are just weird ones, like did a full distance triathlon off no training. Just yeah, a few other little things, adventure races, marathons and stuff in between.
Steven Sashen:
And again, I’m really curious since you have this business now of not only doing retreats but just your professional business. How has this affected your business? So I can imagine positive and negative. I can imagine that on the one hand it could be inspiring for people who want to find out what you’re doing and how they could do more better. I imagine some people could be intimidated, I imagine some people who were flat out nuts would come and hang out with you.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. So I mean, I have a business that I started from 2016 which I still run today but I have less involvement in. That business was for the everyday person you could say, that business and what I do now it does not relate. I’m not inspiring a mom with two kids or a dad that’s working full time to go and do anything, that’s not inspiring them. So in that way it hasn’t helped, but it’s great for getting personal trainers on board that’s for sure. Because personal trainers want to work for you when you’ve done all these crazy things. But I think the biggest lesson its taught me is that if you can stay up for 100 hours you can work hard, right? These things are work ethic based still, no matter what. So there’s always going to be overlap there.
Steven Sashen:
Well, in the obvious question what’s next?
Ethan Fleming:
So currently I’m doing in a few weeks, I’ve got… You know Goggins? The challenge he’s got? It’s 4X4X48, where he does four miles every four hours for 48 hours. So I’m doing that for seven days. So on October 14th, I’m running 6.4Ks or four miles as you guys call it every four hours for seven days straight.
Steven Sashen:
And again, so wait that’s coming up when? Soon?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, that’s in three weeks.
Steven Sashen:
And holy crap, and what’s been the prep for that one?
Ethan Fleming:
Running, a lot of running and I’m not a runner to be honest, Steven. I’m like, I’m a wombat with slightly longer legs. I look like a Rottweiler going through the bush, I’m not a good runner. But I feel like 6.4Ks or four miles is very achievable and as long as I can get that done and I’m okay with the no sleep I should be okay. We’ll see though.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly. So look, so he’s got 4X4X48 and what inspired you to just go, screw it, let’s just go for seven days?
Ethan Fleming:
Well I just feel like what I want from challenges these days for me, I want learning experiences and the learning experiences come from not doing the things that I didn’t think I could do. So choosing something that I think I could do doesn’t really fill my cup the way it used to. So this challenge is something that I’m genuinely, I have no idea how I’m going to go after three or four days. So I guess we’re going to learn together, right?
Steven Sashen:
Well, is that going to be streamed in some way? Can people follow and track it?
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. So I’ve got a Strava event group going with it, and that’s where all the times will be posted. But otherwise, I’ll just flood the Instagram for seven days with what I’m doing and the tears and all of the fun stuff that comes with it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, that would be amazing to follow. So in a few minutes, when I ask you to tell people how they can track you down let’s make sure we give them that info as well because that’s going to be a good one. Holy moly. Here’s a crazy question, are your parents still alive?
Ethan Fleming:
They are, yes.
Steven Sashen:
And how do they think about this?
Ethan Fleming:
So my mom is very much… I don’t let her come to any event because she stresses too much. Dad, I would say he couldn’t give a fuck, he’s all right with it, he doesn’t care. To put it bluntly.
Steven Sashen:
I’m not going to say this is true, but I’m going to say it anyway because… Let’s see, it’s not racist, it’s not sexist, I don’t know what the appropriate word is for this. But to a certain extent everything we’re talking about couldn’t be more Australian.
Ethan Fleming:
It is very Aussie. Yeah, it’s a very Aussie way.
Steven Sashen:
It’s kind of like there’s a guy that I know he was a British guy going in Australia, and he’s at customs trying to get in and they go, “What are you here for? Business? Where are you staying? You’re going to this hotel?” And they say, “Do you have a criminal record?” He goes, “Oh shit, do you still need one to get in?”
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. There is a bit of an Aussie thing to just doing hard stuff, but just having a laugh with it. I think that’s the difference. In the states I’ve met some really hardcore guys in the States, and they’re really hardcore.
Steven Sashen:
They’re really hardcore.
Ethan Fleming:
But in Australia your hardcore guy is your neighbor that you just go out and greet him, and then he goes and runs 300Ks, you don’t even know he runs 300Ks. It’s different. It’s different.
Steven Sashen:
Well, this is my thing. Part of my story is that what got me into the whole barefoot thing was I say a friend of mine who was a world champion cross country runner, which is when I was living in Boulder, Colorado, I could have just said, “A world champion my neighbor.” Because it doesn’t matter where you live, you’re living next to a world champion of some sort. Out of all the people I’ve ever trained with, I’m the only one that doesn’t have a world championship title. It’s utterly ludicrous and I never will. I mean, the guys who are faster than me there. I mean, we’re all genetic freaks but they are the freakiest of the freaks and my only hope is that at some point I outlive them and my actual only hope it’s things like at the world championships I want to make it into a semifinals in the 100. If I make a semifinal somewhere in the top 16 I’m thrilled or actually, I want to be in a four by 100 relay and have the other three guys carry me around.
Ethan Fleming:
I’m assuming you are using barefoot shoes then, right? Surely to train in?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I train and compete in the Speed Force shoe that we made, and we’re actually working on a kind of secret non-spike sprinting spike that it’s not a secret now that I said that. But it’s a very interesting design that I think is probably going to be the best sprinting spike ever made for a bunch of reasons, there’s some very clever technology or lack thereof in it.
Ethan Fleming:
I’ll tell you what I’ve got the shoes that you’ve got in the background the thong ones, I’ve got those. Yeah. I get a lot of crap from my Aussie mates about them, they’re not in here but I rock them loud and proud now.
Steven Sashen:
Well look, if you want to get your neighbors really get their panties in a wad, add some beads or charms, really go for it.
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah. The minimalist shoe world is coming into Australia very hard right now. It wasn’t around two, three years ago, I reckon I was one of few but now people are doing it crazy here.
Steven Sashen:
If you look in the Google data about what people search for, and you look at the trend about when people search for barefoot shoes it peaked originally in 2009 when Born to Run came out and the whole boom started. But it’s at a worldwide peak now, both in the US and worldwide it’s never been higher, and it’s growing organically and growing fast. And I’ll tell you this news, this is something I probably shouldn’t say but I can’t keep secrets. We’re going to really make a change in Australia, hopefully within the next year because we’re working with some people who’ve gotten very into this idea. Actually, one of these people got into it about eight years ago. But now the other people that he works with are getting into it and for people who don’t know the Wiggles, I’m talking about the Wiggles.
Ethan Fleming:
Oh, really?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Anthony, the blue wiggle has been a barefoot guy for eight years and it changed his life and recently they picked up some Xero shoes and called us and said we got to talk and so we’re putting something together.
Ethan Fleming:
To be honest, it actually changed my life too. My feet were broken and I’m not even saying this because I’m on your podcast. If I didn’t like them, I’d just say it’s shit because that’s not what it’s about.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Ethan Fleming:
But I had shin splints, my feet were cooked, I couldn’t do anything without getting feet pain and then soon as I stopped wearing shoes all these problems went away and as soon as I had those changes I was hooked and then I only got into running into zero drop and minimalist shoes probably three months ago. But that’s been a whole nother level of change again.
Steven Sashen:
Yep. Yeah, it’s shocking. My wife has a great line, she goes, “There’s no reason to have another shoe company in the world, there’s enough of them unless your shoes change people’s lives.” And the irony is that the only way we’re changing lives is by getting out of the way and people just don’t get it. And I’m talking to some professional sports leagues and I said, “All we’re doing is going back in time, back into the ’60s and early ’70s, before you got all these modern athletic shoes where injury rates have gone up, the type of injuries have gotten crazier, the severity of injuries have gotten crazier. So we’re just going back in time, but then improving what you were doing back in the ’60s and early ’70s and they’re like, “Oh.” And the pro athletes, they get it. I mean, some of them are nervous. In fact, we had this one basketball player who he was just watching other players check out a shoe that we made and he’s like, “It’s not for me.” And then when no one was looking a little while later, he put them on and started trying them out.
He was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m low to the ground. I can cut better, I got better balance. Okay, this makes sense.”
Ethan Fleming:
Well, the thing is when you first put on minimalist shoes you’re freaking out because you’re feeling all these things. It hurts, it’s harsh, but that’s just you actually reconnecting again. It’s going to take time like anything, you’ve got to actually allow it to do its job. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, and it’s different for everyone the transition time. My favorite story though, good friends of my wife’s and mine we’ve known them for about 13 years for almost as long as we’ve had the business and they emailed us last weekend and said… They’ve never owned our shoes and we never pressed the issue because I don’t care. I mean, it would be nice but I’m not going to force our friends to wear my shoes. They said, “We’ve never owned your shoes. But we got into playing pickleball recently. We needed new shoes, and we got on this website and ordered 13 different styles to try them out and one of the things they recommended was yours, so we ordered a pair. So we tried on the other 12 shoes and just didn’t like how they it and put on yours and went, wow, these feel really good, my toes are spreading and I like the balance. But we were really nervous about playing in them. But we thought, all right, we’ll just bring another pair of shoes just in case if it doesn’t work.” And they both said the same thing.
It’s like, “During the game, we forgot we were wearing them.”
Ethan Fleming:
Yeah, and that’s how it should be. Yeah, that’s how it should be.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that was a fun one. Anyway, but enough about me back to you for the win. So if people want to follow you and track you down and hear what you’ve been doing, because I’m sure there’s things that we didn’t touch upon. But it’s certainly coming up on the world record you’re going for, which is again nutty as a fruit cake. How can they track you down?
Ethan Fleming:
Look, honestly, I’ve done a pretty good job of putting myself on Google. So if you put, Ethan Fleming, in on Google, Ethan Fleming, on Instagram you’re going to find anything you want. It’s all there, all the challenges are there too.
Steven Sashen:
And the link to the Strava group.
Ethan Fleming:
The Strava group, well, that one’s buried. So you’re probably best to find me through my Instagram, and then you’ll be able to see it in there.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, perfect. And wait, what day does that start again?
Ethan Fleming:
That’s 15th October in Australia, so that’ll be the day before you for you guys.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, the 14th. Damn, that’s two days after my wife’s and my 20th anniversary and we’re taking a trip to Cuba where the internet access is not good. So you’re going to be 90%-
Ethan Fleming:
I’ll be there for seven days.
Steven Sashen:
Well, we’re going to be out in Cuba for six so I’ll get the last day.
Ethan Fleming:
That’s the juicy day. That’s the one you want.
Steven Sashen:
All right. Well, I mean I’d want to be able to follow all along. Not while I’m sleeping, but all right I’ll just catch you on the last day then.
Ethan Fleming:
That sounds good, Steven. That sounds good.
Steven Sashen:
Well, Ethan, first of all good, good luck. Secondly, I mean as much as I jokingly say things like, “Hey, this is crazy.” This is really an inspiration. I mean, not because anyone else is going to try and do what you’re doing. But to your point, to discover that what we’re able to do is so much different than what we think we can do is such a big deal and it’s not just about athletics. I mean, this is something that my wife says all the time about our business. She never imagined in a million years, she just had the energy to do the things that she’s done and I’ve watched her become a brilliant business person. She was already super smart, but the things that you can learn, the things that you can do physically. It’s always helpful if there’s someone who’s really breaking the boundaries, where if you’re not going to go that far it gives you that idea you can go probably farther than you thought and that’s almost always true.
So with no more joking or joking aside, I’m just so happy that we got to do this and I’m so looking forward to what you do next and I really hope that it does give people that idea to get on their whiteboard and put a couple of times and distances on one side, whatever that means, and events on the other side. Whatever those look like, and find ways of connecting those and expanding those beyond what you think you can do. Because look, even if you don’t hit the goal whatever that is you’re probably going to end up doing more than you thought and even that is just a tremendous opportunity for people and I hope it’s inspiring them to do just that little more that they didn’t know was possible.
Ethan Fleming:
I hope it is too. Thanks, man.
Steven Sashen:
Pleasure. All right, well wrapping it up first of all, again, Ethan, thank you. For everybody else thank you, a reminder go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media, all the places you can give us a review and a thumbs up and a like, and etc, etc. If you have any questions or comments, if you have anyone you want to recommend being on the show especially if it’s someone who thinks I’ve got my head firmly up my butt, that’d be really entertaining. I find a few of those and I keep asking them but they keep turning me down. But either way, you can drop me an email at move, [email protected] and most importantly, go out, have fun and live life feet first.