Business of Endurance

Part 1: Season 6 Wrap Up

• Charlie Reading • Season 6 • Episode 12

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Hosts Charlie Redding and Claire Fudge wrap up the sixth season of their rebranded podcast, 'The Business of Endurance.' They reflect on a successful season characterised by shorter, more impactful episodes and commend the incredible guest lineup. Notable discussions include Joe De Sena's unique take on resilience, Sophie Power's inspiring experience at the UTMB while breastfeeding, and Sebastien Bellin's gripping survival story linked to the Brussels airport bombing. Each guest provided valuable takeaways and stories, offering listeners a rich tapestry of endurance insights.

Highlights:

  • Joe DeSena on Resilience
  • Sophie Power's Inspiring Story
  • Sebastian Bellin's Journey


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Speaker 1:

I'm Charlie Redding and I'm Claire. Fudge welcome to the business of endurance. Well, that's a wrap. We have come to the end of season six of the podcast and obviously it's the end of the first season after we rebranded to the business of endurance, and I think it's been a brilliant, brilliant season of episodes. We've had some incredible guests on there, no more so than ourselves, claire. What an incredible season yeah, it was.

Speaker 2:

It was particularly exciting interviewing you, charlie, actually, but it was. It was like thank you, it's been a fantastic season and, as always, some amazing guests on, but just with a slightly different angle this time, which has been great, which has been great a little different angle and a slightly shorter episodes.

Speaker 1:

I feel like, from the feedback we got, they were more punchy, really, really great feedback in terms of the content and takeaways. So I think it's been a success and what I'd love to do is spend a bit of time just going through and looking at the sound bites and the key takeaways from each of those episodes. So let's kick things off and let's talk about our first episode in season six, which is joe de senna. So joe de senna, I thought, was a brilliant, brilliant season opener. What did you make of joe de senna?

Speaker 2:

I absolutely loved it. I just loved his hate on resilience and what everyone talks about resilience like and now it's really overused word, I think to a certain degree, but he talks about it in a whole different way, a whole different level, and I guess the one thing and the image that sits in my head is of him giving an example that he made his children walk up a mountain to get their Christmas presents. I just love that and I've got such an image in my head. So I think, for me, definitely resilience, but presented in actually kind of real terms of actually what is resilience? What about for you?

Speaker 1:

Well, I completely agree. I think the resilience piece just struck such a chord with me that the story I was going to pick out actually was where he recruited a kung fu master to come and live with him and his family and he had his children doing kung fu training at 5am every morning, before school. I just think like absolutely brilliant in fact, a few of my mates and I laughed about that afterwards that we were trying to recruit a kung fu master for our families. I just brilliant, I love that and I think actually at the moment there is you're right, there is a lot of talk about resilience, but actually he just seemed to really hit the nail on the head in that we do need to help people build resilience in society more than ever. So let's just have a little catch up of a snippet of Joe DeSena talking about resilience.

Speaker 4:

I saw that Uma Thurman in the movie had a Kung Fu master and I thought, man, I wish I would have had a Kung Fu master growing up training me and I? I asked my wife. I said, look, why don't we hire a Kung Fu master from China that could come live on the farm and just train the kids all day, every day? Kids were young, they were just in and out of the early days of school and my wife went along with it. So we recruited a young Kung Fu master, probably 29 years old, and he moved to the farm and every morning at 5.30 am the kids got woken up and went into the barn and did an hour and change of Kung Fu and every night at 5.30 before dinner, an hour change of Kung Fu. And they became incredibly proficient. It was incredibly hard. I don't think very many parents, if they would have went into the barn when the training was going on, would have enjoyed it. If you want to know what was happening, just Google any of the Shaolin monks, the young children's videos where you see them doing crazy things stretching, holding buckets of weight in their hand, like sweating and shaking, like crazy stuff. But it started to build resilience in the kids, and I had some of my kids tested yesterday. We looked at their brains on scans and we saw a tremendous ability to deal with pain. Well, there's a lot of parents that'll be listening to this or watching this and they'll be cringing and saying I'm an idiot, I'm a nutcase. Kids need to sleep and they need to be coddled and they need more. Just feed them more. Clearly, the results don't show that.

Speaker 4:

When you look at what's going on globally with young kids in the first world the kids, whether it was the Kung Fu, whether it was the Kung Fu, whether it was the downhill skiing and terrible weather in Vermont not using chairlifts I would throw that in every once in a while and say, hey, let's not take a chairlift. We're hiking up the mountain carrying our skis in our ski boots Just crazy. Oh, let's swim across this lake. It's a mile. They can't swim that far. Yeah, they can, we'll give them life jackets so it's safe, but we're going to swim the mile across the lake. They just became grittier and in that process I didn't know this I met a neurosurgeon and the neurosurgeon told me you know, we can see when young people take on hard challenges and complete them, it leaves a track on the brain.

Speaker 4:

There is some fun in it too. They recognize that there's a benefit. We probably should be doing it. He's making me flip tires for four hours. He's got me carrying this thing up a mountain.

Speaker 4:

I'm not in that kind of shape to make it up the mountain, but those events create stories that they tell amongst each other. They become more empowered, create stories that they tell amongst each other. They become more empowered. The kids they do better in school. They do better at their sport. Maybe they get inspired to do a sport. And in the case of the pizza girl I just described.

Speaker 4:

So I don't know what the question was. I apologize, I got distracted there for a second, but it's well beyond my kids. I you know. Yesterday I said to somebody if I could just do one thing, it would be just helping kids. I just love like 12 to 16 year olds, 11 to six, well, even younger 10 to 16 year olds, because they still listen. You just tell them to do it and they do it by and large.

Speaker 4:

And now back to your question what about the ones that don't? There's very few that don't, and a very wealthy family sent a kid two years ago to the farm. He showed up in khakis and loafers and a button-down shirt. I handed him a very messy, broken bag of cement, an 80-pound bag of cement which got all over his brand-new clothes, and I said carry this up the mountain. He said well, I'm calling my uncle. This is ridiculous, I'm not doing this. And I took and smashed his phone and said good luck with that, carry on. If you talk to him now, if you talk to him now that kid will tell you that moment changed his life.

Speaker 1:

So the second episode we had was the just incredible lady that is Sophie Power. So what did you make of the chat with Sophie Power, Claire?

Speaker 2:

More than anything else. It's really in the moment now in terms of Sophie's story, but how she's made that story really created a passion and, you know, a business and something out of actually the photo that was taken of her breastfeeding on an ultramarathon. I loved it and I think you know it kind of aligns with all the current research around female health. So for me that was like fantastic, that it kind of really sort of fits into to kind of today and what we're talking about.

Speaker 1:

I agree. I think firstly it's incredible that she was able to do the UTMB whilst breastfeeding. I mean that's absolutely incredible. The second thing is it's incredible that she had to do it because she obviously didn't want to do it but they wouldn't defer the place. So that whole conversation that we had around how she was essentially forced into doing it I mean, obviously she wasn't forced into doing it, but if she wanted to do it she had to do it then. But I also think it's just such a an amazing story and highlights how the power of one photo in today's social media world can create such a storm. Really, really inspiring, lady, but also just fascinating in terms of how one photo can tell so much. So let's have a quick catch up on a snippet of Sophie chatting about that one photo.

Speaker 3:

This photo, if anyone hasn't seen. It is at the halfway point of UTMB. It's in Kulmaya and I'm breastfeeding my three-month-old baby and pumping the other side and there's a guy with his feet up next to him because he's having a nap, because we've been running through the night and really I'd quite like to be having a nap, but I had feeding business to do so. The reason I'm there and I would never condone running a 106 mile mountain race for a three month old baby is because I've lost my place to run at that race. It's an iconic race. Most people would have heard of it, so I had the choice of losing my opportunity again. Or my initial goal was to just experience that start line and the incredible atmosphere around it and maybe get 10k and just have a family holiday in Chamonix and use it as a focus to stay fit. During my pregnancy, my three-year-old he saw the other races finishing earlier in the week and he saw these children running down the finish line with their parents and he he's like mom, it's going to be me, it's going to be me, I'm going to run this. You're going to finish race, I'm going to. And I was like, oh my God, I've got to get around 106 miles and that was it. It was he wanted to. He wanted me to run with him down the finish straight and I was never going to let my three-year-old down Children's young as five. Five girls see themselves as less able at sport than boys and I've got a two-year-old daughter and it's everything I could do to make sure that she has a very different attitude to average. And what can I do to get her there? But I think we look at racing in general. We know that women are, I think, 51% of runners in the UK, so we are running. So what she races, we did and look at I wanted to.

Speaker 3:

I guess, moving on from utmb and, and the advocacy is like why are women not on these start lines?

Speaker 3:

The parts that's still missing is women coming back, freezing your index, being able to re-enter the sport at the level that you nested, because otherwise you're spending time getting back up to that and the requalifications and you're not having the access to those races. And we need to make a decision that we want mothers to come back to the sport and certainly if you're having multiple children, you want to get back quickly into the racing because you need to think about your sponsors and your sponsors want you on the biggest start lines and as a woman, I am so inspired by an athlete. If you look at, like Chelsea Cesaro, the image of her holding her baby winning the world championships. It means so much to so many women to see her do that and to see her talk about it and how she did that, wants to do her race, whether that's 10k, whether that's a sprint triathlon. Seeing someone else do it at such an elite level gives you so much confidence that you can get back. Then we don't have the teams around us that maybe she did.

Speaker 1:

We've got to make a decision as a sport that we need to support mothers to get back to the elite level so, again, while we catch up between, uh, season six and season seven, boy is season seven shaping out to be, uh, some amazing guests. But more on that later. I wanted to catch up on the episode that we did with sebastian bellin. What did you make of that episode, claire?

Speaker 2:

uh, inspiring, like it was an absolutely inspiring story and I kind of knew about that story but he told it with such passion and for me, obviously, the nutrition side of things you know. So if you listen in, listen to the story about the three bakes of pasta, you know it might get you thinking about, yeah, why you might want to carbohydrate load before, before your events but event he wasn't training for certainly. What were your thoughts?

Speaker 1:

well, I think.

Speaker 1:

I think it links into that very nicely in that we never know what we're training for really do.

Speaker 1:

I mean, we're always training for something, but ultimately, if you're looking after your body in the best way possible, we're training for life and whatever life throws at us.

Speaker 1:

And if we think about it, then Sebastian's training on the basketball court and his carb loading prepared him as as it needed to for when he had the race of his life, which was, you know, the race for his life, and so I think that was absolutely incredible and truly inspiring. But it also kind of makes you reflect on you've got to look after yourself, because you never quite know when we've got a different race to run. And then, of course, the amazing finish to that story is him going on to Kona and finishing that race, which is just amazing in terms of goal setting and seeing that as the way out and to aid his recovery. So, yeah, I just think that really genuine and there was some really interesting advice within that episode as well. So I'd really encourage people to go back and listen to the whole thing, because I think there was a lot of takeaways in there. But, by way of a catch up. Let's listen to a snippet of Sebastian Bellin's episode.

Speaker 5:

We get to the restaurant and I order my favorite dish of pasta carbonara. I love the pasta carbonara there and the owner comes out with the pasta carbonara dish and I'm so hungry I haven't eaten anything all day. But by the time he comes out with my friend and his wife's food, I've already finished. And he looks at me and he says, listen, that wasn't enough. And I said, yeah, your quantity is horrible, your quality is amazing, but your quantity, the portions for a 6'9", 2 meters 5 guy is absolutely horrendous. So he gets really offended and he goes into the back and he prepares me. He comes out a few minutes later with a double portion just huge and I go back. We finished just huge and I go back. You know we finished the meal.

Speaker 5:

I go back that night to my house in brussels and the next day I go to the airport. You know I was five yards, five meters away from the second bomb at brussels airport. You know 34 people died that day. I actually stayed aware the whole time and the surgeons, the doctors, were never able to understand how a guy so tall, with so much body mass index could lose so much blood and yet never pass out. And until I told them about the pasta carbonara the night before, a few weeks later, and actually the chief surgeon came back and said you know, that's why you're alive.

Speaker 1:

Keep your eyes peeled and your ears at the ready for season seven of the Business of Endurance podcast. If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast, we don't ask you to pay for us. We don't ask for patronage. All we ask for is that you subscribe to the podcast, ideally on Apple. Give us a five-star rating because it shows us you care and, if you've got time, leave us a comment. One word is fine, something like inspiring or amazing or something like that, but we really do appreciate it and it will help us to continue to deliver amazing guests on what we hope you find to be an amazing podcast. Thanks, very much. Thank you.