Business of Endurance

Surviving Against the Odds: Joey Evans' Journey from Paralysis to Dakar

• Charlie Reading • Season 8 • Episode 5

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In this episode of The Business of Endurance, we dive into one of the most inspiring stories you'll ever hear. Our guest, Joey Evans, turned the darkest moment of his life—an accident that left him paralyzed—into an awe-inspiring journey of resilience and triumph. For ten years, Joey pursued an impossible dream: to compete in the world’s toughest off-road race, the Dakar Rally. Against all odds, he not only regained the ability to walk but crossed the finish line of the brutal 9,000km Dakar, dragging his battered bike through unimaginable adversity. In this conversation, Joey reveals the mindset and strategies that kept him going when everything seemed lost. You'll discover how goal setting, resilience, and sheer determination can overcome even the most insurmountable challenges. Whether you're an athlete, entrepreneur, or simply someone navigating life's hurdles, Joey’s insights will leave you with practical takeaways to redefine your limits, overcome setbacks, and chase your own dreams with renewed vigor.

Highlights:
- Joey's Introduction to Motorbike Racing
- Understanding the Dakar Rally
- The Dangers of Motorbike Racing
- A Life-Changing Crash in 2007
- The Road to Recovery
- Facing the Brutal 2017 Dakar Rally
- Surviving the Andes and Harsh Weather
- A Devastating Crash and Unyielding Determination
- The Final Push and Unbelievable Triumph
- Reflections on Resilience and Overcoming Adversity
- The Impact of the Accident and Life Lessons
- Technological Advances in Racing and Future Challenges

Links:
Connect with Joey Evans on Instagram & Web.

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Joey Evans:

This is one of the hardest things. I would dream like I was still able-bodied. So I would dream I was running or I was riding or I was doing something like that, and then I'd wake up and then I'm paralyzed.

Charlie Reading:

In this episode of the Business of Endurance podcast, we dive into one of the most inspiring stories you'll ever hear. Our guest, joey Evans, turned the darkest moment of his life, an accident that left him paralyzed and unable to ever walk again, into an awe-inspiring journey of resilience and triumph. For 10 years, joey pursues an impossible dream to complete the world's toughest off-road race, the Dakar Rally. Against all odds, he not only regained his ability to walk, but crossed the finish line of the brutal 9,000 kilometer Dakar Rally, dragging his battered bike through unimaginable adversity. Now you may be thinking he's riding a motorbike. How is this an endurance sport? Well, you've just got to listen to the conversation to really understand that this is definitely an endurance sport. In this conversation, joey reveals the mindset and strategies that kept him going when everything seemed lost. Discover how goal setting, resilience and sheer determination can overcome even the most insurmountable challenges. Whether you're an athlete, entrepreneur or simply somebody navigating life's hurdles, joey's insights will leave you with practical takeaways to redefine your limits, overcome setbacks and chase your own dreams with renewed vigor. You are going to get so much out of this amazing conversation with Joey Evans. So, joey, welcome to the Business of Endurance podcast.

Charlie Reading:

I've been listening to you telling stories and speaking, and I know this is going to be an awesome episode. I grew up on a farm and my grandmother bought me a 50cc Pooch Magnum motorbike when I was seven years old and, having grown up around horses and where you had to mop the horses out, and then suddenly this thing just started when he wanted it to and it didn't eat while he slept. I loved motorbikes, so when I heard about your story, I was like this is going to be absolutely brilliant. We've never had a motorcyclist on the podcast before. What I'd love to know is how did you get into motorbike racing and what was so important about the Dakar Rally?

Joey Evans:

I was one of these guys who didn't grow up on motorcycles. You often hear a lot of guys who race. They grew up on motorcycles. I liked motorcycles as a kid but I grew up one of six children and we didn't have a lot of money and that kind of stuff, so motorbikes was never an option. But I had a BMX bicycle growing up and I loved that BMX bicycle and the places that took me and building ramps in the bush, felt with my brothers and things. But it took me until I was 26 years old and I was actually working and saving money and I bought my first secondhand motorcycle when I was 26.

Joey Evans:

And then I started with motocross, which is on the tracks with the big jumps and that kind of stuff. And then I moved into I did a bit of freestyle motocross for a while, which is you see those ones with the metal ramps and the tricks and that kind of stuff. And then I got into enduro and off-road and that's where you race like cross country through rivers and forests and that type of stuff. And I heard this word, the Dakar Rally here and there, growing up and seeing some images now and again, and it was only really in my 20s that I learned a lot more about the race, and so to give you a bit of background, what the Dakar is it's considered the toughest, most grueling off-road race in the world and it's generally about two weeks long and you race around about 9,000 kilometers.

Joey Evans:

It started off racing from Paris to Dakar in Senegal, so all through North Africa, the Sahara desert and that kind of stuff, but over the years the first one was in 1968. And so it's been going for a number of years. And then they faced a lot of challenges in the early 2000s with political instability and religious fundamentalism and this kind of stuff, and the race started to get targeted by terrorists and things and they ended up having to move it. So the route changed every year up in North Africa. But then they did the biggest move in in 2008, where they moved the entire race to South America, and so for the next 11 years we'd run through countries like Chile, peru, bolivia, argentina, paraguay, through the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert, and then for the last I think about four or five years now it's been held in Saudi Arabia.

Joey Evans:

So it's moved every year. It's never been the same routes all the way through, right from the beginning. It's always been different countries, each year, different places, but it's the concept of this two-week ultimate off-road race. It's considered an extremely dangerous race. There's been over 75 deaths over its 40-something year period. You often have deaths on the race and often those deaths are motorcyclists.

Charlie Reading:

Is it just because you're more exposed, or is it because of the other things that you're racing?

Joey Evans:

It's a bit of both. So when you're on a motorcycle you are exposed to the elements. If you crash, it's your body hitting the ground. When you're in a car or a truck, you've got roll cages and you've got eight-point safety harnesses and hunts devices connecting your head to the back of the seats and all that sort of stuff. It is a lot safer to drive in those kinds of vehicles. So for bikers, you are the most at risk because you're the most exposed to environments. But also for bikers, racing with cars and trucks is particularly dangerous.

Joey Evans:

Normally, if you look at any sort of racing around the world in the different countries, motorcycles won't race with cars and trucks. Yeah, it's always separate events, but there's a few races around the world where you do race with these cars and trucks and quads and that kind of stuff side by sides, and one of obviously the biggest race that does that is the Dakar Rally, as well as like the Baja 1000 and then a few other rallies around the world. You race with the vehicles as well, and that's a massive challenge because you have all vehicles of different speeds. So sometimes cars and trucks need to overtake bikers, which is normally the situation, because with most of these races they let the bikers go first and then they send the cars and trucks afterwards for a bit of time, but inevitably they'll catch the majority of the field. So that is the most dangerous situation, when cars and trucks need to overtake bikes because, as a biker, a lot of guys want to. You want to lose as little time as possible, you don't want to pull over out the way you know and wait for several minutes for this guy to go past, cause there's so many cars and trucks. If you just keep doing that, you'll never finish the race.

Joey Evans:

And for a car or truck, he wants to get past you without letting off that gas at all. He's a guy racing. I mean, sometimes it's a 50-year-old Dutch guy in a truck, but he's like a teenager on Red Bull. He's just racing flat out and trying to get to that finish line. So they don't have a lot of patience, a lot of the guys and so it is a dangerous situation. They have things put in place with alarms and stuff, but it's all like in theory. This is how it'll work, whereas out there in the desert or on the dirt tracks, the reality is very different to what you'd hear in riders briefing.

Charlie Reading:

It sounds insane, and Claire and I have a habit of listening to these amazing events. Going sign me up for this. I'm not sure that either of us are sitting here at the moment thinking we signed up for the Dakar Rally but long before you got to race the Dakar Rally for the Dakar Rally, but long before you got to race the Dakar Rally. You had a life-changing day in, I think, 2007, wasn't it? So tell us about what happened there and the aftermath of the crash that you had.

Joey Evans:

Sure, yeah. So it was the 13th of October 2007. And heading into that, I was racing off-road bikes in South Africa. I was doing pretty good on a local and a regional level. I was nowhere in place nationally, but I was doing pretty good on a local and a regional level. I was nowhere placed nationally, but I was doing all right to all the local races and stuff. And I had this goal to one day race the Dakar Rally. It was certainly nothing that was like anytime soon. You know, I got married quite young. I had four young daughters, and so it was like lots of financial things and all sorts of stuff, but I was like no, one day, one day I'm going to do that race.

Joey Evans:

And I lined up at the start of this local race on a Saturday morning with a whole bunch of guys in the same class as me and I was lying second in the championship at the time. It was the second last race of the season and if I won that race I could still win this championship. And looking back, it was ridiculous. At that time, on that start line, winning that championship just seemed like the most important thing in my life and my goal was to get in that first corner in as close to first place as I could, because the starts really matter a lot, because with off-road racing the further back you get, the more dust, and so the field just spreads out really quickly and the further back you are you just lose time like crazy. So that first corner is super important and that flag dropped for the start and I raced across that field and we got to that first kind of bottleneck where it tightened in and then made a hard right and in that bottleneck I got in there in the first couple of places.

Joey Evans:

I had a great start, but there was a guy behind me who was coming in too hot and he just crashed straight into kind of the back end of my bike and we both went down really hard and in the dust and mayhem. A lot of riders went over me as well and I was unconscious. I'd obviously had a big impact on my head and I lay there unconscious for several minutes and then, when I came around, the first thing I realized is my mouth was full of dirt and stones and I started spitting it out. But it turned out not to be dirt and stones, it was my teeth, and I'd shattered 12 of my teeth just right down into the gums.

Joey Evans:

But the next thing I noticed my legs were bent and they were leaning against a friend of mine who was there and as he stepped back, my legs just fell to the ground. And I just said to the medics. I said I can't feel my legs, and then there was a lot of complications. That day I ended up lying there in the dirt for several hours and then I was transported by road to three different hospitals over the next 48 hours, and then I learned the extent of my injuries and what I'd done is I'd broken my back, my T8 and T9 vertebra, I'd crushed my spinal cord and I was paralyzed from the chest down.

Claire Fudge:

To listen to that story of you being injured is unthinkable really. As a dietician actually having worked with spinal cord injuries, I can only imagine what you might have been going through. And speaking with people who've had spinal cord injuries, that diagnosis is just a terrible diagnosis. How did you approach those first few days after that injury Because that is huge to be told that those first few days after that injury Because that is huge to be told that what was your mindset at that time? What were you thinking Like? How were you getting through every day?

Joey Evans:

So at first the doctors said to me that you're paralyzed and this is likely how it's going to be the rest of your life. And to be honest, at first I just didn't believe it. I guess, as, like a biker and things, my understanding was that if you broke a bone it meant you can't race for six weeks. That was like the extent of this understanding. And so to be told it would be forever, I was like there's no ways, it can't be forever. And so at first I was like no, there's no ways. You know, I didn't really understand what a spinal cord injury was. I'd heard words like paraplegic and quadriplegic and I'd seen people in wheelchairs, but you don't really know these things unless it happens to you or someone close to you. And so at first, no, it'll be fine, it'll be fine.

Joey Evans:

And then the days started to tick away and I've got no feeling, no movement below my chest and my legs start getting skinnier and skinnier as the muscles atrophied. And then suddenly this reality of my situation started to just settle and kind of dawn on me and it was like whoa, and I'm realizing like man, I've messed up here. I've messed up in a big way. I'm a father of four daughters, I'm the breadwinner in the family, I've got all this sort of responsibility and here I am like paralyzed in this hospital and the rest of my life is ruined and I've destroyed everything. And it was man, it was heavy, and then you're kind of in this place where it's just every day is a massive struggle, not just to keep it together physically but keep it together mentally as well. It was the first time in my life I'd been in a place where I looked at the rest of my life and I was like, is this worth it? Man, this is, I don't know if I can do this. This is a big ask. This, you know, it was tough times and I think the strategy that I used at that time was that I had to not think about everything. I had to not think about the rest of my life, I had to not think about all the areas of sweet effect. It was just like that ton of pressure trying to think of all those things. So I would just take it one day at a time and I'd say, right, just today, what am I going to do today? To do the best I can today to just move that little needle, just to take it over just to time a little bit. What can I do today? And the answer generally was to like be positive today, wake up, go to your physio.

Joey Evans:

When I started then it was purely upper body stuff, just trying to keep healthy, just make sure I'm eating right today, just making sure I'm doing everything I can today to just get through today. And sometimes it wasn't even a whole day. Sometimes I'm breaking it up into hours to minutes, especially the nighttimes alone lying in that bed. This was one of the hardest things. I would dream like I was still able-bodied so I would dream I was running or I was riding or I was doing something like that, and then I'd wake up and then I'm paralyzed and so the person I was in my head didn't match this body that I was in.

Joey Evans:

And that was one of the most difficult things. It was like a. It felt like a big dollop of depression every single morning when you woke up and because they give you quite a lot of painkillers and stuff, so you're pretty out of it, I guess, a lot of the time, and so you sleep and you dream and you wake up and it's reality and it was. Yeah, it was super tough, but breaking it up to those little bite-sized pieces was what kind of hacked me through those darkest times.

Claire Fudge:

I can see how, like making those mini day-to-day targets or hour-to-hour targets, are just so important to get you through day-to-day. When did you realize that the paralysis that you had, when did you realize that was incomplete in terms of a spinal injury and that there was a possibility of potentially getting back some sort of function, some sort of movement? So when did that really change for you?

Joey Evans:

We were several weeks in and the one day I could, if I really like, focused, I could make my big toe on my right foot just twitch just a little bit, and it was. It was obviously like, is that me? Because you get a lot of spasms and that kind of stuff, and it would just twitch just a little bit. And then the doctors, they saw it and they and we, they said, look, they needed to fuse my back. So they ended up fusing my back and we came out the operation because it was quite unstable, so they wanted to fuse. It was a bit of a touch and go that one. They weren't. It was should you, shouldn't you, and you don't know a lot in the decisions for you to make, and you're like I almost I know you guys are the docs, you know what I mean. So they fused my back and I came out that operation and then that flicker was gone. And that was pretty scary because now I've got nothing again. And then as the days kicked away, then it came back and then as the days turned into weeks and into months, I started to get a little bit more and then a little bit of movement in my ankle, a little bit of. If I could lie there, I could feel that I could slightly flex my quad on my right leg, so I could feel it tight and it was like I couldn't move the leg at all or anything like that, but I felt like I'm talking to it. Does that make sense? You know, there was something there that next year 2008, was a lot of rehab, a lot of time in the rehab center, lots and lots of physical therapy. I spent a lot of that time in the wheelchair and, slowly but surely, I just got a little bit more, a little bit more, and we slowly started ticking our way along.

Joey Evans:

Obviously, one of the biggest challenges we haven't touched on is that, as you'll know, claire, that when you have a spinal cord injury, you lose all bowel control, you lose all bladder control and you lose your ability to digest food properly, and so that was hard. That was probably even harder than nothing out of walk For me. I'd obviously smashed out all these teeth, so I'm missing half of my teeth. I'm in a wheelchair, I'm wearing nappies, I've got a bag of urine strapped to my leg, and it was incredibly humbling. People would stare at you all the time. It felt almost embarrassing in a way, and on top of that, when you have these accidents because you have no bowel control and you also have no routine, a lot of guys that have had spinal injuries for years they work out a routine so they know when it's going to happen and they make sure they're in a certain place. In the beginning it happens anytime, man, middle of physio sessions, you have an accident and it's just like. I mean, the physio is all used to it, it's that kind of stuff. But man, as like a grown man, that was hard to handle, that was tough.

Joey Evans:

Slowly but surely I just got a little bit more, a little bit more, and then I started to learn to stand with these braces on the back of my legs that held me upright. And then after that, then I started between parallel bars and then I started to do it with some crutches and I also had this kind of cage around the top of my body like a brace that held me upright, because obviously I've lost all core strength and stuff as well. It's not just legs, because my level, I've lost the bottom two stomach muscles and things. And then it just started to get just a little bit better, just a little bit better, just a little bit better. And then sometimes you'd plateau for a bit and you'd be like, no, I need some more. One of the things I needed was hip flexors. I didn't have hip flexors and if I didn't get that I wouldn't be able to walk, and so it was like I need hip flexors, and then one of them would just fire a little bit, and then, as we went along and so just slowly got a little bit more, a little bit more, and then I started walking, taking a couple of steps like super dodgy, my feet dragging and all sorts of things. And it would be one of those where I sometimes get asked well, how long did it take to walk? And I'm like what do you consider walking? You know one step. Can you walk to the bathroom? Can you walk around a shopping mall? Where does it go, you know? So a lot of that time in the beginning was I was in a wheelchair if we went out, but I could not use a wheelchair like between my bed and the bathroom for argument's sake or that kind of stuff. And so it was.

Joey Evans:

You talk about the goals thing. There was a lot of that like little goals, like time, how long it takes you to get dressed. Count how many steps you can do before your legs just start spasming and there's no more power left. And it was all those little milestones of just like little things. That was probably the stuff that kind of kept you going because it was depressing, it was tough, and so I needed to be reminded of how far I came. And my wife, meredith, was really good at that. She'd be like, hey, man, remember a month ago you couldn't do this or you couldn't do that. And look, you're doing it now. And then it's so. I think it was really good to look over your shoulder and go, hey, I've come a long way, I need to be grateful for where I'm at. And then you look ahead and you go, whoa, I've got tons to go. And that, week on week, month on month, and then you know, obviously with my story, became a year on year. I started to make this progress.

Charlie Reading:

And I think it's amazing in that it's very much like when you're in an endurance event itself, isn't it? You know, when you have those dark moments, if you're thinking about, oh my God, I've still got 24 miles to run, or whatever it is you're like, oh, you just totally destroy your head, Whereas if you think one step in front of the other, or just think about the next aid station or the next lamppost or wherever, then you bring it back to the present. So I think that's really interesting. That was what helped you at that time. So at what point in this journey did you start going back to thinking I'm going to do the Dakar rally, and how on earth did you go from setting a goal? What point did you set that goal? How did you set that goal? But then how did you implement it?

Joey Evans:

Okay, cool. I'll start off by saying that I ran some marathons and ultra marathons before I was paralyzed, so I quite enjoyed the running thing as well. So I can relate a lot to that. And it was like I remember when I used to run. It would be like you'd have kilometer markers and it would be like, all right, then you just focus on the next kilometer marker. You're not thinking about, yeah, I'm going to be dead in five kilometers. It was just one more kilometer, one more kilometer. So I can relate to exactly what you're saying on that.

Joey Evans:

In terms of the goal for Dakar, sure man, in that hospital I'd lie there at night on my own in the dark and I'd be like man. Can you imagine if I could come back from this and still raise Dak? Oh man, that would be epic. But it really wasn't. If I'm being honest, I didn't think it was a possibility at that time. It just didn't feel possible. But it sparked that little oh, but if we did, how cool would that be. And so it started in that hospital and then, as we went along, you know, you take that first step and you go, oh, but imagine if you could. And then a little bit by little bits and so it was. The seed was definitely in that hospital right from the get go and then it started to grow and then when I started to learn to walk again, it was like oh, you never know, you never know, maybe, kind of thing.

Joey Evans:

Two and a half years, I would say about after breaking my back, I rode a motorcycle again for the first time and it was just a buddy's bike and I rode just in a circle around a field super slow. They had to start the bike for me, help to lift me on all that sort of stuff. It was pretty sketchy and just out of view of my wife. But yeah, we did a little circle around this field and I remember that feeling of being able to twist that throttle and just move effortlessly, because I couldn't run, I couldn't jump, I couldn't play any of the sports and things I used to do, and just that twisting and moving and it was pretty amazing and that was really a day that I was like man, I wonder if we could do this, man.

Joey Evans:

And then it was three and a half years after breaking my back that I started like riding again and I went and did a race where I actually like completely sucked. It was a format where we had three hours through as many laps of this enduro course as we could. I think the course is probably about eight kilometers long, something like that and I got lapped six times by guys I used to be able to beat, and so that was incredibly humbling, incredibly difficult, and I made it my goal to just finish one lap and three hours ran out, still hadn't finished my one lap. And I used that same kind of strategy I did in the hospital where I was being in these mountains or in these little hills I guess you'd call them we call them kopis here in South Africa, little rocky kopis and I would just pick a rock, like 10 meters ahead, and I'd be like just to that rock and I'd just hack my way to that next rock and then I'd be like pick another one and then I'd just keep hacking my way through.

Joey Evans:

The three hours ran out and I still hadn't finished that one lap. But I kept going and I eventually got to that finish line and obviously I was time-bored when I finished, but I clearly remember riding that bike on the limit, crossing that finish line, just went na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, you know, punching the edge, completely stone lost the guys in the pits thought I was crazy, but it was a little bit of a personal win there. And then it was like I'm going to do this, man, I'm going to chase this Dakar goal.

Claire Fudge:

Awesome. First question is what did your wife think if you're getting back on a motorbike?

Joey Evans:

She was cool with it. To be honest, it was one of those. I get asked a lot about that dynamic between me and Meredith, because a lot of comments I get when I do talks at corporates and stuff was they'll often say, yeah, she should have left you years ago, and those kinds of things, and maybe they're not wrong. But it's one of those where you guys look at the type of stuff you guys do, or a lot of people that you interview do why do you want to do trail runs of over 100 kilometers through the mountains and stuff? Like it's just kind of ridiculous, isn't it? You know, and you think of all these kind of things, what it does for you. You know that it like it helps you with your headspace, man, it gives you something to aim for, it gives you a big juicy goal that you want to just, yeah, sink your teeth into, and it gives you purpose and it gives you all these kind of things. And so part of a marriage is to understand what's important to your spouse and you have to see it through their eyes. And so the way it works is if something's important to Merida, it's important to me, and the same the other way if something's important to me, it's important to her, and so she would see that and she would be like, yeah, she gets it. She gets that. She didn't marry a guy that, just you know, putters around a golf course on a weekend and she didn't marry a guy that, just you know, putters around a golf course on a weekend. And you know, she married a guy who likes to do extreme sports and that kind of stuff and a lot of that sort of stuff makes me tick. I want that adventure, I want that kind of doing something that not everybody wants to do, you know. And she gets that. And she saw the joy and fulfillment I got from doing these kinds of sports and stuff and so she supported me. I must say she a hundred percent supported me with all of these things through the years.

Joey Evans:

And getting back on the bike again, she was there. She would come and watch me race and she would be on that start line. She was on the start line the day I broke my back. She was there with me and she ran across that field when she saw that crash. So it was a pretty, pretty horrendous day that one, but after that she would still come to the races and we'd bring my daughters as well sometimes and they'd be in the pits of the races and that kind of stuff.

Joey Evans:

So it was something that it wasn't. I definitely didn't have to push against the family to do it. I had to find balance. So one of the things is a lot of guys will go riding on a Saturday morning and then they'll come back pretty beat and they'll just fall asleep on the couch, drink a beer and watch the rugby and that kind of stuff. Whereas for me, with four little daughters, the deal was you go riding on a Saturday morning, you get back at lunchtime and then we do family stuff in the afternoons. So that was kind of a deal to make it all work. And so I'd come back, I'm like I'm beat up, I'm full of scratches from thorn trees and had a good ride all morning, and then I'm like all right, get a shower and let's go Family time. You know you make it work. I think you can destroy your family by being too selfish about your sports or your goals or that kind of stuff, but I think you can destroy yourself by totally not doing any of that stuff.

Claire Fudge:

You don't want to be a super selfish dude, but you don't want to be a boring dude that just sits on the couch all day that you've got to find that balance. I think what you've said about one finding the balance but also keeping your passions, and that is such a passion of yours and it seems like that was a massive driving factor to really help your recovery, get you back to where you wanted to be and actually do all these amazing events. You've talked about lots of these like little mini goals to get you to like this big goal. How did you sort of go about making goals to get you to the Dakar? Like, how did that happen? Did you have these kind of bigger goals in your mind to get there, or was it all these kind of smaller goals along the way?

Joey Evans:

No, it was quite good. The Dakar thing really gave me purpose because it was like it's the biggest, gnarliest, most dangerous off-road race in the world. So if you want to aim for something in the off-road racing world, there's nothing bigger. That's the big one. And so to aim that high it's pretty nuts for most guys, and it was for me. Before being paralyzed, it was like, yeah, I really want to do that race one day, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to pull that off.

Joey Evans:

But what's cool about it is you can break that goal up. It's a very easy goal to break up into sections because if you look at it it's cool. You've got to finish the race, so you've got to have all the skills, all the fitness, all that kind of stuff once you're on the race. But prior to that you have to be selected to do the race. You have to qualify, and so there's a list of things you have to do in order to be able to qualify, and part of that is you have to submit a racing CV to the company that owns Dakar the ASO the same guys who own the Tour de France and on that racing CV you had to do one of the full international rallies in the pro class. So you had to finish one of those and they're normally about five, six, seven day races and then under that you had to have done several multiple day races all around the world or wherever you are with that kind of stuff, and then you had to have done a whole bunch of local and international races. So part of all of this for Dakar, for the motorcycles, it's a lot easier to enter Dakar in a car because it's such a high barrier of entry in terms of money and that kind of stuff, and it's also a lot safer for cars. But for bikers, they lose bikers, sometimes more than one in a year, and sometimes they'll go a year where they don't lose a biker, and so bikers are the most at risk. So they're pretty stringent about who they let on that start line, because they've got to make sure these guys don't die in the desert and that kind of stuff.

Joey Evans:

So you have to submit this racing CV and so you break it all down, and so if you break that racing CV down backwards I need to race again. That's number one. So I've got to start that first race, which is what I told you about a moment ago and then after that, getting time-bought at that race, I did others and I started to finish races. And so now I need some multiple day races and we had an event series called the Amagia Zarelli and these were races. They started off as just a single day navigational style race and it ended up being at kind of its highest was a seven day off-road race through the Northern Cape, which is really desolate, and Botswana, which is obviously very raw and wild animals and all sorts of stuff out there. And so then through the years, I started doing all these local races, started finishing races, then I moved up to doing multiple day races and I did three different Amagaza rallies you only got one each year and I started doing that and then after that, then I needed that big international rally. So it was quite an easy ladder with these very clearly defined rungs that I needed to do and I broke that up and then over the years, I just ticked away at that and I did the big international rally in 2016.

Joey Evans:

I think it was about April 2016, where I went to Morocco and I went and raced in the Mazuga rally and that was a six-day race and we raced through the deserts there, part of the Sahara there in Morocco. Just an amazing race, that one and I came back from that race and at that point I had everything I needed for my DAC or CV. But you don't know if they're going to select you. Still, they got a lot of CVs and they select normally about I think it's around about 140 riders from around the world each year. And yeah, in 2016, I submitted my entry and it was about halfway through 2016. And I got the letter to say that I was accepted and I remember opening up that attachment and going whoa, I was so pumped, you know I can't believe it.

Charlie Reading:

And then I was like, oh crap, what have I done? Now I've got to go do this race. It's unbelievable. You overcome this incredible challenge of being told that you're paralyzed for life, and you've overcome that. And then you overcome this huge challenge that is getting to the point where you can qualify to be selected for Dakar. Talk us through that race, because I know you had some highs and lows within that race. Talk us through what the Dakar Rally was like when you finally got there.

Joey Evans:

You know, leading up to the race, there would be like lots of sleepless nights. Can I pull this off? Is this? What have I done? You know, am I just being crazy? Am I going to die out there there? You know there was so much going on in in my head and stuff, a lot of self-doubt, and then I can do this. You know what I mean and that kind of stuff.

Joey Evans:

So there was a lot of back and forth but, yeah, I got on that start line and that's exciting, man. You start off and you're going to the riders briefing and you're seeing all these top guys and you're lining up on the start line with all these top races. It's one of the few sports where you can you're literally racing against the best guys in the world. I mean, if you enjoy racing cars, you can imagine lining up with all the Formula One drivers and you're just on the start line, just Joey from South Africa sitting there with all these guys. That's how it felt. So it was incredibly cool to be there, incredibly intimidating, and then, yeah, off we went and I realized I'd done a lot of racing up until that point, obviously to qualify and things, but suddenly I was like man, I am like out of my league here. And it really hit home at the end of the third day because I was racing for an average of about 16 hours a day and I was sleeping for just four or five hours each night. And at the end of day three I'm destroyed. My hands are blistered, my lips are split, I'm falling asleep on the bike, every muscle in my body is just cramping up and I'm like man, I'm just out of my league and I'm lying like right near the back of the motorcycle class and I'm like I do not belong here. I'm not good enough to be here. I and I'm like I do not belong here. I'm not good enough to be here, I'm not strong enough to be here. I am destroyed. At the end of day three of a 13-day race, you can imagine just like cramping up at five kilometers into a marathon and going like there's just no way. This is just impossible. And it was a really tough realization that there's no ways I'm going to get to the end of this race. And I kind of used that same strategy I did in the hospital where I was like, okay, one more day, and we just focused on that day. And so day four.

Joey Evans:

I got up and I raced on day four, and day four of the 2017 Dakar Rally actually turned out to be one of the most brutal days in Dakar history. We had to cross a dune field of I think it was just over a hundred kilometers and it was at high altitude just over 4,000 meters in Bolivia, and the dunes are really soft and the bikes kept sinking down into the dunes and the bikes lack power at altitude and things. So it was like it was just carnage. Man, there was just bikes everywhere. There was a bike on fire In that one section.

Joey Evans:

Out of like 140 odd guys who started the race, 18 riders all went out just in that one section alone. It was horrendous, you know, but I just kept hacking my way through, hacking my way. You get a little clump of grass and the sand blows up against this kind of clump of grass and then the other sand blows up against that clump. You just kind of get these little mounds and guys were trying to ride and the sand was so soft. Guys were just struggling and it also all being churned up with cars and trucks, because you were right at the back of the field and you could hear guys just revving bikes and just struggling and struggling, and two of my teammates went out in that section on the Dutch team that I was on, and what I did, though, is I would pick one of those little mounds and I'd say right to that mound there, and I would just give it flat out to do what I could, and get onto that mound, and I'd stop with my front wheel just over the top of the mound so I'm just slightly facing downhill and I'd stop, and I'd switch the bike off and give it sort of 20 seconds, 30 seconds, just to cool a little bit, and I'd look for the next mound and I'd go right just to the end. I'd be get on the next mound, stop, and I just did it like that, and it was that patience and that like same kind of 10 meters, 10 meters, 10 meters, and I'd always stop at a place that I could pull off from. A lot of riders will fight it and get stuck, and then they start from a stuck position, and then they go again and get to another stuck position, and then they start from a stuck position, and it just burns calories and it just cooks your motor and your clutch and everything, and I did this stop on a mound, stop on a mound, stop on a mound and I just kept just ticking and eventually I got through some of the gnarliest sections there and I got through that day four and I finished that day four and then on day five we crossed over the Andes Mountains and that was.

Joey Evans:

We had these switchback dirt tracks that were on their way through the mountains and we went over 5,000 meters in altitude. So it was super, super high and it was raining a lot. It rained for like eight days of that race. By the way, it was just insane the amount of rain. Oh, you guys are from England. You're like only eight out of 13. That's nothing, but it just rained and it was so wet and then as you got higher up in altitude it was hailing and then at the tops of these mountains it was snowing and it was just it was ridiculous. But all those tracks were just complete slosh and you got these switchback tracks winding the way through the mountains and on the switchbacks it's just hundreds of meters down to the valleys below. So it's super sketchy, man, you overshoot a corner, you do the Wiley Coyote thing in midair and then falling down. It was just crazy and three of us South Africans on that race the previous day one of my teammates on the Dutch team was a South African guy and it was Bass Trucks we were with, and that was Walter de Blanche.

Joey Evans:

He burnt out his motor, he was out the race. And then on that fifth day in the mountains I came across the other South African guy, which was David Thomas, and he'd had a big crash and I stayed with him. I found him lying in the mud there and I stayed with him and they landed the medical helicopter in those mountains and helped to carry him and put him in the helicopter and things and he was then medevaced out the race and it turned out he'd broken his leg in eight places so he was out. So we lost a few riders that next day again and I just then had to get back on the bike and finish that day. And I finished day five and then day six, day seven, and there was like, oh, there's so many things that happen each day. I couldn't tell you everything every day, but I finished, I think, two days out of that entire race in the light. So I was finishing at night every night. So you started four o'clock in the morning and I'm finishing off the dock and it got dark at about 8 pm there.

Joey Evans:

So it was just these long days, just day after day, and it was just like the best way that I could do. It is, I would just almost like a robot. That alarm would go off, I'd sit up and I'd get out. We slept on the back of a truck and I'd get up straight away. None of this like, okay, stretch, let me think about nothing. Just get up and you go sit and then you eat. And you got to eat and you're eating at like three o'clock in the morning. You're eating like a bowl of pasta and you're barely awake and you're literally just shoving it down your throat and you're like you're trying to fight the gag reaction because you just got to get the calories in you every day and then get back on that bike and, yeah, just hacked my way through. And there were so many different things. Don't have time for the stories today, but out of 13 days, I got all the way to day 12. And that day 12 is the day that I'll remember the rest of my life.

Joey Evans:

And what happens at Dakar is you start in the order that you finished the day before. So I started stone last because I'd finished day 11 stone last. And so I'm right at the back and after they send all the bikes, from four in the morning until all the bikers are gone, they have a little 30 second gap between all the riders, and then, once all the riders are gone, they wait half an hour or so and then they send the cars and then they send the trucks. But now, like we discussed earlier, the cars and trucks are a lot faster than a lot of the bikers and so they'll move through that bike field and that is one of the most dangerous situations.

Joey Evans:

And it was mid-morning and I entered into a semi-arid desert and there was a twin track winding its way through. But over the years those tracks had got like deeper and deeper, so it was like two parallel ruts and these ruts were filled with fish, which is like really fine dirt, it's like talcum powder, and so it's hard to see these ruts. And so as bikers we're racing along at maybe 50 or 60 kilometers an hour, trying to stay in these ruts, because you can't ride outside the tracks, because there's some vegetation and that center island is too steep to ride on, so you just prick a rut and you're trying to stay in these ruts. But the cars and trucks, their four wheels, will naturally track into these ruts, so these guys are coming through at like double our speed. And so I'm racing along in this left hand right and my alarm goes off on my bike, which tells me there's a car behind me that wants to overtake.

Joey Evans:

Now. Normally they buzz you about 200 meters back, so so they give you plenty chance to, like you know, pull off the track, find a place, because you can't just pull off straight away. There's vegetation and speeds and all that sort of stuff. So generally as a biker, you'd slow down, look for a place, pull pull off and stop and then about 10 seconds later, whatever this car comes flying past you. But my alarm goes off.

Joey Evans:

I turn around, he's 20 meters back, he's doing double my speed and I've literally got about two seconds to get out of this guy's way and I just swing my bars over just to try to swerve off into the vegetation to get out of his way. But right where I am, that rut was deep. It was as deep as the axle on my front wheel. And I'm in this rut and I swing these bars over and that front wheel just doesn't climb up the rut and I've already committed my weight and this bike's going down and I hit the ground and as the bike goes into the ground I separate off the bike and the car misses me by centimeters. And then I just hear crunch and this guy crashes right into my bike and completely rides right over my motorcycle.

Charlie Reading:

And so is that the end of the race, or what happens next?

Joey Evans:

The guy stopped about 30 meters away and the navigator puts one foot out the car and gives me a thumbs up and I'm like I'm on my knees next to this bike and I'm like, no, you know, come back here Along with some other words. He just got back in that car and they just drove off. They just left me there on the floor with my bike, still in the middle of the track, just destroyed, parts lying everywhere, and I just dragged that bike out of the track and picked up a few of the parts that were all lying around and stuff and got out of the way because obviously there's more cars and trucks coming through. And I couldn't believe it. This bike was completely destroyed. The whole exhaust had been completely flattened and all bent up into the back wheel. The whole navigation tower was just all mangled and bent back into the handlebars of the bike. The handlebars were all bent, all the suspensions bent up. So you had what we call the triple clamps at the front of the bike that holds the front suspension. They're all bent. The radiator's damaged. The seat is torn out of the mounting. There's three petrol tanks on the bike. Two of the petrol tanks completely destroyed. All the fuels run out. The whole frame of the bike is bent and I couldn't believe it.

Joey Evans:

It had taken me 10 years, since I'd been paralyzed, to get to the start of that race and it's the second last day and I'm out of this race. And it was dark, it was tough and I thought about Meredith and I knew she'd be worried because she's tracking me on the Dacor app. She'll see I'm stone lost and not moving and I know every minute that goes past she's getting more and more worried and I carry a satellite phone when I do these races. And so I pulled out the sat phone and I called her up and I told her what happened and and she just cried and we stood there together and just couldn't believe how unfair this felt. It just felt just so incredibly unfair. It was like this is not right, you know, not on any level. And I hung up the phone and I looked at that bike and I looked at the road book on the bike and I still had 660 kilometers to race that day and there's nothing I can do to get a bike like that 660 kilometers. But rally racing is very different to any other kind of racing and one of the things that makes it so different is that there's no cutoff time that day. The only rule is you have to be on the start line at the next point by your start time the next morning.

Joey Evans:

And I decided when I started that race that I would never quit that race. The only way I'd go out the race is I'd be time bought. So I would just fight until there was just no time left, and so I decided that's what I'm going to do. I'm only going to be out of this race at four o'clock tomorrow morning. That's the only way I go out.

Joey Evans:

I started stripping the bike and I had to strip the whole exhaust off the bike just to get the back wheel to turn, because it was all bent up into it. I isolated the fuel tanks that were damaged. I had to strip some of the navigation equipment off the front of the bikes just to get the bars to be able to turn and, yeah, it was just ram the seat back in, repaired the air filter as best I could and I got that bike working. I'd also ripped off the right foot peg with all the frame mountings and everything, so I didn't have anywhere to put my right foot either on this bent bike with bent bars and no exhaust put my right foot either on this bent bike with bent bars and no exhaust and I just started like limping along but I couldn't ride in that track anymore because there was cars and trucks coming through and I couldn't ride in a rut because the wheels didn't line up. The frame was so bent you see those scooters in the third world countries where the wheels aren't even close to in front of each other and I just limped along through this like semi-arid desert and the time's just going, man, there's no ways it's going to take me like two weeks to cover that distance that I've got to do in the next 16 hours or whatever. It was just wasting my time, just ridiculous. And I just kept ticking away thinking back to the last 10 years and all the sacrifice, all the money, and this race is over, but I'm not quitting, I'm only going out and being time-bored.

Joey Evans:

And then the most incredible thing happened and in the middle of this semi-arid desert I found a bike and it was a bike of a rider who'd crashed and it turned out he'd actually broken both his arms and he'd been medevaced out the race. And so that bike stays there until the sweeper truck at the back of the race comes along and collects this bike and the rules of Dakar is, I can't ride that bike but I can use parts from that bike. And so I started stripping that bike and there were these three Argentinian guys just on old dirt bikes, in the middle of nowhere, just spectators. Hadn't seen anyone for ages. Just these three dudes middle of nowhere on these spectators. I hadn't seen anyone for ages, just these three dudes middle of nowhere on these I don't know 1990 off-road bikes kind of thing.

Joey Evans:

And these guys helped me and we stripped that whole bike.

Joey Evans:

We stripped all the exhaust off the bike, we stripped the whole side of the frame, we siphoned all the fuel out of the bike.

Joey Evans:

I still needed like the radiator, the handlebars, so much more stuff. But I'd lost so much time fixing the bike first time, so much time the second time limping along as well. At this point I was four hours behind the guy who was second last and I just had to get going and so off I went and I rode the rest of that day alone for literally hundreds of kilometers through South America and then it got dark and that night I just kept going road through forests and dune fields and all sorts of stuff. Crossing rivers in South America at night on your own is pretty scary, by the way, and just kept taking my way along midnight one o'clock in the morning, two o'clock in the morning I was still riding, and at quarter past two in the morning I got to that second last bivouac and, long story short, I slept for one hour and then I rode another 850 kilometers the last day and finished the Dakar really.

Claire Fudge:

I was just trying to think from a cycling perspective. Imagine if we were doing a race and we stripped someone's bike down and just made our own and carried on.

Joey Evans:

I've seen guys ride spectators bikes, so they've stolen whole bikes. I know you guys are all so sketchy.

Charlie Reading:

I'm just thinking I'd have liked to have stolen some of Patrick Langer's bike at the Ironman in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago.

Claire Fudge:

There you go, this story is just captivating To listen to you telling it. It's just amazing. Have you always had this real? Nothing is going to stop me, I'm always going to finish. Or do you think actually, the accident that you had and what you had to go through from a rehabilitation perspective, do you think that really changed your mindset?

Joey Evans:

100%. Nobody's born resilient. Resilience isn't something you get born with, it's not something that's genetic, it's something that you earn. It's the only way to get it. And I remember those marathons and ultra marathons in my early twenties and I remember thinking, man, that's, yeah, that's pretty hardcore. You know, I used to think that was cool. You know, I mean I still think it's cool, don't get me wrong.

Joey Evans:

But I was like when I was in that hospital and I was paralyzed and you're trying to, you're trying to stay positive in that environment. You realize that all these kind of sports that we do, even if it's, you know, dakar or whatever, you know it's easy, man, that's easy compared to being paralyzed. And obviously spinal cord injuries is something I've experienced. But people out there would have experienced many different physical challenges. I mean, there's all sorts of illnesses and diseases and conditions people have that just devastate your life physically.

Joey Evans:

And when you're in that environment and you have to stay positive and you have to work hard and you're in a place where you feel like your life is destroyed, that is tough. Those are the tough guys, not the guys getting the medals on the boxes. Man, that's the guy in a rehab center that's getting up every day and he's doing that physio and stuff. Those are the tough guys. And so for me, being in that hospital, that was probably the time in my life that I would say I developed the most resilience. And so when you push through that kind of stuff, suddenly this is just a race man. You know you can do this. This isn't. It almost doesn't feel like it's even real life, because you know what they say. You've got a thousand problems until you've got a health problem and then you've got one problem. I think it was earned through those years at Resilience.

Charlie Reading:

And also so I always think. It reminds me of a saying that I can't remember where I got from, but when I'm struggling in a dark place, in an endurance event, I always think I get to do this, I've chosen to do this. The guys that you're talking about, they don't choose to do that. They're dealing with it and you were dealing with it when you were in that dark place, whereas when we're in an endurance event, we are choosing to be a part of it.

Joey Evans:

Yeah, and also, like I mean even Dakar, which is obviously one of the longest endurance races I would think in the world of when you're talking 13 days, it's nothing compared to some guy who's living with, like a cancer that debilitates him, or someone dealing with muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy or these kinds of things you know, or a spinal cord injury. I mean it's. You know, you're in a marathon, it's all going to be over in a few hours, buddy, this guy has to suck it up every day, again and again, the same thing for days and weeks and months and years, and he's still got to be positive and he's still got to get going, even though he's struggling. And it's like those are the tough dudes, man.

Charlie Reading:

Looking back, obviously, since you had the accident and you broke your back, you've had some incredible highs, but also some incredible lows. Highs, but also some incredible lows. If you could go back and change that and have the choice not to go through that and therefore sacrifice the highs and lows that come with it, since, would you choose to amend it or would you choose to take it as?

Joey Evans:

it was dealt. That's always a tough one when people ask that because the way it's worked out has been pretty incredible. But I still deal with a lot of complications from my spinal cord injury. So to give you an idea, physically I still can't run, I can't jump, I can't feel hot or cold or pain sensation below my chest. My legs still spasm when I get tired or when my adrenaline goes. I can't sweat below my chest, so it's difficult to regulate my body temperature. I still have to take medication every day to help me to digest food and, to be perfectly frank, I still have to self-catheter five or six times every day and have been doing that for 17 years now. I deal with a lot of physical complications still every day and I will deal with those complications for the rest of my life and a lot of those complications will also impact probably how old I'll live to and that kind of stuff as well. So it's a heavy price that I haven't paid yet and I'm still paying dues on that price and, to be honest, if I could go back, of course I wouldn't want to have that crash that day.

Joey Evans:

I'd love to still race the Dakar, I'd love to still done all these rides. But if I could have done it all without that crash, that would be pretty amazing. You know to kind of have my my able body back, if that makes sense. But I have had such richness from riding motorcycles, you know. I've ridden now in like over 40 countries throughout the world. I've wild camped in Namibia and ridden in the salt flats in Bolivia and passed the pyramids in Egypt and the Rift Valley in Kenya and Australia and New Zealand and Lebanon and all these kind of cool places, you know. And so it's like the richness and value it's brought to my life has been incredible. I love motorcycles, I love adventure, I love racing, but I would say I enjoy adventure more than racing. When I'm racing I'm there for the adventure, if that makes sense. I don't care about positions and that kind of stuff.

Joey Evans:

If you said to me if you could go back, would you ride motorcycles? Hell yeah, I'd ride motorcycles and I'd take those risks. If I could have had all the good without the accident, hell yeah, I'll take that too, man. But it's tough because the accident has caused a lot of pain but it's also opened a lot of opportunities. But it would be great to have a body that works well again. I think all of us. If you look back to when we were in our 20s and be like I'd like that body again, that'd be great. So yeah, there's definitely a part of me that wants that. So if I could have all the good without the bad, I'd take that. But yeah, it's hard and it's still going to be hard.

Charlie Reading:

You've written a bestselling book which tells this story, but we ask every guest for books that have inspired them on their journey. Are there any books that you find yourself recommending or books that helped you in those darker times?

Joey Evans:

I love comeback stories. I love those kind of things, you know, ones where guys just kind of push through. I read one recently which was Endurance I think it was called the one with I think I've got it here, I can look it up quick yeah, by Alfred Lansing. So it's the whole Shackleton thing when they were down by the South Pole and stuff. And I just love those ones where you just kind of like couple more days, do whatever it takes to just keep yourself in the game a little bit longer, just to stay in the race, yeah, and so that was one I really enjoyed. I really enjoy like the stoicism type of books, you know, like the Ron holiday ones and those kinds of things. I read a few of those. I really enjoy those. I like comeback stories, man. I like it when bad things happen and some dude just bites down hard. In south africa we call it fuss bait, which means to bite hard, and so it's just you. It's that it's fuss bait.

Charlie Reading:

Ones where guys are counted out but they just hang in there and they end up triumphing over the challenges and actually you're not the first person to recommend endurance, but I I haven't read it yet, so that's, that is definitely a push towards me, uh, getting up to the top of the reading list, because it does sound fantastic I listen.

Joey Evans:

I do audiobooks, I'm an audiobook guy. I listened to that one riding my mountain bike and I was in like a game reserve and I was just riding along listening to this and it was. It was cool, man. It just got my mind going and stuff, and I think it was so much so I actually came across. I was on this little climb and I was on my own. It was a weekday afternoon and I started going up this climb and I'm like listening to this book and I'm I'm looking down. You know like when you're climbing on a bike and you're looking down like a meter in front of your front wheel, and I just heard this noise, that kind of thing, and I looked up and there was three rhinos just a few meters away from me under a tree, and I flipped that bark around and I just went straight down that hill and my heart was going and my legs were spasming. I had a bit of a close call there. So, yeah, so I had a bit of a memory with that one.

Charlie Reading:

Oh, that sounds awesome. That sounds right on my street. There's the. I still would love to do the lay while marathon, which obviously is the marathon through a game reserve, for similar reasons. It just would be amazing. Yeah, it definitely would be a good motivation, wouldn't it? And one of the other traditions we have on the podcast is we get the last guest to ask the next guest a question without knowing who that's going to be. Now you actually get two questions, because our last guest was triathlon couple non-stanford and aaron royal, so I think claire has got non and a Aaron's questions for you.

Claire Fudge:

Number one what will be the next technology to move your sport forward, and will AI ever replace a coach?

Joey Evans:

Some of the things that we use on the motorcycle is we've always had what we call a paper roadbook, and so it's like this massive scroll and it gives you an instructions. So you have a block with instructions, another block with instructions and it's got like a little picture that shows you where to go and it's got like a kilometer reading and then it's got some warning signs, which is all in the French symbols that you have to like, learn off by heart to know what it means and stuff. So sometimes it'll mean like a rut or it's sandy, or the bridge is collapsed or it's a danger, or that kind of stuff. Keep left, keep right over this or whatever. So it's kind of warnings and stuff and that's always been on a paper scroll and we have a little button on the side of the bike that has a little motor that goes. This is going to move this little scroll and that's part of the whole thing is the navigation of it. Obviously, since GPSs were invented, they kept the scroll tradition and so it's like a bit of orienteering as well, with racing is what Dakar is, and one of the technologies that has come through in. This year is the first year that it's compulsory for all the bikers to use. It is now those are digital, so it's the same system, but now it's a digital screen as opposed to a paper roadbook, so it's obviously it's better for the environments and things, but it is also it feels like you're taking away a little bit of the essence, because now it's all gets a bit smaller on the front of the bike and that kind of stuff, so the bikes get a bit lighter. But one of the beauties of Dakar is that it's raw. People can die and people get injured and you can get lost in the desert and you can end up sleeping out in the middle of some arid place on your own in the middle of the night. That's part of it, so you don't want it to get too refined, but it is nice to have tracking on the bike, to know there's someone coming for you at some points and that kind of stuff, not like the old days where guys would get lost for weeks in the Sahara. But yeah, so one of the things is that digital road books is a new thing now for Dakar. So that'll be it, and another one which is super cool I actually got one for this next race. I'm doing now is you have air vests, and so what they are is they are like you now wear your protection, which is like a jacket you put on, but it's actually got built-in airbags, it's got a computer system inside of it that can tell when you crash and it explodes in just a couple milliseconds, and so it's making it safer for the riders, because, yeah, man, I want to do all this cool stuff, but I still want to come home to meredith and my daughters. So that's a technology that is definitely making it better, just making it safer for riders, because there's no glory in crashing. The fun is doing the races and coming back afterwards. The crashing is. That's a part of it. That is not the fun part. So, yeah, airvests and digital road books that's how things are moving forward with off-road racing In terms of AI and the coach.

Joey Evans:

Ai is a cool thing, man, and there's going to be so many things, and we're always very hesitant to say what will happen in the future, because no one could have guessed where we are now just a few years ago. But I don't think so. I think, coaches, they look in your eyes. They can see something in your eyes. They can see what's happening in your headspace. I think computers can draw knowledge. They have but that intuition of seeing how hollow someone's eyes are when they're working out at a certain amount. You can look in someone's eyes and you can see that they're out of calories and they're dehydrated and they're in a messed up state all stuff you can measure. But you can also see there's something in their eyes that says this dude's not about to quit. I don't know how you'd pick that up with AI, so I think, nah, I'm going to go with no.

Charlie Reading:

Good answer. I think there's a lot of things that AI will do, but that is essentially. It's that emotional intelligence piece that certainly will be the last thing to go, won't it? One final question for you, because I have a feeling there is going to be something on the horizon, and I think I don't think it's too far away. You've obviously done this incredible race. You've done many races since, but what's next?

Joey Evans:

After I raced Dakar in South America, I did the Africa Eco Race, which was from Monaco to Dakar, so it was the original sort of North African Dakar route. We raced 13 days all through Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, all the way to Senegal. That was a super cool race. Lots of other stories of that race as well, including I hit a camel in Mauritania, so there's a whole other story about that. Medevaced out but still finished the race with a broken wrist and everything. So there's a whole nother story there.

Joey Evans:

You'll have to do one on that one day. The next one is in a week and two days from now. I'm actually here in Las Vegas right now collecting a motorcycle and I'm heading down to Mexico to go and race the Baja 1000. And I'm racing in the Ironman class. Most guys do it in teams, so one bike does the whole race, but you have five or six riders, so I'm doing it solo the whole thousand miles, solo in the Ironman class. And it's the longest nonstop off-road race in the world 36 hour cutoff. So it starts and go. We'll see how that goes. I could do with a few more months to prepare. It's been a tough year, man. I had a rotator cuff surgery in April, just a niggly injury that's been going on for a few years and just finally had to get it sorted. And then I cracked my wrist about 10 weeks ago and then I had tick bite fever.

Charlie Reading:

But yeah, we'll be on the start line and we're going to face it with resilience and do the best we can and we'll see where it ends up it sounds like we do need another episode at some point in the future where we find out about how this particular race goes and perhaps some more of the story between dakar and today. But it's been absolutely brilliant really. It really inspiring for those people that want to find out more, want to buy the book, want to maybe book you as a speaker. Where's the best place to find you?

Joey Evans:

and follow you. The book is called From Para to Dacor and it's available on Audible as well as in ebook and print format. You can get it on Amazon and that kind of stuff. My website is joievanscoza. I speak all over the world. I've spoken in the uk a few times and europe and the states and that kind of stuff. So anywhere there's a conference, I'm quite happy to travel and I always try to squeeze in a little bike ride wherever I travel as well. But yeah, you can get hold of me through the website there. That's probably the easiest. It's got my cell number in on the website and my personal email address and all that sort of stuff as well, so I'm a really easy guy to get hold of. Yeah, drop me a mail and I'd love to share some stories.

Charlie Reading:

Joey, it's been absolutely fantastic. I look forward to following your Baja 1000. I wish you the best of luck with that. Congratulations on everything you've done so far. It's really a brilliant, inspiring story and thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Brilliant. Brilliant, inspiring story. And thank you so much for coming on to the podcast, brilliant, and thank you so much for the opportunity, guys.

Claire Fudge:

I super appreciate it, thank you. So what did you make of the incredible interview with Joey Number one? He's got so much energy and storytelling is amazing, isn't it? But great also to have on the Business of Endurance podcast someone who's slightly different in terms of what they do from a motorcycle perspective. I am not a motorcyclist, so to hear those stories were amazing and, interestingly, to find out also that he did have a background doing some running and some ultra running. So I thought that's interesting in terms of mindset and story. Have you ridden motorcycles in the past?

Charlie Reading:

Yeah, I got a motorbike when I was seven and I kept riding motorbikes until, I think, until I was about 14. So I used to ride motorbikes around the farm a lot, because you didn't have to muck them out and they didn't need feeding when you didn't want to use them. So I can really relate to a lot of that, and I also can really relate to how exhausting that is. You think, oh, riding a motorbike isn't as tiring as pedaling a bike because you're not doing the work. Actually, when you're bouncing around through really rough terrain it is exhausting, but to be doing it for the best part of 18 hours is really exhausting. He didn't mention it actually on this episode, but he has to put a rubber band to hold the throttle in place. It's like putting a brick on the accelerator of a car or cruise control, otherwise it's too tiring to hold the throttle in place. It's like putting a brick on the accelerator of a car or cruise control, otherwise it's too tiring to hold the accelerator for that long, which seems dangerous.

Charlie Reading:

I thought it was brilliant. You're absolutely right. He's a fantastic storyteller. What I really loved was how he broke down those challenging goals, whether it was recovering from his horrible crash, whether it was getting to the Dakar rally. It was like what can I do now? Even in the Dakar rally, when he was in that penultimate day, it's like, well, okay, I don't think I'm going to be able to finish, but I'm going to keep limping on for now. That's the only thing I can do now and we'll work it out from there. So I thought that was really good. What were your takeaways from it?

Claire Fudge:

I think, definitely like you, the kind of micro goal setting, and it's almost like he does it without thinking. It's really that compounding effect, isn't it? Like these tiny things have got him to where he is. Another thing that stood out for me is he brought his wife into that as well, didn't he? In terms of you know, his passion has always been to be on a motorcycle. That's what he loves. He loves adventure.

Claire Fudge:

Even after that horrendous crash, that was still where his fire is and to go back to it even though he still got from his spinal cord injury. He still has ongoing difficulties from that, but that's where he loves to be, and I just thought that was really great the way he described actually having this support team around you, of which includes his wife, his children, his family. It's just so important when you're doing sport, when you're doing things you love, and I guess it's that teamwork important when you're doing sport, when you're doing things you love, and I guess it's that teamwork, isn't it, whether it's your family or not, about working together and enjoying each other's passions through them? So I thought that was really lovely for him to talk about that.

Charlie Reading:

I agree I was really loving and I think he sort of said it in the sense of you're in a marriage and family trying to make everyone the best that they can be. It's supporting them on on their individual journey. So I thought that was really good. I also in terms of the micro goals thing, I nearly laughed when he said it's like trying to run a marathon and cramping up after 5K. I was like, yeah, I can relate to that.

Charlie Reading:

I can relate. Two miles into the marathon in Kona and I'm totally cooked. I could relate to that.

Charlie Reading:

I think that's normal two miles into the Kona marathon, I can tell you I was reassured when some pros said they were blowing up at the same point, heading out on a Lee drive and it is about bringing it back to. Well, okay, what can I do now? Or I can keep plodding along, or, if I can't plod along, I'll walk for a bit and then I'll, right next aid station, think about that and get to there and then keep breaking it down into smaller chunks. I'm reading a book at the moment. I've only just started it, but it threw out a term which I thought was great, which was just take the next step. As long as you keep taking the next step, you'll eventually get there, and that's ultimately what you're breaking goals, bigger goals, down into, isn't it? It takes real resilience to go back into that sport when you've had such a difficult time.

Claire Fudge:

Mentally, that must be challenging. I think that ties into his passion and his resilience, though like it's not going to stop me. That's actually what I love doing and although it's, you know, being part of my journey, that accident I'm going back to that place. So I think that also says to me this real resilience and adventure and I really got, from the way he was speaking today, that adventure in him. You could hear him talking about how fired up he was by adventure. You made a joke at the beginning saying maybe it's not on my list to do. By the end of that, I want to go and do it. Yeah, I've never ridden a motorcycle.

Charlie Reading:

I mean it would be amazing when he described going up through the andes, the views and the experience you'd get going that far without having to pedal sounds appealing as well. But I know what it's like to ride a motorbike through muddy, rutted fields. I can empathize with him being stuck in a rut when a car is traveling at double his speed from you know about to take him out, so I think I might give the Dakar a miss. There are increasingly gravel-based Ironman or triathlon events. I think Jan Frodeno is promoting one for these gravel-based triathlons at the moment and I think that they're going to. I can see them taking off. So like proper wild swimming, some really off-road bike and then some trail running in there. It comes back to what we talked about with Heather Jackson, isn't it? I think I can see that becoming a big thing. So another inspiring conversation. Hopefully all the listeners got lots out of that For everyone listening at home. Keep on training If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast.

Charlie Reading:

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