Cape Town to Cairo: A man, his two legs, a bicycle and a world record attempt!

What drives someone to abandon a stable career in business and finance to become an extreme adventurer? Get ready to hear from Fritz, a modern-day explorer who left the corporate world to chase his dreams across the African continent. We'll take you on a journey through his most embarrassing moment—an unfortunate run-in with a camel thorn—and hear his thoughts on reshaping identity beyond professional labels. From cycling across Southern and Eastern Africa to a spontaneous Ironman in Rwanda, to his ultimate goal of running from Cape Town to Cairo, Fritz's story is a testament to the power of relentless pursuit and brotherly support.

We'll also tackle the gritty realities of Fritz's mission, where he partners with Vivocon Agua, a German NGO, to bring clean water and hygiene education to Africa. The innovative approaches, such as gamification and art, used to teach children are as fascinating as the logistical challenges they face. Fritz shares the complexities of managing day-to-day operations and striving to break a world record by running without a support car, all while keeping public engagement high and effectively communicating the mission's impact.

Finally, prepare to be inspired by the mental and physical demands of endurance sports. Drawing from Fritz's experience, we explore the critical role of mental toughness and adaptability in challenging environments, such as Ethiopia's unpredictable terrain and weather. With his insights on biomechanics, strength training, and nutrition, Fritz offers valuable lessons for anyone looking to push their limits. As we reflect on his journey, we look ahead to the future, considering the life-changing impacts and new opportunities on the horizon. Join us for an episode that promises to inspire and awe, showcasing the extraordinary lengths one can go to fulfill their dreams.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Where are you now?

Speaker 2: 0:01

I'm in Tanzania, in Iringa, halfway through the country.

Speaker 1: 0:05

Thank you very much for joining me. I'm very excited about this. I always start these interviews with what is the most embarrassing thing that's happened to you. But I imagine you've got quite a lot. So what is the most embarrassing thing that's happened during this trip?

Speaker 2: 0:18

Probably the most embarrassing was when I had a camel thorn in my Achilles tendon and it was super. It was super painful, but it's also. You run an ultra marathon every day, you do so much stuff and then you step on that stupid twig and suddenly you have a bullshit camel thorn in your Achilles and you can't run properly for two, three weeks. What are the chances? I don't know it was so unnecessary. Two, three weeks. What are the chances? I don't know it was so unnecessary. Ironically, we had a first attempt last year in october. I was not able to run anymore on day 23, so I got injured on day 22 and again on day 22 I would step in that camel thorn and it was the exact same day. On the second attempt. What are the chances of?

Speaker 2: 1:02

happening again luckily yeah, it all got well, that sounds terrifying.

Speaker 1: 1:08

And and tell me something.

Speaker 2: 1:09

I ask people to describe themselves, so tell me who is fritz I think a lot of people define themselves with what they're doing or sort of their jobs or whatever, and I've always struggled with that. I think if you want to know who's fritz, then let's have a conversation and talk and you probably get to know me. I studied business at some point. I used to work as an investor. I had my own little business for about a year and then I just turned everything upside down and started cycling in Southern and eastern africa for 10 months. I came back from that and then it escalated into me now running across africa, and each time somebody would be oh, he's the business guy, he's the finance guy, he's the entrepreneur, he's the whatever, the adventurer.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Now maybe some people see me as an ultra runner or extreme athlete. I I'm still the same guy. Sometimes I just see myself as a kid playing around, just playing life, and then people from the outside view it as something very seriously. I definitely have a problem with probably taking things to extremes. Before I worked a lot and then I needed a break or felt I wasn't chasing my own dreams, but I was working a lot to chase other people's dreams. So I decided, ok, let me take a break. But I didn't go to the beach. I did nothing. But then I saw the next big adventure and now.

Speaker 2: 2:35

I'm doing this thing, which obviously is extreme as well, to chase a world record running from Cape Town to Cairo. Maybe that's a bit of a red line that goes through all the things that I do. Tell me from the beginning. So, as I said before, at some point I worked a lot. I'm from Germany, so I had a small business there with two friends. Whenever you start a business, you have to hustle a lot and work a lot and you invest in a lot, and I realized I don't care about the business, I care about my friends, and my friends care about the business. That's why I work, but it's not my own dream.

Speaker 2: 3:09

I didn't do it for the money. I didn't do it for the status, if at all. It was a bit of a challenge to see can I do it. And that was then at the point where I was okay, cool guys, I think I need a break from this. And I dropped and I decided to sit on a bicycle and just drive around. For some reason I happened to start in Cape Town because I had some flights that I had booked at some point but I couldn't cancel. It was intended to use them to come over for a two weeks trip in South Africa and I was like, okay, cool, let me push the flights a bit and take my bike down and start cycling from Cape Town and see where it takes me. And on that bike trip I was in northern Kenya where I got an email.

Speaker 2: 3:52

I had once done an Ironman actually and I got an email from Ironman that says this year there's the first Ironman in Rwanda and I was maybe I could cycle there. I I was bike touring, I didn't have any equipment with me. So I said, hey guys, I don't have a big budget, can I come and participate in the race as a fundraiser just with the stuff I have? And they said, yeah, sure, come on over. So I cycled 2000 kilometers down to Rwanda, swam in my boxer shorts, cycled on my steel frame bike in flip-flops and then, ran in.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Luckily I didn't have to run in my hiking boots. Someone gave me his pair of trainers right before the start. They were three sizes too large and that was a really cool experience, because especially triathlon is a very people are very maxed out on marginal gains and doing it perfectly and squeezing. I just did it the complete other way around. I was just.

Speaker 2: 4:49

Let me show you you can do it without a perfect arrow setup on the bike and whatever, and everybody enjoyed that, I enjoyed myself and I could do a bit of fundraising around that and at that event, I had henry, who ran the coastline of South Africa in 2021 probably and he said yeah, actually my next project I want to run Cape to Cairo or Cairo Cape Town.

Speaker 2: 5:14

If you want somebody to join, let me know. And from then on I was still sitting on my bicycle and I just couldn't let go of that idea, went back to Germany and I was like I can't just go back to a normal office job, let me see how I make this work. Unfortunately, henry didn't manage to join. But now here I am, that's two years later. I got my brother to come with me and support me on the bicycle. We don't have a support car, and that's how it all started.

Speaker 1: 5:44

That's incredible, and tell me how you're funding it. How does that kind of working.

Speaker 2: 5:49

The funding is actually a tough one because to begin with I think I came back to europe and I said you know what can I do? And what do I want to achieve? How do I get there? And I thought, okay, I've now. I've cycled and I had amazing experiences with people. Obviously, I've seen incredible nature as well, but the people I met, everybody was super supportive. There was so much altruism and love out there and you come back to Europe and people are yeah, but that must be flipping dangerous. And what were the?

Speaker 2: 6:28

bad things that happen and were you not afraid, or whatever? You walk through a busy town, everybody is super stressed, everybody's on their way to work, super serious faces. That's more scary than any African village you'll ever see. Also, our motto is people are great. That's the story that I wanted to tell. If I just sit on a bike and drive around, probably no one's going to care. If I run a world record from Cape Town to Cairo, people are probably going to pay attention and I can use that attention to show them what life is and how people start supporting each other instead of taking advantage of another, especially here in africa, but also everywhere else in the world.

Speaker 2: 7:12

That being said, the media image is a very different one 85 percent of the news are negative, and people love their stereotypes to be confirmed, so whenever you go for the drama and you tell people what's going wrong and how you whatever get kidnapped or stuff like that obviously sells way better. So with the kind of story we're trying to tell. It's not very easy to get funding to begin with yeah, I don't necessarily want to work with big companies and do greenwashing for them, but rather with underdogs who are trying to get it right.

Speaker 2: 7:46

Problem is they never have budget yeah so it was a long struggle trying to come up with a bit of funding and at the moment it's a bit from some personal savings. I think we were lucky to get proper equipment sponsored and now our expenses on the road are actually not very high. We sleep on the side of the road in the bush and then if we're in a town we stay at a backpackers or a simple lodge where I pay a few euros per night and we just eat the food that we find on the side of the road. And in zambia or here in tanzania you pay less than a euro 20 rand for a hot meal for lunch. So that budget for going on the way is actually not very high, but you don't need much.

Speaker 2: 8:32

I think that approach is definitely not the easiest one, and the financing part it probably would have been better for me to just go work and put money aside, rather than trying to sell the story to sponsors and have a lot of frustration and not a lot of money. In the end, that's you learn.

Speaker 1: 8:48

When did the fundraising idea kick off? Because you said it started as okay cool, you're just gonna go ride your bike and you're gonna run. But when did the sudden oh, I can actually do some fundraising with us. When did that kind of start?

Speaker 2: 9:00

that was about a year ago I think it was last year when I was back in Berlin and I was sitting down and being like, okay, what can be the next steps? And then that's when I started preparing training wise and also try to pull together some funding, with our first attempt in October last year. So it was half a year of preparation. We then had our first go. It didn't work out. Then we went back to Cape Town, so we stayed down in Africa and I did rehab and I trained again and then we started all over.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Now, end of March this year, Talk to me a bit about the fundraising initiatives that you're involved in and you're working with.

Speaker 2: 9:46

We partner with Lieberkon Agua. It's originally a German NGO who is trying to just fulfill people's right of clean drinking water. They extend their initiatives to not only water but also sanitation and hygiene, because it's often linked. And in South Africa their office is in Cape Town but the projects are in the Eastern Cape. The Eastern Cape doesn't have the best infrastructure. We've been there Actually, we were at the schools.

Speaker 2: 10:14

They work a lot with the kids because it's often the first generation at the moment that deals with higher population density. We start having diseases because of higher civilization or higher population density. We start having diseases because of higher civilization or higher population density and people don't know how to. Maybe the government even puts toilets and taps in schools, but the kids have no habit and don't understand why they should use it. So what Agua does and that's a really cool approach they have in sports classes. They play games how to protect my water. And then there's a really cool approach they have in sports classes they play games you know how to protect my water, and then there's a water bucket in the middle of the kits.

Speaker 2: 10:51

And there's a few guys trying to throw balls at the water bucket.

Speaker 2: 10:54

And if you guys trying to defend that bucket, just to make clear, if you have a dam, for example, and you want to drink the water, you can't at the same time have kettle and geese and whatever in that dam.

Speaker 2: 11:08

So they have really cool approaches beyond just putting infrastructure somewhere and dump it onto people who don't know what to do with it. But they work a lot through gamification and also art. So they have murals on the walls where the kids actually understand what germs are and what bacteria are and why it makes sense to wash your hands. So it's a way more integrated and long lasting approach which we really love and it was beautiful to see during our time in Cape Town to see and work with them together. That's the kind of projects they do in south africa. On top of that it's the more traditional fountains drilling. They do a lot of projects in uganda, there's in tanzania, there's projects of having nets which actually draw the humidity out of the air and then they the water drops drip down the nets and you collect that water and get drinking water that way.

Speaker 2: 12:04

there's's a lot of cool initiatives, but the main project we're involved with is the one in South Africa, and it's all about water, sanitation and hygiene and fulfilling humans' right of clean and fresh drinking water. That's what we're fundraising for.

Speaker 1: 12:19

Tell me a balance between getting that message across and also telling people about the trip and what you're doing on a day-to-day basis.

Speaker 2: 12:26

Yeah, it's. In general, the communication is super tough, and that is actually one thing we're struggling with the most. As I said before, we have the complete underdog approach. There's this thing of you have the coolest product so you get the most attention, but that's actually. It's the opposite. The communication is so much more important than what you do, because, if no, one knows, about it, then you know what does it matter?

Speaker 2: 12:53

so, given that we have that, we have no support car and we're a two-man team, there's very little space and very little energy to communicate every day. It's tough to even have the basic communication on instagram. Try to make people understand what we're actually doing here, because if you speak with other people, let's say, out here they ride their bicycles and they know how tough it is to just buy on your own, with a lot of rest days and whatever, to cope with all the circumstances there. That's insane. But if you sit at home, very understandably you watch us doing this from your sofa and maybe you haven't even run 5k. What's the difference?

Speaker 2: 13:40

between 40 and 60. What's the difference between doing it one day or 200 days? What's the difference between seeing someone doing that with a support car or doing someone doing it without any support? Um, because, you can never fully exhaust yourself. You always still need to have the capacity to deal with all the people around you who are very generous but also very curious, and sometimes you just want to have your own space and no one really cares, because you're just you know, an attraction in that way.

Speaker 2: 14:10

You got to find a place to sleep, you've got to find food all these things that come on top. If you completely exhaust yourself with your run, then you have no capacity for that anymore, so you've got to balance that as well, and alone to get those messages across is quite tough and it's also very weird. People want to show that people are great. If someone's altruistic and they invite me over, it's very odd to just be hey, by the way, I'll film your home, I'll film everything you do, and a lot of people are not even comfortable with that. So to get these stories out it's very tough and it's something we struggle with a lot, because the project itself just getting the things done on the ground is already very consuming, and the communication part is one that it always looks easy when you scroll through social media but it's so tough to come up with these daily reels.

Speaker 2: 15:03

You don't always have internet cutting everything together from one day when you're just exhausted and you want to go to sleep. It's a tough one to balance the communication?

Speaker 1: 15:12

yeah, for sure tell me a bit about the kind of logistics and planning. Is it, was it a plan, you're doing this every day, or is it we're going for it and whatever happens tomorrow happens, there's a rough sort of the structure is.

Speaker 2: 15:27

We run from cape town to cairo we want to break a world record, but the world record Keith Boyd Rainbow Runner has recently improved it from 318 days that was the 25-year-old record to 301 days and we're currently aiming for 230 days.

Speaker 2: 15:46

So, we're quite a bit faster. I'm half the age. I'm half Keith's age, so obviously I have a bit of a physical advantage. We try to run 55, 60 Ks a day, but the rest is very much. You just go with the flow, because we never really know where we're going to sleep. It's more the night before we would check the map and check hey, there could be a cool place to sleep. Is there anything in between? Do we get water? Do we get food? Along the way we got to buy stuff and then off you go and you go from that again the next day.

Speaker 2: 16:19

So it's much more day by day. And then there are some logistics on top. We have a bit of a depot with running shoes and some electrolytes in Cape Town and so every four weeks we send a package up the road. So I have new running shoes. So that is a bit of the overhead logistics. Hopefully I receive a package today in your ringer. That would be great. But that's the stuff we cannot carry with ourselves. Everything else we just more or less wing it, because you never know. You can have a good day, you can have a bad day, you can get injured. The more you plan in advance, the more stressful it gets.

Speaker 1: 16:58

Tell me where are you now in terms of the journey, how far have you gone, how many kilometers and how far do you still have to go?

Speaker 2: 17:05

I'm actually not 100% sure, but I think it should be about four and a half thousand kilometers, so the total journey are 11,000 kilometers. We're closing in on the halfway mark. Iringa is in the center of Tanzania, so finally, the blue dot on Google Maps has moved away from Cape Town. In the beginning it's very frustrating, but by now you realize you've gone somewhere, which is really cool. I think the first day we made it to pal at least, but still you just have your own two feet and your tiny little legs.

Speaker 2: 17:39

But you keep moving, step by step, day by day and then at some point you see how far you can get, and I think that applies to all areas of life. It's often that thing that you think for one day, oh, it's not really worth it, but if you keep going it actually can go a very long way. That's pretty cool to see that we now got so far, and especially given that after our first attempt I had an inflammation in my hip.

Speaker 1: 18:03

How far?

Speaker 2: 18:03

did you get the first time, the first time we went to windhoek? Which yeah, also it's funny you run the first time. We didn't take any rest days. I averaged more than 60k every day we went through Namibia in, yeah, beginning of November, so we probably had temperatures around 50 degrees on the road and you run 23 consecutive ultra marathons all the way from Cape Town to Windhoek and then it's a failure. If you don't see that in the context of that whole journey, everybody would be like yeah that's insane.

Speaker 2: 18:37

But since the overall project was so much longer, it was like okay, haven't really gotten far. But I had an inflammation in my hip joint and the doctor said I need a surgery to scrape. I have more bone on my left leg than on my right leg.

Speaker 2: 18:53

So the standard procedure would be, if you have such an impingement, to scrape off bone and then create more space in the joint through surgery. And if it needs a surgery for me to run across Africa, then I don't want to do it. But I just said I'll work with coaches who have a good understanding of biomechanics and rehab and I do my mobility and I do my strength training and I focus on that hip and let's see how far we get. And it was a big gamble. Also my coaches they were. We have no idea if this actually works and I was injured for such a long time. I think I had, maybe I had three or four weeks of running training before we started. So I went from I don't know 20 Ks a week to 40 to 80. I'm super grateful that everything worked out so well so far. And I was mentioning earlier I had that flipping camel thorn in my Achilles tendon but other than that physically.

Speaker 2: 19:50

There's no shin splints, there's nothing. My ankles are fine, my knees are fine. I still feel that my left hip is tighter than my right one, but there's no pain in that sense I can manage it really well. So all the critical parts are really good In the mornings I get up and walk around super stiff, but that's all right.

Speaker 1: 20:10

Talk to me a bit about your background, but then also the training that you did for this was that you say you had, you've had coaches, but you said you did very little. So is it more a mental thing than anything?

Speaker 2: 20:20

else. I think the body is a necessity, and especially with. For example, if you now wanted to cycle from cape town to cairo, I would just tell you get a bike and go. Don't think about it, just go. You don't need to train, you can start with 20 40k's on the bike, doesn't matter, you get fit along the way and that's easy. Obviously, if you want to break a record, then you gotta be a bit faster, but with running, you definitely need a base where you don't get injured.

Speaker 2: 20:50

So, yeah, what I had is generally, I enjoyed endurance sports. For some time in 2020, I had done an ironman. I was nothing close to any professional athlete or whatever. I just enjoyed cycling, I enjoyed running and when I was in high school, I swam. So at some point I put it all together. I wanted to see if I can do an Ironman. I did that and that was it for me. I never had bigger ambitions, and this thing more came from a background of adventuring and being hey, I actually I'm able to deal with all the circumstances out here dealing with the people, dealing with the food, with the food, with the weather and that's everything. That's absolutely a mind game, because nobody is accommodating you.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Obviously, it's your choice to go to foreign countries, yeah those.

Speaker 2: 21:40

They just live differently than you live. You got to be grateful for other people welcoming you, but you can't expect them to do things the way that you're maybe used to it. And the same with the weather. The weather doesn't care about you. If you have strong headwinds, if you have rain, if you have a big mountain, whatever, you can start being mad, but you can start shouting, but it's not going to change anything. You have to solve that adversity within yourself and just be fine with it. There's good days and there's bad days, and it's just you accept that.

Speaker 2: 22:09

So that is all the more the mental part. But when I decided I'm gonna do this, I had half a year where I would go to the gym two to three times a week to build that strength in my legs and I would do a lot of long runs to. I did very little high intensity training but I did a lot of conditioning in terms of long runs so my bones and tendons and everything got used to that consistent impact. Also back to back. I would sometimes do 30 40k runs Saturday, sunday, just to get my body used to this impact, exactly to avoid shin splints or broken bones in your feet and that adaption process, I would say is very important and it's a lot more strength training.

Speaker 2: 23:01

And, yeah, getting the movements right is way more essential than running fitness per se, because your cardiovascular system, you can bring it up to speed along the way. But if you move badly then you have knee problems, then you have foot problems. So that you got to get right and I can if anybody wants to do something.

Speaker 2: 23:23

I would definitely focus a lot on working with someone who understands biomechanics, who understands the way you move and how to move that in a direction that is not perfect, but more in line with what our bodies are designed to do and how it should work, and that, I think, is the most crucial part, especially if you want to go for such long times that's super interesting me.

Speaker 1: 23:50

how do you make those calls in terms of okay, I'm done for the day, or I've got a little bit of pain, or the weather's too bad, or things like that? How do you make those decisions?

Speaker 2: 24:01

it's a lot of gut feeling and, yeah, there's just different. I think it's very individual. I mean, for us we just can't afford to say we go strictly 60k a day, because you never know where exactly 60k is. So for us it's more okay, cool, I know I do between 50 and 60 and it's just much more. Some days I feel strong and I'm okay, we started early, or sometimes there's a place, a good place, to sleep in 65k, so I wake up a bit earlier yeah make sure I take a little lesser rest, and I know I can for one day.

Speaker 2: 24:39

I can always push 65, so we go there next day is a place to stop after 50 Ks. Maybe that's good enough and the rest is listening to your body. You have some days where it just feels easy. You fool around. We talk a lot and it's fine, and some days I'm just in, I have no capacity to talk, I just, you know, it's sort of survival making step by step.

Speaker 2: 25:02

And you go with that flow a bit. If it's an easy day and you have the capacity, you go a bit longer. But it's a lot of gut feeling and for me it works really well. Same with food. I just eat as much as I can and if I go beyond that, yeah, yeah, I can imagine, yeah, yeah, but if I go beyond that point, I end up having stomach cramps and whatever and it's not serving me in any way, you need a lot of total calories, so you add a lot of peanut butter and olive oil to your meals, and you need enough carbs, and carbs are around everywhere in africa anyways.

Speaker 2: 25:32

So you eat your rice and your chapatis and your pop and you're fine and that's enough structure for me. There's other people who, if they don't force themselves to eat every half an hour or every hour specific amounts of whatever, they just forget about it, or then you have to force yourself a bit more, and it's the same with how many kilometers you go.

Speaker 2: 25:57

For other people that's too much uncertainty and they need to know exactly what's going to happen on that day, otherwise they don't function. If it was that for me, it would take out the whole joy. No one can answer you that question. You cannot go to someone else yeah hey, I have some pain in my knee. Is that just temporary or am I fucking something? Upright?

Speaker 2: 26:15

yeah, you have to decide for yourself, but I feel that with the hours I spent running and doing endurance sports, I try to listen to my buddy and I think I've become fairly good at knowing what are mind games where your buddy is okay, that didn't work let me try the ankle, for okay, that also didn't hurt yeah maybe I can go for the shoulder shame. Yeah, that guy just doesn't stop.

Speaker 2: 26:39

It's so weird sometimes that pain is just gone after a few minutes. I think the funniest experience I had when I actually trained for the Ironman. I would sometimes cycle indoors and sometimes outdoors. It's the exact same bicycle. Outdoors I can go for 10 hours without my bum hurting If I sit indoors it's terrible after 30 minutes and that's just your mind being, mind being hey, dude, it's boring and I don't want to do this.

Speaker 2: 27:08

That's definitely the pain that is just in your head and where your mind tries to trick you. But then sometimes you have this sort of pain where you know okay, if I keep running now, that's just gonna make it worse. I think it's very individual. You gotta develop that feeling over some time and you go through some injuries and make these experiences and eventually you can differentiate a bit. What is what. Some things go away after 10 minutes and some things. If you don't stop running, then you have a problem for the next few weeks talk to me about the rest days.

Speaker 1: 27:41

Is it just, oh, I need a break, or is it every x days you take a rest day?

Speaker 2: 27:45

it's roughly once every week. Okay, roughly one day a week, but it's very much dependent on where we are. It is, yeah, just now it was a week going from mbeya, which is a bigger town, to iringa in tanzania, and it made sense to stop here again. Sometimes you're just I don't know. You run in from nata to kasani or livingstone and just for hundreds of kilometers there's nothing.

Speaker 2: 28:12

It doesn't make sense to put your tent in the midst of the desert, without water, and be, hey, seven days over. Today is my rest day no matter what?

Speaker 2: 28:19

it's always a bit flexible and it's yeah, it's a mix of how does my body feel, how tired am I, how many things are piling up in terms of organization and content and communication and whatever, and also where's a good place to stop. Probably, from now on, we'll do the next rest day in Russia, which probably only is in two weeks from here, but I feel at the moment and it's probably hopefully it's going to work out if need be, or there's a good place and it makes sense to stop somewhere we can always do that. It's not fixed to that degree and, funnily, sometimes resting is never resting you have the running part.

Speaker 2: 28:59

The project in the background yeah we're trying to sort out a documentary. Have podcasts you? Need to organize your food and other stuff. Oh no, we're gonna do it on the rest day, because then we have time and in the end it's sometimes more stressful than actually just be on the road and run, so it's never really arrested tell me what other than what we've discussed, what other challenges have you faced and what is the safety? Been Challenges.

Speaker 2: 29:25

I think they're mostly within yourself and it has a lot to do with, because a lot of people view at it oh it's, I can maybe run 10 kilometers a day. How can this dude run 60 Ks? You live on the road for almost a year, so there's a lot of things you not at home, you don't see your friends, you don't see your family you deal with a lot of adversity, obviously, and a lot of things just happen and you don't always have the time and the capacity to reflect on them you invest so much and you ask yourself what's the outcome?

Speaker 2: 30:02

and then you realize when I first started this, I thought cool, obviously it's a great story, I'll get a little sponsoring. Yeah, that didn't happen. Then you're okay. Do I still want to do it, knowing that the setup is small and whatever? And you're okay, I still do it. And you have a first attempt and now I'm injured. So what do I do now? Do I stop, or do I still want to do it?

Speaker 2: 30:21

so you keep going yeah and now we realize with the means we have we probably won't reach the hundreds of thousands of followers we maybe hoped for in the beginning, is it still worth it? And there's no right and wrong. You could also just say hey guys, I started this with this and this attention, intentions, and I realize the way we're going about it and with all the setup, it's just not what we had envisioned and we stop here and maybe there'll be another attempt, and that's totally fine as well.

Speaker 2: 30:48

No one, there's no right and wrong, but you constantly have that battle within yourself, and then it's not just me it's me and my brother and we totally have these discussions together and it was my idea to come up with this and to do this, and I asked him if he wanted to come along and support me and in many ways, it's way more challenging for him. I was talking about the communication part that is. That's what Max does, and that is way more exhausting than we had initially intended, and he gets to the point where he's almost burned out and needs a break. We've been spending every day together for almost a year.

Speaker 2: 31:28

And you can be very compatible, but still there's always a bit of friction because you're not the same person and all these things.

Speaker 2: 31:36

There's a person behind that and that's actually your life. So you must always ask yourself is it actually worth it to go through all of this and is that a life that is somewhat fulfilling? Because just for that moment of being in Cairo, that one little few seconds of glory, yeah, it's not worth it for that. So is that actually a somewhat sustainable lifestyle for almost a year on the road? And that's the daily sort of battle that you face, that is just within yourself. And you have phases where there's a lot of support. You meet people on the road who are really inspired and who are you know, who are vouching for you and who are supporting you, and there's phases where literally no one really cares or no one understands.

Speaker 2: 32:22

You just have a bunch of trucks driving around, mad truck drivers who probably, outside of their trucks, are great people as well. We have so many trucks stopping and giving us water and they always have a smile on their face and they greet you and it's great people. But give them a few tons of steel and an engine and they drive mad people.

Speaker 2: 32:45

Same with the buses and whatever, the human life is then, yeah, it's not, it doesn't feel it's worth much anymore. I think these are way more the battles that are the challenge every day, that maybe not everybody is so much aware of, but that actually is what it comes down to. You know, getting up in the morning, and being like okay it's still worth it.

Speaker 1: 33:07

And I still take enough out of it. Talk to me about the future. What is the plan for the next week, the plan for the next month and then, obviously, the plan once the trip's finished?

Speaker 2: 33:18

Yeah, I think the next week and month will be business as usual. We keep going and we see where we get, all the way to adis. We're very confident because adis the capital of ethiopia, that path is, and it's fine north of that. I'm not sure how much you followed keith's journey, but he's had a rough time in northern ethiopia and we are observing how the situation develops, and I don't have military training, unlike yeah, and I don't want to be caught in open gunfire so yeah, you must also ask yourself the world record is a structure and is means to an end, but it's not an end in itself, and if you actually want to share that story of people and inspire people, you can do that.

Speaker 2: 34:03

on other grounds, you don't have to go through an active war zone in order to do that. So that's definitely something that we're observing very closely, and at the moment it's a big question mark how we can continue our journey north of Addis, and let's see how that evolves.

Speaker 2: 34:21

I think that we will see in about one and a half months and then afterwards. I would definitely want to share the experiences with other people and use it, hopefully for the good of others, in terms of giving speeches, maybe writing a book. Let people participate and to have someone spreading the good news. That don't sell as well I need to pay rent and get some food at some point again yeah but how I go about that and if I combine it or if it's separate hustles or whatever.

Speaker 2: 34:52

It's still completely open. The beautiful thing about being on the road is you literally you think about tomorrow. Sometimes you just think about the next five kilometers. I will figure something out, but at the moment that's not my priority and in some way it's also beautiful not to know what's to come if people ask me where do you want to be in five years or where do you see yourself?

Speaker 2: 35:15

in five years I don't want to know if I knew what the next five years look where's the fun in that? So I'm excited. I have the feeling with this kind of project you open a lot of doors, you meet a lot of interesting people and a lot of opportunities have arisen already and probably will still arise, and I will just see where I'm at or where we're at after this project and see what's to come this was.

Speaker 1: 35:40

I thought this was going to be a 20 minute interview, but it turns out it's an hour, but this was absolutely fascinating and thank. 20 minute interview, but it turns out it's an hour, but this was absolutely fascinating, and thank you so much for taking time. We will obviously be following along and looking forward to the follow up once you get to Cairo.

Speaker 2: 35:54

Thanks for taking the time.