Simply finishing the World’s Toughest Mudder is a feat of physical and mental ferocity.
It’s a contest for athletes “who find marathons too easy and triathlons meh,” merging extreme endurance with severe military-style obstacle courses.
Ryan Atkins of Toronto won the World’s Toughest Mudder in 2013. He followed up by being the only competitor to race in all four obstacle world championships in 2014; he medaled in three, and won the Toughest Mudder for a second consecutive year, in the process racing 95 miles over 24 hours in the Nevada desert, all while wearing a wetsuit.
In a Q&A with The Huffington Post, Atkins shared details about how he eats, how he trains, and how he sleeps, his favorite travel journeys, his most useful advice, and even how he proposed to his girlfriend.
You celebrated the new year by climbing Mount Washington in horrendous weather. What was that like? What are you telling yourself when you’re approaching those big challenges?
There is so much going on in your head when you’re climbing a mountain in really cold, terrible, whiteout conditions. You’re always assessing risk and reward, thinking about avalanches, getting lost in the whiteout, making sure you don’t do anything stupid.
It’s definitely a struggle, and my mantra is: one step after the other. There are points where you’re going up, you’ve been out for several hours, and you can’t see the top. But you just keep plodding along and believing that you’re going to get there.
Keep going, next step, next step. That’s pretty core to my beliefs, and it seems to be working pretty well [laughs]. Sometimes you can’t look at the challenge as a whole, the path is too daunting. But if you just think about not stopping, about keeping going the best you can, then eventually you get there.
Once you reach the top, it’s an awesome feeling.
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I was tossing around the idea of proposing on top of a mountain, or in some other grandiose way. But this just seemed more intimate and more special for where we were in our lives at that point. She’s my best friend
What’s a memorable gift you’ve received?
The best gift you can give someone is an introduction to a new experience or a new skill. There was someone who introduced me to cross-country skiing when I was about 18. They taught me how to ski, helped me find equipment, did all sorts of stuff. It’s now a sport that I really love — I was just doing today [laughs].
The coolest gift you could ever give someone is to introduce them to a passion that they’re going to hold dear to them for a long time, maybe the rest of their lives.
What advice would you give younger people working on their education or a new career?
You should find someone who you respect, someone older who seems happy to you, and talk to them about what they do and how their career path unfolded. Do that with as many people as possible.
Don’t shy away from hard work. Some people will say, “I don’t know what to do at university so I’m just going to take the easiest program and float my way through it.” That’s a terrible idea. If you don’t know what you should do, you should err towards harder challenges.
I see a lot of friends who go through a program for three or four years — they probably went because someone suggested it or their parents wanted them to — then they come out of college and they really dislike the job that they trained for. Instead, just spend a couple days here and there shadowing someone who’s doing the career that you’re considering and see what it’s like, see if it’s something you could see yourself doing. Do that when you’re 16, 17, 18, versus after you’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars on schooling.
Transcription services by Tigerfish; now offering transcripts in two-hours guaranteed. Interview has been edited and condensed.
