When you wake up on that second morning knowing that, oh my God, I have to do five more marathons here, surely your head gets into a very dark place.

No.

Yes and no.

It didn't come then.

Weirdly enough.

So the Marathon to Sob, I need to kind of give a little bit of context to this.

So how Marathon to Sob came about was 2017, I was at a business event, a mastery event in Amsterdam.

Where do you see, now obviously you're coaching a lot of clients, where do you see it being used, coaching a lot of coaches should I say, where do you see it being used from a coaching perspective at the minute versus like where would you like to see it go?

[laughs]

Um, but I came home that Christmas, and I was having a real kind of sob and pity party for myself.

I was like, "I hate my job.

I don't like London.

I'm not enjoying this." And Mom put a question to me.

It actually made it [laughs] into the last book, the habit I learned to jump out of bed every morning, and it was, "What would you do for free?" And I thought about that.

I was 22, 23 years of age at this point, and I was like, "Oh, I'd, I'd work in a gym for free." I was like, "I love working out.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

...

if you're a weight loss coach or you're in the fitness industry helping people get in shape, and you're trying to compete with the results, you can't compete with all the collective information that the likes of Claude or ChatGPT can pull together in a matter of seconds.

But if you position yourself separately and in a different space, you can still win and use AI as a tool to help your clients get better results, help your gym members get better results, help your customers, clients get better results.

And the positioning for that is you're not selling the results anymore.

You're not positioned as an expert selling the results.

You're selling the accountability structure, you're selling the filtering of the information, and if you're in person, you're selling the community aspect.

Yeah, talk me, talk about that journey.

Oh, yeah.

I had very poor coping mechanisms or, let me rephrase, I had very good coping mechanisms, [chuckles] very unhealthy coping mechanisms for dealing with the amount of stress that would come up in my life, whether it was from being a father, being a business owner, just moving through the world.

It's like no one comes through life- In an easy pattern.

It's a difficult thing trying to balance everything, family, relationships, business, your career in general, your friends, your self-care, your health.

And I started to break my life into four quadrants, which really helped me s- tunnel down and funnel down into what was important.

And I do health, wealth, love, and fulfillment.

Most people will have some framework or some filtering process that allows them to navigate how they're balancing life.

Keep going, but I just have to be like, "You're using the tire slash analogy."

So for you personally, Was that a similar experience for you in your early years in your upbringing?

Some of the values were intentional, I think, and some of them were unintentional.

And I've had some brilliant experiences, a very close relationship with my mother, always historically, not so much with my dad.

We have a very good relationship now in the last decade, but not historically very good.

But I got some great values from him too, mostly unintentional ones, but they were there.

I, interestingly enough, security was a big one, but that was an unspoken value.

And when I mean it was unspoken, it was you'd be around the table and something that always would come up when a person's name was brought up was, okay, what do they do and how much do they make? that is something that would come up in conversations around the kitchen table.

And that's instinctively what I've always wanted to do, which is interesting.

Have you had any opinion on that?

I did.

I looked it up directly after our podcast, because as soon as you said it, the way I've always historically used blood flow restriction training or bands has been with injury rehabilitation for people.

I used to do a lot of work with athletes, high level athletes.

10 years ago, I'd work with sports teams, etc.

Back when I qualified first as a strength and conditioning coach.

And one of the modalities in the very, very early stages that we use was blood flow restriction for those who are coming back from surgery, those coming back from injury, because it was creating that one an improvement of blood flow to speed up the recovery but it was also creating a bit of resistance on the muscle building up the strength but somebody that was injured and couldn't actually load with a physical weight and then as soon as you said it on the podcast i went oh my god that makes so much sense because although body types are different what is interesting which is a parallel i wouldn't have drawn had i not been in the space athletes and particularly injured athletes And perimenopausal women and menopausal women are very similar in the sense that they have a lot of moving parts.

So what is the number one mistake that women make when trying to get stronger or leaner?

And what is your advice for someone who doesn't yet see the limiting beliefs that are holding them back? They don't know because maybe they're so busy, they're so distracted by the life that they're in, they haven't figured out how do you take a step back and gain that self-awareness? What would be your advice to them?

I can use myself as a personal example because this isn't a strong suit of mine and I had to do a lot of work on this.

twofold one is having someone a third party externally putting the mirror back on you and the second is learning to check in with your intuition and making sure that you're living in alignment they're two different things and i can unpack both because both have served me in different ways at different times in the early days I was exactly, as you mentioned, so busy being busy.

My plate was full.

And if there was a small little space on that plate, I would fill it up with something else and then I'd stack it on top.

And sometimes and during that period of my life, I needed a coach or a mentor or sometimes a friend or a family member to show me what was happening.

In 2018, I remember, I'm still embarrassed to even admit this story, John, but in 2018, I hired my mom to work with me.

I wanted to go back, Brian, to both the Sahara run that you did and the Arctic run, because sometimes you Getting to the starting line is the hardest part, but sometimes the next hardest part is when you start really feeling a terrible amount of discomfort and you're in pain and in your cases you might have blisters or other things going on how do you learn to push through those moments because i'm sure in both of those races there were times when you just wanted to quit what kept you going

So take me there, because I think this is so different.

I'm gonna take us back in the time machine.

When I was in London, after I got my qualifications, I went broke the first time by just not knowing how to get clients.

I wasn't good at my craft and I didn't know how to get clients.

But I still had a little bit of income coming in from teaching, so it was fine.

The second time I went broke was the only time ever, now I'd never gone into debt, but I've been broke.

I was living in a flat in West London.

No. (laughs)