.O’Brady, she believed, was a figure who
could speak to all kinds of people. “If you’re
thinking about this as storytelling,” she says,
“then obviously Colin has his incredible
comeback.”
Around 2014, just as O’Brady was coming
into his prime as a triathlete, the two got the
itch to do something more meaningful than
just “high-fiving each other at the finish
line,” as Besaw puts it. O’Brady sensed that
he had a massive reserve of power and won-
dered how he might tap into it to do some-
thing big and fulfilling. “I’d always been
drawn to the mountains, so that’s where we
looked,” he says.
By 2015, O’Brady was laying the ground-
work to break the speed record for the Ex-
plorers Grand Slam, a challenge that entails
climbing the highest peak on each continent
and skiing the last degree to the North and
South Poles. Their goal was to use the effort
to inspire kids to be more active and pur-
sue their dreams. With $10,000, O’Brady’s
life savings, the couple built a website and
launched a nonprofit called Beyond 7/2.
Initially, they struggled to attract sponsors.
Just a month before O’Brady was scheduled
to begin, they had secured only half of the
$500,000 the project required.
“I kept thinking, We’re going to find a
way,” he says. “And sure enough, we ended
up in a conversation with Nike, and they
were like, We love this.”
At the time, only two people had com-
pleted the Explorers Grand Slam in under
a year, but O’Brady did it in 139 days, beat-
ing the previous record by 53 days. Along
the way, he set a new record for the fastest
time up the Seven Summits, 131 days, bag-
ging both Everest and Denali in an eight-day
stretch in May 2016. Following a suggestion
from his cousin, he sent the first-ever Snap-
chat from the summit of Everest. It became
one of the platform’s most popular posts
of the year, with 22 million views. All told,
the project racked up half a billion media
impressions, while their nonprofit partners
brought O’Brady’s go-bigger message to
kids in 29,000 schools.
O’Brady had proven his ability to reach
an enormous audience. He and Besaw won-
dered, what else can we do?
AT THE TOP of Snow King, Besaw reminds
O’Brady of the day’s schedule. He has an
11 A.M. call with Pace, the private school in
Atlanta. The executives at a freight-logistics
company want to talk about a keynote. He
needs to work on his book.
Of all the appointments, O’Brady is most
excited about speaking with Ross Bernkrant,
a Florida man who won a 30-minute phone
call with him at a fundraising auction. The
guy beat Stage IV esophageal cancer, heard
O’Brady on a podcast, and became inspired
to take on his own Everest—hiking laps on a
mountain in Vermont totaling 29,029 verti-
cal feet. It took him about 24 hours.
“Knowing what you know now, do you
ever wish you hadn’t had cancer?” O’Brady
asks him.
“No, man. I think I’m much happier now
because of it, doing what I want to do.”
“I feel the same way about the fire,”
O’Brady says, gazing at his scarred legs.
“I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,
but there’s something about coming out the
other side, when you look back on it, the
strength and perspective it gives you to take
advantage of every day.”After the Explorers Grand Slam, in June
2018, O’Brady climbed to the highest point
in all 50 states in just 21 days, breaking the
previous record by almost half. Along the
way, he and Besaw sought to create what
they called a “Forrest Gump effect” by in-
viting people to join him for portions of the
climbs. (Roughly 1,000 people came out.)
The project doubled as training for the Ant-
arctica crossing. For months, O’Brady had
been visiting a Portland coach and Navy of-
ficer named Mike McCastle, who once did
5,804 pull-ups in 24 hours while wearing a
30-pound weight vest. Under McCastle’s
guidance, O’Brady worked to hone more than
just his muscles. He submerged his hands in
ice baths and then untied knots and solved
Lego puzzles. On his own initiative, he went
on ten-day silent-meditation retreats.
He also set about refining his diet—a
crucial aspect of an extended polar expe-
dition—with help from one of his spon-
sors, a Wisconsin supplement company
called Standard Process. O’Brady figured
he’d burn at least 10,000 calories a day on
the ice, which meant he’d have to pull a lot
of weight just to keep from starving. “The
primary thing that goes into the sled is food
and fuel,” says Besaw. Add food and you can
last longer, but you’ll move slower, and the
window to complete an Antarctic expedi-
tion is less than 90 days. “The margins are
extremely tight,” she says.
Before O’Brady had begun his high-points
project, the medical staff at Standard Pro-cess put him through a battery of tests that
revealed a nutrient deficiency and disfunc-
tional digestive system, plus, on the posi-
tive side, a resiliency gene that allowed him
to recover rapidly from extreme exertion.
They put him on a supplement regimen that
included, among other things, probiotics,
protein powder, and ashwaganda. Still, after
O’Brady finished all his climbs he felt des-
perately fatigued, and new tests showed him
to be in an even worse state.
“We had to sit him down for a very seri-
ous conversation,” says John Troup, a vice
president for clinical innovation at Standard
Process. “With too much inflammation, the
underlying systems of the body can become
dysfunctional. This is why we believe Wors-
ley died.”
Just weeks later, however, O’Brady
cast off on another adventure, a 400-
mile trek across Greenland. This time,
though, he incorporated oranges into
his nutrition, and a slower pace af-
forded him daily recovery time. Blood
work confirmed a major improvement.
Standard Process eventually sent him
slabs of custom-made “Colin bars,” a
4,500-calorie plant-based gut bomb
that’s 70 percent fat and palatable enough to
eat all day every day for nearly two months in
Antarctica. (At the end of the crossing, doc-
tors examining him were amazed he’d lost
only 25 pounds.)
On my last night in Jackson, we go to a
brewery to watch O’Brady’s beloved Portland
Trail Blazers lose the NBA Western Confer-
ence finals. Afterward he runs through some
of the highs and lows of the effort. Bluebird
days with no wind that felt like a gift. Storms
that left him weeping in his tent. In his great-
est moments of doubt, he’d hold his arms up
like a champ and channel the love and sup-
port of millions of people rooting for him.
“I’m sure I looked like a fool,” he says.
As for what’s next, he won’t say, but one
assumes it will involve supreme athleti-
cism and human connection. “I love the ac-
colades and being out there, but that’s not
what endures,” he tells me. “When you strip
it all away, it’s the fabric of the experience
that stands out.”
A few days later I reach out to Rudd, who
is busy planning an adventure that he wants
to remain secret for now. I ask him what he
was going to suggest to O’Brady that day on
the ice. He tells me, and I debate whether to
share it with O’Brady. In the end, I keep it to
myself. Some stories are better that way. OCORRESPONDENT TIM NEVILLE
( @TIM_NEVILLE) WROTE ABOUT
CHINA’S SKI-RESORT INDUSTRY
IN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018.“I GOT OUT AND LOOKED
DOWN, AND THE SKIN ON
MY LEGS WAS CHARRED AND
PEELING LIKE A HOT DOG.”