10 minutes.
10 minutes!
Hey, you guys want to check your e-perms real quick?
Marty did. I checked it.
Marty, do you check yours?
What?
Yeah, exactly.
Look at that.
That's like the millennium.
It's like the millennium.
It's like the millennium.
It's like the millennium.
That's like the millenium fountain.
I have a little quote that I'd like to share.
I think it's a little appropriate here.
There is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans.
But the moment one definitely commits oneself,
that Providence moves too.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.
Here's the deal. I'll lay it out straight.
I averaged for a couple decades, 250 days a year on the water.
This is 1969.
I'll tell you what, the older you get,
the more freaked out about how short your time is.
And some of these people have no clue as to how much time they've wasted, right?
I even feel like I've wasted some time.
I guess I want to say that I think it was all of us.
I think we tried to come up with multiple challenges.
And I'm turning 40 in three weeks.
I don't want to feel like I'm on the downside of my life.
It's easier to settle later on in life,
because you have so many things pulling you all over the place.
I want my child to know that her dad never quit on anything.
Maybe when I play like guitar, the hair will get out.
Totally.
I wish that's how things work if you just play guitar.
You're commuting to work, you're cooking dinner,
maybe turning the TV on and drinking some beer,
and you wake and repeat, and all of us can use a good dose of inspiration,
whether it's athletic inspiration or otherwise.
We've been planning on doing an outrigger race, an ice canoeing race,
multiple other races, and then we just said,
well, why not the Grand?
It seems like the best option of all of these,
and let's just go challenge ourselves like we never had before.
And so we're going to try to go faster than anyone's ever gone through the Grand Canyon.
My name is John Mark Selig. I'm captain of the U.S. men's rafting team.
My name is Seth Mason.
For this particular adventure that we're setting up,
I've been the primary instigator trying to get all the pieces aligned
so that we can actually make this thing happen.
Mine's not Norfleet.
I guess mostly my role is, it was just to row hard.
Kurt Kensel. I'm the timekeeper, and I think my line was,
you guys are crazy, but I'm in for sure.
I'm Ian Anderson. I'll be one of the paddlers,
more likely just the mascot.
I'm a really good cheerleader though.
My name is Rob Preckle, and I am a rower and former underwear model.
My name is Marty Borges,
and I was brought in to help steer this boat down through the Grand Canyon.
Jeremiah Williams. I row for the U.S. men's rafting team,
and I'm typically the comic relief.
Okay, we're here at Pierce Ferry Rapid.
It's going to be something like...
No one laughed. That was the shittiest joke, apparently.
This attempt is definitely different.
You know, the Emerald Mile had the record forever,
but the water was above 80,000 CFS.
We were going to be nowhere near that.
There was a big debate at the time,
as far as the way that we approached this,
because we're paddlers. We're not oarsmen.
I guess the final decision was, we just need to use oars.
We want to be fast, and paddles are not fast.
We realized pretty quickly that we needed to get serious about building the boat,
so I went home, tore a big sheet of paper off my kid's easel,
and stayed up till, I don't know, 11, 12 o'clock at night,
kind of drawing out ideas, drawing out tubes.
There's no manual on how to design a boat for eight people
that goes fast down big white water.
You know, people don't tend to do that.
If you go in the Grand Canyon, you're going to spend a lot of time,
and you want to maximize your beer space.
The design of the boat went through several iterations.
The first big redesign ended up moving from a 34-foot long boat
to a 48-foot long boat.
We realized that it needed some tweaks.
It was too heavy, too bendy,
and we're not sure it's exactly right,
but we think we're getting closer.
We're definitely stepping outside of our comfort zone,
especially because we've never designed a boat like this.
We've never rowed like this for potentially 34 hours.
We didn't really have the opportunity to custom fabricate a whole lot of stuff.
We're scrounging up parts from old growing machines and raft tubes
that are part of an old kiteboarding terrain park.
They're not even raft tubes.
So it's been a trip.
Today, we're testing out the raft.
This is the Moab daily section.
So this is Seth's big-ass boat.
We're going to try this sucker out.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
This is the six-pack.
Oh, yeah.
I had heard about its dimensions,
and I thought, God, that's wild.
I can't even put it together.
But when I saw it, it's completely reasonable.
My only concern is its length
if you got into a breaking hole or something
to where something got broken.
I want those guys to have a good repair kit.
You got a rowing song, Jules?
Today was a really good test of the boat in flat water,
but we're totally untested in white water at this point.
How's this thing going to feel
when we get into 20-foot waves?
I mean, these guys are strong.
I mean, we've got five months to work on it.
It's the night stuff, the night rapids.
That's the one that's going to make everybody a little bit nervous.
The part that does keep me up is the darkness.
If we lose the moon behind a cloud,
visibility goes to shit,
and there's some real consequential white water coming up.
If we wrap our boat, we'll be in a world of hurt
because cold water, cold air, tough to warm up,
tough to come back from.
We've got a lot of water coming up.
We've got a lot of water coming up.
We've got a lot of water coming up.
We've got a lot of water coming up.
Cold water, cold air, tough to warm up, tough to come back from.
Taking an endeavor like this is not easy.
If everybody's mindset is not in the right place,
then it could be a really bad idea.
I've had my butt whip many times down there in many rapids,
and there's a lot of things down there
that can beat you up real bad at any given time.
You should be scared.
If you're not,
then you don't have the right respect to be down there.
One thing I was thinking about today,
like in the next couple months,
we've got time to do some training in the gym,
get stronger so that we've got more stamina to do that,
and hopefully that decreases the pain a little bit.
It's going to hurt more than anything any of us have ever done.
There's no way we're not going to fix that.
It's going to hurt a hell of a lot more than today did.
And we've just got to figure out a way to come to grips with that
and figure out if we can deal with that.
The pain that I'm going to experience in the Grand Canyon
is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.
My dad is dying of cancer.
The pain that he feels other people feel in the world.
This is for fun. This is a true pain.
We've chosen to do it. That's a big difference.
We're weird, yes, we're strange,
but we come alive by doing things like that.
I will never judge anybody that's here.
I don't care how long I've been here.
I look at these speed trips as a fantastic challenge
for the human spirit.
And all these guys are dedicated in a big fucking way.
And very few things in life present challenge like that.
But also it's pretty easy to me to look at it and go,
well, it's only two days what could possibly go wrong.
You know.
But that spirit of adventure is the shit.
If we break this record,
everybody will know, no, no one will probably even know,
unless you're watching this.
That's pretty insignificant, right?
To a canyon that's millions and millions of years old,
30 hours, meaningless.
And certainly the river doesn't care if there's six guys in a boat
trying to row real fast down it.
The significance, I think, is more about our relationship
with that place that is so old.
We grow ourselves in an ancient cathedral, this magical place.
We're not going to change that canyon,
but ideally at the end, the canyon changes us.
We've been working with John Mark
to design these pretty brutal workouts
up to 16 or 18 hours in length.
And that's a tough way to spend a weekend.
In between all the time we spend in the gym
during weekday mornings and more evenings,
growing late into the night while we're watching Netflix.
And it becomes very exhausting physically
and then mentally.
It's tough on families.
I know my wife's pretty excited for me to be done with this.
She's very supportive, but we're ready.
It's tricky to get real close to my fingers.
I'm just practicing for whenever I'm a dad later in life,
just making some kids lunches.
I figured it was just a good thing to do while we were wasting time.
Daddy, is that really important?
It helps power the battery.
Remember how we talked about wrapping it at nighttime?
Yeah.
Years from now, I'm talking to my kids about what we did
and why we did it and thinking about life.
I'd like to be able to say that doing things like this
really provides you with an understanding of yourself
and a set of tools that allow you to deal with
adversity, pressures, or difficult situations.
I'm going to have my nine hours of this thing.
Hey, get funky.
I mean, that's another one that concerns me a lot.
Well, I can sit on the left-hand side.
Okay.
We're going to be in the space suit.
We'll be traveling a good time.
Yeah.
How do I look?
Beautiful.
I'm brave.
I'm ready for a ride.
I have a little quote that I'd like to share.
I think it's a little appropriate here.
There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which
kills countless ideas and splendid plans,
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
that providence moves too.
Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now.
And now it's basically, you can land it up on the side.
This is my book.
It's the Jump of the Rocks.
Left.
Good.
Good.
Are either of them broken in the back?
Hit them.
Are they broken?
Broken.
This one's cracking me back.
If we hit anything else, you're definitely not staying together
and you're stressing me to put on a platform.
I think the thing that we've got to keep in mind is
where are we going to be when it's dark?
They're not going to make it to lava before dark.
They've driven a lot of the river at night.
The river has never liked too much organization,
so try and scatter your shit a little bit.
Don't let it win.
Hey guys, I have some thoughts.
I figure I'd share with you.
I've been thinking a lot about our trip down the canyon
over the last week.
One thing that I've been particularly surprised by
is this deep sense of satisfaction
that every member of the team has expressed.
This, despite the fact that we came up short
in our quest for the speed record.
This massive bomb went off.
That was pretty awesome.
We've got an amazing run in lava.
We started off the wind and went under the bridge
and crashed and then they fixed it in the boat
and they're on the way here.
This isn't about setting a record.
It's not about being the fastest.
It's all about doing the thing.
It's about what went into this.
It's about strength of character.
They're limping in right now on a frame
that's busted up, the tube is patched,
but they're making it and they're finishing.
It looks like they're going like this.
We hit it, we were square, we were going through
and we decided to hear from you.
This idea that you can throw yourself at an audacious goal
knowing full well that there's a chance
that you will fail
and accepting the fact that the only way out
is by going through
and that you and the community of people
you surround yourself with
are equipped to handle great adversity.
You might come to understand that the greatest sense
of action in both adventure and life
is not in achieving greatness
but in striving to make it through
and in the companionship of others
that you experience along the way.
It needs a pretty good overhaul
before we're able to use it for anything
but we were talking about decking, astroturf,
maybe a firepan and some camp chairs.
One of the more kind of notable rapids
here in the Grand Crystal,
right at the top we went over, pour over
and broke this thing in multiple spots.
We've got a paddle right here
that was used as a little bit of a support piece.
This was kind of one of those spare backup backup backup plans.
It's pretty exciting for Johnny
because this whole front part of the boat
in a class five rapid
went underwater.
There's two guys sitting on a porch
and they're drinking a beer after work one day.
There's a dog laying on the end of the porch
and he's looking himself and one guy looks
at the other one and says,
man, sure wish I could do that.
And the other guy says,
that dog can bite you.
You know, the whole game that we've got here on Earth,
we're lucky to, you know,
we're kind of a pretty lucky little visit here.
Hello humans or whatever.
