Never Let Your Dreams Die

This is the Daily Boost Podcast with Scott Smith. How are you? Come on in here. Man, today, a story of resilience. Resilience built in when this goal was attempted.

And resilience even amplified when maybe the outcome wasn't exactly what he wanted. Some disappointment, some excitement. Death Valley, 124 degrees. Oh, my.

What a journey this was. Glad you're here. It's me, Scott. Good to have you. Thanks for stopping by. Yeah, back from Death Valley, California. I just spent a couple of days out there.

My friend, Croy Sather, he's an ultra marathon runner and decided to go out there and see if he could break the Badwater Crossing. It's a solo self-contained crossing. We couldn't help him. He had a little card.

He had to push along, had his water, had everything in it, the water being the key player here. And we went there to help them. I remember back in November when he was on my Face Your Passion inner circle call.

And he just announced to the group, surprisingly to all of us, he said, Scott, I know what I want to do. I know what my passion is. It's great. What is it?

Let's go do it. He said, I'm a world record holder. I like to do stuff like this. I'm going to go run across Death Valley again. He was the only person to get the permit to do it this year, by the way.

Hundreds of people apply. He's the only one to get it. Only one ran that crossing. Well, we thought it was kind of crazy, to be honest with you. And anybody I've ever talked to about running across Death Valley in August says the same thing.

What, is this guy crazy? But he headed down that path. Needed money too, because you'll find if you want to face your passion, that fund your passion comes into play too. It's like, you could be at the job at your office right now thinking, yeah, man, I'd love to face my passion and do what I love to do, but how am I going to pay for it?

It's a problem. That's why we teach people to do both. Got a sponsor for Croy. A lot of money too. This dream became possible simply because he decided to do it.

If you've ever thought about what you want to do, If you ever thought it's impossible from where you sit right now, why you're so confused, why it feels so foggy, so it's so hard for you to, to move forward. It's probably because you don't have the information and you don't know how you're going to pay for it. I see it way too many times.

And we got a sponsor and went after it. And as I told you a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go out there to support him. I was supporting my camera crew. I was the producer on this project.

We hired some great guys at Nat Geo quality camera crew. And we were getting amazing footage of this thing. But have you ever gone off to go after something, facing your passion? And this was passionate for me, too, to go support him.

And everything was hard. Nothing was easy. Not one single step of it. I was laughing about it by the end of this journey. So many things happened. I won't have time to tell you today what I went through personally.

Not that it matters, except I got stuck in Vegas for two and a half days. Terrible stuff. I picked a couple of shows, too. But, you know, my wife still mad at me about that.

Every single thing went wrong. Nothing was easy. Nothing went incredibly wrong. Nothing was dangerous wrong. But everything went wrong before it went right.

Nothing was easy. So we made our way out there in the desert. Stayed at one of the oasis inns out there. And got going on Wednesday morning. Packed up early.

It was dark. We headed out to the Badwater Basin to get ready. It was kind of fun to be out there. We had some tourists out there that were seeing, well, what's this crazy dude going to be doing running across the desert?

Already about 105 degrees. We got him loaded, got him ready to go. And then he did what he did. He took off walking, pushing this little car just over three mile an hour.

And we settled in. And if you've never done something like this to, I began to call this an expedition because I've never done this kind of thing either. But when you're creeping along at, you know, two mile an hour behind somebody who's running across the desert and the sun starts to rise, as soon as it comes over the ridge, the line of fire as a sun comes across the ridge and that line of shadow and sun kind of moves closer to you. When it hits you, it feels like fire in your face.

If you've never done that, if you've never just dragged three mile an hour through the desert, you haven't been to Death Valley. It's a beautiful place. It's like Mars.

And it's gorgeous in so many ways, but it is just brutal. We even had a flat tire at noon in Death Valley. Big SUV tire got punctured by a little rock.

Had four big strong guys having to change a tire in the desert. Asphalt pavement, 200 degrees. Nothing was easy about this. And while this is going on, by the way, Croy is marching along down the desert.

He's got his water. He's got his cooling rags. He's just marching along, keeps on going. And everything was good for a very, very long time. But the temperatures got hotter.

We came past the Furnace Creek Ranger Station. They have a thermometer there. It's a famous thermometer. And we arrived there and it was 118. And we left, it was 124.

I'm not sure it ever got any cooler than that. And as we went through the day, Croy kept doing what he was doing, drinking a lot of water, and I said, I think he's drinking a lot of water. He's dousing himself quite a bit.

Remember I told you things did not go exactly right. Things were a little bit difficult in this. We got to the hotel a little bit later than we expected to do the night before.

And he had 17 and a half gallons of water, and the goal was to have them frozen in the hotel, in the freezers there, give him frozen water that would thaw out as he went so he could cool himself, keep his core cool.

Well, that water didn't freeze all the way. It went anyway. The cart had a thermal compartment in it, and it wasn't built as well as it should have been, and it was a little warmer than it should have been. And because Croy was so hot, he kept going in and out of it, opening it, and just melted the water faster.

So I was watching him as we went down this road, and little by little started to see some signs, kept checking on him. I'd see him maybe off balance a little bit, throwing away a lot of water, too, because the water would get hot. He'd have it out in his cup in front of him. He'd just toss it out, and he'd get more water.

It wasn't looking good, but it was holding up okay. But then we hit a grind, a hill that seemed to go on forever. And I didn't think he was going to make it. He actually stopped at the top of this thing and he was imbalanced.

If you see somebody from a distance, again, I couldn't help him. We could check on him. We could see how he was doing. He was kind of, I don't know, having trouble standing up.

We later found he was almost passing out. So we're getting ready to go through the night on this thing. And we were in between hotels. I was probably going to be in the car all night long watching him because he was looking unstable.

We weren't going to leave him out there. And somewhere along about maybe 730 or so, I just noticed something. I don't know what it was. I said, stop. And I got out of the truck and I called him.

I called him. I said, wait. I got up there and said, what's going on, man? He looked at me, a guy's dream about to die. He said, I'm getting too hot. I can't control my temperature anymore.

Heart rate was about 109 just standing there. And I don't have any more cold water. I don't have enough water to finish. I said, you can't finish? He said, no, I've used the water for, I can't even finish the race.

I said, hold on. I ran back to the truck. Our sponsor, Colin, was there. And I said, Colin, he says he can't finish, doesn't have the water. Come on, we've got to intervene.

Let's pull him out of this thing. And so we walked back up to him and I took control of this one. I took me about 10 minutes to talk him out of his dream, to talk him from killing himself, to get him to give up on the race.

Colin sat there and supported him emotionally. And eventually he gave up. Then a big smile on his face. He realized it was over. Well, I packed up everything and we dragged him down to, there happened to be a hotel about, it was about a two hour walk, but it was about a five minute drive.

Happened to be a hotel. And they happened to have a pool. And so we get there. We get him in the pool. He jumps in this pool and he stays there. And on the way home, his heart was burning.

His lungs were burning. He was borderline delirious, but we're 90 miles from anything. Little by little, he kind of came around. I think we almost lost Corey that night.

And he'll say that. He'll say we saved his life. I don't know that to be true, but I do think if we had let him walk another half an hour, we might have lost him.

And it was a tough thing, a tough thing to pull a guy's dream away from him. And then to go back to the hotel and get up and have to do some post-race interviews and pull everything together to see what we can do with this thing. I mean, he went to make a documentary. He wanted to break a record.

His dream was to do this, to have a TED Talk and everything else. And he saw nothing but bad. And his contract said, potentially, that he wouldn't get paid anymore if he didn't finish the race.

It was a big conversation that we had. It took us all day to do it, all day, completely with a $300 stake that night. So it got a little better. It was good.

Yeah, one stake, $300. At the end of the day, what we found was a story of resilience. So he had broken the record before. He had run Badwater before.

He had one of five guys to ever complain it, and he has the third fastest time. He wanted to go take the whole thing. He had run across America. a 26 mile marathon every day for a hundred days until he got across America.

He had done all this stuff. It seemed like this was completely over and he was crashing and burning. And, and one thing I've learned over time is that the story that you get, the gift you get from trying is often very different than when you thought you were going to get.

And God works in mysterious ways. And what he thought he was going to get from this was absolutely the opposite of what he got. And that as time kind of played out that day,

And you get a little away from it a little bit. You start to kind of see the light. You start to smile a little bit. And we had a ton of work to do just to get unwound and get out of there again.

Like I said, this trip did not go good for anybody. I got delayed in Vegas for two and a half days because the airline kept bouncing flights because it was too hot.

But by the end of that, Croy was on his way back. He had a cart. He had not planned how to get the cart back home. He had all the supplies he had purchased.

He hadn't planned for that. Wouldn't fit on the airplane. Couldn't do that. But you know, sometimes when you have what you think is a failure, sometimes what you need is what comedians call a long, silent ride.

When a comedian has a bad set, and they just go home and they don't say a word. The whole drive home, no radio, no nothing. That's what he did. And we talked.

I said, man, don't stop and talk to anybody. Just go. And he did. He drove all the way home. Took his car with him. Got a one-way car rental. Didn't talk and see anybody.

Was not on the phone at all. Very little social media. I said, just let us sit, man. Let us sit. We got home. Saw his family and And now we're at the place right now.

We're trying to figure out what to do, but try to help them with this. But the story is pretty amazing. The story of resilience. Here's the thing about this.

And one thing you have to understand, and maybe you get this already. It is hard to face your passion. It is hard to come up with this thing that you want to do, that you love to do, that challenges you. Inherently, it's hard to make it happen in your life.

Everything has to get moved around. And boy, did we move everything around to get this to happen. But then it's even harder to go do it. And if you don't succeed, it gets even harder.

but what you get from it's a crazy thing. I sleep in two hours a night for three or four nights in a row. That's hard to do. And yet you come out of it going, man, man, what an experience.

So I don't know where he's going to end up. I know he's healthy. You know, he's good. I know he survived. It's just fine. I know he's not going to ever try it again.

That's already there. I do expect this to become some kind of a film. I think it's going to do. We actually have a, the people who did free solo, they made that film.

We've had, been in contact with them and talks with them about them taking this over. It's not done. And that's the thing about whatever you want to do.

I'm so passionate about this stuff. I love people say, man, I just want to go for it. I just love it. I will do anything to support anybody who says, let's go for it, including figure out how to get the money like I did with Croy.

Crazy stuff. I just love when it happens. I also love sometimes when you don't succeed because as painful as it is, you'll learn a completely different lesson.

I still know what the lesson is for him. But I know that multiple times in multiple intervening conversations, we just are encouraging him. And I encourage you to do this today with whatever you're doing, wherever you are in your life.

If it's not going your way, look for the gift you're being given. There is a gift right in front of you. There is something more powerful than you can ever imagine that's been put on your lap. I know it happened to me.

It's going to happen to you too. There is no no in you, right? Just decide what you want to do and say, let's go do it. Will it be fun? Will it be easy?

You know, no, it never is. That's all I got today. Let's get out of here. I'll see you tomorrow on the Daily Boost.