Episodes
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Cross-country skier Veronika Mayerhofer is a Mental Performance Specialist at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Centre in Austria. In this episode, she analyses the responses from this season’s superhuman guests.
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When endurance athlete Aron Anderson won 2017’s Wings for Life World Run, he raced an incredible 90km. The Swede talks Rob through his amazing sporting CV: he’s competed in four Paralympic Games in three different sports, swum from Sweden to Finland, climbed Kilimanjaro and skied to the South Pole.
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Missing episodes?
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In 2020, American ultra-runner John Kelly ran England's 268-mile Pennine Way in record time, breaking a 30-year-old record in the process. A week later, he lost it. He tells Rob what it took to win it back…
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Mountaineer and explorer Saray Khumalo became the first Black African woman to summit Everest - but it was far from a simple trip. Three previous attempts had been thwarted by lethal landslides, earthquakes, bad weather and, sadly, numerous deaths. However, this didn't stop Saray's drive and determination to push towards her dream.
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Camille Herron is an icon of ultra running, and the first person to hold the 50k, 100k and 24-hour world records simultaneously. She tells Rob about how she ran 270km in a single day.
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In 2012, Erden Eruç successfully completed a unique circumnavigation of the globe – his journey had been entirely human-powered. The Turkish adventurer had travelled alone; on foot and by rowboat, kayak, canoe and bicycle.
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When Lael Wilcox won the 2016 Trans Am Bike Race, she cemented her position as the world’s greatest long-distance cyclist. Even more amazingly, she had conquered the 4,200-mile course while still a relative novice.
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Welshman Ash Dykes became the first person to walk the 4,000-mile length of China’s Yangtze River in 2019. He tells Rob how he overcame extreme terrain and temperatures – and the threat of bear attacks – to do it.
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Spanish endurance athlete Kílian Jornet is a legendary mountain runner and ski mountaineer. Without a doubt, he's one of the greatest of his generation.
But in 2017, he achieved something that – even by his own mind-boggling standards – was incredible: he travelled up Everest twice, without oxygen, in the space of a week.
In this episode, Kílian tells Rob about how his upbringing has shaped his love of nature, and what motivated him to take on the world’s highest peaks in such spectacular fashion.
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Ultrarunning legend Rob Pope returns with more stories from the limits of human endurance.
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In this extra special episode, Scottish cyclist Jenny Graham chatted to Rob Pope about how she broke the female world record for cycling around the globe – unsupported – in 2018, smashing Italian Paola Gianotti’s four-year record by an extraordinary 20 days.
Recorded and streamed live during Red Bull Timelaps – the world’s longest one-day cycling event, which challenges riders to accumulate as much distance as possible within 25 hours – Jenny’s story of cycling 18,000 miles, through 16 countries, completely self-supported, served as much-needed inspiration to event participants – and will to any budding endurance cyclists.
Averaging more than 156 miles a day for 124 days, Jenny gives a thrilling account of her extraordinary journey. From being greeted by beautiful blinding sunrises after long nights of riding, to experiencing new magical cultures and ways of life, to the many incredible and unforgettable interactions she had with those she met on her journey, Jenny describes the gratitude she felt every day as she made her way around the globe, powered by her own steam. But, as Jenny describes, it wasn’t without its challenges: freezing temperatures, deadly wildlife, illness, and overwhelming exhaustion made for some truly testing days, which saw Jenny pushed to the very edge of her physical and mental limits…
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Paralympic hand cyclist Karen Darke was just 21 when she set off on a climbing trip that would change her life forever. Leading a climb on a sea cliff outside Aberdeen, she fell as the last bit of secured protection came away. Three days later, she woke up in intensive care to the news she’d broken her neck and back, paralysing her from the waist down.
In this episode, Rob Pope chats to Karen about her climbing accident and the achievements that followed it – from hand cycling across the Himalayas on a specially made tandem and spending a month in minus 30°C temperatures crossing Greenland on skies, to the highs and lows of Paralympic training, and a punishing schedule that took her to London and Rio...
Karen also reveals how she was forced to confront her fears and past trauma head-on when she agreed to climb the revered and unforgiving sheer granite behemoth of El Capitan in Yosemite, California. Twenty metres up and petrified, Karen shares the mental process she used to overcome her fear and take control of her mind, as she physically took on the equivalent of 4,000 pull-ups to scale the kilometre-high sheer granite rock face.
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Boundary-pushing big wall climber, Sasha DiGiulian, holds multiple first ascents and more than 30 female firsts for some of the world’s most revered and difficult big wall climbs. In this episode, Rob Pope chats to Sasha about her journey from six-year-old indoor climber to world-renowned pro and free soloist - touching on her historic ascent of the Rocky Mountains Trilogy as the first woman (and only second person ever) to complete the trio of climbs in one season.
From unexpectedly having to free solo one of her earliest big wall first-ascents as the holds crumbled away in her hands 1,000ft up without any protection, to experiencing the exhilaration of climbing in a flow state whilst conquering the 5.14-grade Rocky Mountains Trilogy in 2018, Sasha chats about the risks and rewards that come with climbing when the ground is way beneath her feet.
She describes the moment she thought she was paralysed, and reveals the method she sometimes uses when she’s feeling scared of falling mid-climb by discussing her relationship with fear.
“Even after 20 years of climbing, I don’t think fear ever goes away.”
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Gabriel Cordell became the first person to roll across the United States in a standard wheelchair - giving Rob Pope a lot to chat about with him as they shared tales of their incredible journeys travelling the width of North America.
Supported by a team of volunteers, the 3,100-mile journey from California to New York took 100 days to complete, and saw Gabriel pushing his chair for an average of 30 miles a day.
In the episode, Gabriel lays bare just how torturous this journey this really was, describing everything from the savage terrain he faced in Pennsylvania, as he rolled for 450 miles across the Appalachian Mountains (losing 15 pounds along the way), to the agonising shoulder pain he experienced as he reached mile 650, leaving him temporarily unable to roll his chair another metre.
But, as he reveals to Rob in the episode, it was such a willingness to withstand pain that saw him reach the finish line in his hometown of West Hempstead – and something, he says, we are all capable of. The difference, he says, in somebody accomplishing something extraordinary or not, is simply about overcoming the 'threshold...'
Gabriel also reveals the series of life events that later culminated in him seeking redemption through this Herculean physical and mental challenge – a journey that began 20 years previous when a car accident changed the course of his life forever.
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Rob Pope catches up with British adventurer Anna McNuff, who ran 2,352 miles completely barefoot across Great Britain. That's the equivalent of 90 marathons over everything from gritty tarmac to muddy moorland.
"By the end, the last two weeks, I was just a shell of a woman. I just wasn’t even there. I was going through all the motions but mentally I was gone..." reveals Anna, as she explains to Rob the mental toil she was feeling as she approached the London finish line -- having travelled all the way from the Shetland Islands.
From how she coped mentally with such a long (and often painful) journey, to how her body also learned to adapt to the relentless stress and exposure, Anna gives an epic insight into the workings of her mind and body as she pushed them to their limits.
Anna also reveals what went into preparing for the challenge – namely, the one-and-a-half years she spent learning to run barefoot – as well as her motivations for doing it. And she reveals some of the unforgettable moments and encounters she had along the way that made all the hard graft worthwhile -- including one particular 24-mile run that she enjoyed with one giant, and very inspirational, lobster...
Read more about Anna and her adventure at https://win.gs/BarefootBritain
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Tim Don was out for routine training ahead of the Kona IRONMAN World Championship when he had an accident with a truck - breaking his neck and leaving him with carbon fibre ring drilled into his skull (known as a 'halo') to help the fracture heal.
Just six months and five days later he completed the Boston Marathon in less than two hours and 50 minutes.
Rob Pope asks this extraordinary Superhuman about his brilliant career leading up to that horrific incident in Hawaii which led him to becoming a world record holder; what he remembers of the incident and how he recovered from the 'hangman's fracture' and not being able to move from his belly button up.
From having to sleep bolt upright in a chair, to having the screws in his skull regularly tightened to keep the halo place, Tim lays bare the torture he went through in what he describes as "the toughest two months of my life".
But through sheer dogged perseverance, Tim explains to Rob how he refused to let the accident – or his agonising brace – put his hopes of competing again on hold: continuing to train in the gym, and later on the turbo trainer, to gradually build up his strength and fitness. And as he reveals in the episode, his training and tenacity didn't just pay off. It led to a comeback of epic proportions...
Also watch the Red Bull TV documentary on Tim 'The Man with the Halo' http://win.gs/ManWithTheHalo
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Rob Pope speaks to trials bike legend and Red Bull athlete Dougie Lampkin about his record-breaking 37-mile wheelie around the Island of Man's TT course. The feat, which Dougie took months of painstaking preparation and saw Dougie pushed to the very limits of his physical and mental capacity.
Chatting to Rob about what exactly went into making it happen, Dougie opens up about the many setbacks he endured on his journey to the start line – and how, at one point, he even pulled the plug on the project completely, as he began to believe he had taken on the impossible.
He also reveals the overwhelming pressure he experienced on the day itself, when swarmed by film crews and spectators – and haunted by the underlying knowledge that, with one small slip, the project would be over.
And as Dougie relives the course, section by section, with Rob – from riding over the Snaefell mountain road amid volatile winds, to the crippling pain he felt in his back and legs as he attempted to maintain control of the bike going into the home-straight – the knife-edge nature of this never-before-done feat becomes eye-wateringly clear...
Watch the Red Bull TV documentary 'Wheelie Man' at https://win.gs/WheelieMan
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