Stephan Kesting, author of Perseverance, drops by for a chat!

Paddling 1600 kilometers in less than 50 days in boreal Saskatchewan, Stephan shares some great pointers, some definitely do not do tips, wild animal stories, and how much fun it is to duct tape ruined maps back together.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and good day, eh? Welcome to the Super Good Camping Podcast. My name is Pamela.

SPEAKER_02: 0:04

I'm Tim.

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

And we are from supergoodcamping.com. We're here because we're on a mission to inspire other people to get outside and enjoy camping adventures such as we have as a family. Today's guest is an adventurer, jujitsu practitioner and instructor, and a firefighter. He has traversed the Canadian North for over 40 years, both on his own and as a guide. He has a master's degree in biology from McGill University, which has informed and deepened his appreciation for the natural world. As a firefighter for over Over 25 years, Stephen has been commended for his courage, being awarded the Canadian National Medal for Bravery. He has been published in canoeing anthologies. He's the author of several jiu-jitsu instructional books and has written thousands of online and magazine articles in the martial arts and outdoor adventure space. Follow him on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, or also on Blue Sky because we found him on Blue Sky. We did too. And via his popular podcast, The Strenuous Life with Stephen Kesting. Please welcome Stephen Kesting. Stephen Kesting. Casting author of Perseverance.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03

I'll answer to anything, but thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06

Thanks for coming.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08

Cool.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

Yeah, welcome.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10

I have to ask right out of the gate. So it's a very cool book. Thank you very much for the pre-published copy. We both quite enjoyed it. What was the impetus to go on the trip and what becomes the impetus to write the book?

SPEAKER_01: 1:30

Well, I've always loved the outdoors. I think one of my very earliest memories is waking up in a tent when my parents had a place on Crane Lake, which is a place in sort of central Ontario. And they were thinking about building there. They didn't. But I remember waking up in the tent and going outside. And I don't think it's an implanted memory. I think it's true. And then I, like all other kids growing up in Ontario, I did the canoe camp thing. Shout out to Camp Big Canoe. And Sparrow Lake, I also went there. And so, yeah, it was just a part of a normal upbringing. But then that kind of shifted. In my 20s, in my late 20s, I went through a couple of tragedies. Two of my younger brothers died in quick succession, totally preventable accidents. And I ended up using the outdoors as kind of a place of healing or processing that and just to create the space to be on your own and go through those emotions and I guess ultimately not feel judged. And there's just something about being in nature that I think is inherently healing, at least for most people. And you can argue that there's evolutionary reasons for that, but that's my happy place. And so if we jump forward a bunch of years, when I was 45 years old, I was dying. I was dying of kidney failure. I had polycystic kidney disease. I'd inherited it from my mom. It's a genetic condition. Basically, your kidneys get larger and larger and larger. And as they get larger, they work less and less and less well. And eventually, I had to have a kidney transplant. I got a kidney from my brother, for which I'm eternally grateful. And in the last little while before going through the transplant, and one of my last cogent thoughts before going under anesthesia was, for the operation was, you know, maybe if I come through this, if I survive this, and if I get enough function back, I can finally do that trip in that part of the Canadian North that I'd been thinking about for, I think about 25 years at that point. And so in some ways that trip was, you know, the reward or the light at the end of the tunnel, if I can do everything right, if I can go through all the physiotherapy, if I can, you know, follow my doctor's instructions, if I can, make it through all this really quite a grueling process. Maybe I can do that. It was also, I think, a way of coming to terms with my own mortality, because there's nothing like mortality as a memento mori. There's nothing like a memento mori of nearly dying to remind you that you are going to die someday. So you might as well go do the things that you have always wanted to do. And in some ways, it's a big middle finger to death. You know, hey, you didn't get me today. you know, I'm going to go do something crazy. So I went and did something crazy. That's excellent.

SPEAKER_00: 4:29

And you survived. And I

SPEAKER_01: 4:31

survived. It'd be hard to be sitting

SPEAKER_00: 4:33

here and have a conversation on this. I never know.

SPEAKER_01: 4:36

It could be a documentary. Like a guy goes and, you know, plays with bears by himself for an entire summer and it doesn't, and I'll film all of it and it won't end well. Yes,

SPEAKER_00: 4:47

you're right. When you had a lot of wildlife interactions with your trip, did you want to just tell us about some of those?

SPEAKER_01: 4:54

Sure. So I started the trip in northern Saskatchewan in the boreal forest. So that's, people think of Saskatchewan as this flat area full of wheat and barley and other grains. And that's true for southern Saskatchewan. It's true if you're driving to TransCanada. But as you go further north, you enter into the Canadian Shield, which is very, very similar to Ontario or Minnesota. You know, the rocky granitic hills with spruce, a larch. Aspen. And so I started there. I started an hour past where the paved road ends in Saskatchewan. And so that's black bear country. Then as you head further north and you start crossing over into the, through the tree line, you start getting tundra grizzly, brown bear. And then you move out onto the tundra where you still have tundra grizzly. And now you start adding other large animals in like caribou. And then when you get down towards Hudson Bay, which is where I ended up, I ended up at a small little village, an Inuit village called Arviat on the west coast of Hudson Bay. You go through a very dense polar bear region because all the polar bears that are there in that Hudson Bay is something like a thousand kilometers across and 1300 kilometers south to north. And in the winter, that's all covered with ice. And on that ice are polar bears looking for seal, basically. And in summer, when that ice melts, all the polar bear go and sit on the shore, basically getting hungry and grumpy and waiting for winter when they can eat again. So you end up with a very dense polar bear concentration. So it was kind of a black bear to brown bear to white bear gradient as I went along the trip and I got increasingly bear annoyed as I went along.

SPEAKER_02: 6:43

Yeah. And I'd be very nervous as I went along for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 6:47

I recall some encounters you had with a bear.

SPEAKER_01: 6:52

Yeah. So right in that transition area where you're going from the forest to the tree line, that happened for me on Newton Lake. So Newton Lake is this amazing lake. It's 150 kilometers long. It's the most complex and beautiful lake I've ever been on, I think. And there used to be a fishing lodge on that lake. And I didn't know where it was. They weren't returning my emails. They weren't picking up my calls because I wanted to establish contact with them saying, hey, I'm coming through. Maybe if I was injured, I could use them as a potential flyout point, or maybe I could fly some emergency supplies in there if I broke something. Never got in touch with them. And then I heard a rumor they'd gone out of business. And so, okay, well, that kind of takes that out of the picture. And then on Newton Lake, I paddle around a corner, and there's the lodge. And I paddle up to the lodge, and it basically looks as if, I don't know, there'd been a zombie attack in the sense that it was in full swing. All the boats were out. The tools were still in the shed. All the little cabins were still there, but everyone had just vanished. And So I started, I just wanted to explore. It was too early in the day to stop. So I started heading up through part of the lodge system by the little cabins. And the cabins had been pretty destroyed. Wolverine and Bear had been in there. So I'm kind of watching out for Bear. But there are no tracks. So there's some very old tracks in the ground. So I'm not too worried. If there was an active Bear, I would see it. I'm an expert outdoorsman. I would see it for sure. So I continue up towards the lodge. And the lodge is this really big building sitting on this crest of a sandy ridge overlooking this beautiful bay on Newton Lake. And as I'm going around, I see that they've got bare boards. And for your listeners who don't know maybe what bare boards are, they're sheets of plywood that you drive three or four inch nails through and then turn it upside down so that the nails are all pointing up. And you put that around your cabin. So a bear trying to get in will step on the nails and decide not to bother your cabin. So I'm going around. Every door is protected by bear boards. And then I get to the main door of the lodge and the bear board has been shoved aside. I'm like, who would do that? That's just going to allow the bears in and they're going to go in and ruin the joint. Still hadn't clicked in. Bears are smart. Bears can move bear boards as it turns out. And then I realized three things in quick succession. Number one, the main door of the cabin has indeed been kicked in. And there's a big gaping hole. Number two, I am surrounded by piles of bear turd. And number three, there's something growling at me from inside the lodge. So it's one thing to come across a bear on a hiking trail or a portage. Usually they run. But if you corner a bear in its den, or even worse, at a kill, now it's territorial. Now it's trying to defend its den. Maybe it's cubs. I don't know if there are cubs in there. You might trigger a defensive attack. And of course, I'd left my bear spray and my shotgun in my canoe, which is now about 300 meters away. And yeah, I can't outrun a bear. So I, that was a, that was a mistake. I had just, yeah, I'm just going to look around. I'm an expert. What could possibly go wrong? I got complacent is the answer. Yeah. So I now start backing off. You know, I don't want to run. I don't want to trigger it chasing reflex. So I'm backing off. And I start going back the most direct route to the canoe possible. And now I go through a sandy area, a different sandy area. And that sandy area is just rotten with bear prints, including some that couldn't have been more than 30 minutes old. I mean, they're still wet. And the sides of each claw mark looks like somebody has gone in there with a razor blade cutting through the sand. I'm not a hunter. I'm not a tracker. But I can tell when a print has just been done. Yeah, so this bloody bear has taken over this enormous lodge. He's got the nicest view of any bear in history. He's just sitting there looking out over his lake. And as it turns out, there is somebody who's trying to rebuild that lodge system. So what happens there? I'm not much of a fisherman. I'll fish if given the opportunity, but the fishing on that lake would be amazing. So if that lodge opens up, it's kind of bittersweet. On the one hand, I had that enormous lake to myself. On the other hand, it would allow other people to experience that. So I'm torn. I know the guy who's trying to restart it. I like him. So I'm vouching for him, rooting for him. But on the other hand, it's a special privilege to have such a gigantic body of water and such a unique body of water all to yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 11:59

When you said that you didn't do much fishing on this trip or hadn't planned to do fishing on this trip.

SPEAKER_01: 12:04

Yeah. I mean, the fishing in the north is amazing. Whether you're talking grayling or on Newton Lake, for example, you see these fins come up. It's like a mini shark coming up. And so there are enormous lake trout and enormous pike in that lake. And they've basically been untouched for close to a decade now. And it's an enormous lake and there's not a lot of fishing pressure on it. The reason I didn't fish is number one, I had to push as hard and as fast as possible over a long distance. That trip was over a thousand miles, about a thousand miles, 1600 kilometers. I only had a certain amount of food and there were a lot of upriver sections and over watershed sections connecting two different watersheds and that's slow going. And so I would eventually run out of food and Another constraint was as summer goes on, the storms near Hudson Bay get worse and worse. So arriving in Hudson Bay in mid-August is very different from arriving there at the end of August, very different from arriving there in September, because now the odds of getting pinned down by a four or five day long storm really go through the roof. So I didn't want to waste time fishing. Also, I didn't want... The main way of staying safe against bear... was not by minimizing smell and i didn't want fish on my hands i didn't want fish smell in my boat i didn't want fish smell on my cooking gear i didn't want to create fish smell at a campsite so it was for time expediency and for smell reduction uh the the main way you end up with bear trouble is when bears figure out that you have food I mean, look at what happens in Algonquin Park. The bears have learned that, you know, ripping open the bags that these silly humans bring is a pretty good way to get a tasty snack. Yeah. So

SPEAKER_02: 14:08

or coolers or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 14:10

Yeah. Yeah. When you mentioned cooking. So did I remember in the book you said something about a burner. So you took like a was it a twig stove or it was more of a you took cam fuel with you?

SPEAKER_01: 14:21

Yes, I did take an MSR stove. just a white gas stove. The twig stoves are okay, but if you're dealing with really wet fuel, and especially as you get further north onto the tundra, you might spend an awful lot of time with a set of clippers trying to gather enough willow branches. So just to have something that reliably puts out a ton of heat. I also wasn't cooking that often. I was cooking once a day. Everything else was a cold meal. And I would occasionally light a fire, sometimes just to keep the bugs down. Sometimes at the height of black fly season, you have to light a fire. And as a firefighter, I do everything I can to stay out of smoke. In the last 50 years, the profession of firefighting has evolved tremendously, where we basically have close to a zero tolerance for inhaling smoke. So we're wearing the SCBA, the self-contained breathing apparatus. We're using ventilation. And now you go on a camping trip and the bugs are bad. You light a fire and you stand right in the smoke. Maybe it's a little bit better for you because it's not as many plastics burning. It's wood, but it's still not good for you. So mostly cooking on a little white gas burner.

SPEAKER_00: 15:40

The mention of the bugs just had me cringing and itching. It sounds like it was pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_01: 15:46

Yeah, the analogy that I use with the bugs is, it's like somebody tells you, I went to outer space and I hated it. I didn't like it at all. Well, when you went into outer space, were you wearing a spacesuit? Oh, no, no, I just stepped out of the spaceship and my eyeballs began to freeze and I got decompression syndrome and I went blind. Like, well, you can't go into outer space without a spacesuit. You can't go into the far north during... peak bug season without the right gear either. Now that's long, you know, even in hot weather, which happens sometimes, long sleeve shirts that bugs can't bite through, gloves, taking special care of how to get the sleeves to fit over the end of the gloves. I put thumb loops on most of my clothing so that I can put my thumb through that thumb loop and then that pulls it up over the glove. or a mosquito, a bug jacket. And it's kind of oppressive to be in a bug jacket for 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day. But when there's no wind, then that's what you have to do. And it just gives me even more respect for the native people who are out there and just basically using lots of stoicism. Once in a while, you hear things like, yeah, they used to rub rancid bear grease on their faces. And honestly, if I was up there without a bug net, I would try rancid bear grease as well. I don't know if it would work, but I would try it.

SPEAKER_02: 17:19

So you ran into it, and this I found interesting, just in how you managed to save some wet maps. So right out of the gate, for those that don't know, right out of the gate, You went over and a whole bunch of gear went in with you. And it never occurred to you because the tubes for the maps are waterproof, except the tiny holes where the straps join. So water penetration into the maps, much as you waterproofed them, they sat overnight or 20-ish hours in water. Then they were just a glued together mass. What's the win there?

SPEAKER_01: 18:01

What's the

SPEAKER_02: 18:01

wind there? Not for that situation. I mean, how do you come out the other

SPEAKER_01: 18:06

end? Yeah, there was no wind. That was a disaster. And it was entirely my fault. And it was complacency again, right? The bear incident and the going over in the first two hours of the trip. That was, you know, I was looking down when I should have been looking up. I was looking at a map when I should have had a paddle in my hand. I should have been paying attention to the wind. and how it was shifting. And I wasn't. I was just happy that I was going fast and had a little sail up. And sailing a canoe is great. But unless you're rafted up with multiple canoes, if you're a sail in a canoe without a big keel, then you're tippy. And if the wind shifts and hits you from the side, you've got, yeah, exactly. You've got this massive force multiplier of the sail. You know, levers work. As it turns out, Science and engineering figured out something pretty important when they figured out levers. And if you have this five-foot mast on your canoe and somebody pushes at the top, you go over. So, you know, that was a massive comeuppance for me. And it's not like I hadn't sailed canoes before. It's not like I hadn't spent 10,000 hours in a boat before. But I got sloppy. and yeah as you said all the maps that i had were waterproofed and they were in a waterproof case but i didn't test the waterproofing and so what's the opposite of a shout out a uh i used map seal and yeah map seal might be okay to keep a couple of raindrops off your maps but if your maps are sitting in water they're they're going to melt so two days Two hours into the trip, I basically melted most of my maps and I had little shards of paper and that's, it's a long way to go. I had something like 50 maps that were both one to 50,000 and one to 250,000. Now, yeah, I had a GPS as well, but navigating just off of a GPS is, especially in a complex area, if you just need a direction, Okay, GPS, I'm here and I want to go there. Yeah, it'll give you a direction. Great. But that's not what canoe tripping is. Canoes, you're going around islands, you're trying to find the right channel. And then as you zoom in on your GPS, what looked like one island suddenly splits up into five islands. And so navigating off that little GPS screen is really difficult. It's also battery intensive. So what if it's not sunny for a week? What if it's rainy for a week?

SPEAKER_02: 20:47

Yeah, how's your panel

SPEAKER_01: 20:48

going to work? Exactly. You're not going to be able to charge your GPS with your solar panel. If you hook it up to your phone, now you've got another thing that you're going to be draining power. So what works for a quick hike in a provincial park or even a two- or three-day hike, you need a different technology if you're going for– I had it planned for 50 days. So the maps getting shredded was a real– Point of difficulty caused me so much trouble I basically every time the Sun came out even a little bit I would take all these maps out and lay them out and put rocks on them and like try and dry them and when I ended up with this massive collection of pieces of paper roughly the size of your hand and Used up every piece of duct tape I had trying to hold them together to create this mosaic and then I went through and the native village of South End and which is right at the bottom of reindeer Lake and bought a bunch more duct tape, not to fix my canoe and fix the maps. So yeah, the, it speaks to the necessity of if there's some mission critical item, you need a way to repair it or to duplicate it. Now, how do you, and you need to, if your mission critical item depends on something, say waterproofing, anti shout out to map seal, Yeah, I don't want you as a sponsor. Then test it. Take that, what I should do is take those maps, put them in the bathtub. Yeah. You get this great rain gear at the thrift store. You score and you get this helly Hanson hard weather, whatever their top of their line thing is. You know what? It's totally worth putting it on and standing in the shower. for half an hour while you're listening to a podcast to see if that rain gear actually works the way it's supposed to. Because it's one thing for your gear to fail when you're using your rain gear to run from your car to the Safeway. It's another thing when it's the one thing keeping you from hypothermia. Even on a four or five day trip, you can get hypothermia plenty easy in an afternoon. So yeah, test everything as often as you can. is I think one of the big take-home lessons that I learned on that trip.

SPEAKER_00: 23:14

Is there anything else you would have done differently for that trip? Or would you do that trip again if you were contemplating doing it again?

SPEAKER_01: 23:20

I've done part of that trip again. Last summer, I was hoping to do an expedition on the Tha'ane, which is a river to the north of there. So I set off, I flew into Newton Lake. My time was really limited. My best friend made the incredibly bad decision not to get married, but to get married in the end of July. So who gets married in the middle of canoeing season? I ask you. So I was, I was constrained. Uh, there were also a couple other reasons I couldn't go for the entire summer last summer. So I, I set out to do the Thane, but then I ran into such ice and wind on Newton Lake that it, it added like five or six days to the trip. And then I was like, Ooh, I, don't know if I have enough time to do the full trip. I might run out of food and I'm certainly going to miss the wedding. So I did the Fluiaza a second time, this time without the detailed maps that I would really like. So I have done it a second time. I've done other trips since then. But your question was, what would I have done different? I think I would have... So when you're pushing yourself that hard... There are only a couple of things that you can do to put money back into the bank account. When you're going day after day after day, it's like going with your credit card and saying, I'm not going to cook today. I'm just going to buy breakfast on my credit card. I'm going to buy lunch on my credit card, buy dinner on my credit card. I'm going to fuel up my car with a credit card. I'm going to pay my mortgage with my credit card. And you can do that for a while, but unless you're putting money into that account, you're going to end up in major trouble fairly quickly. So when you're pushing yourself day after day after day for 10, 12, 14 hours a day, that's paying for everything on your credit card. So how do you put stuff back in? There are really only a couple of ways. Number one is sleep. Number two is nutrition. And number three are drugs. Like when you've got pro athletes training four times a day, reason they're doing that is because they're cranked to the gills on steroids and stimulants so i'm not on steroids i'm not on testosterone replacement therapy i'm not on any of that stuff so that only leaves food and sleep as positive or we'll call sleep and rest those those things together are the only ways to pay off your credit card and In subsequent trips, what I did was I increased the amount of protein I was eating, and that helped significantly. That allowed for more repair of muscles. I have to be careful with eating too much protein because I only have one kidney. So it's this balance between how much protein do I eat to not knock out my kidney, but at the same time, if I'm pushing myself that hard, I need more, so I need to really hydrate. So Improving my diet somewhat helped. And then improving the quality of sleep helped. So things like an eye patch, like a sleep mask, that helped. Things like trying to regularize the time that I went to sleep and leaving a little bit of transition time at the end of the day. even just half an hour to just chill out as opposed to paddling all day, setting up a tent and then going to bed. And like, why am I not asleep? It's because you're still pumping with adrenaline and cortisol. That's why. So trying to create a little bit of a transition time, the darkness helped. I, yeah, I don't. Another thing that I tried that worked for me, there's one of the, It's funny. I don't smoke pot. I'm not a pothead. But I went to the head shop, I guess. The cannabis dispensary.

SPEAKER_02: 27:25

Head shop in the old days,

SPEAKER_01: 27:26

yes. Yeah, head shop in the old days. And got some CBN, which is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid that helps with sleep. And I tested it. First, I tested it at home. And then I never had any problems waking up from it. That was my big concern. What if a bear comes into the tent in the middle of the night, I don't want to be groggy waking up. So I never had, for me, it never hurt my sleep. It never hurt my waking up from sleep. So that helped. So yeah, so improving the quality of sleep and improving the quality of nutrition is something I would have done a little bit different. That's a long, long answer to your question. Sorry about that.

SPEAKER_02: 28:10

No, we like detailed stuff. but on the note of, of sleeping, I know you mentioned like physically a thousand miles is with a, Oh, I can't even remember how much you said. We think you had 250 pounds of gear. I can't remember what the canoe weighed, but it's almost 18 feet long. There's you in the canoe. I mean, that's, that's a lot to move. That's a lot to keep motoring around. Right. I know what you said. It took, it took a toll, especially in the early going on your shoulders. And then you ended up I want to say you ended up with a swollen hand at one point. How does that... Because those are things you want to recover from by doing things like sleeping, right? I can't imagine, unless you're a back sleeper and you're totally cool and that's all good, but if you roll around at all, that's got to interrupt your sleep. How much did that affect your sleeping rhythm?

SPEAKER_01: 29:05

Being sore all the time certainly didn't help, especially in the back. So one thing I've done on subsequent trips is change my pre-trip strength and conditioning a little bit. So on that trip that's covered in the book, the thousand mile solo, that I did a lot of preparation for, but it wasn't, I missed a certain area. And that's the posterior chain, basically your spinal erectors that hold you upright when you're sitting. I was pretty strong in a standing position when my spine is straight. But when you're sitting in a canoe, especially a narrow canoe where you've got a seat, you're basically sitting in an L position all day long. So now that's a different position from where I was strong. And so on subsequent trips, what I've done a lot more of, if any of your listeners are familiar with things like Romanian deadlifts or stiff-legged deadlifts, basically strengthening the spinal erectors in a bent position. And And really becoming more comfortable with being stable in that bent position that really helped reduce the amount of pain in my back. So that was an interesting discovery. And I do wonder if that would be transferable to other people or if this was just a sort of a uniqueness to my body and my set of injuries and wear and tear over the years. But it is difficult to sleep when you're in a lot of pain.

SPEAKER_00: 30:40

Well, and you'd mentioned, too, that you'd had a shoulder injury from jiu-jitsu before the trip and then also an electric skateboard. You're a racing electric skateboard. I would love to hear the story of what was going on with the electric skateboard.

SPEAKER_01: 30:54

So, yeah, before I did that trip, I had all these plans about how I would train very specifically, right? I would train for paddling by paddling. But then, because I'm stubborn... I buggered one shoulder by, I was training jiu-jitsu with a friend of mine. The friend of mine is smaller than I am, older than I am, not as experienced as I am. So he caught me in some weird arm lock, basically where your arm is getting forced behind the back, but it wasn't done the right way. It's like, I'm not giving up to this. I'm not tapping out to this. This is stupid. It's not even the proper way to apply this lock. So I got out. I got out by taking a big breath and then exhaling and just yanking my arm out a little bit. And I got out and good for me. But as soon as I cooled down and as soon as the adrenaline wore off, I was like, oh, I've really, you know, I've hurt something in there. So I strained or sprained something. And soon I could barely lift that hand above my shoulder. I had that trip planned at that point. That trip was in the books. It was coming. I had received permission from my wife-to-be to head off on this. I was starting to dehydrate food. I was like, oh God, I hope that this shoulder heals. Then I just bought one of those electric skateboards and my kid was on a bike. I was on the skateboard. We went out for some food and we're coming back. We started racing. So, you know, it's a valid question of what somebody in their late 40s is doing racing on a skateboard. But at some point, I don't know if it wasn't calibrated properly, if I wasn't riding properly. The nose dipped, I planted, and I planted hard on the pavement with my hand above my shoulder of my other arm. So now both shoulders were fairly injured. And I basically wasn't even able to do a push-up. Certainly not pull-ups, certainly not paddling. And so the only thing I could do to condition for that trip was cardio. At least I'm going to take the heart and lungs out of the equation. The heart and lungs are going to be good. I don't know about the rest of the body. So I went into that trip in excellent cardiovascular condition and terrible musculoskeletal condition. It turns out that the phrase that motion is the lotion, that if you do something like take... 20 or 30,000 paddle strokes a day with minimal resistance, just get that body moving. It does bring blood in to the damaged areas and the shoulders actually healed. The rest of my body, not so much. The back especially. So I'm figuring these things out. I think there's real value. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a physiotherapist. But in general, it really does seem to be that if you have an injured body part, that 80% of the time by strengthening it and moving it, you make it better. I totally recognize there could be situations where you make it worse. But most of the time, strengthening around an injury or at least getting that injury moving is the right thing to do. Cool.

UNKNOWN: 34:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 34:16

On a different topic, you'd mentioned about buying duct tape to repair the maps and not having to repair the boat. But did you run into any issues with the boat where you did have to do some last minute emergency repairs?

SPEAKER_01: 34:29

No, not really. I was paddling a C1. So like it's a canoe kayak hybrid produced by Western Canoeing out here in British Columbia. And so as you pointed out, it's long. which means it goes reasonably fast, but it's slow to turn. I did get a few extra layers of glass put in at the high wear areas. I'm figuring it better that it's heavy, but durable, than lighter and faster, but less durable, because you are inevitably gonna, you're gonna crash the damn thing. You're going to bump it. Especially, I come from, I have a fair background in play boating. So in play boating, it's totally normal to, Hey, I want to break from this rapid. I'm just going to let the boat drift sideways into this rock and we'll pin ourselves on this rock. While I look downstream, right. We'll do a rock scout. It's not the way that you would have paddled a birch bark canoe back in the old days,

SPEAKER_02: 35:32

but in a square, no big deal.

SPEAKER_01: 35:34

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I was paddling it as if it was some kind of exotic plastic. So yeah, the boat held up really well. It, The bottom of the hull did take a beating. I did have to get it repaired, and that was not cheap. Just from repairing all the gouges and the scratches and the wearing off of the gel coat. But it held up well. It's always tricky to know how much repair stuff to bring. I mean, you could bring glass and resin and epoxy... And I have. But how much do you bring? Do you bring enough to build a whole new boat? Well... Or do you just bring Gorilla Tape? You know, that's usually what I do. And that stuff's pretty solid. You can only repair a certain amount of... You know, there's definitely an upper limit to how much you can repair. I also bring a little bit of epoxy. A little bit of two-part epoxy. But not a lot. I also bring a little bit of... Well... on other trips i've used pack boats those are folding aluminum frame boats they're pretty tough but i'll bring a slightly different repair kit for those so it's it's the size and weight versus do i have everything covered it's always a trade-off right you're trying to have uh and on any longer trip you're always going to be spending usually by after the first week count on spending an hour a day doing repairs of clothing of your bags of your stove of your barrel arm of your maps right that's one i never thought i would have to repair that took more than an hour a day so yeah

SPEAKER_02: 37:26

and sorry you mentioned the barrel arm which is something i'd never heard of before tell me about that because that was pretty cool

SPEAKER_01: 37:32

yeah so years and years ago I had the brilliant idea that I would use a fishing reel. And one of those, they call them rape alarms. It's like a little thing, maybe half the size of a phone with a tab that you'd pull out and makes a shrieking noise. So I tried to, and I knew that on that trip, I would be ending up close to Churchill, Manitoba, which again, got a lot of bears. And so I would rig this fishing line on this reel around my tent, then hook it up to this little alarm device and And it worked okay, but it just took so long to set up that in the end, I used it only in the very worst of the bear country. Since that time, somebody else had the same idea and they built it and they built, it's called a pack alarm, P-A-K alarm. And I don't get any financial compensation for saying this, but the things about the size of, I don't know, a half a slice of a grapefruit. Okay. And it's less than a hundred bucks. and it contains an integral reel on a monofilament line. And you rig the monofilament line to go around your tent. I bring those, they have those little hooks and Velcro devices you can attach to branches. What I prefer to do is bring like shower hooks that you would use to hang a shower curtain onto the rod. So they're bigger. And then I bring some string so I can tie some parachute cords. So I can tie that around a bush. there's photos on my Instagram and on my essential wilderness channel if you dig hard enough you'll find what it looks like and it's then it's got a lever that gets triggered it's it's really a pretty cool piece of kit and I can vouch for it because I've not had it set off by a bear but I've had it set off by a caribou I've had it set off by a bird and and i myself have set it off what i meant to say is tested it yes on about one-third of all mornings when i get out of the tent because i'm blurry-eyed and i just need to pee and then i stumble into the line i set it off like yeah uh say a four-letter word and then go look for the stupid alarm to turn it off so it it does work pretty well if i was going to be doing a trip And that line is pretty tough. But again, these things, you know, the line snaps. Now you've got to tie it back together. At some point, the knob broke off because after 30 days of use, going into a pack, getting banged around, the knob broke off. So I had to find a way to repair that. There's also, if you poke around on the Essential Wilderness site, you can see the repair kit I took basically fits into a large Ziploc bag. So that was the compromise that I made. About the same size as the medical kit I took. It was a large freezer Ziploc bag. Lots of drugs, lots of drugs.

SPEAKER_02: 40:33

Lots of drugs. That's how I win my trips. Lots of drugs. Okay, well, we know that you need to get out the door and head off to the Outdoor Adventure Show in Vancouver. So we're going to wrap this up. Very cool book. Very cool trip. So much planning and yet like so much effort to cover all the dot, all the I's, cover all the T's, still miss shit. Like it still happens, right? Every time. So try to cover them all as best as you can and away you go.

SPEAKER_01: 41:08

The planning really does make a difference. I mean, planning is useful in a couple of ways. I mean, obviously there's that phrase that proper planning and preparation prevent piss poor performance or, you know, Fail to plan, plan to fail. Right. So there is truth to that. You can't plan for everything, but if you don't have a plan, then things are going to go really severely sideways. Yep. Because if nothing else, planning is an exercise in thinking about worst case scenarios. And your plan for worst case scenario one, you might be able to use part of that plan to deal with worst case scenario two that you didn't think of. Number two, planning, I enjoy it. It gives me a way to think about the trip for, well, in some case, months or even years in advance and kind of vicariously appreciate it forwards in time, if that makes any sense. I get to think about the route and think about the trip for long before I ever actually do it. So planning really does help. I use Excel. I've got multiple spreadsheets and then tabs within spreadsheets and lists of lists. And I've been hit in the head a lot in the context of my jiu-jitsu career. So I can't keep it all in my head. I definitely have to write it down. Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 42:35

Well,

SPEAKER_00: 42:35

it was a pleasure talking to Stefan Kesting. Please do check out his book, Perseverance. Is it out now or it's out soon?

SPEAKER_02: 42:43

When we air this, it'll be out

SPEAKER_00: 42:45

now? We got a pre-coffee. We feel

SPEAKER_02: 42:47

special. It's out

SPEAKER_01: 42:48

March 4th. Please

SPEAKER_00: 42:54

do check it out. I felt like the book was, I mean, not only just the adventure, but it was also an exercise in mindset of like just the tips and things that you sprinkled throughout the whole book, I thought was just so good to help people just kind of grasp like doing hard things, but you have to do it with the right mindset.

SPEAKER_02: 43:11

Exactly. And I do want to just say like, like Paul Mason gives you a shout, Frank Wolf, April Henry, Adam Schultz, like all of them going, hey, yeah, this is a cool book. This is good writing. This is good stuff. Go read this. Okay. I mean, I'd be like, yeah, I'm all of that in a bag of chips.

SPEAKER_01: 43:34

I'm very grateful to the people who read the earlier versions and said nice things about it. Their checks are all in the mail. Exactly. And I'm super grateful to you guys. So thank you for the show and thank you for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_00: 43:48

No problem. Please do check out Stefan on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, and check out his podcast, The Strenuous Life with Stefan Kesting. And please do check us out. We're on all the things and email us if you would like. We are at hi at supergoodcamping.com. That's hi at supergoodcamping.com. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye. Bye.