Real Ones

Pete Nelson II flies in with a bag of tools to spend 48 hours with fighter, outdoorsman and entrepreneur Chad Mendes. They build Chad's new SISU sauna from the crate, Pete rolls in his first grappling class, and Chad teaches him punch combinations before landing a shot to the liver. They finish going back and forth between the sauna and a cold plunge, looking back on the two days.

Pete Nelson II and the SISU team spend three days in Utah with Trevor Farnes, co-founder of MTN OPS, and his team at their headquarters. They put together a SISU barrel sauna from its crate in a corner of the MTN OPS gym, head up a snowy mountain trail from a 6:30 a.m. trailhead meetup, and train with the team. On the podcast, Pete talks about the values the two companies share and explains what sisu means.

Pete Nelson II spends three days in Austin, Texas with Eric Hinman and Todd Anderson. They train, tour Eric's house, set up an Eden Outdoor Shower, sweat through a hard sauna session and run intervals with a local run club. Eric talks through his path from door-to-door insurance sales to qualifying for Kona twice, the nightly sauna sessions he hosts in his Crew Cabin, and why he now lives by what he calls perfect days.

Pete Nelson II spends 72 hours in Springfield, Missouri with Baylee Rayl, who had just joined SISU's ambassador team, and her family. They run four miles of country roads, build a Crew Cabin sauna and a Drake cold plunge in about four or five hours, and do a partner workout Baylee wrote. The night ends with a contrast session: 30 minutes in the sauna, then about two rounds with the cold plunge.

Cory Gregory bought an island in Ohio on Zillow without knowing how to drive a boat, and an Edwin barrel sauna gets craned onto a barge and floated out to it. Cory talks about his Ohio Valley coal-mining family, working the mine to fund a shot at personal training, his daily mile of lunges and coaching other entrepreneurs. He says he had never used a sauna regularly with real protocols and wanted to add it to his routine on the island.

Pete drives to Cookeville, Tennessee to spend a day with Rich Froning at CrossFit Mayhem, a year after SISU brought down an Eddy barrel sauna and built it out with him. They sit down to talk family, growing SISU and the Finnish sauna protocol, then row eight 500-meter sets, squat, and grind through a bench press and sandbag clean ladder before finishing in the heat. Pete leaves with three takeaways: always be a kid, shared suffering and community.

Pete visits ultra runner Harvey Lewis at his home in Circleville, Ohio, 19 days before what Harvey says will be his 16th year at Badwater 135. Over a run, a meal and a session in the SISU Charlie Cabin in his backyard, Harvey talks through 13 years of running to work and back, and how he reversed his old rule of training in heat only a couple of days a week. Asked what he would tell his 20-year-old self, he says to keep doing what he was doing, and that there were no shortcuts to where he got.