If you help everybody else around you become successful and achieve their goals, as a byproduct, you win. Like, you have to win them. Three, four weeks ago, so it’s a big acquisition, couple of million dollars of profit, and I was doing this deal, and the whole deal collapsed, like, three days before closing. Just totally collapsed. Everyone’s fallen out, and everyone’s telling me, “Dude, this deal is dead. You’re never gonna resurrect it. Not even you can close this deal.” And I asked myself that very question, what would the Iron Cowboy do? What’s the one little micro step I can take to get back up off the floor? And I did it. And then I took another step and another step, and then we closed that deal.

I was dragging a broken body over fourteen thousand miles. And it was so exhausting that it just became, like, how mentally strong can I be to manage this level of pain for that amount of time? A very warm welcome to the Creative Deal Maker podcast. I’m Karl Allen. I’m your host, and I’m gonna be interviewing expert guests sharing investor strategies that will completely and utterly disrupt the market when it comes to buying and selling businesses all over the world.

Welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast. Got a very, very special guest on the show today. As you know, James Lawrence is one of my big heroes, somebody that’s taught me a lot about myself and my own limits in terms of mental toughness. I’ll let James tell his story, but he did fifty Ironmans in fifty days in fifty different states. And then he still had something left in the tank, and then he went and did a hundred, which I think was a hundred and one. So, James, this is one of those life moments to actually be able to kind of interview, you know, one of my superheroes is a real pleasure for me. So, thank you so much for joining us, and welcome to the Creative Dealmaker podcast.

Yeah. Awesome, man. Thanks so much. Man, I gotta say, dude, you know how to throw a party. We were just, at your event, and I had an opportunity to go on stage and really throw down. It was a ton of fun. What an amazing group of people. It was just so energized, so much fun. And, I mean, I know once I left there, the energy shifted, and a lot of good things happened. But I’ll say this too. Like, I’m super jealous of your backdrop. Like, I want both of those in my collection immediately.

So, man, let me tell you about the pictures. Right? So, as you know, I am collocated. I spend half of my life in Viera, Florida where I am now and half of my life in the UK. So in the UK, I’m a massive soccer fan. We call it football, but soccer. In the US, I’m a basketball fan. Right? And there’s two players that really kind of epitomize success for me. It’s Kobe, who’s my all-time favorite player, and Steph Curry, who’s my current favorite player from Golden State. And, well, I didn’t get into basketball until, like, two thousand. So I missed the whole Chicago Bulls, Michael kind of thing. I’ve only kind of got into it since. But, yeah, they’re my guys. And, you know, when I came into this office, you know, I feel like I’m surrounded by greatness, especially now with you in the room. I really, really need to up my game, which is really cool.

But, yeah, let’s get into your backstory. Right? I know there’s a lot of kind of stuff that you did. You set world records. You started running triathlons and all those crazy things and Ironmans. But let’s talk about the fifty. Right? Because, like, I told you this story when we met a couple of weeks ago. You know, I did seventy-five hard during COVID, and I came across you, listening to Andy Frassella, and, you know, you develop just listening to your story, and then I read the book, and watched your Netflix documentary. It kind of taught me that my limits as a human being were way beyond what I thought was even possible. But then, you know, when you look at your journey, the fifty, like, how do you get your head around?

Because, like, firstly, every other person walking on this earth, they can’t even comprehend what it takes to go through something as extreme as you did. And I kinda wanna I want you to talk about that.

Yeah. I kinda wanna framework two things here. One, dude, I’ve had every genetic test done on the planet. I’m, like, as average. I joke and I say I’m like, I’m an average white Canadian. I grew up in Canada. But, like, I think people need to understand, like, what an Ironman is. It’s a two-point-four mile swim, hundred and twelve-mile bike, finishes with a full marathon run, twenty-six-point-two miles, hundred and forty-point-six miles. NBC Sports calls it the most single challenging day in sports. And like I said, when I first found triathlon, I wasn’t doing Ironman. I was doing, like, the short-distance sprint. Super challenging, super explosive, super fun. And at the time, I just wanted to do one Ironman. In fact, my journey truly started, running with my wife, and she says, “Hey. Let’s go do this four-mile fun run.” And it was over Thanksgiving. Our little town was thrown in, and I was like, “Do you have fun? Nobody runs for fun. That’s stupid.” And then, you know, I went and had a terrible experience. You know, I joke all the time, like, I was getting passed by women pushing their kids in strollers and, like, having Sunday afternoon conversations with their kids, on this Thursday, Thanksgiving. And, you know, she was just like, “Dude, you are pathetic. Like, I can’t believe, like, you’re supposed to be, you know, the physical specimen in the man.” And I went to the gym, but I didn’t really do cardio-type stuff. And I looked great, but I was kinda not healthy on the inside. And so she signed me up for a marathon and said, “Figure it out.” And that’s really what kickstarted this whole journey. And so just really, really humble beginnings.

And what I wanna impress on people is, like, it’s okay to start a new journey, and it’s okay to suck at that journey. And as you move through that journey, all of a sudden, your perspective changes, and what you believe is possible changes. And you’re a business dude, and I guarantee when you were younger, you were like, “Man, if I could make five k a month, like, sixty k a year, I’m gonna be the man.” And then, you know, you make your first hundred k, and you’re like, “Okay. What does half a mil look like? What’s a mil look like? Okay. What’s ten mil look like? Okay. What’s that hundred mil thing that people are talking about? What’s that club look like?” And then all of a sudden, a billion comes into view. And it’s like everything we do. It’s a moving goalpost, but it’s based on where we are in our journey. And people are, again, are just so scared to start because they’re overwhelmed. Like, they’re like, “I can’t make a billion dollars.” Well, I guarantee you where you’re sitting right now, like, you’re knocking on the door of a billion. Like, it’s realistic to you. And for me, when I first started, I was like, “Four miles of running? Are you freaking kidding me?” And then we do a hundred consecutive Ironmans. And so, really, you’ve gotta just start your journey, and you gotta keep going.

And so the fifty was very unique. It was kinda like really where the tipping point happened in my career in terms of belief. Putting the t starting to put a team around me, starting to really build on the experiences that I’d had. And, you know, what made the fifty so hard was it was the first of its kind. Nobody had ever done anything like this. The United States is enormous. And to try to do a fourteen-hour event and get to the next state, and then every single day, you’re dealing with chaos, confusion, new environment, new people, new problems. And it really just built and built and built our confidence and allowed us to truly believe that anything is possible now.

So how did that work? So, like, where did you start? Where did you actually start the journey? Where was Ironman number one?

Yeah. So and just to be clear, these were not sanctioned Ironman events. Those only happen on weekends. They’re not in every state. And so we put on our own events. And so add that complexity to it. You’re organizing an event that you have to plan to put on and execute in all the courses, all the maps, all the people, all everything. So, wow. Enormous project in the scope of things. And so we we had, you know, the way I started this. I’ve got five little kids. Right? And so I was like, “Okay. How do I engage the family? How do I get them to buy in?” Right? It’s like a sales tactic. And so I went to Walmart. I bought the biggest map I could find. I threw it up on the wall, and I grabbed some markers, and I started like, “Hey, man. Look. This is what this state is. Let’s look online and look what’s fun to do in this state.” And we started to figure out all these really cool things to do in all these states. And my kids were like, “Dude, we’re gonna get to do all of this in fifty days.” And I’m like, “Yeah. We are.”

And so the two most difficult states to me, logistically, were Hawaii and Alaska. They require a commercial airline. And so I was like, “Okay. I gotta do those first. You either gotta do them first or last.” And I’m like, “I don’t wanna do forty-eight consecutive states and Ironmans and then run into a problem that’s outside of my control.” Resetting after two days is very different than resetting after forty-eight. So the decision then was made, “Okay. We’ll start in Hawaii, and we’ll finish in Utah so that I can go home to my bed and sleep once the journey’s over.” So it went Hawaii, do an Ironman, fly to Alaska, do an Ironman, fly to Washington, and then the team met us there with the motor home, and we all piled in. And then we started to navigate the lower forty-eight states.

But you had to do a fourteen-hour Ironman in Hawaii. Right? And then you had to get on a plane. You had to fly all the way to Alaska with your family, get off the plane, do another Ironman, then get on another plane, fly to Washington, and do another Ironman. So you have to do three Ironmans in three days, literally thousands of miles apart. Like, when did you sleep?

Yeah. You know, I can’t remember the exact number, but I think over those first three Ironmans, I got a total of six hours of sleep. And it’s because, you know, we had to start at midnight in Hawaii. So wake up on day one at midnight and do that first one because we had to catch an early enough flight to get to Honolulu because we did it on Kauai, get to Honolulu, make it in time. We landed in Alaska in the morning, and I had to go literally put my bike back together, get to the swim area in Alaska, and do that second one. So I got very little sleep on the plane that night, and then did the second one. And then, again, we were crunched for time. An overnight flight landed, and I think I got maybe three hours that night once we landed in Washington to start the next one. And then that’s really when chaos ensued. And so right from the get-go, we were so exhausted. By day four in Oregon, I was already starting to fall asleep on my bike, and I was like, “Man, something has to change. We gotta play catch up somewhere.” And, unfortunately, for seven weeks, there was really no opportunity to play catch up.

So at what stage, so you’re four days in. You’ve had six hours of sleep. You’re literally running on fumes. You’re falling asleep on your bike. Like, was there ever a time where you thought to yourself, “You know what? I don’t know if I can do this. Like, maybe I’ve just punched too far above what’s possible. No one’s ever achieved anything even close to this.” Like, was there ever a time when you thought, “Yeah. I don’t think I’m gonna do this”?

Yeah. Here’s what’s so interesting, and I don’t know if it was a naivety or whatever it was, but I was being interviewed leading up to the fifty. And, you know, they would always ask, “Hey. What do you think your chances are? Hey. Do you ever have that self-doubt? Hey. Do you have these conversations?” And I was literally confused by the question because I was so bought in. I was, like, three hundred percent this is happening. And so when you commit to that level, like, it becomes the only thing you’re doing is problem-solving and persevering and pushing through. I didn’t have the luxury to even think about quitting. And I think, you know, those guys on the wall behind you, they’re not thinking, “Is this the year we win the chip?” They go into every season being like, “We’re winning this year.” Right? There’s no doubt in our minds, and they, like, they have to have that belief.

That’s why I find it so interesting when, like, these big sports guys get interviewed, and then they get accused of being, like, cocky or arrogant for saying, “No. I’m gonna win that MMA fight. I’m gonna knock this guy out.” Like, if you go into a fight thinking you’re gonna get knocked out, like, I just did my very first-ever boxing fight for charity, and, dude, you cannot go in there with any doubt. And it’s so funny. I knew I was gonna beat the guy because I could see in his eyes, like, he doubted. He was intimidated. And I knew I was like, “Dude, there’s no chance.” And you can tell someone’s belief and conviction just by listening to their language, the words that they use in interviews. You know, and I promise you, I get messages all the time. “Hey. You’ve inspired me,” which is amazing, “and I wanna try x, y, z.” And then I ask them a series of questions. I know instantly just by the way they frame their answers if they’re gonna be successful or not.

Words matter that much. Because a lot of times, if you wanna achieve something insane, like, it’s the power of your why and your purpose that’s gonna carry you through. So, like, clearly, you must have had a bunch of that going on in your own head when you were going through the fifty, but, like, what was your why? What was the fuel that was taking you through it?

Yeah. Great question. And this is so powerful, and I had to have I had to be armed with a lot of different reasons and whys. And I can go off on a whole tangent about how one why is not enough. You gotta have a bag and be armed with a lot of different reasons and stack them up, and ultimately, that becomes your purpose, your passion. But you have to tie what you’re doing to something greater than just, “Hey. I want to break a record” or “I want to, you know…” this and that and rewind our history a little bit. I immigrated from a different country, Canada, albeit, but, you know, English-speaking, but immigrated here, and I had very little money in my pocket. I knew one person, and I was chasing that American dream. And eventually started my own mortgage company, and then, as we all know, the ’08 crash happened, and everything got beat down. And that’s ultimately what put us on this path.

And trust me, you, as a man, as a provider, you remember the moment that they knock on your door, take away your home and all of your possessions, and you’re, like, stripped of everything. Like, it’s the most humiliating slash humbling experience you can have, and it was rock bottom for myself and my family. And then we started to go on this journey and start to break these world records, and the why of the fifty became, “I’m going to take my life back, change the trajectory of my life, and create the future that I want.” And so every single day, I woke up and I was like, you know, I’d bike past, like, a beautiful home, and I’m like, “I’m gonna give my wife the dream home she deserves, and I’m going to do this, and I’m gonna do this.” And so as I was out there suffering, I would shift my focus to the things I was dreaming about in the future that I wanted to create. And so my why became so very emotional and powerful, and you have to tie your why to a big enough emotion for when you’re in those, like, really desperate moments. It just doesn’t matter, and the thought of quitting doesn’t even enter your mind.

And I remember reading your book. You talked about, I think, whatever day it was, you’d fallen asleep. You came off your bike. You know, you were kind of in a mess, and you didn’t know how you were gonna get up and complete. But I remember seeing your why was that your daughter, Lucy, had agreed to run the final five k’s of the day because you were raising money for obesity and charity. So you had a date with your daughter every night to run that final five k. And, like, I don’t know. I got goosebumps just thinking about that. Like, if one of my kids was waiting for me at the end of a journey, yeah, there’s nothing that would stop me. So, clearly, that must have been a huge driver for you.

Yeah. Huge why. I mean, we, and that’s why I said you have to have more than one why, one reason. It just becomes more and more and more powerful and palatable. And so, you know, there was that personal journey. “I’m gonna take my life back. I never wanna feel rock bottom again.” We were raising money for charity, making an impact. We’re raising money for the Jamie Oliver Foundation and to eradicate the childhood obesity epidemic that exists today. Here’s a shocking statistic. We’re the first generation ever where the parents are slated to outlive the kids. I don’t wanna be I don’t wanna be part of that statistic.

That’s awful, man. Yeah. I didn’t know that.

It’s terrible. And then, of course, that seven o’clock meeting with my daughter, that appointment every single night. Because, you know, early in the journey, I crashed, and I’m laying on the side of the road, and I’m like, “I don’t know how to get back on my bike.” And I share a quote all the time that says, “He who has their why can bear almost anyhow.” And I didn’t know I didn’t know how, but I knew why.

That’s the quote of the show. He who bears almost any so he who has the most powerful why can bear almost anyhow.

Correct?

Yeah.

And so for me, I was like, my daughter’s waiting for me, and she has this goal to run all fifty-five 5Ks. And if I don’t show up, she can’t achieve that goal. And the beautiful lesson behind that is if you help everybody else around you become successful and achieve their goals, as a byproduct, you win. You have to win at that.

Lucy doesn’t realize that me figuring out how to help her and show up so she can achieve that goal got me to that point every single day, and then we just had to show up.

It’s so powerful what you’ve done. You may know this, you may not, but the ripple effects through the world with what you’ve done are profound. For example, I was listening to your story, and that got me through something called “75 Hard,” which we’ll talk about in a minute. I started talking about you all the time to my protege community, and you met a whole bunch of them. You met three hundred and fifty of them in Atlanta a few weeks ago, and your book “Redefine Impossible” is mandatory reading for them, along with watching your online documentary. I think it’s on Netflix or Prime; I can’t remember.

You inspiring me has allowed me to inspire other people through the story. We have a saying, no joke, when a deal goes south, they’re trained and conditioned now to ask the question, “What would the Iron Cowboy do?” What’s the next step? Can I take one step to try and instill to fruition?

Where that kinda came from was I was doing “75 Hard,” which was my hard. Your hard is a different level. We’ve all got a different hard. You can do fifty or a hundred Ironmans in a row. My hard is “75 Hard.” So I’m doing that. I’m sixty-two, sixty-three days in. It’s pouring down with rain. I’m doing my outside run, my workout, and I slipped and tore the cartilage in both sides of my left knee. I’m lying on the side of the road. I’m in tears. I’m about to call my wife to come rescue me. The challenge is over. And then I thought, hang on a minute.

What would the Iron Cowboy do? I know what he’d do. He’d get up and take one step. Just be perfect for a second. Take one step. Take another step. Take another step. Then you’re walking for a minute. Then you finish the workout, and then you do the rest of the different challenges.

What we’ve done is we’ve taken that kind of framework and applied it into deals. I was working on a deal literally three, four weeks ago. It’s a big acquisition, couple of million dollars of profit, and I was doing this deal, and the whole deal collapsed three days before closing. Just totally collapsed. Everyone’s fallen out. And everyone’s telling me, “Dude, this deal is dead. You’re never gonna resurrect it. Not even you can close this deal.”

And I asked myself that very question: what would the Iron Cowboy do? What’s the one little micro step I can take to get back up off the floor? And I did it. Then I took another step and another step, and then we closed that deal. I’ve got all of my dealmakers using that. “What would the Iron Cowboy do?” So I want you to be not just proud of what you’ve done—it’s incredible, an unbeatable feat—but the way you’ve inspired people like me and probably millions of other people and how we use that to inspire our own tribes. That’s your legacy, brother. Because no one’s ever gonna do what you’ve done. Right?

And, yeah, you did the fifty, but how did you not get injured? Let’s talk about that for a minute. You did fifty Ironmans for fourteen to sixteen hours a day all those days. How did you not get injured, or did you just have to just get through it?

Yeah. I wanna back up one second. The part about doing one step, and the way that relates into real life is what’s happening and what I’m seeing around the world is we’re getting overwhelmed with the enormity of everything that’s happening. The kids have to get here and get there, and I gotta do my business. I gotta do my workouts for myself, and I gotta do my cold plunge and all these things. I gotta do my reading, and I gotta do my self-improvement. When am I gonna take time for myself and grow my bit? All these things.

We get so overwhelmed. And literally, it’s just like, “Okay, what’s the one thing I can do right now that’s gonna be the most important thing to move this ship?” And it just becomes a matter of one thing at a time, and you slowly chip away at it. I just wanna share, too, I’ve talked on stage about quitting on yourself and your journey and not becoming that master problem solver. We truly don’t know the legacy that we’re leaving because someone’s always truly watching.

That ripple effect that you talked about—just this past weekend, I got to have an amazing experience, where I ran the Chicago Marathon and guided a young man with Down syndrome, who just finished doing the World Marathon. He got all six stars—Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, Chicago, Boston. That’s a lifetime achievement for a lot of people. As a person with Down syndrome, you’re not supposed to be able to do this kind of stuff, and he’s breaking barriers. And you wanna know how his journey got started?

His family, four years ago, sat down and was scrolling on Netflix and saw our documentary. This young man said, “I can do one of those.” And his dad said, “Yeah. Maybe, why not? If that guy can do fifty, why can’t you do one?” He’s gone on to inspire so many people. It’s crazy. And had I quit on my journey and not really cared, what opportunity are we missing to impact other people?

So yeah, just really an opportunity. If you’re thinking about quitting on your journey, don’t. Because not only are you quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on those around you, and you’re quitting on those people and the legacy that you’re leaving that you don’t even know they’re watching. I don’t care who you are. Somebody’s watching you.

In terms of injury and stuff, it really comes down to preparation. Preparation, game plan, and execution. And then when something comes up, having the courage to adjust or pivot. The fifty was a decade worth of building blocks and foundational building and doing the basics. One of the things I love to say is, success comes from doing a lot of little things consistently over a long period of time.

That was really the lead-up to the fifty. The only reason we struggled during the fifty was the logistics. It caused a level of incomprehensible fatigue. But my body was strong. In fact, I got stronger every single day. My time over the last twenty was faster than the first thirty. That was mind-boggling.

What it proves is in the face of adversity and challenge, if you continually show up, your body adapts to where an Ironman a day becomes routine. Now, just think about that for a second. To where an Ironman a day becomes routine.

In your daily life and in your daily struggle, what happens is you have to have that insane belief and conviction in what you’re doing. There’s a disconnect between the mind and the body. What happens is it’s called the lag or the gap. Eventually, your body catches up and believes what the mind’s been telling it. If you’re saying, “I’m a billionaire. I can achieve that. This is the game plan. This is the route,” and your body’s like, “I don’t know yet. This doesn’t seem right, and I don’t think I can handle that kind of workload,” as you continue to do that workload, your body adapts.

Then that moment happens where the mind and the body and the spirit all come into unity, and you’re like, “This is where the magic happens.”

You showed some photographs of your toes when you spoke in Atlanta at our event, and they look like they’ve been put through a wood chipper. Is that the worst injury that you had, or did you have even worse injuries than that throughout the fifty?

Yes. On the fifty, actually, day number five, I tore my shoulder in the swim in California. For the next two days, I was doing the swim with kinda just one arm and side-stroking it and just trying to figure out how to do it. Eventually, I just said, “You know what? With pain, it kinda reaches a threshold. You just maintain that level of pain.” I learned, “Okay, if I can figure out how to manage this, then I can continue through.” Eventually, my body adapted, and I was able to start to swim normally again, even though I had that tear in my shoulder.

What’s funny is that picture I showed in Atlanta—that picture’s from day sixteen. My feet didn’t look like that in the end, and it’s just proof positive that your body adapts even under stress. We were still doing a hundred and forty miles a day. Even under stress, my body said, “Okay. I get it now. He is actually going to do an Ironman a day. I need to get on the same page as this dude’s mind.” The body says, “I’m going to do whatever it takes.” By the end, my foot was healing by doing a hundred more minutes.

After you finished the fifty, how long did it take you to fully recover and get back to normal levels?

It wasn’t instant, but it was pretty quick. There’s a program out there called Strava where we post all of our times and distances over routes in our neighborhood. I was looking back at times, and some of the fastest times I ever produced were fairly close after the fifty. Really, I just needed to take a hot minute and recover my mind from dealing with the pain and let some of those intense things heal. But within six months, I was just clicking. Just back to it, doing challenges.

I mean, I ran two hundred and thirty-five miles across Greece soon after. I rode my bike to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. I did the four hardest extreme triathlons in the world championships in Norway within a two-year period. Really quick, we adapted and got right back to it. That’s just a testament to one of the other things I like to talk about, not on stage, but just in these conversations. You just have to always be game-ready, in life, in business, in whatever it is. That’s in terms of your mental sharpness, your physical status, because opportunities are continually flowing across our desk. Opportunities are coming in, and people are doing things.

If you’re not game-ready, whatever that means physically, emotionally, spiritually, if you’re not game-ready, that opportunity is gonna come and pass. You hear all the time, “Life dealt me a rock card, and I don’t have this opportunity.” No. It means you’re not game-ready. You need to be game-ready for an opportunity to hit so that you can seize that moment. You gotta latch on to that horse that’s running a million miles an hour, and then you figure it out. If you’re not game-ready, where you can’t even grab the horse and jump on and go for that ride, yeah, of course, you’re gonna be missing out on opportunities.

So stop having a pity party. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get yourself game-ready because you have no idea when the next opportunity is gonna present itself right in your lap. If you’re not ready, someone else is gonna be ready and take that opportunity from you.

That’s amazing. That’s really kind of valuable. So you finished the fifty. You took some time to recover, but were still doing all these different things. Now clearly, when you finished the fifty, you must have realized that you had something left in the tank. Right? Because then several years later, you did a hundred. I think you even did a hundred and one. Right? You got to the end of a hundred. Who does a hundred Ironmans and thinks, “Yeah, let’s do another one.” Right? Like, that’s insane.

So what was that harder or easier? Because I know you did them all in the same location, but man, a hundred and one days consecutively doing this. Did you find that harder or easier than the fifty where you were moving location?

Yeah. They were both different in different ways and had their own unique complexities. Well, let me just frame it like this. The pandemic hit and the world shut down, especially my world. Speaking, coaching, racing—all of it, wiped clean. It disappeared overnight, like most industries did, but mine especially. So I kinda always wanted to redo the fifty because, you know, when you do something, you’re like, “Oh, I can do that better.” I think it’s natural instinct with that move.

We believe we can do something better than we did it in the past. That’s the whole point in life: make mistakes, challenge yourself, and then do it better. When the pandemic hit, I was like, “Oh, this is my opportunity,” because I’d always kinda wanted to do it better. I thought to myself, “Okay, if I can put the team in place, remove chaos, and put systems and protocols in place, could we double what everybody said was impossible? Could we defy logic?”

And the problem is there was a five-year gap. So remember leading up to the fifty, it was foundational blocks. It was building. It was growing. It was experiences. It was all these things that then led into the fifty. Well, the hundred, they’ve been five years off where I was coaching, mentoring, speaking, helping others, doing all these things.

Well, good old Iron Cowboy got a little bit out of shape. And out of shape is obviously all relative, but I was twenty pounds heavier than I was. When we finally made the decision that this was something we were gonna do, I only had a four-month training block to get ready for that. I was gonna really rely on my mental toughness and my past experiences. Unfortunately, my body just wasn’t ready, and we got into injury problems really early.

So if the fifty was chaos, logistics, and fatigue, the hundred was pain management. Adjusting over a really long period of time. You gotta think a hundred and forty point six miles a day for a quarter of a year. No days off. That’s fourteen thousand plus miles, and you’re dealing with shin splints and stress fractures on day five. So now the whole campaign changes, and it really became mental because I was dragging a broken body over fourteen thousand miles. It was so exhausting that it just became like, how mentally strong can I be to manage this level of pain for that amount of time?

So what’s next for the Iron Cowboy? Everything you put your mind to, you totally annihilate. What’s the next big challenge? What else are you doing these days?

I’m just really enjoying my family and speaking on stages around the world. I’ve spoken in fifty countries now. It goes right back to what we talked about at the beginning of the conversation—like that belief system that we can be anything we wanna be. Now I just have to ask myself two questions. What’s the sacrifice it’s gonna take to accomplish X, and what’s the benefit to my family and my community? If I can’t make those things align, I’m not interested. But I do believe I could do anything. I just gotta answer those two questions. Right now, the answer has always been no. It’s not worth it.

So now I’ve shifted to helping others accomplish what their version of the hundred is. We talked a little bit about how everybody’s hard is different. One of the biggest things I’ve recognized as I’ve traveled around the world is that humans, we are losing the conversation with ourselves. We’re getting in our own way, and we’ve honestly lost hope in what the future can look like and be. I’m not speaking globally; I’m more speaking here in the United States. There’s so much opportunity, and there’s so much good that’s happening. Really, anybody can go get their piece of the pie if they want it. It’s just a matter of having that mindset shift and going. For me, it’s helping as many people achieve their version of the hundred as we can.

We’re coaching, we’re mentoring, we’re doing the retreats. Next year, 2024, we’re launching our new book called “Iron Hope.” We’re also launching the new documentary that’ll premiere in February at Sundance. We’re super excited for both of those releases. We believe they can have an amazing impact. The retreats, everybody always asks me, “How do I become more mentally tough?” This is Iron Grip, right? These are the retreats.

I’m gonna come do one. So my business partner, Chris, who you met, he’s pretty badass. We’re gonna get a bunch of our inner circle protégé members, and we’re gonna come down. I’m gonna do one of those with you. So, yeah, talk to me about that. What does that look like? How does that actually work? Hopefully, I don’t have to do fifty Ironmans, but I can do something that’s gonna really help me bust outside of my comfort zone and define a new level of hard. But, yeah, tell me about Iron Grip.

So, like I was saying, people ask, “How do I become more mentally tough?” It’s not gonna be listening to you and me having this conversation. It’s not gonna be watching the documentary or reading a book. There’s so much information flow out there. The missing piece is taking action and doing it. In order to close the deal, you gotta take action. You gotta do all of these things. And so in order to become more mentally tough, you have to have an experience.

These retreats are two to four days long, and we bring in some incredible speakers and some people who are gonna educate you and motivate you. But you’re also gonna have a physical experience. All physical ranges are welcome, all abilities, and we’ll scale it. But the thing is, people need to realize that when they’re broken, they can still take one more step like we talked about earlier. We’re gonna do breathwork, we’re gonna do workouts, we’re gonna do yoga, we’re gonna have amazing conversations, amazing connections, and we’re gonna do fun activities. So it’s really an opportunity to go and have that experience where you get to ask yourself, “Now what am I going to do? Am I going to take the next step, or am I gonna do what I’ve always done and quit and put my hands up and go home?”

I’m in. I absolutely can’t wait. What can people find out about Iron Grip if they wanna come?

They can follow us on Instagram at Iron Cowboy James, and everything is on our website, IronCowboy.com. That’s where we’re gonna announce new locations. We’ve got three of them set up for next year. Our first one’s in Kanab, Utah, next week. Not sure when this is gonna post; it’ll probably have already happened by then. But our flagship one is gonna be next May, May 2024, on a private British island, and it’s gonna be incredible. If you have the time and the means, this is something that you’re not gonna wanna miss.

May 2024, I am in. I’ll check that out. I’ll get with your team. I’m gonna bring a bunch of my super protégés and my business partners down.

Well, James Lawrence, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for doing this. Good luck in all the cool things. You and I are gonna do some cool stuff together. We’re gonna look to do some deals. It’s gonna be absolutely amazing, man. I wanna be a coach to you in some of the business stuff, as you’re gonna be a coach to me in some of these physical and mental things. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining the show, and we will see you soon.

Absolutely honored. I just wanna finish with this thought that you just brought up. If you’re trying to create greatness on your own, stop it. One of the things I love to say from stage is nothing great is ever accomplished on our own. You’ve gotta surround yourself with amazing people like Carl, like whoever it is that you aspire to be, because everybody has a different level of amazing and a different skill set that they’re gonna bring to the table. Trust me, there’s not enough time in the day to become an expert at everything. So start creating your tribe. Start surrounding yourself with coaches. Start putting mentors in your pocket, and that’s how you’re going to win.

I saw a great analogy one time where they were like, “Hey, would you like this entire—” what was it? It was a watermelon. They were like, “Hey, would you like a piece of the watermelon? No. Would you like this one piece?” Dang it. I screwed it up. I can’t remember what it was. But essentially, you want a watermelon this big, and you want a little piece of that watermelon, and then everybody shares it together. Trust me, you can accomplish way more by doing it together. You’ve been amazing, totally humbling to be able to come on your podcast, and I wish everybody to have an amazing successful time, and be blessed.

Thank you, James. Well, that’s the show, guys. That’s Creative Dealmaker. We will see you guys soon. Until next time. Bye for now.