The helicopter is 120 metres up when it stalls.
For thirty seconds, it's been shaking harder and harder. Jay Stevens is being thrown from side to side, waiting for the pilot to fix it. He doesn't. The horizon tilts out the window, and suddenly there's nothing underneath them.
One thought gets through before Jay hits the ground: “I can't go out this way.”
He was 32. A new father, a keen runner and surfer, with a fast-tracked career in medical devices. Within weeks of the crash, he was told he'd probably never walk again.
Eight years later, he's become the first paraplegic to walk to Everest Base Camp without a wheelchair and has set a 24-hour treadmill distance world record.
His co-guest on this week's episode, Jen Irvine, arrived at ultra-endurance from a very different direction.
Jen spent her twenties actively hating running. Then, during the Covid lockdowns, a TikTok handstand attempt left her with bulging discs and a physio who couldn't offer much relief. Eventually, she went for a 3km jog in her CrossFit shoes just to see what would happen.
She's since raced 250km through the outback and is now training to represent Ireland in a backyard ultra, where competitors keep running the same loop every hour until they can no longer complete it in time.
Their stories started in completely different places, a helicopter crash and a TikTok video gone wrong, but somehow brought them into similar territory: testing the limits of what they thought they were capable of.
Here are six lessons from Jen and Jay’s episode of the Raise The Bar Podcast that apply well beyond ultra-endurance.
1. Don't let other people define what's possible for you
In the spinal cord ward, Jay wasn't getting the back-and-forth he wanted from his rehabilitation. So he started looking elsewhere.
He made friends with the hospital chef, got himself a swipe card and began running his own sessions in the gym after hours, drawing on his background in exercise science and his own research into biomechanics and neuroplasticity.
Later, when he tried to access newer bracing technology, specialists repeatedly ruled him out. From Jay's perspective, he kept hearing what he couldn't do without getting much help to explore what he could.
That became fuel rather than something to accept.
"I'm there to walk," he says. "I'm not there to make friends."
There is an important distinction here. Expert advice is important, particularly when health and safety are involved. But someone's previous experience of what is possible isn't always the same as the limit of what is possible for you.
Jay refused to let someone else's expectations become his own.
2. Find your fuel, even if it isn't pretty
Jay is upfront about the fact that some of what gets him through isn't especially wholesome. He talks about using resentment deliberately, imagining the people who doubted him were "taking food off his table" and channelling that anger into training.
At the same time, he talks about walking with an enormous sense of gratitude because he remembers what it felt like to lie in a hospital bed unable to move.
He doesn't sort those emotions neatly into good and bad. In his words, he uses the light, he uses the dark, puts it all into the recipe and sees what comes out.
There's something useful in that. Motivation doesn't always have to come from the place we'd put on an inspirational poster. Sometimes it's excitement. Sometimes it's gratitude. Sometimes it's frustration, stubbornness or the desire to prove something to yourself.
The important part is knowing what moves you and learning how to use it.
3. Commit first. Solve the problems second.
Jay signed up for Everest Base Camp before he'd worked out how to climb a flight of stairs. Suddenly, the problem wasn't theoretical. He had a date and ten months to teach his body a movement pattern he didn't yet have the neurological coordination for.
Jen's story follows a similar pattern. She agreed to a four-day stage race through the Larapinta Trail after a single text from a friend, without really knowing what she was signing up for. It was a huge leap from the half marathon she'd run beforehand.
She was wildly underprepared. On one stage, what she'd assumed would be a fairly straightforward 21km took six and a half hours. On another, she spent hours alone, ran out of water and recorded a video for her mum because she genuinely wasn't sure how things were going to end.
But not knowing the full scale of the challenge was also part of what got her there.
There are times when waiting until you feel completely ready means waiting forever. You don't need to know exactly how you'll reach the finish line before you put yourself on the start line. Sometimes committing creates the reason to start solving the problems in front of you.
4. Your why only gets you so far
Jen has an interesting take on one of the most repeated pieces of motivational advice: find your why. Her advice to the athletes she coaches is almost the opposite:
"Forget your why."
By the time you've signed up for the race, she argues, your why has already done its job.
The real test comes when things stop going according to plan. You're cramping. Have you had enough salt? You're exhausted. When did you last fuel? Your head is telling you to stop. What's actually happening, and what can you do about it?
"You become the runner that you are when you become the problem solver," Jen says.
It's something she looks for during training too. Not whether someone can execute every session perfectly, but what they do when they can't. Because eventually, something will go wrong.
That idea applies well beyond running.
Motivation might get you to start a difficult project, change a habit or commit to a goal. It won't remove the problems that appear along the way. Resilience is being able to meet the problem that's actually in front of you, work out what you can control and keep moving from there.
5. Look at what your past has prepared you for
Jay was dealt about as difficult a hand as it gets. But when he talks about what happened next, he also looks at what he already had.
A track and field background. A degree in exercise science. Years spent discussing anatomy with spine surgeons through his career in medical devices.
In his words, he was lucky it happened to him because he was unusually well equipped to figure out a way through it.
He describes himself as "built for this."
That didn't make the accident fortunate. It changed the way he viewed everything that came before it.
He drew on his understanding of biomechanics to experiment with his training. He crawled on his hands and knees to practise a contralateral movement pattern similar to walking. He borrowed drills and ideas he'd encountered through his previous work and kept experimenting with ways to improve his movement.
It's a very different way of looking backwards.
When circumstances change, the skills, knowledge and experiences you've accumulated don't disappear. Sometimes their value only becomes obvious when you're forced to use them in a completely different way.
Instead of asking why something happened to him, Jay focused on what he already had that could help him deal with what happened next.
6. Rehearse the worst case before it happens
Our instinct is often to picture success and try not to think too much about everything that could go wrong.
Jay deliberately does the opposite.
Before a major event, he works through the ways things could unravel, physically and mentally, and decides in advance what he'll do if they happen. He compares avoiding those thoughts to holding a beach ball underwater. Eventually, keeping them down takes more energy than confronting them.
That preparation became useful during his 24-hour treadmill world record attempt. Around the 11-hour mark, things got dark mentally. Instead of assuming he was falling apart. Jay recognised the symptoms as something he'd prepared for. He adjusted his salts and fluids and, within about 90 minutes, his head had cleared.
He didn't have to work out what to do while already under pressure. He'd done some of that thinking beforehand.
It's a useful approach for situations far less extreme than a 24-hour world record.
Think about the specific ways something could go wrong. What will you do if your energy drops? If you miss a week of training? If nerves hit? If the first plan doesn't work? Then, if it happens, you already have somewhere to go next.
Resilience is built in what happens next
You don’t need to survive a helicopter crash or 250km in the outback to learn these lessons.
Resilience isn't necessarily knowing that you can handle something before it happens. A lot of the time, you build the evidence by handling one thing, then another, then another.
And when the next problem arrives, you have a little more proof that you can figure that one out too.
Listen to the Full Episode
Listen to Jen and Jay on the Raise the Bar Podcast. Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
TL;DR
(Too Long, Didn't Read)
- Other people's expectations don't have to become your limits.
- Motivation can come from gratitude, anger, stubbornness or something in between. Learn what moves you.
- You don't need everything figured out before you commit. Sometimes committing forces you to find a way.
- Your why gets you started. Problem-solving is what keeps you moving when things don't go to plan.
- Look at what your past has equipped you with, especially when circumstances change.
- Prepare for what could go wrong so you have a response ready when it does.
Now, it’s your turn.
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