Welcome to the Catalyst for Growth Podcast, a place where we talk about everything under the sun regarding the journey of the professional salesperson. Welcome the host of the C4G Sales Success Podcast, John Colunus II. Take it away, big guy. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, this is John Colunus II and today I have built best with me and we're going to be talking about Iron Man, which is an unlikely topic for the two of us. Yeah. I never was an Iron Man. He had helped. But Bill has been an Iron Man. He's been very successful. He's also an Iron Man coach. And why is this important to financial advisors? I think it's important for a couple of different reasons. Bill talked about his reasons. I'll turn it over to him in his experiences and how it's taken him all over the world. I think it's important that you set an outside goal and that it establishes some work-life balance. I think it's real important for something as crazy as Iron Man that makes you, what was that book? Was it Rockefeller's Habits, Bob Big, Harry Audacious Gosell, The Beheg, the Beheg. That was Bill's Beheg goal and he worked and actually this whole family supported him in doing this. But he'll talk a little bit about his journey and why it was important to him. But it gave him something that was outside of his family for himself. It helped him, I think, in his business relationships. And I think what it's done is given him another community in which he can be a part of. And I think those communities for financial advisor are very important. People's not in the retail side of the businesses are Operation Guru at Regal. But what it gives you a community, like I have a hunting and a fishing community, I regularly engage with those ladies and gentlemen and what it brings me is a different way of expressing myself. But it also gives me an opportunity to garner more clients and have client acquisition because just the natural law of attraction is a John Maxwell Principle. So Bill, let's talk a little bit about your Iron Man. Why'd you get in such a crazy ass hobby? So in 2008, at 49 years old, my daughter who was working in a bagel shop and figure skating on Lake Placid decided she was going to take me to the finish of an Iron Man. So this is Brittany. This is the oldest of the three. And you go to the finish of an Iron Man between 10 and 12 o'clock at night. You have athletes who have at 12 o'clock at night. They will have been out there for 17 hours starting with a swim, then a bike, then a marathon. A 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and a 26.2 mile marathon. And I stood there and I watched these, what I call the stories come across the finish line. And these folks have been, they're big people like me who struggled particularly on the run. They're people who've survived accidents. They're people who are cancer survivors. There are some legendary stories out there of John Blaise who ran his first and only Iron Man just after he found he was diagnosed with ALS. And on the end of the race rolled across the finish line. And people have been rolling across finish lines in honor of John Blaise ever since. The hoiates, a father and son, the son I believe had cerebral palsy and Dick Hoyt pushed his son around Iron Man courses and marathon courses. I think there's a 30 and 30 on him. There probably is. I know it's been an ESPN feature hundreds of times he did it and it was remarkable. I remember doing the World Championships and I'll come back to the beginning a second on sat beside the first woman who had completed the race and she was a paraplegic. So she had to do the 112 miles on the, through the lava fields on Kona, in it with a hand crank on the bike. I always like to kind of joke that the challenged athletes generally do OK in the water, but on the bike it's tough because they're using a hand crank. But they blow us all away on the run course because they're in the wheelchair. So you saw the spirit is amazing, so you saw this with bread, Lake Placid, you saw the spirit. Yeah. And I cried. If you don't cry at the finish of an Iron Man, you're not human because you see these stories come across. And I said, I quietly said to myself, I'm going to give myself two years to do this and I'll do my, I'll do one. So I came back to Lake Placid in 2010 and I gave it my all. I made a stupid rookie mistake of changing my nutrition on the course during the bike and got this gelatin in my stomach that caused me to become something called hype on a Tremac, which means you literally are drowning from the inside. Your body's not processing, so you're drowning from the inside. And it's actually a condition that I suffered a few years later at the World Championships in 2013. It's actually something that can be fatal. So I don't make light of it and I'll get to my, that story in a second. But I was 26 minutes late and I have a picture of me at the finish line with the race director putting a medal on me, giving me a hat and a, and a t-shirt, a finisher t-shirt with all the banners and everything torn down, virtually no light. And he gave me a hug and he said, you know, this is, you're what this is all about. I was 26 minutes late. So I resolved that moment to come back the next year. I had a great race the next year, didn't make any silly mistakes and then completed seven races since then. Where are those races just to get the lights on? Then I've been in Taupo, New Zealand. I've been in Kona and the Big Island, Hawaii, Chattanooga, Lake Placid, Wisconsin. I've done 11 half Ironman all over. I do, I'm 65. I'm not in the shape that I once was. I'm determined to get back into shape and in the next two to three years do a race that I DNF in 2018 as that was a whole other story because it's unfinished business. And I really would like to finish Ironman cans in Australia up on the gold coast near the Great Barrier Weef, one of the most beautiful places in the world to run a race. So I embarked on my journey and I will say that some of the life lessons are preparation, preparation, preparation, education, education. I started coaching Ironman athletes as a hobby in 2016. I still coach. I actually have my athletes donate to a charity that my wife and I support. And my goal for them is to have them as well prepared as they could possibly be and be ready to deal with any sort of adversity when they're on the course. And it's just such a metaphor for life and preparation and being equipped to it is and I think people that probably tune in said, what are these two guys talk about Ironman? It is preparation, it's education, right? Every single day if financial advisor is going to battle and maybe it's a start shirt that you're wearing not armor, but you were trying to convey a purpose and trying to help align people to understand what you do for a living and how you can help them. And all of it comes through education. You can't be, you can't talk to anybody about education unless you're prepared. Right. The other thing that's important too is it's all about attitude too. Because on the course, it's amazing and it's a real, it's a real study in men versus women. And when you're out on the course, the women are encouraging and they are very effusive in the way and they're, they're extroverts. Whereas the man are sort of grumpy and they kind of lumber along and I kind of have some fun because it's a very, it's a very interesting observation. What gets you through the race in a lot of cases is your attitude. And if you're encouraging and like I have some pat lines like smile, it hurts less. And statistically, it takes more, more muscles in your face to frown that does the smile. Keep your feet moving. Like you don't have to run, if the dirty little secret of iron man are twofold, one, the wetsuit helps you because it's buoyant and two, you shuffle through the run. You don't have to, you could walk the marathon and still finish on time. But you just, you just have to keep encouraging people and it's amazing what it does for you. Whereas you see these guys plotting along and it is really, it's really something else. And the other thing is age that I've had some really interesting experience with and not underestimating old, someone who's older and I'll never forget I did a half iron man in Oceanside, California, cold cold swim because you're in the Pacific Ocean. It was a good bike through Camp Pendleton. We talked about the last beautiful and other podcasts about service to ride through Camp Pendleton. A few times civilians actually get to be on the grounds was amazing. But I'll never forget on the run, they put your age on your calf in indelible marker. So we're out there and we all know how old each other are and I was running along or plotting along the way I do and I would hear these heavy steps behind me and this guy passed me and he was 30 and at the time I think I was 56 and this little game I and I just kept going. I was not speeding up wasn't slowing down just kept going and this guy kept passing me and the and the third time he passed me I passed him again. I never saw him again and this lady ran up behind me and she kind of tops me on the shoulder and she says you know you really pissed him off because he didn't like being passed by an old big guy and I just I all I could do is laugh because you know we don't know what other people are capable of and we would do well to not make assumptions and to actually learn what what is behind it. I learned what it what a like us and that is for everybody. I had a wonderful coach and she just said you know what you finish. If you have to walk but you finish and I have fired athletes who have walked off the course because they didn't get a good enough time. They're there to do something for themselves. They're not there to show off to somebody else and the one thing that I I'm asked to all to often is well what was how you know what was your best time how it was your time and I just say you know what I'm here to finish and that's when it's important to me. So we all have things that are important to us but if you would like to be a guest on the C4G podcast please contact us at
[email protected] or 813-454-0557. Crime Time Players Only, bring your A-game or don't contact us. Yeah, with the financial service representative that are listening right what great principles you know preparation, education and I think that I circle that you said you use the word resolve. Yeah. You have the resolve to do that. Building a business is incredibly difficult. I mean statistically 85% fail numbers five years right and so you need to have resolve you need to have that grit there's a variance perseverance and an Ironman I mean I remember watching it on TV just thinking what a bunch of crazy son of a bitches you know when they first started showing it in white world of sports like how can they possibly do that. And now after meeting you there's a lot of YPO or CEOs that go and do Iron Man in concrete and you've helped I don't know how many of our employees but I know people that have been aligned with us and have left and you're they've left our organization and you're still coaching. Yeah. It's still helping them and being a being a sort of a men should a good guy helping them along the way and giving them advice on how they can accomplish it's a major accomplishment. So one of the best examples of preparation perseverance dealing with adversity was I was blessed to do the world championships in Kona the the most famous of Iron Man. I got there on the lottery. It used to be John Collins who formed who founded Iron Man and just a quick word. There were seven original Iron Man competitors. They were all military service personnel on Hawaii and they got together and there were swimmers, runners and cyclists in the group and they wanted to have an event to determine which of the three which of the three disciplines was the strongest athlete. So they ended up deciding that they were going to combine the open water swim at Waikiki Beach, the rough water swim with the right around the island with the Honlulu Marathon and they did it as a group and who won is not important. The two stories that came out of it that I think were hilarious were the first finisher took 17 hours. That's now the cutoff for to finish the race. The other one that I thought was funny was that some of the seven of them went back to their hotel rooms after the swim to have a shower to go out on the bike. But that's how Iron Man was born. So we ended up in I ended up getting a lottery spot because he he deemed when he sold the brand to world triathlon, there were 150 spots that were for ordinary people because the Hawaii Kona. How many participants would be in a world shape? Well, the world championships restricted you about 1800 and I was vote to say because that's the number of bikes that can fit on the pier. Oh, it's just to be a logistic, depicted by size, it could be a logistical nightmare. There are Iron Man that are three to 4,000 athletes and I have a funny story about that if we have time, but I got out on the so I had a great swim at Kona and it was the most beautiful. I could have done the whole 140 point six miles in the water. I got off and I got on my bike and about 10 minutes after I'm out of transition, I had my first of three flat tires that I have to change myself. I can't get help. Well, you only carry two changes and some people only carry one. I have been to carry two. So I had one change about 10 minutes in and literally 10 minutes later, I'm going, I'm on the Queen K highway, I'm going down the hill. My rear wheel burst locks up. It was everything I could do to keep the bike up straight and now I've had my second flat tire and now I change it, but I'm now done. I have no more tubes, I have no more CO2 to pump them up. So I then rode the next 45 minutes, listening to every sound of my bike because I would be identified as a third flat. Finally a tech truck came along and gave me an extra CO2 and another two by stuffed them in the pocket and the back of my shirt and I kept going. I got out to the turnaround, just before the turnaround point and I hit a metal shard and my tire went down for a third time. So I changed my tire, I could only get it up partially inflated so I came around, got it pumped up, went off to finish. I was now on the Queen K highway about an hour and a half later than I expected. The trade winds had come up. I then spent the next 35 miles riding headfirst into a 30 mile an hour headwind. Now I have a 52 inch chest and when I sit up on a bike, it's like taking a spinnaker in reverse and I stop your sale. So I made a bad mistake, I stayed in aero position which is crouched down on the bike and I just grabbed water off of the aid station. So for two and a half hours I rode like hell and drank water. Well, I got to transition to go out on the run and I was bloated, nothing was moving in my body. There were no electrolytes, I basically overtaxed my system. And about a kilometer into the run, I wore a race belt and I threw it off, another mistake. What's in a race belt? A race belt has electrolyte drink, it has, I threw it off because it was so uncomfortable. And why, when it goes from night to day, it takes about 10 minutes. So I'm now at mile three, approximately mile three, it's pitch black and I'm now on the ground shoving my fingers down my throat, trying to make myself throw up because I'm so bloated. And at that moment, I said stand up, put one foot in front of the other, start walking. So I did. And I got to the first aid station and I started sipping some Coca-Cola because that was something that got into my system, some chicken broth and some electrolyte, little bits, little bits, little bits. By aid station six, I was starting to feel better, I was moving. The guy who is the SAG guy, the guy who is at the back, making sure you're not gonna drop on them. He comes up, he says, "Bill, knew my name, knew my number," says, "If you keep up this pace, you'll finish." At that moment, I saw this little green light. I felt like I was watching ET. And I knew that there was this woman in front of me, her name was Harriet Anderson. She was 79 years old. She was doing her 22nd consecutive Kona Championship. Wow. And I thought she will be on the wide world of sports, or sorry, on now the NBC sports cast. If I catch up to her and stay with her, I'll finish the race. So sure enough, I caught up to her about, about mile seven and a half. And we had a friendship. There were three of us. There was Harriet myself and the guy named Chris, never seen him again, shared the whole evening with him, but we'll never know who he is. We get out to about mile 20. You go down into something called the energy lab with totally different climate, microclimate. So it's hot in the human. You go downhill, you come uphill. My garment watch died. So I had no more pace. I didn't know what time it was. I missed mile marker 22 and I started to panic. I got to mile marker 23 and I started to feel a little bit better because I knew I had time. Got to mile 24 and my wife was waiting for me. Sheila was there and you're not supposed to pay somebody, but she started moving with me. I got to mile 25 and I'm starting to, and you iron man mess with your head. I make the corner. I can see the finish line. I can hear them calling people. But they, I've still got over a kilometer, almost two kilometers left. So I had to go out and into the dark and back around and I ended up on what they call a leaky drive, which is the finish and it was all dark and there was nobody and I'm thinking, what the heck is going on like if it ever gone home? I came around the corner. Sheila's with me encouraging me and I see the finish line. There are about 8,000 people. Now I know what it's like to be a rock star because they're just going well. They think I'm the last finisher because Harriet and Chris had stopped and slowed down at 24 and I said, no, I got to be somewhere. So I just kept going. I ended up hitting the finish line, getting in, getting across the finish line. The voice of iron man, Mike Riley called me. It was great. There were 15 pros. This is the beauty of the sport. These pros had finished at 3.34 o'clock in the afternoon, but they were all back at midnight. I finished with five minutes and 32 seconds left before the race cut off and I wouldn't have been an official finisher. And I realized afterwards that I generally run about a 12 minute mile, which is pretty darn slow. I ran the last one, basically 1.2 miles at a 927 pace, which I couldn't replicate. Wow. I couldn't. I don't know what was like an out of body experience, but the funny part, but if your normal time was there, you wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't have made it. Yeah. Wow. So I made it across. I finished the transition area or the finish line. I come out and is pitch blind, but I see in the distance the medical tent and I went, I feel like crap. So I made it in the medical tent and they put you on a lawn chair and I had a doctor in a nurse with me and I started wretching because they took blood work. And I looked at the needle and I was squeamish and I started wretching. Well, I was wretching because I was squeamish. They thought I was suffering from hyponite. I was suffering from hyponitremia, but the first sign of cardiac arrest with hyponitremia is vomiting. So I went from having one doctor to eight doctors and a crash cart. They pump two bags of innerveness into me. I'm feeling great. They're all concerned. I'm feeling great. I had the best recovery from a race I've ever had because they put these fluids into me. But it was just the perseverance and the need to get this done. Most people would have quit after two flats on a bike. And I just, there's nothing to stop you. And the last thing I'll say, because I know we're coming up on time, is I often have people say, well, I can't do that. And my response to them is you don't have to do that. Just do something because what happens in life is people just, they don't challenge themselves. Just do something. Find something you like and just do it. What do you think the benefit for a financial advisor listening to just challenging themselves? Why is that? I mean, the business itself is enough of a challenge. Why is an outside challenge, right? Important. I think it's important because the, because your clients are looking to you for a whole bunch of different inspirations and in large part, they're looking for inspiration and trust on the financial side, which is important to them. Because they're also looking for inspiration and trust in their, in their personal relationships and then their relationship with you. And if there's something that will, can resonate with them and it deepens the bond with you, then you, you've got a relationship, which is going to last, it's no longer transaction. Well, the great thing about your story and I've heard it multiple times is, you show that you were successful and you overcome a lot of odds, but you also showed you were very vulnerable and going through that. I mean, that's a tough thing to explain all the things you went through in those races and people listen to that and they're like, okay, this guy, he's the real deal because there's an authenticity about that, right? It's not all grandiose. You're talking, you're an Ironman. I never heard you talk about that. You talk about how you overcome and the mental game for you was to overcome and not quit. Yeah. And that resolves. And not quit. I think that if you give yourself permission to quit, this is one of the rules I have for my athletes, don't ever stop on the course, don't stop on the bike, don't stop in the water. You can slow down, you can pace yourself, but don't stop because the first time you give yourself permission to stop, permission will become easier and easier and easier and easier. And as you're building a practice, if something doesn't go right, it won't, it's not going to go right. It never goes the way you've envisioned it. You've got to give it the next go and the next go and the next go because as soon as you give yourself permission to give up, it makes it easier and easier and easier. Yeah. And I see this, I think, a lot and advisors in their marketing and the way they structure their practice. It doesn't work out immediately to give up when they stop and we have a lot of victimization going on in our global community. So no, Bill, I appreciate you sharing that story. I know you've talked to our advisors about it. I know you've shared this and you've got a book drafted about your experiences, I have to make sure that when you do pen that, that we get this attached to this episode. But appreciate your friendship, appreciate all things you do for our advisors and our business. Again, Bill has several different podcasts here on C4G for growth and the 4 is the number 4 dot org. So you can check us out and it builds other episodes and listen to those. I think it'd be well worth it. You'll see there's a lot of depth to the bill and there's a lot of great things to learn from Bill as well as our other guests. So stay tuned. Everyone's they will drop a new episode. I appreciate you listen, this is Bill Bass and John Columnus for this episode signing off. Thanks. Thank you. Hey, thank you for your time today. We will have another content packed session posted next week. Please check our website, canalistforgrowth.org, for our legal disclosures on the bottom of our home page. If you're into that sort of thing, hey, thank you for your time today. Please check our website, canalistforgrowth.org, for our legal disclosures on the bottom of our homepage if you're into that sort of thing.
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