Brian Keane
speaker
176 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Brian Keane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I started writing my first book, The Fitness Mindset. Those two things were giving me a lot of focus at the time because they were directly building the business alongside me. And 2017 came around. I released the book. It did incredible. And then... I was starting to kind of waver a little bit. I felt, for the lack of a better expression, a little bit soft, Ilana.
Like I had been working really hard. I was now making really good money. I had a lot of freedom and options and choices, but I felt life had got very comfortable. And again, it's probably a psychoanalyst dream to wonder why I was seeking out to get out of this comfort. But at the time, it felt really unnerving for me.
And just by chance, I was at a business mastery event in Amsterdam and I ran into someone who became a very good friend of mine, Tom Otten. He just got an exit from Create Digital Media, the top digital media agency in Dubai in the UAE. And fitness people tend to attract fitness people. I was in shape. He was in shape. We started chatting at this event.
And I was like, he's a good bit smaller than me, but he's clearly lean. He clearly works out. So I was like, what do you do? He goes, I do ultramarathons. And I said, sorry, no, I was like, I'm in the fitness industry. But I was like, what's an ultramarathon? I was so far from this world. And he goes, well, it's anything over 26.2 miles. That's a marathon.
So anything over that is an ultra marathon. And then he started talking to me about this race in the Sahara, a marathon to sob, six back-to-back marathons in the Sahara desert, self-sufficient. So you carry all your food and everything you need on your back. You have to carry a bin and pump within arm's reach at all times in case you get bitten by a snake. Very, very extreme race.
They give you water at checkpoints every 10 kilometers, but that's it. And if you drop your water or spill it, it's gone. You get nothing again until the next day. So it's very, very extreme. And I was looking at him just jaw dropped, like going, that sounds nuts. That sounds insane.
And I missed the whole next speaker at the event because I was on Google going through Marathon to sob, seeing what it was like. I was like, oh, my God, that sounds amazing. And then I came home and something happened that has probably happened to a lot of people listening. And it happened to me several times before was that kind of voice in my head started to get really loud.
And it was like, you're not a runner. For those that don't know what I look like, I'm five foot eight. I'm 83 kilos. I'm built like a little muscular hobbit. I'm short.
I'm stocky.
I'm not built for long distance running. And that voice got very strong in my head. You're not a runner. What are you thinking? You can't do this. Fast forward three months later, I was sitting outside the gym about to go in for a workout and I was about to post on Instagram. So this is back when Instagram, the social media strategy was quote cards. They were very popular.
People used to share them, they'd comment and you get lots of viral reach from quote cards. I was putting up a quote card that said, behind every fear is a person you want to be. And right before I went to post, I went, oh, you hypocrite. I was like, you cannot post this on your social media channels. And the conversation with Tom came back into my head. And I said, oh, crap. So I went home.
I paid in full for the marathon to run to the Sahara. And I posted the quote card. And I spent the next few months. It's interesting because I never ran. That wasn't my background. I was an athlete. I played GA, which is like a combination between rugby, soccer, basketball. So I played sport all my life, but that's a sprint sport.
Very, very different. And I even remember that next day I went into the gym. I did my normal workout, push workout, shoulders, chest, triceps. I'm like, all right, I'm going to try a run. So I hopped on a treadmill. At this point in my life, I'd never ran on a treadmill. I'd done an incline on a treadmill, but I'd never ran on a treadmill.
So I had no concept of what was fast or slow on a treadmill. So I put it to 21 kilometers an hour, which is about 15 miles an hour, which is way too fast for a treadmill, for someone that's not used to running on a treadmill. I nearly went flying off the treadmill. LAUGHTER becoming a viral sensation on YouTube for all the wrong reasons. And I said, I'm going to do three kilometers.
I did the three kilometers at that speed, slowed it down slightly and nearly got sick. I got off, went back to the dressing room, Alana, and I went, oh, my God, six marathons in the Sahara is the equivalent of 250 kilometers. I'm after feeling sick after three.
How am I going to do 247? It went into my head. And I did what I normally do with weight loss clients, fat loss clients, body composition. I was like, all right, pyramid of prioritization. What's important now? Bringing back my win, my WIN. I was like, well, I have to learn how to run a marathon. I've never ran a marathon. There's no point worrying about six if I can't run one.
So I signed up for one. That was August, September 2017. Then I did the Dubai marathon in January 2018. Completed that and then went to the Sahara 2018 and did the six back to back marathon. It was insane because it was the only time still to this day with all the races I've done and challenges I've done. It was the only one that I didn't think I was going to finish until I finished it.
The only one I did the Arctic year later and I tore my Achilles 86 kilometers from the end running to the Arctic Circle line five days for 230 kilometers. And I strapped it so tight that I couldn't feel my ankle or anything below my ankle. And I pulled it behind me for 86K and finished it as an aside. So the Arctic, I love the Sahara, but the Arctic, there's the local indigenous Sami tribes.
So they're like a reindeer tribe that set up these teepees in tents and they'll put holes in the water and they'll boil the water. And you have these special thermal flasks that you can stay hydrated. And I was in a tent And there's a photo that went viral here in Ireland with all the newspapers and magazines, which I'd never really thought about this, but it'll make sense in a moment.
The Arctic's about minus 20 to minus 40 degrees Celsius. And when I tore my Achilles, you need to be in this weird Goldilocks zone in the Arctic. You move too fast, you'll sweat, your risk of hyperthermia goes up. You go too slow, your risk of frostbite goes up. And when my Achilles tore, I was pulling my leg behind me. But because I was moving so slowly, the water in my eyelids, they froze.
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