We Are Superman

After Nick Jonsson, a Swedish-born, Southeast Asian businessman, found the mounting stresses of his job and climbing the corporate ladder untenable, he began drinking heavily, abandoned his fitness regimen, and put on a ton of weight, leading to him losing his job, as well as his wife and son. After getting help to control his alcoholism, Nick, who has now been sober for six years, recognized that one of the primary reasons business leaders were failing was having no one available to open up to about these stresses. Instead, they blew off steam in the bars and in other unhealthy outlets. He realized that businessmen, in particular, could benefit from having support to cope, just as he had to regain his sobriety. The well-traveled Nick now leads the Executive’s Global Network in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia to bring business leaders together to discuss issues they face both in and out of the office. He encourages leaders all over the globe to seek out similar groups before work stresses cause them to sli

On a bike ride on an open road in New Jersey in 2011, Ron Gold was struck head-on by an SUV whose driver had fallen asleep behind the wheel even though it was the middle of the day. He barely survived, suffering critical injuries, and was left a paraplegic. It was bad enough the driver was totally unapologetic about causing this tragic event. Ron spent many months in rehab, not to mention wrestling with feelings of despair and hopelessness. After he finally got back home, one thing he learned, which you would likely never find out otherwise, is how challenging it is to find a reliable home health care provider. Ron and I are fellow alumni of the University of Pennsylvania, and leveraging the business acumen he had gleaned both there and in his Wall Street jobs, Ron and his wife Betsy, who had encouraged him to find purpose in his life despite his situation, founded and run LeanOnWe. This organization serves to help pair people in the New York Tri-State area who need home healthcare with screened providers, as

The We Are Superman Podcast has hit 300 episodes... we think. But thanks to David's impetus, inspirational WASP guests have touched millions of listeners around the world.  Or at least thousands. After a quick historical recap, I'm honored to bring you my recounting of my truly amazing trip to Chile and climbing peaks in the Andes as high as almost 20,000 feet in the driest and one of the most remote spots on Earth, the Atacama Desert. Our trip included many impressive elite athletes, surprising sights, spectacular scenery, jaw-dropping starry night skies, and consuming so many wraps that I still haven't eaten one since. The climbs were some of the toughest challenges I've ever undertaken, but the rewards of exploring my limits - as well as seeing the others doing so - were well worth it. I hope you enjoy following along with this awesome adventure (which you can do as well, see below).If you'd like to take the same amazing trip, contact Tyler Andrews at:Instagram @TylerCAndrewschaski

Imagine you are an 18-year-old and you have worked your entire life and gotten to the cusp of achieving your dream of playing hockey on the Division 1 collegiate level and then the NHL, and suddenly you are told that your dream is now kaput due to a health issue. That was the reality faced by David Carle, a star defenseman from Anchorage, Alaska following a physical he received at the NHL combine for top prospects just prior to the 2008 draft. Instead of hearing his name picked in the early rounds by a team that would be eager to add him to their roster after a few years of playing college hockey, he now faced an uncertain future due to a drastic diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease of the myocardium heart muscle. However, George Gwozdecky, the head coach at the University of Denver, where David had decided to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Matt, a winner of the Hobey Baker Award as the best player in college hockey, honored the scholarship offer he had made, and added David to th

This past late winter I met a truly impressive group of athletes on a trip to the rugged and beautiful, high-elevation Atacama Desert of Chile. One of these is Kat Edwards of Richmond, Va. A relative newcomer to ultrarunning at 24 years old, and having never experienced performing at altitude, Kat crushed climbing peaks of 16,000 and 18,000 feet before tackling her first FKT attempt, on nearly 20,000-foot Nevado San Francisco on the border between Chile and Argentina. This same insanely difficult climb with 4400 feet in elevation gain over just 4.67 miles took me more than nine hours to the summit and back. Coached by Tyler Andrews, who led our trip, Kat quite impressively set the female FKT by reaching the peak in 3:37 and completing the roundtrip in 5:40. Kat has followed that up by taking on more scary challenges that have been more opportunities for growth. She raced for the first time on foreign soil in the Petzl Trail Plus 80K in Ecuador on a dastardly beast of a course that led to a DNF, but she also g

This is a very special and personal episode for me. I want to introduce you to Nate Zayonc, a young man whom I am very proud of. His life was not in the most positive place a bit more than a year ago, but now he is thriving as a private in the U.S. Army. Nate was a top distance runner on the cross country and track teams at Bear Creek H.S. where I helped coach him. His desire was to run in college and then professionally. However, his life at home was difficult, and in fact he did receive a partial scholarship offer from UConn, but his parents for whatever reason never told him about it. Actually, his parents were an aunt and uncle who had adopted him. His biological mother was 14 when she had him and hasn’t been in his life since he was a toddler. Nate was also born with fetal alcohol syndrome, which led to him having behavioral issues growing up. His father was 18 at the time and subsequently served time for statutory rape and is currently imprisoned on another charge. Nate’s adoptive parents weren’t great

Jack Rubalcave and I are at the end of our now-four-part summation of our amazing trip to Asia this past fall. I hope you’ve gotten a lot out of hearing about our adventures and that we have helped inspire you to go explore the world yourself. As you have been hearing, we encountered so many unexpected experiences, but they were almost all positive. The terror of driving scooters through the chaotic streets of Bali, the incredibly nice and polite people in the bustling cities of Japan, how different the toilets, yes, the toilets were, vending machines on the streets that served up everything from cold food to hot food to fresh-squeezed orange juice, the night markets in Seoul and Taipei with really, really strange food, things we learned at the DMZ dividing North and South Korea, checking into a hotel where bringing in a fruit called the durian is banned just like smoking is, the jaw-dropping beauty of Buddhist temples in Bangkok where also poisonous water monitors casually roam a busy city park, the food, th

Tim Kaufman fell victim to all of the classic American poor lifestyle choices. He ate primarily processed food – and large quantities of it.  After surgery related to a crippling disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, doctors prescribed painkillers and soon he was hooked on them. Like most addicts, he connived ways to get more of them and even more powerful narcotics, like fentanyl. He smoked, he chewed, and he drank staggering amounts of vodka. Tim was raised in a strait-laced Christian family in a quiet, rural town, demonstrating how his pitfalls don’t discriminate based on social standing. Realizing he would soon be in a coffin, 400-pound Tim decided it was time to get bariatric surgery, only for his doctor to tell him that his body’s catastrophically poor health wouldn’t allow for him to have it, which sunk him into further despair. Four simple words from his terminally-ill mother-in-law shook Tim into deciding that he needed to find a way to live. Tim knew David and like the latter’s book, Out There, Tim

Jack Rubalcave, my 24-year old traveling companion, with whom I’ve previously traveled to Portugal, the Azores, and Ecuador, took an amazing 3½-week long trip to Asia this fall, and we want to share with you some of our adventures and inspire you to seek your own. We carried nothing but a backpack, took 13 flights, visited seven incredibly interesting countries, and probably spent less than $1000 each for the entire trip. We have been sharing some of our formula as well as the exotic sights, food, and fun we had.  In the previous two episodes we covered Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and in this one we talk about the crazy times we had in Thailand and Bali, Indonesia, including a surprise encounter with really big, venomous water monitor lizards in a Bangkok park, an enchanting elephant sanctuary in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and attempting to rent and drive scooters on the very chaotic streets of Bali. I think these travels have given me a much deeper understanding about other people a

If you think you can’t accomplish a lot of change and challenge yourself to achieve new goals in a short amount of time, then you’ll benefit from listening to this chat with Diarra Cropper. I’ve gotten to know the ever-enthusiastic Diarra through the Black Men Run community.  Black Men Run is a dynamic nationwide organization that is a movement that encourages Black men to be active to reverse health risks like hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and mental depression that disproportionally affect this population. The organization conducts meetups to bring local chapters together and organizes to connect at races throughout the country. I began running with the Denver chapter three years ago and have developed many great friendships. With awesome leadership, the Denver chapter has been one of the fastest-growing in the country. Diarra, like many African-American male track athletes, gravitated toward the power events like sprints. And why not? If you turned on a marathon on TV, the only Black runners you saw were

Keenan Haga is who you might call a serial marathoner. In fact, he has run 311 of them so far. On every continent, including Antarctica. He has run one in every state – three times. Keenan’s goal for 2024 is to run 100 marathons, including 13 in 15 days, plus a 100-miler. You’ll undoubtedly enjoy hearing about his cool experiences running among polar bears, sea lions, on the race track at Churchill Downs, at Crater Lake, Oregon, and the not-so-great ones like getting a parasite from water at an aid station in Brazil. In the midst of all of this marathoning, Keenan also beat stomach cancer, chemotherapy, the whole works. He credits running with helping him develop the attitude that he could dig in to battle it. But he kept his diagnosis to himself, even to his family, until he met another runner, Karen Kay-Timonier, at the American Heroes Run to whom he opened up and began to share his cancer journey. Keenan had already discovered how much he cherished the running community he’s met throughout the world, but n

Helping and honoring our military veterans was deeply meaningful to David, and he helped support them with his American Heroes Run. As you may know, I now direct the event to continue his important legacy. Proceeds support Warriors’ Ascent, an organization that provides holistic programs to veterans and first responders experiencing post-traumatic stress. Treating veterans with this not-as-visible type of battlefield injury has often gotten overlooked by the Veteran’s Administration and organizations that support veterans. I became aware of Iraq War veteran Gene Bennett’s story and received a copy of his chilling book, “We Did Not Deserve the Crapper: The prison we entered but never fully left.” Gene served two tours in Iraq. At first, the Army used him as a truck tire mechanic, but as sometimes happens, they assigned him where needed, and with just a smattering of training, he ended up a prison guard. Gene, whose callsign was Spazmasterflex, termed this job “the worst babysitting job ever.” In 130o heat, oft

In a little bit of a twist, I’m chatting today with another podcaster, Joe Corcione, from the Everyday Ultra Podcast. Joe is a fellow New Yorker who also cheers for, and often suffers with, my same New York teams the Giants, Yankees, Rangers, and Knicks. The Everyday Ultra Podcast is laser-focused on the ultrarunning world with one of the best lineups of guests to keep ultra aficionados informed and entertained. Joe also presents episodes that provide excellent tips and guidance to your everyman and everywoman ultrarunner. What is incredibly impressive, though, is that Joe grew up as a self-described non-athlete who eventually developed a serious drinking problem. When Joe hit his breaking point, he moved west, eventually landing in Arizona, and he began running and jumped in with both feet, pun intended. Like most starting out, his journey began with baby steps, and Joe began to rise rapidly in his challenges to become an ultrarunner and is now training for the Cocodona 250. Not only that, but he has built a

If you’ve ever run an ultramarathon, you almost certainly know the name of Marshall Ulrich. His accomplishments are unparalleled, and if I tried to list them, I’d undoubtedly leave out many. I could naturally mention his 29 official Badwater finishes in Death Valley, a race most of us would not want to tackle even once. Or that he dwarfed those finishes by continuing on to the Mt. Whitney summit, or that he once ran around the entire 425-mile perimeter of Death Valley, which we have fun talking about here. He completed the Seven Summits on his first attempt, and he set the speed record for the transcontinental run across the U.S., recounted in his great book, "Running on Empty." I could add his Stray Dogs team completed all of the Eco-Challenges, televised as The World’s Toughest Race. You may have already heard about all of this, so instead let’s focus on his latest endeavors, like the Route 66 Ultrarun, a 140-mile, multi-day event along that historic route in Arizona, and his support for his good

We are into the dog days of winter, and for a lot of folks the days are gray and cold and New Year’s resolutions are starting to fade into oblivion. That’s why I thought it would be great to bring back Dan Herman, whose upbeat approach to health, fitness, and setting goals would be a refreshing antidote to the winter blahs. Dan owns Dan Herman Performance in New Jersey, and I think he offers some of the most practical advice people can employ to knockout fitness and nutrition goals in sensible ways and not succumb to the hype of online hawkers of canned fitness programs and supplements that have not been scientifically studied. It’s not just that Dan had once been 375 pounds, lost weight, got fit, and now thinks he knows it all. Dan has earned numerous certifications, and knows great ways to help people develop solid plans to overcome obstacles that prevent them from following through on their stated goals. Plus, I always enjoy Dan’s positivity for a guy who lives in Jersey. I hope you take away a few nuggets

For 24 days beginning in mid-October, Jack Rubalcave and Bill (and Nigel Leonis for part of the trip), had an amazing time traveling through 7 countries in Asia. In part 1 of this trilogy, we described the incredible energy and culture shock we experienced in Japan, and the interesting Communist world of Vietnam. In this episode, we share with you our experiences in South Korea and Taiwan, two countries that have experienced their share of conflict. Seoul is a beautiful city with many cultural surprises, including crazy almond stores, wild street food, and an obsession with K-Pop. We also took a fascinating side trip to the DMZ, where we got to within 70 meters of the North Korean border. Taiwan is fiercely independent despite China wanting to seize it back. We had some unique experiences in Taipei, where we saw some beautiful Buddhist temples, as we did in Seoul. Jack and I hope that you enjoy hearing about these adventures and get inspired to explore new travel destinations yourselves. Bill Stahlsilly_billy

For 24 days beginning in mid-October, Jack Rubalcave and Bill (and Nigel Leonis for part of the trip), traveled through 7 countries in Asia. It was truly an amazing trip and we crammed an incredible amount of activities and saw so many sights in such a short span of time in each place. We each brought only a backpack. We took 13 flights in the 24 days, and get this, our total outlay for airfare was $204! We flew on airlines like Scoot, Peach, Air Asia, and VietJet using our miles and points, and had almost no issues. Our lodging was just over $500 for all of these nights!Jack and I hope that you enjoy hearing about these adventures and get inspired to explore new travel destinations yourselves. We describe in this first of three parts our adventures for the first eight days of the trip in Japan, and in Vietnam, where we ended it. Japan stood out for its incredible energy, how nice and polite people were, its cleanliness, fantastic food, and its surprising customs. Like buying hot corn chowder from vending mac

It's that time of year for resolutions and goal-setting. But how do you do this after last year was derailed and you're still struggling to take the first steps to even set goals for the new year? Using my own current experience battling back from August bunion surgery that still hasn't yielded good results, I discuss strategies to set your sights on goals you'd like to achieve in the coming year.Bill Stahlsilly_billy@msn.comFacebook Bill StahlInstagram @stahlor and @coachstahlYouTube We Are Superman Podcast

It’s the New Year, and we all know what that means. Perhaps you are already on your way to working toward your 2024 goals. Others might be planning to start on Jan. 1. Or maybe later when the snow begins to melt. Some will go it alone, so to speak. But for a great many, coaching will improve the chances you can have success. After all, I have yet to see a football team take the field this bowl season without a coach. Even in individual sports like golf or tennis, the pros have coaches. Heck, Tiger Woods had a cadre of coaches – a swing coach, a mental skills coach, a strength coach, a nutrition coach, etc. What can a running coach do for you, and who might want to have one? I discuss this with UESCA-certified coach Miki McConaha and cover many aspects in which coaches can help you get more out of a sport in which you’re already investing a lot of your time and resources, so why not get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. Many runners enjoy the community aspect to being coached, but perhaps you live in a

Our annual tradition is back!  We began this with David Clark and have continued it since.  Gary, a former obese alcoholic who became an ultramarathoner and all-around extremely insightful human, and I share a chat which goes in any and all directions.  Always one of our most downloaded episodes, you're sure to gain some gold nuggets when listening to Gary's wisdom. Enjoy, and Merry Sober F*cking Christmas and Holidays to all WASP listeners!Gary Stotlergarystotler.comFacebook Gary StotlerInstagram @_garystotler_Find his latest book, "Success is Spelled Action" on AmazonBill Stahlsilly_billy@msn.comFacebook Bill StahlInstagram @stahlor and @coachstahlYouTube We Are Superman Podcast