#17 – Mike Trevino: life-lessons from ultra-endurance, mindset, hard work, and removing limitations

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Mike's birthday ritual makes age tangible: run your age in miles.

  Starting at 40, he runs the number of miles matching the birthday. At 43 that meant a 43-mile fasted run after a 5 p.m. beer the night before, worst-case banana money in the pocket, and a finish that still left him clear enough to call Peter the same day.

• 02

  Badwater 135 taught heat, elevation, and crew management in one package.

  The race starts below sea level in Death Valley (asphalt so hot the white line can feel ~10°F cooler) and finishes at Whitney Portal around 8,500 feet after 135 miles. Peak air near 125°F turns the hood of a car into an egg skillet; Mike treated the ecosystems along 395 as part of the problem to solve, not scenery. He finished into Lone Pine craving pizza before the final climb; the race used to summit Whitney itself until safety rules cut it at the portal.

• 03

  Race Across America showed how sleep debt becomes psychosis.

  Best practice is roughly 20–22 hours on the bike and 2–4 hours of sleep per day. On his first RAAM he stayed on the bike ~28 hours, slept ~none for ~45 hours, broke his crew early, and later entered a delusional stretch where he concocted a chase narrative around a following van near a power plant. Hallucinations were the middle stage; full delusion—the 'mentally insane' phase he names—was the warning that the event was no longer sports.

• 04

  Objective metrics beat vibes when deciding if you are race-ready.

  Time, heart rate, and bike horsepower do not flatter. Mike asks whether course-record shape is real or self-mythology before he adds load, a habit he argues transfers to anyone training for a first 10K.

• 05

  A Himalayan parasite forced a 10-day fast that rewired his view of hunger.

  Yak meat at extreme altitude left him with a severe parasitic load discovered the following year. Western and Eastern clinicians agreed the nuclear option was fasting ~10 days; days one and two were brutal, and by day three his visual field widened into a calm he had not expected. UCSD infectious-disease input sat alongside whatever Eastern modalities he tried; the point was clearing the organism, not collecting fasting credentials.

• 06

  Trans-Iowa / RAGBRAI curiosity became a continuous crossing experiment.

  Growing up doing the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, he kept asking why everyone stopped at night. As an adult he tested how fast the state could be crossed in one push—an endurance puzzle more than a party ride.

• 07

  Modafinil maintains wakefulness but is not a free lunch for ultras.

  FDA-labeled for narcolepsy and banned in sport, it is a non-stimulant wakefulness drug. Peter recalls Air Force pilot data: ~200 mg held performance a long time then fell off by 24 hours; ~600 mg (the top tested dose, which he himself used in residency) looked flatter across the day—useful context, not a race plan. Stimulants, he argues, eventually 'blow you up' on multi-day races; wakefulness drugs still trade in recovery debt.

• 08

  Peers dying on the course recalibrated what 'extreme' was worth.

  Deaths around the ultra community (including Bob Breedlove and a later wake-up call involving Nick Venuto in 2010) made law-of-large-numbers risk concrete. Mike eventually pulled back from the edge rather than treating every record as mandatory. Law of large numbers on open roads and remote trails means something eventually happens if you stay out there long enough.

• 09

  Leadership at home and work looks like taking out the garbage.

  With a ~15-person company he still does unglamorous chores. He does not want his kids' model of excellence to be a father who 'did everything athletic' but nothing relational—the inverse of his own handy dad who could fix anything.

• 10

  Navigation and contingency planning are part of the training.

  He has charted hundreds of miles in ziplock-bagged cue sheets taped against sweat. The same mindset—expect 7-Eleven bananas, expect crew fracture, expect sleep math to fail—is what he tries to hand kids and teammates.