#2115 - Riley Gaines

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Riley Gaines (0:06)

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Hello.

Riley Gaines (0:13)

Hello.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

Very nice to meet you.

Riley Gaines (0:14)

Yes, and you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

You've been on a wild little journey, huh?

Riley Gaines (0:18)

A journey that I certainly never expected, never wanted, still don't want, so yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you would have to be an advocate for women's sports?

Riley Gaines (0:34)

For sanity.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

For sanity, yeah.

Riley Gaines (0:37)

No, no. Never did I imagine that anyone would have to be in the position that I'm in, nevertheless me. So like you said, it really has been a wild, almost two years now. I graduated college, set to be a dentist in dental school, wanting to specialize in endodontics, which weirdly enough is root canals.

So to say that this is a totally different path than I could have ever anticipated doesn't do it justice.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

Yeah, that's a minor understatement.

Riley Gaines (1:11)

Yeah, right. Exactly.

Joe Rogan (1:12)

So walk us through the beginnings of this for you. What was your first introduction to this insanity of biological men with gender dysphoria, trying to compete with women?

Riley Gaines (1:29)

So I'll take you through my kind of timeline here.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

Okay.

Riley Gaines (1:34)

Started swimming when I was four years old, right? I come from a family of athletes. So my dad was an NFL player, my mom, she played D1 softball, my oldest sister, she played softball. I went to Ole Miss, my brother, he's in college playing football now. All my uncles won Super Bowls and all this stuff. So come from a family of athletes. Started swimming when I was four, graduated when I was 22 So you know, 18 years of my life, I really dedicated to my sport. Impossible to put in the words, you know, this, the time and the hours and the dedication and the sacrifices that it takes to compete and ultimately be successful at the highest level. But of course, I was willing to do this. I knew I had to.

Right? You don't get to go to prom, you don't get to have sleepovers with your friends on Friday night because guess what? Practice at 6 a.m. on Saturday. All of that to really say it's a lifelong journey. College rolls around.

Truth be told, I really could have gone anywhere that I wanted to swim. I'm absolutely biased and the SEC is the best conference. So I knew that was for me. But went to University of Kentucky, could not have been a better place for me.

Freshman year, there was a lot of adjusting. It was a lot of time and hours. I thought I worked hard before I was wrong. We were in the water six hours every single day, with three of those hours being before 8 a.m. So you practice from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. Go to class, come back, practice again from 1.3 to 4.30. Ate your dinner, iced your shoulders, went to bed. Did it all again the next day. We swam about 15,000 yards every single day, which is equivalent to like 10-ish miles. So lots of adjusting. Sophomore year, still improving though, still getting better. Sophomore year, rolls around.

We're, you know, I really started having this breakout season, started doing some pretty great things. Really had finally developed like a sense of consistency, I think. And about three days before we were supposed to leave for our national championships, which of course, you know, the NCAA, think about basketball, the NCAA tournament, equivalent in swimming, we were ready to go, the meet you work all year, really all your life for. About three days before we were supposed to leave in March of 2020, our coaches pull us out of the water, sit us down, say, look, you know, if you live in the dorm rooms, pack your stuff up, you have to leave campus tonight. Of course, COVID had hit.

I didn't really know what this meant at the time, there's still a lot of uncertainty around this. So I thought this meant we got a weekend off, we got to go home, we'd quickly return. But of course, that was not a correct assumption because upon going back home, home is Tennessee for me. Right, there were no pools open, there were no gyms open, nothing like that. And so every day I swam miles aimlessly in the lake. I put on a wetsuit and I'd jump in the boat dock and I'd swim down by Johnny Cash's house and I came back and I did the same route every single day. Because again, I knew that I had to if I wanted to continue this breakout season, I was having my junior year or my sophomore year into my junior year, right? And the amount of snakes that I swam by and like dead catfish that are floating on top of the water that like hit you in your face while you're swimming is not pleasant.