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

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Welcome to this episode of The Peter Attia Drive. This was a really fun one for me to do, and it was done relatively without much preparation or prompting.
So in this episode, I interview one of my really, really close friends, Mike Trevino. Mike and I have been friends from the moment we met, which was about five years ago. And you know, there are just a number of things about Mike that are really interesting, and you'll learn a lot of them in this episode. Starting with the fact that Mike is arguably the most accomplished amateur endurance athlete, certainly that I've ever known, but you'd have a hard time making a case for any other amateur endurance athlete, period. His accomplishments are beyond legendary. And we go through many of them here, though not all of them.
And that's sort of why I wanted to have this discussion with him, is like, Mike and I see each other every week. We somehow figured out a way to time our travel, such that there's one day a week, at least three weeks out of the month when we're not traveling, and we can go out and do a ride, and it's a relatively short ride. We ride about 40 kilometers, but it's just kind of this amazing time when we get to catch up on life and all of the things that we think about together. And so Mike shares a lot of that stuff today. He gets into, again, I think you could listen to this and easily come away overwhelmed and thinking, wow, there's nothing about that guy's experience that I can relate to because he's basically setting world records in running, in cycling. He's doing these things like the Race Across America that I think it's almost impossible for a normal person to fathom what that means. It's impossible for me to fathom what that means, and I have some experience in these sort of ultra-distance world.
But I think he also is able to make the case that the lessons that he learns in doing these things are applicable to life, and they're applicable to specifically things that you might wanna do for your own endurance. If you're currently able to run a 5K and wondering what does it take to get to the 10K or the half marathon, or you're running the half marathon and you wanna run the marathon, what does it take? Well, in many ways, it's sort of taking a page out of Mike's playbook. Mike's a really special guy to me. Mike and his wife, Nada, who are very close friends, have been there for me during arguably one of the most difficult periods of my life, and they were the first people to basically show up when I needed to be picked up. And so I'm forever grateful to Mike and his family, and I just find that our weekly bike rides on Sunday mornings, which are usually when we do them, are among kind of the most cherished things that I do outdoors anymore. So much of what I do is now alone. I lift weights alone, I ride my Peloton or my Wahoo Kickr alone, and this is kind of the one time a week when I get to go and be with somebody else for an hour or 75 minutes, hour and a half, and I value it greatly. One anecdote that I'll tell before we jump into this episode, just to put in perspective for anybody who is themself, a cyclist or a reasonably serious athlete, just to put in context Mike's accomplishments and just his ability. So about four years ago, when I was training very hard as a time trialist, and at this point, Mike was, he was running, but he was kind of done with his ultra distance career and had not been on a bike in probably a year.
And he was like, I'm gonna come out and join you one day for one of your workouts. I said, that would be great. And I couldn't expect that he could even come close to keeping up with me, because at the end of the day, just conditioning seems to matter and how much preparedness you have matters. And so we went out to Fiesta Island where we train and there's a loop that you do that's part of the training. So we did this workout together and it was a very tough workout. Lots of sort of three minute, four minute all out intervals. And at the end of the workout, we decided to do two hot laps. So that's two laps of the big loop of Fiesta Island. That would be about almost 14 kilometers for those two laps.