Ep. 756: Skateboarding Route 66 and Other Wild Adventures - Damien Rider
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 579 Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Skateboarding, Paddling: Damien LeRoy's Radical Transformation – 500-Mile Solo Paddle for Child Abuse Awareness, 2500-Mile Route 66 Skateboard, Mattress Marathon, 3-Ton Truck Push, 7500ft Hot Air Balloon Jump, World Records, One Breath Meditation Creator. After living a life that he wasn’t proud of for long enough, Damien decided to do something radical to change his trajectory. With no previous endurance experience, he set of to paddle 500 miles solo for 17 days to raise awareness about child abuse, something he personally suffered from.
After that first life-altering experience, he continued doing amazing feats of adventure, including a 2,500-mile skateboarding tour of Route 66 in the US, running a marathon with a mattress on his back, and pushing a 3-ton pickup truck for 17 miles. His most recent adventure involves jumping off the top of a hot air balloon from 7,500 ft!
He’s also a multiple world-record-holding adventure athlete, author, creator of One Breath Meditation, and motivational speaker, recognized for his humanitarian work as well as two National Geographic documentaries about his adventures.
To learn more about Damien, visit these links.
Instagram: @damienrider
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | on the hill catching fire from like kitchen fire and the whole place was burned down and like lit up the whole californian hills |
| 0:06.0 | so i had to wait a night and then get up the next next morning and uh by gas mask so i'll keep on skating through so i was scaded down the californian hills while they was still sort of on fire. |
| 0:36.4 | Hey folks, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast. |
| 0:39.2 | I'm your host, Mason Gravely. I don't always get stumped by naming an episode, but today's episode I was definitely, I didn't know what to call it. |
| 0:46.8 | Damien has got to be in the running for the most interesting man in the world, based on the |
| 0:51.7 | adventures he's done, based on the stories that happen |
| 0:54.1 | the guy has been on the cover of men's health he's been on the bachelorette he's been uh kidnapped |
| 1:01.7 | and held at ransom he has run a marathon carrying a mattress on his back he is as of recent in what |
| 1:07.9 | we were talking about in this episode jumping off a hot air balloon and skydiving |
| 1:11.9 | from the top. He's skateboarded Route 66, as you know from the title, 2,500 miles across the U.S. |
| 1:18.5 | And he has paddled 500 miles along the Australian coast on a paddle board. And by the way, |
| 1:26.2 | without a paddle, he just laid on the board and paddled with his hands, |
| 1:30.0 | getting knocked off the board, literally by sharks and having to fight them off and get back on the board before they eat him. |
| 1:37.0 | And I'm not even exaggerating. |
| 1:38.5 | That's the kind of stuff this guy does. |
| 1:41.2 | And you ask, what drives someone to be this crazy? |
| 1:47.2 | And it is a lot of times a pretty traumatic childhood. Damien had a horrific start in life. We're not going to get |
| 1:54.5 | into detail of it here on this, on this show, but he's done a ton of interviews, and there's a lot of articles out there talking |
| 2:02.2 | about the details. But to say the least, his childhood was probably one of the worst you can |
| 2:07.4 | imagine. And that led him down a pretty dark road early in life, so much so that he had a heart |
| 2:12.7 | attack at the age of 22 from the stress, from the abuse to his body. And by the time he was in his 30s, |
| 2:18.6 | he was ready to change things, make a difference, make a change of some sort that led to something |
... |
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