The Climate Expedition S2 - Ep1

good day mates I'm Beau Frith and I'm Reese Woodland and we're doing an expedition a year in each of the eight different climate zones of Australia all to explore how climate affects the human body and why doing multi day nature experiences is good for overall health and well being and building resilience last season we took on the Aussie 10 which is the 10 highest peaks in the cozy Osco National Park where we really pushed ourselves across the four day period out in the snow in August to understand what it means to be climate resilient it was the adventure of a lifetime physically it was a challenge like no other for us but mentally it was even more rewarding absolutely confronting those pigs taught us that pushing ourselves in nature isn't only good for the body but also essential for the mind that getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing a bit of stress in nature is super beneficial we work at Natural Cool Air and our job is to help try and cool down large spaces without any air conditioning during the work we do we've noticed that communities and cities around the world have disconnected massively from the natural world thinking about climate as a liability instead of an asset but what we've discovered that is if we leverage climate and rebuild our relationship with the natural world we can start to cool down these buildings and our cities in the process and then we thought what about us as people do we need to be more resilient to climate especially in a changing climate and to heat and stress and then we thought what's a fun way we could research this and share it with people so they can learn as well and that was where the idea for the climate expedition began only this season we're a man down our brother in law Layton unfortunately had an injury and was uh was unable to make it so but we carry on so join us as we explore Australia's climate zone No. 1 the tropics in the Wet Sunday Islands as we unlock the secrets of resilience in nature when Bo and I were chatting about what we should do for the next challenge and he mentioned a sea kayak voyage I was like yes that one let's do it I didn't even care about the other options that was the one I wanted to do because I love the ocean so much I've always felt a deep connection with it and what better place to do a sea kayak voyage than in the with Sundays with our choice of climate zone this year we have gone Climate Zone 1 because it was the polar opposite to what we did last year in the Alps we wanted that complete flip and try something new uh so Climate Zone 1 is tropical which is a hot humid summers and warm winters it's pretty hot pretty much consistently uh eventually get to the north of Queensland but that humidity really plays a major role in how our bodies regulate uh our Thermal temperatures the plan of attack is the motor from Chute Harbour to Whitehaven Beach where we'll set up camp for our first night from there we begin paddling along the stunning Whitsunay Island coastline tackling our first 20 kilometer stretch to reach our next destination the camp on day 2 of paddling sees us navigating the treacherous Whitsunday Hook Island channel as we make our way up to Crayfish Bay on Hook Island on day three we'll brave the winds and swells for an epic 22 kilometre journey from Crayfish Bay back through the channel and Onward down to Gigong Beach for our final night from there it's a homeward stretch to Shoot Harbour with a total distance of just over 50 km and after we'll need a much needed pub meal and a cold beer await to celebrate the event ready to start training probably the best spot we found that is similar to the with Sundays is the Noosa River and going out into the bay around Noosa there when it comes to the training now during our training we noticed that up and body strength was was was the thing that we were probably lacking the most on and weirdly enough our hip flexes things like that I know is our legs didn't really get don't get really much of a workout but hip flexes and and lower back was with things that were really showing up as as problem areas getting in the kayaks and paddling was Paramount but we also looked into talking to Kevin Brown from lift Nambor we got him involved to really take us through some strength and conditioning exercises so that we could develop the right amount of strength in the areas that we needed is we're gonna be really focusing on finding the principle of relativity to the session so we're gonna start off with a little bit of mobility and activation so the idea of that is gonna be to be relative to what imbalances or what things are time all sorts think to get one of your moving on your expeditions so I tried to like visualize in my head with what you gonna do well yeah I think so for example when we're doing incline press we do alternating so we starting in the kin that's what we're gonna be doing today up front you should have a nice natural arch it's fine head in neutral with press dumbbells up so remember we got both elbows tucked in right up keeping the upper back nice and tight so here we go one for what well left hand is under our right hand all the wheel through the opposite side change all through the book oh stop trying to keep motion on the squirt follow them your shoulders like you try to but you're going to sleep over the road rotate you side again focusing and you are trouble elbows squeeze my whole body as tight nice control on the way down and we're pressing up tops or when we rock the bar nice and tight not cold position superset in that with maybe doing Russian twist seat position rotate thanks man just made it back to the factory after doing a little bit of a training session but we're out for about an hour yeah about an hour look I real yeah I I think we were less than 15 minutes in and I realised that my left shoulder is need some work I it's pretty pretty sore after doing that but I we feel a little bit more stable in the kayaks now she's a bit reassuring but we've got so much more training to do so I think we're gonna introduce a little bit more swimming um and actually jump into the kayaks a lot more frequently before we actually go but yeah what a rude awakening our shoulders are very sore and Reese's hip flexes I got out and I was like somebody was making me bend over again so I thought I think that maybe our problem might be with the tipping and that is the fact that they're bit too buoyant yeah um yeah I reckon bit a bit more weight in here would probably be a bit better might help stop it roughin yeah just help us a little bit more yeah just finished up at your Monday pool cutting about a k in the water this morning just before work recent and I found ourselves that we need to do a lot more swimming in order to prepare for our kayaking trip up in the mid Sundays our shoulders are definitely feeling it but after a few days of swimming definitely feeling a lot better honestly today is absolutely magic yeah can't stress this enough having the weight extra weight in these clocks has made an unbelievable difference hey what we would that was super tippy before we like getting in them and they're like almost throwing us out every sort of wave would go over and almost launch us out of the kayak and now we've put we filled up a bunch of water bottles put a bit of extra weight in them and it's made a huge difference kept them nice and buoyant uh uh well it's actually displaced the water a lot better and kept them uh not so tippy so it's made us a little bit more confident in when it comes to being out in the open ocean up in the Whit Sundays which is going to be pretty wavy up in some of the parts in the passage and especially when we start to circumnavigate Whit Sunday Island and avoid the strong current just over there and we run aground now we're just gonna try and push through the current even though it's a bit wild to say yeah yeah that was really hard but currents are way stronger than what I thought you don't know you didn't notice it paddling out yeah as I guess it was like an absolute dream ha but cause we were going we were going it's taken us the same amount of time to paddle just that small distance as what it took us to paddle out yeah yeah so definitely makes a difference going with the car oh my God it was a good test to like feel it that strong cause we haven't we've been pretty lucky with the tides I feel like the whole idea is to try and build some proper arm strength yeah to be able to deal with cause the currents up there get pretty wild hmm so we've been told so it's about knowing when when they are when they're happening and hopefully we can work around it work with it and build up those shoulders how you feeling yeah extra weight in those in the front and the back that's way more steady now I'm feeling feeling a lot more confident out in the open water we are three weeks out from our kayak expedition in the Whit Sundays uh we plan to do about 5 days to circumnavigate Whit Sunday Island so while we're here in Vietnam we thought we'd jump in a couple of kayaks and get some more training in we've done quite a few kays up the river it's not quite the same as being in the ocean for training nonetheless we need to get we need to continue uh back when we get back jumping in the sea kayaks and getting stuck into it quite difficult quite difficult to get the training up on this one but we're uh we we yeah we we're cracking on with it where are they reset the back there look at these mountains picture esque day 1 and we get to the boat ramp at Chute Harbour to launch out and head off to Whitehaven Beach now after learning a little bit more about the wind Sundays and learning about how rough the seas can actually still get up there we decided that we wanted to get a support boat as well uh and which was which was piloted by Mr Dean Frith uh which was good it was good to have him on board because we knew that we were we if if anything major really happened uh we had something to fall back on we were lucky enough to have the legends of Breakway Marine lend us their new Gale Force Momentum 4.2 m center console as our main support boat it handled beautifully and gave us everything we needed to get this trek done and we're away just leaving Shoot Harbour on our way out to Whitehaven we're gonna camp that night tonight feeling good how we feeling boys during our trip though it was an incredible blessing we saw all these whales on the way out there a lot of them out in the distance but a mother and a calf came right up close to our boat I've never had that experience in my life and seeing humpback whales that close and breaching the water they were only within 20 meters of the boat was so special you are joking they're so big you are joking I don't know on the way out we're just taking in the amazing scenery of all the islands and the beautiful clear water and seeing whales out in the channel we saw so many whales we saw a mother and calf and um another pot of Wales it was just whales everywhere and that definitely was a bucket list item a mum and calf came really quite close to the boat and we stopped the engine and just we were just amazed and in awe of these beautiful creatures the water is so calm and glassy as we're going out from Chute Harbour it actually would have been the perfect day to paddle across the channel there out to Whitehaven but we just wanted to make sure we could get out to Whitehaven so we decided to go in the boat and we were kind of kicking ourselves that we didn't paddle that day plus we could obviously take a lot of the nutrition and hydration products that we needed which we we sorely missed in season one uh the fact that we had that support boat was really really good also bringing in Kate Primavera from Active Nutrition to help us understand more about the nutritional uh things that we needed to or decisions that we needed to make big difference and like I said before when it come to the nutrition that we took with us in the Alps we were seriously lacking and we didn't really focus on recovery at all we definitely were not taking on the right amount of calories what are we trying to look for when it comes to nutrition specifically when we're doing quite strenuous activity in this regard yeah so when you're looking at intense sort of prolonged periods of exercise it does come under endurance so when you're looking at endurance you're looking for I suppose three main things you're looking at your overall calorie intake so how much energy you're taking in from the food and drinks that you're having you're looking at keeping up enough protein so that you don't completely break down your muscles in the process that's one of the things that will give you that intense muscle soreness that you just really don't feel like you're getting over um and enough carbohydrates for energy so when you're doing endurance exercise the main the main I suppose metabolite that you'll be using in that time is carbohydrates you have to be getting carbohydrates from your food there's no point prioritising heaps and heaps of protein if you're not getting the carbs cause your body is just not gonna be able to keep up with that intensity of exercise for that period of time it'll just it'll cap out yeah gotcha I know it's part of the reason obviously we're quite sore like after the after the hike that we did in the Alps muscle soreness and recovery was crazy intense yeah you've got all those extra factors in there that are environmental as well yeah you've got the cold the bitter bitter cold your body will be burning at a much higher rate just to keep up with the temperature so you've got such a massive massive amount of energy expenditure you've gotta hit your calories first that's the primary thing then you look at your protein intake as something to pretty much just prevent damage or minimize the damage when when it came to I guess cal calorie calculations we were really only doing that off what we the information we're getting from our wearables yeah uh how accurate is that and and and how can we I guess better determine what we need to take from a calorie standpoint yeah so essentially when you're doing these kinds of you know prolonged exercise you're almost always going to need more than you think to be able to keep up with it not just from an estimation like you wearables and stuff are great to give you a baseline understanding what you're doing in usual exercise they usually overestimate what you might need but up to 20% it depends on the device so like a Fitbit versus an Apple Watch might tell you something different and a Garma will tell you something different again ah what you're looking at there is active calories burn doesn't account for your metabolic rate so your base metabolic rate within that you're not accounting for the thermic effective food so the cost to your body to actually digest the quantity of food that you're putting in and if you're putting in twice as much food as what you normally eat you'll be burning extra calories just to digest the food and you've got to add a little bit more you've got to add more than for the recovery aspect so that your muscles don't break down you've also got to account for probably not a great deal of sleep in those conditions you'll then need more to account for not sleeping yeah so there is you generally wanna account for your base energy expendition not even just your metabolic rate what you normally burn on a day today to keep you alive plus all the active calories plus probably an extra you know thousand to 15 hundred calories on top of that if you can take it in well and look we we were doing on average about 3,000 active calories burning uh in in the Alps three three and a half thousand yeah uh we expect that we'd probably be doing slightly under that for the kayak trip in the wet Sundays yeah the benefit of what we have with the Wet Sundays is that we have a support boat which is part of the reason why we have gone right well this is all the food that we can now take because we have ice boxes and things like that that we can actually take steaks and other vegetables and not just dried food yeah I think that's the downside with the fact that we had to pack everything in for the Alps yeah the upside that we have for today but let's talk a little bit about some of the foods that you've seen so far yeah um we obviously got our proteins with our with our steaks some sausages here and some even some uh some chicken skewers uh huh these are because we have access to like small plate burners yeah these are probably the most practical for us uh to be able to cook in in the time like those propane burners this is probably the most practical thing we've got uh also in meat and that as well we've got tin tuna um yeah tin tuna is such an easy one well let's so the proteins are really that tin tuna the meat and then eggs we had quite a lot of eggs yeah and then supplementing with with literally just like little protein bars yeah to try and help during the day while we're paddling yeah yeah um so what what are your thoughts on that is it like obviously we we we planning on taking a lot more than this on the on when we're there but these are kind of the ideas that we have and yeah so when you're um looking at your protein intake if you're getting a a rough estimate of what you might need you can actually use your body weight to give you an idea oh cool so if you're going into an event or you know into an endurance event this is in the case of um the wet Sunday strip or in any kind of other extended period of time intensity effort you use your body weight so if you're roughly say 80 kilos going into something you'll probably wanna double your body weight and that would not in the sense of put on another 80 kilos but use that number in a calculation so 80 kilos times two then we would use that as your grams of protein per day that's gonna give you a rough estimation of what you need so yeah hundred and sixty grams of protein in a day would be enough to prevent your muscles from completely breaking down and being incredibly sore um and giving you grief when you do back to back days of events um um the minimum that you'd wanna go off is about 1.6 which is probably what most people realistically hit in an event so if we're looking at say 160 grams in a day something like these backcountry meals for example that's got 33 grams of protein oh yeah so out of a whole hundred and sixty grams that you've got to fit in the day that's a full meal and it's only 30 grams of protein gotcha so you'd be wanting to look at supplementing it uh with other kinds of foods and making sure that you're still getting your main meals within the day plus things like your little bars um tunas are fantastic these little tins here for example they've got over 30 grams just in that one little tin wow so there's different ways to make it work you can use other things other dried options like uh jerky jerky is a really good one and it's also salted so it can help with your hydration that was the one thing that we had for so my dad actually makes his own jerky uh yes and it was like we got him to make and it's like covered it around like all my friends love it yeah so they are like when's your dad making beef jerky again cause it's so good we got the we got uh that was when we went out we actually got a few bags of beef jerky yeah uh what happens like with the beef jerky processes is it just that it condenses it down into like small bite size bits it essentially just strips the water volume got you so it's basically that but with no water yeah so it means that it's a lot easier to carry with you and a lot more compact um you obviously still wanna drink water alongside it but when you're looking at getting in large volumes of food if you take the water component out you can fit a lot more in yeah so it's just easier to get more nutrition that way like in a little serving of beef jerky you can usually get up to 30 grams of protein in it interesting but if you're looking at say trying to eat that versus eating a pack of jerky what's a lot easier to get down yeah which one can you keep eating for a longer period of time yeah um so it's trying to get nutritious sauces as well as dense sources yeah got you yeah we finally made it out to Whitehaven cause we were partnering along quite slow because the kayaks were in tow and we didn't want him to be bumping around with us going too fast and we've turned around the corner to White Haven and it is stunning what a beautiful beach the sand is so white and the water is clear and blue it's no wonders it is one of the destinations of the wet Sundays when we got to White Haven Beach even though there was a lot of people there initially by five PM after we'd set up our tent everybody had left the beach and we were it was pretty much deserted apart from us and two other little small families and it was uh that was pretty magical as well as the day winds down the nurse for tomorrow are definitely starting to set in focused on getting some much needed rest and loading up on enough calories to fuel the 20 kilometre stretch to our next campsite every paddle stroke every training session over the last six months has LED us to this moment we know it's going to push us to our limits but that's exactly why we're here

2024-11-26 20:58

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