Pushing the Limits

Lisa Tamati

It’s wonderful to be here Kashif, and I love working with you and your team and we made it happen. We’re persistent

Kashif Khan

Yeah, we made it happen. And that’s what you do, right? You are a high-performance human. You make things happen. And if people dive into your story and read your books and listen to you speak all around the world, they’ll realize that human potential is so much more than what we think it is. I mean, part of your story is you’ve run, I think you’ve run like a total of what, 70,000 kilometers now?

Lisa Tamati

Yep. Something around there. So about two and a half times around the planet, around the equator, if you put it all together. It really Kashif, just means I’m old, I’ve done a lot.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Lisa Tamati

Been around a long time. If you add it all up, it sort of comes up to a fair amount of running.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, no kidding. So obviously, to get to what you’ve done, and I mean, some people listening know your story, some don’t, and we’re not just talking about going to the racetrack at the local school. I mean, you’ve been up mountains and Death Valley and the Gobi Desert, like extreme, it’s not just the movement, but also the terrain. You put yourself literally through hell to push yourself. So, yeah.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah, so doing ultra marathons for 25 years, sort of did the world’s toughest and longest races or a lot of them. Did over 2000 kilometers in the Sahara, did the Arabian Desert, the Libyan Desert, Niger, Jordan, the Gobi Desert of China. Yeah, Death Valley in the USA, which was pretty bloody and special. A couple of times, different parts of the Outback of Australia, Himalayas, Nepalese and the Indian Himalayas. And at one point I ran right through New Zealand, which is 2,250 kilometers, I’m not sure in miles. Is that 1600 miles? Or something like that, in 42 days for charity, which nearly killed me, I must admit.

Kashif Khan

Cool.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah, the funny thing is I’ve got no talent. I was never a particularly talented athlete at all. It was a more of, “This is what I wanna do and I’m gonna do it somehow, or die trying.”

Kashif Khan

Yeah. I mean, we’ve looked a little bit at your DNA to understand what makes you this high-performance human. And there’s things that kind of stand out.

Lisa Tamati

Dr. Mansoor made me laugh when he went, “Oh yeah, with that combination of DRD2 gene and your 2-bin gene, yeah. You’re in for trouble.”

Kashif Khan

Yeah. You literally are designed for that pursuit too. You can’t give up and you need to win and you need to keep doing more and more and more, which is why you achieve so much. But for the average person that’s listening today, how do they take, I mean, it’s one thing to say, “How do I become like, Lisa?” Well, good luck.

Lisa Tamati

Don’t want to.

Kashif Khan

But I guess the more important question is how do you take from you, what you’ve done, and just apply it to everyday life? What is there to learn and to take everyday world, like life and make it better?

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. And this is the thing Kashif, when you do these extreme adventures and expeditions and stuff, you start to realize the capability of humans because you’re being told constantly, “Yeah, that’s impossible. You can’t do that.” I mean, if I had a dollar for every time, I’d be really, really wealthy. If I’d listen to people who tell me I can’t do things. But you don’t just dive in at the deep end, so to speak, you start off small, and then you get a little bit bigger and a little bit longer and you start to learn and develop and you train, but you have to have this sort of a driving mentality of going all in. And it’s a theme of what I would like to talk about today, because I’ve got a couple of stories around that, but it’s a matter of working out what you want to commit to, why you want to commit to it. The “why” is a very, very big piece of the puzzle because it has to be worth the effort, the sacrifice. 

And that’s something that’s not really talked about a lot in the goal-setting world. It’s sort of like, “Set big goals and go for them.” It’s like, well, you have to see, is that goal really worthy of your time, of your effort, of the mission that you’re on? Is it really worth it? Because it’s going to cost. So understanding that “why” is a really big piece of the puzzle and having those emotional drivers pushing you along, because when you’re aiming for something big, and you know this, running your company and how hard, and all of the obstacles that come your way, you better have a really determined mindset if you’re gonna find a way through those obstacles and you better have a pretty strong mission and vision for, in your case, your company, or in my case, for getting through this race or whatever I’m doing, because otherwise, you won’t make it. You have to be sort of ready to walk over coals, hot coals, so to speak. Does that make sense?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I get it. It sounds like, what is the big audacious goal? But then how do you have the mindset that matches the goal? And that’s something that you are really good at, that mental resilience. So how do you do that for somebody that feels like, “I can’t handle it”?

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. I mean, it certainly, I think the genetic part of it is a piece of the pie. But as you and I know, genetics is not deterministic, it’s something that we can work with and we can use that information to help drive us forward. I think for me, I grew up in a family that was very sports-orientated. And I grew up with a dad, and I had this wonderful dad who I adored and wanted to please, and little girls like to please their dads. And my dad was a hard-ass. He wanted me to be the best, he wanted me to represent my country and do you know. I always joke, “If I was a boy, I would’ve been an All Black and an NZSAS soldier and everything if it’d been according to my dad. And that, I think, sort of framed who I was as a youngster. So, your cultural background, what’s expected of you. But what I learned from that lesson is when you place expectations on people or on kids or whatever, it does make them rise to the occasion. And in a funny little story, my dad always wanted me to represent New Zealand in some sport. So as a kid, I tried out gymnastics and I was really good up until I reached puberty. And then I grew too tall and I just didn’t have it. And he was absolutely devastated that I pulled out when I was like 15.

Kashif Khan

Wow.

Lisa Tamati

And I knew that I was never gonna make it. I was tall and athletic and too big and too heavy and all of these things that you, and he was devastated. So then I tried surfing and I have two brothers who are really top big wave surfers. And I tried that for seven years, day in, day out surfing, but I was hopeless, I just didn’t have what it took. And then I got into running. I had an early adventurous life of cycling around many, many countries and climbing mountains and doing all of this. And I got into the ultra marathon running. And we can go into that story if you want. But I started to realize like I was hopeless at running. You put me in a local 10K race or something, and I will be in the middle of the pack, if you’re lucky. I’m not fast, but what I found I had was an ability to go long. 

And I was sort of still left standing when everyone else had fallen away by the wayside. And so then I decided, “Okay, well, I’m gonna represent New Zealand in ultra marathon running. And I worked out that you could do this 24 hour racing where you’re racing around a track for 24 hours, a 400 meter track. And you had to do 185 kilometers, which is, oh, I don’t even know how much that is in miles, you could work it out, to qualify for the New Zealand team to go to the worlds and so on. It took me eight years of doing this, running around of running around the track for 24 hours, which, believe me, is a really hard thing to do before. And I was 42 years old when I finally qualified and got to take home to my dad a silver fern, which is our national emblem. And I was able to represent New Zealand after seven failed attempts. I finally did 194 kilometers in 24 hours at the age of 42, and went home to see my dad.

Kashif Khan

Incredible.

Lisa Tamati

My dad was so proud.

Kashif Khan

I’ve talked to you a few times, but I never heard that before, it’s blowing. First of all, just the thought of running on a track for 24 hours, I can’t imagine driving for 24 hours, forget about running on your leg.

Lisa Tamati

There’s one hell of a lot of pain involved in that and the mental suffering and all that. And to be honest, I didn’t wanna be doing it for the fun of it, that one, it was just purely, I wanted to represent New Zealand. I wanted to make my dad proud, and this was something I was relatively good at by the time I’d gotten to this point, I never gave up on that dream, even though as a 15 year old, as a 20 year old, I’d failed and failed and failed. And it was really, really special to bring that home to my dad. And my dad just says to me, “I’m so proud of you, but it did take you a little bit longer than I was expecting.” And that’s like, some people are never pleased. You know, it’s never enough.

Kashif Khan

There’s always room for improvement.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. Funny.

Kashif Khan

That’s incredible because I mean, the resilience, the mental toughness required to grind for 42 years. How many people could actually? You would move on and say, “This is not for me.” You kind of did it with surfing, but you didn’t do that with the goal. You just said that, “I’m on the wrong path, I gotta find a better path.” So that desire and burn never went away. And you got there.

Lisa Tamati

And that’s another good point. Sometimes you gotta know when to quit, right? So, sometimes the path that you are on, like I’m all for going hard, going long, being persistent, all of that sort of stuff. However, if the goal that you are after no longer serves your purpose for some particular reason, and you need to pivot, then don’t be afraid to do that. It’s knowing when to quit. And this is something I’ve not known how to do. And sometimes I’ve, I have a lot of different businesses over the years and I haven’t known when to quit, or I’ve done sports too long. I mean, I’ve retired now from doing the ultra marathoning. I retired when I was 48. And to be honest, I probably should have retired about three or four years earlier. But it was, “Who am I, if I’m not this ultra marathoner?” And then I was forced to retire at that point because I had a family situation, which we’ll maybe talk about later too. But knowing when to quit and to pivot and to change direction is also an important skill, I think as well.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. That’s a big challenge because quitting isn’t necessary. It’s shifting, it’s changing, it’s real life. Which can sometimes feel like quitting, which is so disappointing, especially, “What are people gonna think?” So it’s kind of more like replacing, so that’s just advice for people that are listening. Stopping something doesn’t need to be the end. You just replace it with something better or more aligned. You learn from the thing that failed and then you know better what to do next, right?

Lisa Tamati

So, yeah. And this is another good point, is that understanding that you’re gonna learn the biggest things when you fail. And I have a podcast called Pushing The Limits, and it’s all about pushing the limits, but when you’re pushing the limits of possible, whether this be in your career, in your academic life, in your sporting life, whatever it is, you’ve gotta understand you’re doing something that’s pretty hard and pretty tough and there are things that you cannot control. And these are variables outside of your realm, if you like, that you can’t control. And when you, in my case, you’d be doing maybe an expedition or something, you can just prepare the things and you can be really on with your safety and you can be really on with your planning and your training and all of that aspect. And then you have to sort of give it up, right? 

Whatever is left, you have to just go, “Well, the rest is sort of beyond my control. It’s up to the universal God or whatever you believe in is gonna be the whether you make it. And you can’t worry about those consequences. You have to just go, “I’ve done the planning, I’ve done the work and I’m going for it.” I did this race in the Himalayas, Kashif, that was really like this. It was really on the edge of possible for me. It was a 222K race over the two highest motorable mountain passes in the world, in Northern India in the Himalayas there. And this race had only been run once before I did it. And only one guy had finished it. And he was a bit of a crazy dude who’d done absolutely mad things, like he was not your average human. And so I didn’t know whether it was possible, really, for a normal person to do this. We were going from 3,600 up to 5,800 meters, which is an extremely high altitude, back down again and then back up again. So there was these huge mountains you had to climb, but you had about a third of the oxygen up there and I’m an asthmatic. I have a very small lung capacity. My VO2 max is very poor. I’m not very good in the cold. 

And one of the reasons I did mostly deserts was because I was better in the dry heat than I was in the cold. But I heard about this race and I was like, I rang up Mark, the guy that had done it the year before. And I said, “What was it like?” He said, “Well, the other runners ended up in hospital and it was the toughest thing I’ve ever done. And it was brutal and I’ve still got some health consequences from it. But he said to me, one thing he said, “Lisa, do you realize, no woman has done this race?” And that’s all I heard, because I wanted to be the first. Because there’s not many things you can be first at. So I signed up and I’m like, “Oh, I’ll work it out.” I signed up and I do this, I just dive on in. And it’s not always a good thing, but sometimes I just dive on in and then work it out on the way and try to work out, “How am I gonna swim here?” And so I had to work out altitude, how to run an altitude, how to try to get my body more red blood cells and all of that sort of stuff. And I was always been fighting with anemia, that’s another thing. 

And so I didn’t have a good oxygen-carrying capacity anyway, but I heard about this thing called a Hypoxico tent, which you can sleep in and it takes a part of the oxygen out and it helps you adjust to altitude. And I got one of these things sponsored and I was all excited. I started sleeping in it and I followed the instructions and you go up like 1500 meters and then 2000 and so on and so forth. And you do it over a period of time. But by the time I’d got this tent, it wasn’t that far out from the race. And I was running outta time and I was like, “Oh gosh, I need to go faster.” So I rang up my ex-husband, he’s an ultra-marathon runner from Austria and he had one of these and I said to him, “Do I need to follow the instructions, or can I just go higher, faster, because I’m running outta time. And he said to me, “Ah, following the instructions is for wimps. I want you to, yeah, just turn it up to six and a half thousand meters, which was the max that this thing went to, which is about like 30% of the oxygen that we are breathing and sleep in it every night.” And I’m like, “Are you sure? Is that safe?” And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do it all the time.” And anybody listening out there who may have an ex-husband, never, ever trust your ex-husband. He may be trying to kill you. So this is what happened with us. I did that, I followed his instructions stupidly. And after a couple of weeks, I was really starting to have trouble. Now I expected that I wasn’t gonna be too full of energy for a while, but I was having issues with my brain. And you might think, “Well, you probably got mental issues anyway,” but this was sort of slightly different. This was all, I would lose my memory. I’d be talking to you one day and then I didn’t know the next and all of that sort of thing. And then I had a bacteria proliferate. So you had all these infections, and so on. 

So I went to the doctor and I said, “Oh, I maybe pushed it a little bit harder on this tent. I’m preparing for this race in the Himalayas.” And he said, “Well, what was your oxygen levels at night?” And I said, “About 70%.” Now, 70% is a pass mark in an exam, usually. So I was like, “Okay. Well that’s okay.” I didn’t realize that at that point that we are like 98, 99% usually at oxygen saturation in our red blood cells. And so this was a deadly level, I was killing myself. And he said, “You’ve got a hypoxic brain concussion. So you’ve been knocking off your brain cells and you really couldn’t afford to do that. And you better get outta that tent. And I suggest you pull out of the race, because you’re now sensitized to altitude and you’re probably not gonna cope at all up there.” And I’m like, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.” I couldn’t pull outta the race because I had sponsors, I’ve been training for a year and a half, I had lots of responsibilities, I had a crew, full-on team and everything. And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll get out of the team, I’ll try to get healthier.” And I promise I’ll try and make this story a little bit shorter. 

But a few weeks later, I went over to Australia and I was doing this 100K race over there as a preparation and buildup. And I was feeling a little bit better and starting to come right. But the following day, I had a photo shoot with The North Face, and now, they’re my sponsors. And when The North Face do a photoshoot, it’s like a 15 hour Odyssey in the mountains. And I was pretty tired. And I came down at one particular point at nighttime when they were doing these flash shots. And I ripped the ligaments off my left ankle on both sides. So now I had the hypoxic brain concussion, the bacteria plus ligaments in my ankle ripped. And I had like 10 weeks before the race.

Kashif Khan

Can’t even make this up.

Lisa Tamati

Yes, it was crazy. And I said, “Look, you won’t me to run for seven weeks on these ligaments?” So, you can’t train, basically. All I could do was weight training, swimming and things like that. And I decided I’m going anyway, because everything’s gone to custard, but I might as well just keep going, and go to the scariest race that I’ve done. And I went over there and I had 10 days, I went over early and I was preparing. And we got over there, and there’s seven runners and five of them were women. There were only two guys, five women. And I was just like, “Oh, you’re kidding.” All I thought was I would have to get across the finish line somehow and I’d be the first woman there, because I’d be the only one. 

But no, there were five women there, and I was really, “Oh”. And then we had the Indian army there and they were trying to stop the race because they said, “People are gonna die”, altitude sickness, all these things that can go wrong. And then we had a group of doctors come over from America and they wanted to study us because humans hadn’t done this really before, going up from 3,600 to five eight, and then back down and back up, while running, 222 kilometers, it sort of hadn’t been done, and they wanted to experiment on us and see what would happen. Take our blood and do all that. And they were also responsible for our medical welfare. And so they were giving us lectures on pulmonary edema and cerebral edema and how you can die this way and die that way. And it was just terrifying. 

I was just like, “Oh my gosh, what have I got myself into?” And it got to the point where I can’t take anymore of this fear mongering. I’ve gotta stop listening to everybody else and I’ve gotta protect my psyche. If I’m gonna have a go at this thing and do my best, then I need to protect myself. So I got my team and I said, “I want you to protect me from everyone else. Don’t let any negativity through to me. I want you to tell me how amazing you are as a team and how great we are, and how well-planned we are,” and all of this sort of stuff. So for the final 48 hours before this race, that’s what my team did. Doctors and the army and everybody else, all of this, was chaos going on. And we just went over and over our plans, and they really made me feel strong. And then on the day of the race, I remember waking up at 4:00 AM and you open your eyes and it’s that moment where you go, “Oh no, I’ve got to actually run today. I’ve got 222 kilometers to run in the Himalayas today, right now.” And the fear starts coming up. And so what I do when I feel fear like that is I start to get control of my breathing, for starters, because your breath is so important for being able to control your cortisol and adrenaline responses. And then I start imagining and visualizing that I’m a superwoman. 

So I’m Gal Gadot, I’m Wonder Woman, I’m amazing. So as I put my running gear on and I put my start number on, when I put my start number on, that’s for me as symbolic and now it’s game time, and I become a different person in my head. This is all in my head. This is just a psychological preparation of what an athlete sort of does when they’re getting ready for a battle that they don’t really, there’s a lot of fear. And when you do that, you release testosterone into the blood and you make yourself full of testosterone and you feel more powerful, and you stand there and you go like this, like Rocky at the top of the stairs in Philadelphia, and you sort of pump yourself up, ready for action. And so you’re doing, you don’t run the other way. I just wanted to go home to my mommy, really. I was so scared, but then I got to the start line and the gun goes and we’re off. And I knew that the first pass would probably be okay, I’d go really slowly, conservatively. Everyone ran past me and I was just, me and my team, me and my team. That was all I was focusing on. 

Not focusing on the other athletes, who’s doing better, whatever, because the race hadn’t really begun. And I managed to get up the first pass. I had some vomiting on the way up. I had an asthma attack on the way down. I had all sorts of problems in the next 24 hours, going through these villages that were really full of pollution and all sorts. And the second pass that I had to go up, I knew that that was gonna be the make or break. And in the morning of the second day I had heat stroke, because we had like 40 degrees temperatures, really, really hot. And I’d been running all day, all night. And into the next day, I passed out. My crew came and put me in the car, because they had a crew car. They stuck me in there, tried to cool me down, put me back out on the road. And now I’m like really out of it. And like down to a walk, I can’t run anymore. I’m really sick. And I’m looking up the barrel of the second huge pass, which is 35 kilometers up the side of a mountain. And these really dangerous single lane roads. And on these roads, there was convoys of army trucks coming through that are just 40 odd trucks at a time, and they’re spewing out all this unfiltered diesel into the thin air, atmosphere as well. And I’m going up this thing really, really slowly, and in my mind, just battles raging. Like, “Why don’t you just stop? Why don’t you just give up? You’re in so much pain, you’re in so much suffering. You’ve got a heat stroke. You haven’t slept for 30 hours.” All of this sort of stuff’s going on in your brain and you’re looking up this thing and going, “Oh my God, how am I gonna get up there?” And as the day wears on and then the nighttime comes in, and it gets colder and colder and colder. 

And now you’ve got hypothermia, and you’ve got every piece of clothing on that you can possibly get on. And you’re still just crawling up this mountain side. And then you have all these trucks come past and then you couldn’t breathe. And my team were just pulling out all the stops to keep me going. And they were just absolutely amazing. And it got to the point where I’m like, “Take a hundred steps, sit down, take another hundred steps, sit down for a minute, recover,” because you just can’t breathe. It’s like breathing through a straw. And it got to the point where a snowstorm came in, I kid you not, like I’ve got a documentary of all this. It can give you the proof if you ever wanna watch it. A snowstorm comes in and it’s freezing temperatures and it’s snowing and we’re heading up the mountain, 

And it gets to the point at 10 o’clock at night where I just can’t. I’m calculating, how far is it to the top? How far? How far, how far? And I’m working out and I think it’s only a couple of kilometers and I’m like, “I can hang on. I can hang on.” And I said to my crew, “Go and work out, how far is it?” And one of the guys, Josh, comes back and he says, “No, sorry, Lisa, it’s six kilometers to the top, not two, six kilometers.” And six kilometers up there is like two hours of hell. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d been out there for 45 hours and I just sat down in the snow and I just broke and all my friends, they were like, “we’re so proud of you, you’re amazing. It’s okay, it’s alright to fail. You’ve done everything you can. We’ve been here with you,” and they gave me permission to fail. And then one guy in my crew, his name was Chris, and he came over, and he sat down on the ground, and he grabbed me by the shoulders and he sort of shook me like this and he says,

“No bloody way are you going to fail now. You are going to get your bum off that ground and you’re going to walk up this thing and I’m staying out here with you every step of the way.” And it sort of shook me out of my balling, crying, hysterical And he dragged me to my feet, and one of the other guys said, “Yeah, and I’ll come out here and I’ll help you too. And I’ll walk with you,” which was a huge sacrifice for these guys. And these guys just came out and they really, you know when friends pick you up when you’re really down?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lisa Tamati

And they just get you over that hard hump. And that’s what these guys did. And they walked and talked me up all the way up to the top of this pass. And I had 33 kilometers to go, to get down to the other end. But I knew that I was gonna finish. And to cut a very long story short, I finished in 53 hours and five minutes, but I was the second woman home. I was beaten by a 55 year old grandmother from England who also had asthma. And this is where like Kashif, age is no barrier, your sex is no barrier, your ethnicity is no barrier, your genetics are no barrier. Nothing’s a barrier if you want it enough, if you’re prepared to fight hard enough. And if you’re prepared to believe in yourself and build a good team around it, then you can achieve anything. So sorry, I’ve rambled terribly.

Kashif Khan

No, that’s one of the most inspiring few minutes of my life. To hear what human potential is. The whole time you’re talking, I’m thinking people listening are like, “How do I find 10 minutes to get on the treadmill?” That’s the challenge for today. Yeah, “How do I not watch that extra episode on Netflix?”

Lisa Tamati

The funny thing is, I had those days too, because it is all about what is in front of you right now and what you are dealing with as well. But this is where putting in some good habits and some good things around you, framework in order to make sure that you get on that treadmill, and that you do do what it takes every day to keep your health. And you and I are both in that health-optimization space. And that’s a big part of what I do now, is helping people do that and be in that space.

Kashif Khan

So, in part of the help you do, you tell people, “When it comes to your big, important goals, that you have to go all in,” right?

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

So people have a sense of what that means, but what does that mean to you? What are you actually teaching people?

Lisa Tamati

Well, can I share a story with you about my mom? Because that’s an all-in story. 

Kashif Khan

Yeah. 

Lisa Tamati

So, another big story coming guys. But six years ago, my mom, who you probably hear sneezing in the background, I said to her, “I’m recording,” and she’s being really loud. So sorry, guys. My mom had a massive aneurysm and she was left with a, so an aneurysm is a bleed in the brain, a massive bleed in the brain. And when this happened, we didn’t think she was going to survive. And the doctors managed to do the surgery and she was in and out of a coma for three weeks. And in this time, we’d had sort of a medical misadventure at the beginning, where they thought she was having a migraine to her there for six hours while blood was going into her brain and killing her, basically. And so that really made me hyper aware that I had to control to the best of my abilities. 

And I had no medical background at that point of the situation and to study and to be vigilant. So my mom was then in the coma for three weeks or so, or in and out of a coma. And in that time, she had to have another operation, had another stroke. She was paralyzed on the right side. When she came out from this critical phase, where I couldn’t do a lot in this critical phase, except watch what the doctors were doing, understand the medications, understand the pathology of what was happening to her, she stabilized, but she had massive brain damage, like hardly any higher function left. And she was 74 years old. And the doctors said to me, “Look, she’s got massive brain damage. 

She’s probably never gonna do anything again, she’s not gonna ever have any quality of life.” They shifted her back to our regional hospital. We had three months in hospital. And in this time, I started studying everything. And now I was seeing signs of hypoxia in her body, which I’d seen in myself when I was racing at altitude. And I was seeing these signs in her. And so I put two and two together and thought, “I think she’s got sleep apnea.” And I went to the doctors. I said, “I want a sleep apnea assessment.” And they said to me, “Why would we do that?” And apparently, when you have a stroke or an aneurysm, this can cause sleep apnea. And in this case, is what happened. So I went and brought an outside consultant into the hospital, did an assessment and came back that she was stopping breathing hundreds of times a night. So she was not getting enough oxygen. 

And she was, of course, sleeping 18 hours on a day. And for the time that she was asleep, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. So she had this massive brain damage, plus not getting enough oxygen. So that was a first win for me, that I managed to get the CPAP machine put on her and she got oxygen. And then she started to have little improvements. And then I started to think, “What else can oxygen do?” And I came across something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And for those who’ve got the camera, in behind me is a mild hyperbaric chamber. And this turned out to be a huge part of her rehabilitation. And at this point, my mom couldn’t speak, she didn’t know who she was, she had no control over any bodily functions. She was just basically like a baby in a 74 year old woman’s body. And after three months, they said, “Well, we’ve gotta put her in an institution. 

She’s 24/7 around the clock here, there’s no way you’ll ever cope with her.” And I went, “No, I’m taking my mom home.” And they said, “Well, you’ll never cope.” I came in with my first two books and I threw them at the social worker. And I said, “This is who I am. And I’m taking my mom home and you better get used to it.” And I had a hell of a battle to get a little bit of support. So caregivers for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening is all we were wanting. And some advice on how to renovate the house and things like that. And I said, “Well, we, as a family, are going to look after our mom and we’re gonna take her home.” And so I eventually got to take her home and I had been starting hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And so I went to this dive company, now they use hyperbaric for divers who have the bends. And I went to the dive company and said, “Here’s my research, here’s my situation. Can I use your chamber?” And these amazing people said, “Yes. You sign a legal waiver and you work out the protocols and do all of that in conjunction with some doctors and we’ll do it.” And so we did this, I’d take her down into this factory setting, stick her on a forklift. 

This is a very frail, in a wheelchair, completely out of it mom, and I stick her in this forklift and stick her into this big steel hyperbaric chamber that looks like a big LPG tank or something. And we did this for an hour and a half a day for five days a week, for 33 sessions. And in that time, I started to notice changes. And after 33 sessions, she was starting to respond and the oxygen, because it hyper oxygenates the body and it gets through the blood brain barrier and it gets oxygen to the cells that are desperately needing it. And so it was starting to work, but then I lost access to the chamber because it had to be taken off on a contract. And so I’m like, “Ugh, next obstacle. What do I do now?” So then I researched and found I could buy a hyperbaric chamber, so I mortgaged my house. 

I bought a hyperbaric chamber, I installed it in my house, it’s what you see back there. And I actually ended up opening a clinic, and I’m about to open another clinic. And over the next few years, I ended up doing hundreds of these sessions. And then I started working on other aspects and this is where you guys came into it, because I studied DNA, I studied epigenetics, I studied everything. And so working with the DNA company has been a huge thing for me because this was another big piece of the puzzle. Then I studied function neurology and keto diet and all these other aspects that I did. It took me two and a half years to take her from being like a baby, where she could not even sit or chew or anything, to having a full driver’s license, walking 5Ks a day and going to the gym five days a week. 

And the doctors just said, “This is an impossible journey,” but nobody asked me what I had done. And so I actually ended up writing a book, and this book called Relentless – How a Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds. And that’s the journey of bringing her back, and what I did. And it was really the mindset, Kashif, because if I hadn’t had that mindset as this crazy athlete, if you like, which you think, “What’s the point of running all those kilometers around the world?” Well, that was the point, because that taught me how to just grind out the daily training. I put her through hundreds and hundreds of hours of retraining of her brain. And I would go for months on end and see no change, but I would keep going. When everybody else was telling me, “Why are you carrying on? There’s no point, she’s never gonna improve. It’s waste of time. You’re putting her through all this training and it’s torturous and it’s hard for her and stuff. 

Why don’t you just let her be and make her comfortable?” I don’t do comfortable. And I think, comfortable means we are declining. We need to be pushing, being strong and we need recovery, don’t get me wrong. But hundreds and thousands of hours have gone into rehabilitation, but two and a half years, it took me to get her back to full health again. So, a really empowering and inspiring story. And unfortunately, Kashif, in October last year, my mom was diagnosed with a lymphoma, an aggressive CNS lymphoma. So that’s, she had a brain tumor and we went into round two of her journey and we were told once again, “She would not survive. This was terminal. She would have only weeks to live,” it was very aggressive. And so I went and what I did best is go do the research, go to the science. And I studied everything I could about the metabolic approach to cancer. 

And I selfishly went and got her some of the world’s best doctors and scientists on my podcast so I could learn from them. And it took me 12 weeks, but we now have no sign of cancer. You never wanna say you’re cured, because cancer can always change its metabolism and so on. But as of now, we are now 10 months in, in doing hyperbaric intravenous vitamin C, the metabolic approach to cancer, off-label drug combinations, peptides, DNA, all of these aspects. And now the tumors are gone, and she’s fully functioning again. And she’d regressed right back to being a baby again when she had the tumor. 

So I’ve been through this journey twice, and to see her come back at the age of 80 now is just absolutely phenomenal. And it’s amazing what the human body can actually endure. And it’s amazing what happens when you actually go to the latest in science and you start taking responsibility for your health. She’s on a very strict diet, a very strict training regime, a number of hours every day into her rehabilitation, but I’m prepared to do that, and she’s prepared to do that in order to live, and she gets to hang around and be with her grandchildren and have a wonderful life. But she has to be an athlete, she’s my athlete. I treat her like we are training for the Olympics and every day is a training day. There’s no days off, you know?

Kashif Khan

Yeah. That’s incredible. Because what people don’t hear about often in these kind of stories is the journey and how difficult, it’s the same as you spending eight years to get to your goal. Eight years, even when you’d say it, it’s hard to really feel what eight years feels like, right?

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

To grind failure after failure. And imagine with your mother, month after month after month of seeing no change and sticking to it.

Lisa Tamati

Yep.

Kashif Khan

It’s that big audacious goal. And the fearless path is just, “I know it’s gonna happen. I’m gonna make it happen.” The belief is part of what makes it happen.

Lisa Tamati

Yep.

Kashif Khan

But the resilience and your mental strength allows you to plow through. And I’m sure when you bring that mental strength to your mother, it bleeds onto her. It becomes, yeah.

Lisa Tamati

Well, she’s tough beyond tough. She’s this gentle little lady. She hasn’t been an athlete or anything in her normal life. But she is strong in the mind. She just does what I ask her to do to the best of her ability, every single day. And she never complains. Or once or twice, she would tell me she wants to punch me in the face because she’s had enough of me bossing her around. But very, very rarely. She’s so tolerant. And that is key. Now I work with a lot of clients now with our health coaching, with doing our DNA and a number of other things. And I can tell pretty quickly whether somebody is going to have a chance at coming back or not, because I know you can work out whether they’ve got the commitment to do what’s going to be required. Because people often come to me and they see these results and stuff, and they’re like, “What’s the magic bullet? What’s the one thing, what’s the pill that I need to take?” And unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. It’s hard work, it’s a multifaceted approach.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Lisa Tamati

And it’s grinding out the daily stuff.

Kashif Khan

Isn’t that just so cool? Because what you’re saying, that a clinician will look at the pathology and determine whether this person’s coming back or not.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. I mean, I try not to make that deterministic sounding, but you can pretty, early on in the journey, see whether they have the strength in the mind to fight, you know?

Kashif Khan

Yeah. Because that is the solution. The clinician, it’s what they’re trained to do. They’re looking at what does this disease looks like? How far progressed is it? And do I add the skill technology medication to reverse based on where it’s at? Here’s my calculation, here’s your chance of survival. You’re looking at one thing, is this person ready to live or not?

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

Are they gonna fight through, or not? Because the solution isn’t all of what they’re measuring. The solution is truly, if you want to heal, you have to fight. You gotta be willing to fight. You gotta have that mental strength. And like the things that you have done and overcome, there is nothing that we can’t overcome.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. And Kashif, by the same token, you have to also know that you can fail. You can go all in and still fail. I had a situation, unfortunately, with my precious dad who died 18 months ago. And that was a situation where I went all in with everything I possibly could and I failed, or not I failed, but we lost my dad. He had an aortic aneurysm. My dad had unfortunately been a smoker all his life and I could never stop him smoking. And he loved his bad food. See, mom always listened. Dad was very fit, strong and capable, and he was very, he lived a really outdoorsy life. So he had that going for him, but he did smoke and he did eat terribly and I could never change my dad. And so he had this aneurysm and he was in the hospital. 

They’d done operation. They couldn’t believe that he’d survived this massive operation. But unfortunately, he developed sepsis. Now I was aware, because of the work I do, of the clinical research around intravenous vitamin C and sepsis. So I tried to get him intravenous vitamin C in the hospital because they were running out of options at this point. And I just came up against a brick wall of bureaucracy. And I know in America, in certain states, there’s a thing called the right to try, where if you’re at the end of life and the doctors have run out of options, you have the right to try different approaches because there’s no other options. And we don’t have that law, unfortunately, in New Zealand. And I came up against a brick wall of bureaucracy. And I wouldn’t even know, if I had had the intravenous vitamin C from day one when I was asking for it, whether that would’ve been enough to save him, that and a number of other things. I couldn’t, because he was intubated in an ICU unit. I’d lost complete control over him. So I could not. And I had to fight against ethics committees, and I did, and I fought for 15 days. I had this legal battle. I had to get every doctor, every nurse in the entire ICU unit on board with me doing this. I had to fight the ethics committee. I eventually won that, but it was too late for my dad.

Kashif Khan

Hmm.

Lisa Tamati

And it was 15 days in. He was at death’s doorstep. And despite that, the intravenous vitamin C started to turn things around initially, but we needed it every six hours, huge doses of vitamin C, which was the protocol that I was trying to get. And they stopped me doing the second. They stopped me doing the third. They stopped me doing the fourth, and I had to fight 18 hours every time to get the next one in. And unfortunately, my dad was too far gone at that point. So I knowwhat it is to go all in and to fail, and I know what it is to go all in and to succeed. When I look back at that horrific journey, which was horrific for me and my whole family, and just heartbreaking to lose the center of our family world. Excuse me. I know though that I did everything I could for him. I gave him every opportunity that I possibly could. And you can’t control the universe, unfortunately, but this is what makes me so passionate about people being in the preventative space.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Lisa Tamati

About taking care of your health. Increasing your lifespan, having longevity and having a functional life where you are strong and capable, right to the very end. That’s my goal for people, that we drop dead at 150 or 180, if you’re like Dave Asprey and going for broke. And I do think with the technology and you’re at the cutting edge of this, you know the stuff that’s coming down the pipeline. We are going to be able to live decades longer. We understand genetics better and it’s getting better all the time. We got the chance. If we can hold it together now to live decades longer, I believe, and live functionally, healthy longer, and that’s the key. We don’t wanna have this decline that we see so many, and I’ve lived with my mom, like bringing her back and having to keep her there. It’s a huge commitment on a day-to-day basis.

Kashif Khan

So, I mean, in that, you mentioned anti-aging and longevity, we’ve been talking about your mind and the power there, which is incredible. We’ve been talking about reacting to sort of acute situations your mom and dad were in, which, by the way, it’s interesting that you use the high dose vitamin C for both when they were two very different problems.

Lisa Tamati

Yep.

Kashif Khan

Right, but it worked.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah. And so does hyperbaric, by the way, they’re all part of the oxidative medicine family. And they have very broad reaching sort of almost panacea-like therapeutic value. Hyperbaric is just huge. And synergistically, intravenous vitamin C and hyperbaric work very well together. And in the case, like with cancer, keto diet, exogenous ketones, intravenous vitamin C, and hyperbaric, you’ve got a winning combination to start knocking those cancer cells off. So, and it’s far more complicated than that, but yeah, these are things that are real antiaging. Intravenous vitamin C becomes sort of a pro-oxidant at these super high levels and can attack everything from bathing the tumor, basically, in oxygen. And with the hyperbaric, you’ve got inflammatory pathways down, regulated, you’ve got stem cell production, you’ve got hyper oxygenation of the body and the tissues. So any place that’s hypoxic, or if you’ve had a stroke, concussion, anything like that, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, wound injuries, gut health, everything is helped with that. It’s absolutely amazing. And it’s not promoted as well as it should be because nobody can really make money out of it unfortunately. There’s no drug to patent.

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

It’s funny, I’m actually going to a hyperbaric conference next week.

Lisa Tamati

Oh, wow.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. For the time

Lisa Tamati

Really?

Kashif Khan

In my life. Yeah. There’s a conference where they’ve asked us to come, just speak about the genetics of it and how oxidation affects the body. And you’ve kind of already answered my question, which I was trying to figure out. You’re talking about things therapeutically, what are your thoughts on longevity, but it’s really one and the same. The way you deal with hyperbaric because of, like you said, that panacea effect, it’s not a responsive sort of therapeutic. It can be, but it is also preventative, but it’s also, that’s sort.

Lisa Tamati

Absolutely. I do blocks of four to six weeks in there, three times a year. Actually. You probably have Dr. Jason Saunders at this conference that you’re going to, I imagine. Is it in America? He was just on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, fantastic. And he’s written a book called Oxygen Under Pressure, highly recommend that book. And it explains just really simply and clearly what it actually does. And I would probably butcher the explanation, but it is, because oxygen is actually a nutrient, and if we have tissues in our body that are hypoxic, not enough oxygen, which we all do, because as we get older, we get more hypoxic tissue, plus anything that’s like a crush injury, a burn or gangrene, or inflammation, or arthritis, or a stroke, a concussion, all of these cause hypoxia in those tissues. 

And if we can get the oxygen, which in the chamber, the oxygen, you’re on an oxygen mask, you are compressed at a pressure rate of, depending on what clinic you go to, this one here only goes to 1.5 atmospheres. Some of them in the hospital settings go to two and even three atmospheres. But the therapeutic is usually around 1.5 up to say 2.5, is mostly where a lot of the therapeutic dosage is brought into effect, if you like. The oxygen molecules just briefly are compressed down in size, because of the pressure. And it’s like a can of fizzy drink. You open up a can and it all bubbles out, right?

Kashif Khan

Yeah.

Lisa Tamati

That’s what’s happening when you’re releasing the pressure. When it’s under pressure, those bubbles are smaller. And that’s what happens with oxygen. It’s compressed down in size and it can then dissolves into the plasma. So it becomes like a liquid and then it can pass through the smallest capillaries and the smallest… When it’s attached to the red blood cell, it’s too big to get into places that have got crushed, spooned, inflammation, whatever, going on. It can’t get through, it can’t get through the blood brain barrier. So this is where we can get up to 15 times the amount of oxygen for the period that we’re in there. And then you also have the epigenetic changes because if you’re doing this 20 plus sessions over a period of weeks, you get epigenetic changes happening as well as you turn on certain genes, certain transcription factors are upregulated and so on and so forth, so that you get an immediate effect, but you’re also getting this epigenetic effect over time. You get neovascularization, where you get new growth of new pathways, so you can actually get, like if you have a blockage somewhere, it can actually make the body make new capillaries around the blockage and things like that. It’s absolutely, for athletes, amazing for your oxygen carrying capacity and so forth.

Kashif Khan

Is there like a sensorial, “Wow, I feel amazing.”

Lisa Tamati

No, actually what you do feel, and it’s a little bit different for every person, if you have a short session. So if I’ve got an athlete who wants to train and they wanna be hyper oxygenated before they go training, then you might do just a short 20 minute session and then they’ll probably be energized and have more oxygen for their immediate training straight after the hyperbaric. I use mine at the end of the day, because I stay in there longer, an hour to an hour and a half. And that puts me into a very, it’s a very strong parasympathetic driver. 

So it puts you into a very deep, relaxed state. In fact, when I come out, I’m a little bit dopey and a little bit, sort of, “I’ve gotta sit down and gather myself again,” because number one, it has a detox effect, partly as well, especially if you’ve got a lot of toxins in the brain, but also this parasympathetic. So it puts me into this relaxed state, so I’m not gonna be ready. So doing it before I come on a podcast, probably not a great idea, because I need a little bit of adrenaline to do that.

Kashif Khan

That’s pretty cool. Yeah. It’s amazing that you’ve opened up, literally, the door to your home and told us your family’s story because it’s through that, that you discovered something that everybody needs to know.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

And it’s not only your personal story, but it extends into your family. And the vision of resilience or what I get after listening to you and how much more I think I can do.

Lisa Tamati

You can do it Kashif. You can do it, we can all do it. What we need is a team of people and a network of people that we can pull on when we need help. And we need to build that support network around ourselves. I always had a good team of people around me as an athlete, and my family, in regards to my mom, they backed me every step of the way. And that’s absolutely key, but believe in yourself. And when we believe in others, we empower them. As a coach, I love when someone comes to me, they wanna run an ultra marathon and they’re just starting out or something. And they’re like, “I can’t do that. Impossible. It’s only for superheroes and you have to be.” And I’m like, “Hell no, this is how you do it. I’m gonna give you the plan, just follow the plan and anybody can do it.” And I truly believe that as long as you’ve got a relatively healthy body, anybody can do an ultra marathon, or anybody can achieve success in whatever field they want to go for. 

It’s just a matter of following a plan and sticking to it and being persistent and getting around obstacles when they come and fighting, fighting hard. And having the discipline to keep going when everything else is looking like custard. And you’ll know, like in business, the stuff that comes at you, I mean, COVID, we’ve all been through that. Ah, you know, you have to have resilience. You have to go, “Okay, this was tough, huh.” Sit down, have a cry if you have to, I do regularly and then go, “What the heck have I just been through?” And then I get myself back up and back at it again, you know?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, keep going.

Lisa Tamati

Yeah.

Kashif Khan

So people listening, I’m sure at this point, you’re like, “I need to work with Lisa, like how do I?” So, the people that you coach, are they only local to New Zealand?

Lisa Tamati

No, no. International, definitely international. So obviously, I work with you guys. So we do DNA testing, obviously, epigenetics. Online, if people can go to my website, it’s probably the best place to find me. Just lisatamati.com. It’s T-A-M-A-T-I, lisatamati.com. And I’m all over Instagram and YouTube. I have quite a big YouTube channel, as well as my podcast, which is Pushing The Limits. And if anyone’s interested, yeah, I’ve written three books. So the other two were Running Hot and Running to Extremes, of my running adventures. So yeah, bit of light evening reading.

Kashif Khan

Where’s the documentary of you killing yourself?

Lisa Tamati

I have them on my YouTube channel. So, if you Google “Lisa Tamati” and you’ll find my YouTube channel. I’ve got a whole playlist of all my ultra marathon documentaries. And if you can’t find it, you can reach out to me at lisatamati.com and I’ll send you the links, but that’s where you can find me.

Kashif Khan

I’ve got my TV plan for the next month now.

Lisa Tamati

Brilliant. I just love working with you guys. I love your team. I’ve loved learning from you all. And yeah, I love being at the cutting edge of what science is doing in helping people be preventative and optimizing their health and longevity.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. It’s great working with you. The ability to work with people like yourself who have seen it all, done it all, pushing the limits, it’s a compliment to know that we can benefit that in any way, but honestly, you coming here opening up, telling us your story, telling us about your family, just the inspiration. I’m sure people are oozing right now to get out and do what they’ve been putting off. Thank you so much. Thank you again. So yeah, anybody, again, wanting to work with Lisa directly, it’s lisatamati.com. So T-A-M-A-T-I.com, YouTube, Instagram, anywhere, she’s all over the place. Read the books, watch documentaries, get inspired, climb a mountain, tell her about it.

Lisa Tamati

Exactly.

Kashif Khan

Thank you Lisa. This was awesome.

Lisa Tamati

Thank you Kashif.