"We were soaked the entire time," Colin O'Brady recalls.
Colin O’Brady was traveling through Thailand in 2008 when he was severely burned while attempting to fire jump rope at a beach party. With third-degree burns covering 25 percent of his body, the competitive swimmer was told he may never walk again.
He returned home to Portland, Oregon, where his mother’s positivity inspired him to set lofty goals. Eighteen months later, he competed in the 2009 Chicago Triathlon—and won the amateur division.
“That was the beginning of the path I’m on now,” says O’Brady, 34. “I realized that with the right mindset, you can access the reservoir of untapped potential inside of you."
He went on to finish more than 50 triathlons before taking on even bigger challenges: summiting the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents and climbing to the highest point in every U.S. state.
In December 2018, he became the first person to complete an unsupported, solo crossing of Antarctica. O'Brady recounts the 932-mile, 54-day expedition in his memoir, "The Impossible First."
Even after that, he felt there was more to accomplish. His next feat, he decided, would involve rowing, something he'd never done. “I was curious to see if I could take what I’d learned from other expeditions and bring it to a new discipline,” he says.
O’Brady and five other men set their sights on rowing themselves across the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica, a 700-mile journey that includes some of the roughest, coldest, and iciest waters on earth. The group left Chile on December 13, 2019, and completed the first human-powered crossing on the 25th. (Discovery TV chronicled the quest for the documentary The Impossible Row.)
Furthermore caught up with O’Brady after he returned to shore to find out what it took to survive almost two weeks on a 29-foot boat, rowing in 90-minute stints with nothing but protein bars for fuel.
