The World’s Fittest Humans: Preface
How Did “The World’s Fittest Humans” Come to Fruition?
I believe that it is valuable that people understand the turning points in my life because they provide the background and resonance to grasp the deeper meaning of the lives of the 12 intrepid competitors of The World’s Fittest Humans. Part of this backstory is going to talk about death on a level that penetrates all the way down but understand the purpose of this passage is to be soul deep and ruffle the inner feathers a bit (clean out the cobwebs) because that is precisely what will be needed to gain access to deeper mental spaces, but, at the same time, there is no intent to be disturbing or dark or worse — so don’t go there. Much of The World’s Fittest Humans is focused on using the mind in powerful ways and it so happens death and the perception of death is a cornerstone in the life of organisms and, because of this, it is a biological resource to be perfected no differently than hitting a backhand in tennis. Your first goal might be to just disconnect your knee-jerk, discomforting reactions so that you can begin connecting to a deeper place in earnest.
I am on a mission to rattle your cage until the cage collapses and then you are free to explore the worthwhile.
Summer and I got married in August 1994. We were both 37. We met in early 1992 at the opening of Frog’s Athletic Club in Solana Beach, California which at that time was the coolest gym on the planet; people came from all over just to train once to experience it. She was a Reebok ambassador and one of the best aerobics instructors in the world for several years and was head aerobics instructor at Frog’s and her classes were so packed that if you arrived late it was tough luck especially her weekend class called Spirit Dance with live drumming — not a class, an event! On a lark she entered a NPC Novice Bodybuilding competition (not bikini or figure) because in bodybuilding you have to have a choreographed posing routine to music and she did choreography as a living for aerobic, dance and exercise routines and did them all over the world. She never had done much weight training and only prepared for 6 weeks lifting weights like a crazy woman while dieting down — all while still doing her high-energy aerobics classes. A few years after that she had several injuries in a row to her knees and feet from cumulative damage over the years from high impact stress fractures caused by hardwood flooring. She had to retire from aerobics and then started teacher trainings in yoga, qigong, and Pilates and got going on a second and final career.
In October 2006 she was diagnosed with stage IIIC ovarian cancer and after a very ugly five-year fight and multiple surgeries and several rounds of chemotherapy, died at home in August of 2011 at the age of 54 in an unimaginably torturous and horrific way. I remember in the final days her saying how much she wanted to live; she would have only said that when she knew that that was no longer a possibility and that is the moment when fear shows up for real because Death finally takes its gloves off — I was scared through her, not just for her. I was devastated, I never saw her death coming, not like that, the finality of death disintegrated my insides. When you lose the intimate connection with someone you deeply loved for so long, you realize a near-death experience yourself and see Death unvarnished, you know what Death is, not what you, or others, believe. Death and the concept of death are very different — you can believe whatever you want about death until you know Death. You never seriously consider anyone’s beliefs about death again because you know the difference between death and Death and also between dying (a process) and Death (an event).
I was a zombie in a daze for 6 months and did very little training for a year. I weighed 177 but at a higher body fat; a lot of my conditioning went down the toilet and I was circling the drain with it. The stress in the aftermath of her death created some really morbid blood tests, shocking really. Not only did her death rock my world but Death grimly atomized my beliefs. Death, I soon discovered is absolutely neutral but — concomitantly — is a very polarizing force that can either be a positive force or negative force depending on how you orient yourself to it like an iron filing being sucked into a magnet’s North or South pole; once you clear the deck of all the emotional detritus and turbulence from the shockwaves you must accept surrender and accept what is. Death, like gravity, is not a force you can fight without a cadaverous outcome. Accordingly, many people are violently shipwrecked and die without warning after their spouse dies. Others use it as means to soul search like Peter Matthiessen did in his book The Snow Leopard when he sojourned to Nepal after his wife’s death to ostensibly find the elusive snow leopard but really it was a search to find himself by coming to terms with the meaning of meaning.
For me, Death brought into focus the meaning — the isness — of the finite. I think deeply about the changes in the structure and function of organisms over their lifecycle (ontogeny): when you are young, death is something that old people do; it is at best an abstraction infinitely detached from your naïve, toy agenda. Adolescents do not fear death and, therefore, dare death because it simply cannot happen to them and it is an addictive rush; death only becomes Death when the abstract becomes the concrete, when ones perception of life’s journey switches from open-ended to close-ended, when innocence is shattered and urgency no longer snores. Death is the world’s greatest teacher because it alone can clarify the meaning of your existence without needing your permission; Death is to communication what an icebreaker is to a ship’s safe passage to the North pole.
How does Death teach about the meaning of life? Death’s curriculum is expressed in daily lessons of dying that graduate to advanced degrees in urgency if you are an astute student of life. So what is urgency? Urgency is knowing — not believing, but knowing first hand — that after today you are not only one day closer to Death but you are even closer to that pivotal day you can no longer perform at the level you could yesterday — it is about decline and the inkling of decline, no matter its pace or manifestation. The big time-and-space picture: the potent psychological impact of decline is a nascent fuel of fear that emerged with the evolution of self-awareness; humans may not be alone, it may be relevant to cetaceans, elephants, higher primates, and magpies. This is a previously unexamined question.
The loss of hair, the greying of hair, the loss of joint mobility, the emergence of morning stiffness, the cumulative loss of postural integrity in the cervical and thoracic spine, the loss of near vision, the narrowing of auditory sensitivity, the wear on molars and the erosion of gums, the loss of peak aerobic power, the loss of maximal strength and strength-endurance, the loss of flexibility and mobility, the decay of blood tests until they fall off the chart, and, finally, the loss of memory until its denial is as hopeless as the Little Dutch Boy patching the weary dike that holds back the timeless sea: these serve as tangible evidence for the cosmic wakeup call. The last one is the most catastrophic because of the birthing of the fear of becoming a zombie. This one I know well, there came a day when my mom was around 70 and she asked who I was and then got lost in the house we grew up in and it was all of 1200 square feet: this was a moment of Realization powerful enough to cave my best laid plans of mice and men — et tu?
Ignoring or denying the above or executing a strategy of an ostrich burying its head in the sand is the unspoken and common remedy but is not representative of intelligent, rational behavior. Neither is the blind belief in the mirages of modern medicine or hanging on to a threadbare shadowy flicker of aliveness until a perpetually heralded, medical singularity just beyond the next rainbow rescues you from the imminent maelstrom: never make the grave error of mistaking quantity for quality of life. The biggest enemy you will ever face in realizing your potential is harboring thoughts of procrastination (I shall later…) or — the far more weaponized form of procrastination — immortality. Immortality is the underwriter of complacency which is the ideal fertilizer to spawn mediocrity. Mediocrity is the mask that cowardice wears. The ancient Greeks understood the mammoth cost to society of mediocrity and cowardice. This is addressed diligently and enforce in Chapter 4, Ellie from the United Kingdom with her studies of ancient Greece and their cultivation of areté from Homer to Aristotle. How have we as a society forgotten their wisdom and tragically done a 180? The Greeks understood the majestic omnipotence of mortality and Death so well but today someone would consider someone who believed in mortality like Plato or Heracles did as lunatics. But who is the lunatic here?
Your biological life is your most important asset. It is an asset that will be spent no matter what. Life is also a performance; you will perform no matter what. You can choose to be a ship tied to a dock in a safe harbor for decades. But ships are not designed to accumulate barnacles and rust; they are designed to explore vast, virgin, open oceans. Bioeconomically, the currency of your life is time. Only you can decide how it is spent. Everyday you must spend time and what you receive in exchange is experience. Time is a constant but experience is not: what was the value of your experience today, was it worth a day of your life? When you flip the calendar each month do you pause for just one fleeting second to assess the exchange value of a chunk of your life for what you constructed biologically and experientially? It was worth it if you lived at your potential like Ellie — areté — and with the intention of building your vital capacities in lieu of stockpiling barnacles and baubles.
Only you can increase your degree of aliveness and that is achieved by investing time in yourself in an intelligent, disciplined manner over decades. There are no short cuts; it is about wax on, wax off; it is about learning; it is about doting i’s and crossing t’s; it is about know thyself leading to trust thyself. A better approach to life comes into focus after you fully come to terms that life is an hourglass composed of tiny round slices of your existence we call days: time is currency to build bionetworth because the best thing to save for old age is yourself. It is the stark, concreteness and internalization of the finiteness of life that gives meaning to life; the greater the degree that mortality clarifies and intensifies your awareness while you embody a deep feeling of purpose in the total absence of fear, the more alive you become — at that point “potential” becomes transparent and tangible while “future” becomes opaque and intangible: your life changes radically at this decisive juncture, Death is now a positive force, your greatest ally, something you can tap into, the gale force squall at your back instead of in your face, you embody Achilles (West) and Miyamoto Musashi (East). A strange reversal of fortune, indeed, if understood, appreciated and exploited.
Do not confuse this with a Faustian bargain or confusing deep-dark (hard to explore mental spaces) with evil-dark (“Dark”) or attaching some phantom religious connotation; what is truly Dark is allowing the fear of death to rule your life, it is liberating to no longer grovel in fear’s shadow — that is the source of Darkness that cages people into accepting meager, hollow, mediocre lives. The more you explore the dark crannies, the more you can open up and let the light in until you finally experience Dawn from the inside out.
For the first time in my life I was Awake and could breathe without restriction, free of fear’s tyranny. When fueled by the urgency of mortality nothing can stop you except running out of fuel — get a grip and harness that, I thought. If Death no longer intimidates me, what can? I felt ready to bust open some Doors.
I had an awesome mentor and started training in 1970. He was into health, well-being, training and nutrition and approached life with intelligence, patience and wisdom. Muscle and Fitness and Bob Hoffman’s Strength and Health magazines were in steep piles. Barbells, dumbbells and benches were all painted red and black from York Barbell Company.
In June of 2012 I decided to train at a level I had never done before and I was going to slay the Janus-faced strength and endurance monster and see what happens after 3 years of going for it flat-out devil-may-care. All these years that I trained and read countless books on training I thought I knew something about training. I didn’t, not really. All of that dealt with training, not Training:
The mind is what you Train, the body is what you train, then: the mind uses the body as a tool to Train.
At this point, life was about executing my training plan with Terminator reliability. I filled the frigid abyss of infinite loneliness with the fire of desire. I went after training like Peter Matthiessen went after snow leopards. I did not miss one training session in 3 years — all that mattered was executing today’s training and recovery. Chapter 2, Airi from Finland, the world’s fittest woman, shows you what it takes to prepare to Train for real.
Come hell or high water my mind was going to do it and the body could come along for the ride — or not. The mind would finish the training with or without the body — lead, follow, or get out of the way. On one stationary, endurance-capacity bike ride in the summer at 200 watts for 2 hours there was a long trail of sweat that entered into a drain and when it dried it left a thick white residue of salt 12 feet long and 3 inches wide. Several long hikes in the endless hills on my local Nemesis were just like that — my hiking shorts were caked with white powder losing 6 pounds in the process. I put mind first and foremost and just let the body deal with it — it decided to get with the program and adapt like a phoenix rising from the ashes; where the mind goes the body follows even if dragged kicking and screaming through the fields of Mars and up through Pluto’s arse:
And Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
— Marcus Antonius
Shakespeare Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 1, 270–275
You certainly get the picture, phenomic mental and physical training spawned from the distinction between training and Training. Toughness is irrelevant if you learn how to mentally execute while empowered from that scary, dark place — when Death has your back your previously elusive potential becomes a ridable wild horse into the worthwhile. Achilles smiled at me. I did a lot of qigong during this period including 30 minutes straight of Pushing the Mountain once a week. Nothing compared to mentally having to face that — that IS Training. Heavy weights and creating salt trails are mental vacation compared to qigong of that ilk. Chapter 7: Ji from China orbits that vibe which is alien to Western science. Chapter 8: Jōtara from Japan approaches the same wavelength but from the samurai zeitgeist of 16th-century Miyamoto Musashi where acceptance of death is the Door to invincibility. Chapter 3, Ivan from Russia is about training versus Training and gaining access to the mental gatekeepers for limit strength and emergency endurance. Chapter 2, Airi from Finland, shows you how Finnish Sisu faces down Death and is part of their culture. Chapter 12, Karina from Russia, is all about dying, fear and Death in a most harrowing story of emergency endurance and using the mind to domesticate the awesome power of Death and then leveraging it for survival advantage. All different cultures, all the same ancient truth.
In the West we don’t talk about death, we hide from death, sugarcoat it, euphemize it, and we incriminate or tar death as evil. Dead bodies are ugly so they are adorned behind beautiful exotic wood boxes. A bare skull is only not a bare skull for a single blink of a celestial eye — in less time than that someone will be holding your skull, so go ahead and grip about it and then get over it as quickly as possible so you can do something worthwhile with the quality time you have left.
Life and Death are flip sides of the same coin; by shielding yourself from Death you drain the potential magnificence of life down to biological poverty. Life and death are inseparable, a complementary unity. Any attempt to isolate them is both impossible and a grave error, which, unfortunately, is deeply interwoven in American culture. Life is not the absence of death; it is not binary as dead or alive, it is, instead, a continuum of aliveness:
Death | dying ⇌ mediocrity ⇌ magnificence ⇌ areté | life
The degree of aliveness is directly proportional to your level of awareness (urgency) of Death in the mental background (phenomic mind) + the physical state of your multi-dimensional conditioning (phenomic body). Chapter 12, Karina from Russia demonstrates how alive and magnificent Homo sapiens can become as Death approaches.
Is aliveness trainable?
In 1993 I met the most amazing man, Steve Untch, 37 years old at the time. He was a world-class, high-altitude, alpine-style mountaineer and also an explorer at the highest level imaginable. He had done a new route of the South Face of Annapurna (8091m) and a new route of the North Face of Shishapangma (8027m). He was what I call a Red Zone Operator, someone who pioneers the uncharted waters at the extreme right-edge of the human performance envelope. He would take clients anywhere they wanted to go within reason; he was measured, not a dare-devil risk taker. He was 6–5, 213 pounds at 6.8% fat and an expert free and technical climber (Zodiac route on El Capitan, VI 5.11 A4). He still holds speed records in the Sierras for climbing multiple peaks alone in a single day. He was one of the fastest people ever under load for both vertical or horizontal efforts above 7000m; he had freaky reserve aerobic power relative to others when ambient oxygen concentration was low. He could stride where other accomplished climbers could only shuffle their feet with multiple breaths between steps. He used this rare talent to rescue people in dire straits because no one else had the speed and strength to aid someone down to safety (rescue demand is physiologically very different than speed climbing unloaded). In one of his letters to me he said on Annapurna, after being there for two months, he was in a rescue that lasted four days on a total of 9 hours sleep and covered 30,000 feet of vertical, up and down. No one else could do that. Where the air is thin, he was a life-saving monster.
When I met him he did several pull-ups effortlessly in my office using just the tiny lip of a door casing as finger holds which is about 1/2 of the first finger digits. Several companies sponsored his 1994 K2 Alpine-Style Himalayan Expedition where members of his team were going to be the first people to paraglide from near the summit of K2. I designed the only full-spectrum metabolic tool for Red Zone Operators in the world; Steve contacted me via another high-altitude climber client that was going to be on the K2 squad. I sponsored the micronutrition for his team so we could research and refine the micronutritional profile for humans operating at the limits of the performance envelope in multiple physiological dimensions, something that has been my passion for humans and horses since 1990. Cycling’s hour record was set in late 1994 using the same product of my design that Steve used to increase aerobic power on Annapurna and — on the equine front — a new world record was established for the mile in standardbred horse racing on a 1/2 mile track.
In 1994 while in the early stage of the K2 expedition there was a distress call from another expedition. Steve went to rescue them and he had to use an abandoned rope that may have been on K2 for many years. He fell to his death in a valiant rescue attempt to save their lives. My sadness hung over me like a dark cloud for several months. I only met him in person that once, but what struck me deeply was his unhesitant willingness to risk his life for complete strangers in peril, on several occasions, and his entire life’s energy being focused on realizing his dreams. He felt his calling and sacrificed all to make it happen. His actions mirrored his dreams more than any person I have ever known. He was extremely alive, not just not dead, however brief his life. I miss him greatly, still, 22 years later. His humility, selflessness, and dedication were a beacon to all who knew him. In The World’s Fittest Humans you will feel his spirit in Chapter 3, Ivan from Russia; Chapter 5, Janu from Nepal; Chapter 11, Roger from Australia; and Chapter 12, Karina from Russia. I urge you to read his letter again with sensitivity and you will feel the essence of the meaning of a great life speaking to you, one effused with vibrant aliveness, a life well spent. He sacrificed everything in his life to execute training efforts to be able to do what others thought impossible, that is precisely what Red Zone Operator do. He trained phenomically, he was long and strong. It was not about how he died; everyone dies, even cowards eventually die. It was about how he lived, few live to realize impossibilities. His life embodied Homeric areté, heroic excellence. He dared to be alive, to trail blaze — nothing more is asked if your life has a say.
So is aliveness trainable? Yes, it is. Steve led by example. We seem to live in a world of followers. He was worth following.
In other cultures, both ancient and modern, death is seen at face-value and instead of hiding from Death, Death is used as a mental tool to bridge over to realms of performance beyond the boundaries of matter and measurement. In judo, an opponent’s force is used against him; in life, Death is a force used to empower the mind and flip ON the emergency switch of the body. Do you have to focus on Death to achieve this level of performance? No, there are other methods and they will be discussed by the competitors and their world-class coaches. But why are you afraid to use Death as a mental tool? When you look at it in terms of how the organism perceives Death, it knows a lot more about Death than your superficial beliefs and petty concepts and it can marshall special forces in the body that are quite remarkable — these are inherent countermeasures to the perception of the threat of death such as access to limit strength or emergency endurance performance that are perfectly alien to scientific understanding. So, it is a tool, learn how to exploit it and jettison all the nonsense and conceptual baggage. Through the eyes of the competitors, that is where I am going to haul your arse kicking and screaming in The World’s Fittest Humans. You will come to the conclusion that the upper registers of the meaning of life can only be accessed through the lens of Death — acute awareness of mortality is a powerful wellspring of inspiration that originates from a bottomless source of energy not accounted for by E=mc².
You may be frightened of that scary, dark place right now, but until you master it, you will never Train.
I got the idea to write an essay called The World’s Fittest Humans in the spring of 2014 based on a competition I created called Phenomic Games after researching what would accurately assess the fitness of humans. It is founded on the deep-biology principles of biological anthropology and ontogeny, the only means of correctly benchmarking Homo sapiens’ survival readiness — no one had ever ventured into these waters at crush depth before, not the Greeks, not the Spartans, not modern military or any form of extant sport. It was only going to be an 8,000 word essay (1/5 of the length of Chapter 6: Gabriela from Brazil) but that soon became the Introduction to a larger project that would address in-depth for the first time in history multiple polarities simultaneously and neutrally:
East and West,
strength and endurance,
mind and body,
training and recovery,
survival and death,
ancient and modern, and
male and female.
The story is told through the diverse world views of 12 different competitors facing different weaknesses and a single moderator with the technical expertise to sort through all the contradictions for the reader. The ultimate purpose is to provide the reader with a vivid, multifaceted theatric tool to imagine and visualize what it would mean and feel like to be preparing for the ultimate test of mind and body through the eyes of 12 of the fittest humans in the world.
After the training I had just done in the aftermath of Summer’s death plus my background in strength and endurance theory and practice along with my 26 years in designing the most powerful micronutritional formulas in the world for equine and human Red Zone Operators and 1o years of studying aging and development in mammals in the 1990s resulting in An Operating System for the Human Organism (Phenomic Games’ research has deep roots here), I found myself ready and qualified to pull it all together. The only way to write something soul deep, profound and unbridled with such breathtaking scope and scale was in the genre called realistic fiction. In this genre, the story and characters are fictional but as far as what happened, could happen, or could have happened, well, you quickly discover that reality is only one reality of an infinite number of possible contingent realities. This is also a perfect haven for theoretical biology. So the concept for the book The World’s Fittest Humans: Exploring the Limits of Physical and Mental Performance, Training, and Potential was born and has three layers:
a fictional narrative about the universe of Phenomic Games and its competitors (this layer would be an incredible story for an on-the-edge-of-the-chair action film featuring a diversity of philosophically irreconcilable, deeply-inspiring characters, surreal aerial cinematography from all over the world with these high-octane, human jaguars and jaguaresses, and all while being a film that doesn’t hinge on violence (but Roger from Australia, Chapter 11 can bring violence in spades with his expertise in weapon systems for state-sponsored, clandestine assassinations; he represents my 9 years exposure to working at Lockheed in the 1980s and customers I have had since 1992 in Special Forces for micronutrition);
a theoretical biology layer to open up the realm of the possible; and
a hard-science, multi-disciplinary, nonfiction basement layer rooted in Phenomics Games.
Each of the 12 biographies has an interview between Dr. John Beasley, a science and technology reporter for the London Herald with a PhD in phenomics, and each competitor and their coaches where they deep dive into over-the-top, highly-nuanced mental and physical spaces on the frontier of the performance envelope never before contemplated — right at the theoretical edges of the human phenome, the grey zone of virgin madness that inhabits that niche between life and Death. These aspects of Phenomic Games are the kind of free-radical mental spaces that awaken vapid humans out of their drone-like coma hamstrung by four-feet-under aliveness and ignite wonder as to what they are here for:
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
— Mark Twain
If it weren’t for Summer there would be no The World’s Fittest Humans or Airi, Jōtara or Ivan to open the mental jail door to your incarcerated possibilities. But in particular she influenced Chapter 4: Ellie from the UK with Ellie’s focus on Pilates, Gyrotonic and dance to connect to her divine
feline movement qualities that her mum lived and breathed. Summer taught Pilates, dance and yoga. Chapter 5: Janu from Nepal is about Tibetan Buddhism and its cosmic role in the perilous, life-threatening career of a Himalayan Sherpa, the runaway winner of Nemesis at Phenomic World Championships in the Pennine Alps near the Italian and Swiss border. Summer was a Tibetan Buddhist and her Buddhist name was Tsöndrü Pelmo which means “Exertion Glorious Lady”. Janu’s middle name is Tsöndrü. Chapter 7: Ji from China is about primordial qigong and Eastern ontological understandings. Summer was a qigong instructor at the end of her life and could communicate the essence of qigong or yoga nonverbally and nonphysically as only the beckoning, clarifying force of Death can project. If The World’s Fittest Humans nukes your distorted life priorities, thank Summer.
I came to the realization that I took her for granted during our 20 year relationship. Given my shortcomings, I didn’t deserve to have her in my life in the first place but that is not something I could understand in the moment any more than a fish can understand the value of water until the sea is bone dry. Death is the best teacher of the meaning of life because the yardstick of life can only be felt as the inverse presence of Death — when you are young the water seems infinitely deep; later on, however — via a drop-by-drop, stealthy, siphoning process whilst you perfect pretending much ado about nothing — your life moves into the shallows and you eventually become aware of just how shallow it is as the tide goes out smartly in the twilight hours taking your forlorn bionetworth with it.
Perhaps for many future lives, the reason for being born will be framed by the trials and tribulations invoked by Phenomic Games, one of the few challenges worth the cost of a meaty chunk of your life in my experience thus far — no other sport can hold a candle. Indubitably, life is fleeting but Training at life’s zenith with aim to explore human potential in the same orbit as an astronaut or Steve Untch — or, perhaps, to experience your potential — is far shorter, more dear and — most crucially — requires deep, fathomless water to make a courageous go of it. Make it count because while you flounder around chasing your tail the clock pays no heed, the shoals are nearer than you dare to fancy, and the tide is indefatigably going out.
“Life is the process of exploring. When exploring dies, the body and mind soon follow.”
— Gabriela Delgado (Brazil), neuroscientist and female Bronze medalist of the Phenomic World Championships in Turin, Italy (Chapter 6)
“A pure Western approach focuses on the caterpillar and when executed correctly produces great results upfront but then encounters insurmountable diminishing returns. A pure Eastern approach adopts a strategic view, a long view in gradations of many years or even in terms of the human lifespan; it uses the caterpillar to build an inner, invisible cocoon of long mental gestation ultimately resulting in a metaphysical butterfly. In other words, mind is the bridge between the physical and the metaphysical. The Western approach is the best system for physical development whereas the Eastern approach is the best system for mental and metaphysical development. In my Theory of Training Strategy I integrate both approaches resulting in a caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly model of human performance development.”
— Jōtara Musashi, female Silver medalist of the Phenomic World Championships in Turin, Italy, Excerpt from her interview with John Beasley, PhD from the London Herald (Chapter 8)
“When I compete out there in front of the world there is this overpowering feeling that I truly am an equal [to men] and that opens something up deep down inside and keeps me target-locked on experiencing my potential and reaching for perfection. It articulates and fuels meaning for my training and training is my life. Words cannot do justice to the realization of the ultimate freedom of dedicating one’s life to the pursuit of extending the boundaries of human limits into unknown realms while also receiving full recognition for the accomplishment. In my career, my value as a woman is not limited by my looks, it is unlimited by my actions. That should be the norm for every woman — regardless of walk of life — and should be instilled in every child at the dawn of learning language and social mores. My actions, and those of my peers, will be the catalyst to cause the universal extinction of the glass ceiling.”
— Airi Jokinen (Finland), the world’s fittest woman, female Gold medalist of The Phenomic World Championships in Turin, Italy. Excerpt from her interview with John Beasley, PhD from the London Herald (Chapter 2)
This link takes you to the Introduction.
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The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
PHENOMIC GAMES is a trademark of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
