Dan Baum was “a pudgy, overmothered cherub” of five when he first shot a gun, he writes in his new book . At summer camp, an adult showed him how to use a Mossberg .22-caliber rifle. “I cannot remember the names of my neighbors’ grown children or the seventh dwarf,” Baum writes, “but to this day I can summon every detail of that rifle and its metallic, smoky, chemical aroma.”

Gun Guys: A Road Trip.

Dan Baum.

Despite the fact that he came from a gun-averse Democratic household, Baum fell hard for guns, and he’s been trying to figure out why ever since. In every other respect, the 56-year-old journalist is as liberal as they come—a believer in “unions, gay rights, progressive taxation, the United Nations,” and President Obama. A few years ago, having already written books about , , and , Baum decided that it was finally time to tackle what he calls “my gun thing.” He worried that gun guys wouldn’t accept him if he didn’t look the part, so he signed up for an NRA-approved concealed-carry class and got a permit to carry a handgun. Then he shoved a .38-caliber Colt Detective Special in his waistband and set off on a cross-country road trip, stopping at gun stores along the way in search of “the essential quality” about guns that, “like anchovies on pizza, impassioned some people and disgusted others.”

The book is sure to anger people on both sides of the chasm. Baum criticizes the NRA, pokes fun at his gung-ho firearm instructors, and argues that anyone who wants to carry a gun needs “much much much much better training” than what’s commonly offered. On the other hand, he treats people who want tighter gun laws with suspicion, he unapologetically defends the cultural resentments of straight, white men, and he ignores the phenomenon of mass shootings, at least in the body of the book, addressing them in a postscript written after James Holmes killed 12 and wounded 58 in Aurora, Colorado, and Adam Lanza murdered 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Baum is a quirky writer with an original point of view, and with Gun Guys he’s made an important addition to the literature. A clear, stylish writer, he has a knack for getting gun enthusiasts to open up—their stories are compelling and sometimes surprising. Here, Baum talks to Jason Fagone about the appeal of the AR-15 rifle, the link between gun love and social class, and how carrying a firearm changes the way you look at the world.

What I like about your book is that you write frankly about guns as seductive objects. They work on the psyche in ways that aren’t talked about a lot.
I’ve always wanted to get at why we love these things so much. I live in this liberal, Democratic, gun-hating world, and I like guns, so I’m often in the position of feeling like a closeted gay man. We wouldn’t say terrible things about black people or gay people, but it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about testosterone-poisoned gun freaks. Meanwhile, the NRA—which I hate, and which doesn’t represent me—is making all kinds of assumptions about gun people, and the left is, too. So I said, I’m going to go out and talk to gun guys.

You’re an unlikely narrator for a book about gun love.
I don’t look like a gun guy. I’m a Jewish boy from the suburbs of New York. Nobody had guns there. It was a million miles from gun culture. Because I don’t look like a gun guy, I got a concealed-carry permit. It was my entrée. If you carry a gun, you’re one of them. But I also wanted to see what it was like to carry a gun.

I like your description of how carrying a gun changes the way you look at the world.
Changes everything.

You say it puts you in a state of mind called Condition Yellow. What is that?
Condition Yellow is…. I don’t want to say a state of hyper-vigilance, because that makes it sound bad. But it is a heightened awareness of everything that is going on around you. It is an awesome responsibility to walk around with a gun. You’ve really got to have your shit together when you’re wearing a gun. It really tightens the laces on your life in kind of an appealing way. That’s Condition Yellow. When I wasn’t wearing the gun—when I was visiting a state that did not honor my concealed-carry permit, or when I knew I would be drinking—I would go back to Condition White, which is a state of obliviousness about your surroundings. And I would realize how much I liked Condition White. That’s where you daydream, and it’s where art happens, and I like that, too. Ultimately, I decided to stop wearing the gun, because I got burned out on Condition Yellow. I think it’s left me in a kind of Condition Pale Yellow.

In the end, it seemed like you doubted your ability to actually stop a violent crime. You weren’t enough of a warrior.
Yeah.

I don’t want to spoil it, but you go through a very intense kind of shooting test involving a sophisticated machine used to train police.
And after I go through that, I get a better gun. For a while, I go further into the gun carrying.

You get a Glock.
And I don’t like it. There’s no reason to like a Glock. I like old guns. The Glock is just an utterly charmless man killer. That’s all it’s good for. It has no aesthetic value. But it really shoots well, and it holds a lot of bullets. When the Aurora shooting happened, in the movie theater, I had stopped carrying my gun by then, but what went through my mind is what I’m sure went through a lot of gun guys’ minds, and that was: Damn, I wish I had been in that theater with my gun.

Do you think you could have stopped James Holmes?
I don’t know. I’d like to think I’d have kept my head, waited for a clear shot, and taken it. And I believe that whether I hit him or not, I’d have upset his rhythm. Again and again these mass shooters kill themselves when the police show up. (Though not Holmes. He simply seemed to run out of enthusiasm.) Adam Lanza, Seung Hui-Cho, the Columbine shooters…. They don’t want a gunfight. They want to kill a lot of people. So I like to think that, if Holmes had seen a muzzle flash, it would have at least made him pause. In any case, I don’t see that things could have been worse with someone shooting at him.

You talked to a lot of angry gun guys on your trip. What were they so upset about?
The bulge of the gun-guy demographic is middle-aged, straight, white men who have not finished college. That’s a demographic that has really suffered in the past 30 years. They haven’t had a wage increase since 1978.

You write that these guys have had “their livers pecked out while women, immigrants, blacks, and gays all seemed to have become groovier, sexier, and more dynamic players in American culture.” Do guns make these guys feel powerful and important again?
There are two things. One is: the NRA comes along and says to them, “You’re angry because the liberals want to take away your guns.” The other is: living alongside firearms is a big self-esteem builder. You feel good about being somebody who is capable and clear-headed and skilled enough to be around these incredibly dangerous things, and maybe even carry one, without anyone getting hurt.

There’s an interesting scene when you visit the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia. You’re getting a tour from a guy in the NRA’s education and training division, and you prod him to tell you why he loves guns—and he gives you a very direct answer.
When you talk to gun guys, they talk about how, oh, guns are like cameras—they’re these beautiful devices. But there’s no denying that there’s a death element to gun fascination, and I really hadn’t heard that from anyone. So I go to the NRA toward the end of the book. I find this one guy who I like. And I say, Come on, man, this is all about death. I thought he was going to deny it, but he goes, Yeah, this is about death. And it is. I mean, to be a gun guy—not just to carry a gun but to be around guns—it’s the same kind of thing that skydivers have, or free climbers. You’re getting this little contact high from the Grim Reaper.

Let’s talk about the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which, as you know, is the type of weapon Adam Lanza used at Sandy Hook and Holmes used in Aurora. You start the book with it. The first time you go to a gun range, you take a rifle made in 1900 for the Spanish-American War, and you find that you’re the only guy who has an old gun. Everyone else is shooting black AR-15’s. What did you discover about the appeal of this weapon?
It’s portrayed now, post–Sandy Hook, as some kind of bizarre outlier to the gun world. Who needs an AR-15? Why would any hunter or any decent person want an AR-15? It turns out—and this was a surprise to me—that the AR-15 is the whole gun business. It’s all anyone wants anymore. It’s all you see at rifle ranges. Half the guns in a gun store will be AR-15’s. Why? Because they are incredible rifles. There’s very little recoil, thanks to a big spring in the butt. It’s very accurate. But more than that, it’s modular. It all comes apart, so you can endlessly swap out pieces. New stock, new pistol grip. You can even change the caliber, in seconds, just by snapping pieces on and off. There is a bottomless universe of shit you can buy for your gun.

You write that attempts to ban the AR-15 are “stupid.”
Yes.

But if I wanted to ban the AR-15, I’d use your reporting to make the case. You write: “My own rifle punched me like a prize-fighter, and to fire a second shot, I had to throw a heavy bolt lever up and back, forward and down. With this gun, I barely brushed the trigger, as gently as flicking crumbs off a tablecloth. … It was effortless, like shooting a ray gun. … Imagine a guitar that made you play like Eric Clapton.” It really does seem like a fundamentally distinct class of weapon. Why is it stupid to want to ban something that puts tremendous lethal firepower in the hands of inexperienced shooters?
For one thing, there are gazillions of them already out there, so unless we do a house-to-house search, we’re still going to be living with these things. As for why anyone needs an AR-15, that’s not a question we ask in any other context. We don’t ask why anybody needs an eight-cylinder SUV or a 6,000-square-foot house. And I would argue that the SUV and the house may be limiting our human future more than the AR-15. If you look at FBI statistics, these guns are used in about 3 percent of killings a year. If you really want to do something to make us safer, ban handguns. Which I think would be nuts.

What about a ban on high-capacity magazines?
I’ll send you a YouTube video of a guy changing a magazine in a second. One second.

Sure, but Jared Loughner—the Tucson shooter who killed six and injured 13, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—fired 31 bullets in 15 seconds from his Glock. There were 33 rounds. Lanza fired about 150 rounds from his AR-15 in just a few minutes. Police got to the Aurora movie theater within 90 seconds of the start of Holmes’ rampage, and by that time he’d already killed 12 and wounded 58. It seems like introducing even a minor inconvenience could save lives.
My first book was about the politics of the drug war, so I have an instinctive prejudice against bans. I think banning things that lots of people want is bad policy. It produces the opposite effect of what you want. It’s caustic to people’s respect for the rule of law. And it’s undemocratic. People who talk about banning the AR-15 and banning large-capacity magazines are rooted in unreality. A lot of this impulse to ban is seizing an opportunity to stick it to the other tribe, and I really hate that.

One issue I have is that, when you talk about the flip side of gun love, your sensitivity and nuance go out the window. You seem to think that people who don’t love guns are just snobs. I kept waiting for a moment when you’d acknowledge that those who want tighter gun laws might be genuinely concerned about gun violence. But that moment never came. You put “epidemic of gun violence” in scare quotes, like it’s something that’s been invented to tar gun owners.
Violent crime is half of what it was 20 years ago. We have done an incredible job in this country. It is an unalloyed piece of good news. It is a public-policy victory. And I devote three of 18 chapters to the dark side of guns—a young man murdered, another disabled, and a chapter about a former gangbanger who killed a man.

We’ve still got the highest rate of gun homicide in the advanced world. We still have 30,000 firearm-related deaths every year. Five hundred murders last year in Chicago, and 331 in the city where I report, Philadelphia.
Chicago, which has some of the toughest gun laws in the country.

Yeah, but as David Frum has pointed out, there’s not a wall around Chicago. Guns can come into Chicago from other places. There are other problems. Suicide. Teens who try to kill themselves with guns tend to succeed, as you point out in the book.
That is bad. That is definitely bad. Look. Going back to your question about the motives of the gun-control people—

I can tell you that, personally, the reason I don’t want to be around guns isn’t that I have some pathological aversion to them as objects. It’s that I think they’re dangerous. I have a four-year-old daughter. If I had been out with her and had seen you open-carrying your handgun in Whole Foods, my impulse would have been to come up and tap you on the shoulder and ask what the fuck was wrong with you.
It’s well and good to say I have a four-year-old daughter and I live in Philadelphia and I don’t want anything to do with guns. But, forgive me, it’s a little bit like saying I don’t want anything to do with gravity. I mean, the country is full of guns. We can’t do away with air crashes by repealing gravity. The gun-control side—and this has been especially true since Sandy Hook—has been depending on an emotional argument. You just made, really, an emotional argument.

I could cite statistics. Studies show that more guns equal more homicides, across all sorts of metrics.
Private firearm ownership per capita in the United States has gone up tremendously in the past 20 years. Gun laws have generally gotten looser everywhere in the past 20 years. And gun murders have fallen by half. So I don’t know why you say more guns equals more homicide.

Those are the findings of David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Places with more guns have higher rates of homicide.
David Hemenway, frankly, is a partisan on this issue. As is Gary Kleck on the other side. These guys have an agenda. I don’t trust them. But it’s Hemenway who has found that guns are used to save lives 80,000 times a year, which means guns may be saving more lives than they’re taking.

In one chapter, you quote a lawyer at the Goldwater Institute who makes an argument I’ve seen a lot: that the Second Amendment exists in part to let citizens arm themselves as a “bulwark against tyranny.” He’s talking about doing battle against the U.S. government if necessary. Do you think that’s a valid point?
I don’t believe we’ll get to the place where we have to take our rifles out of the closet and overthrow a tyrannical government. But I do think that the widespread private ownership of guns bespeaks a relationship between the government and the people that is unique and that I like. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, in countries where the only people with guns are the military and the police. I don’t like it. And I’m not sure most Americans would like it.

Your other views are so progressive, though. To be a progressive, you have to believe that the world can be improved. But it seems like, at the heart of so much Second Amendment absolutism, there is this dark vision of inevitable, lawless decay. Like: The world is screwed. You may as well start burying AR-15’s in your yard.
No, no, no. It’s not that.

Am I misunderstanding?
Yeah, I think you are. There are definitely a lot of gun guys who feel that way. You know, when they make the argument—like Aaron Zelman’s genocide argument, that gun control precedes genocide—

Aaron Zelman. This is the late head of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. He wrote a book called Death by “Gun Control,” arguing that gun laws led not just to the Holocaust but also to eight other genocides.
I was born in 1956. You were probably born in the ’70s? We’ve lived in a pretty good era in the United States. But in our lifetimes, people wearing Gap and Benetton clothing were lined up in front of pits and shot for being who they were. This happened during our adulthood. And these were not savage Africans. These were Europeans! These were white folks, wearing the kinds of clothes we wear, and carrying the kinds of consumer products we carry. They were lined up and shot, for being who they were, in Bosnia.

Sorry: savage Africans?
Well, you know, when it happens in Africa, I think we all have a tendency to go, well, it’s Africa, right? But this happened in Europe. We’re not talking about the Nazis. We’re talking about the ’90s. So I cannot completely dismiss Zelman’s argument. I also lost half my family in the Holocaust. And I do kind of share his sense of wonder that the vanguard of the gun-control movement in this country are the Jews.

You talk about being a progressive. I’ve been appalled at how my fellow quote-unquote progressives have this sudden, newfound adoration of police power. I mean, hello? We used to oppose excessive police power. We used to be all about civil liberties. And now you’ve got “progressives” talking about confiscating people’s property.

Who’s talking about confiscation?
Andrew Cuomo. Under New York’s SAFE Act—passed under “emergency” conditions, so that legislators got only 20 minutes to read the bill—assault rifles and magazines have to be taken out of the state in 90 days or surrendered. A similar law is being debated in Missouri and Colorado.

You say it’s an admirable thing that we give ordinary people this level of trust with firearms. And many of the people you meet in your reporting are model gun owners. But what about all the guys on a site like AR15.com, who post psychopathic rants about the United Nations?
Oh yeah, they’re scary.

And what about the kid you encounter who’s shooting into a rock face and the bullet’s pinging back at him? Doesn’t the easy availability of guns in America ensure that many people who shouldn’t have them will have them? You don’t engage with these people.
I take exception to the idea that all the people in my book are responsible gun owners. I really did try to represent the knuckleheads and the malevolent, too. Brandon Franklin, a 22-year-old I knew from my reporting days in New Orleans, gets murdered. And I interviewed a guy who killed a guy. A gangbanger. So they’re not all good guys, for one thing. But as the guy at the Goldwater Institute put it: we are a big, messy, polyglot country with a tremendous amount of freedom. A certain amount of bad shit is going to happen.

You argue that if Democrats try to tighten gun laws, they’ll only alienate voters who could help them accomplish other things that you believe in—action on climate change, income inequality, and immigration reform. Newtown seems to have changed this calculus, though. Has it changed your views about gun control?
No. I think Joe Biden, whom I love, is making mistakes here. The gun-control side is underestimating the force of the reaction they’re in for.

Mass shootings only appear tangentially in the body of your book. The Fort Hood shooting, Virginia Tech, the Wisconsin Sikh temple—they come up in the postscript, but that was written after Aurora and Newtown. Why didn’t you feel the need to address them?
They’re very rare. They seem like they happen all the time, but a statistically insignificant number of Americans die in these events.

Nine hundred people in the past seven years, according to USA Today.
Yeah. Which is a lot of people. No question. I and probably a lot of other gun guys believe that if somebody wants to do it, they’re going to do it. We can tinker with the gun laws all we want, but Timothy McVeigh did not use a gun, and he killed more people in his single act than any of these shooters.

You seem to despair in the book about the two sides coming to any kind of agreement. They’re too far apart.
Yes, and if I’m harder on the progressives, it’s because I think they’re largely responsible for this. It’s because of their sanctimonious, self-congratulatory sense of superiority to the gun people, and their desire to win a tribal point by smashing the idol of their opposing worldview. They drive gun guys into a defensive crouch.

You’ve laid out what progressives can do: listen to gun guys, respect their views. What can gun guys do?
Gun guys have to lock up their fucking guns. Much of the bad shit that happens in this country with guns happens because some honest person who bought a gun legally in a gun store left it unlocked. Thieves get them, and then they go into criminal hands. Kids find them, depressed teenagers find them. Adam Lanza found his mother’s guns unlocked. I think gun guys need to pull up their big-boy pants. And if they won’t, then we need to have laws that impose criminal penalties if something bad happens with your gun.

You also support universal background checks.
And putting them online, where we can all get them.

Did the road trip change any of your other, non-gun-related political views? Are you still an Obama supporter?
Oh yeah. I’m no less a tax-and-spend liberal Democrat. I’m a big Obama guy. But I must say, I do understand now the sense that we are all overmanaged and underrespected as citizens. I think we have lost a tremendous amount of individual agency in this country. The abhorrence on the part of the left that an armed citizen might have been useful at Sandy Hook or Aurora seems rooted in this instinctive liberal horror that any individual could be vigorous and capable and independent-minded enough to do something that dramatic. To actually intervene in a situation like that. And as somebody who instinctively cares more about the collective than the individual, I think we’re misguided there. I think the collective is better served by vigorous and capable individuals in the same way a machine works better with higher-quality parts.

You’re trying to speak to both sides in a debate where there really aren’t a lot of centrists. There’s a gap in the middle.
People will hate this book on both sides. When I think about what The New York Times is going to do, if they review it at all, I pucker up. I mean, Terry Gross isn’t going to have me on. We’ll see. Both sides are the fucking Taliban. It’ll either be a huge hit or I’ll go get a job.

Jason Fagone is a contributing editor at Wired and Philadelphia. His book will be published by Crown in November.

Dan Baum has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for Harper’s, Wired, and many other magazines. He’s the author of several books, including .

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On November 22, the Canadian adventurer Len Stanmore began an endurance footrace called —a wild, seven-day, six-stage haul across part of Antarctica. It’s the kind of thing that can devastate even a fit 24-year-old, which is what makes Stanmore’s bid all the more impressive: He’s a 60-year-old retiree.

The story of Stanmore’s transformation into a global explorer is an unlikely one. Before he started climbing mountains, he didn’t even particularly like the outdoors, although he was no stranger to physical exertion. One of his first jobs in his native Toronto was pumping gas for $2 an hour. When Stanmore was in his mid-twenties, he figured he’d never get anywhere if he didn’t go into business for himself, so he borrowed $5,000 from his parents and started his own telecom firm. In the beginning, the firm was just Stanmore and another guy in a truck, digging holes to lay cable. Little by little, though, Stanmore built the business, and, 25 years later, it was the largest telecom contracting company in North America.

In 1998, Stanmore sold his company to a Silicon Valley firm, and the following year, he retired. That’s when he experienced a crisis of faith that launched him on a remarkable run of outdoor achievements. He has climbed the highest peak on each of the seven continents—the Seven Summits—including Mt. Everest. He has cross-country skiied to the North and South Poles. And he has raced through the Gobi, Atcama, and Sahara deserts as part of , a series of footraces in extreme environments. If Stanmore finishes The Last Desert in Antarctica, he’ll become the first person ever to stand on top of all Seven Summits, ski to both poles, and complete the 4 Deserts Grand Slam. His bid is part of an effort to raise money for , a charity that aids orphan children who live at the bases of popular climbing destinations. He hopes to raise $100,000. You can follow Stanmore’s journey in Antarctica at the Trekking for Kids website.

Here, in a conversation that took place before he shipped off for Antarctica, Stanmore discusses his training regimen, the surprising agony of running across salt flats, and how to fight off polar bears.

What exactly is required of you in The Last Desert?
It’s a 250-kilometer run, and it’s over seven days. They have one long day, which is anywhere between 80 and 100 kilometers, and the rest of them are 40-kilometer days. It looks like our first day is going to be a 100-kilometer race, so that’s going to be a good challenge. Usually they don’t have that on the first day, because you’re getting used to your gear, and I think for a lot of people, especially people coming from warmer climates, that’s going to be very tricky.

You’re 60 years old. I assume most of your competitors will be younger.
They’re all younger.

So, at your age, how do you prepare for something like this?
Well, I’m pretty strict about training. Normally I’ll train between four and six hours a day, six days a week. I’ll run between 90 and 120 kilometers a week. Then I’ll fill in with another six to eight hours of cardio on top of that, whether it’s elliptical or stepmaster or spin bike. Then I’ll train another eight hours on top of that during the week with a trainer.

For these races, you have to carry all your gear with you. The pack weighs anywhere from 27 to 30 pounds. That doesn’t sound like much, but after about 10 kilometers, you really start to feel it. It’s like carrying a two-year-old on your back for the whole race.

How’d you get started with endurance athletics in the first place, back in the late ’90s? You weren’t an athlete at all. You were a recently retired guy who played a lot of golf.
I started feeling depressed. I didn’t have any purpose in my life, any challenges. And I could look ahead, seeing myself 20 years down the road, standing at the same golf hole, putting at the same green.

So I’m at this business lunch one day in California, with these two guys, and on the weekends they had been mountain climbing. That really intrigued me. This is the excitement I need in my life. I thought, “I’m going to go to Africa and climb Kilimanjaro.” I picked Kilimanjaro because it was the only mountain I knew by name.

It was the most exhausting thing I’d ever done in my life. At the time, I was 50 pounds heavier, I smoked cigars, and I’m not outdoorsy. I was really out of my element. All my friends and family thought I was completely crazy.

But anyway, when I was on that trip, you get talking to people, and they started talking about these Seven Summits. And it’s like: That sounds interesting. That could eat up five years of my life. I never thought I’d get to Everest. I just thought, I’ll take them one at a time, and I’ll take the easiest ones first and I’ll see how far I get. And that’s what I did.

And then you started skiing?
When I was doing the climbing, people always talked about the Grand Slam: Do the Seven Summits and ski to the North and South Poles. I needed something after I did the Seven Summits, so we did the North Pole in 2007. I’d never cross-country skiied before. You know, I did a few sessions here in Ontario, and then I just landed on the polar cap, and away we went, and I learned along the way. It was quite something, I must say. I always feel sorry for the guides: “Oh my God, where did this guy come from.” That’s tricky skiing. So much open water! You’ll be going across thin, thin, thin ice, maybe a half an inch thick, and you’re pulling a sled and thinking, Are you going to go through? Rigging your tents up to keep polar bears out.

Wait, how do you rig a tent to keep a polar bear out?
Oh, this is interesting stuff! This is really cool. You put aluminum pipes around your tent, and then you put fishing wire connecting each one. And then you put flares in them, so if a polar bear comes in, he trips the fishing wire and trips the flare, which gives the guide time to get out his big-ass rifle and shoot it. Polar bears are the worst. They will hunt you, right?

To even get invited to compete in the Last Desert in Antarctica, you have to have already successfully finished two other races in the 4 Deserts series. When was your first 4 Deserts race?
In 2009, I started running. The first run I did, I left the house here, did what I thought was a pretty good run, came back, marked it off with the truck: 1.5 miles. Not exactly stellar. So I went back to my trainer. I said, “I signed up for this race in the Gobi Desert.” He said, “Oh, good, how far is it?” I said, “It’s about 250 kilometers.” He said, “Oh gosh, you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I attemped it in 2009 for the first time, and I failed. I got 180 clicks in, and I had to quit.

Why’s that?
Well, because I didn’t listen to anybody, and I was an idiot. The terrain is really rough. Up and down mountains, over boulders. I didn’t realize that blisters could bring you to a complete stop. I’m not talking about little blisters. I was on crutches after that. I had nerve damage. But what did I wear? Trail shoes or running shoes? Running shoes. I kept trying to suck it up. Completely ridiculous.

After the experience in the Gobi, I thought I’d never go back. But it always kind of bugged me that I didn’t finish it. It drives you crazy. So in 2011, I figured I’d try one of the other races. So I went to the Atcama. It’s one of the 4 Deserts races. It’s in Chile, and it’s another 250-kilometer race. You’re not runnining over roads. You’re running over mountains, sand dunes, over the salt flats, which was incredibly hard. It’s like running on jagged coral, about 20 kilometers of that. I always thought the salt flats were flat! They’re not. You bounce from one jagged rim to another.

But anyway, I knocked that one off and felt pretty good about myself, so in July, I went to the Gobi Desert, where I had failed before, and that was a good race for me. I completed it on July 22. It was incredibly hot. On our long day, about 87 kilometers, it got up to 54 degrees Celsius. That would be 120 or 130 degrees Fahrenheit. And it stayed there the whole day. It was just mind-boggling. You just felt like your brain was frying.

What’s the mission of Trekking for Kids, and how did you get involved with them?
Oh, this is a good story. So, I’m in Ecuador, and I’m climbing Cotopaxi and some of the mountains there, and my guide from Everest, Luis Benitez—he’s an American, and just a phenomenal climber; he’s summited Everest six times so far—I’m climbing with him, and he says, “Len, I’m a volunteer with a charity, Trekking for Kids, and I gotta stop by the orphanage. Do you want to come?” I said, “I guess.”

I’m kind of skeptical about charities. You never know if your money’s going to pay somebody’s salary or if it’s going to the cause, right?

So, anyway, I go there, and I meet the nuns, and I meet the orphan girls, and I’m so impressed with the dedication of the volunteers, so I decide to donate. I bought them a new stove and a new fridge. The stove was broken down. They make baked goods and they sell them to make money for the orphanage. And then I put some money into building some beds for them, and then I paid for them to have a vegetable garden put in, so they can eat the vegetables and sell them. I was staying down there for a while, so I was actually there while they had local workers coming in and building the beds and stuff. You can see the difference you’re making. You know exactly where your money’s going.

Normally when you travel, you stay in a really nice hotel in the middle of the city or on the ocean, and you really never see how 95 percent of the world lives. But doing these adventures, I really see how people live and how they struggle, just to survive. It’s like, holy Christ, this is really rough. Especially with children. They don’t have anyone to help them. If we can’t help them with organizations like Trekking for Kids, I don’t know what kind of hope they really have.

What advice would you have for anyone who’s like you were several years ago—overweight, not particularly athletic, etc.—and wants to try one of these long treks?
For me, I’m always battling with my age. You can’t compete with youth. I think you have to train harder than you think you need to. But at the end of the day … it’s more of a mind game than a physical game. I’ve been in some spots, say, climbing, or in a race, and after eight hours I’m completely exhausted, I’m just thinking, “This is it, I’ve got to pack it in,” and 12 hours later, I’m still going.

Trust me: I don’t think I’ve gone on one race or one climb where I haven’t thought, “Why the hell am I here? This is ridiculous.” In the Atcama race, I got lost, and I was really suffering, and I remember thinking, “If I just fell down and broke my leg, I could get out of here with some dignity. I just have to break my leg and there’s no shame in that.” You really just have to stop and analyze yourself. “Wait, I’m a little hot.” Push through it, push through it.

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