Miles Chamley-Watson is grunting in pain. The fencer is in the gymnasium, Standing next to a dummy hanging from a rig and strapped to weights on the ground, and he is suffering from toothache.
Chamley-Watson, a slender 1.93-metre-tall athlete, is in full fencing garb and holds a foil - one of three types of sword used in the sport - with his right hand. The American flag is painted across the mesh of his mask. Although he was born in London, Chamley-Watson fences for Team USA and, in 2013, became the first American fencer to become world champion. He's a medal contender for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Chamley-Watson looks at the dummy hanging before him and grimaces. "I can compete with broken fingers; that's nothing compared to a throbbing pain in the tooth that you can't do anything about," he says. "Still, I'm going to destroy this dummy."
The gym is the Red Bull High Performance Center, a 270m2 space inside the company's North American headquarters in Santa Monica, California. It's a vast building that includes a cinema, recording studio and gaming room. Here, the Red Bull-sponsored athletes are looked after by a team of performance experts and use an extensive assortment of equipment.
In one corner is a large trampoline where skateboarders, surfers and gymnasts improve their acrobatic skills. Next to it is a Formula 1 simulator. There's also a neurological training system with a headset that measures brainwaves, a sensory-performance station where athletes can test ten perceptual and visual-motor skills using a touch screen and strobe glasses, an anti-gravity treadmill, a cryosauna - a therapeutic chamber in which the body is subjected to cold temperatures - and a lab equipped with stationary bike, treadmill and breathing masks where lactate thresholds and lung capacity can be measured.
This chilly March afternoon is Chamley-Watson's second day at the centre, part of his introduction to Red Bull's High Performance Program. He has conducted a battery of physical exams, neurological assessments and an extensive blood test that tracked more than 200 nutritional biomarkers for a range of medical conditions. Now, he is warming up for the final test. Opposite the dummy a film crew is setting up a high-speed Phantom camera. "The tests have been surreal," Chamley-Watson says. "There's no one in the fencing world doing this kind of stuff. I want to come back for a week. I'll come out looking like the Terminator."
Chamley-Watson spends the next few hours relentlessly attacking the dummy with his foil: from the back; from the front; with mask; without mask; using different types of strike; and attacking angles. As he watches slow-motion replays of his movements, he begins to notice aspects of his movements that he has never seen before - how his eyes focus on his target when he attacks, and how he tends to strike the dummy only after his front foot makes contact with the ground. "It's supposed to be strike, then foot," says Tyler Jewell, a Red Bull high-performance consultant. "Miles realised that he was telegraphing his movements. He started thinking about his technique right there and then."
Towards the end of the session, Chamley-Watson executes a beautiful balletic movement. He taps the dummy twice with his foil, then lifts his left arm, swivels slightly and strikes the target from behind his back. A huddle forms around the camera to watch the replay. Slow motion, particularly at a speed of a 1,200 frames per second, makes the movement even more elegant. A handful of people cheer with delight. "That's your Magic Mike shot right there, dude," Jewell says.
Red Bull's inextricable association with sports can be traced back to its founder, Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz. It was in 1982, during a sales trip to Thailand, that Mateschitz, then a marketing director for German cosmetics company Blendax (now part of Procter & Gamble), first tried a local tonic called Krating Daeng, which helped to alleviate his jet lag. The drink contained water, cane sugar, caffeine, B vitamins, inositol and taurine, an amino acid. Its logo depicted two red bulls charging head to head against a backdrop of the Sun. In Thai, "Daeng" means red; and "Krating" means gaur, a type of bull native to Thailand.
At the time, Krating Daeng was a favourite of factory workers and truck drivers who had to endure long night shifts. It was also a ubiquitous sponsor of Thai-boxing matches. The energy drink, which launched in 1976, had made its inventor, former antibiotics sales- man Chaleo Yoovidhya, a billionaire.
Mateschitz proposed to Yoovidhya setting up an independent company that would expand the energy drink into international markets. In 1984, he founded Red Bull GmbH in Fuschl am See, Austria. Mateschitz spent the next three years pondering the company's strategy and tweaking the original flavour to better suit western tastes before launching the drink in Austria.
But given Mateschitz's proclivity for action sports, perhaps Red Bull's early marketing alliance with sports was inevitable. The Austrian businessman was a dilettante athlete who spent his holidays mountain biking, windsurfing and snowboarding with some of Austria's top athletes. In 1989, he convinced Gerhard Berger, the Austrian Formula 1 driver teamed with Nigel Mansell at Ferrari, to became the first athlete to be sponsored by Red Bull. Today, Red Bull owns two Formula 1 teams, football teams in Salzburg, Leipzig, São Paulo and New York, and sponsors more than 750 competitors in over 150 sports, including triathletes, ultra- marathon runners and skateboarders.
Not all US-based Red Bull athletes participate in the High Performance Program. Those who do, such as Chamley-Watson, are part of one of the world's most sophisticated and experimental training programmes, whose partners include institutions such Cirque du Soleil, Intel, elements of the US Department of Defense and a vast network of universities and scientists. "We have all this talent and from the start we made a decision to learn as much from them as we could, to test them and understand their mastery," says Andy Walshe, Red Bull's director of high performance. "We started collecting data without knowing what we were going to do with it. Blood work, brain scans, psychometric questionnaires… It's not big data, it's complex data and we're just focusing on collecting as diverse a range as possible."
Walshe, who's Australian and has a PhD in human movement studies, started the programme in 2007. When he arrived he already had a reputation as an innovator, earned after nine years as the director of high performance for the US Ski Team, during one of the most successful periods in its history. "When I arrived we were seventh in the world rankings," Walshe says. "When I left we were competing for first. We started with just me and another guy and built up a full staff of performance scientists and coaches. At Red Bull, I had to go through the same process at the start. There was nothing, just me in an office with a few athlete marketing managers. I thought to myself, 'Fuck, did I just give up the best job in high performance for this?'"
Breath-Hold Camp: The first Breath-Hold Camps were designed to teach surfers how to sustain their breath for an average of four minutes. When Red Bull's coaches discovered that athletes were also using these techniques to manage stress levels and break psychological barriers, they expanded the camps to include skiers, snowboarders and other action athletes. Breath-hold exercises are now part of the Performing Under Pressure Camps.
Project Acheron: Snow: Named after the river that borders Hell in Dante's Inferno, the first Acheron took athletes led by former US Navy SEALs on a tour across Patagonia. The second took four female athletes to the Australian outback for extreme hiking, kayaking and freediving.
Project Stratos: On October 14, 2012, daredevil Felix Baumgartner freedived for 50 seconds when he jumped to Earth from an altitude of 39km. Trained by Andy Walshe, the 43-year-old became the first person to break the speed of sound unassisted.
Performing under pressure: The first PuP camp was in October 2015. Its goal: to push the limits of the 12 participants and improve their ability to deal with high-pressure situations. Activities included mindfulness classes, breath-hold training and speed racing.
But Red Bull had something that Walshe wanted: a different type of athlete. Surfers, skateboarders and many other athletes who had never had coaches or support staff and yet were the best in the world in what they did. This intrigued Walshe. One afternoon shortly after he joined Red Bull, he took a stroll down to Venice Beach and sat down at the skate park to watch the skateboarders. "They were trying to jump and ollie down a huge set of stairs and they were just crashing, crashing, crashing," Walshe recalls. "The crowd was cheering. The bigger the crash, the louder the cheers." Walshe hadn't seen this amount of failure in sports in years. These kids weren't just failing, they were celebrating the failure. It reawakened a concept that Walshe knew about from college called discovery learning. "Say you teach the forward roll," he says. "You can give specific instructions. Or you can set up an environment like a playroom with mats and let people play. You generate cues that lead to the idea of what you want them to do, but you don't teach them directly. The environment reinforces the right behaviour and they self-discover the extent of the lessons. In high- performance teams, we'd lost that."
Walshe embraced failure as one of the principles underpinning a performance programme with the clear mandate of supporting the athletes in whatever they wanted to achieve. One of his first projects involved BMX riders Mikey Day and Jill Kintner. "They wanted to get ready for the Olympics," Walshe recalls. "I'd never worked with BMX but I was comfortable with Olympic programmes." At Beijing 2008, Day and Kintner won silver and bronze.
The Red Bull High Performance team launched training camps for snow and surf and began accruing successes with projects such as motorbike stunt rider Robbie Maddison's New Year's Eve 2008 jump to the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Las Vegas in front of 50,000 people. "It took about six months to get that right," Walshe says. "We built a platform and stepped it up ten feet at a time. He had a foam pit - we allowed him to fail. The practice was centred on progression and failure."
In autumn 2010, Richard Ingelhoffer popped into Andy Walshe's office. Ingelhoffer was the personal manager of Austrian stuntman Felix Baumgartner. He was looking for a stationary bike and someone had told him that Walshe would be able to help. Behind Walshe's desk, Ingelhoffer noticed posters depicting the projects Walshe had been running. "What the hell is all that stuff?" Ingelhoffer asked. Walshe told him about High Performance. Within a week, he was on a plane to Austria to meet Baumgartner.
Baumgartner was involved in a separate Red Bull project called Stratos, whose mission was to carry him to an altitude of 39km, from where he would jump back to Earth. If successful, Baumgartner would break the record for the highest-ever free fall and become the first freediver to break the sound barrier. His team included aerospace engineer Art Thompson, who had worked on projects such as the B-2 stealth bomber, and former US Air Force captain Joe Kittinger, who broke the then sky-diving altitude record in 1960 when he jumped from a height of 30.5km. Unlike Baumgartner's previous undertakings, Project Stratos wasn't a stunt. It was a bona fide test-flight programme.
That this test flight happened to be run by an energy-drink company partially explains the problems that Walshe encountered when he joined Stratos. By then, the project was behind schedule, Thompson had been fired and rehired, and Baumgartner had developed a phobia of the pressure suit so severe that, shortly before the first test in 2010, he had called Thompson, in tears, to inform him that he was returning to Austria. Baumgartner also asked Thompson what the Air Force did to help pilots afflicted by this sort of mental block. They get rid of him and bring in the next guy, Thompson replied.
Baumgartner remained, and Red Bull brought in Walshe and his team to help him. "Felix had gone home and the programme was shelved," Walshe recalls. "The environment was getting tough. Confidence was lost and people were asking when or if this was actually going to happen."
For two weeks, Walshe, his team and a psychologist called Mike Gervais worked with Baumgartner to help him face his fear of the pressure suit, slowly working up to the point where he was comfortable in it for more than six hours inside a depressurised capsule. "We said to him, imagine yourself in 40 years telling this story to your grandson and what kind of story you want to tell," Walshe says. Walshe ordered a metal plaque to be made etched with the words "How do you want to be remembered?" and affixed it to Baumgartner's cabinet.
Project Stratos was completed on October 14, 2012, when Baumgartner ascended to an altitude of 39km, sitting in a capsule built by Thompson and lifted by a helium balloon.
"I'm ready to jump," he told mission control. "You were born ready, Felix," was the reply.
Baumgartner rolled the capsule's door open, disconnected his oxygen hose and stood on the step into space. "I'm coming home now," he said.
To Red Bull, Stratos was a project with deadlines that had to be met. To the engineering crew, it was a flight-test programme whose mission was to achieve something that had never been achieved before. And to Baumgartner, a stuntman who'd made a career of operating on his own, the claustrophobic pressure suit had become the symbol for the tug of war between his need for autonomy and his dependency on the crew. "I saw in Stratos what I had seen in the skateboard park," Walshe says. "Flight-test programmes are a series of incremental steps designed to push the equipment and staff to the point of failure, so that you find where the system needs correction. And that is exactly what learning skateboarding tricks is all about. You fail and fail until you figure out what you need to correct then you improve."
Project Stratos gave Walshe the impetus to come up with another programme that would train athletes for the unknown element of extraordinary undertakings. "It's not about breaking them," Walshe says. "That's easy. It was about crafting a learning experience that allowed them into an unknown environment they had to adapt to. We built in elements of military training, doubled down on the science and tried to build a once-in-a-lifetime experience." The result was Project Acheron. Its working title: "How To Toughen The Fuck Up".
That wasn't something that Australian triathlete Jordan Mercer was told when, in April 2014, she received an invitation from the Red Bull High Performance Group to join Project Acheron II. All she knew is that she had been selected along with three other Red Bull female athletes - freestyle mountain skier Michelle Parker, skier Grete Eliassen and Enduro motorbike rider Tarah Gieger - and that they would be accompanied by two former Navy Seals. Mercer, 20 at the time, was the youngest. "I had heard about how gruelling the first Project Acheron had been," Mercer says. "I also knew it had taken place in the snow. I' d never been to the snow so I was pretty excited about that."
Project Acheron II began in Broome, northwest Australia, on September 1, 2014 at 3.30am. "They woke us up and ushered us to a Jeep," Mercer says. "We still had no idea where we were heading." After a short ride, they pulled into Broome International Airport. The athletes realised that they would be jumping out of an aeroplane only when they walked into the airfield and saw a skydiving crew holding parachutes. They flew for a few hours. Mercer felt nervous and uncomfortable, strapped up to the parachute and the skydiver who would be jumping with her.
It was still pitch black outside. "We had been flying for an hour when the Sun rose. It looked incredible," Mercer says. "I had never seen anything like that." Then she noticed that the door of the aircraft was open. Michelle Parker went first. "She just flipped out of the plane and I started screaming," Mercer says. "A shriek like I've never even heard myself make before." Before she knew it she was being pushed out of the aeroplane, into the open sky.
They landed on a mushy patch of thick shrub in the middle of Prince Regent National Park in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia. After landing, they were approached by Leah Umbagai, an Aboriginal woman, who performed an ancient ritual that involves burning plants whose smoke wards off bad spirits. They then started walking in single file into rugged untracked terrain, dotted with boulders and covered in two-metre-high spinifex grass that had to be cleared with a machete. It was 42°C. A few hours into the hike, Mercer hit her lowest point.
"I never enjoyed walking," Mercer says. "It was my worst nightmare - walking with uncomfortable shoes, wet pants and a 25-kilo backpack." For the next four days, they averaged 16km a day. They were sleep deprived, had blisters and had been attacked by ants. "You're so tired you get delirious," Mercer says. "My legs were beyond jelly. I had to lift them when we were climbing."
At the end of the fourth day, they camped on the top of the King Cascade Falls. In the darkness, the group spotted a red light approaching. "I was pretty scared," Mercer says. "We were so exhausted that I didn't react. So I'm eating a chocolate bar and watching my life flash before my eyes."
The approaching menace turned out to be Walshe. The next day, the group travelled to the top of Mount Waterloo, where they met Leah Umbagai again. "She told us about her people and her land," Mercer says. "The thing I took away from it was that if you respect the land, the land would look after you." They camped atop Mount Waterloo and sailed to Freshwater Cove the next day. There they were given tents, a radio, a stove and a pot and told that they would be sleeping in isolation from the rest of the group.
On day eight, Umbagai performed an exit smoking ceremony. The group headed north. "I thought it was over," Mercer says. "But they told us we should rest. I said, 'Are you serious?' Then they told us it wasn't over."
The next day, they performed an exercise which consisted of holding their breath, pulling themselves down a rope to the sea bed 22 metres below and returning to the surface. Mercer was in her element. She dived down the line, took out her GoPro and started walking on the ocean floor. She was calm. But she felt a very strong urge to breathe. "It sounds silly, but I forgot that I was underwater," Mercer says. Then she did the number-one thing she wasn't supposed to do. She panicked.
Red Bull first included breath-hold exercises as part of a training camp with Ian Walsh called Surf Survival. A few years ago, Walsh could, at best, hold his breath for about 40 seconds, an expected duration for someone who was regularly wiped out by ten-metre waves. At his request, Andy Walshe contacted Kirk Krack, the head of Performance Freediving International, a Hawaii-based school which teaches freediving and breath-holding techniques. "The Navy had developed programmes for breath hold under stressful circumstances like helicopter crashes in the ocean," Walshe says. "We adapted elements of both."
In October 2010, Walsh, Walshe and a few surfers flew to Hawaii's Big Island for Red Bull's first breath-hold camp. For four days, Krack taught them the theory of breathing techniques and the psychology of water survival. They then practised static breath holds in a swimming pool, where they learned how to control and lower their heart rate to preserve oxygen. To simulate being pounded by waves and the subsequent feeling of disorientation, the surfers were thrown around at the bottom of the pool while being blasted with gas from an air tank shooting in their faces.
"We also threw Ian [Walsh] off a cliff into the ocean," Walshe says. "He would swim back up and, as he got to the surface, I would pull him back down to get that second hold-down effect." By the end of the course, Walsh was able to deep-dive 36 metres and hold his breath for more than four minutes. "Although we were doing this for Ian's safety, we started to realise the power of what we were teaching," Walshe says. "Breath holding is actually a tool to break into perceived mental limitations, the difference between perceived and actual ability and the personal outcome of internal dialogue and self-doubt."
Soon, Red Bull started extending its breath-hold camps in Hawaii to other athletes. "We took four snow athletes there," Matt Christensen, Red Bull's air awareness coach, says. "One of the girls was from Montana and this was the second time she'd been to the sea. He had to start with the very basics: 'OK, so this is a diving mask…' Kirk had to change his whole course because the girls had no experience." In 2014, they organised a second camp with ten athletes, including Jordan Mercer.
When it came to the final dive, Mercer went down to the bottom with motorsports legend Travis Pastrana. "They had Red Bull cans with them and cheered, and when he was ready to go up, she stayed down there having fun," Christensen says. "She's like a little fish. Badass."
Walshe's role during the breath-hold exercise at Project Acheron was to watch over the athletes. He recalls the moment Mercer emerged from the sea. She was at first euphoric, then her lips went blue and her head rolled back. She blacked out. Grete Eliassen, who was standing nearby, held Mercer's head, removed her mask and tapped her cheeks. Within seconds she had regained consciousness. "The fact she got to that limit was great," Walshe says. "Pay attention to your environment. Continuously check in on yourself. Don't get cocky."
During the 2014 breath-hold camp, Walshe began entertaining the idea of organising another camp that would challenge the participants on a purely psychological level. "If we keep just pushing athletes to their physical limits the result is just bigger waves and higher cliffs," Walshe says. "At some point, someone would get killed." To Walshe, the breath-holding exercise helped athletes to overcome mental limitations without a demanding physical component, so he asked his team to start brainstorming similar ideas.
"We didn't have much time," Matt Christensen recalls. "You have to be creative and sometimes we have crazy ideas like throwing people into the ocean from a helicopter to see how they respond. Of course, there's no way that we're allowed to do that. But imagine if we just did it anyway, then you beg for forgiveness. We might be out of a job but wouldn't that be cool."
The first Performing Under Pressure camp took place in October 2015 for six days. The group of 12 included an e-gamer and some entrepreneurs. The camp included breath-hold exercises, speed racing, bomb disposal, improv and crawling blindfolded through the interior of a dark wooden box containing pythons. "They came out of those four days with the equivalent of 40 years' life experience," says a Navy Seal psychologist who collaborated with Red Bull. "It was transformational."
Preparing for the unknown was a lesson learned the hard way at Project Stratos. In Project Acheron, it was a feature by design whose effects were later substantiated by evidence.
"With the University of San Diego, we measured fMRI pre and post on the athletes," Walshe says. "In many cases, they'd changed their brains to high levels of resilience and adaptability. There are structural changes that accompanied the experience." The camp divested the challenge of the unknown from its physical manifestation, making it a mostly psychological experience that could be undertaken not only by athletes but performers, musicians and entrepreneurs.
"We learned that the principles we use for an athlete are applicable if you're an entrepreneur, a parent or a scientist," Walshe says. "That's what's behind the idea of hacking talent. I would like to get to a point where we apply the same amount of energy and resources we apply, say, to the world's top football team to the individuals tackling social problems or scientists trying to cure cancer. That's what drives us."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
