Johnny Ward: traversing the world's mountains and poles - one step at a time
Johnny Ward at the summit of Denali: "it was freezing. I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes for months. My mate went blind and we had to evacuate the mountain."
Johnny Ward has rowed 3,200 miles across the Atlantic in a single boat, climbed Kilimanjaro on a diet of beer and crackers, and carried around a bag of his own poo for days.
The Galway-born 39-year-old has broken more bones than he cares to remember. He’s slipped two discs, smashed his tibia-fibula, and shattered his kneecap in a motorbike crash in Thailand.
Just six months ago, the ligament was ripped off his shoulder bone, causing excruciating pain — but none of these injuries were enough to put a pause to his extreme adventuring.
In 2017, Johnny became the first Irish person to visit every country in the world.
“It took me 11 years. It was basically my whole life from 24 to 35 and when I finished, I got a bit depressed. I thought was going to feel proud of myself — like I’d fulfilled my goal — and be able to chill afterward but no.”
What he was experiencing is not unusual and many adventurers report feeling depleted and low after the fact.
“It’s pretty common when people do a decade-long goal. I was kind of naive going ínto it.”
It wasn’t long before Johnny was planning the next expedition much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife (after 10 years together, his friends are incredulous how she tolerates him being away for such prolonged periods of time) and he set his sights on becoming the first person to ever visit every country, reach the North and South Poles and scale the seven highest summits in the world - known as the ultimate explorers' grand-slam.
So far, he’s already conquered Aconcagua, the Carstensz Pyramid, Denali, Elbrus, and Kilimanjaro. Everest is next, followed by Mount Vinson in Antarctica if he’s successful there. While he says that he has “the freedom to do big things,” he also acknowledges that there’s an element of replacing one “big thing” with the next.
Having fled his home with his mum and sister when he was younger, that residual fear still seems to weigh heavily on his choices. Is he running away from something, I wonder?
“Yeah, of course. It’s true. It’s punishing yourself. It’s better to suffer acutely for short periods of time so you can be proud of yourself for the rest of your life.”
That suffering has taken its toll on Johnny’s body but his mind remains resilient and committed to his goals. “When I climbed Denali in Alaska, it was freezing. I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes for months. My mate went blind and we had to evacuate the mountain.
“There was an Australian guy who was one day ahead of us and he fell down a crevasse and died. He was a beast, that guy, a far better climber than I am. That was a bit of a reality check.”
Johnny got married recently but his training schedule means he is often away from his wife, Jajaa.
“It’s quite a selfish mentality. Basically, you just have to drop everything to do it.”
So, what’s the training like for an extreme adventurer like him? You need to carry 25kg in your bag and on a sled — and then there’s the acclimatisation to the altitude.
“I’m sleeping in this altitude tent with my missus beside me. It’s the size of six shoe boxes. I bought this cheap Chinese tent and I’d been sleeping in it for two weeks and it wasn’t working. I just got a new tent two weeks ago and I’ve had to crank it up to the maximum altitude — 7,000 metres — and I can hardly breathe. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’ll wake up in the foetal position gasping for air.”
What about basic things like going to the toilet and washing yourself?
“You’re stressed and knackered and you have to carry a bag of your shit up and down with you. There are toilets at base camp but that’s it. I’ve gone without a shower for six weeks.”
As far as physical fitness, Johnny has always been quite athletic but he does a lot of long-distance running, (up to 400k) HIIT and weight training in the gym.
“I’ve always been into sports my whole life.” This is all starting to sound a bit masochistic to me. Is 400 kilometres of cardio as gruelling as it sounds? Yes, actually.
“It was brutal. It’s weird. You hate yourself for every second of it. And then when you finish, you’re really proud of yourself.”
Building your endurance levels and your cardiovascular fitness is imperative, he says, but perhaps even more important is mindset.
“A lot of mountaineers have far more skills than I have but I can suffer better with my life experience.”
Johnny grew up with a single-mother family in Galway with his sister, never having enough money to travel abroad.
“I feel like it’s my tough upbringing [that prepared me for endurance]. We were on welfare until I was about 14 or 15.” The now multi-millionaire studied international economics which stood to him when he created his travel blog One Step 4Ward. “As soon as I could as soon as I finished uni at 22, I just wanted to try to work out how to make money from the internet so I would never have to worry about having money for holidays or anything like that.”
I presume he’s not much of a box-set kind of guy, then?
“You’re an idiot if you don’t take the opportunities to do what you can do with all that freedom? Sit around and watch Netflix?”
Home is in the North of Thailand in a city called Chiang Mai where himself and his wife have recently built a new house.
So, what’s the most important advice he would give to a budding adventurer?
“You’ve got to make sure your hamstrings, your quads and your ass are ready for 18-hour days on the mountain.” Ward has been vegetarian for over 10 years. He groans when I ask if he has to bank calories.
“Apart from boozing with the boys, I eat really healthily. I don’t study my nutrition. I don’t track my calories — ‘paralysis by analysis’. If you start tracking your macros, that changes your performance by 1%. Shutting up, putting your sneakers on and going on run for 30k will improve way more.”
Johnny is about to take on Everest but he’s not afraid of storms, frostbite, injury, or death. What he is afraid of is being evacuated before he can reach the top.
“It’s the fear of failure that fuels me more than the glory of success,” he says.
On his world travels, he has come across a lot of privately educated men on the mountains doing the “gap year” type thing, often at their parents’ expense. The difference between them and us? Our belief system, he says, which is “self-deprecating and humble”.
“All the posh English boys are trying to make it sound like they’re the only people who can do it.” While Johnny is certainly influential and organises sell-out trips with groups of people, he loathes the whole influencer culture. “There’s no sincerity. Everyone’s just trying to sell you something. The only guy I follow religiously is David Goggins.”
Johnny sees himself as the poor man’s explorer but a recent bout of frostbite where his fingers turned completely blue from wearing cheap gloves made him realise he needs to invest a bit more in his gear: “I’ve made quite a lot of money over the years online but still so fearful of being poor again. So, I bought I’ve always got the shittiest gear.”
Johnny has always been very open about his finances.
He taught English as a foreign language in Thailand, enrolled in several medical research trials, and eventually invested in several properties which proved to be quite lucrative.
Don’t let finances hold you back, he says. “You don’t need your parents to give you €30,000 to live a good life.”
Johnny is very close with his mother who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 12 years ago.
He travels with her often and encouraged her to do a skydive at 65 to raise money for the disease.
Will he make it to the top of Everest, the highest mountain peak in the world? We’ll have to wait a few weeks to find out.
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