We Are Superman Bill Stahl

After Nick Jonsson, a Swedish-born, Southeast Asian businessman, found the mounting stresses of his job and climbing the corporate ladder untenable, he began drinking heavily, abandoned his fitness regimen, and put on a ton of weight, leading to him losing his job, as well as his wife and son. After getting help to control his alcoholism, Nick, who has now been sober for six years, recognized that one of the primary reasons business leaders were failing was having no one available to open up ...

On a bike ride on an open road in New Jersey in 2011, Ron Gold was struck head-on by an SUV whose driver had fallen asleep behind the wheel even though it was the middle of the day. He barely survived, suffering critical injuries, and was left a paraplegic. It was bad enough the driver was totally unapologetic about causing this tragic event. Ron spent many months in rehab, not to mention wrestling with feelings of despair and hopelessness. After he finally got back home, one thing he learned...

The We Are Superman Podcast has hit 300 episodes... we think. But thanks to David's impetus, inspirational WASP guests have touched millions of listeners around the world. Or at least thousands. After a quick historical recap, I'm honored to bring you my recounting of my truly amazing trip to Chile and climbing peaks in the Andes as high as almost 20,000 feet in the driest and one of the most remote spots on Earth, the Atacama Desert. Our trip included many impressive elite athletes, su...

Imagine you are an 18-year-old and you have worked your entire life and gotten to the cusp of achieving your dream of playing hockey on the Division 1 collegiate level and then the NHL, and suddenly you are told that your dream is now kaput due to a health issue. That was the reality faced by David Carle, a star defenseman from Anchorage, Alaska following a physical he received at the NHL combine for top prospects just prior to the 2008 draft. Instead of hearing his name picked in the early r...

This past late winter I met a truly impressive group of athletes on a trip to the rugged and beautiful, high-elevation Atacama Desert of Chile. One of these is Kat Edwards of Richmond, Va. A relative newcomer to ultrarunning at 24 years old, and having never experienced performing at altitude, Kat crushed climbing peaks of 16,000 and 18,000 feet before tackling her first FKT attempt, on nearly 20,000-foot Nevado San Francisco on the border between Chile and Argentina. This same insanely diffi...

This is a very special and personal episode for me. I want to introduce you to Nate Zayonc, a young man whom I am very proud of. His life was not in the most positive place a bit more than a year ago, but now he is thriving as a private in the U.S. Army. Nate was a top distance runner on the cross country and track teams at Bear Creek H.S. where I helped coach him. His desire was to run in college and then professionally. However, his life at home was difficult, and in fact he did receive a p...