When Life Flips Your Canoe: Lessons Learned When We Got Our Ass Kicked Training for the MR340

Send us Fan Mail Two hours into what should’ve been a normal MR340 training paddle on the Missouri River, our canoe flipped and everything got real fast: cold water, whitecaps, drifting gear, and a current that wouldn’t let us “just kick to shore.” I’m Sigfre J Teagues, and I’m walking you through what happened with my buddy Joe, moment by moment, because the details are where the real lessons live. When you’re training for the Missouri River 340, it’s easy to obsess over cadence, nutrition, technique, and grit. Then the river hands you a test you didn’t schedule. We talk about how wind plus current changes the entire equation, why overconfidence turns into cut corners, and how incomplete preparation shows up when chaos hits. You’ll hear the hardest call I had to make: letting thousands of dollars of canoe and equipment float away so I could stay in position to help my partner. “People over possessions” sounds like a slogan until you’re forced to prove it. After we get out, we debrief what we got wrong, what we got right, and why humility and community matter as much as toughness. If you’re into endurance racing, river safety, resilience, or mindset training for hard things, this one lands.

You can listen to When Life Flips Your Canoe: Lessons Learned When We Got Our Ass Kicked Training for the MR340 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

When Life Flips Your Canoe: Lessons Learned When We Got Our Ass Kicked Training for the MR340 is an episode from Do Hard Things by Siegfried Jay Tiegs and Brian Larson .

This episode is 36:33 long.

This episode was published on Apr 29, 2026.

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