PODCAST - The Best Part of My Bachelor Party Wasn’t Drinking
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[00:00:00] Welcome to The Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host, Johnny Havie, an ultra runner, endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone 100K ultra, I proved them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned, from breathing techniques to mindset shifts, to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals despite limitations, let's get started.
When people hear a bachelor party, they typically think alcohol, bar crawls, clubs, and overall chaos. Basically doing something stupid before settling down and getting married. Well, today on the show, I [00:01:00] invite you to look at your bachelor party and your boys' trips, your time with the boys, with the guys, as an opportunity for something different.
I have always been looking forward to creating an unforgettable weekend with my best friends at my bachelor party. Well, even though drinking was a part of the weekend, my best friends and I were able to create an amazing weekend that everyone's talking about and wants to do again with the focus on the following five things.
Not strip clubs, not alcohol, and not getting crazy. And the first was building a weekend around self-care. This Was our number one focus before we even planned anything else. And it started with selecting the location. Instead of looking at a place to go bar crawling, or a place where we can go out and eat at a fancy restaurant, get drunk, and, uh, [00:02:00] go out on the town, we looked at, what is a location with built-in self-care?
And this is why we selected Glenwood Springs. Glenwood Springs, Colorado has it in the name, springs, specifically hot springs. And hot springs, traditionally, a very restorative and relaxing way to spend you and my time. So this was number one, is we decided for our three-day bachelor party weekend to go to Glenwood Springs, and to specifically go to one of three hot springs there called Iron Mountain Hot Springs.
And at Iron Mountain, they have the following combination of things for self-care. Number one, hot springs. Obviously, it's in the name. Number two, cold plunge, which if you've been following my channel for a while and listening to my podcast, you'll know that cold exposure has been extremely powerful for [00:03:00] me in my athletic endeavors, and in giving me energy to show up at my best every single day.
And the last thing is saunas. Now, I love saunas. I don't know as much about saunas as a couple of my friends who also joined on this little adventure, but this was the foundational piece of the entire weekend. We knew that we were gonna spend most of the day on Friday at the hot springs. And out of the 10 of us that were there, more than half had never cold plunged before.
So this was the first time that a lot of my friends had experienced these different things. In addition, there were also a couple of my friends who had never used saunas before. And the great thing about Iron Mountain Hot Springs is they had five different types of saunas. So even my friends and myself who have experienced saunas before, we learned the differences between infrared saunas, dry heat saunas, fragrance-infused saunas, a steam room [00:04:00] infused with lavender, and even a salt lamp sauna.
We also partook in different temperature cold plunges and 36- different springs with different minerals, from man-made springs to natural springs. Once the weekend was over and we were recounting the weekend, the consensus was that the hot springs piece was the best piece. Now, we made sure to include a couple of other things to really stick with the self-care center of this bachelor party, and that included a Airbnb with five bedrooms and six bathrooms.
Really important when you're talking about having a comfortable experience, a comfortable place for everyone to lounge around and enjoy. We also made sure that everyone had their own bed. So even though people were sharing bedrooms, no one had to feel like they needed to share beds. We also had [00:05:00] a hot tub at our place, and we were on .6 acres of land with an unforgettable mountain view View.
This was the backdrop of my bachelor party. Number two, we knew that having a group of 10 people was gonna make the food part of all this complicated, if we made it complicated. Which is why what we did instead, was we made sure to bring up enough food, most of it being healthy, but yes, we brought up some bacon, some bagels, some things to add some flair.
But the cool thing about the Airbnb is it had two kitchens, and the main kitchen was massive, so we had plenty of room to cook all but four of our meals. And those four meals we brought in. We had delivered, and we ate healthy food at the hot springs. But food was extremely important, and people at the end of the trip were like, "Wow, you [00:06:00] hit the food on the head."
I was eating yogurt and berries for breakfast. We were cooking massive amounts of scrambled eggs for people to enjoy. We had smoked salmon. We grilled the first night, and we cooked everything from salmon burgers, to regular burgers, to brats, to vegetarian burgers, so that people had leftovers to eat throughout the weekend.
There was always food available for everyone to eat. Number three, games. And this is another reason why we picked the Airbnb that we did. 'Cause we wanted a place that felt extremely relaxing, that was open, and was a place that we could spend a lot of time at over the weekend, and still get the views of where we were in the mountains, still have the access to places like the hot springs that we wanted to go to, have the access to the food places that we wanted to bring in to the Airbnb.
But when we're looking at games, I love games. While self-care was the foundation, games is what we spent most of our time doing. From [00:07:00] playing a cornhole tournament with randomized partners so that everyone could get to know people that they didn't, to playing tons of different board games, ranging from Dominion, to King of Tokyo, to Heroes of Arcadia and beyond, to having a full-on five-hour D&D campaign, Lord of the Rings themed.
This was another one of the foundational pieces of the weekend that people are talking about today. Now, we really only had four things scheduled for the weekend. Grilling and yard games on Thursday night, hot springs on Friday, D&D on Saturday, and the last thing I'll talk about next. But the other thing we did was create opportunity for other things to happen, and that brings me to the fourth thing, sports.
I knew that the World Cup was going on and kicking off the weekend of my bachelor party. I knew that the [00:08:00] NBA finals were going on during the weekend of my bachelor party. I didn't plan time for us to see it, but I did make sure that there was time in our schedule, and plenty of it, for us to have time to do things like this if everyone felt inclined.
Well Two really cool things happened during the bachelor party because we created the opportunity for them to occur. The first one was the USA men's soccer team had their debut game during the bachelor party, and they won four to one, the best game that any of us had ever seen the US play in a World Cup.
The other thing that happened, we did not plan on sitting down and watching this, but when the game came on, for 90 to 100 minutes, this is all we did, was watch the game and hang out with each other. The other thing that happened, the Knicks won the NBA finals four games to one during the bachelor party as well.
This [00:09:00] was extremely important, and we didn't even have it scheduled into the weekend. And lastly, we planned exercise, and specifically, on Saturday morning before we played D&D, we planned a one to two-mile hike. This was important because there were different fitness levels. More importantly, there were different levels of excitement on doing a one to two-mile hike on a boys' weekend.
This isn't something typical for a bachelor party. Well, one of my friends said that while he has done hikes during bachelor parties before, this was the first time he'd ever done a hike where everyone showed up and did the hike together. This was one of the other highlights of the bachelor party, because it got us out.
We were in the outdoors. We got to do something to bond together, and it just really encompasses who I am as a person. So getting everyone together to exercise was extremely important to me during my bachelor party. Now [00:10:00] remember, no matter if you're throwing a bachelor party for your best friend getting married, or you're having your best friend or friends throw a bachelor party for you, or you're just planning a boys' weekend, the most important part of the entire weekend is being together with your friends.
You don't need alcohol. You don't need all of these crazy things that create chaos. What you need, something that brings you and your friends together, and something that nourishes your soul and your friendships. This is what we created during my bachelor party, and what I wanna create going forward with my friends when we do our yearly boys trips.
Now, if you wanna focus even deeper on your health and have a guide that you can use when building your own self-care focused bachelor party, I call it my Three Pillars of Healthy Living guide, and it is linked in the show notes and in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. Or you can go to www.athletewithasthma.com/healthy-living-guide to grab your copy today.
I'll see you in the next [00:11:00] episode.
Thanks for tuning in to The Athlete With Asthma show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection, it's about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals. And if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible
