Jason Coffrin: A Lifetime of Fishing Adventures and Chasing Dreams

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 720 with Jason Coffrin, owner of Mr. Trigger Sport Fishing and Cochran Jewelers, on running the Moab 240 ultramarathon, elk hunting, and his years running charter boats in Costa Rica and Panama.

Jason Coffrin: I'm Jason Coffrin, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, Jason. What's up, man? How are you?

Jason Coffrin: I'm good. How about yourself?

Tom Rowland: Doing great. I've been looking forward to connecting with you, and I'm going to start off by reading this post from a couple of days ago. This will set the tone of why I wanted to talk to you, and why I think we're going to have a really awesome podcast here. In the last twenty years, I've managed some pretty cool things. I have inshore and offshore world records in fishing, unofficial. I've been all over the world chasing the biggest sea monsters imaginable. Lived in an aluminum boat shed for four years at a hundred and twenty degrees in the day because I had no money for a home. Once I floated for three days off Costa Rica until me and my first mate woke up and decided this was bullshit and we could fix anything, and got our asses home. I've been in a bar in Central America when drug lords had a meeting that turned into a shootout, and I was almost hit with stray bullets. When my truck broke down in Costa Rica, I wasn't allowed to use the bait cooler at the marina or my bait would just be stolen. So I walked with a fifty-to-fifty-five-pound cooler two miles down the beach after every charter, with it on my shoulder, and walked home with my canine and my knife in hand so I wasn't robbed in the dark on the way home. I was stranded on a boat on a sandbar once, twenty miles up a river in Panama, when a storm changed the opening to the sea. Fast forward, I now drive seven thousand miles a year to Oregon from Florida just to pursue my dream as a bowhunter, and I've been unsuccessful, but still going. I ran the Moab two-forty race across Moab, Utah, two hundred and forty miles in four days, because I felt it would make life easier. It worked, by the way. I am now in the best shape of my life, and I need to start taking business as seriously as my endeavors. I never chase the dollar, always a dream with a story at the end. I am now chasing the dollar as I own and operate Cochran Jewelers and Mr. Trigger Sport Fishing, to help me with a new endeavor to help stop poachers in a far-off place in South Africa with my canine. This is the beginning of that journey, and I'm finally going to tell that story. Wow. Holy cow. You've got a lot of stuff going on, and you've done a lot of crazy things, man. How did all that happen?

Jason Coffrin: I say I'm an entrepreneur that doesn't make any money.

Tom Rowland: Well, there are a lot of those out there.

Jason Coffrin: There is.

Tom Rowland: So what about that crazy ride? How did that get started?

Getting Started with Charters in Costa Rica

Jason Coffrin: The Costa Rica thing was probably, I was trying to write my dates down last night. In 2004, a buddy of mine that owned a restaurant here moved his family to Costa Rica, to Flamingo, which is about three hours south of the Nicaraguan border. They had me come down in 2005 because they started a little charter business. They had, like, a twenty-foot or twenty-seven-foot inboard gasoline boat, I don't remember exactly. So they called me up, and you know how people that don't fish think a fisherman can just do everything. So I woke up one day, and they'd sent me an email about everything they wanted me to do, and I'd never been out of the country. I was like, yeah, I'm going. Then they said, oh, by the way, you have a billfish charter about a week after you get here. And I was like, I've seen one sailfish in the Gulf, so let's go ahead and do this.

That first time down was a disaster. I did it for about a year, more to help them get the boat and tackle ready than actually moving down there myself. They didn't even know what to buy — if they'd walked into a store it would've been a nightmare. So I did a lot of back and forth, coming back to the States and bringing them supplies to match the boat they had. They didn't have a tower or outriggers, so we really turned it into an inshore business, and that's when I got the unofficial world record roosterfish.

Tom Rowland: Oh, really? Wow.

Jason Coffrin: Yeah. It's unofficial because we didn't bring it in — we didn't have a scale, but it crushed the record. It was six-foot-four, six-foot-five, a hundred and fifty-seven pounds. We had one of those old copper scales that only went up to two hundred. It wasn't official, but it was actually caught by a guy here in Sarasota named Ron Gauthier — I don't know if he still has the TV show, but it was called Ocean Explorer.

Tom Rowland: Oh, yeah, I remember that.

Jason Coffrin: Yeah, he actually caught it. So that was cool to have a record of it, and I've still got pictures.

Tom Rowland: Wow. How do you catch a fish like that? Is a giant roosterfish like that inshore or offshore there?

Jason Coffrin: Inshore is funny there — it's like California. The water just drops off, so we don't have bays like here; it's more like California with the little beaches and mountain cliffs on the side. Fifty yards offshore could be a hundred feet deep, so what's priced as an inshore charter there is really slow-trolling with live bait around structure, kind of like fishing for kingfish, bumping the drift.

Tom Rowland: That's cool. My wife has it in her head that she wants to take the whole family to Costa Rica. I'd love to talk to you about it.

Jason Coffrin: It's a blast. Send me an email or a text before you go and I'll send you a ton of ideas. I was down there for eleven years.

Tom Rowland: Eleven years? You're basically an expatriate down there.

Jason Coffrin: Yeah, I had a car registered down there, a Panamanian captain's license because Costa Rica honors it, and a Costa Rican driver's license. What happened was I went down in 2005, got that first year set up, and was there about ten months. Then it was kind of time — I wasn't prepared to move down there permanently, and my father had just passed in 2003, so it was kind of a get-out-of-town situation, but I knew I needed to come back and help my mom with the family jewelry business. I'd just gotten started fishing some of the IFA Redfish Tour events around then too, and I think that's when I met you guys — that would've been 2006.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I've got an IFA trophy from around then too.

The Injury, the Surgery, and the Wreck

Jason Coffrin: So then I spent eleven years total going back and forth to Costa Rica. When I came home the first stretch, I went back to work at the jewelry store doing repairs, and I realized sitting at a desk — except for tying knots or flies — was not me. About seven months later, I got in a nasty car wreck. Before that though, I'd herniated a disc trying to release a tarpon at a tournament called the PTTS down in the Keys, and that disc ended up fusing to my sciatic nerve. They didn't know that until they went in — the MRI just showed a bulging disc, but once they cut in they had to spend another forty-five minutes freeing it because the nerve had grown into the disc. The pain was insane. The only thing that would relieve it was hanging by my arms, like a gymnast on parallel bars, to take the weight off my spine — I'd literally crawl into the kitchen and hang between two countertops. My surgeon was a friend of mine and didn't want to operate; he sent me to every specialist first, and I'd walk out in more pain every time, because they were pulling on a nerve that was fused to the disc. Eventually he had to do the surgery, and I got real bad on OxyContin during that recovery.

Tom Rowland: I can imagine why. I just went through something similar myself — I fell off a pull-up bar and had a hematoma pushing on my sciatic nerve, and it was this hot, searing pain I'd never felt before. I can believe you got hooked on OxyContin from something like that.

Jason Coffrin: It was awful. In the beginning it's great — you go from the worst pain to just watching TV feeling nothing. But about a week in, your pill doesn't work anymore, so you take one and a half, then two, and there's always more in the jar. It messes with your whole digestive system too. I did that for about five months, and then one day I just went cold turkey.

That was actually right around when the car wreck happened — a week after my back surgery. A buddy wanted to take me out to celebrate that I was off the Oxys, and he was in his new sports car and hit wet grass going around a corner. We went through a fence and a house at about sixty miles an hour. I broke my left hip and dislocated my left shoulder. The only reason I'm here is because I wasn't wearing a seatbelt — I'm not saying don't wear one, obviously, but a board from the fence came through my seat right where I'd have been sitting, and I got thrown clear. It took nine guys at the ER to lift my hip back into place; my skin and ligaments were basically the only things still holding my leg on. My surgeon didn't even believe it was me when the hospital called him.

Tom Rowland: That's unbelievable. What was the recovery like?

Jason Coffrin: Honestly not bad — you can't put a cast on a hip. I'd broken the edges of the socket, and the surgeon said cartilage and scar tissue would form at the ends and basically act like a support to hold it in place, as long as I didn't do anything to break it again. I've done a little jiu-jitsu since, ran the Moab 240, and I still work out — years later it just holds up. My shoulder was similar; it never fully dislocated, but it stretched way further than it should have, so it was a lot of rehab and cupping, and it bounced back fine.

Discovering Running on a Costa Rica Beach

Tom Rowland: So after breaking your hip like that and coming back, how do you start running?

Jason Coffrin: That happened back in Costa Rica. When I cut off the Oxys, I was staying with my mother, and I was basically useless around the house — like the old Holiday Inn commercial with the guy who comes downstairs with a big idea and gets told to get lost. I had this giant board with all my Costa Rica plans written on it, the budget, everything — I was going to buy a boat from Mote Marine Laboratory, a twenty-seven-foot 1988 Morgan, an old tarpon boat that had been donated to them, right here in Sarasota. I'd gotten about eighteen thousand dollars from the accident insurance, the boat was fourteen thousand, so I had four thousand left for electronics and gear. My mom just said, okay. A month later, there's Jason out working on the boat overnight, hooking up outriggers, and she realized I was actually going. I'd go to the store, work a half day fixing jewelry, come home, and work on the boat until I couldn't keep my eyes open. I did that for another year and shipped the boat down to Costa Rica in a container in 2008; I was fishing there by 2009.

The outriggers folded down small enough that the part that bolts to the boat stayed on, and I carried the rest down myself in surfboard bags wrapped in bubble tape — customs looked at me like I was smuggling aluminum. I got it going again working with a restaurant called Marisol, which means "the sun and the sea" in Spanish. They'd already closed their own fishing charter business by then, so I put some brochures in the restaurant, and everybody down there just kind of helps everybody else out — American, Costa Rican, whatever. I jumped back in and got the business going.

That's about when I actually started running, too. I was down there about eleven years total, and maybe halfway through — I was twenty-five in 2005 — I was having fun, surfing, drinking too much, that kind of thing. I became friends with a lot of surfers and paddleboarders who were all in great shape, and I thought, that's so much more fun than what I'm doing, drinking all night and crawling onto a boat for a charter the next morning. I was living at a hotel called Flamingo Marina's Resort that had its own beach with a spiral staircase down to it, so I started running up and down that staircase. Then I found a piece of rock shaped almost exactly like one of those sleds you use dragging lobsters behind the boat. I started picking it up over my head and throwing it ahead of me, frog-jumping to it in soft sand, then walking out into the water and holding it underwater the way surfers train in Hawaii. My first mate — who was also our night guard on the boat — started noticing I was never around for breakfast because I was always down on the beach, and eventually he started coming down and joining me.

There was a little gym down there we called the monkey gym, and my goal became doing that rock workout in the morning, running a full charter all day, and still making it to the gym at night. People think a charter guy is just hanging out on a boat, but you're in the sun, moving around, talking with people, and there's a mental grind if you're not catching anything. By the time I got home some nights I'd tell myself I wasn't going to the gym — and then finally I went one night, and it was great, and after that I went six days a week, every day I had a charter.

Tom Rowland: I used to run after charters too, sometimes before, but leaving the dock at five-thirty, are you really getting up at three to go running? In the Keys heat it's brutal in the summer. I'd come off the water so hot I'd just take my clothes off and lay on the cold tile floor. When I started running down there, I'd leave my shoes outside, because if I walked in the house and hit the AC, I wasn't coming back out. Every time I'd feel like I had no energy for it, but a mile or two in you feel great again — like more effort somehow equals more energy.

Jason Coffrin: When the wind dies in the Keys —

Tom Rowland: Even the wind — all the runners down there say the wind is our hills, because you're running into a twenty-mile-an-hour wind and somehow you turn around and it's still in your face.

Jason Coffrin: I don't know how it works, but I'm always running against the wind too. I've got a bridge I go over near Siesta Key — I run down the island to a fire station, tap a monument, turn around, and the wind's in my face again the whole way back. I never even changed direction.

Tom Rowland: That thing about more effort equaling more energy is absolutely real. So you were able to do the morning workout, do a full charter, and do the evening gym workout?

Jason Coffrin: That was the whole goal, and I hit it because we went to the boat every day — there's always something to do on a boat, even if it's just polishing an outrigger or sharpening hooks. Anybody who says everything's done on their boat isn't the one running it. My mate would pick me up from the beach in a little zodiac after my workout, we'd have breakfast, and go fish for the day.

Tom Rowland: Just so I'm clear, this is already after the hip injury and the wreck?

Jason Coffrin: Yes — that all happened in between the 2005 trip and going back down in 2008. Were you having any issues with the injury during those rock and stair workouts?

Tom Rowland: That's what I was going to ask you.

Jason Coffrin: The stairs were straight up, wood plank stairs, brutal — it was definitely a walk in the beginning because I wasn't in that kind of shape yet. It went from a walk to skipping steps like a lunge, and then to doing the rock-hop up to the stairs and running up and down. If I had pain back then, Tom, I honestly don't remember it now, so it couldn't have been much — maybe some days where I'd rather just go to the boat instead.

Tom Rowland: That's amazing, given a major injury, major surgery, and then a major reinjury on top of it.

Jason Coffrin: I actually ran into my doctor recently at Publix and told him about the Moab 240, and he just blinked at me, thinking I meant a buddy of mine, not me. He's at Kennedy White Orthopedic here in town, and he's actually going to blow up one of the pictures of me at Moab and hang it in the office — they've had a bunch of professional athletes come through there.

Discovering Ultrarunning

Tom Rowland: So there's a big difference between running down the beach and doing some stairs versus setting your sights on a fifty-miler, a hundred-miler, and a two-forty. I saw on your Instagram you were unsuccessful in the fifty and the hundred, and then successful in the two-forty. Let's talk about that. How do you go from those kinds of workouts to wanting to run that kind of distance?

Jason Coffrin: I moved back to Sarasota around 2017. In 2018, my best friend passed away — he was hit by a car changing his own tire in the middle of the night. He'd had an argument with his girlfriend, told her he was heading back to his own place for the night and they'd talk in the morning, and while he was changing his tire a car hit him. They never found who did it; it's still unsolved. That was a real eye-opener. He'd actually quit his job twice while I was in Costa Rica just to come down and help me — showed up with a suitcase and said he'd heard I needed a hand. He spent about a year with me in 2009, helped me get that thirty-two Blackfin ready and shipped it down to Quepos, Costa Rica, then moved home again while I moved back up to Flamingo. That's the kind of friend you don't find twice — he left his bills, his job, everything, just to help.

In 2018 he needed a career change. He was a boat detailer over at Inman Marine, where they carry Pathfinder, and he was great with his hands, so I sent him to jewelry school. I sent him in August, and he passed away in September, right after he'd started. That was the wake-up call. He was originally from Philadelphia and a diehard sports fan, so to honor him and see his family, I ran the Philadelphia Marathon in 2019. It was a disaster — I'd only started running about three months before that, and everybody told me good luck, hope you finish, and I said I'm finishing, come on. I did finish, but it hailed, thirty-mile-an-hour wind, rain the whole time, forty degrees — this is a guy from Florida. I ran a four-fifty-four. My whole family was at the finish line, I got to hug my mom, and I gave her the shirt off my back — it had my friend's nickname, Wooly, on it; we'd had shirts made that said "Go Willy." We had dinner and I took off.

After that I liked the feeling and wanted to keep it going. Then right after, the pandemic hit. We're a jewelry store, so nobody's thinking about jewelry during a pandemic — we closed for about four weeks when it got bad, and everybody just stayed on finishing existing jobs instead of opening the doors. I was going in about a half day and being home the rest of the time, and I just needed to do something, like somebody taking your boat away. So every day I'd go out the door for a run before work, get back around three, and think, I've got the rest of the day, let's go do it again — and I never stopped.

The Unofficial Fifty and the Forgotten Florida Hundred

Jason Coffrin: People don't realize the fifty-mile run was never actually a race — that was on my own. I was preparing for Moab and had watched a bunch of videos of guys like Cameron Hanes, and a lot of his training was overnight, so I started doing some night runs, nothing like fifty miles at first, but built up to it. I went out to a place called the Celery Field, a park here in Sarasota with a decent hill, a couple hundred feet — it's Florida, so that's about all we've got.

Tom Rowland: I used to run up and down the parking garage in Key West — tallest point in the whole Keys.

Jason Coffrin: I used to run the parking garage at the hospital here until they threw me out — got too busy and they figured I was some weird guy always in the garage at night. Anyway, I wanted to simulate being up all day and all night running, so I did a normal day at work, went to the gym, and instead of going to bed around ten-thirty like usual, I went out to run through the night to about the time I'd normally get up. I ran until about 7 a.m. and got about forty-five of the fifty miles — that's why I say I didn't complete it. I passed out twice; I woke up in a ditch not even knowing where I was, then remembered, oh yeah, this idiot's training. I had zero support — just my car parked on one side of the park with a Yeti cooler and supplies, and a water fountain on the other side, so those were my two rest stops. It was July, so the bugs were brutal — I think I got swarmed by mosquitoes and that's really what got me in the end.

Tom Rowland: I did a ruck run one time from Hawks Cay to Layton and back through Long Key State Park, and I guess they don't spray for mosquitoes there — I got swarmed like you wouldn't believe. If you're sweating enough you can mostly keep them off, but barely.

Jason Coffrin: Barely is right.

Tom Rowland: Between the marathon and that fifty-miler, did you follow any kind of training program, or were you just interested and did it?

Jason Coffrin: Everything I read, I was basing it all around Moab — I wanted to do Moab someday, though I wasn't signed up yet. The biggest thing was changing it up, because everyone's got a training plan for Moab online, but when you talk to the real guys — later on I became friends with Cameron Hanes and that crowd out in Oregon — and when I asked about a training regimen, he just rolled his eyes and said it's just time on your feet. So I'd run the beach barefoot, run the road on lunch breaks, go back to that one hill in boots — anything to make it harder than I thought it needed to be.

The next year, July 2020, I ran my first official hundred-miler, called the Forgotten Florida Hundred, up in Ocala National Forest. I was going for the twenty-four-hour cutoff and got to 75.2 miles. I didn't realize until afterward that I'd actually been in first place for most of the race — I got lost, called the race director, and he told me if I backtracked and cut through a certain section I could keep going, but by then I knew I wasn't making the twenty-four-hour mark. My hamstring was starting to lock up, it was pouring rain and about forty-five degrees, and my mom and my aunt were my crew, sitting there waiting in that weather. I pulled up to them at 75.2 miles and just said, that's it.

Could I have finished? I don't know — I was on hour seventeen at that point with until hour thirty-two to work with, so maybe I could have covered the last twenty-five miles, even walking it, but mentally I was done. I actually wish I hadn't seen my mom and aunt at that stop, because I'd hurt my leg around mile sixty and had told myself, just get to the next rest area, and I did that a couple times, and then once I saw them in the truck and got warm, that was it.

Earlier in the race, around mile forty, I was still in first place, and a woman at an aid station took my pack to refill it and told me, son, you have way too much liquid in here. I didn't listen to her then. I found two other women later who were struggling too, and the three of us decided we'd all get through it together, sharing water and snacks between us, and we did.

Tom Rowland: How much were you paying attention to electrolytes?

Jason Coffrin: Not really, though the aid station staff were good about asking if I had enough — they'd offer gummies, and eventually I discovered Tailwind, a drink mix one of the sponsors made. I'd never used it before, but it sat great with my stomach, and because of how they mixed it I was getting more hydration than I realized while still getting calories.

Tom Rowland: That stuff really works — you can go a long way on it.

Jason Coffrin: I'm a big believer in it now. The only other thing I used was gummy electrolyte chews. And the food at the aid stations was great — burritos, bacon cheeseburgers.

Tom Rowland: What did you actually crave? Sometimes after a big run you just need something with ketchup on it, or pancakes.

Jason Coffrin: Bacon cheeseburgers, every time, loaded with pickles for the salt — a bun for carbs, bacon for protein and fat, the burger for more protein, and the pickles for sodium. I'd smash a couple of those in a reclining chair, and by the time I was done eating it was time to go again.

Tom Rowland: How hard is it to get out of that reclining chair? Did you hallucinate at all?

Jason Coffrin: I slept about three hours total during that whole hundred-mile attempt, and I think I got right to the edge of hallucinating. That race is actually where the mental lesson stuck — five days after dropping out at 75.2 with a "bad" hamstring, I ran to the gym, worked out, and ran home, and realized it hadn't been an injury at all. I was just dehydrated. That reset how I thought about training for everything after.

Signing Up for the Moab 240

Tom Rowland: We're kind of zipping through this, but what I know from my own endeavors is that a setback like that can be really difficult to get over mentally. How were you able to deal with the disappointment of not finishing the hundred, and reset toward the original goal?

Jason Coffrin: This might sound weird, but I actually love failure — for some reason it wakes me up. It's, what did I do wrong, what should I have done differently, and I jump on that right after I fail, because a year from now doesn't help you. I wish I'd run it a certain way, like if you hadn't finished one of those Navy SEAL boot camps you were talking about, you'd have been dying to get on another one — I can tell by your attitude you'd have jumped right back on it. I do that right at the moment of failure. That's what I did at the gym five days after the hundred — I told myself I should be limping if I was actually hurt, and I wasn't, so it had to be dehydration.

Tom Rowland: But even that — when you're training for something almost triple the distance you failed at — if you learn it's a hydration issue, that's a win. You're going to make the trip out to Moab, and now you know something you can control and practice before you get there so it doesn't happen again. A lot of people would see that as a major failure instead of a win.

Jason Coffrin: No, that was a win. Ninety percent of newcomers to anything go out too fast, so at Moab I made sure I stayed in the middle of the pack — I wanted to find the slowest guy out there and let him beat me.

Tom Rowland: I want to get to the Moab part — what's it like stepping up to that starting line, at this iconic race where everybody there deserves to be there, and it's your first one?

Jason Coffrin: It didn't actually hit me at the starting line. I still had butterflies, but it really hit me the night before at gear check-in, where former pros and past winners go through your gear — you need a certain size water bag, and there's a medical exam. I remember thinking, oh god, what if they find out about my hip, I'm going to have to lie about everything. That's when it hit me that I had to actually do this in the morning at 6 a.m.

Tom Rowland: That could be brutal — showing up and being told your water bag's the wrong size, and suddenly doubting whether you even deserve to be there.

Jason Coffrin: I had everything right on my gear, but I had my course map loaded correctly on my phone and wrong on my watch. The guy checking said we've got to fix this before you can check in — I almost said fine, I don't have to run it if the watch is broken, and he just said, get to medical, I'll fix your watch for you. And he did — while I was in the medical tent he fixed it and told me I was good to run.

What actually took the butterflies away that morning was that my mom and aunt were my crew again, and they hadn't downloaded the tracking app. So right at the start I was literally jogging along holding their phone, downloading the app while we went down a hill and around a corner where I'd see them again about five hundred yards later, and I handed the phone back to them like a football handoff and said, I'll see you at mile nineteen. That killed the butterflies — I was too busy trying to get the app working to think about anything else. Going under the big Destination Trail Run overpass at the start, I looked up at it kind of like a boat going under a bridge and thought, here we go, it's time.

Racing the Moab 240

Jason Coffrin: Like I said, I'd learned from the hundred to stay in the middle of the pack and not go out too fast. My nutrition strategy was cheeseburgers loaded with pickles, Tailwind mixed half-and-half so I was hydrating while eating, and gummy electrolyte chews. My hydration strategy was the opposite of the hundred — I wanted my water bottle empty by the time I reached the next aid station instead of overloaded.

That helped a lot, because at one point we got to a rest area where a lot of people arrived at once, and they were actually turning people down for a second refill. I'd had about half a bottle down when the guy told me no second refill, but that the next water station was only four more miles up. I got there and found a guy literally kicking an empty bucket down the gravel drive — that station was completely out of water too, and unmanned. I ended up going twenty-seven miles on what water I had left in my pack before the next one. I heard somewhere between fifty-seven and sixty-seven people dropped out of the race right around that stretch. I found two women who were struggling through the same thing, and the three of us decided we were all getting through it together — we shared water and snacks, made it to the next stop, and then went our separate ways again.

Tom Rowland: How much attention were you paying to electrolytes that time?

Jason Coffrin: Much better — the staff at every aid station would ask if I had enough, had my gummies, and I'd actually take them up on it every time.

Later in the race, at night and alone, I had my most mind-messed-up moment. I could see a big mountain in the distance, but the trail moved away from it, and my brain kept insisting I had to go straight toward that mountain — I was literally arguing with my own map. My body wanted to cut across a cow field and just go for it. I saw a coyote out there and was legitimately worried it might attack me, even though it was maybe twenty pounds. I had Cameron Hanes' audiobook going in my ears the whole time, and I think I was right on the edge of hallucinating. Eventually I got to a rest stop called Needles — put my feet up, had a burger, hot chocolate, pounded a coffee — and then some guys I knew from the trail-running world showed up behind me and said, come on, you're coming with us. After that I never had another mental episode like that.

By the last thirty miles I actually felt like I was at my best — I've got a picture of myself doing push-ups at the finish line. That night I stayed up with the staff, folding tables, felt totally fine — it was the next day the swelling really hit. I slept about three and a half hours total across the whole event.

Tom Rowland: What was your calorie intake like in the twenty-four hours after — did you even want to eat?

Jason Coffrin: Kind of a funny story — my mom had booked me a nice campsite in Red Rock as a gift, but hadn't realized checkout was at 9 a.m. I finished the race around 9 p.m., and by the time I was done watching other finishers come in it was around midnight. So at 9 the next morning, there I am with these swollen feet, breaking down an RV to head home. It was five days straight driving back to Sarasota, and I went straight to work when I got there. Along the way I mostly ate Cool Ranch Doritos and gummy bears — the worst part honestly was just getting out of the car to pump gas, because once you sit and settle in the car you really don't want to move again. Once I got home it was pancakes, oatmeal, and back to eating right away.

What the 240 Taught Him

Tom Rowland: When you finished the two-forty, what lessons carried back into regular life?

Jason Coffrin: The biggest thing is realizing how small most day-to-day stress actually is. I'm an outdoor guy who's also managing repairs at a jewelry store — a due date on a job, sure, we need to get it done, but if I have to call a customer and ask for an extra day, I'm not going to pull my hair out over it anymore. I ran two hundred and forty miles. I get a flat tire, I put on some music and change it and move on with my day. I go out fishing with a guide and don't catch a permit that day — okay, I got to throw a fly at one of the hardest fish on the planet, that's not a big deal, I'll come back next year. One of my dogs is a little under the weather right now, and it's not a pull-your-hair-out thing, it's, let's get to the vet and figure it out and move on. It's really shrunk the smaller stuff in life down to size — bring on whatever's next, I don't worry about things the way I used to.

Elk Hunting Together

Tom Rowland: How about your elk hunting? I'm probably around the same amount of time into it as you — my boys have been out at Montana State, and ever since my older son moved out there about five years ago we've been elk hunting. The first few years I just went along as support so he wouldn't get eaten by a grizzly bear, and to help pack out. We were unsuccessful the first three or four years.

Jason Coffrin: You're one or two years ahead of me — I'm two years unsuccessful so far.

Tom Rowland: It could happen any time — I was just talking to another guest who smoked one his very first time out. Same thing with permit fishing: talk to one guy who's caught three the first day out, talk to another who's been at it for seven or eight years and hasn't landed one yet. Sometimes people are doing something wrong, sometimes they're not.

Jason Coffrin: They'll come see me eventually — I've never caught a permit either.

Tom Rowland: We can do both, permit fishing and elk hunting. Anyway, my son finally got it done about a year and a half ago now, and we did the whole pack-out. After that I decided I wanted to get my own bow setup fully dialed in the way you do with anything else before you dive in — which of course becomes its own new obsession.

Jason Coffrin: That's when he's going to walk out on you.

Tom Rowland: Right — and the worst thing would be taking a bad shot and watching an animal run off with an arrow in it, so there's been a tremendous amount of practice and rucking leading into these hunts. For me, elk hunting turned out to be a lot like permit fishing — every time you think it's going to get easier, it gets harder. Even once you've finally killed one, you think, okay, now it'll be easier, and then the weight of packing it out just crushes you. You plan on a light load, two trips, and then you start thinking a bear or a wolf could get to it if you leave it, so you end up trying to pack everything out at once as fast as possible, and it just gets harder instead of easier.

I watched years of elk-hunting videos thinking there's no way this comes together — you hear an elk, call it, it comes to two hundred yards and just won't cross that last hill — and then when it finally happens, it happens exactly like you'd seen in those videos.

Jason Coffrin: They read elk like you read permit.

Tom Rowland: Exactly — you can do everything right on a permit day and it just doesn't come together, and then another day fifty percent of your shots come together perfectly. Eventually we'd been around enough elk that it happened just as scripted — my son smoked one at fifty-eight yards, and it was amazing. It renewed my whole sense of confidence, because so many of those close calls feel impossible in the moment.

Jason Coffrin: And the forest out there is insane.

Tom Rowland: Right, but part of that is lack of experience setting up so you actually have a shot — knowing there's a forty percent chance it comes in here versus an eighty percent chance over there, and taking the extra ten seconds to reposition. When it comes together right, it's amazing.

Jason Coffrin: And then the pack-out.

Tom Rowland: Then the pack-out, which only gets harder. So what have you got going on now — anything else on the horizon beyond the Moab 240?

Broadheads, Bow Setups, and Trusting the Right Guy

Tom Rowland: Did you have any trouble with broadhead tuning?

Jason Coffrin: I did the first year. I was shooting fixed-blade heads, and that took a lot of adjustment — I didn't even have a target that would hold up to a hunting blade that first year. Once I got out to Oregon they got me onto fixed blades that worked, and then I started shooting a mechanical four-blade head, I believe made by Grim Reaper, that doesn't require you to readjust your bow at all.

Tom Rowland: I was shooting a Grim Reaper too, I think the same style head — it's got a magnet in it. Same thing happened to me: I was hitting everything so tight at sixty yards with field points, felt completely dialed in, and then my son told me I'd better start shooting broadheads before season, because sometimes they don't fly the same as field points. I tried one head that looked almost like a stone or prehistoric blade, only two blades, and on my eighty-pound draw it went everywhere — total frustration. I ended up trying a different head that flew a lot better, but I only had the one, so I'd shoot it, walk down and get it, and shoot again. Eventually I went out to a shop in Bozeman called Straight Six, and the guy there took one look at my setup and said, you need to try this head, it'll fly exactly like your field points — and it did, though it still needed some fine-tuning. My sons got the Allen wrench out and started adjusting things a few shots at a time until it was dialed in.

Like a lot of things, when you've got somebody helping you who's done it a thousand times, what would take you four months of trial and error on your own, they solve in an afternoon.

Jason Coffrin: Especially with all the different broadheads they had at the Bow Rack — I just bought a box of every kind. I was set up out at Wayne's place, where he actually lives and shoots every evening. I got there maybe fifteen minutes early one day, and when he walked up he grabbed four boxes of different heads out of my bag and said, shoot this one and this one, and we're done. He also taught me how to do the sight tape — I couldn't believe how many shots it takes just to get that dialed in.

Tom Rowland: That's exactly why you never touch anyone else's bow — you know how much work went into somebody's sight tape and setup. My sons and I don't touch each other's stuff.

Jason Coffrin: I remember one day at the Bow Rack, somebody had Cameron Hanes' bow sitting there, and one of the guys said, that's Cam's, he's coming to get it. I turned around and walked the other way — I wasn't going to be the guy who even looked at his bow.

Tom Rowland: That's the right call — even though somebody with that much experience could probably diagnose what's wrong with a setup in about two seconds, just like in fishing, where a guy can look at your rod and immediately tell you've got the wrong line on it. You don't even have to cast it to know an eleven-weight line on a three-weight rod isn't going to work — it's just going to droop and fall off. With the broadheads, once we found the head that flew right, we did our sight tape work with actual broadheads on so we could dial it in and confirm it at the same time — no need to readjust the bow again afterward.

That whole experience really restored my confidence. I'd gone from an all-time high shooting field points to an all-time low with broadheads going everywhere, back up to feeling like, if one walks out, I'm taking the shot — before that I wasn't even going to bring the bow up.

Jason Coffrin: Has one walked out on you yet?

Tom Rowland: Yes, and the way we hunt, I try to keep putting my boys up front — I want them to get it done first. One of my sons has already killed one with a bow, the other hasn't yet, so we'll set up where one's in the primary spot and I'm in a backup spot. It's just like fishing — I've had customers who bring a friend along and say they don't want to catch one until their buddy does, and it's fine in theory, but if the friend's never tarpon-fished before, day one he gets all the shots and just isn't executing, no matter how much everybody's trying to coach him through it. After a few bad experiences like that, I'm more convinced now that the better move is to let the more experienced guy take a shot and land one first to prove it's possible, and that actually helps the newer guy relax and catch one faster, because the pressure and fatigue of missing over and over kills their confidence. I didn't want to do that with elk hunting either — I wanted my boys up front — but I made sure I was in the backup spot just in case, because it doesn't always go as scripted.

Jason Coffrin: What's a script in Mother Nature?

What's Next: The Keys 100 and Anti-Poaching Work in Africa

Tom Rowland: So what's on the horizon for you now — is there something more than the Moab 240?

Jason Coffrin: I signed up for the Keys 100 in May — I'm not totally sure I'm going to do it, but I'm signed up.

Tom Rowland: At least you're not stuck in the middle of a desert out there — you can stop at a convenience store along the way and grab a hot dog.

Jason Coffrin: I can't wait to just collapse on the Seven Mile Bridge.

Tom Rowland: That's the one stretch you really have to watch out for. But before we wrap up, tell me about what you're planning to do with your dog in South Africa.

Jason Coffrin: To me, with hunting, there's that saying that hunters are conservationists — look at the tags we buy, the time we put in, how much guides genuinely care about the animals. People don't realize that if we didn't hunt, elk numbers would collapse — even hikers mostly only see them because of the work hunters and guides put in. There are guys paying tens of thousands of dollars for tags in places like Alaska, and that money goes straight back into conservation. I've seen the other side of it too, down in Costa Rica, where I've literally pulled my boat over tuna schools and told giant commercial boats to back off, because they'd have wiped out the dolphins and baby whales caught up with them in the process — I still believe in taking a tuna home myself, but not wiping out everything around it.

I love working with dogs — I've worked with bite dogs, gone to training classes, done some search-and-rescue work as a trainee. I want to go over to Africa and help find poachers who are killing rhinos purely for their horns. There are stories about poachers doing it out of hunger, but when you see a full rhino carcass with just the horn cut off and the rest left for other animals to scavenge, that's not for food — that's pure money. Same with lions killed for a paw, or elephants for tusks. What I've found is that a lot of these organizations use dogs not just to catch poachers, but to do article searches, find camps, and even help track and tag animals so vets can monitor them. I'm not military, so realistically I'm probably not going out there hunting poachers myself, but being able to help find a camp, or help a vet tag an animal, would be incredible.

Tom Rowland: Who do you actually work with on that?

Jason Coffrin: There are a couple of organizations that have reached out to me on Instagram since I started posting about it — one's called the Canine Ranger Project, and another that reached out is a wildlife trust in Africa; they work hand in hand with each other. It's all very new to me still, so I can't say much more than that, but I know they're looking for volunteers. I'm guessing the volunteer commitment would be quarterly, or maybe half the year — I'd love to do it quarterly since I've still got the business and the rest of my life here. Maybe this year I go over for a week or two just to see what it actually takes.

I'm brand new at it, but it's kind of like Moab was — by 2020 I knew I had to work my way up to actually doing it in 2021. If it happens, great — I'll train all year for it, because I need to be physically fit and my dog needs to be ready. We already have a blast doing tracking games — I've got friends who'll hide in the bushes for me to find, and hunting buddies who'll let me come find their trucks after they've headed out for the day so my dog can track them down from a scent off the tailgate. It's really just research right now, but if I get the call, I want to be ready, the same way you don't want to be underprepared going into an elk hunt. My dog would do this all day if he could — if he wanders off in the house, I just hide a cup I've touched behind the couch and he goes and finds it. That's all he wants to do.

Tom Rowland: That's cool, man. I hope that works out for you.

Jason Coffrin: We'll see — that's why I call it a pipe dream in all my posts about it, but it's something to work toward, and I love having goals. If it happens, it happens; if it doesn't, I'll find some other way to stay involved in conservation, whether that's with elk out west or something else.

Wrapping Up

Tom Rowland: Well, if you're signed up for the Keys 100, you're signed up. We'll catch up again after that, or if you make it down to Africa, I'd love to have you back on.

Jason Coffrin: Oh, absolutely, I'd love to be back. I actually knew who you were before this and was following your regular Instagram, and then I found the podcast and saw it was fitness and fishing together, and I thought, what's not to like about this?

Tom Rowland: That's exactly right, man. Well, it's great to talk to you and get to know you a little more — good luck with everything you've got going on. Thanks for being on the podcast, and seriously, congratulations on the two-forty. That's a serious accomplishment, man. Alright, Jason, thanks. Tell people how they can follow you on Instagram or connect with you.

Jason Coffrin: Yeah, I'm on Instagram as Jason L. Coffrin, and I'm starting a new tarpon charter operation this coming May and June called Mr. Trigger Sport Fishing — that's mistertriggersportfishing.com, and the same handle on Instagram. Just getting that started and getting back into the fishing game.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man, good luck. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Coffrin: Take care.

Tom Rowland: See you.

Jason Coffrin: Thanks so much for having me.

Tom Rowland: You bet.