In this extraordinary episode of Epic Begins With 1 Step Forward, Zander Sprague sits down with retired emergency physician, author, and living kidney donor Dr. Matt Harmody, whose story redefines what it means to live with purpose. Matt shares how he became part of a five-person team that set a Guinness World Record by summiting the highest point in all 50 U.S. states in record time – after donating a kidney to a stranger. From Denali to Mount Washington, Matt reflects on endurance, teamwork, adaptability, and the mindset required to overcome unexpected obstacles. The conversation also dives deep into the life-saving impact of living kidney donation, dispelling myths and highlighting how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. This episode is a powerful reminder that one bold decision, taken one step at a time, can save lives and inspire millions.
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50 State High Points, One Kidney: Dr. Matt Harmody’s Record-Breaking Mission
We have an epic story for you. I have Matt Harmody here with me. Matt, tell me who you are and what you do.
I am glad to be here, Zander. I am a retired emergency physician. I am also a living kidney donor. I do advocacy work for all things living kidney donation.
I want to talk about that part. You’ve done some epic things in your life, Matt. One of those, which is cool, that I want to start off with is talking about how you’re in the Guinness Book of World Records.
You could add to my intro list being a first-time author, which is certainly related to climbing mountains and the Guinness World Record. We put together a team of five living kidney donors and made an attempt at the Guinness World Record for submitting each of the highest points in all 50 States in the shortest amount of time.
Were you successful?
We were. It was quite an adventure. The previous record, I believe, set back in the 1980s was a little over 43 days, to put it in perspective for folks. We were a bit over 41 hours at the end.
Matt’s Easiest, Hardest, And Most Favorite Ascents
That’s great. I can’t say that I’ve climbed all the highest peaks in all the states. I’ve climbed a few. For you, what was your easiest ascent? What was your most challenging?
Maybe a little bit more background for your audience. We have five teammates, as I mentioned. We have 3 climbers and 2 support people. A ton of logistics went into planning this trip, as one might imagine, figuring out the route around the 50 states, which ones to do first, and which ones should be saved for the end. There are all kinds of restrictions.
As you well know, if you’ve climbed some summits, many of them require permits. Those permits are usually only good for that day, as you get them. Sometimes, it’s a lottery. In other cases, it’s private property that the high point is on. Sometimes, the property owners have a very strict window for when people can go to that state’s high point.
It took a lot of months of preparation, and the decision was made to start on Denali. That, clearly, is the hardest of the 50 for many reasons. Our captain, Dave Ashley, has the incredible distinction as a mountaineer of having summited all of the seven summits. Those are the highest points in each of the seven continents around the world.
The primary purpose of the trip was to raise awareness for living kidney donation, showing that you can do whatever you want and what you did previously to your donation. Most kidney donors are not climbing mountains, but that made it much more interesting. Dave felt that doing something within the United States would be much more relatable to people.
When I talk to people about our trip and about the book I wrote, a lot of people at least know their own state’s high points, and many of them have been to it, in fact. It’s much more related for all the people. We had a ton of people come out and support us at many of the high points. Those kinds of things are tough to do when you’re in a foreign country thousands of miles away.
Denali is the hardest. For the easiest, there probably were quite a few. I would share a brief anecdote from the book on one of the easier ones. Before we started out, Dave got a little bit of grief on social media with someone joking about how difficult Florida would be. Florida happens to be the lowest state high point with 350 feet. Most people probably guess that Florida is on that list. Dave took a little bit of offense to that and wanted people to focus on some of the more difficult ones. There are some quite difficult ones that require technical climbing skills and specialized equipment.
Florida was maybe a half to two thirds into the trip. We kept pestering Dave to do something entertaining for Florida in somewhat of a response to the joke that was giving us a hard time about it. He is a very serious guy, an accomplished veteran, and an accomplished endurance athlete. It took us a long time to convince him, but we finally did. We got him to dress up in all the mountaineering gear that he would have worn on Denali. He had all the winter clothes on. He had an ice axe and crampons. We theb had him trudge to the high point slowly, like he was climbing a mountain.
We had a young man who helped us with videography and photography with us. Guinness required a ton of information and support to approve a record as you might imagine. He’s got a lot of gifted skills in media presentations. He overlaid some blowing wind and some snow. He posted a 10 or 15-second video on social media, and that probably got more responses in a positive fashion about the trip than any other part of the trip.
That’s funny. Hopefully, it wasn’t too hot when he was in all that gear.
It was at night. It wasn’t 95 and sunny, but it wasn’t very cool either.
One of the mountains that you climbed is one that I’ve also climbed. It’s not necessarily particularly difficult, but Mount Washington in New Hampshire is.
It’s a pretty popular one. People may or may not know not all 50 states are like Denali. Some are what are called drive-ups. People can drive to the summit, park, get out, and make a short walk to the true high point. Mount Washington would be one of those. Some are flat as a board. You drive up or walk a short distance to the high point then you have everything in between. Out West on the West Coast has some pretty significant mountains, like Mount Hood and Mount Rainier. Those are very serious climbs with technical climbing gear. Mount Washington is known for the highest recorded wind speed ever. I believe it’s 240 miles an hour.
Not all 50 states have summits that you need to hike. Some allow you to drive or simply make a short walk to the true high point.
It’s something like that.
It was pretty windy up there. I distinctly remember we had to get video and photographs at each of the high points for Guinness. I can remember standing up there. The temperature wasn’t too cold, but with that wind, it was hard to stand up.
When I did it many years ago, we went up Tuckerman Ravine and stuff. I remember when we got to the top, it was quite blustery. You’re like, “I’m at the top. Now, I’m going down. I don’t need to spend a lot of time up here.” That’s cool. What was your favorite ascent?
I’ll start answering that question by saying the topography and the geography of every high point were different. It was a joy to travel around the country and see all these places. Many are very remote, but to appreciate the beauty and the vastness of our country. I would maybe say Arizona’s Humphreys Peak. That’s about 12,600. It’s up there. It has a ski resort attached to it.
We were in the May and June timeframe. We unfortunately picked coming out of a winter that set records out West, not so much in Colorado, Utah, and Montana. There was a ton of snow, which set us back. Our hope was to finish in Maine for many reasons. We had to leave five Western high points back. We finished in Maine and then had to take a plane to LAX to finish the last five. That gave us an extra two weeks of snow melt. It was amazing how much different those climbs were.
Humphreys Peak was fun. The snow was intermittent, but the trail was very icy. We went out late in the afternoon and came down at night. We decided to do what’s called bushwhack down. To avoid the icy trail, we went straight down the mountain in all the snow. I’m not sure that was the best decision in hindsight.
It was so steep and quite difficult to come down. There were lots of slips and falls. We hung together and finally got down to a gravel road, which was probably a green slope or a green run during ski season. We safely made it back down. There are a ton of anecdotes on that trip. There are so many memorable things, most of which I captured in my book.
What Matt Has Learned About Himself In His Adventures
On any epic journey that any of us go on, there are things that we learn about ourselves and our own resilience and ability. Even if you’re confident, you never know when you get out there. I’ve done some pretty cool stuff. I’ve been lucky to travel to many places, but I can tell you that in every epic adventure, I learned something about myself. I learn sometimes that I have a lot more resilience than I thought when stuff doesn’t go exactly right.
Having climbed a few mountains in my life, I also know that when you start off, you think everything’s fine. Oftentimes, stuff goes slightly sideways. The weather was supposed to be clear. All of a sudden, you’re soaked in cold rain, and you don’t have all the right equipment. I get that. For you, what were some of the things, as you reflect back on it that you learned about yourself?
I would back up to the first true mountain that I climbed, especially with other living kidney donors. I donated back in 2017. I was probably somewhat of a closet donor. I only shared it with close family and my work colleagues. I’m not a self-promoter. It was an important thing for me to do. However, that all changed when I got an invitation to try out an audition interview for joining 22 living kidney donors to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. That was back in 2022. I’d never done anything like that before.
I know that you’ve got a running background. I’ve done plenty of running ultras and what are called adventure races. I’ve been in all kinds of very long endurance events, but I’ve never been to that type of altitude. You talk about what you’ve learned and how your mindset has changed. Everything I’d done up to that point was timed. I was maybe not competing with everyone else in the race, but more so competing with myself.
When my wife dropped me off at the airport at ODAR 30, I made the promise to her that I was going to do my best to enjoy this trip as a journey, especially the climb, and not be too concerned or even disappointed if I don’t summit. As you said, there are a ton of variables. I’d never been at that altitude. Kilimanjaro is 19,341. It’s up there.
I did enjoy it. I didn’t know anyone on the trip prior, so I got a chance to meet a lot of cool and interesting people. It’s a long hike. It’s certainly difficult near the top, but there’s no technical climbing required. It’s within the wheelhouse of anyone who’s even of average fitness. We had some people who weren’t super athletes or even weekend warriors. That’s the mindset I had for the 50 states summit trip. It was like, “Let’s enjoy the experience.” We were on the clock, and that kept everybody on their toes.
When you go mountain climbing, just enjoy the experience even if you are on the clock and everybody is on their toes.
You talk about checklists. We had a Bible that was about two inches thick. Part of that was documentation for Guinness, but a lot of it was checklists, resources, and people to call. At every trailhead, we knew the closest gas station, the closest place to dump water from the RV and fill up, and the closest grocery stores.
We had all the directions, and sometimes, we had to modify those directions. We had a Garmin RV device that you could plug into the height of your RV, and it would reroute you, especially around bridges that were too low for you to pass. That threw us off-course in one particular summit. Dave got a little excited. He was like, “This isn’t the right way. The Garmin is telling us this way, probably for a reason.” We didn’t realize that it was a height restriction that it was trying to avoid.
This constant reassessment checklists for every trailhead, what equipment was needed, who wanted what food and clothing, whether we were going to leave and do a bunch of chores like washing clothes and grocery shopping, or whether this was a quick one where we have to wait for the climbers and then head back out.
There was lots of planning. I used to do marathons. I’ve done one ultra. You know this, and I know this. No matter how well-trained you are when you get to race day or whatever, you honestly don’t know, no matter how prepared you are. I certainly know when I was running my marathons, I hoped I had a good running day.
Going Against The Clock For A World Record
For someone who’s also been a runner, you hope you don’t have what I call a grindy day, which is where you can’t find your breath, your pace, whatever. You get over the distance but it’s grindy. It’s so much harder. You hope that on race day, you don’t have a grindy day in a marathon because it would be a long day. You were on the clock because you were trying to set the Guinness World Record. For the Guinness World Record, is it the combined time of the actual climbs up the mountain, or is it the whole time from when you started on Denali to when you finished on whatever your last mountain was?
Interestingly, there was a lot of debate amongst mostly Dave, our captain, and other people who have some skin in the game with respect to setting records for endurance events. Guinness had a set of rules. I don’t know if you’re familiar with FKT or Fastest Known Time. That’s a community, at least for your audience’s sake. That sets standards for non-organized races. For example, if you wanted to run up Denali and back down. There’s no race for that, but there’s an FKT for that.
Dave worked hard to try to coalesce all the rules and get those different communities to agree upon a set of rules. There wasn’t a lot of interest on the other organization’s part, so we had a hybrid set of rules. To answer your question, mostly for these types of events, the clock starts when you begin the ascent of your first mountain, and then it ends at the top of, in our case, the 50th summit. The clock continually runs. There’s no stopping it at the bottom, driving to the next one, and then restarting.
I got it.
Driving counts. We tried to do all the main things like grocery shopping and washing clothes. We probably put 15,000 to 17,000 miles on an RV. We had to have a couple of oil changes accomplished, and that is no easy feat. It’s not like getting your car’s oil changed, where you can pull up and get it done. I have a brief, funny story. We were in Yellowstone. The team was on Granite, which is the highest point in Montana. We had to drive two and a half hours to get to Gardiner to have any significant resources. The good news was that it was a drive through Yellowstone, so we were not complaining about that.
There are no posted daylight speed limits. You might be able to push the RV slightly faster and not worry about getting a ticket.
There’s that. You talk about roadblocks and unexpected challenges. That was after the river flooded. I believe that was the summer or early fall prior. They had road outages. At least when we were going through, there were a couple of spots that were one lane only in one direction at a time. They had traffic control there. It took about another half an hour.
We got to Gardiner, and it’s like the RV capital of the country. They’re everywhere. We looked up and found a couple, and then drove down to one that does maintenance and oil changes for RVs. The bays are huge there. We pulled in, and one bay was open. It was like, “This is our lucky day. We should be in and out of here.”
We roll in and ask the woman at the counter if we can get an oil change. She nicely and calmly asked us when we’d like to have that done. We looked at each other and were like, “Now would be great.” We were like, “We’re booking six weeks out from today.” She’s like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” We had to engage some mobile oil change folks who specifically work in RVs. We had to meet him at a truck stop. He crawled under there and did his thing in a cold drizzle. There were a lot of challenges like that, but that’s life. It’s taking one step at a time.
I would add along those lines that I was doing a fair number of ultra trail races around when I did my kidney donation. There was one I did every year that’s 100K or about 62 miles. I donated in late September, and the race was in mid-January. My goal was to at least do the race. To your point of having a grinder race, I anticipated that it was going to be one of those, but they held me back. They didn’t want me running for 4 to 6 weeks, so I was walking a ton. I probably was running a little bit before they wanted me to, but I was careful.
The worst thing I could do is take a fall on a trail, land on the wrong side, and disrupt surgical wounds that hadn’t completely healed. I progress through that. It’s one step. It’s walking a mile. It’s walking a couple of miles. It’s jogging a couple of miles. Inch your way back up to what you’re used to. Sure enough, I was successful and finished that race. It wasn’t my fastest time, but the goal was again to finish. That’s when I knew that I was 100% recovered from my kidney donation.
What It Is Like To Do A Living Kidney Donation
Before our time runs out, because I know it’s important to you, and I do want people to know about it. Talk to me a little about living kidney donation. There are so many more people who need a kidney than there are kidneys available. Talk to me a little about living donation and what people need to know.
It’s a huge challenge in this country. There are over 90,000 people on the transplant wait list for a kidney. Once you enter that list and start dialysis, about 50% of people will die within 5 years. The need is great. There are about 25,000 or 26,000 kidney transplants done a year, but only a third of those are living donors. It’s very safe. It’s about as risky as a woman delivering a term pregnancy. The risk is not zero.
There are over 90,000 on the kidney transplant wait list. About 50% of those people will die in five years.
It’s a pretty strict evaluation health-wise and even mental health-wise. The transplant centers want to make sure that you’re a good candidate and that you will do well with one kidney. Our kidneys are over-designed, so we can easily live with one kidney. People return to their usual state of health. I know many donors who are healthier now because they take a little bit more care in protecting their one kidney.
The only lifestyle changes are two, and they are minimal. One is being careful about hydration. As you well know, distance running, especially here in the heat of North Carolina. I’m a little bit more careful about my fluid intake. The second is no non-steroidal pain medications like Motrin, which is Ibuprofen. Tylenol is perfectly fine.
There’s some belief and evidence that non-steroidal pain medications can injure the kidneys. If you only have one, be a little bit more careful. There are plenty of resources out there for people to check it out. I like to summarize the experience of living kidney donation as follows. It allows an ordinary person to do an extraordinary thing to save a life.
Was the kidney that you donated familiar, meaning someone within your family, or was it that you happened to be a match for someone else?
There are about 25,000 or so kidney donations done a year, but only about 6,000 are from living kidney donors. Only about a few hundred each year are folks who are called non-directed donors or sometimes altruistic donors. Those folks, like myself, donate to a stranger. It goes into the system and goes to the patient that’s on the wait list who is highest on the list, which is a good match for that person’s kidney.
This country could use many more kidney donors. The deceased donor kidneys are not nearly as good as a living kidney donor. The living donor kidneys last about twice as long, or about 15 to 20 years. That’s the most important difference. We have a tremendous number of people. If roughly 1 in every 10,000 healthy adults in this country donated a kidney, the wait list would be eliminated. It’s not an unbelievably difficult goal to have. It’s mostly awareness and people realizing that they can live a normal life with one kidney.
If one in every 10,000 healthy adults in the United States donated a kidney, the wait list would be eliminated.
I believe the kidney is the one major organ that we have an extra. We can get by on one. You can’t do a liver donation because you only have one liver.
Liver donations are very infrequent. Zander, you’re right. You can’t do without your liver. What’s amazing about a liver is that the donations are a partial or a portion of your liver grows back. It’s a pretty phenomenal organ, but it’s a lot more complicated surgery, a lot longer recovery time, and a little bit riskier. Living kidney donation is bread and butter. 25,000 of them are done every year in this country.
I hope that we can get that number to be 10X or 100X because that would be great.
It would be awesome.
Get In Touch With Matt
What information do you want people to know about how to find out more about living kidney donation, how to find you and your book, and contact you if they’re like, “That was a great thing. I need to talk to Matt?”
My contact information, information about my book, and my background are all easily found at my website, and that’s MattHarmodyMD.com. That would be one. The second is the National Kidney Registry. That’s the organization I donated my kidney through. They’re the country’s leading living kidney donation organization. They coordinate matching kidneys and transporting them around the country. Their website is KidneyRegistry.org.
There’s a button on the upper right-hand corner saying something along the lines of, “Interested in donation?” You can read and take a quick screening survey. Most importantly, no matter how far you get along in the process, the testing, and even to the point of being in the pre-op holding area, you can always change your mind. There’s no pressure to be committed or remain committed. It’s a pretty big decision. Trust me, you won’t regret it. Ninety-five percent of all living kidney donors, when surveyed, say that they would do it again if they had another spare kidney.
That’s awesome. I want to thank you so much for sharing your epic story. It’s truly an epic adventure. Congratulations on being in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.
You bet. I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, remember that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
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About Matt Harmody
Matt Harmody, MD, MBA, is a retired emergency physician, living kidney donor, and endurance athlete. Inspired by his father’s battle with kidney failure, he donated a kidney to a stranger in 2017 through the National Kidney Registry’s paired-exchange program—an act that sparked his lifelong mission to advocate for donors, mentor those considering the gift, and fight for policies that expand access to transplantation.
He currently serves as board chair of the National Kidney Donation Organization and is a principal in a nonprofit organization that is working to reform federal law and end the nation’s chronic kidney shortage. His advocacy has taken him from mentoring individuals one-on-one to briefing congressional leaders on Capitol Hill.
An adventurer at heart, Matt has completed ultramarathons and multiday adventure races, and, in 2022, he summited Mount Kilimanjaro with 21 fellow kidney donors on World Kidney Day. In 2023, he joined a Guinness world record–setting team that climbed the highest peaks in all 50 U.S. states.