Jeremy Collins barely slept during his penultimate night in San Juan del Sur, stranded on Exile Island. He laid awake by the fire, twisting and turning on a bed of rocks, probably dreaming about the yacht ride and pastrami sandwiches he gave up to Jon Misch and Jaclyn Schultz, assuming he dreamt at all.
“I’m feeling real lethargic this morning,” he said the following day. “I feel like I got hit by a train.”
In reality, the train had not arrived yet, but it was on its way to pick him up, with Jon and Jaclyn conducting the thing. Destination: Blindside City. Passengers: One.
Many months later, Jeremy was feeling exhausted all over again — except this time, it was in the comfort of his own home, not in the middle of a hot, isolated beach. The Cambridge firefighter had eaten nothing more than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a protein shake over the past two days, and when he woke up on the third morning, he felt, once again, and in his own words, “very lethargic.”
“I woke up and was not feeling healthy. I had to eat some food,” he tells me when we speak in Cambodia. “But even then, you have to go slow. I just trained myself, you know? I’m ready for it.”
Ready or not, here he comes: Collins, the 10th place finisher on Survivor‘s 29th season, is back on the beach, locked and loaded for a shot at the Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance title. The broad-chested physique he wore in the first days of his first season isn’t totally gone — the man is still cut, and I have little doubt that he could pluck my face off using only two fingers — but he isn’t quite as big as he comes across on TV.
It’s a new look, in a new location, but by and large, it’s the same Jeremy. He still has swagger. He still has confidence. He’s still the guy who mocked his “dumb” tribe on Season 29; even now, he says his former cast mates would fall apart after three days out here in Cambodia.
“It rained one time in Nicaragua and Julie quit,” he says. “It rains every 20 minutes out here. And then it stops. And then it’s 120 degrees. This is brutal. It’s unbelievable.”
It’s also great, according to Jeremy. He grins big when he tells me how he “can’t wait to see people crack. I know that once I’ve cracked, then people have cracked a long time ago. I’m totally ready for this.”
Beyond his physical weight, Jeremy enters his second stint on Survivor feeling lighter in another way. When he played the first time, he competed in a Blood vs Water season, an iteration of Survivor that pits players against their loved ones. His wife Val was the second person voted out of the season, and just as he had to move on without her then, Jeremy is trying to focus on what’s in front of him now.
“What I try to put in my head is, the last time I talked to her, is the last time I’m going to try and think about her,” he says. “I’m going to try and go in this game and everything is focused on this game. Saying that, I know it’s unrealistic, but that’s the goal.”
It is unrealistic, sure, but you can’t deny that Jeremy is a goal-oriented guy. Before his first Survivor season, Jeremy trained by depriving himself of food, attempting to get used to the extreme hunger experienced in the game. He says he doesn’t regret the move at all. “Mentally, because I prepared for it, I was fine.” In fact, for round two, Jeremy has put himself through food depravation once again — but for this season, he’s taken things a few steps further.
“I did it worse this time,” Jeremy says of preparing for Cambodia. “I stopped working out for the last month. I stopped eating. I’m down 15 pounds. I feel so weak and so small.”
So why does he feel so ready, then? Why go through such a physical transformation ahead of an experience that’s already designed to starve its players? Because, if all goes according to plan, Jeremy is right where he wants to be in order to give an old strategy a new makeover.
ON THE NEXT PAGE: Surround And Drown 2.0
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