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

When a tribe swap occurred midway through his run on Season 29, Jeremy’s odds looked much slimmer than he looks here in Cambodia. He found himself sharing his shelter with three former members of the rival tribe, Coyopa, with one of the Coyopa competitor’s loved ones also in the mix. With only two allies of his own against a tight group of four, Jeremy knew he was in big trouble if his team lost the upcoming immunity challenges. Luckily for Jeremy, he didn’t lose those challenges — but he was laying track for the worst case scenario, just in case, by working over Alec Christy, the lone Coyopa without a loved one left in the game. “As a firefighter, we have this thing called surround and drown,” he explained in a confessional. “If you’re fighting fire on a building and it gets out of control and you can’t even go inside anymore, everybody stays outside with their hoses, surrounds it and drowns it. That’s what we need to do. We need to just drown [Alec] with the water of the singles.” Jeremy does not say the words “surround and drown” when we speak in Cambodia, but the strategy he describes to me brings the old trick to mind. He explains exactly why he’s looking thinner than usual heading into Second Chance, and it all comes down to the surrounding competition. “I want people to look at me like I’m not that big,” he says. “I’m good enough to compete, but my body, my legs, everything is smaller.” Jeremy looks at the field of Second Chance contestants and sees a great number of alpha types — players who are known for their challenge prowess, their physical abilities, their beach bodies. He sees that some of these people are even bulkier than he expected. “Like Joe,” he says, using the Worlds Apart heartthrob as a for instance. “He looks bigger.” “These guys are eating and everything, trying to lift weights and get bigger,” Collins continues. “I wanted to do it different. I wanted to come in as a smaller guy. I’m still strong, I’m still fast, I’m still fit, but my physical appearance is smaller.” When people look at Jeremy, he wants them to ask themselves a simple question: “That’s Jeremy? He looked bigger on TV!” He feels that he was viewed as a physical threat on his first season, and he does not want to be viewed that way this time around — even though he’s looking at the physical threats as potential allies. “That’s the game plan,” he says. “If I go with a bunch of alphas, the alpha that’s the smallest alpha will come through. All the other alphas have to get everyone else out. I’m hoping that I can be that smaller guy.” I look at Jeremy’s slimmed-down strategy as a revamped version of “surround and drown,” because he’s coming into the season wanting to surround himself with physical powerhouses, so he can duck away from the fire once they start coming after each other. But there’s every chance that the strategy could drown, too, and it seems like Jeremy knows it. “I don’t know if I shrunk up small enough,” he says, “but I’m hoping.” If he can’t become a beta alpha male, Jeremy feels he has other avenues to explore. “I need to get people when they’re a little bit tired, hungry, and not on their game,” he says. “That’s when I’m going to figure things out.” Right now, he’s already figured one thing out: Second Chance is brimming with people who know Survivor inside and out, or, at the very least, know Survivor better than his first season’s cast. It’s a fact that Jeremy thinks can only help him this time around. “I think now you can look at this as a game, and look at it in your own mind,” he says. “On my season, I was trying to think how players would think, and that’s not how it works out when people don’t think that way. I feel like we’re all on the same level right now, so we’re all looking at the same thing.” Jeremy, like the other players this season, has had the opportunity to study up on his competition, given that the list of potential Second Chancers was public for weeks before the final cast was revealed. But he says he’s trying not to make too many snap judgments of the other Survivors based on their Second Chance campaign strategies. “These are all gamers,” he says when I ask how much he paid attention to other people’s podcast appearances and interviews over the last few weeks. “If they’re showing you something, they’re probably showing you something on purpose.” With that said, Jeremy says he’s keeping an open mind about possible partners in the game, stopping short of name-checking the people he’s looking to align with. “I’m psyched to see everybody,” he tells me. Okay, maybe not everybody. ON THE FINAL PAGE: The Nale in the Coffin