My wife, Hilary, was essentially handing me a gift, and I didnā€™t know what to do with it: She was taking our toddler, Jay, to the Oregon coast for a week, and I was invited to not join them.

Meaning: I had a full week to do anything I wanted, for the first time since Jay was born 14 months prior. No toddler wrangling, no constant vigilance to make sure he didnā€™t fall off something, or stick his finger in something, or eat something indigestible. I could stay up late, sleep in, eat takeout, whatever. OR: I could go on a big adventure somewhere, like I used to do: I could fly (by myself!) somewhere for a few days, or take a road trip, or pack a backpack and spend five days in the backcountry. What should I do?

One of my favorite memes of the past five years is the . It started as someone revisiting their childhood memory of asking their mother to take them to McDonaldā€™s, only to have their mother say, ā€œWe have food at home.ā€ And then the meme of course evolved from there, in incredibly diverse ways.

Iā€™d lived in Missoula for about five years of my adult life in total (over two stints), and I still felt like I hadnā€™t seen that much of itā€”grad school, then Covid, then pregnancy, and a new baby kept me around town (or thatā€™s what I told myself).

And then with an entire week off to go exploring, I got choice paralysis, and finally just decided to stay home. Luckily, we have trails at home.

I picked out some mountains, some close, some a little farther away, some legit rocky peaks and some just really steep tall grassy summits, and asked some friends to join me for different ones. I shot some video every day, put it on a hard drive, and thought ā€œIā€™ll make sense of this someday.ā€

When I finally sat down with all the clips, I found myself digging way back in my own history to figure out a through line. As youā€™ll see if you watch the video, it goes up.

The post I Just Like Standing on Summits. All Summits. appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

I have run and bicycled a certain one-mile section of the paved riverfront multi-use path in my hometown probably at least 200 or 300 times. A handful of times, I have thought to myself, ā€œI should really stop and read some of these historical plaques along the trail.ā€ I believed there to be two or three of them, and in four years, I never made the minuscule effort to pull off the trail even once for the 60 to 90 seconds required to read them.

A few weeks ago, though, I finished reading what I think is now one of my favorite adventure books, and I got inspired. Because books can do that.

Dean Karnazesā€™s Ultramarathon Man inspired hundreds or thousands of people to try ultrarunning, Colin Fletcherā€™s books inspired probably thousands of people to take up backpacking, and Cheryl Strayedā€™s Wild inspired a generation of thru-hikers. My friend Alastair Humphreysā€™ new-ish book was the catalyst for one of the least epic, but most satisfying adventures of my recent life.

The book is called Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness, and the concept is this: A guy who lives in the suburbs of London looks for adventure on the 400-square-kilometer map with his house in the center. This particular guy has bicycled 46,000 miles around the world for four years, rowed a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, and walked across the Empty Quarter Desert towing a giant homemade cart. Itā€™s no Into Thin Air, or story of survival in Antarctica, or tale of the first human forays into some unexplored corner of Earth. But Al got this map, decided to spend a year essentially ā€œstaying home,ā€ exploring one randomly-selected square kilometer per week, whether or not it looked interesting on the map.

Here is one of my favorite paragraphs in the book, on page nine:

ā€œWhat if where I live, this bog-standard corner of England, which had held no surprises for me, was actually full of them, if I only bothered to go out and find them? Not known, because not looked for. This was an opportunity to get to know my place for the first time and to search closer to home than ever before for things Iā€™ve chased around the globe: adventure, nature, wildness, surprises, silence and perspective.ā€

I imagine having to write a book about the experience pushed Al to try to dig up interesting things about each grid square he exploredā€”which, in my reading, often resulted in me looking up from the book and saying to Hilary, ā€œDid you know ā€¦ā€ And it reminded me of some of the best tour guides Iā€™ve met on trips, who remain enthusiastic after repeating the same facts and figures hundreds of timesā€”or my sister-in-lawā€™s father, John, who has lived in the same town in Wisconsin for almost his entire life and seems to have a million pieces of local trivia ready at all times. And how last year I traveled to a spot very close to my hometownā€™s , but still hadnā€™t read the goddamn signs on the riverfront path Iā€™m on five times a week.

So Tuesday morning, after riding my bike to drop off our little guy at daycare, I pedaled down the section of path Iā€™ve traversed so many times on foot and on skinny tires, and I stopped at every single plaque. There are 10 of them in the span of that one mile, detailing the human and geologic history of the valley here dating back 16,000 years: the lumber baron who built a mansion near the mouth of the creek (and whose widow, more notably, donated the land for the cityā€™s first park), the bridges that washed away in floods, the glacial lake that flooded and carved out the valley several times in ā€œone of the most significant geological events in the history of the world,ā€ and did you know we used to have a streetcar here? I mean, I guess not really ā€œwe,ā€ but the people who lived here a century ago.

Several years ago, at an American adventure film festival, I saw a film of an expedition to climb a mountain in a country halfway around the world. In one scene, as the team of climbers slogged onward and upward through the jungle under ridiculously heavy backpacks, they passed through a village and a few local children and adults watched them. The characters in the film were of course far from home, very ā€œout thereā€ in many ways, and struggling against great odds for a goal and a story about trying to reach that goal. But to the people who lived in the village, it was just Wednesday. Maybe a notable Wednesday, since these weird people with colorful clothing and backpacks were passing through, and that didnā€™t happen every Wednesday. But I found myself thinking more of the contrast: Eight people having a capital-A adventure within ten feet of other people sitting in their front yards. Which is something that never happens in my neighborhood, because people donā€™t fly halfway around the world to climb the mountains near my house.

But should you have to spend several days and thousands of dollars traveling to have an interesting experience? Seems a little elitist, doesnā€™t it?

My friend Forest and I have spent time together in many beautiful places, usually as photographer (him) and writer (me). I have picked up a handful of camera tricks from him over the years, but have no illusions about switching careers to photography. I asked him one time to tell me how I could improve my photography, based on what heā€™d seen, and he gently suggested that I should try to get closer. Of course he was rightā€”I always default to the ā€œtiny person in huge landscapeā€ shot, which is easy for me to see and feel (weā€™re so small out there!), but hard to replicate without a long lens. Being able to look closer, to zoom in, is something I still struggle with, literally in photography and metaphorically in life. Isnā€™t it harder to experience wonder the closer you are to where you live and work and get stuck in traffic and take out the trash, or is that just me? I aspire to be someone who can find wonder anywhere.

Iā€™m not saying that reading a handful of plaques has now made me some sort of expert. But it did send me to the library, and to Google some thingsā€”which I wouldnā€™t have Googled without having my interest piqued by what was on those plaques (the environmental disaster behind the old dam) and what was not on those plaques. (Okay, but what about the history of indigenous people in this area?) Which is something we are lucky to have the ability to do nowadays, to follow up on our interest(s) .

Another paragraph from the introduction of Local:

ā€œIā€™d imagined this would be a year of poking around rabbit holes in the countryside, but it became a year of falling down internet rabbit holes about hundreds of obscure topics, as well as reading dozens of books about history, nature, farming, and the climate emergency. Anything clever you read in the following pages, and almost every fact and figure, was new to me when I began this book. Do not make the mistake of thinking Iā€™m a clever person who can stand in an empty field and see biology, geology, and every other ā€™ology, while you merely see a field. I, too, saw only the fields before I started, but paying close attention unveiled so much.ā€

Of course I love to travel, and some of my favorite places in the world are special because the first time I visited, a friend who lived there showed me around. And tour guides are great, but nothing beats someone who is enthusiastic about where they live, because theyā€™ve paid attention to it and donā€™t mind sharing it with someone else. Now if youā€™ll excuse me, I have to do some research on this streetcar we used to have here in the early 1900s, so I can tell visiting friends about it for the next decade.

If youā€™d like to read Local (which has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize!), hereā€™s where you can find it:

ĢżĢżĢż

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It was a couple years ago, probably eightish miles up the Stuart Peak trail near my home in Missoula, Montana, when I first started thinking about it. A small tree had fallen perpendicular across the trail, no more than four inches in diameter. I had to slow my already-not-that-fast uphill trot to almost a complete stop to step over the tree.

I thought for a half-second, like I always do, that my day would be a tiny bit more pleasant if that tree had not fallen thereā€”or if someone had removed it before I started my trail run that day.

But I carried on, to the top of the peak, stepping over a couple other pieces of deadfall, a minor nuisance on the way up the trail, but a brief low hurdle on my way back down.

I remembered some mountain bikers Iā€™d run into on this same trail a while back, in the early season. Theyā€™d carried a chainsaw to cut the trees that had fallen over the winter, but of course they stopped at the wilderness boundary, where bicycles werenā€™t permitted (let alone chainsaws).

I finished my run, and repeated it several times, always encountering some deadfall. Same with some of the other trails around Missoulaā€”every year brings a few more trees down.

Every time I stepped over one, I made a mental note:

And then Iā€™d go home and never do it. Once or twice I googled electric chainsaws, but never clicked ā€œbuy.ā€

A ripped through our town in late July with winds in excess of 100 mph, and I spent two consecutive days cutting fallen branches, and hauling 15 pickup loads to the city brush pile (itā€™s a small pickup).

The first day, when everyoneā€™s power was out, I had the longest conversation Iā€™d ever had with my neighbor Nathan, standing on the sidewalk in front of his house. I mentioned how I wished I had actually bought a chainsaw instead of just thinking about it, because Iā€™d have it for this, but Iā€™d also be able to cut deadfall on trails.

“What you need,” Nathan said authoritatively, “is a Silky Katanaboy folding saw. Theyā€™re amazing. My buddy talked me into getting one and I love it.”

I googled the Silky Katanaboy. It was $245, and huge. Ideal Version of Me could wait some more, I guess.

Then my friend Kevin and I did an adventurous run/hike up Pyramid Buttes this September, and there was so much goddamn deadfall. I cursed myself, but, shrug, what are you gonna do, cut through 30 trees in the middle of your 17-mile day?

A couple weeks later, on the way up Sky Pilot, same thing. Lots of gymnastics to get up and around all the deadfall. If I were a pompous asshole, I would have huffed and said, ā€œsomebody should do something about this!ā€ But come on, I have some idea of how the world works, and you donā€™t just call the Forest Service and report a downed tree on a lesser-used trail, like youā€™re calling down to the front desk to request more towels.

I googled the Silky Katanaboy again. It was too big (20 inches long, 2 pounds), and too expensive. If I bought it, Iā€™d have to mentally record where the downed trees were, then go back, hike in with an actual backpack, and cut the trees. How about something smaller?

The Silky Gomboy Curve 240. $65. Folds down to 9.5 inches. I measured my running vest. A 9.5-inch saw would just fit. Sure, itā€™s bulky and heavy compared to, you know, not carrying a fucking saw when you go running, but Iā€™m already carrying bear spray in there, and Iā€™m also a 45-year-old middle-of-the-pack dadthlete who loves to eat baked goods. Other people arenā€™t exactly taking a microscope to my Strava times, but they might appreciate a tree not blocking the trail.

I looked online for reviews, finally finding , by Casey, a mountain biker from Montana. The review was good, but what really sold me was when he said this:

ā€œWith work and kids and stuff, I don’t get to go to a lot of trail work days, so this is one of the ways I try to give back and do my part because I use these trails a lot, so I gotta support them somehow.ā€

All told, he said, getting off his bike, pulling out the saw, cutting the tree, and moving it off the trail took 10 or 15 minutes.

I bought that saw, the Silky Gomboy Curve 240.

It fits in my running vest. I cut a piece of deadfall off a trail this week. Itā€™s not much, but itā€™s something.

The post The Ultimate, Compact Tool for Clearing Deadfall on Your Local Trails appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

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I think of my old car sometimes when I drive by the Walmart Supercenter. The parking lot there was essentially the launch point of my first real long-distance road trip as an adult, spanning ten days and eight states in the late spring of 2004. We drove my 1996 Pontiac Grand Am GT, a car that my friend Nick announced had taught him that he would “never buy a two-door car.”

I didnā€™t keep a journal of the trip, but I believe Nick said that while standing in the Watchman Campground in Zion National Park, on maybe our eighth day of wrangling gear in and out of the car’s back seats. We couldnā€™t use the trunk because it was full of everything I could justify bringing from my grad school apartment in Missoula, Montana, to our terminus in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was moving in with my then-girlfriend. We tried to keep what we needed in the backseat, and of course to access anything in the backseat, you had to fold the front seat down, lean in, and bend around the corner.

I believe this type of two-door design was, and maybe still is, referred to as a ā€œcoupe,ā€ a word that is almost never paired with the word ā€œadventure,ā€ which is what we were trying to use the Grand Am for, and certainly not the word ā€œdirtbag,ā€ which is the type of adventure we were trying to have.

We left Missoula about 10 days before Memorial Day. Nick bussed in via a Greyhound from somewhere in Iowa, an 18-hour ride heā€™d probably never do again.Ģż So a car, any car, a space heā€™d only have to share with one person, probably felt like an improvement.

I had gotten the car through my college roommate Chris, whose brother, Andy, had bought it at an auction, repaired the one thing that was wrong with it (someone had tried to steal the passenger-side airbag), and then sold it to me. There were a few reasons why it was not the ideal road trip car, some of which were my fault.

I had packed the trunk almost full by the time Nick added his stuff, and then attached a trunk-mount Yakima bike rack to haul an old Schwinn mountain bike all the way to Arizona, so if either of us wanted anything in the trunk, we had to remove the bike, pull off the bike rack, and then open the trunk. The bike and the rack, of course, fell off the back of the car multiple times on bumpy mountain roads, first on our way up and down to the Mt. Pilchuk trailhead outside of Seattle. The summit was in a cloud when we arrived at the end of our short, steep hike.

People sleep in all kinds of adventure vehiclesā€”old vans, new Sprinter vans, RVs, trucks with toppers, trucks with campers, station wagons, even in sedans in which the back seats fold down. The Grand Amā€™s seats did not fold down. And we couldnā€™t recline the front seats very far on account of all our stuff in the backseat. Still, we slept in the car twice, because we were young and durable, and had no other options, once next to the ocean somewhere near Aberdeen, Washington, and once near Barstow, California, where weā€™d driven after hiking up Half Dome and being unable to find a campsite anywhere near the park.

We camped almost all the other nights, except for a couple nights we spent on friendsā€™ floors in Seattle and Bend. The trunk light somehow melted a hole in Nickā€™s Therm-a-Rest on the second-to-last day of the trip, so he slept rather uncomfortably on our last night in Mexican Hat, Utah. Weā€™d walked into the ranger station at Natural Bridges National Monument late that afternoon and asked about campsites, and in an I-swear-this-actually-happened exchange that Iā€™ve written about elsewhereā€”itā€™s so dumb it sounds like I made it upā€”the ranger said, ā€œYou guys donā€™t want to camp here. Youā€™ll be done with this park in an hour. Tell you what: Are you intense?ā€

I looked at Nick, kind of shrugged, and nodded. We were young, fairly fit, and maybe looked pretty intense, I guess. The ranger went on to tell us to head south to Valley of the Gods, the entirety of which was BLM land, and we could just pull off the road and camp anywhere we found a spot. We thanked him for the advice and left, and I was unlocking the car door in the parking lot by the time I realized what heā€™d actually said. Over the roof of the car, I said to Nick,

ā€œOh, he meant ā€˜in tents,ā€™ like are we camping in tents or do we have an RV.ā€

ā€œYeah,ā€ Nick said, not understanding my confusion.

The low clearance of the Grand Am meant we didnā€™t get too far into Valley of the Gods before we chickened out and drove back to the paved highway, and spent the night in a paid campground behind a lodge in Mexican Hat. It was not that intense. The next day we drove through Monument Valley, checked out the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and gave the car a well-earned rest in a visitor parking spot at my girlfriendā€™s apartment complex in Scottsdale, after the biggest adventure it would ever go on.

To be fair, I had not bought the car under any pretense of it being a ā€œroad trip vehicleā€ or ā€œadventure vehicle.ā€ I bought it because it was a pretty good deal, from a trusted friend, and I was not very picky about cars. And I didnā€™t treat it that wellā€”I bought it in 1999, if memory serves, and I have been sober since March 2002, but the period of time between was a bit rough on the car. The inoperable driverā€™s-side window was my fault (rolling it down when it was iced over), as was whatever went wrong with the front right wheel (hit a curb at high velocity). The windshield had been shattered once (a friend tried to jump over the car as we were leaving a party; I eventually got it repaired), and the trunk-mount CD player had been smashed by a full beer keg that rolled into it (on the drive back to our party).

Still, it was what I had, and entering the job market in 2004 with a graduate degree in journalism, I wasnā€™t exactly ready for a down payment on a new BMW. Or any car, really. I worked for a year in the Phoenix area, and then moved to Denver, where the Grand Am was even less useful, because, you know, snow.

Luckily, Nick, who lived in Denver, had bought a 2004 Toyota Tacoma, and was willing to drive to Summit County ski resorts in the winter and mountain trailheads all summer. One winter day, though, I drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park to snowshoe, and met a guy my age who also happened to be from the Midwest. We chatted all the way back to the parking lot, and when I stopped behind the Grand Am, he asked, ā€œIs this your car?ā€

I said, ā€œYeah. Itā€™s kind of a Midwest car.ā€

He said, ā€œItā€™s kind of a meth car.ā€

I wasnā€™t about to defend the Grand Amā€™s honor. I mean, its overall aesthetic didnā€™t exactly scream ā€œNOT a meth car,ā€ but it also had never really let me down, at least not in a big way. And although we never drove my car to a trailhead if there was any sort of questionable dirt road involved, I thought of the day the previous summer that we had taken Nickā€™s Tacoma to climb Grays and Torreys peaks. The road to the trailhead was rough with bumps, holes, and big exposed rocks, and I was glad Nick had volunteered to drive his truck.

But then, about a half-mile from the trailhead, the Jeep in front of us slowed, and in front of the Jeep was someone in a Honda Civic negotiating a very tricky-for-a-sedan spot in the road, backing up, re-orienting, pulling forward, backing up again, and then sending it, with nary a scrape. The Civic made it to the trailhead just fine. I lived in Colorado off and on for 15 years, and I learned that whenever you think that a Forest Service road is impassable by anyone without high clearance and 4-wheel-drive, youā€™ll always see that someone made it up to the parking area in a goddamn Honda Civic.

The Grand Am survived our 10-day, eight-state road trip, and saw its share of national parks and quite a few Forest Service roads, but it was never my first choice if anyone else was willing to drive their vehicle for a day of hiking or skiing. One night in February 2006, I was cruising up Josephine Street in Denver with my then-girlfriend, and a guy floored it from a stop sign on 5th Avenue, not seeing us until his car bulldozed into the front passenger side of the Grand Am at full speed. We rammed into a light pole on the street corner, hard enough to bend it, but not hard enough to knock it over. Just after we came to a stop, I looked over to my girlfriend and asked, ā€œAre you OK?ā€ She answered yes, she thought she was OK. A few seconds later, I quietly but excitedly said, ā€œI think the carā€™s totaled.ā€ The carā€™s destruction, of course, being the only way I would be able to replace it, with my $25,000/year salary at the newspaper. As soon as the insurance money came, I found an all-wheel-drive 1996 Subaru Impreza Outback on Craigslist. I figured it could take me anywhere I wanted to go, and it did.

The Grand Am was a bad fit for the lifestyle I wanted at the timeā€”I was chomping at the bit to see the world, and the world I wanted to see didnā€™t have smooth roads leading to it. It was a piece of gear that didnā€™t work that well. But when I was first starting out, none of the stuff I had was very goodā€”cotton pants, clunky hiking boots, bargain backpacks that didnā€™t fit, a heavy sleeping bag, the cheapest climbing shoes I could find, thrift-store snowboard pants.

Would some better gear have been nice? Sure. But Iā€™m glad I didnā€™t let it keep me from getting out there.

The post An Ode to the Worst ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Carā€”and All the Places It Took Me appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

My new book, Ultra-Something, explores humansā€™ weird proclivity for endurance, and how we express itā€”including, but not limited to distance running, factory work, benign masochism, improv comedy, and rooting for football teams that will never win a championship. I ran thousands of miles and explored dozens of rabbit holes of research, athletics, and storytelling, then built it into a narrative, with more than 90 illustrations I drew. The final product is a 285-page book and itā€™s out now.Ģż (Buy it at Bookshop , or at Amazon in paperback , and on Kindle .)

Hereā€™s the book trailer:

The below is excerpted from the book’s prologue.

At the finish line of the 2015 Western States Endurance Run, arguably the most famous and most prestigious American ultramarathon, the crowd suddenly became energized. A runner was coming, entering the Placer High School track, where the 100-mile race ends after winding up and over Californiaā€™s Sierra Nevada mountains from Olympic Valley Ski Resort.

Spectators cheered, clapped, and frantically rang cowbells, as the runner, Gunhild Swanson, rounded the track. A group of runners who had joined her peeled off at the start of the straightaway, clearing the way for her finish. The sides of the track were lined with people anxiously yelling ā€œCome on, come on!ā€ and other words of encouragement which sounded more like worried hope. More spectators ran across the infield, and a few paralleled her on the other side of the barrier fence set up on the track. Dozens of cameras and phones recorded her as she chugged toward the white finish arch, her strides shortened by 99-plus miles of mountain running and hiking over the previous day and a half. As she crossed the timing mat at the finish, the crowd erupted, hundreds of arms popping up into the air in a coordinated burst of emotion. Three feet past the finish line, the runner bent at the waist, hands on her knees, exhausted but grateful to be finished. Online videos of this minute of running would be watched hundreds of thousands of times.

Gunhild Swanson had finished dead last, 254th out of 254 runners. When she crossed the finish line on the track, the clock above her head read:

She had beaten the final 30-hour cutoff time by six seconds.

When that yearā€™s winners, Rob Krar and Magdalena Boulet, crossed the same finish line hours earlier, in 14:48:59 and 19:05:21, respectively, the scene was almost serene in comparison: some applause, some cheering, but with the overall energy and volume turned down.

The climax of Sylvester Stalloneā€™s 1976 movie Rocky, when boxer Rocky Balboa finally squares off with the defending champion, Apollo Creed, only lasts about nine minutes, but might be the most famous boxing match in film history.

Apollo, who had been scheduled to defend his title against a boxer who was injured, needs to find a new opponent, and decides to put on a show: As the original fight was scheduled to take place during Americaā€™s bicentennial year in 1976 in Philadelphia, Apollo says heā€™ll fight an up-and-coming boxer. Rocky Balboa, a Philly club fighter with more heart than skill, is chosen.

When the fight begins, everyone, including Rocky and Apollo, is surprised that Rocky actually lasts more than a few rounds, even landing some good punches, and as the fight drags on, ends up making it longer in the ring than any other boxer has against Apollo.

After Apollo knocks Rocky down during the 14th round and he battles to pull himself back up, the camera cuts to two people who we believe have much better judgment as far as Rockyā€™s well-being: First, the trainer, Mick, who growls from just outside the ropes to Rocky, ā€œDown. Stay down.ā€ Then, Rockyā€™s girlfriend Adrian, who has just entered the arena to see Rocky at his worst, writhing in pain on the canvas. She looks away.

Rocky staggers in his corner like a drunken man trying to get back up on a barstool. Apollo stands in his corner with both arms raised.

Rocky gets up at the count of nine. Apollo drops his arms and his jaw in disbelief. Just before the bell, Rocky lands a shot to Apolloā€™s ribs.

When both fighters are in their corners, Apolloā€™s trainer says to him, ā€œYouā€™re bleeding inside, Champ. Iā€™m gonna stop the fight.ā€

Apollo replies, ā€œYou ainā€™t stopping nothing, man.ā€

Rockyā€™s team cuts the swollen skin around his eye so he can see again, and Rocky stands up, saying to Mick, ā€œYou stop this fight, Iā€™ll kill you.ā€

The two haggard fighters trade punches throughout the 15th and final round, mumbling promises to each other that there will be no re-match, and the bell rings, both men barely upright, but having survived. A bloodied Rocky calls out for Adrian, who finds her way to the ring, where she and Rocky profess their love for each other.

In the 1979 book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, Syd Field laid out what would come to be known as ā€œFieldā€™s Paradigm,ā€ or the Three-Act Structure. Every screenplay, or actually, the story that forms a screenplay, Field argued, has three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. The three-act structure is often drawn as a diagram, in various levels of complexity. A simple version might look like this:

Rocky went on to be a surprise box office success, and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three, including Best Picture. The film spawned eight sequels over the next four and a half decades.

One scene in the original film, in which Rocky goes on a training run and ends by sprinting up the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, became famous, inspiring tourists to run up the stairs, and prompting tributes and parodies of the scene in other films and TV shows. The 72 steps themselves became known colloquially as the ā€œRocky Steps,ā€ and before the premiere of Rocky III, Stallone commissioned an eight-and-a-half-foot statue of Rocky to be built and placed at the top of the steps. Philadelphia City Commerce Director Dick Doran welcomed the statue and said Stallone had done more for Philadelphiaā€™s image ā€œthan anyone since Ben Franklin.ā€

Rocky Balboa did not win the fight in Rocky. As the closing theme music builds, the ring announcer calls the fight ā€œthe greatest exhibition of guts and stamina in the history of the ring,ā€ and then announces the split decision in favor of Apollo Creed.

The plot of Rocky, as well as the plots of all eight sequels, per the three-act structure, might look like this:

At almost any marathon race in the United States, there is a solid chance you will hear, played on a sound system near the starting line, or on a spectatorā€™s stereo along the race route, one of two songs, if not both: The song ā€œGonna Fly Now,ā€ also known as ā€œTheme from Rockyā€ (a version of which appears in the first five Rocky movies), and the Survivor song ā€œEye of the Tiger,ā€ commissioned by Sylvester Stallone for Rocky III.

Every year around the world, about 1.1 million people run a marathon, an organized race thatā€™s 26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers. The story of why we do this dates back to 490 BC: During the first Persian invasion of Greece, a heavily outmanned Athenian army defeated the Persian forces in battle near the town of Marathon, Greece. A herald named Pheidippides was chosen to deliver the news of the victory to Athens. He ran the entire distance of 26.2 miles/42.195 kilometers, addressed the magistrates in session saying something like, ā€œJoy to you, weā€™ve won!ā€ and then died on the spot.

The Greeks also created the tradition of the Olympic Games, held every four years, or each Olympiad, from 776 BC to 393 AD. The ancient Olympic Games never had a marathon raceā€”the ā€œlong-distance race,ā€ or dolichos, introduced in the 15th Olympiad, was somewhere between four and nine kilometers (approximately 2.5 to 5.5 miles). The last recorded ancient Olympic Games were held in 393 A.D., after which they took a 1500-year hiatus.

When the Olympic Games were revived in 1896 in Athens, the first marathon race was held, celebrating Pheidippidesā€™s legendary (and fatal) run from Marathon to Athens. A few months later, the Knickerbocker Athletic Club organized a marathon race from Stamford, Connecticut to The Bronx, and in March 1897, the Boston Athletic Association held the first-ever Boston Marathon. From there, the marathon race spread all over the world.

If you signed up to participate in a running race, such as a marathon or a 10K, your personal journey could also be seen as three acts:

No one, from the fast runners hoping to win the race to the people just hoping to finish, has any idea how their race is going to go. As the race day draws near, tension builds, whether you feel it or not, and the only thing that releases all that tension is the actual running of the race. When itā€™s over, whether youā€™re happy with the result or not, itā€™s over.

The first time Ray Yoder ate at a Cracker Barrel, he wasnā€™t that impressed. He was in Nashville in 1978, helping to set up an RV show at the Opryland Resort and Convention Center, and there was a Cracker Barrel nearby. So he ate there, and it didnā€™t exactly blow his mind. But he had a job delivering RVs across the country from a manufacturer in his hometown of Goshen, Indiana, and he spent a lot of time on the road. So he found himself in a lot of places with Cracker Barrel restaurants. He kept eating at Cracker Barrels, and they started to grow on him.

He was almost always on the road by himself while his wife, Wilma, was at home raising their four children. When all the kids had finished school and moved out of their house, Wilma started to join Ray on the road. Around 1993, they realized they had eaten at lots of Cracker Barrel restaurants, and decided to try visiting all of them.

By August of 2017, the Yoders had both turned 81, and had visited almost all of the 600-plus Cracker Barrel restaurants in the United States, Ray mostly eating blueberry pancakes if it was breakfast time, meatloaf if he was there for lunch or dinner, and pot roast if it was Sunday. Cracker Barrel caught wind of Ray and Wilmaā€™s quest and flew them out to Portland to visit the newly-opened restaurant in Tualatin, Oregon, Number 645. A line of applauding Cracker Barrel employees greeted them at the door, with a bouquet of sunflowers and roses for Wilma, and custom aprons for both of them.

Their journey had taken them to 44 states, and Ray estimated they had driven more than 5 million miles. ā€œWell, everybody does something, usually anyway,ā€ Ray said. ā€œSo we thought we would do this and it would be fun.ā€

At the 2017 Run Rabbit Run starting line at the base of Coloradoā€™s Steamboat Ski Resort, 314 runners stood in the corral, every one of them hoping to finish the 102.5-mile race. Only about 58 percent of them would actually make it to the finish line.

The Run Rabbit Run is not typically mentioned as one of the hardest ultramarathon races in the United States, and 2017 wasnā€™t an abnormally hot or difficult year. Generally, about one-third of people who start the race each year donā€™t finish for one reason or another: injury, gastrointestinal distress, dehydration, exhaustion.

No one standing in that starting corral believed it was impossible for a human being to travel 102.5 miles of mountainous terrain in 36 hours. Everyone was aware that it was something humans did. They had heard of these types of races before, maybe knew someone who had completed one, or maybe theyā€™d even run this one in a previous year and had fun doing it. They believed they could be one of the people who earned a Run Rabbit Run 100 finisher belt buckle, and thatā€™s why they were standing just inside the red start/finish arch, pacing, chatting with other runners, shaking out their nervous legs.

I was there too, standing in the corral, anxious and jittery, with a race number pinned to my running shorts, as the morning sun started to warm the high-altitude air. Like everyone else, I knew that people, arguably ā€œnormalā€ people who had day jobs and families and credit card bills, were perfectly capable of running a 100-mile mountain ultramarathon in 36 hours. It was something that had been done plenty of times before by human beings just like me.

Well, maybe not like me. I wasnā€™t sure if Iā€™d be just like them, a finisher. And Iā€™d been unsure for eight months, since Iā€™d paid my entry fee.

I was still unsure when the gun went off and the crowd of runners started shuffling forward through the starting arch. I started jogging with them, and no one tried to stop me, so I just kept going.

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In 2020, Kevin Kelly wrote a post on his website titled ā€œ68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,ā€ which heā€™d put together for his 68th birthday. I read through it, found myself nodding along with his Tweet-length recommendations, loved it, and shared it in . This one was the second bullet on his list: ā€œBeing enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.ā€

The post was shared widely, first by people who were fans of Kevin Kelly, and I imagine later by people who hadnā€™t heard of him before but found the list to be insightful. I knew Kevin Kelly as the founding executive editor of WIRED, and the guy who came up with the back in 2008, and an avid backpacker and traveler. (TLDR; lots of people think heā€™s a pretty wise person.)

In a scenario that every online writer dreams of, a publisher decided the 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice would make a good book, so Kevin Kelly removed them from his website, added 150 more bits of advice, and in May 2023, the book was published.

My friend Mario mailed me a copy of the book back in April, and of course I blazed through it in a couple hours. But in reading it, I started thinking that many of the bits of advice are applicable to adventure, whether itā€™s a big-A, expedition to some faraway mountain range ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, or a little-a, letā€™s bike or hike to a new place this weekend adventure. So I started flagging them with Post-It notes, in order to compile a list. Here are 25 of them, with a few of my illustrations.

Tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than by mountains.

Taking a break is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.

A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

If a goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream.

A major part of travel is to leave stuff behind. The more you leave behind the further you will advance.

Experiences are fun, and having influence is rewarding, but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.

The greatest teacher is called ā€œdoing.ā€

Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. This is 100 percent true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need.

Always read the plaque next to the monument.

Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.

Looking ahead, focus on direction rather than destination. Maintain the right direction and youā€™ll arrive at where you want to go.

In preparing for a long hike, old shoes of any type are superior to brand-new shoes of any type. Donā€™t use a long hike to break in shoes.

For every good thing you love, ask yourself what your proper dose is.

Purchase the most recent tourist guidebook to your hometown or region. Youā€™ll learn a lot by playing the tourist once a year.

Should you explore or optimize? For example, do you optimize what you know will sell or explore something new? Do you order a restaurant dish you are sure is great (optimize) or do you try something new? Do you keep dating new folks (explore) or try to commit to someone you met?

The ideal balance for exploring new things vs. optimizing those already found is ā…“. Spend ā…“ of your time on exploring and ā…” on optimizing and deepening. As you mature it is harder to devote time to exploring because it seems unproductive, but aim for ā…“.

Hikersā€™ rule: Donā€™t step on what you can step over; donā€™t step over what you can walk around.

To have a great trip, head toward an interest rather than a place. Travel to passions rather than destinations.

Your flaws and your strengths are two poles of the same traits. For instance, there is only a tiny difference between stubbornness and perseverance or between courage and foolishness. The sole difference is in the goal. Itā€™s stupid stubbornness and reckless foolishness if the goal does not matter, and relentless perseverance and courage if it does. To earn dignity with your flaws, own up to them, and make sure you push on things that matter.

The big dirty secret is that everyone, especially the famous, are just making it up as they go along.

The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.

You choose to be lucky by believing that any setbacks are just temporary.

Measure your wealth not by the things you can buy but by the things no money can buy.

If you are stuck in life, travel to a place you have never heard of.

When making plans, you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didnā€™t know you were looking for.

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I finally went to the doctor last week. It was day 22 of having symptoms of something, a cough, probably a sinus infection, maybe walking pneumonia, something stubborn that just refused to go away despite all my attempts to just ignore it and keep going.

I have very few memories of my parents staying home from work because they were sick. Recovering from a couple surgeries, yes, maybe the occasional cold that was a real knockout, but rarely. I remember in 1997 when Michael Jordan battled the flu (or food poisoning, depending who you ask) to score 38 points against the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and I was probably less impressed than I should have been, since, really, it was just a guy going to work when he was sick.

After several decades and one global pandemic, I of course know that itā€™s not appropriate to try to ā€œpower throughā€ when youā€™re sick, since it makes illnesses last longer, makes you miserable at work, and helps viruses spread. But itā€™s . Plus, I rationalize working while Iā€™m sick because I donā€™t even have to go anywhereā€”I can work on my laptop on the couch!

In my regular healthy life, I never sit on the couch unless Iā€™m trying to get our toddler to read a book with me, or the occasional night once a week or so when Hilary and I watch one episode of a show. Sheā€™d usually rather write, or read, or garden, and I always have a 10-foot-long to-do-list:

Thatā€™s how you get shit done, I tell myself. I am not a LinkedInfluencer telling you how to optimize your life down to the minuteā€”I just prefer doing things to relaxing. Relaxing, being, as far as I understand it, not doing things (?).

I also have an overdeveloped sector of my brain, which, on a cranial CT scan, would look like this:

Iā€™ve had illnesses like this before: In 2010, while bicycling across the United States, I battled a cold/flu/something for 11 days, taking DayQuil during the day and NyQuil at night, while pedaling about 60 miles every day. In 2016, I caught a cold during a book tour and made it last six weeks, turning it into a sinus infection by the end. In 2018, I managed to get sick the day before a Run The Alps group trip from Chamonix to Zermatt over eight days and spent the first half of the trip recovering.

So many things I like to doā€”running mountain ultramarathons, climbing mountains, long hikes and bike ridesā€”require learning how to push through pain, fatigue, and common sense. So Iā€™m pretty used to the line of thinking that discomfort is actually just a side effect of meaningful experiences. Except when itā€™s not.

After coughing for three weeks straight, through two negative Covid tests, two doctorā€™s appointments, another negative Covid test and negative flu test, and one chest X-ray, I finally resigned myself to: resting.

To actually rest, I have to force myself to watch movies. Committing to a movie puts me in a flow state, in which I cannot check email, read the news, look at social media, or any of the other things that might give me anxiety.

Movies, nowadays, includes YouTube, and it wasnā€™t long into my convalescence until the algorithm fed me a Beau Miles video titled during which Beau coughs his way through an entire year of nonstop doing stuff/making videos/trail running, with not one but two (!) pneumonia diagnoses.

In the first year of sending our little guy to group childcare, Iā€™ve had something like seven or eight colds, two bouts of norovirus (or something similar), and one round of hand, foot, and mouth disease. Throughout that year, I said to my friend Mike (also dad to a toddler) that ā€œfeeling 80 percent is the new 100 percent,ā€ which was me trying to be optimistic.

So in Beauā€™s ā€œIā€™m Sickā€ video, when he said, ā€œThe thing is, I was like 70 percentā€”and 70 percent is OK in my book,ā€ I of course saw myself.

Also: ā€œIā€™m not the kind of bloke that likes baths. I think baths take way too long.ā€

Also see: Person who just keeps going, coughing through everything, refusing to stop because ā€¦

ā€¦

ā€¦

ā€¦

Why is it, exactly, that we think we have to keep forging ahead?

I donā€™t know about everyone else, but it looks like this for me:

Americans (myself included) . And many of us will take a vacation, but suck at actually being present on said vacation, checking email, maybe taking a work meeting or two while weā€™re gone, you know, somehow keeping a running mental tally of the number of unread messages in our inbox(es) and arriving at the end of our vacation having not really ever disconnected at all.

I noticed this thing a few years ago when leaving on a trip where I would have zero service for several days: I got ahead of everything as much as I could, frantically finishing up work throughout the final days before I left, answering every unread message so Iā€™d have Inbox 0. Even on the drive to the trailhead where my phone would finally be useless, I refreshed a few times, just to make sure Iā€™d covered everything. Finally, my cell phone bars disappeared completely, and I shut off my phone, with no choice but to be present, to take a break.

After the trip, I avoided turning my phone back on for hours, the pre-trip urgency and anxiety having evaporated somewhere out there. When I finally did turn on my phone, I scrolled through the six days of email Iā€™d missed, scanned the text messages that had come in while I was offline, and to my great relief and mild dismay, everyone had gotten along just fine without my input.

Which is exactly what happened when I got sick, and finally, begrudgingly submitted to the idea of actually resting: The world, quite shockingly, survived without me for a few days.

Now, if I can just remember that for next time.

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A few months back, I posted on Instagram a short video of myself hand-writing something on my iPad, and someone commented, ā€œYou mean you actually write that stuff out by hand?ā€ And I realized, I’ve never really explained how I make these handwritten and illustrated stories, so I thought I’d take a minute to do that in this video. (OK, it’s actually 3 minutes and 29 seconds)

And of course, here’s a handwritten and illustrated version of the above video:

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